ZOAHARIAN.COM - The settlers' belongings were filled with beds, furniture and building materials as they approached Kadim

A new generation of Israeli settlers has returned to the settlement of Kadim, in the occupied West Bank, two decades after the settlement was evacuated by the previous Israeli government.

Thirty “pioneer families” arrived in the settlement on Thursday from Tel Aviv, according to the regional settler council, following a wave of Jewish nationalism encouraged by the current Israeli government.

They came in small groups, some under military escort, the blue and white Israeli flags flying from their cars as they passed through Palestinian villages and farmlands.

Israeli settlers in the West Bank told the BBC that attacks on Palestinians were justified as revenge

“Twenty-one years after the crime of expulsion from northern Samaria, we have completed the correction and have returned to the settlement of Kadim,” right-wing Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said at the opening ceremony, using the biblical word for the northern West Bank.

Alongside him were Israel's Justice Minister, the Speaker of the Knesset, and Yossi Dagan, chairman of the regional settler council, who vowed that one day the settlers would also return to Gaza.

Kadim, located on a small hillside outside the Palestinian city of Jenin, was evacuated in 2005 by the previous Israeli government as part of a broader unilateral Disengagement Plan that also saw all Jewish settlers and soldiers pulled out of Gaza, and three other settlements in the northern part of the West Bank dismantled.

At the time, the four settlements were considered too isolated and expensive to protect, and of little strategic value.

Senior Israeli politicians including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana attended the national ceremony

In recent weeks, white trailer homes have reappeared on hilltops here, in preparation for the family's return.

Our request to speak to the people at the opening ceremony was denied; we were told that no media would be allowed to enter the settlement today.

Driving down a dirt road in the hills behind him, we met a Palestinian vegetable farmer, living in the house he was born in 53 years ago.

He told me how, as a child, he witnessed Kadim being built for the first time, then witnessed the settlers there being expelled by the government again twenty years later.

"Back then, the settlers lived with us, and we coexisted peacefully. They lived their lives and we lived ours," he told me.

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