Gush Etzion
Etzion Bloc) is a cluster of Israeli settlements located in the Judaean Mountains, directly south of Jerusalem and Bethlehem in the West Bank.
The core group includes four Jewish agricultural villages that were founded in 1943–1947, and destroyed by the Arab Legion before the outbreak of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, in the Kfar Etzion massacre.
[9] The establishment, defense and fall of Gush Etzion have been described as "one of the major episodes of the State of Israel-in-the-making", playing a significant role in Israeli collective memory.
[10] The motivation for resettling the region is not so much ideological, political or security-related as symbolic, linked in the Israeli psyche to the massive loss of life (1% of its total population) in the 1947–1949 Palestine war.
[11] In 1927, a group of religious Yemenite Jews founded an agricultural village they named Migdal Eder (Hebrew: מִגְדַּל עֵדֶר), based on a biblical quotation (Genesis 35:21).
[14] In 1932, a Jewish businessman of German extraction, Shmuel Yosef Holtzmann, provided financial backing for another attempt at resettling the area, through a company named El HaHar ("To the Mountain").
[15] The kibbutz established there in 1935 was named Kfar Etzion, in his honor (the German word Holz means "wood", which is etz עץ in Hebrew).
The Jewish National Fund organized a third attempt at settlement in 1943 with the refounding of Kfar Etzion by members of a religious group called Kvutzat Avraham.
Despite the rocky soil, shortage of potable water, harsh winters, and constant threat of attack, this group managed to succeed.
Against the backdrop of an impending struggle for Israeli independence, the secular Hashomer Hatzair movement founded a fourth kibbutz, Revadim.
An emergency reinforcement convoy put together by the Haganah and attempting to get to Gush Etzion under cover of darkness was discovered; all 35 members were massacred.
Later in the day, the Arabs captured the Russian Orthodox monastery, which the Haganah used as a perimeter fortress for the Kfar Etzion area, killing twenty-four of its thirty-two defenders.
[25] The interim period saw the rise of two movements designed to commemorate the fall of Gush Etzion, through songs, poetry, prose and cultural activities.
A loose organisation of Bnei Akiva activists, who later coalesced into Gush Emunim, led by Hanan Porat, whose parents had been evacuated, petitioned Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol to allow the reestablishment of Kfar Etzion.
[27] Among the supporters were Ra'anan Weitz, head of the settlement department in the Jewish Agency; minister of internal affairs Haim-Moshe Shapira; and Michael Hazani of the national religious movement.
[29] Weitz's plan of creating a line of settlements based on territorial continuity, however, had a number of opponents: the descendants of the original residents of the bloc, the settlers on the ground, the Religious Kibbutz Movement, and the Israel Defense Forces.
This eventually was supported by defense minister Moshe Dayan, who envisioned five settlement points in the West Bank, one of them being the Etzion bloc.
On September 30, 1968, the government gave permission to create a regional center and Hesder Yeshiva in Kfar Etzion, a major demand of the settlers and the final departure from the continuity plan.
The junction is a popular hitchhiking post, both south to Hebron / Be'er Sheva and north to Jerusalem, as well as west towards Bet Shemesh and the coast) which has frequently been the site of attacks by Palestinians against Israeli citizens.
