Kfar Drom: The First Jewish Settlement In Gaza

Frequent contributor and honorary Hedgehog Ralph Kostant shares the following:

Kfar Drom in Hebrew means southern village. The first Jewish settlement in Gaza bearing that name existed in Talmudic times (200-400 C.E.). In the 1930's, Jewish pioneers returned to settle and farm the area, and adopted the ancient name for their settlement. It was destroyed once by Arab rioters in the 1930's, but was refounded, only to be overrun by the Egyptian army in 1948. When Israel recaptured Gaza in the 1967 Six-Day War, Kfar Drom was re-established for a third time. Now it faces destruction once again, this time by the voluntary surrender of the territory by the Israeli government.

The so-called Green Line, the now sacrosanct 1967 borders hallowed by the U.S. State Department, the International Court of Justice and the European Union, are no more than the January 1949 cease-fire lines where valiant, outnumbered Jewish fighters stopped the Egyptian and Jordanian Armies bent on destruction of the newborn Jewish State of Israel. Kfar Drom is no more the legitimate territory of the non-existent State of Palestine than is Tel Aviv. In a Jerusalem Post article entitled "Sacrificial Phoenix", writer Sarah Honig discusses the tragic history of Kfar Drom and ponders what its apparent imminent demise portends for other Jewish villages that were overrun by the Arabs in the War of Independence, but were later recaptured and rebuilt.

Ralph B.Kostant