President Isaac Herzog gave a boost of support to the West Bank settlements when he visited two of them on Tuesday to mark the opening of the school year.
“The Har Bracha settlement is in my DNA as an Israeli and as a Jew,” Herzog said he inaugurated a new building for a religious girls high school in the hilltop community of approximately 3,000 people.
Located in the Samaria region of the West Bank, it overlooks the Palestinian city of Nablus and is considered to be an isolated settlement, but there are plans to eventually transform it into a city.
This was not, Herzog noted, his first visit to the settlement or to the region.
The President was formally the head of the Labor party and a supporter of a two-state resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His party in the past has blocked the concept of including only high-population areas within the permanent boundaries of the state of Israel.
He is also among those Israeli leaders who speaks with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
On Tuesday, while in Samaria however, Herzog said, “I want to put aside for a moment the political debates regarding a final status arrangement with our Palestinian neighbors to speak of a simple truth – the Jewish people’s deep connection [to] this space [Judea and Samaria], which cannot be denied or diminished.”
He added, “Every visit to Samaria is a dive into the depths of our history. Past and present are conflated together here between the mountains.”
Herzog also visit the Sal’it settlement, a community of some 1,300 people, to inaugurate a Montessori school.
Samaria Regional Council head Yossi Dagan who accompanied Herzog recalled how Herzog’s father (former president Chaim Herzog) had visited the Samaria region to help celebrate its first decade of renewed Jewish settlement.
Dagan recalled that Herzog had visited Har Bracha as an opposition leader in the Knesset to pay a shiva call on the family of Rabbi Itamar Ben-Gal, who was killed in 2018 at age 29, while he waited for a bus outside the nearby Ariel settlement.
“I thank you for the love you have for the entire nation of Israel,” Dagan said of Herzog. He also thanked Herzog for “the respect you have shown Samaria residents in all your past positions as a minister and as the opposition head. You were with us when you needed to be and strengthened us with your love for Israel,” Dagan said.