Yossi Katz

The outbreak of the War of Independence in 1948 abruptly severed the process of Jewish settlement in the mountainous area south of Jerusalem which came to be known as Gush Etzion, or the Etzion Bloc. The first settlers reached the area in the 1920s, but it took years to create a cluster of kibbutzim and bring the Jewish settlement enterprise to the point where people could actually live and work in this rugged terrain. The book probes the story of the pioneers who came to the Etzion Bloc in the 1940s and grappled with the isolation, the physical rigors, and the precarious political situation, to shape the future and Jewish character of this region. Tract by tract, land was purchased and four kibbutzim were built up through the combined efforts of the Jewish National Fund, the Jewish Agency, Hapoel Hamizrachi, Hakibbutz Hadati, and Hashomer Hatzair. It was this core of settlement that enabled Jews to resume their foothold in the Etzion Bloc in 1967, immediately after the Six Day War, and to establish, over a period of thirty years, an impressive stretch of Jewish settlements between Jerusalem and Hebron.