Growing up in a Jerusalem apartment, Aaron Lipkin used to marvel at the two-story houses that he would see on weekend drives with his parents. It made little difference to him that those houses were in Israeli towns in Judea and Samaria. A religious Zionist, he sees no problem living in the territory that the United Nations views as occupied land.
So when he and his wife went house hunting in Jerusalem 19 years go and couldn’t find anything in their price range, they ventured north to the town of Ofra in southern Samaria. Ever since they have lived there in the two-story house of Lipkin’s dreams.
A generation later, Lipkin is facing the same problem. His kids want to move back to Ofra — but now it, too, is unaffordable. Lipkin bought his house in 2000 for 550,000 shekels (about $200,000 in 2018 dollars, correcting for inflation). Now he sees houses the same size in Ofra sell for at least 1.5 million shekels, or $411,000.
In fewer than 20 years, in other words, the price of housing in the town has doubled.
“We’re not sorry for a second when we think about the price of the house, the ease of buying it,” Lipkin, the spokesman for Ofra and a tour guide, told JTA while sitting in an chair in the corner of his spacious living room. “Today we’re shaking from fear. We have five kids and we have no idea how our kids will buy their own house without becoming enslaved to a crazy mortgage.”
Since the Lipkins moved across Israel’s pre-1967 borders, or the Green Line, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have followed their lead. In 2000, there were fewer than 200,000 settlers living in Judea and Samaria, excluding eastern Jerusalem, according to B'Tselem, a left-wing Israeli organization. Now the number is closer to 450,000. And home prices are rising accordingly. (Read More)
