colony Kfar Rosenwald

Zar’it (Kfar Rosenwald) is a settlement in the Upper Galilee, situated at an elevation of approximately 650 meters above sea level near the Palestinian-Lebanese border, on the lands of the depopulated village of Tarbikha. Currently, about 250 settlers reside there.

Construction of the settlement began on January 30, 1966, and it was officially inaugurated in 1967 by the Galilee Moshavim Movement as part of the “Suss” operation aimed at increasing Zionist settlement in the Galilee.

In 2006, Hezbollah abducted two Israeli Defense Forces soldiers in the Zar’it area, an incident that led to the outbreak of the Second Lebanon War.

During the Operation Iron Swords conflict, the moshav was declared a closed military zone. In January 2024, it was struck by rockets launched from Lebanon, which hit a mushroom farm established in 1982, responsible for about 40% of local production.

The settlement was originally named “Zar’it” at its founding. Two years later, its name was changed to Kfar Rosenwald, after the American Zionist philanthropist William Rosenwald, one of the founders of the United Zionist Kibbutzim and son of Julius Rosenwald. The foreign-sounding name sparked strong opposition among the settlers. In 2022, the settler population was approximately 237.

Sources:
Due to the scarcity of Arabic sources, Hebrew sources were used:

• The settlement’s website (in Hebrew)
• The Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics
• Information on the village of Tarbikha from Palestine Remembered website