Seven years ago, Israel announced with great fanfare the establishment of Trump Heights, a settlement named for the glitz-loving American president. Today, despite the name, the place is about as far from the Trump aesthetic as imaginable.
The community is home to about 27 families living in a tight cluster of spartan, prefabricated homes in the rugged north of the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, a few miles from the volatile frontiers with Lebanon and Syria.
The location would not appeal to everyone, but for some residents, the location is kind of the point. Trump Heights sits in a remote corner of the strategic plateau, with commanding views across northern Israel.
Its birth followed President Trump’s decision in 2019 to formally recognize Israeli authority over the long-disputed Golan, which Israel seized from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war and later annexed.
The Trump proclamation, citing security imperatives, reversed decades of American policy and flouted international opinion, which broadly views Israel’s occupation and annexation of the area as illegal. (Colombia became the second country to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights last month.)
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Syria has long demanded the return of the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. In the chaotic aftermath of the ouster of the dictator Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, Israeli forces pushed deeper into southern Syria. Israel now occupies territory beyond a buffer zone established under a Disengagement Agreement in 1974, citing a need to secure its frontier.
Within weeks of Mr. Trump’s announcement, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other dignitaries held a festive ceremony at the desolate site designated for Trump Heights and unveiled an outsize sign emblazoned with the settlement’s name in gold lettering, and framed in still more gold for good measure.
A year later, the Israeli government approved initial funding of 8 million shekels (then about $2.3 million) to establish a temporary encampment of mobile homes at Trump Heights, and the first residents moved in 10 months after that. Officials said it would eventually accommodate 300 families.
Given the name, it was perhaps inevitable that visiting reporters would occasionally use the settlement, with its mixed population of secular and religious Jews, as an informal barometer of Israeli feelings toward Mr. Trump. These tend to veer sharply, not unlike his Middle East policies.
The inhabitants of Trump Heights are weary of being asked about the man it was named for, and they say they spend little time discussing either him or politics. Some say they feel no connection to the name and would not be averse to it changing.
“There were already discussions about it from the start,” said Daniel Biber, 32, a writer and editor. His family was the first to move here, in April 2021, and his wife, Tzofit, is the director of Trump Heights, known as Ramat Trump in Hebrew.
Only three months before they arrived, he noted, a mob of Trump supporters had stormed the U.S. Capitol. “In the end,” Mr. Biber said, “he’s the president of the United States, not ours.”
In the eyes of many Israelis, Mr. Trump has lurched over the past year from being a national savior to an antihero.
First, he helped secure a deal with Hamas to bring Israeli hostages back from Gaza. Not long afterward, he joined Mr. Netanyahu in going to war against Iran, Israel’s archenemy. Then he made a preliminary deal with Tehran that even longtime Trump and Netanyahu supporters in Israel viewed as a dangerous gamble with their security, and curbed Israeli action against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Mr. Netanyahu recently rejected Mr. Trump’s plan for disarming Hamas in Gaza.
An opinion survey by the Israel Democracy Institute, an independent research group, indicated that Mr. Trump’s popularity was at a new low this summer, with only 28 percent of Israelis believing he prioritized their security, down from 64 percent in March.
Mr. Biber said the residents of Trump Heights spanned the spectrum when it came to Mr. Trump. Defining himself as a political centrist, Mr. Biber said Mr. Trump’s recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights was not a major consideration in his family’s decision to move there.
About 22,000 Israelis live in more than 30 settlements dotting the plateau, alongside a similar number of Druze residents in four main villages. The Druze, an Arabic-speaking religious minority spread across Lebanon, Syria and northern Israel, practice a faith often described as an offshoot of Ismaili Islam.
Several residents of Trump Heights said they came not out of ideology, but to live close to nature in a small, like-minded and tolerant Jewish community. Druse assistants work in the community’s kindergarten.
It is a far cry from Mar-a-Lago or Trump Tower. The only hint of gold here is on the faded sign at the entrance — a local attraction, with Israelis coming to take selfies with it as a backdrop. (Before the U.S. election in 2024, a group of ultra-Orthodox Jews came to light candles and pray for Mr. Trump to win.)
The grounds are sunbaked and thorny, and an old sign on a section of chain link perimeter fence warns of land mines. There was an earlier attempt, 35 years ago, to establish a community here, for immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Most abandoned the place, for lack of a livelihood, though a handful remained.
For now, Trump Heights offers a simple life with a small library, a modest synagogue and a used clothing store. Families won plots for permanent homes through a lottery. They get the land for free, but said it would most likely take years and more than $650,000 to build an average house.
The population is overwhelmingly young, with 85 children under 13 and more on the way. Many adults work remotely, and family dwellings are only about 600 square feet — roughly the size of a studio apartment.
Residents and future homeowners marked five years of community life with a potluck meal and activities for the children.
They have thoughts about foreign policy but are much more engaged in the details of daily life.
Dotan Gal, 39, was with his two children in the hamlet’s small playground. Here, he said, the burning question was whether to get a new swing set. “The pace of this place doesn’t match with the pace of the news,” he said.
The nearest supermarket is at least a 20-minute drive away. A residents’ WhatsApp group is full of requests like “Who has milk?” or some pita bread.
Noa Aviad, 42, a mother of five young children, said she was afraid for the days after the Trump presidency, with sentiment in the United States becoming less sympathetic to Israel.
Her youngest child, Matan Shalom, was born last October, two years after the Hamas-led attack on Israel that set off the devastating war in Gaza. His name is a prayer for peace, Ms. Aviad said.
“People here feel — like many Israelis — that Trump doesn’t ‘get’ the region,” viewing everything in transactional business terms, she said.
Trump Heights can feel like a distant outpost far removed from the world’s problems — more like a social experiment for a country wracked by tensions between the religious and the secular, Jews and Arabs, conservatives and liberals.
The aim, Ms. Aviad said, is to build a Jewish community made up of equal numbers of religious couples, secular couples and mixed couples.
Its vision statement includes the “aspiration to become an example for connection” between the disparate parts of Israeli society.
The more heated discussions tend to revolve around subjects like the level of Orthodoxy adhered to in the synagogue and how strictly kosher the food needs to be at a potluck.
“Unlike in the city, where there is a choice, here we have to find solutions that satisfy as many people as possible and do the least harm,” said Amalia Grinvald Urbach, a religiously observant architect and a mother of five.
Asked what Mr. Trump might make of the place should he visit, Ms. Aviad, sitting in her yard strewed with toys, laundry and utensils, said it might need sprucing up a bit.
Mr. Biber, the writer, said the president would probably not want to stay long.
But his name seems likely to stay for the foreseeable future. “We learned to live with it,” Mr. Biber said. “One day he won’t be president, and we will remain here.”
