Three months after burying his eighteen-year-old son, Yehoshua Sherman walked into a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu carrying something no father should have to hold: a detailed strategic plan to plant one hundred new Jewish communities across open land in Areas A and B of Judea and Samaria. Sherman’s son, Yehuda Shmuel Sherman, was murdered in a terrorist attack near the Shuva Yisrael farm in Samaria, when the ATV he was riding was struck by a vehicle driven by a local Arab man. Sherman did not come to the Prime Minister’s office to grieve. He came to build.

Sherman is a founding member of the “Homeward – Returning to the Homeland” forum, established roughly two months ago alongside Eliav Libi, whose own son David fell in combat in Gaza. The forum’s proposal calls for settlement in open areas that would not require evacuating existing residents, and Sherman used the meeting to thank Netanyahu for advancing farms and communities throughout Judea and Samaria while urging him to adopt the new plan. Under the Oslo Accords, Area A remains under Palestinian Authority military and civil control, Area B under PA civil control with Israeli military oversight, and only Area C permits Jewish residence. Sherman’s plan does not accept those lines as permanent.

The verse Sherman himself invoked at his son’s funeral in Elon Moreh comes from Job. Standing over his son’s grave, Sherman cried out, “Earth, do not cover his blood” – a direct echo of Job’s own demand for justice. The full verse reads: “O earth, cover not thou my blood, and let my cry have no resting place” (Job 16:18). Job refused to let his suffering be silently absorbed into the ground and forgotten. Sherman is refusing the same fate for his son. In Jewish thought, spilled blood does not simply disappear into the earth – it cries out, as Abel’s blood cried out to God from the ground after Cain killed him. Sherman’s demand at the funeral, and his plan on Netanyahu’s desk three months later, are the same act stated twice: refuse to let the blood be covered. Build where the blood was spilled, so the ground itself testifies that Jews did not retreat.

At the funeral in Elon Moreh, attended by hundreds of mourners, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, Sherman called on the government to abolish the 1993 Oslo Accords entirely and vowed to establish new communities in his son’s name, among them settlements to be called Tzur Yehuda, Netzah Yehuda, and Pisgat Yehuda. Smotrich, a longtime friend of the Sherman family, told mourners the government was working to dismantle the Palestinian Authority and erase what he called the lines, definitions, and letters dividing Judea and Samaria into Areas A, B, and C.

Sherman’s son had spent his final months herding sheep on the hilltop of Shuva Yisrael Farms, several kilometers north of Nablus, in what the outpost’s own crowdfunding page describes as a mission to seize the land and leave it in Jewish hands. That page has raised over one million shekel, roughly $320,000, much of it reportedly from the Sherman family itself. An indictment filed against Daus Hasson, the Palestinian man accused of ramming the family’s vehicle off a cliff road near Beit Amerin, charges him with intentional killing, attempted murder of two other passengers, and weapons offenses. The Sherman family has since pressed authorities to demolish the terrorist’s home in Beit Amerin, arguing that deterrence demands it.

The Bible does not treat inheritance of the land as an abstraction settled once in Genesis and never revisited. Every generation that enters the land does so again, often through loss. Sherman’s hundred-community plan sitting on the Prime Minister’s desk is not a policy paper divorced from his son’s death – it is a direct continuation of it, in the same way Job’s cry was not separate from his suffering but the meaning he insisted on giving it. Yehuda Sherman herded sheep on a hilltop so that Jews would return to a place empty of them. His father is now asking the Prime Minister of Israel to make sure that hilltop was not the last one.

The earth in Samaria has absorbed Jewish blood before. Yehoshua Sherman has made clear he does not intend to let it be covered in silence. Whether Netanyahu adopts a plan for one hundred new communities or shelves it, the demand embedded in a father’s grief will not disappear along with the paper it is written on.