According to the Jerusalem Post prior to this time it had served as Nahal military outpost, before being designated to become an Israeli labourers' camp. The outpost's establishment was delayed despite the November decision, for political reasons. Yigal Allon was due to meet Henry Kissinger in Washington and any leak of a new settlement would have been inconvenient at that time. Galili said the timing for the setting up of camps on the site should coincide with Kissinger's movements, timing it so that the latter's shuttle diplomacy would find him in transit to Brussels. Finally, around March 1975, following a ministerial decree to expropriate 3,000 hectares of land from the area's Palestinian villages. forty members of Gush Emunim built a water tower and prefab concrete hut on the site, only to be evicted the same afternoon by Israeli troops, each prospective settler carried away by four soldiers. This site was thereafter called by the settlers "Founder's Circle". The land it was built on had beenland expropriated from Palestinian villages. In 1977, Haim Sabato founded a hesder yeshiva (paramilitary field seminary) there and it was also designated to become a planned community, suburb and commuter town for nearby Jerusalem, to which many residents would commute daily.