Israel is the most hated country in a world of 195 countries. Think about that. If we are going to be hated, let’s at least be hated in our entire inherited and promised land. Op-ed.
In the words of the late Salomon Benzimra, author of The Jewish People’s Rights to the Land of Israel
“Tell the world there will be no negotiating until the territorial sovereignty of Israel and Judea Samaria is no longer questioned.”
The entire world shared their views on the Jews and Israel after October 7.
We are living through times where too many stand with the Barbarians. Why do people CHOOSE to stand with evil? For surely that is what is happening when western countries stand with Muslim countries against Israel’s right to exist. When US college students demonstrate for Hamas. The question is “which Israel”? What are the borders to which they disagree?
In honour of our ancestors and to protect our descendants:
Enough already.
It’s time for every Jewish organization around the world to come together as one and declare:
FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA – ISRAELI SOVEREIGNTY
We must begin with the knowledge that billions of people hate us for the crime of being Jewish. Far too many countries want to see the demise of Israel – including Western countries like Spain, Norway and Ireland.
Nothing Israel does will appease the Jew haters. Israel must stop appeasing and take the most important step in her recent history. Declare sovereignty over the land of Israel – the God-given land and the land over which the Jews have fought for millennia.
I remember reading an article in the Toronto Star in 1967. I took from that article that the Star believed the world would be a better place without Israel. This, after the 1967 war when 5 Arab countries attacked Israel. Then the powers-that-be were worried about oil. Not now. Now it is just a pathological hate for Jews and Israel.
Knowing this endemic, systemic, innate hate exits, why does Israel try to placate the west, especially America and of course the UN? Why does Israel choose to appease those who want her destruction?
If Israel is going to appease then at least appease them from the entire country: from the river to the sea: Israeli sovereignty.
Although there were always Jews in Israel and waves of Jewish immigration began in the 19th century, the reconstitution of the modern Jewish homeland in Israel began in 1920 with the San Remo Resolution. The San Remo Conference took place on April 19, 1920, lasted for seven days and published its resolutions on April 25, 1920 laying the political foundation for the creation of the 22 Arab League States and the one and only Jewish State of Israel. Before the San Remo Conference there did not exist a single Arab independent nation state.
In 1967 Israel regained all that was lost in the war of 1948 and then some. Israel regained Gaza, Jerusalem and Judea/Samaria which San Remo had granted her. Why did Israel not declare sovereignty over the God given land? It doesn’t matter. But, now is the time.
Watch this video: a collage from videos taken during the Nova massacre.
After the Holocaust we said Never Again. But it happened, again. In Israel.
Did you see all the people at Nova trying to escape? Many trying to drive away in their cars?
Now look at these photos I took at the “car cemetery” in the Gaza envelope. Some cars have bullet holes and other damage, but look closely at the layers of cars. Burnt to a crisp. By barbarians, evil creatures: rude and uncivilized. How many had humans in them?
When I saw this “cemetery” the first thing that came to my mind were the photos from the Concentration Camps; the railway cars filled with bodies of dead Jews, one on top of another.
A U.S. 7th Army medical corpsman, newly arrived with liberating troops, looks into a train car piled with the emaciated and mutilated corpses of men from the Dachau-Birkenau concentration camps. (Photo by © CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)
Nothing has changed in the world in which we live. Jews are hated and with the reconstitution of the Biblical, historical and legal State of Israel, Israel is the most hated country in a world of 195 countries. Think about that.
If we are going to be hated, let’s at least be hated in our entire inherited land.
I take you now to the other side of Israel to Gush Etzion in the Hebron Hills of Judea/ Samaria with Nadia Matar; co-chair of the Sovereignty movement founded by Women in Green who proudly calls out “Eastward Ho”! I am ashamed to say I knew nothing about Gush Etzion until my recent visit to Israel. I suggest that too many of us are not aware of Israel’s rich history – from the Bible to today. You cannot protect and defend what you do not know.
When David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the State of Israel he said:
“If Jewish Jerusalem exists… it is first and foremost due to the fighters and settlers of Gush Etzion.”
The Hebron hills are the cradle of the Jewish people- the fathers of the nation, kings and prophets, vine growers, farmers, and shepherds, fighters and rebels all of them passed this way. They form the backdrop to the story of Gush Etzion, nestled between Jerusalem, the Holy City, and Hebron, the City of the Fathers. They are the unbroken Jewish chain from father to son. And it is time to declare sovereignty over that land.
I learned about the heroic Jews of Gush Etzion who had defended Jerusalem in the 1948 War at the Gush Etzion Heritage Center. Gush Etzion fell. The Arab attackers mutilated the bodies of the defenders. Sound familiar?
Gush Etzion came back to life in 1967. I saw the extraordinary Sound and Light Show at that Center. You must go and see for yourself. It is a riveting story about our Brave Jewish ancestors, their fight to save Jerusalem in 1948 and the return of the Jews in 1967. It is an homage to the resilience of our people in our God-given inherited land.
How long have the Jews lived here?
This mosaic showing David playing his harp was flooring in a synagogue in sixth-century Gaza. Illustration found during excavations in the early years of this century at Khirbet Qeiyafa in the Valley of Elah, where David is said in Bible to have fought Goliath
Israel remains under attack, politically and militarily. America has the audacity to sanction JEWS living in Judea and Samaria.
No more “Land for peace.” That policy only leads to more attacks on the State of Israel. Einstein told us doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity.
Let’s try something new! Declare sovereignty over the Biblical and historical land which Israel regained in the 1967 war. Following the 1948 War of Independence, a Green Line was established demarcating the Israeli, Jordanian, Syrian and Egyptian forces and in the 1949 armistice agreements that formally ended the war, the Green Line served as Israel’s de facto but not official international border until the 1967 Six-Day War. But that changed following the 1967 Six Day War when Israel took possession of the ‘West Bank’, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai peninsula. Yet, the “world” only recognizes the pre-1967 ‘borders’. Why?
Now is the time to take over all of Eretz Yisrael to honour our ancestors who died rebuilding Israel, and for our descendants – to protect and defend them; for there is no guarantee that the Jews in the Diaspora will be safe. It is time to declare:
FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA – ISRAELI SOVEREIGNTY
I leave you with the battlefield eulogy for a young Jewish soldier named Roi in 1956, by Moshe Dayan. It was delivered in Nahal Oz, the same Nahal Oz that was infiltrated by Hamas murderers on Oct. 7.
“Not from the Arabs of Gaza must we demand the blood of Roi, but from ourselves.” Jews have forgotten, he lamented, that the youth of Israel carry the burden of “the heavy gates of Gaza, beyond which hundreds of thousands of eyes and arms huddle together and pray for the onset of our weakness so that they may tear us to pieces.”
The millions of Jews, annihilated without a land, peer out at us from the ashes of Israeli history and command us to settle and rebuild a land for our people. But beyond the furrow that marks the border, lies a surging sea of hatred and vengeance, yearning for the day that the tranquility blunts our alertness, for the day that we heed the ambassadors of conspiring hypocrisy, who call for us to lay down our arms.
It is to us that the blood of Roi calls from his shredded body. Although we have vowed a thousand vows that our blood will never again be shed in vain we were once again seduced, (almost like a prophecy, it happened again on October 7, 2023, D.B.) brought to listen, to believe. Our reckoning with ourselves, we shall make today. We mustn’t flinch from the hatred that accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs, who live around us and are waiting for the moment when their hands may claim our blood. We mustn’t avert our eyes, lest our hands be weakened. That is the decree of our generation. That is the choice of our lives — to be willing and armed, strong and unyielding, lest the sword be knocked from our fists, and our lives severed.
If not now, when?
I concur absolutely with Diane Bederman, as I do with the wonderful Women in Green, Nadia Matar and Yehudit Katsover, who each work tirelessly for full sovereignty throughout every last inch of our ancestral and G-d given homeland – which must include not only Judea and Shomron but the Biblical territory of the Jewish tribes of Menachem, Reuben and Gad, now languishing in Jordan along with the inheritance of the Jewish tribe of Judah, now in Gaza.
Liberate and reclaim it all. If not now, when?