T. Belman. In 2003 just after the Roadmap was released, I wrote “Israel must shift the battlefield from its security to its rights”:
The fact remains, that the process or Roadmap is of no concern to anyone. What matters is that Israel be forced, by hook or by crook, by obfuscation or relentless pressure, to return to the ’49 borders. The rest is smoke and mirrors.
Many people, Tobin included, talk of the land as being “disputed”. I disagree. Jews are the only ones that have legal title to the lands. There is no basis in law for the Arabs to claim title to these lands. So I will never concede that there is any right but ours to the land.
By Jonathan S. Tobin, COMMENTARY
Israel diplomats were reportedly shocked this week when their country’s new deputy foreign minister asked them to speak up about Israel’s rights in the conflict with the Palestinians rather than just its security needs. As the Times of Israel reports, Tzipi Hotovely raised more than a few eyebrows when she told a gathering of the country’s diplomatic personnel that it was a mistake to downplay the country’s own territorial claims when seeking to counter complaints about Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Jerusalem. The very idea of quoting the Torah when speaking of ties to the biblical heartland of the Jewish homeland seemed to strike them and left-wing commentators who howled about it later as absurd. Indeed, as the left-wing Haaretz put it, the world may find the minister “hard to swallow.” But while the Likud Knesset member is swimming against the tide of international opinion as well as the culture of the ministry she’s running, she is right. Though many in an international community increasingly influenced by anti-Semitism and misinformation about Israel will never accept such arguments, as the Palestinians have demonstrated over the last generation, talk of rights always trumps security.
Hotovely, whose importance will be heightened by current the lack of a foreign minister (Prime Minister Netanyahu is reserving the post for himself while hoping to give it opposition leader Isaac Herzog should he join the government), is being dismissed as a right-wing extremists for even mentioning Jewish rights, but her critics would do well to heed her advice.
For the last 20 years, Israel’s diplomatic posture about the territories has concentrated on its willingness to make peace. Israel has repeatedly demonstrated its desire to negotiate with the Palestinians and give them a state if they are willing to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state next to them. But the Palestinians have repeatedly refused to do that. But they are not generally held accountable for this unreasonable stand because their position is basically that negotiations are unnecessary because Israel has not right to be in any of the lands that it took in the 1967 Six Day War. If the West Bank and Jerusalem are, as the Palestinians claim, stolen property, then they have a point.
But these lands are disputed territory to which both sides can make a legitimate claim. As I wrote in 2012, a report on the legality of Israel’s presence in the territories makes a definitive case that Jews have every right to be there. Asserting that right does not preclude surrendering some or even all of this land in exchange for genuine peace. But as long as the world accepts the fallacious notion that Israel is only there because of fears for its security, few will back it and that assumption undermines Israel’s negotiating position even as it seeks compromise rather than surrender.
Such a stand discomfits most Israeli foreign ministry employees and always has. Standing up for Jewish rights would make them even more unpopular in many of the countries where they serve than they already are. But they should be willing to brave the brickbats that will be thrown at them.
Israel’s case for its presence in the West Bank is based on historical, legal and spiritual factors that cannot be negated by revisionist Arab history of the region or the hate that the Jewish state inspires in its foes. It’s time for all of its representatives to stop trying to avoid the core issues of the conflict and to realize that no one will back Israel because its scientists are brilliant, its high-tech industry is innovative or its beaches are beautiful. The only answer to the apartheid state lies is a counter-argument that is rooted in the same sense of justice that motivates those who sympathize with the Palestinians. Saying Jews have a right to be in the West Bank doesn’t preclude a two-state solution. Not saying so ensures that the world will never seek to force the Palestinians to compromise and make peace.
Annexation in stages is acceptable and will cause fewer diplomatic problems if done correctly. But the stages must be functionally rather than geographically organized.
In other words, don’t annex bloc by bloc. Instead, start by shifting administration of Area C from Israeli military to Israeli civilian control. In the meantime, with the population growing at a steady 4.4 per cent per year, it becomes even more impossible with each passing year for anybody to unscramble this particular omelet. The goyim and El Fatah — when they aren’t busy lining their own packets — will rant, but more and more Jews are born each year in that 62 per cent of Shomron and Yehuda where the blue and white Star of David snaps in the breeze. So all this is a fait that renders itself more and more accompli with month by month and year by year.
By the way, leftist, Arab-loving and Yesha-hating B’Tselem says the Jewish population of the Area C increased by some 5,000 people since the latest Ministry of the Interior census population data was released in January 2015. One thing I like about B’tselem is that their maps tend to be accurate, and since they bitch about these matters continually, that tells me we are winning.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Ted, Is correct Israel needs to assert its rights to Judah/Samaria/Jerusalem.
Israel in its desperation to find peace undertook the Oslo Accords which have proven to be a huge mistake.
The government of Israel itself said the territories were disputed. They maybe claimed by two people so they are actually disputed but Israel has the better claims and must assert it both diplomatically, legally and by sheer physical presence (military and building and expansion of Jewish towns).
Israel needs to enact the Levy Report, build in E-1, the Jordan Valley and elsewhere in Judah/Samaria/Jerusalem.
Area C needs to be annexed (this can be done in stages if need be block by block).
Two stat solution? Sure! So long as the Palestinians find some place they can call their own, they can have their state for all I care. But not one inch of the land that belongs by RIGHT to Israel. And that is from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean.
ArnoldHarris Said:
the problem is not what to do but getting any GOI to do it.
ArnoldHarris Said:
this is the Key, if this is done then all else will follow
the idea that Jews should not live in YS is ludicrous… thats what they came here to do. The problem is getting a GOI to do it.
Let’s cut all the crap about rights, security, and the propaganda campaigns incessantly mounted at great expense by Jews, and usually leading to nothing productive.
In the world conceptualized by all too many of our Jewish dreamers, there is justice, as if the world were some sort of global courtroom. Maybe that’s the case in the olam haba of life after death. But I don’t place much credence in this life after death stuff. My world is the one I wake up to every morning, until the day comes when I won’t wake up ever again.
For me, there is only objective reality, and there is power.
Objective reality are the 389,500 Jews living in Area C of Shomron and Yehuda — an increase of about 15,000 since 2013 –according to the Interior Ministry of Israel in January 2015, and another approximate 375,000 Jews living in “disputed” neighborhoods of Jerusalem on the other side of the 1949 armistice line, in communities such as French Hill, Sanhedrin, Mount of Olives, and Mount Scopus.
All this was cited in a recent article by Ahuva Balofski, who like Ted Belman, is another Canadian Jew who came to Israel and stayed. She, in turn, researched this topic with Dani Dayan, who ran the Yesha Council for a number of years and who knows exactly what he’s talking about. So if any of you think the data is false, argue with Ahuva, not me.
Now, I would agree that most of these folks are concentrated in this or that settlement bloc, and that some parts of Area C are probably as bare as central Arizona. But, with appropriate policy changes, Area C’s Jewish population will easily be not only expanded, but also geographically homogenized. Believe me or any other trained land use planner; it doesn’t take much time to fill in 1400 square miles of land, and it won’t take an 1889-style Oklahoma Land Rush to get it done.
So, assuming an annual growth rate of about 4 per cent, we are looking at doubling that Jewish population, which all the world’s Jew-haters grit their teeth about, doubling to more than 1.5 million in just 18 years.
Now that’s the kind of objective reality that a guy such as me can take seriously. Even more so in that I agree with Dani Dayan that a Jewish population of almost 3/4 of a million Jews just isn’t going to moved, by the UNO, the EU, any US president, and sure as hell not by El Fatah’s Palestine “Authority”. So two-state solutions in Eretz-Yisrael are more likely to wind up representing the cities of Ramallah and Gaza. Well, probably not Gaza; try Hevron instead.
Now about power. That’s the one thing in the world that can’t be faked, as Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin purportedly reminded Iron Feliks Dzerzhinski, the main leader of his secret political police, one day in the early 1920s when they were having lunch together in Stalin’s small Kremlin apartment. “You either have power, or you don’t.” He, more than anyone of the 20th century, knew all about that.
Israel came back to life, hopefully with the backing of HaShem, but very definitely because the Jews of 1948 had learned, or were learning quickly, how to shoot people dead and live to tell about it. That was the rebirth — maybe ever so small, but nonetheless as real as a stream of fire from a machine gun — of the power of the Jewish nation.
And it must have been something like that in Bergmann’s mind when he began the surreptitiously hidden program that would result in Israel possessing a nuclear and thermonuclear arsenal estimated some years ago by the USA’s CIA as amounting as estimated 200-400 warheads, and with the means to deliver them exactly to the targets for which they are surely intended, like the most badass pizza delivery system imaginable.
The truth of the matter is, nobody in the Arab or other Islamic worlds who really give a shit about the Palestinians. And neither do the Jew-haters of the West. It’s our Jewish nation they want to shrink to the size of a large old-fashioned East European ghetto, and either curse at or sometimes try to wipe out en masse.
Which is why Bergmann — and maybe HaShem helping him — made that terrible arsenal possible. Because that would enable the Jewish state and Jewish nation, if it ever came to that, to make a firestorm of much of planet Earth. Would I do that, if I were in position to do so, and if I knew that our Jewish nation were doomed in any case? You’re damned right I would.
So that’s the way I want the next generation of Jews all around the world to think and act. Don’t plead with those bastards for justice, mercy, fairness or all the rest of that crap. Just shut up, get rid of the leftist Jewish traitors — maybe the way traitors are traditionally dealt with, at least in the healthy cultures; fill up Shomron and Yehuda with Jews; find and put in place policies to take advantage of this endless civil war of the Moslems against one another, to take even more of the land, upon which to build an even Greater Israel. And build and keep Jewish power by every means that comes to hand.
And if it all works out like I think it really could, every self-respecting Jew alive on this planet will have something really wholesome for which to thank HaShem: real Jewish power that can be won and held, to take the place of endless and feeble whining for justice in a world in which there is no such thing, certainly not for Jews, and probably not for most everybody else.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
@ bernard ross:
Yes, you are right that morally the existence of a nation and national rights to a territory cannot depend on the recognition by other nations.
Israel’s claim to Land of Israel must come from Israel, not from other nations.
The magic is that when Israel does that, other nations will be much more open to recognizing these rights.
Recognition by other nations is certainly important, but not essential.
It is also important to understand that legal arguments are going to be better received that Biblical by the no-religious majority.
Additionally appeal to morality, fairness, and history, together with concerted attack on the hypocrisy and antisemitism of the Arab occupiers and their Bolshevik supporters can and will result in rapidly changing attitudes of the “international community.”
It looks like only Jewish women have balls!!!
Has IL or Zionist lawyers ever claimed and provided evidence, to the Int. community, of the rights of the Jews to the whole land of Israel? Every second Jewish son is a lawyer! Where are those sons, to defend the rights of Jews to the whole of Israel? If Jews do not stand and fight for their rights, they have no rights. The “world” has no intention to give the Jews what is theirs!!! How many evidence do we need?
the gravest error is in making existential decisions based on having others “back” those decisions; especially for the Jews who rarely receive that backing and whose existence is not based on that backing.
Actually, it was the historical connections of the Jewish people with the land of Israel as written in the bible that persuaded the euros to recognize those rights and establish them in the international law that they originally advocated and now try to breach and swindle. The biblical rights came first and Hotovely simply takes the circle back to its point of origin. The foreigners may, if they like, remember the agreements they made with the Jewish people at that point of recognition. If they still cant remember their own agreements, promises, guarantees swindles, and breaches after being taken back to square one then there is no reason to discuss any other paradigms or anyone else’s complaints. After all, from where does their “recognition of the historical Jewish connection to the land of Israel” arise? DUH???? Much of the archaeological authentication of that connection occurred after their recognition.
Apparently the ignorant illiterate Jews in the foreign ministry are unaware of both the biblical and legal bases. They should get rid of those leftists and purge them from the ministry.
They say that when you lose something you should return to the point that you last remember having it: that is what Hotovely so astutely, and aesthetically, just did to all the dummies who consider themselves cultured and literate.