By Nadav Shragai, ISRAEL HAYOM
We can continue the argument over the settlements with the world of U.S. President Barack Obama and his supporters in legal and diplomatic language, rightfully protesting his hypocrisy and hoping for better under incoming President Donald Trump.
But all this cannot be done without screaming in the ears of the world — especially during Hanukkah — a single basic truth, as Simon the Hasmonean put it some 2,200 years ago: “We have not taken foreign territory or any alien property, but have occupied our ancestral heritage, for some time unjustly wrested from us by our enemies; now that we have a favorable opportunity, we are merely recovering our ancestral heritage” (Maccabees 1, 15:33-34).
Our real and imagined friends in the United States and all over the world must finally hear that the historical, religious, legal and emotional links the nation of Israel has to Hebron, Beit-el, Shiloh and of course, Jerusalem, is no less than that of the Palestinians. They must hear that we are not occupiers in our own land, and that we are connected to it with bonds of love, the Bible, heritage and nature; that the settlements in Judea and Samaria, as elsewhere in the Land of Israel, are the realization of justice and natural rights.
This basic truth relating to the Land of Israel in its entirety will not change due to a U.N. resolution made on the Sabbath. Morally speaking, there is no difference between settlement in the Land of Israel, where Arabs lived at the beginning of the last century, and settlement in the Land of Israel, where Arabs live in the current century. There is no difference between settling Petach Tikva, which Zionist leader Moshe Smilansky described a few generations ago as a “small Arab settlement between Arab villages,” and large settlements in Judea and Samaria.
Our justice and our natural rights are not based on security needs, nor on international law. They may not be considered to be “realpolitik” today, but they are explicitly a part of the discourse on rights, whose content, essence and language must once again be laid on the table.
What Simon the Hasmonean understood more than 2,000 years ago, and what our sage Rashi understood in his interpretation of the first verse in Genesis some 1,000 years ago, followed by Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and later Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and certainly Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is that we exist here by way of force and of diplomacy, but, above all, we exist here by right.
There is no way to bring a legal case to court if the court ignores it and decides for itself what the judgment should be.
Since we already know that the odds are stacked against us, we should do our thing and ignore the rest.
Otherwise, we can consider giving Massada to the Palis too.
There are PLENTY of evidence that IL has as much if not much more rights to J & S than the Muslims. IL must build and present her LEGAL case. There can be NO other but legal case!
@ YJ Draiman:
The UN is willing to tolerate as many Islamofascit entities that the Muslims can create. The UN has major problems with allowing the existence of IL or the creation of a Kurdish state for the Kurds.
The world (in particular the West & the Muslims) wants to eliminate the Jews and the best way is to dispossess them from their land.
Nobody cares that Jews have been or are short changed.
I think the Arab-Palestinians need to face reality and stop deluding themselves. No distortion of history or pressure by the Arab-Palestinians will change that. No UNESCO – U.N. declaration-resolution or anyone else. There is not going to be another Arab-Palestinian state west of the Jordan River. The Arabs have already an Arab Palestinian state which is on Jewish land over three times the size of Israel, east of the Jordan River; it is called Jordan, where 80% of the population are Arab Palestinians and the Arabs in Judea and Samaria aka the West Bank have a Jordanian passport. They were all Jordanian citizens when Jordan Annexed the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The Arabs received over 12 million sq. km. after WWI and the Jewish people were (allocated over 120,000 sq. km. but received only about 21,000 sq. km.) given back their historical land in all of Palestine aka The Land of Israel. The Arab countries also terrorized and expelled over a million Jewish families and confiscated all their assets, including businesses, homes and over 120,000 sq. km. of land owned by the Jewish people for over 2,400 years; these assets are valued in the trillions of dollars. Most of the million expelled Jewish families from Arab countries now reside in Israel.
Israel must expedite of building in Judea and Samaria and build super highways to connect Judea and Samaria to central Israel.
YJ Draiman
The U.N. cannot create or modify countries or territories, they can only recommend (see the UN Charter it is only advisory, this also applies to the ICJ). Israel was reconstituted by international law in 1920 which allocated Palestine for the Jewish homeland and the Arabs were allocated and received over 12 million sq. km. – over 5 million sq. mi., the British in violation of international law took away over 77% of the land allocated to the Jewish people about 120,000 sq. km. and gave it to the Arabs as their state east of the Jordan River. The Jews were short changed and received only about 21,000 sq. km..