A people cannot be called “settlers” in their own ancestral and Biblical heartland

Liberals, leftists, socialists and secular folks may not like being told this, but the following are truths that cannot shrivel away.

So when did it become an accepted truism that a delusional peace between Israel and the predominately Muslim Arabs, those who call themselves Palestinians, require that Israel give to them it’s very own Biblical birthright in its Jewish heartland for a mess of potage? When did the Oslo Accords, the Wye Agreement, the Roadmap, ad nauseum, supersede the eternal possession of the Jewish people to their God given homeland? To even ask the question would seem to be a monstrous tragedy, so enormous as to spit in the face of God and make the very angels in heaven weep.

“Who are they who dare divide the land that the Almighty bequeathed to Abraham and to his descendants through Isaac and Jacob? Who are they who would give any part of tiny Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel) to the descendants of Ishmael who possess vast land throughout the Middle East and North Africa?

All this political disloyalty by leftist Israeli politicians was designed to appease those U.S. Presidents who displayed pro-Muslim policies, which were a clear and present danger to the very existence of the Jewish state and, may I suggest, to the very spiritual and physical future of our beloved America itself. Remember Genesis 12:3.

And then there was Barack Hussein Obama whose hatred of the Jewish state surpassed even the lamentable Jimmy Carter. Remember Obama’s Secretary of State, John Kerry, who came numerous times to pressure and threaten Israel, thus ushering in a baleful time for the Jewish state?

The so-called Palestinian Authority was encouraged by Kerry and Obama to harden its demands to insufferable and arrogant levels. It required Israel to essentially commit national suicide. And how many times did we hear Mahmoud Abbas, the Holocaust denying leader of the fraudulent Arabs who call themselves Palestinians, tell Kerry that the “Palestinian Arabs” will never accept Israel as a Jewish state. Period.

Kerry spewed his own poison by stating, as he stood shoulder to shoulder with Abbas, that Israeli “settlements” are illegal. The PA and the PLO, along with the Iranian funded and supported Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza were thus encouraged to instigate more criminal violence and murder against Israelis by the Kerry’s of this world and so the Jewish death toll mounts.

All these notions of “land for peace” and a “two state solution” erode the millennial and inalienable rights of the Jewish people to the land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. But tragically too many Israeli leftwing politicians have allowed themselves to believe in false Muslim promises of peace (tekiyah) when there is no peace. Do they not remember Jeremiah’s prophetic words: ”Peace, peace but there is no peace.”

Indeed, there should instead be demands made upon the artificial Arab entity known as the Kingdom of Jordan (which sits upon four fifths of the geographical territory which was known as the Palestine Mandate) for the return of Biblical Gilead – in north west Jordan – which is the ancestral home of the Biblical Jewish tribes of Gad, Manasseh and Reuben. But this it seems would be too courageous for an ever timorous present Israeli government to demand.

Tragically Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government, as well as previous governments stretching back to those of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, have all betrayed Jewish patrimony in the Land of Israel. Long wasted years since the liberation of the Jewish heartland during the 1967 defensive war against Arab aggression has emboldened a hostile world and allowed it to demonize Jewish towns and villages in Judea and Samaria. Thus these Jewish communities are delegitimized with the use of the pejorative term: “settlements.”

Too many Prime Ministers and leftist Israeli politicians have tragically conceded to the Arabs the blatant lie that Israel “occupies” Arab territory – specifically territory claimed by a fraudulent Arab people who have come to call themselves Palestinians. This absurdity has given birth to a grievous, self-inflicted wound which afflicts Jews within Israel and the Diaspora. Remember, there has never in all of recorded history ever existed a sovereign, independent state called Palestine.

Jewish communities, (villages and towns) do not consist of “settlers.” The Jewish population of Judea and Samaria (the so-called West Bank) consists of the descendants of the native and indigenous Jewish people who are now inhabiting and redeeming their own ancient land. These men and women and their children are not “settlers” in what is already theirs by virtue of millennial physical and spiritual attachment. Indeed, many present day Jewish villages, especially throughout Judea and Samaria, are built on the very sites upon which Biblical Jewish communities once existed. On the Golan, for instance, numerous sites abound where ancient synagogues existed thousands of years ago.

I personally consider it anathema to describe Jewish communities in the Biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria with the odious term, “settlements.”  They are villages and towns and for so many Israelis themselves to continue calling them “settlements” without thinking is almost as if they have resigned themselves to calling their land, ‘not our land.’ How odd that every Arab community, especially the majority of them can trace their origins back only to the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Yet, they are automatically called villages and towns. Jewish communities, on the other hand whose origins can be found in Biblical times are still dishonored with the term, “settlements.” This is rank anti-Semitism and anti-Israeli hatred.

Notice that Judea and Samaria have still not been annexed. The time to restore Judea and Samaria to all of Israel is well overdue. These lands are the very warp and woof, the very fabric and fiber of Jewish history, both during and after Biblical times.

Ted Bellman, writing several years ago in the Israpundit blog, pointed out that once again an Israeli government and Prime Minister have missed a golden opportunity to exert to the entire world the Jewish state’s empirical and unassailable historical rights to the territories known as Judea and Samaria, but which a hostile world prefers to still call the “West Bank.” He writes as follows:

“In accepting UNSC Res 242, Israel also accepted “recognized and secure borders” rather than rejecting such resolution and such borders and demanding our right to all of Judea and Samaria. Nothing has changed since then. Even now, as Israel negotiates a final settlement, she doesn’t start by demanding all the land and supporting such demand with strong historical and legal arguments. Instead she doesn’t make such a claim and meekly says she will settle for security and recognition.

As long ago as 2003, Professor Talia Einhorn wrote about Judea, Samaria and Gaza, or as it is known by its Hebrew acronym, Yesha: meaning Yehuda, Shomron and Azza.

She was commenting on the ‘slip of the tongue” by then Prime Minister Sharon who used the word “occupation” in reference to Israel’s presence in Yesha. In 2003, Yesha still included Gaza. It was abandoned in 2005 for the sake of peace! And what a monumental disaster for the Jewish state that abandonment became. Hamas, the junior branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, now occupies Gaza and its charter calls not only for the destruction of the Jewish state but for the extermination worldwide of all Jews.

Professor Einhorn stated clearly then that Israel, the Jewish state, is not an “occupying force” in Yesha. This is what she said:

”Up until 1948, Judea, Samaria and Gaza were a part of the British Mandate. In the 1948 War of Independence, Egypt illegally grabbed the Gaza Strip and Jordan too illegally took Judea and Samaria, and called it the so called ‘West Bank.’

“Egypt did not claim sovereignty in Gaza but Jordan deigned, in 1950, to annex Judea and Samaria. This illegal annexation was not recognized by international law. The Arab nations objected to it, and only Britain and Pakistan recognized it – and Britain did not recognize the annexation of eastern Jerusalem.

“In 1967, after the Six Day War, these territories – which were originally meant for the Jewish Nation’s National Home according to the Mandate Charter – were liberated and returned to Israeli control.”

Professor Einhorn added that,

“according to international law, Israel has full right to populate the entire Land of Israel with dense settlement and thus actualize the principles set by the League of Nations in the original Mandate Charter of San Remo in 1920.

“At that time, the mandate to the Land of Israel was granted to the British and an introduction to the mandate charter states clearly that it is based on the international recognition of the historic ties between the Jewish People and the Land of Israel. Clause II of that mandate charges Britain with ‘ensuring the existence of political, administrative, and economic conditions that will guarantee the establishment of the Jewish national home in the Land of Israel.'”

We, of course, know how that turned out. Britain reneged on its promises and undertakings. Britain tore away 80% all of the mandate territory east of the Jordan River in 1922 and gave it away to a Saudi who became the Emir Abdullah. Professor Einhorn pointed out that the UN Partition Resolution of November 29, 1947 merely recommended that a Jewish and Arab state in what was the geographical territory known as Palestine “shall come into existence.” Thus Palestine is in reality present day Jordan.

Though the Jewish leadership reluctantly accepted the partition plan, it was, as we all know, rejected utterly by the Arab states, which invaded Israel thus voiding the UN’s recommendation of any legal basis.

The decision by the Jewish leadership to accept the UN Partition Plan was deeply painful for them. After all, the armistice lines where the invading Arab armies had been stopped left the Jewish state a mere nine to 15 miles wide and with Judea and Samaria (the so-called West Bank) and half of Jerusalem occupied illegally by hostile Jordanian Arab Legion troops.

The assessment was also motivated by the desperate need to give sanctuary to the 800,000 Jewish refugees driven out of their ancient homes throughout the Arab world, and to provide a haven for the remnants of the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust.

Israel was forced to fight yet another defensive war of survival against Arab genocidal aggression in the June, 1967 Six Day War. It liberated Yesha – Judea and Samaria – from Jordanian occupation and Gaza from Egyptian control. It therefore must be understood that this precious – yet minuscule territory – is empirically the very heart of the Land of Israel by all that is holy. And if that’s a dirty word to some, so be it.

Simply put: The Jewish people are not settlers in land that already belongs to them from time immemorial. And the Jewish people cannot be called “settlers” in their very own ancestral, Biblical and native homeland.

Now if those facts are understood and hammered home again and again by every Israeli and pro-Israeli throughout the world, think of the power and the glory that will ensue. Finally, the world will hear about unassailable Jewish rights to the Land and not the fraudulent claims of an Arab people who call themselves Palestinians. As Ted Bellman wrote about the Zionist leader, Theodore Herzl:

“Herzl rejected Uganda when it was offered because, even though he was secular, he realized that the only place for the Jewish state he envisaged, was in Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel) which includes Judea and Samaria, because it is to Eretz Yisrael that the Jews prayed for two thousand years, while in exile, to return home. Nowhere else would suffice.”

And may I make a special plea to all who read this.

Please help to finally honor the Jewish villagers and townsfolk living now in the ancient and Biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria – often in great danger from Arab terrorism – by rejecting  the use of the hurtful and illegitimate terms; settlers, settlements and West Bank. Thank you.

© Victor Sharpe. All rights reserved.

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