In the last two days one thought persists in my mind: how would I feel if any of the three school children abducted and murdered in Israel were my children?
But in fact I feel they are my children. They are children of Hashem, and they are the children of every decent person...
My heart goes out to their parents.
I'm also angry at the response of the media. Many refer to the victims as "settlers". Not only is this not true, because the children lived within the "Green Line", but so what if it were true, and they lived beyond the Green Line. So what??? Does that justify their cold-blooded murder?
And, as usual, the media focus is not on the despicable murder and its perpetrators, but on Israel and its response.
How do we respond to this grief?
My response is to redouble my efforts to defend Israel and the Jewish people. To renounce the lies and expose the bullshit.
Those Arabs, Syrians, Jordanians, Egyptians and others who now call themselves “Palestinians”, are engaged in a terrorist war to claim what they consider to be their "occupied homeland". Their aim is a fantasy based on gross myths and lies...
We must remedy what has become an intolerable situation that threatens the Jewish people with the loss of their one and only homeland.
The following is a "tour d'horizon" of previous postings on this blog on the Jewish People's right to the Land of Israel.
....The so-called "Green Line" is not a border but is where the contending armies stopped fighting and accepted a cease-fire in the war of 1948-49. It has no administrative, geographical, or topographical significance....
The international community appears to have forgotten the clear statements of the various Armistice Agreements of 1949 which provided that the Armistice Demarcation lines were "not to be construed in any sense" as political or territorial boundaries." No provision of those Agreements was in any way to prejudice the rights and claims of the parties in "the ultimate peaceful settlement of the Palestine problem." The Israeli presence in the disputed areas is lawful until a peace settlement, because Israel entered them lawfully in self-defense.
...As part of the settlement in which the Arabs received most of the lands formerly under Turkish sovereignty in the Middle East, the whole of Palestine, on both sides of the Jordan, was reserved exclusively for the Jewish people as their national home and future independent state...
The moment of birth of Jewish legal rights and title of sovereignty thus took place at the same time Palestine was created a mandated state, since it was created for no other reason than to reconstitute the ancient Jewish state of Judea in fulfillment of the Balfour Declaration and the general provisions of Article 22 of the League Covenant...
The San Remo Resolution is the base document upon which the Mandate was constructed and to which it had to conform. It is therefore the pre-eminent foundation document of the State of Israel and the crowning achievement of pre-state Zionism. It has been accurately described as the Magna Carta of the Jewish people. It is the best proof that the whole country of Palestine and the Land of Israel belong exclusively to the Jewish people under international law....
The decisive moment of change came on May 14, 1948 when the representatives of the Jewish people in Palestine and of the Zionist Organization proclaimed the independence of a Jewish state whose military forces held only a small portion of the territory originally allocated for the Jewish National Home. The rest of the country was in the illegal possession of neighboring Arab states who had no sovereign rights over the areas they illegally occupied, that were historically a part of Palestine and the Land of Israel and were not meant for Arab independence or the creation of another Arab state. It is for this reason that Israel, which inherited the sovereign rights of the Jewish people over Palestine, has the legal right to keep all the lands it liberated in the Six Day War that were either included in the Jewish National Home during the time of the Mandate or formed integral parts of the Land of Israel that were illegally detached from the Jewish National Home when the boundaries of Palestine were fixed in 1920 and 1923. For the same reason, Israel cannot be accused by anyone of “occupying” lands under international law that were clearly part of the Jewish National Home or the Land of Israel. Thus the whole debate today that centers on the question of whether Israel must return “occupied territories” to their alleged Arab owners in order to obtain peace is one of the greatest falsehoods of international law and diplomacy....
[The August 31, 1947, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) partition plan which recognized Arab national rights in western Palestine] lent credence to the false idea that Palestine belonged to both Arabs and Jews, which was an idea foreign to the San Remo Resolution, the Mandate and the Franco-British Boundary Convention of December 23, 1920. The Jewish Agency should have relied on these three documents exclusively in declaring the Jewish state over all of Palestine, even if it was unable to control all areas of the country, following the example of what was done in Syria and Lebanon during World War II....
The gravest threat to Jewish legal rights and title of sovereignty over the Land of Israel still comes from the same source that has always fought the return of the Jews to their homeland, namely, the medley of Arabic-speaking Gentiles who inhabit the land alongside the Jews. They no longer call themselves Arabs or Syrians, but “Palestinians”....
The Arabs of the Land of Israel have ignited a terrorist war against Israel to recover what they consider to be their occupied homeland. Their aim is a fantasy based on a gross myth and lie that can never be satisfied, since that would mean the conversion of the Land of Israel into an Arab country. It is up to the government of Israel to take the necessary steps to remedy what has become an intolerable situation that threatens the Jewish people with the loss of their immutable rights to their one and only homeland.
See Israeli sovereignty derives from San Remo for more
Resolution 242 is the cornerstone for what it calls “a just and lasting peace.” It calls for a negotiated solution based on “secure and recognized boundaries” – recognizing the flaws in Israel’s previous temporary borders – the 1948 Armistice lines or the “Green Line” – by not calling upon Israel to withdraw from ‘all occupied territories,’ but rather “from territories occupied.” [...and it has done that, in the entire Sinai, which is larger than all the territories it now holds, combined ]...
Arab declarations about destroying Israel were made preceding the war when control over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as well as Sinai and the Golan Heights, were not in Israel’s hands, and no so-called Israeli occupation existed.
That is why the UN Security Council recognized that Israel had acquired the territory from Egypt , Jordan , and Syria
Resolution 242 speaks of “a just settlement of the refugee problem,” not ‘the Palestinian or Arab refugee problem.’ The history of the resolution shows that it was intentional and reflected recognition that the Arab-Israeli conflict created two refugee populations, not one. Parallel to the estimated 600,000 Arabs who left Israel , more than 899,000 Jews fled from Arab countries in the aftermath of the 1948 war – 650,000 of them finding asylum in Israel
See
Golda Meir announced and repeatedly explained. Israel and Jordan were the two state successors to the British Mandate, she noted, and
“there is no room for a third. The Palestinians must find the solution to their problem together with that Arab country, Jordan, because a Palestinian State between us and Jordan can only become a base from which it will become even more convenient to attack and destroy Israel.”The various policies developed by the major parties after 1967 could be summarized as follows:
- There was bi-partisan support for retaining control of the Territories until a secure peace could be negotiated;
- There was bi-partisan opposition to the concept of a Palestinian State;
- There was bi-partisan refusal to negotiate with the PLO;
- There was bi-partisan support for the principle that any future negotiation would result in new “secure and recognized boundaries” which would differ from the 1949 Armistice lines.
- Labour governments permitted Jewish settlement in essential security locations;
- Likud governments actively encouraged settlement throughout the Territories
The official approach of both the major parties, supported by the mass of the Israeli public, continued to be based on the hope for a solution based on “territory for peace”, and to reject proposals to cede territory unilaterally....
At present the rights of the parties, including settlements, are governed by the terms of the agreements implementing the Oslo Accords which set up the Palestinian Authority. These provide that the issue of “Settlements” is to be a subject of the “final status negotiations” and that meanwhile Israel is to be responsible for the security of “Israelis and Settlements”.
See Some plain facts about the "settlers" for more
Barack Obama and his followers talk constantly about “The Settlements.” Obsessing over this pretends the conflict began in 1967....
Reducing the conflict to the settlements is an act of historical vandalism, defaming the memory of nearly 30,000 Israelis, very few of whom died in settlement-related violence – most of whom died because of the continuing Arab refusal to accept Israel’s existence....
We also know that traditionally, when countries fight, the winner keeps the territory. I challenge my historian colleagues, asking them to name one example when a country won a defensive war then voluntarily returned the territory it conquered, if it had a prior claim to the land. The only answer is Israel, returning the Sinai to Egypt in 1979, relinquishing control under Oslo in 1994 and leaving Gaza in 2005...
...Fighting delegitimization is fighting for peace. Just as the Palestinians, and many Israeli and international NGOs, complain each time a Jew breaks ground outside the Green Line, Israel, the US and the entire pro-peace infrastructure must complain every time a Palestinian delegitimizes Israel, denies its right to exist or attacks the Jews. There must be zero tolerance for such language, which only discourages compromise.
...we need a coalition of conscience ...to fight demonization from all sides and to work for peace, improvising a solution based on mutual accommodation rather than stubbornly and artificially freezing boundaries in one random historical moment or another.
See Obsessing about the Settlements for more
From Keep the Settlements
Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, the misnamed occupied territories, are not the obstacle to peace between Israelis and Palestinians. They are the acid test of peace. To argue that peace is conceivable unless the bulk of the settlements remain in place constitutes stupidity or hypocrisy.
Leave aside the issue of whether Jews have the right to live in the historic homeland of the Jewish people.
Ignore the fact that the settlers live overwhelmingly on what was waste land and turned into gardens, vineyards, and industries which have uplifted the lives of Palestinian Arabs more than all the aid that has passed through (or rather stuck to) the fingers of the kleptocrats of the PA.
Leave aside also Israel’s requirement for defensible borders: that is a critical issue but not identical to the continued presence of settlements.
Accepting the settlements is the sine qua non of any viable peace agreement. It does Israel no good to defend Israel’s right to exist but to condemn the settlers...
...the Israeli settlers have built a garden and a workshop where before there were bare rocks, and thriving communities that are integral parts of Israeli society. It takes longer to get crosstown in Manhattan in traffic than it does to drive from the center of Tel Aviv to Ariel, the largest town in Samaria. This is yet another accomplishment of Jewish ingenuity and industriousness, and it is (or should be) an inspiring example to all who hope for a better life for the peoples of the Middle East. We will know that the Palestinians want peace when they admire rather than abhor this effort....
... to achieve a durable and robust peace by abandoning the settlements ... is a delusion: we will make ourselves immeasurably less secure by abandoning the settlements than by holding fast to them.
See Keep the Settlements for more
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