Ketzaleh
KetzalehIsrael news photo

President Shimon Peres, greeting the most recent new immigrants to Israel on Tuesday, spoke briefly of the country’s pursuit of peace with its neighbors. MK Yaakov Katz countered his words sharply.

Peres said, “The IDF is a defensive army... We never wanted to fight, but we won the wars that were imposed on us. And when our neighbors are ready to make peace, we gave them back the land and the water…” Though Peres interspersed present and past tenses, his insinuation that the land and water are not ours did not go unnoticed. 

MK Yaakov Katz, head of the National Union party, responded sharply. He issued a statement saying, “Every Jewish child throughout the generations who was raised on Jewish tradition knows that Shilo, Beit El, Nov, Anatot, Hevron and Shechem are our lands, and the water flowing in the Shiloah and Gichon [both in Jerusalem] are ours just as those flowing in the Kishon and Yarkon [near Tel Aviv].

“It is too bad,” Katz continued, “that Peres, who has already ended his political career and is now merely ‘holding on,’ greets new immigrants, of all people, and gives them the opinion of a radical, anachronistic, eccentric group, shared by perhaps 1 percent of the population, that the lands and waters here belong to foreigners. We are guided by the words of another Jewish leader named Shimon – Shimon the son of Matityahu the Hasmonean, who said about the Holy Land, ‘This is not the land of foreigners that we conquered.’"

"It could be that Shimon Peres, at the heights of his age (87), has forgotten," Katz concluded, "but the Nation of Israel throughout its generations does not forget.”