Daniela Weiss, former Mayor of Kedumim and a veteran activist for the Land of Israel, expects construction in Judea and Samaria to pick up, not slow down, after Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's declaration of a building freeze.
"I have no doubt that there will be an awakening on the ground,” she said Sunday. Recalling limitations on settlement activities set by prime ministers since the 1970s, she declared: “We have been through a lot, since Menachem Begin who decided to settle only through military bases, through Yitzchak Shamir who, along with Secretary of State James Baker limited construction to 500 housing units, and all sorts of other troubles and decrees that landed on us from Left and – unfortunately – from Right. But we will get over everything because it is our nature to build our land.”
“We will continue to build at the outskirts of Shechem, in Jenin which is [the biblical] Ir Ganim, and we will renew the Jewish settlement enterprise everywhere,” she vowed.
The construction of new Jewish communities will go on, she promised. “We built at Shvut Ami, Ramat Migron and other places, and I am glad to see that the life spirit continues to course through the veins of the Jews in the Land of Israel."
"I watched Binyamin Netanyahu yesterday at the press conference, and I saw a man who could have been a leader but turned into a doormat," she said acidly. "He seemed like a man who had been surrounded by the wolves of the world and he is standing there like a small, pathetic Jew, so embarrassed. I felt sorry for him because of the nation of Israel, but if this is how he is, it seems that he is not fit to be a leader. He stood there like a beaten, pathetic man. But the liveliness of the Nation of Israel will continue.”
"I call to everyone – get out of your ghetto, go outside and start building,” she exhorted her listeners. “They want to lock us up in a pen, we must not give them that... If everyone gets out of the 200 communities [in Judea and Samaria] to establish new points then all of Barack Obama's decrees will pass from the world.”