The quarter of a million Jewish civilians who reside in communities throughout Judea, Samaria and Gaza, the Jewish people?s historic homeland, are natural targets for Arab terror. Fully 20% of all the Israeli fatalities since October 2000 have been those world calls ?settlers?, while we are only 3% of the general population.
I myself live in Shiloh, on a hilltop never occupied by Arabs. Three of my neighbors have been murdered, one a 5 month old infant. In the political and media parlance, my home is a ?settlement?, a term which implies something foreign, intrusive, even temporary. But would it not be most natural for a Jew to reside where his forefathers dwelled? Where his kings ruled and his prophets spoke? The landscape of Judea and Samaria has been Jewish for over 3,000 years. It was because of this reality that the Jewish National Home received international legal recognition in 1922 with no mention of Arabs.
When we first returned to this area, after having been banned from them for 19 years after the 1948 war - unlike Arabs who were permitted to live in Israel, - we founded our communities almost exclusively on unused and unpopulated hilltops. All our zoning and construction processes were carried out under judicial and political supervision. If necessary, we altered our plans. In Hebron, we moved back into homes where Jews were brutally murdered in 1929 as similarly happened in 1948 to the Jews of Gush Etzion when Arabs initiated the violence. No one recalls those acts of ethnic cleansing by Arabs.
In the face of today?s hostilities, the nine-year experiment of the Oslo Peace Process must be judged a failure. The Palestinian Authority?s school curriculum has adopted classic anti-Semitic portrayals. Its media broadcasts programs hailing war, violence and hatred. The immoral insanity of suicidal homicide-bombers is impossible to grasp. Moreover, with no connection to Israel, the local populace is suffering under Arafat?s brutal regime of human rights abuses, embezzlement and other despotic trappings.
The implanting in the minds of terrorists that they deserved a state was an error. Those who claim that Israel can securely live "side by side" with an unthreatening "Palestinian state? can be compared to Lewis Carroll's White Queen, who could believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
The terror we witness is the fault of Yasir Arafat and implacable religious fundamentalism. He must disarm the terrorists, disband them, and denounce them publicly and repeatedly. And then democratization steps must be implemented.
The proposed solution of dismantling and transferring the Jewish communities cannot work. In pre-state days and after Israel?s establishment, Jews constantly ceded land. There was a partition in 1922; another in 1947. After the Sinai Campaign, again land was ceded, as in 1978 with Egypt, and in 1994 with Jordan. Israel always yielded but not so the Arabs. Historically, the ceding of land never resulted in peace.
Before the 1967 war, there were no ?settlements?, no ?occupation?, no ?territories?. And there was no peace, but there was terror. There is no logical connection between the future of the Jewish communities and the gaining of peace.
If the Arabs cease their violence, they will find that there is enough room in this country on both sides of the Green Line for all.
(This was broadcast over the BBC in August upon the invitation of the BBC and inaugurated their new weekly personal opinion slot "Speakers' Corner" on Friday)
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Yisrael Medad is a longtime activist.