The entire settler public has been marked again with the scarlet letter of murder and expulsion. Addressing a recent emergency session of Arab League foreign ministers in Doha, Qatar, Mahmoud Abbas declared that “when an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital is established, we won’t allow the presence of one Israeli in it”.
In December 2010 Abbas said that “I will never allow a single Israeli to live among us on Palestinian land”. Now the Palestine Liberation Organization’s ambassador to the United States confirms that any future Palestinian state it seeks with help from the United Nations and the United States should be “free of Jews”.
Such a state would be the first to officially prohibit Jews or any other faith since Nazi Germany, which sought a country that was “jüdenrein”, or cleansed of Jews.
A few years ago, the widow of Andrei Sakharov, the late Yelena Bonner, denounced the creation of “a Palestinian state cleansed of Jews, because in addition to the demand that Palestinian refugees return to Israel, there is also the demand that Judea and Samaria are cleansed of Jews and turned over to Palestinians – while in Gaza today there is not a single Jew already. The result is both strange and terrifying, not only because Israel will essentially be destroyed... Because the plan ‘two states for two peoples’ is the creation of one state, ethnically cleansed of Jews, and a second one with the potential to do the same thing. A 'Judenrein' Holy Land - the dream of Adolph Hitler come true at last. So think again, those who are still able, who has a fascist inside him today?”.
We have the evidence of the policies currently practiced by many Arab countries. Laws and rules hampering Jewish life in Arab countries is the general condition, rather than the exception.
Saudi Arabia doesn’t even permit Jewish visitors, let alone Jewish foreign employees, and certainly will not accept Jewish residents, even Canadians or Americans. An exception was made in the case of Jewish servicemen and women in the American armed forces during the recent Gulf war - and only because Washington insisted that the Saudis’ anti-Jewish rules had to be waived in this instance.
Jordan is no more tolerant of Jews. As a matter of policy, the Jordanians do not permit Jews to be domiciled in their country. In 1948, when Jordan occupied the West Bank after the termination of the British Mandate, it expelled any Jews remaining alive in the territory under Jordanian control. Since then, Jordan has remained “Judenrein”.
And who in this world is more roundly despised than the 500.000 Jews who have settled in Judea and Samaria over the past 25 years? If there is one thing that Europe, the State Department, the United Nations, and most of America’s media big feet agree on, it is that the settlers are an intolerable affront who must be uprooted and removed if there is ever to be “peace in the Middle East”.
The term “Judenrein” was applied throughout Nazified Europe. That a nationalist Arab movement which supported Hitler and Saddam Hussein should call the presence of Jews an obstacle to peace is one thing. It is quite another for an enlightened world to do so.
Now we hear American and other liberals saying that Jewish communities on the biblical land of Judea and Samaria, the cradle of the Jewish nation, must be emptied of all their inhabitants, so that even in a Jewish homeland there can be “Judenrein” areas.
Liberals’ demand to drive Jews off their own land in order to create a Judenrein area, in the land of the Jews, of all places, is the height of hypocrisy by those who claim to be fair-minded advocates of justice in the world.
Settlers are the 'Jews' whom legions of enlightened Westerners love to hate. And the first target of the Palestinian anti-Israel violence.
Last year Talya Ames and her husband Yitzhak were two of four Israeli settlers murdered near Hebron. The Samarian community of Itamar then woke up to find five Fogels, father, mother and three children, slaughtered in their beds.
Just a few weeks later, Ben-Yosef Livnat, nephew of Minister Limor Livnat, was killed by a Palestinian policeman at Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus.
Last week a group of influential rabbis and Israeli activists created a “Jewish Authority” in case the IDF abandons to their fate the Judea and Samaria towns. The initiative should convey to you the feelings of anger and estrangement among the Israelis of Judea and Samaria.
Yet, the State of Israel has always felt committed to the defense of Jews wherever they may be. True, the IDF hasn’t yet withdrawn. But this could change within a short time under Jihadist or international pressure.
What will happen in case these settlements are abandoned by the government? Their residents include Jewish doctors, academics, nurses, educators, engineers, production workers, computer operators, businessmen, and scientists. They cannot by themselves bear the brunt of daily security and earn a living for their large families, while holding the hills around their towns and villages.
The Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria, whose residents have long believed that their presence is vital for Israel’s security, endured hundreds of deaths during the Second Intifada, with the days full of fear, the nights spent standing guard in the isolated houses, the sudden massacres of families, infants and unborn babies, the drives through darkened streets in helmets and bulletproof vests. They, too, serve in the IDF.
People in the West ignore the amount of blood spilled in these communities. Overwhelmingly, the Western media and intellectuals ignored and downplayed the terrorist atrocities suffered by the 'settlers'.
Worse, the media blamed them for bringing it on themselves, describing them as “hard-liners”, “extremists” and “settler kids”. Leftist university professors can’t wait for the moment when the Israeli government uproots hundreds of thousands of 'settlers'.
They have been portrayed by the media, by entertainment icons, by governmental advisers as blood- crazed zealots, “parasites”, as the single largest danger to Israel’s well-being.
The concept of removing all Jews from a certain region, that brings back the worst memories of the tragedy that befell the Jewish people in World War II, has become acceptable and mainstream when it is applied to a part of the land of Israel.
The “Judenrein view” flows logically from the long-held and widely publicized pronouncements of the Arab League and the PLO that the entire State of Israel is an alien presence among the Arab nations - an undesirable island in an Arab sea, which must ultimately be submerged.
This view, which is in Arab textbooks and is taught in the schools of all Arab nations, is the ultimate bar to real peace in the area, not the Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria.
After a killing spree of 'settlers', we all read the same comment in the global media: if the settlers hadn’t been there, they wouldn’t have been killed. If Israel took this approach seriously, it would dismantle the entire state. The same could have been said after the Ma’alot and Kiryat Shmona killings.
If Jews weren’t living in Israel, they wouldn’t be killed.