Unfortunately, Israel has created the mistaken impression that it is a Lego state.
It’s the only nation prepared to act as a guinea pig for an experiment whose results are known in advance.
Truncated and compressed into the pre-1967 borders, the Jewish state, the dream of millions of people for 2,000 years, the state for which pioneers toiled and soldiers died over 10 decades, is a miniature and indefensible outpost, like a big Givat Assaf or Migron, whose homes are now under threat of demolition.
The outposts control strategic points for the IDF. The Jewish residents thought that the great wave of terrorism had finally convinced everyone to follow their path, the Jewish presence in the territories at all costs.
Beyond these communities you have Jordan, Iraq and Iran. Can Israel imagine having rockets deployed five hundred meters from the Ben Gurion Airport?
Haifa has already been bombed by Hizbullah, as have Ashdod and Ashkelon by Hamas. The citizens of the Judea and Samaria communities are the edge of a people besieged and tormented by terror.
Can Israel imagine having rockets deployed five hundred meters from the Ben Gurion Airport?
“If there are no outposts, the army isn’t allowed to stay in the region”, tells me Lt. Col. Yitzhak Shadmi, one of the leader of the regional council of Judea and Samarai: “And if the IDF leaves the hills, what will happen in case of a regional war between Israel, Iran and Syria?”.
From the beginning of the renewal of Jewish settlement, the general idea was that the army would operate and defend from the same locations in which there were Jewish residents. If there was no Jewish settlement to defend, the army and the government would find any excuse to retreat.
Consequently, 60 years ago the IDF patrolled and set up ambushes in the regions of the kibbutzim in the south, Nahal Oz, Nirim, and others, solely because Jewish pioneers were living there.
There are now two methods of destruction. The state can bulldoze Migron, as it did in Gaza. Or it can ensure that a community becomes isolated. Once you turn it into a ghetto, it will decay or fall prey to “external” forces.
This is a Machiavellian policy which hates and despises the Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria and those Jewish families who made their homes there, saying: let them fall and waste away by themselves. The more their lack of security increases, the faster they will themselves abandon their homes.
In a recent New York Times’ report titled “Mapping Mideast Peace”, there are three possible scenarios, in which 59.782, 79.805 and 94.226 Jewish settlers are abandoned to their fate, along with 77, 82 or 88 communities.
“Netanyahu wants to build only in the big settlements, but if you remove the smallest towns it will be a domino effect for the entire state of Israel”, tells us Hillel Weiss, Professor of Literature at Bar Ilan University and one of the mentors of the 'hilltop youth'.
“If the army can’t protect us, the state should allow the residents to defend themselves. Today in Judea and Samaria there are about 600.000 Jews, the same number there were when the state of Israel was proclaimed in 1948. It’s a shame that the Jewish people survived to Hitler and today is talking about dismantling the outposts”.
It’s like in Arthur Koestler’s 1946 classic “Thieves in the Night”, in which he showed how Jewish youth outwitted both the British authorities and the Arab marauders and terrorists of the day to set up settlements in the furthermost corners of the land of the Jews. They worked the fields by day, and at night, stood guard to fight off intruders.
Peace Now's claims about the outposts resemble the Arabs of Jaffa at the beginning of the century, who accused the Jews of “illegal settlement” even when they were well recompensed for the land which they sold in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, the Jezreel Valley, and Galilee.
The British Mandate adopted these definitions when they imposed the “White Paper” on Jewish immigration into Eretz Israel, on the purchase of land and settlements.
Based on this charge sheet, the entire Jewish state itself is therefore “illegal”. From Bruchin’s outpost you can see the Azrieli towers in Tel Aviv. On the right, the chimneys of Hadera. On the left, the port of Ashdod. The outpost holds in its palm of hand half of the Israeli coast. Down below you have Ramat Aviv, a prosperous neighborhood suburb, where there are many supporters of the Left.
This is the location of the Tel Aviv University campus, where there are numerous professors and lecturers who, in their lectures, support the establishment of a terrorist Arab state and the uprooting of the Yesha communities. But Ramat Aviv stands on the land of an Arab village, Sheikh Munis, whose inhabitants abandoned it in 1948. No one evicted them. They fled, together with the inhabitants of Jaffa, after believing the Arab leaders who promised them that the invasion of Israel by the Arab armies on May 15 of that year would be followed by an Arab victory. They would then be able to return also to conquered Tel Aviv itself.
Do the Israelis really think that if they uproot the outposts in Judea and Samaria the Arabs will forget their claims to Sheikh Munis, Sheikh Bader and Kafr Sumeil and will allow the Jews to live there “in peace”?
For the Islamic world, everything Jewish here is “illegal”.
Everything is “stolen land”.
Dismantle the Samaria’s communities and the next in line will be the Ramat Aviv’s yuppies.