Yehudit Katsover & Nadia Matarare Co-Chairs of the Sovereignty Movement
The day of Simchat Torah 5784 was for all of us a day on which the world changed, a day on which hard and terrible truths were revealed. The enemy’s hatred opened our eyes and exposed before us what we have long known, but for many of us it is a new, painful and horrifying world.
The people of Israel rose up and shook off their maladies and their disputes and like a lion, charged forward to defend the land, to defend good, to distinguish between light and darkness, while anti-Semitism raged around them.
A new sprout is beginning to grow. A people battling for its land, appreciating the value of its homeland, aware of its destiny, rising to the challenge of its life, but, as in the past, once again, this people is paying a heavy price in blood to rectify the situation.
In recent weeks, far from the northern and southern battlefields, something is happening in elegant parlors and in the halls of the Knesset.
A new reality is developing and its crowning glory is that the basic truth of our lives is being heard once again. The eternal truth that this land was given to the Jewish people by the Creator of the universe at His will, a truth that neither the Hague Tribunal nor the United Nations General Assembly can reject while claiming “you are robbers.”
This fundamental, elementary, and essential principle lies at the heart of the important book by former United States Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, “One Jewish State,” which has just been published in its Hebrew and English editions. At the initiative of MK Ohad Tal, two festive book launch events were held, one in the Knesset and the other at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Jerusalem. Another book launch event, at the initiative of Yossi Dagan, head of the Samaria Regional Council, took place in the Samarian hills.
The pages of the book reveal a profound insight tied to the roots of the existence of the Jewish people, indeed, the roots of the existence of the entire world: the Master of the universe and its Creator has greater familiarity with the global reality than anyone else, and from this understanding the perception emerges that Israeli sovereignty should be applied to the Land that He promised to the Jewish people, and peace, security, and prosperity will be brought to the region.
“The Jewish people are called Jews because they come from Judea, part of the kingdom ruled over by King David and King Solomon. The notion of Judea should not being part of the Jewish state of Israel, as demanded by the Palestinians and nearly all of the world, is untenable and part of a larger goal to decouple the Jewish people from their biblical homeland. As an observant Jew, and particularly since the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023, I feel as if God is calling out to us and admonishing: How many more times do I need to convince you not to surrender the land that I have given you for eternity?” (David Friedman, from the book).
In his book, Friedman presents what appears to be the most realistic plan for normal life in the Fertile Crescent region. The participation of government ministers, Knesset members, mayors and many other personages at the book launch events indicates a growing support for the vision of applying Israeli sovereignty over the Land of Israel in its entirety. The book lays out a coherent and revolutionary program that addresses the future of the Jewish people in their land as well as the quality of life of the Arab population.
Friedman proposes in the book to grant resident status without citizenship to the Arab population of Judea and Samaria and provides lucid and scholarly reasoning, anchored in the theory of international diplomacy, that this is not apartheid. The world is full of precedents for this type of policy and similar ones. The book requires deep analysis and rethinking of the situation.
Friedman’s plan also received the support of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who wrote in the book's foreword: “One of the first people who sought a meeting with me after I had become secretary of state was Ambassador Friedman. He requested the State Department revisit its policy of many decades regarding the legality of the West Bank settlements. Ambassador Friedman methodically explained to me why the 1978 memorandum of Herbert Hansell, then the chief lawyer at the State Department, was wrong in its conclusion that Jewish settlement in the West Bank was per se a violation of international law. [...] I was sufficiently persuaded by Ambassador Friedman's presentation to authorize my team to do a deep dive into the relevant issues. Ultimately, we concluded that Ambassador Friedman indeed was correct in his arguments, and I issued a directive reversing the Hansell memorandum and finding that Jewish settlement in the West Bank was not per se illegal. That order became known as the Pompeo Doctrine.
In issue 17 of the Sovereignty journal, published by the Sovereignty Movement (200,000 copies in Hebrew and English), Ambassador Friedman and MK Ohad Tal gave a joint interview in which they detailed the political plan. We were pleased to see that this was a different plan from the one on which the Deal of the Century was based. In contrast to that previous plan, which our movement, like many others, opposed, here it is referring to Israeli sovereignty over all the territories of Judea and Samaria without the Oslo division into Areas A, B, and C. Moreover, there is a total rejection of the idea of establishing a Palestinian state. We welcome this development and reawakening, so sorely needed during these fateful days.
We will add and relate that in a recent meeting that we held in the framework of the “Café Shapira” forum, led by Gali Bat Horin, who is working tirelessly to bolster and intensify the vision of the Right in Israel, we met many of those for whom the October 7 massacre shook their worldview and led them to a reawakening, to return to the Land, to join the right-wing camp. We met there for instance a member of a kibbutz who had been deeply rooted in the extreme Left and reversed his views, a woman who had skipped from the fringes of the Meretz party to the far right edge of the map, and many, many more like them.
The change, the reawakening, the return to Zionist and Jewish values are becoming increasingly apparent. This reawakening of so great a segment of the general public, alongside Ambassador Friedman's revolutionary book, are central components of the birth of a new era. May it be so.