As we celebrate this year’s Yom Ha'atzmaut, there are people in the West who still do not understand that the Jews have a legal, moral, and historical right to live in all parts of the land of Israel, including Judea and Samaria, and that Israel is engaged in a religious war—not a war over territory, but over the right of Jews to exist in peace in any part of their ancestral homeland.
When former US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman expressed support for Israel retaining part of Judea and Samaria in any future peace agreement, his remarks were greeted with scorn from Haaretz and others. Anyone unfamiliar with the history of the Israeli/Arab conflict might conclude that the Arabs won all of the wars in which they fought and therefore can dictate the terms of the peace.
A logical question might be asked: By what legal right are Arabs permitted to live in Gaza and Judea and Samaria, but the Jews are restricted to only certain portions of these areas? The Mandate for Palestine conferred the right of the Jews to settle anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. This entitlement has not been changed in international law.
Despite the right of the Jews by law to live in Judea and Samaria, there are those who claim this is occupied land. Eugene Kontorovich, an Israeli legal scholar specializing in constitutional and international law, explains why this is not true. “Under international law,” he asserts, “occupation occurs when a country takes over the sovereign territory of another country. But the 'West Bank' was never part of Jordan, which seized it in 1949 and ethnically cleansed its entire Jewish population. Nor was it ever the site of an Arab Palestinian state.
Moreover, a country cannot occupy territory to which it has sovereign title, and Israel has the strongest claim to the land. International law holds that a new country inherits the borders of the prior geopolitical unit in that territory. Israel was preceded by the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, whose borders included the 'West Bank'.”
What is Rarely Mentioned
What is hardly ever acknowledged or perhaps even known is that Judea and Samaria are the “heart of Biblical Israel, where the ancient kings of Israel ruled, and the prophets preached,” explains David Friedman in his very timely study, One Jewish State: The Last, Best Hope to Resolve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (West Palm Beach, Florida: Humanix Books, 2024).
He notes that Judea and Samaria “is where Jewish history was forged, where Jewish morality and ethics were created, and where the majority of the Jewish people in the world have chosen to live. Surrendering this territory, he said, would place some of the “holiest sites on earth for Jews and Christians in the hands of people who want nothing more than to eradicate the biblical sanctity of this land. To millions of Christians and Jews, this surrender is also decidedly against G-d’s will.”
William G. Dever, an American archaeologist and biblical scholar, said archeologists have been using the evidence found in archeological excavations as another means to validate Israel's claim to a Jewish presence in the land from the time of Joshua bin-Nun (1354 BCE-1244 BCE) to the Arab conquest in the 7th century.
Norman Bentwich, the first attorney general of Mandatory Palestine, observed, "Wherever you plant your foot in that land, you tread on history. A hundred years ago, Palestine was largely deserted and derelict." Aside from the holy cities of Jerusalem, Hebron, Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Tiberias, which were visited by pilgrims, and except for a number of Biblical sites such as Gaza, Ascalon, Jericho, Shiloh, and the graves of the righteous, most of the locations referred to in the Torah had not been identified.”
Distorting History
“The Palestinian Authority has undertaken a very carefully and purposefully orchestrated program of historical revision in an attempt to blur and eventually erase the Jewish connection to the Land of Israel,” according to Naomi Kahn, Regavim’s international spokesperson. “Because Judea and Samaria are the cradle of Jewish history, these areas are quite naturally the focal points of this insidious campaign.”
The absence of genuine Palestine Arab history has not prevented them from inventing their own by establishing the Palestine Museum with the support of Birzeit University near Ramallah. According to the Aga Khan Foundation, the museum, established May18, 2016, was built to celebrate Palestinian Arab "heritage", and with a stated aim to ‘foster a culture of dialogue and tolerance,’ the museum is a flagship project of Palestine’s largest NGO.”
A Religious War
The conflict between Israel and the Arabs in Israel is a religious war that has led to interminable commissions, conferences, and agreements based on the delusional assumption one can negotiate with people who believe Jews are infidels who stole their land.
As historian Mordecai Kedar explains, “The religious reason is rooted in Islam’s conception of itself as a faith whose mission is to bring both Judaism and Christianity to an end and inherit all that was once Jewish or Christian: land, places of worship, and people. [That] Jews now attempt to pray on the Temple Mount suggest[s] that Judaism has returned to being an active, living, and even dynamic religion. This brings the very raison d'être of Islam into question. … Muslims loyal to their religion and aware of this danger cannot possibly accept the existence of a Jewish state, not even a tiny one on the Tel Aviv coast."
A Final Note
Israel’s first Prime Minister Ben Gurion knew of “…no other people that was exiled from its land and dispersed among the nations of the world to be hated, persecuted, expelled, and slaughtered…that did not vanish from history, did not despair or assimilate (though many individual Jews did), but yearned incessantly to return to its land, believing for two thousand years in its messianic deliverance—and that indeed did return and… renew its independence.”
Dr. Alex Grobman - is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and on the advisory board of the National Christian Leadership Conference of Israel (NCLCI). He has an MA and PhD in contemporary Jewish history from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.