Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Why There Are Jewish Settlers in Judea and Samaria

Nadene Goldfoot
The word, Jew-comes from the name, Judea.  We have been living in Judea since before the time of King David, when Hebron was his first capitol before Jerusalem.  Please read my  article on Hebron that I had written in 2008.  Many of our people perished in 70AD when the Romans overtook us and burned Jerusalem and carried away prisoners, but some Jews were able to surive and continued to live in the land.  Judea and Samaria was our home. 

It's hard to imagine the end of an empire, but that's what happened to our Jewish country.  Being it became the crossroads of many, other nations may have tramped over it but never had settled there to build a country.  The land went to seed and became a wasteland of swamps and deserts.  It remained like that until the 1880's when Jews, driven from persecutions in Russia, started returning in groups called aliyahs.  They returned to face mosquitoes and malaria, planted eucalypus trees in swamps to drain them, and other Jews followed.  Though the land had been on the map of the Ottoman Empire, they certainly left it as it was, barren.

By the 1920's the Jewish National Home had been buying land in Eretz Yisrael for a future home.  The end of WWI gave Britain a mandate to maintain the land, and they in turn rewarded Chaim Weizman for actually making it possible for them to have won the war with his inventions, so rewarded him with the Balfour Doctrine of giving the Jews their homeland back again.  When a sheik heard about the deal, he complained enough to get more than half of the land for himself without having done a thing for England.  The Jews were given a small plot of unsavory land, instead of the original deal. 

All our history in Judea and Samaria was ignored.  Somebody else was in a more favored position.  It wasn't till 1967 when Israel, an established nation through the United Nations, who had gained their country through buying land at high prices, saving England and thus the whole Western Europe from collapse, who had done all the legal necessities to establish a country in 1948, was attacked by all the Arab nations surrounding it again.  Israel gained back its ancient land of Judea and Samaria.  One against many.  Many felt that this was indeed a miracle. 

There were established cities that had never died out like Nablus.  Jews had been living there continually, only to suffer a huge massacre of over 700 persons in 1929.  Again Jews went there to resettle.  There are more than 500,000 Jews now living in Judea and Samaria.  Itamar lies in the mountains of Samaria.  About 1.5 million Arabs also live in their towns. 

Over one million Arabs live in Israel proper and are Israeli citizens with all the rights of Jewish citizenship except for one thing only:  they are not expected to serve in the army.  Yet the Palestinians expect to expell all Jews out of Palestine when they create their state.  As Bret Stephens has said, "Israel's consistent mistake since the peace process began nearly 18 years ago was to suppose that conspicuous displays of reasonableness and moderation would beget likewise on the other side. The reality has been closer to the opposite."  Israel has a pluralistic society housing every religion under the sun, in which Arabs are even serving in the knessset, yet Palestine is to be Juden-free (no Jews allowed) and completely Muslim. 

http://israel-nadene.blogspot.com/2008/12/hebron-ancient-city-of-judah-judah-was.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Bank

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