ISRAELIS AREN'T SETTLERS - CHAYEI SARAH

11/22/24

The first property ever purchased by Jews in Israel is in the West Bank city of Hebron. It was a piece of land bought by Abraham to bury his wife, Sarah, as detailed in this week's parsha of Chayei Sarah.

Known as Me'aarat Hamachpela, this sacred burial ground is one of the holiest sites in Judaism, second only to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, and is visited by many hundreds of thousands of Jews each year.

But this holy and ancient Jewish land lies in what is now called the West Bank—territory that Israel captured in 1967 and whose status remains unrecognized by much of the international community.

The truth is that the West Bank is saturated with Jewish history, arguably even more so than the rest of Israel. If Tel Aviv is a city built by Jews, it is the cities in the West Bank that built the Jews.

Shechem, modern-day Nablus, is where Abraham lived upon entering the land of Israel, and where G-d promised him, "To your children I will give this land." Bethlehem is where King David was born, and Hebron is where he ruled. Shiloh is where the first Jewish temple stood, Ramah is where Samuel prophesied, and Bethel is where the Judges ruled.

But despite these lands being undeniably Jewish historic locations, predating the presence of any other modern group, Jews living in the West Bank are often demonized, with people referring to them as "settlers" or accusing them of "occupying" other people's land.

The irony of calling an indigenous people living in their ancestral homeland "occupiers" should not be lost on anyone. It is as misguided as it is unhelpful.

But regardless of one’s opinion on Jews living today in Judea and Samaria in the West Bank, it is incredibly shortsighted to refer to the Israelis living there as “occupiers” or “settlers.”

Because if we consider the Jews in the West Bank to be occupiers, we are practically begging for the international community to apply the same logic to Tel Aviv or Netanya. If Jews are colonizers in the West Bank, the same argument holds for Haifa, Jerusalem, and Ashkelon.

What right, after all, does the Balfour Declaration, the UN partition plan, or even IDF victories give us to live in another people's land? If we root our legitimacy solely on these modern achievements, we are practically inviting the world to tell us we are colonizers, and that the UN or the British had no right to give the Jews the land.

The only true response to such claims is that we did not colonize another people’s land. We returned to our G-d-given, indigenous homeland. We may not have always been able to live in Israel, but Israel has always been our home. For thousands of years of exile, Jews prayed three times a day to return to Zion and cried at every seder, "Next year in Jerusalem."

But this truth holds for the West Bank as well—and arguably, more so than some of the rest of Israel.

The present-day Jewish presence in Israel is, with G-d's blessings, thanks to efforts such as the Balfour Declaration, the UN partition plan, US support, the IDF, and other critical achievements of modern Zionism.

But those efforts only allowed us to return to the land that was always ours—to our indigenous G-d-given land. We must not conflate or confuse modern successes as the reasons for our right to the land.

For if we diminish our claim to Israel by reducing it to those efforts, whether consciously or subconsciously, by calling the West Bank “Occupied Territories” or scorning those who live there, we forfeit our true legitimacy. We have no answer to cries of colonization.

If we credit the Balfour Declaration for our right to Israel, why be offended when Emmanuel Macron reminds us that Israel was founded by a UN vote?

If we want others to believe Israel is our home, we must believe it first.