Printer Friendly

Email to A Friend

Friday January 24, 1997

Do Jewish settlements promise peace or ensure war?-They're building a bulwark against ruination of Israel

William Mehlman

With Jewish attention riveted on Hebron, Benjamin Netanyahu's performance in respect to several other policy imperatives that earned him 60 percent of the Jewish Israeli vote last May has all but been forgotten.

Admittedly, none of these matters rank in immediate concern with Hebron, but even if the Hebron issue were to disappear, the prime minister's horizon would hardly become a model of clarity.

Among other things, he would still be confronted in Israel by a secular educational system suffused with a far-left, anti-Zionist, anti-religious deconstructionism; a TV media contemptuous of Zionist ideals and any balance in its handling of news and opinion; and a consular bureaucracy (most notably in the United States) so wedded to the political agenda of Shimon Peres that it has vilified, even threatened, American Jewish opinion makers who challenge their agenda.

Assuming Netanyahu is aware that whoever controls the educational system and the media and the image of Israel projected abroad by its diplomatic representatives controls the future, what does he intend to do about correcting this unfortunate state of affairs? And when will he start?

There is a fourth issue that played a major, perhaps decisive, role in the outcome of the May election -- the growth and strengthening of Yesha, the Jewish communities of Judea, Samaria, Gush Katif and the Golan Heights.

To its credit, the Netanyahu cabinet has voted to lift the freeze on the expansion (on privately owned land) of existing Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria imposed by the governments of Peres and Yitzhak Rabin. It has also restored their subsidies and tax concessions.

For this, Netanyahu was taken to the woodshed for allegedly imperiling the peace process in a letter signed by eight former U.S. secretaries of state and national security advisors, including the architects of such Middle East policy triumphs as the abandonment of the Shah (Cyrus Vance) and the arming of Saddam Hussein (James Baker).

While the Jewish community should rally around Netanyahu in the face of this outrageous interference in Israel's affairs, he is entitled to more.

The notion floated by Yasser Arafat, and seconded by his international chorus of sycophants, that the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria have somehow been rendered illegal by the Oslo Accords is utter fiction.

Neither the Peres nor Rabin governments ever questioned the settlements' legality, and the Netanyahu foreign ministry has affirmed their right to exist and flourish. That being the case, the security, demographic and political rationale for their expansion, to at least the limits of their land availability, is overwhelming.

If Netanyahu's tenure as head of state leaves us with but one legacy, it must be the achievement of a doubling of Yesha's population over the next four years.

The stakes in this enterprise are incalculable. A Jewish population of 250,000 in Judea, Samaria, Gush Katif and the Golan would at one stroke put paid to Arafat's dream of a sovereign PLO state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, paid to the Peresite illusion of Israel as some pseudo-Singapore, a Middle Eastern moneychanger shorn of its Zionist roots and living on borrowed time.

A Yesha community of 250,000 by the arrival of the millennium would be Israel's true bridge to the 21st century, a fact on the ground that all the Oslos ever concocted could not alter. It would mark the beginning of a reversal of the awful tide of surrender and defeat unleashed by Peres and Rabin, the codifier of the Jewish people's permanent return to the land of its fathers and mothers.

The argument that an indebted Israeli government hasn't the funds to provide the housing and infrastructure for another 120,000 people in Judea, Samaria and the Golan is unacceptable.

The obvious solution for a government already pledged to the privatization of Israel's economy is to let private enterprise have a shot at this challenge. Given the reasonable expectation of a government guarantee of their investment against a sudden political pirouette, entrepreneurs, Israeli and foreign, would outdo each other for the opportunity to provide the moderate priced and rental housing that would be required to accomplish the task.

The United States, both on a federal and statewide level, has facilitated the creation of this kind of affordable housing for decades. There's no reason why it can't be done in Israel. And if not over the next four years, when?

None of us can fail to appreciate the incredible pressure on Netanyahu to abandon Jewish history, Jewish land, Jewish security and the Jewish national struggle in exchange for the counterfeit "respectability" offered by the so-called international community.

But acting despite such pressure is what leadership is all about. If Netanyahu's policies double Yesha's population by the year 2000, his place in the modern Jewish pantheon will be permanently secured.

In mourning the assimilation of some 12 million Jews in the 48 years since the establishment of Israel, Netanyahu told the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York last summer that we lost them "because many of them didn't even know that they were Jews or forgot very rapidly.

"If you a take people and lobotomize its memory" he warned, "you rob them of their future."

Israel's historic memory and its present reality are inextricably linked to Judea, Samaria and the Golan. Their future is squarely in his hands.

Did you find this article interesting? Subscribe to our FREE newsletter and you'll be notified each week when "J." goes online. We'll tell you about the most important stories of the week and give you a link to each one.

This page contains a BETA version of Amazon contextual links. They are marked by the dashed underline.  Your purchases support our site. At times they point to items which are not related to the actual link. Please alert us by email if you discover objectionable links.