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ABOUT THOSE JEWISH SETTLEMENTS

Pro-Palestinian partisans have demonized the Israeli Jews who live in the towns and villages of Judea and Samaria (AKA the West Bank). The logic was simple. They believed the Arab claim that the land was Arab. They expected that eventually the Arabs would be given it. They worried that the Jews were hindering the process by building homes there. Hence the propaganda designed to stop Jews inhabiting the land. Consider how different the perspective becomes when one pays attention to a simple fact: the Jews own the land by international law in an irrevocable trust. The initial article by Salomon Benzimra lays out the legal foundations for why the Jewish Settlements are legal.

The other articles in this section address the demonization of the Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria and the current threat that the Israeli Government will again suicidally move Jews from their homes and businesses as they did in Gaza in 2005. (Note also that the September-October 2012 issue of Think-Israel featured a section on the Levy report here.)

JEWS BUILDING SETTLEMENTS IN JUDEA AND SAMARIA IS LEGAL By: Salomon Benzimra

THE DEADLY ISRAELI HOUSE By: Daniel Greenfield

So much of the world is able to ignore such minor contributions to the dissension between Israel and her neighbors as Arab youth throwing heavy rocks at people driving by or taking pot shots at them, decapitating Jewish babies and stabbing nearby pedestrians. They don't bother blaming the unrest on such minor inconveniences as missiles lobbed from Gaza or explosives left unattended in pizza parlors. Or even the home factory production of poison gas or deadly viruses. But they do, as Daniel Greenfield reminds us, rightfully have concerns about WMH -- the Weapons of Mass Housing that Jewish settlers have planted on some of the land they occupy. As Greenfield points out, these dwellings are terrifying. They are the real danger to a peaceful solution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. President Obama recognizes this. He might ignore trivia like "the gangs of paid rapists assaulting women in Tahrir Square" or the "small mountain of African corpses" in Sudan or Iran building nuclear bombs, but he has drawn the line at the criminal activity exhibited by Jewish settlers, who blatantly erect still another housing unit in Jerusalem. He has directed his cabinet ministers and countless agencies to give the matter their full attention. We now understand retroactively why he was given the Nobel Peace Price.

SIREN; SEWER PIPE; CEASE! FIRE! By: Rachel and Moshe Saperstein

Rachel and Moshe Saperstein were among the 10,000 Gazan Jews that became refugees in their own state when, in 2005, the Sharon government expelled all the Jews living in Gaza in the bizarre belief that this would cause their terrorist neighbors to make peace. Left to their own devices and no longer monitored by the local Jews, the Arabs of Gaza used the extra elbow room to train terrorists and manufacture and/or assemble ever more sophisticated weaponry. It is bitter irony that all Israel is suffering from missile attacks from Gaza and this would never have happened if Israel hadn't kicked settler Jews like the Sapersteins out of Gaza the first place. Recently the IDF tried again to contain the missiles attacks. Saperstein writes of needing to seek shelter yet again during Hamas's intensified missile attacks.

DON'T DO IT, NETANYAHU By: Giolio Meotti

Before Ariel Sharon threw all the Jews out of Gaza, it was possible to voice all sorts of reasons to do so. But the consequences are beyond dispute: expelling the Gaza Jews was one of the worst -- if not the worst -- mistakes Israel ever made. It doesn't take arcane reasoning to figure out why it was a mistake. The missiles Hamas lobs from Gaza into Israel are a constant reminder of what happens when you turn over land to a terrorist organization. They reward your generosity by trying to kill you with greater enthusiasm and more deadly weaponry. And they can do it closer to you than ever before. Give up Samaria and Judea and they won't need long-range missiles to hit their targets. They'll literally be right next door to them. Aside from giving terrorists prime shooting positions, we might mention Israel has done a lousy job of resettling the 10,000 internal refugees from the 2005 Gaza fiasco. How do they plan to pay for resettling another 100,000-250,000 more displaced Jews? The wonderment is that an article such as this one by Giulio Meotti should be necessary.