Arafat's Occupation immediately below | Occupied or Disputed | Settler's History of Settlements
End Arafat's Occupation
By Michael Freund May
30, 2002
(Freund served as Deputy Director of Communications and Policy Planning in the Israel Prime Minister’s Office from 1996 to 1999. This essay was originally published in the Jerusalem Post, May 29, 2002.)
It is time for Israel and its supporters to finally muster up the courage to acknowledge the cold, hard truth - the West Bank and Gaza are "occupied territories."
These areas are administered by a cruel and heartless regime, one that has no mercy on its perceived foes, targeting them with derision, humiliation and even military force.
Little concern is shown for the lives of the innocent, as ruthless measures are employed with the aim of driving the residents from their homes, making them so miserable that they will have no choice but to leave.
This occupation is a menace to the entire region, destabilizing it and undermining any chances for a lasting peace between Arabs and Jews. There is no choice but to bring about an end to this colonialist enterprise, and to dismantle the occupation once for and all.
Or, to put it more simply: Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian Authority have got to go.
For, if there is anyone who should be considered an "occupier" in the territories, it is Arafat and his dictatorial regime.
Over the past nine years, they have transformed large swaths of Judea, Samaria and Gaza into hothouses for terrorism and violence. They have targeted Jews living in these areas, seeking to compel them to leave by shooting at them, firing mortar rounds at their communities, detonating explosive devices as their cars pass by and invading their homes.
The PA has set new standards of corruption, misusing foreign donor money for unsavory purposes and cultivating a culture of death and suicide among their own people. They have thwarted all efforts to end the century-old Arab-Israeli conflict, preferring instead to resort to the rifle.
Under the PA's rule, the Palestinian-occupied territories have become an irritant to the entire Middle East, threatening to plunge it into another round of bloodshed and violence.
Much of the world turns a blind eye to this reality, chalking it all up to that amorphous and highly unpopular phenomenon known as "politics."
But there is a far deeper, and more compelling reason, why the PA should be considered an "occupying power": they have taken control of land that does not belong to them.
Regardless of what the United Nations or others might say, Judea, Samaria and Gaza are the patrimony of the Jewish people. History, quite simply, is on our side.
Hundreds of years before the advent of Islam, the territories were home to vibrant Jewish communities. David, king of Israel, was born and raised in Bethlehem, while the prophet Amos foretold the future in the hills near Tekoa, southeast of Jerusalem.
Ancient synagogues and burial sites dot the landscape, all serving as physical testimony to the Jewish presence in these areas. Politicians may lie, but 2000-year old stones do not.
Visit Shilo, capital of the northern kingdom of Israel, in Samaria. Take a look at the ruins of King Herod's palace at Herodian, in Judea. Stop by the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, and you will see with your own eyes that these areas were Jewish long before the sword of Islam was ever unsheathed.
To suggest that Israel has no right to this land, or that it has taken someone else's territory, is simply an affront to truth and to history. If you do not accept the Bible as proof, then look to the archaeologists, who will gladly point out the evidence to you.
Even after the Second Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed and the people of Israel sent in to exile, Jews continued to live in these areas, albeit in smaller numbers. Hebron was home to a continuous Jewish presence up until 1929. Only once their neighbors massacred them were they forced to flee.
Gaza - yes, Gaza - also has a long and rich Jewish history. The Hasmonean king, Yochanan, brother of Judah the Maccabee, took Gaza in 145 BCE, and his brother Shimon sent Jews to settle there. In the fourth century of the Common Era, Gaza served as the primary port of commerce for the Jews of the Holy Land.
Nearly forty years ago, on the outskirts of Gaza city near the sea, Egyptian archaeologists discovered a mosaic floor from an ancient synagogue. According to the inscription, it had been built in the sixth century, or 1400 years before the establishment of the PLO.
These are hard facts. They cannot be denied or argued away. So, when Jews now seek again to live in these areas, they are doing so not as foreign occupiers, but as indigenous residents returning home. They are merely continuing in the paths of their ancestors, walking where they walked so very long ago.
The land is big enough and bountiful enough for Arabs and Jews to live together under Israeli rule. There is no reason why anyone needs to be forced from his home. But there is every reason for Arafat to be sent packing.
So to all those who say "End the Occupation" -- I couldn't agree with you more. Let us remove Yasser Arafat and his regime, and return the land to the Jewish people, its original owners, once and for all.
FROM "OCCUPIED
TERRITORIES" TO "DISPUTED TERRITORIES"
by Dore Gold, Israel's
Ambassador to the United Nations (1997-1999). Published in Jerusalem
Center for Public Affairs
"Occupation" as an Accusation / The Terminology of Other Territorial Disputes / No Previously-Recognized Sovereignty in the Territories / Aggression vs. Self-Defense / Israeli Rights in the Territories / After Oslo, Can the Territories be Characterized as "Occupied"?
"Occupation" as an Accusation
At the heart of the Palestinian diplomatic struggle against Israel is the repeated assertion that the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip are resisting "occupation." Speaking recently on CNN's Larry King Weekend, Hanan Ashrawi hoped that the U.S. war on terrorism would lead to new diplomatic initiatives to address its root "causes." She then went on to specifically identify "the occupation which has gone on too long" as an example of one of terrorism's sources.1 In other words, according to Ashrawi, the violence of the intifada emanates from the "occupation."
Mustafa Barghouti, president of the Palestinian Medical Relief Committees and a frequent guest on CNN as well, similarly asserted that: "the root of the problem is Israeli occupation."2 Writing in the Washington Post on January 16, 2002, Marwan Barghouti, head of Arafat's Fatah PLO faction in the West Bank, continued this theme with an article entitled: "Want Security? End the Occupation." This has become the most ubiquitous line of argument today among Palestinian spokesmen, who have to contend with the growing international consensus against terrorism as a political instrument.
This language and logic have also penetrated the diplomatic struggles in the United Nations. During August 2001, a Palestinian draft resolution at the UN Security Council repeated the commonly used Palestinian reference to the West Bank and Gaza Strip as "occupied Palestinian territories." References to Israel's "foreign occupation" also appeared in the Durban Draft Declaration of the UN World Conference Against Racism. The Libyan ambassador to the United Nations, in the name of the Arab Group Caucus, reiterated on October 1, 2001, what Palestinian spokesmen had been saying on network television: "The Arab Group stresses its determination to confront any attempt to classify resistance to occupation as an act of terrorism."3
Three clear purposes seem to be served by the repeated references to "occupation" or "occupied Palestinian territories." First, Palestinian spokesmen hope to create a political context to explain and even justify the Palestinians' adoption of violence and terrorism during the current intifada. Second, the Palestinian demand of Israel to "end the occupation" does not leave any room for territorial compromise in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as suggested by the original language of UN Security Council Resolution 242 (see below).
Third, the use of "occupied Palestinian territories" denies any Israeli claim to the land: had the more neutral language of "disputed territories" been used, then the Palestinians and Israel would be on an even playing field with equal rights. Additionally, by presenting Israel as a "foreign occupier," advocates of the Palestinian cause can delegitimize the Jewish historical attachment to Israel. This has become a focal point of Palestinian diplomatic efforts since the failed 2000 Camp David Summit, but particularly since the UN Durban Conference in 2001. Indeed, at Durban, the delegitimization campaign against Israel exploited the language of "occupation" in order to invoke the memories of Nazi-occupied Europe during the Second World War and link them to Israeli practices in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.4
The Terminology of Other
Territorial Disputes
The politically-loaded term "occupied territories" or "occupation"
seems to apply only to Israel and is hardly ever used when other territorial
disputes are discussed, especially by interested third parties. For example,
the U.S. Department of State refers to Kashmir as "disputed areas."5
Similarly in its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, the State Department
describes the patch of Azerbaijan claimed as an independent republic by indigenous
Armenian separatists as "the disputed area of Nagorno-Karabakh."6
Despite the 1975 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice establishing that Western Sahara was not under Moroccan territorial sovereignty, it is not commonly accepted to describe the Moroccan military incursion in the former Spanish colony as an act of "occupation." In a more recent decision of the International Court of Justice from March 2001, the Persian Gulf island of Zubarah, claimed by both Qatar and Bahrain, was described by the Court as "disputed territory," until it was finally allocated to Qatar.7
Of course each situation has its own unique history, but in a variety of other territorial disputes from northern Cyprus, to the Kurile Islands, to Abu Musa in the Persian Gulf -- which have involved some degree of armed conflict -- the term "occupied territories" is not commonly used in international discourse.8
Thus, the case of the West Bank and Gaza Strip appears to be a special exception in recent history, for in many other territorial disputes since the Second World War, in which the land in question was under the previous sovereignty of another state, the term "occupied territory" has not been applied to the territory that had come under one side's military control as a result of armed conflict.
No Previously-Recognized
Sovereignty in the Territories
Israel entered the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1967 Six-Day War. Israeli
legal experts traditionally resisted efforts to define the West Bank and Gaza
Strip as "occupied" or falling under the main international treaties
dealing with military occupation. Former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court
Meir Shamgar wrote in the 1970s that there is no de jure applicability of
the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention regarding occupied territories to the case
of the West Bank and Gaza Strip since the Convention "is based on the
assumption that there had been a sovereign who was ousted and that he had
been a legitimate sovereign."
In fact, prior to 1967, Jordan had occupied the West Bank and Egypt had occupied the Gaza Strip; their presence in those territories was the result of their illegal invasion in 1948, in defiance of the UN Security Council. Jordan's 1950 annexation of the West Bank was recognized only by Great Britain (excluding the annexation of Jerusalem) and Pakistan, and rejected by the vast majority of the international community, including the Arab states.
At Jordan's insistence, the 1949 Armistice Line, that constituted the Israeli-Jordanian boundary until 1967, was not a recognized international border but only a line separating armies. The Armistice Agreement specifically stated: "no provision of this Agreement shall in any way prejudice the rights, claims, and positions of either Party hereto in the peaceful settlement of the Palestine questions, the provisions of this Agreement being dictated exclusively by military considerations" (emphasis added) (Article II.2).
As noted above, in many other cases in recent history in which recognized international borders were crossed in armed conflicts and sovereign territory seized, the language of "occupation" was not used -- even in clear-cut cases of aggression. Yet in the case of the West Bank and Gaza, where no internationally recognized sovereign control previously existed, the stigma of Israel as an "occupier" has gained currency.
Aggression vs. Self-Defense
International jurists generally draw a distinction between situations of "aggressive
conquest" and territorial disputes that arise after a war of self-defense.
Former State Department Legal Advisor Stephen Schwebel, who later headed the
International Court of Justice in the Hague, wrote in 1970 regarding Israel's
case: "Where the prior holder of territory had seized that territory
unlawfully, the state which subsequently takes that territory in the lawful
exercise of self-defense has, against that prior holder, better title."9
Here the historical sequence of events on June 5, 1967, is critical, for Israel only entered the West Bank after repeated Jordanian artillery fire and ground movements across the previous armistice lines. Jordanian attacks began at 10:00 a.m.; an Israeli warning to Jordan was passed through the UN at 11:00 a.m.; Jordanian attacks nonetheless persisted, so that Israeli military action only began at 12:45 p.m. Additionally, Iraqi forces had crossed Jordanian territory and were poised to enter the West Bank. Under such circumstances, the temporary armistice boundaries of 1949 lost all validity the moment Jordanian forces revoked the armistice and attacked. Israel thus took control of the West Bank as a result of a defensive war.
The language of "occupation" has allowed Palestinian spokesmen to obfuscate this history. By repeatedly pointing to "occupation," they manage to reverse the causality of the conflict, especially in front of Western audiences. Thus, the current territorial dispute is allegedly the result of an Israeli decision "to occupy," rather than a result of a war imposed on Israel by a coalition of Arab states in 1967.
Israeli Rights in the
Territories
Under UN Security Council Resolution 242 from November 22, 1967 -- that has
served as the basis of the 1991 Madrid Conference and the 1993 Declaration
of Principles -- Israel is only expected to withdraw "from territories"
to "secure and recognized boundaries" and not from "the territories"
or "all the territories" captured in the Six-Day War. This deliberate
language resulted from months of painstaking diplomacy. For example, the Soviet
Union attempted to introduce the word "all" before the word "territories"
in the British draft resolution that became Resolution 242. Lord Caradon,
the British UN ambassador, resisted these efforts.10 Since the Soviets tried
to add the language of full withdrawal but failed, there is no ambiguity about
the meaning of the withdrawal clause contained in Resolution 242, which was
unanimously adopted by the UN Security Council.
Thus, the UN Security Council recognized that Israel was entitled to part of these territories for new defensible borders. Britain's foreign secretary in 1967, George Brown, stated three years later that the meaning of Resolution 242 was "that Israel will not withdraw from all the territories."11 Taken together with UN Security Council Resolution 338, it became clear that only negotiations would determine which portion of these territories would eventually become "Israeli territories" or territories to be retained by Israel's Arab counterpart.
Actually, the last international legal allocation of territory that includes what is today the West Bank and Gaza Strip occurred with the 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, which recognized Jewish national rights in the whole of the Mandated territory: "recognition has been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country." The members of the League of Nations did not create the rights of the Jewish people, but rather recognized a pre-existing right, that had been expressed by the 2,000-year-old quest of the Jewish people to re-establish their homeland.
Moreover, Israel's rights were preserved under the United Nations as well, according to Article 80 of the UN Charter, despite the termination of the League of Nations in 1946. Article 80 established that nothing in the UN Charter should be "construed to alter in any manner the rights whatsoever of any states or any peoples or the terms of existing international instruments." These rights were unaffected by UN General Assembly Resolution 181 of November 1947 -- the Partition Plan -- which was a non-binding recommendation that was rejected, in any case, by the Palestinians and the Arab states.
Given these fundamental sources of international legality, Israel possesses legal rights with respect to the West Bank and Gaza Strip that appear to be ignored by those international observers who repeat the term "occupied territories" without any awareness of Israeli territorial claims. Even if Israel only seeks "secure boundaries" that cover part of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, there is a world of difference between a situation in which Israel approaches the international community as a "foreign occupier" with no territorial rights, and one in which Israel has strong historical rights to the land that were recognized by the main bodies serving as the source of international legitimacy in the previous century.
After Oslo, Can the Territories
be Classified as "Occupied"?
In the 1980s, President Carter's State Department legal advisor, Herbert Hansell,
sought to shift the argument over occupation from the land to the Palestinians
who live there. He determined that the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention governing
military occupation applied to the West Bank and Gaza Strip since its paramount
purpose was "protecting the civilian population of an occupied territory."12
Hansell's legal analysis was dropped by the Reagan and Bush administrations;
nonetheless, he had somewhat shifted the focus from the territory to its populace.
Yet here, too, the standard definitions of what constitutes an occupied population
do not easily fit, especially since the implementation of the 1993 Oslo Agreements.
Under Oslo, Israel transferred specific powers from its military government in the West Bank and Gaza to the newly created Palestinian Authority. Already in 1994, the legal advisor to the International Red Cross, Dr. Hans-Peter Gasser, concluded that his organization had no reason to monitor Israeli compliance with the Fourth Geneva Convention in the Gaza Strip and Jericho area, since the Convention no longer applied with the advent of Palestinian administration in those areas.13
Upon concluding the Oslo II Interim Agreement in September 1995, which extended Palestinian administration to the rest of the West Bank cities, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres declared: "once the agreement will be implemented, no longer will the Palestinians reside under our domination. They will gain self-rule and we shall return to our heritage."14
Since that time, 98 percent of the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza Strip has come under Palestinian jurisdiction.15 Israel transferred 40 spheres of civilian authority, as well as responsibility for security and public order, to the Palestinian Authority, while retaining powers for Israel's external security and the security of Israeli citizens.
The 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention (Article 6) states that the Occupying Power would only be bound to its terms "to the extent that such Power exercises the functions of government in such territory." Under the earlier 1907 Hague Regulations, as well, a territory can only be considered occupied when it is under the effective and actual control of the occupier. Thus, according to the main international agreements dealing with military occupation, Israel's transfer of powers to the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo Agreements has made it difficult to continue to characterize the West Bank and Gaza as occupied territories.
Israel has been forced to exercise its residual powers in recent months only in response to the escalation of violence and armed attacks instigated by the Palestinian Authority.16 Thus, any increase in defensive Israeli military deployments today around Palestinian cities is the direct consequence of a Palestinian decision to escalate the military confrontation against Israel, and not an expression of a continuing Israeli occupation, as the Palestinians contend. For once the Palestinian leadership takes the strategic decision to put an end to the current wave of violence, there is no reason why the Israeli military presence in the West Bank and Gaza cannot return to its pre-September 2000 deployment, which minimally affected the Palestinians.
Describing the territories as "Palestinian" may serve the political agenda of one side in the dispute, but it prejudges the outcome of future territorial negotiations that were envisioned under UN Security Council Resolution 242. It also represents a total denial of Israel's fundamental rights. Furthermore, reference to "resisting occupation" has simply become a ploy advanced by Palestinian and Arab spokesmen to justify an ongoing terrorist campaign against Israel, despite the new global consensus against terrorism that has been formed since September 11, 2001.
It would be far more accurate to describe the West Bank and Gaza Strip as "disputed territories" to which both Israelis and Palestinians have claims. As U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright stated in March 1994: "We simply do not support the description of the territories occupied by Israel in the 1967 War as occupied Palestinian territory."
* * *
Notes
1. CNN Larry King Weekend, "America Recovers: Can the Fight Against Terrorism
be Won?," Aired November 10, 2001, 21:00 ET (CNN.com/transcripts).
2. Mustafa Baghouti, "Occupation is the Problem," Al-Ahram Weekly Outline, December 6-12, 2001.
3. Anne F. Bayefsky, "Terrorism and Racism: The Aftermath of Durban," Jerusalem Viewpoints, no. 468, December 16, 2001.
4. See Bayefsky, op. cit. U.S. and European officials may use the term "occupation" out of a concern for the humanitarian needs of the Palestinians, without identifying with the PLO political agenda at Durban or at the UN.
5. U.S. Department of State, Consular Information Sheet: India (http://travel.state.gov/india.html) November 23, 2001.
6. 1999 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Azerbaijan, released by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, U.S. Department of State, February 25, 2000.
7. Case Concerning Maritime Delimitation and Territorial Questions between Qatar and Bahrain, March 15, 2001, Judgment on the Merits, International Court of Justice, March 16, 2000, paragraph 100.
8. The Japanese Foreign Ministry does not use the language of "ending the Russian occupation of the Kurile Islands," but rather resolving "the Northern Territory Issue." (www.mofa.go.jp/region/europe/russia/territory). U.S. Department of State "Background Notes" describe the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus as the Island's "northern part [which is] under an autonomous Turkish-Cypriot administration supported by the presence of Turkish troops" -- not under Turkish occupation.
9. Stephen Schwebel, "What Weight to Conquest," American Journal of International Law, 64 (1970):345-347.
10. Vernon Turner, "The Intent of UNSC 242 -- The View of Regional Actors," in UN Security Council Resolution 242: The Building Block of Peacemaking (Washington: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1993), p. 27.
11. Meir Rosenne, "Legal Interpretations of UNSC242," in UN Security Council Resolution 242: The Building Block of Peacemaking, op. cit., p. 31.
12. Under the Carter administration, Hansell's distinction led, for the first time, to a U.S. determination that Israeli settlement activity was illegal since it purportedly contravened Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention which stated that "the Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it is occupying." Subsequently, the Reagan and Bush administrations altered the legal determination of the Carter period, changed the U.S. voting pattern at the UN, and refused to describe Israeli settlements as illegal, even if American political objections to settlement activity continued to be expressed. One reason was that the Fourth Geneva Convention applied to situations like that of Nazi-occupied Europe, which involved "forcible transfer, deportation or resettlement of large number of people." This view was formally stated by the U.S. Ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Morris Abram, on February 1, 1990, who had served on the U.S. staff at the Nuremberg trials and, hence, was familiar with the legal intent behind the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention.
13. Dr. Hans-Peter Gasser, Legal Adviser, International Committee of the Red Cross, "On the Applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention After the Declaration of Principles and the Cairo Agreement," paper presented at the International Colloquium on Human Rights, Gaza, September 10-12, 1994. Gasser did not state that in his view the territories were no longer "occupied," but he did point out the legal complexities that had arisen with Oslo's implementation.
14. Foreign Minister Shimon Peres's Address at the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement Signing Ceremony, Washington, D.C., September 28, 1995.
15. Ehud Barak, "Israel Needs a True Partner for Peace," New York Times, July 30, 2001.
16. The present intifada violence resulted from a strategic decision taken by Yasser Arafat, as admitted by numerous Palestinian spokesmen:
"Whoever thinks the intifada broke out because of the despised Sharon's visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque is wrong....This intifada was planned in advance, ever since President Arafat's return from the Camp David Negotiations," admitted Palestinian Communications Minister 'Imad Al-Faluji (Al-Safir, March 3, 2001, trans. MEMRI). Even earlier, Al-Faluji had explained that the intifada was initiated as the result of a strategic decision made by the Palestinians (Al-Ayyam, December 6, 2000).
Arafat began to call for a new intifada in the first few months of the year 2000. Speaking before Fatah youth in Ramallah, Arafat "hinted that the Palestinian people are likely to turn to the intifada option" (Al-Mujahid, April 3, 2000).
Marwan Barghouti, the head of Fatah in the West Bank, explained in early March 2000: "We must wage a battle in the field alongside of the negotiating battle...I mean confrontation" (Ahbar Al-Halil, March 8, 2000). During the summer of 2000, Fatah trained Palestinian youths for the upcoming violence in 40 training camps.
The July 2000 edition of Al-Shuhada monthly, distributed among the Palestinian Security Services, states: "From the negotiating delegation led by the commander and symbol, Abu Amar (Yasser Arafat) to the brave Palestinian people, be ready. The Battle for Jerusalem has begun." One month later, the commander of the Palestinian police told the official Palestinian newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida: "The Palestinian police will lead together with the noble sons of the Palestinian people, when the hour of confrontation arrives." Freih Abu Middein, the PA Justice Minister, warned that same month: "Violence is near and the Palestinian people are willing to sacrifice even 5,000 casualties" (Al-Hayut al-Jadida, August 24, 2000 -- MEMRI).
Another official publication of the Palestinian Authority, Al-Sabah, dated September 11, 2000 -- more than two weeks before the Sharon visit -- declared: "We will advance and declare a general intifada for Jerusalem. The time for the intifada has arrived, the time for intifada has arrived, the time for Jihad has arrived."
Arafat advisor Mamduh Nufal told the French Nouvel Observateur (March 1, 2001): "A few days before the Sharon visit to the Mosque, when Arafat requested that we be ready to initiate a clash, I supported mass demonstrations and opposed the use of firearms." Of course, Arafat ultimately adopted the use of firearms and bomb attacks against Israeli civilians and military personnel. On September 30, 2001, Nufal detailed in al-Ayyam that Arafat actually issued orders to field commanders for violent confrontations with Israel on September 28, 2000.
Dore Gold is President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Previously, he served as Israel's Ambassador to the United Nations (1997-1999). This Jerusalem Viewpoints is based on an earlier Jerusalem Issue Brief on this subject.
A Settler's History
of Settlements
By Marc Zell, May 26, 2002. From The
Media Line; found in Israelinsider
I am a resident of Alon Shvut in Gush Etzion, a "settlement," really a town of 5,000 Jews located about 20 minutes south of Jerusalem. Alon Shvut was established in 1970 by a group of young Yeshiva students and their families associated with what became the world famous Har Etzion Yeshiva, run by Rabbis Amital and Liechtenstein. Alon Shvut, like Kfar Etzion, Rosh Tzurim, Migdal Oz, Neve Daniel and Bat Ayin, is built on land that was bought and paid for by the Jewish People long before the Jewish State was formed in 1948. Its original inhabitants, many of whom were Holocaust survivors, and some of whom were members of the left-wing pioneering movement, Hashomer Hatzair, were attacked by Palestinian irregulars and the Tran Jordanian Arab Legion in the months that preceded the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948.
Kfar Etzion was captured by Arab forces on May 14, 1948, the day before the State was declared and the major part of its 200 defenders were gunned down in cold blood after surrendering to Arab forces. The remaining inhabitants and defenders of the "settlements" of Gush Etzion were taken into captivity in Jordan and were released only in 1950. After the capture of the "settlements" of Gush Etzion, the Arabs systematically destroyed every trace of Jewish life here, including uprooting thousands of fruit trees planted by the "settlers" who had reclaimed the barren hills and established a viable agricultural economy. In their place, the Jordanian army built an army base and various encampments that for 19 years had a commanding view of the entire Israeli coast from Ashkelon to Hadera. For 19 years Jews were not allowed to set foot on their land and were left to viewing it from what became known as the John F. Kennedy Memorial Forest on the outskirts of Jerusalem.
On other portions of the Jewish land in Gush Etzion, the Jordanians built a Palestinian refugee camp, Dehaishe; it is to this day registered in the name of the Jewish National Fund. The Jordanians proceeded to annex the entire "West Bank" (a euphemism invented by the Hashemite regime to describe its newly annexed province and what had theretofore been known throughout time immemorial as Judea and Samaria.)
The Jordanian annexation was condemned by the entire international community, save the UK and Pakistan, and the entire Arab world and was consequently, illegal ab initio. No Palestinian Arab state in the area was ever established or proclaimed as the Arab world had rejected the 1947 UN General Assembly partition resolution (No. 181), electing instead to invade the Palestinian mandate and destroy the nascent Jewish State and its "settlements" from the Galilee to the Negev.
In 1967, after being attacked without provocation by Jordanian troops in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the "West Bank," Israeli troops acting in self-defense re-entered Gush Etzion and other areas of Judea and Samaria and expelled the Jordanian forces. Three months after Judea and Samaria were liberated, the children of the original inhabitants of Kfar Etzion petitioned the Government of Israel to return to the site of their kibbutz in Gush Etzion and received permission. Thus began the restoration of Jewish life in Gush Etzion. Today, there are some 15 communities in the "Gush" administered by a Regional Council. In addition there is a sizable town called Efrat founded by Rabbi Shlomo Riskin in the 1980s that numbers some 10,000 souls and the soon-to-be city of Beitar Illit with some 20,000 inhabitants. To the south of Gush Etzion is the town of Kiryat Arba with some 10,000 residents adjacent to the city of Hebron which too has seen its ancient Jewish community restored after repeated attempts by the Arabs to destroy it before 1948.
To give you some historical perspective, the modern Jewish communities of Gush Etzion are themselves successors to a virtually unbroken chain of Jewish "settlement" in Judea that began in the time of Abraham, two thousand years before the first Arab settled here. The Jewish village of Tekoa, was established in 1977 adjacent to the Arab village of the same name and the home of the prophet Amos ("and they build the waste cities, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and drink the wine thereof' They shall make gardens, and eat the fruit thereof; and I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be plucked up out of their land which I have given them, saith the Lord thy G-d").
Towering high over Tekoa is the ancient Hasmonean era citadel known as Herodian, with its magnificent archeological excavations. From the top of the Herodian, one can see clearly the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the Dead Sea and the mountains of Moab, now in Jordan. One can also see a vast plain dotted today by dozens of Arab villages, none of which existed before 1967. These Arab "settlements" were established (without international protest) when Bedouin nomads attracted by the economic boom generated by the return of Jewish life to Gush Etzion decided to "settle" down and earn good livings from the construction trade and related businesses.
Just east of Herodian, on a site adjacent to the Dead Sea, there is a place called Qumran, where the first of the famous Dead Sea Scrolls, written by Jewish "settlers" some 2,000 years ago, were discovered by one of those Arab Bedouins in 1947. Just to the west of Herodian, a few meters outside modern Tekoa, is another cave, where 13-year old Kobi Mandel and his friend were brutally murdered and mutilated last year by a descendant of the same Arab Bedouin "settlers" who now populate the plain below Herodian. And just around the bend from there was where my friend and fellow immigrant Aharon Gurov was gunned down in cold blood just a few weeks ago.
We have a custom here in Gush Etzion to climb up to the Herodian every year on the Ninth of Av and commemorate that solemn day with prayers under candlelight from the ancient synagogue there. On that very site and on that very day in the year 70CE those other earlier Jewish "settlers" of Gush Etzion watched with horror as the Second Temple was engulfed by flames and reduced to rubble by Roman armies in Jerusalem just a few hilltops away.
Further to the west in Gush Etzion, just a few hundred meters from my home in Alon Shvut, there is a road leading to the newest of Gush Etzion communities at Bat Ayin, built on or near the site of the pre-1948 kibbutz of Ma'asuot Yitzhak, named after the late Chief Rabbi of Israel and former Irish Chief Rabbi, Yitzhak Herzog (father of Israeli President Chaim Herzog). In 1990, when the first Jewish pioneers returned to that site, I used to do guard duty throughout the night to help the new "settlers" get started and helped them make their first prayer minyanim. Today there are probably 100 families living there in homes they built with their own hands.
When the Jews of Bat Ayin were building the road that would link them to Kfar Etzion and the rest of the Gush, they stumbled upon some stones that appeared to have a deeper significance. After a few days of excavation by the regional archeological team, they found the remains of another Jewish "settlement" built during the time of the Second Temple. In this ancient Jewish town, they found a mikve, or ritual bath, and at the bottom, a rusted key, of the same type known to have been used by the Jews of another ancient Jewish "settlement" known as Jerusalem. Indeed, it now appears that some of the residents of this ancient Jewish town in Gush Etzion were refugees from the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in the year 70 CE. One of them brought with him or her, this memento from their former home, which is today just a 20-minute drive north by car. In 1990 the newest Jewish residents of this spot brought with them another "memento," the Torah scroll that was taken into Jordanian captivity by their predecessors when the Gush fell to the Arabs in 1948.
Forgive me for having taken so much of your time to read these few lines. The Jews of Gush Etzion are not interlopers or trespassers; just as their counterparts all over Judea, Samaria and Gaza are not. They are the "Indians" (Native Americans) who have returned to their ancient home. They are part of the long and unending chain of Jewish "settlers" who have been part of this landscape since the time of Abraham to this very day. Some day I might relate to you the story of Judah Maccabee's connection with Alon Shvut and the battle that King Jehosophat fought in the valley below Kfar Etzion, just outside my window. Even the name of our people, the Jews, is taken from the tribe, region, province, Kingdom of Yehuda (Judah/Judea), whose heartland encompassed these very hills of Gush Etzion and Hebron for millennia. So it goes on and on and on?
It is therefore with amazement that I read David Newman's piece (New York Times, May 21, 2002) and hundreds of others like it as well as the statements of some (but not most) of my own countrymen who look upon these no longer barren hills and these flourishing Jewish villages, towns and cities in ancient Judea and Samaria as "colonies" and "obstacles." I ask myself what kind of peace can there be if the Jews cannot live and build in Judea? Has the world gone completely mad when it sees the descendants of the Jews of ancient Tekoa and Hebron and that newly discovered Jewish Second Temple period town in Gush Etzion as "trespassers?"
I say to the world that if you deny the legitimacy of our habitations in the hills of Gush Etzion and Judea (and Samaria and Gaza), you deny the legitimacy of the entire Jewish State... More than that: you deny our very legitimacy as a People on this G-d given Earth. Understand this and you will understand why the Arabs of Eretz Israel are relentless in their campaign to expunge the "West Bank" and Gaza of its Jews; to make Judea "Judenrein." Understand this and you will understand why David Newman and his ideological soul mates are tragically wrong.