Opinion & Commentary:

They are Jews and they are Israelis, period

By Seth Mandel

July 18, 2008

The Israeli deputy consul general could not, for all his humble sagacity, see the future.

Yet Benjamin Krasna's heart was heavy. It was June 28, 2006 -- two weeks before Israel and the Iranian terror proxy Hezbollah would fight a bitter, monthlong war in which Hezbollah would succeed in causing the deaths of hundreds of Lebanese civilians in addition to the Israeli casualties of the war. But as he spoke that night to the Jewish Federation of Ocean County, there was still some hope that 18-year-old Itamar resident Eliyahu Asheri was alive. Asheri had been kidnapped by Palestinians earlier that week, and his body would be found only hours after Krasna's speech.

When asked about Asheri, Krasna said he wanted to make one thing clear: "He is an Israeli," Krasna said. We don't, he continued, perform the crass act of pretending to better understand Asheri's kidnapping in light of the fact that Itamar is a Jewish village near Shechem -- a "settlement."

Krasna was clearly irritated by the media's portrayal of Asheri as a "settler" -- as if that made his kidnapping OK.

Two years later, on July 3, 2008, a Palestinian terrorist would drive a bulldozer over Jewish pedestrians and motorists in Jerusalem, killing three and wounding more than 60. Haaretz, the Israeli daily, via its columnist Bradley Burston, was in utter disbelief at the savagery of "the man behind the wheel of a bulldozer, who has taken it upon himself to kill Jews. Not Israeli security force personnel, not occupation troops, not the Shin Bet. Jews. Women and children and the elderly and the infirm. Jews who may be in favor of an independent Palestinian state. Jews who have nothing against Arabs. Jews who may work to end the occupation. Jews."

The ideologues behind Haaretz, who have admitted to covering up corruption and last year told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that Israel has to be "raped" into making concessions for peace, were aghast. Where, they wanted to know, have all the good terrorists gone? You know, the ones with the decency to target settlers and occupiers and soldiers. Why target Jews unaffiliated with Israel's settlements? 

On July 7, almost 100 Israel Defense Forces reservists from the Rabbinate Corps were called up to active duty for the purpose of exhuming bodies of foreign fighters that are to be returned to Hezbollah as part of a prisoner swap. Hezbollah will receive hundreds of prisoners and bodies, as well as Samir Kuntar, who is currently serving consecutive life sentences in Israel for his murder of Einat Haran. Einat was 4 years old when Kuntar smashed her head repeatedly against a rock with the butt of his rifle until he crushed her skull, next to the lifeless body of the girl's father, Danny Haran, who Kuntar had executed moments before in order that Einat's last sight would be the murder of her father.

It is doubtful that there is any air on this planet more wasted than that which circles Kuntar's lungs, giving life to someone who exists only for death.

Yet he will be free, and he will kill again. And in return, Israel will receive the bodies of two of the IDF's fallen heroes, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, whose kidnapping by Kuntar's masters touched off the war.

Goldwasser and Regev were taken from within Israel's borders. But to the purveyors of self-hating collaboration such as Haaretz, are they still tools of the "occupation"? Upon their return, as the worldwide Jewish community cries for its sons of Israel, mourns for its two faithful servants of God and country, sees the tragic end of a story that compelled it to say Tehillim every day for two years, feels the weight of failed hope and fights the onset of hope's loss: what will we think?

To those of us who watched Goldwasser's wife and mother plead for his return last year in New York, standing across the street from that nest of corruption, that cathedral of depravity known as the United Nations building, we will think simply that we have lost two of our own. There are no categories; there is no caveat -- regardless of on which part of biblical Israel they stood when they were taken from us.

After all, international law unequivocally sides with us on this one. Ex iniuria non oritur ius. An illegal act cannot produce a legal result, roughly translated. That's the principle of international law that removes any recognition of Jordanian sovereignty over the West Bank. An illegal act (Jordan's occupation of the West Bank from 1948-67) cannot produce a legal result (accepted claim of sovereignty over that land by Jordan and the Jordanians now living there as a result, known as West Bank Palestinians).

Additionally, it is not disputed that Jordan shelled Israel before any Israeli guns were aimed at Jordan during the Six-Day War in 1967, so the West Bank was land that Israel won in a defensive conflict. International law, as scholar Julius Stone wrote, considers Israel's actions perfectly lawful -- an obvious but important edict.

International law, he wrote in International Law and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, "does not so forbid [taking land], in particular, when the force is used to stop an aggressor, for the effect of such prohibition would be to guarantee to all potential aggressors that, even if their aggression failed, all territory lost in the attempt would be automatically returned to them. Such a rule would be absurd to the point of lunacy. There is no such rule."

Which means Haaretz, the New York Times, et al. are wrong about Asheri and his fellow Itamar residents. They're Israelis. And so are the Jews in the oldest Jewish community in the world, Hebron. And the tumultuous modern history of Jews in and around Shechem (now home mostly to a large Palestinian settlement called Nablus) makes them no less Israeli. Same goes for the flourishing Jewish community in Ariel, which is separated from Jerusalem by random Palestinian settlements along the way but is of great value to the state and the Jewish people.

And what about Jerusalemites? They're Israeli, too! Despite this, in January, just before President George W. Bush was to visit Israel, Condoleezza Rice admonished Israel over a planned housing complex in Jerusalem called Har Homa. "Har Homa," Rice carped, "is a settlement the United States has opposed from the very beginning." The very beginning of what? On July 16, 1997, the U.N. voted to criticize the housing project. The United States voted against that resolution.

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) offers the reasons why then-U.S. Ambassador Bill Richardson voted with the Israelis, instead of voting against them or even simply abstaining. First, the land is 1,850 dunams, about 460 acres, which the Israeli government acquired via eminent domain, and 1,400 of the 1,850 dunams were owned by Jews. Much of that land was owned by Jews prior to 1948. Every single dunam of the entire planned housing project is currently vacant -- not a single home would have to be knocked down nor anyone displaced.

Additionally, in the Oslo Accords, Jerusalem is specifically separated from settlements: "1. ... the jurisdiction of the Council will cover West Bank and Gaza Strip territory as a single territorial unit, except for: a. issues that will be negotiated in the permanent status negotiations: Jerusalem, settlements, ... (Interim Agreement, Article XVII)." Building in Jerusalem is not only a feature of the final status agreements (not the interim agreements or Declaration of Principles), but it is also a distinct feature from settlements.

Fortunately Rice, whose strange ruling on Har Homa contradicts Bush's opinion on the matter, managed to defuse the situation when she couldn't even answer questions about building in Jerusalem. For example, reporters asked her, do you consider other Jewish neighborhoods outside the Green Line, such as Gilo and Ramot, to be "settlements?"

"The important point here is that one reason that we need to have an agreement is so that we can stop having this discussion about what belongs to Israel and what doesn't," she responded.

In other words, she has no idea.

But the answer is that while Jerusalem has the greatest significance for Jews and the Jewish state, Jews have every right, as Israelis, to live in the West Bank, and the brave men and women of the IDF have every right to defend them. Terrorism against Jews in the West Bank is murder, and it cannot be justified or explained away any more than the Mercaz Harav massacre in Jerusalem in March. The Palestinians want Tel Aviv as much as they want Ariel or Hebron or Beersheba, and they want West Jerusalem cleared of Jews, too. That, Mr. Burston, is what Husam Taysir Dwayat, the 30-year-old driver of the bulldozer and resident of a southeast Jerusalem neighborhood, was doing.

Walid Shoebat, the former PLO terrorist turned Israeli advocate once said: "There are only two choices when it comes to terrorism. The first is to make excuses for it. The second is to say there is absolutely no excuse for it. There is no third choice."

Settler, soldier, secular, or scholar, the second choice should always be our first response.