Merav Michaeli Refuses to Invest in Judea and Samaria. SHAME!
Israel’s Minister of Transportation, Merav Michaeli, recently stated that it would be a “shame” to invest in transportation infrastructure in Judea and Samaria, because, according to her, this territory will not be a part of the State of Israel in the future. I wasn’t aware that Michaeli could predict the future. Is she a prophet of some kind? Nope. She’s just a left wing politician, who, like other politicians on the Israeli left, clings to the old mantra of the two-state solution being the cure-all to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Jewish history is full of examples of Jews being expelled from places they live just for being Jewish. But you know what’s worse than non-Jews deciding where Jews should and shouldn’t live? Jews telling their fellow Jews where they should and shouldn’t live. Michaeli and the rest of her ilk have basically decided that Jews should be confined to a pale of settlement that excludes most of the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland in Judea and Samaria, aka, the West Bank. Some of these leftists believe that Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria should be restricted to what are sometimes called the major settlement blocs. Others go even further, suggesting that Israel should go back to the so-called pre-1967 borders, which the late Israeli statesman, Abba Eban, who was coincidentally a member of Michaeli’s Labor Party, called the “Auschwitz borders”. Borders that once made the Jews of Israel highly vulnerable to a second holocaust at the hands of Arab armies.
Actually, the pre-1967 borders were never borders at all. They were armistice lines drawn up by Israel and the then hostile Arab countries of Jordan and Egypt following the 1948 War of Independence. These lines were never meant to be permanent borders, nor should they ever be. I know I speak for many Jews both inside and outside of Israel when I say that Jews have the right to live anywhere they please, and that especially includes their ancestral homeland, whose core is the territory of Judea and Samaria.
I do support the principle of two states for two peoples. The difference between myself and people like Michaeli, however, is that I don’t consider the two-state solution to be a solution at all, because at the end of the day, the Palestinians don’t want a country of their own. They want to destroy ours. Palestinian leaders may pay lip service to the two-state solution, but in reality, they have never given up on what has always been the ultimate goal of the Palestinian national movement: the destruction of the Jewish State of Israel and the creation of a Palestinian Arab state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. In fact, the Palestinian national movement is the only movement for self-determination in the world that seeks to destroy another country. Too bad it is also the most celebrated national movement among leftists around the world, at a time when there are plenty of more peaceful and more rational movements for self-determination that are much more deserving of support.
The failure of the Palestinians to accept the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in their ancestral homeland is the reason that even their supposedly moderate leaders in the Palestinian Authority do not promote coexistence with Israel. Instead, Palestinians are urged to kill Jews wherever they find them, using any means necessary. Indeed, killing Jews is the most lucrative opportunity in territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority, because the families of those who do so are given very generous payouts by their leaders. The PA’s practice of paying stipends to the families of those who murder Jews is now commonly known as pay-per-slay. What if Israel’s leadership gave financial handouts to Jews who kill Palestinians? Can you imagine the international outcry? Yet most of the international community seems to be okay, or at least indifferent, when Palestinian leaders pay their people to kill Jews.
Israel cannot allow the creation of a Palestinian state alongside it, because doing so would only embolden the Palestinians to pursue further violence against the Jewish state in the hopes of destroying it. An independent Palestine can only be allowed to emerge once the leaders of the Palestinian people decide that they want a country of their own more than they want to destroy ours. Until that happens, Israel’s leadership is obligated to treat those of its citizens who choose to live in Judea and Samaria the same as those who live elsewhere in the Jewish state. This obligation includes government funding for vital transportation infrastructure. Judging by Merav Michaeli’s recent remarks, however, the current government does not believe in such an obligation. It’s time Israelis elect a government that does.