REMAINING
TRUE TO THE ANCIENT PLEDGE
Edited from an article by Israel Harel
Prime
minister Ehud Barak has paid a fair amount of lip service to
declarations of his deep love for the Land of Israel. But that
has not prevented him from choosing the exclusive company of
those who, from the very start, have wanted us to be uprooted
from Judea and Samaria.
In their eyes, the identity and roots symbolized by the Land of the Bible
are simply too heavy for them and are, in fact, superfluous.
They have no further desire to identify with what is
symbolized and demanded by the tradition of Bet El, Anatot,
Hebron, Shilo, Eilon Moreh and Tekoa.
“If I forget you, O Jerusalem, may my right hand wither”
Unless we remain true to this ancient pledge, the entire
enterprise of the Jewish people’s renaissance in the modern
age will lose both its primary meaning and its primary
rationale.
If the state of Israel is like any other country on the face of the globe
and if what we have established here is just one more state
lacking any particular identity or uniqueness, we have no
right, moral or otherwise, to be living here.
Those, who today possess the power to dictate believe that if they can
bring home a peace treaty, they will somehow overcome most of
Israel’s domestic problems. They are wrong.
Arabs will never concede their right to return to the
places from which they fled…This aspiration will express
itself in continual efforts to push us out of the last
remaining foothills we still have here.
We know that the concessions in Judea, Samaria, the Gaza Strip
and Jerusalem are but a prelude to the utter loss of both this
land and our state.
Recently, we observed the fast day of the 17th of Tammuz, on
which date the wall surrounding the Temple was breached, thus
paving the way for the destruction of the Temple. Caution must
be exercised lest the act of raising an Arab flag over the
Temple mount-cause a catastrophe that we will live with for
generations to come, namely a split in the Jewish community
between those who have no respect for the Temple Mount
and those who would con../side2r such an act to be a disaster and a
desecration. Should that act take place, not only can we
forget about peace for generations to come, we can anticipate
a deepening of the abyss, an intensification of Israel’s
society’s polarization and chronic instability. That outcome
might be the only fruit-the tainted fruit, in fact-of this
imposed “peace