I had the opportunity to speak with Rabbi Yehuda Levi. Rabbi Levi usually spends his time teaching and guiding groups on the Temple Mount and in Jerusalem. He also volunteers for Hatzalah – an international Jewish run emergency response organization.
In the above video – he describes what he saw in the Gaza communities he went down to help.
There is a common mantra the international leftwing and woke movement repeats over and over. – “Israel is the occupier.” While it is easy to refute such nonsense, videos and images from cities like Hebron can make it hard to assuage even veteran Israel supporters.
After all, at first glance Hebron is jarring. A little more than 1,000 Jews live among at least 150 thousand Arabs. The IDF appears to be all over the place and security barriers divide various areas. Despite the fact that the larger Jewish community of Kiryat Arba abuts Hebron, the Jewish community in Hebron can still feel isolated.
However, the images and a videos one sees from afar or the experience one has in person is not the whole picture. In fact, the heavy security presence in Hebron only exists in about 3% of the city – the area that is controlled by Israel since the Wye River Accords otherwise known as H2. The rest of the 97% of Hebron – known as H1 is officially controlled by the Palestinian Authority.
The reason for the heavy military presence in H2 is due to the pogroms, terrorism, and violence against the Jewish community in Hebron. This has gone on well before the 1967, when the Jewish people regained sovereignty in Hebron and long before 1948, when the Jewish people regained their independence.
While the international left likes to paint a distorted image of Hebron, the fact is, it is hard consider control over just 3% of a city – occupation – especially when that 3% contains residents and holy sites that have been maligned by the majority Arab population for centuries.
It is time to look at Hebron holistically and within a broader historical context instead of pigeonholing it into the same false conflict paradigm that exists within the anti-Israel leftwing.
When Mark Twain arrived in the Holy Land in 1867 he saw a barren land with few inhabitants. His depiction of Land of Israel is as follows:
“The further we went the hotter the sun got, and the more rocky and bare, repulsive and dreary the landscape became…There was hardly a tree or a shrub any where. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country”.
While in Jerusalem he did find connection to the spiritual, he still depicted it as hardly populated. Interestingly, according to the Ottoman census already by the 1860s the population he would have found there would have been majority Jewish. This begs the question, if the Jewish population was in the majority, how big was the Jewish Quarter over 150 years ago if the Jewish population was in the majority?
In the second half of the 19th century Jewish Jerusalem was bursting at the seams. More and more Jews were streaming to Jerusalem and the surrounding areas. So much so, that by the 1880s Jews started venturing outside the walls of Jerusalem for the first time.
The Jewish population lived throughout today’s Old City and beyond. There were Jews in abundance by the Flowers Gate in the North as well as in today’s Christian Quarter. What is known as El Khaladia Street in today’s Muslim Quarter was the main street of the Jewish population.
However, this began to change when the British took over the Holy Land as they employed the quarter system we are all used to today. In the years between 1917 and 1948 a series of Arab pogroms occurred with little resistance from British authorities. This decimated the Jewish population and pushed back to the current Jewish Quarter, which was extinguished in 1948 when the Jordanian were able to take control Jerusalem’s Old City for 19 years.
Upon liberating Jerusalem in 1967, Israel reestablished what is today known as the Jewish Quarter, but kept the erroneous four quarters the British had instituted. Unfortunately this gives a false impression that Jews only lived in that area.
In order for the Jewish people to have an authentic and honest connection to their ancestral homeland, they need a very real historical account of Jerusalem. That includes fact that most of the “Christian and Muslim Quarters” were in fact Jewish not so long ago.
According to the website of the Jordan based NGO APNature masks itself as a environmental social justice organization,“concerned with the protection of the environment and the natural resources of Arab countries against all hazards, including the destructive impacts of wars and foreign occupations.”
APNature has taken upon itself to take over Area C, the area allotted to Israel according to the Oslo Accords and where very little Arabs presently live.
Their campaign to plant millions of trees in Area C has been effective. Hill after hill has been taken, turning what was set aside for growing Jewish communities and handing it to “Palestinian” squatters. APNature’s campaign is part of the broader Fayyad plan, whose namesake was the former “Palestinian” Prime Minister and saw Area C as the next stage for “Palestinian” Occupation.
APNature, like lots of faux social justice organizations functioning on behalf of the “oppressed and occupied” in Judea and Samaria claim they are only righting some sort of wrong and so can play on the sympathies of millions who also support environmental causes. What person wouldn’t want to plant trees in “the desert”?
What APNature and those like it, who use the guise of conservation to ensnare and harness the kindness of other for a destructive political cause are doing is land theft on a massiv escale.
Israel has only recently been engaged in enforcing and pushing back on this sort of insidious behavior and interference by foreign organizations.
Im Tirtzu, a Zionist Watchdog organization has brought this issue to the forefront. The group revealed that APNature planted nearly 2.5 million trees in Israel as a means of “green resistance” to “liberate Palestine from the river to the sea.”
Im Tirtzu CEO Matan Peleg said: “Israel’s enemies have learned that they don’t need weapons to conquer Israeli land; all they need is a tree and a camera. While IDF soldiers know how to deal with terrorism, it is much more difficult to fight against this sort of warfare.”
While the government has decided to invest millions of shekels into combatting the “Palestinian” occupation of Area C and the State Lands within it, there is a real need for a change of mindset amongst everyone. The “Palestinian” national movement and its supporters are engaged in more than land theft, they are using environmentalism, not for saving the planet, but for the benefit of their national movement and the armed gangs that come along with it.
Besides a massive injection of cash into projects to plant more trees for Israel in these areas, as well as investments into farming projects, a new type of pioneer in Judea and Samaria needs to be supported. The youth are looking for their movement and if the government eases up on zoning laws for Jews, which the Arabs don’t follow anyway, young pioneers will be the tool to push back and remove the “Palestinian” occupation forces from Area C.
Ahuvya Sandak, a 16 year old boy from Bat Ayin was killed last week when the vehicle he was riding in flipped over as a result of a police chase. When news first broke, the police closed off the area for six hours, letting his body lay in the open. His friends who survived were sent to the hospital for treatment and then released to house arrest. The initial report was that the boys were throwing rocks and a chased ensued, but something seemed fishy.
Knesset member Betzalel Smotrich arrived at the scene and the police prevented him from entering, which is against the law. Witnesses have come forward saying the police were driving out of control and put everyone’s lives in danger.
The family has requested an independent investigation, but the police have started their own – insisting the other boys should be tried for manslaughter.
All of this seems like a passing story anywhere else, far less important than elections and corona, but since the accident and the government’s stalling of an independent investigation, protests have erupted around the country, police stations have been vandalized, and extra security given to the police who were involved.
In normal times we would move on, but something has changed now in Israel. People are beginning to question the system that they are living in. The system, who for all of its triumphs in technology and defense has long ago used the police as an arm of complete control.
During Gush Katif, the media and the left convinced the country that it could lay waste to patriotic pioneers in Gaza – destroying 8,000 homes.
In Amona, shortly after, it tried to stampede the young resistance under the hooves of police horses.
Year after year, it has put down protests against Chareidim, settler youth, Ethiopians, and more.
During the Duma manhunt, which falsely placed blame on pioneering youth in Judea and Samria and in doing so saw torture being employed against kids as young as 14, normal people began to question and many people still question the legitimacy of case’s outcome as being politically driven.
Ahuvya’s death, unnecessary and seemingly a product of an over zealous and paranoid police department, appears to have broken whatever lock there has been on a focused protest movement, with the aim to take down Israel’s police state infrastructure.
People are tired. They are tired of being played against one another. They are tired of being fed media lies and being told they need to “fall in line” with an Israel focused more on handshakes with other countries and PR initiatives to keep the investment money in tech coming, rather than justice and fulfillment of a Divine purpose.
The economy is in shambles, Arab squatters are taking land, another election cycle is upon us, but Ahuvya’s death appears to have become the catalyst for something else.
The irony is, that if this was the old days people would believe the police’s story about the youth throwing the rocks, but their lies are known now. Initial reports say that the was car rammed by the police and pushed off the road and now the policemen say they thought it was a “Palestinian” vehicle.
It is unravelling, but not just their story – their control.
Israel can be a beacon of light it was meant to be, but it must first rip apart the Deep State that has held sway here since the original socialists stole the Zionist movement from within.
The youth of the hills have had enough. They want an Israel based on G-D given rights, not one where the State believes it is the arbiter of our rights. There is an uprising now. It is small and growing and everyday the government waits to gut the police department, the uprising will grow.
Yes, these elections may claim to deal with the coronavirus, but at the end they may be forced to deal with something far more important and that is determining our true national ethos. However, it may be that if the politicians continue to squabble for power, the youth of the hills just might determine that ethos for them.