By Marissa Newman, Times of Israel—
Education Minister Naftali Bennett on Monday said Israel should annex the West Bank, beginning with the Etzion bloc and Binyamin regions.
“The time has come to say Israel is ours,” he said at a meeting of the Knesset’s Land of Israel Caucus. “To go from strategic defense to a process of initiating the implementation of Israeli sovereignty over the territories under Israeli control in Judea and Samaria.”
“We need to mark this as a strategic objective and stop the misunderstood message sent from Israel abroad,” added Bennett, who heads the Orthodox-nationalist Jewish Home party.
The caucus, which urges continued Israeli control over the entire West Bank, convened to celebrate the publication of a new wine guide.
The “New Israeli Wine Guide,” written by Israel Hayom wine reporter Yair Gat and Gal Zohar, a former wine curator in London who is employed as a consultant by a number of Tel Aviv restaurants, initially did not include wines made in West Bank settlements. After facing a backlash from the caucus, which accused it of boycotting the settlements, the authors relented and included settlement wines.
Earlier this month, Bennett reiterated his longstanding call for West Bank annexation in an interview with JTA.
“The approach that I’m promoting is reasonable, sane. In the Middle East, we don’t have the luxury to indulge in fantasy. If it were up to me, I would not wait. I would start with the Etzion bloc , and apply Israeli law and sovereignty on the Etzion bloc first,” the minister and leader of the Jewish Home party said.
“We did this twice before, both times unilaterally: in Jerusalem in 1967 and with the Golan in 1981. I would do it in 2015,” he added.
The caucus’s “main goal is to strengthen the State of Israel’s hold on all of the Land of Israel, particularly in Judea, Samaria and the Jordan Valley,” according to the Knesset website. It is chaired by Jewish Home MK Betzalel Smotrich and Likud MK Yoav Kisch.
When she was Prime Minister, Golda Meir once made the statement of how lonely she felt whenever she attended a session at the United Nations. “We have no family there,” she said. “Israel is entirely alone. Why should that be?” Being a non-religious socialist, Golda was entirely mystified as to why — at the very least — some of the other socialist nations would not stand in unity with the Jewish state. As far as I know, she never attempted to answer her own question.
When the prophet Balaam was hired to curse Israel, he could not, and instead pronounced blessings upon the Jews. In Numbers 23:9 Balaam makes this interesting statement about Israel — “This is a people that dwell alone, not being reckoned among the nations.” On the one hand that doesn’t sound like much of a “blessing”.
On the other hand, being alone among the nations, is perhaps one of Israel’s greatest blessings, because their entire existence has always depended upon the faithfulness of God Almighty! In his profound philosophical anthology, A People That Dwells Alone, Professor Ya’acov Herzog made this observation. “A people that dwells alone is the natural concept of the Jewish people. That is why this one phrase still describes the totality of the extraordinary phenomenon of Israel’s revival. If one asks how the ingathering of the exiles, which no one could have imagined in his wildest dreams, came about; or how the State of Israel could endure such severe security challenges; or how it has built up such a flourishing economy; or how the unity of the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora has been preserved, one must come back to the primary idea that this is a people that dwells alone.”
Prime Minister Menachem Begin — who, unlike Golda Meir, was a a religious man and a student of the Tanakh — added this to Herzog’s conclusion: “So there you have it,” he said. “If we cease dwelling alone, we cease to exist. What a conundrum!”
I write all that to say this: Should Israel annex Judea and Samaria (which I think they should do) they will, of course, be vilified by the world, and once again they will find themselves “alone”. But in reality Israel has never been truly “alone”. They have never been forsaken by the God of Israel, and there remains in the world today a remnant of Gentile Christian Believers who are not ashamed to stand with the Jewish State. I, for one, am happy to be counted among that “remnant”.