To our dear friends,
Thank G-d the elections are behind us. The Right won, but it seems that the rightwing camp has been weakened, since Ministers Shaked and Bennett and MK Shuli Mualem are left without a place in the next Knesset. This fact will not be enough to stop the State of Israel’s historic progression in the application of its sovereignty in Judea and Samaria. Nor will our efforts toward the completion of this vision in practicality be halted. We will have to work harder, but we will not weaken in our efforts.
At this time, we can point a number of milestones which are evidence of significant progress regarding sovereignty:
1. The Likud Central Committee’s resolution on Dec. 31, 2017 to apply sovereignty over the settlement enterprise, which was passed thanks to the hard and skillful work of our friends Shevah Stern, Natan Englesman and Yishai Merling.
2. The U.S. recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.
3. The prime minister’s public commitment to apply sovereignty not only over the blocs of settlement but also over the isolated communities
4. The reports from the U.S. that Donald Trump’s “Deal of the Century” will not include a Palestinian state, but autonomy (according to the Washington Post). This means that the American president has internalized the great danger inherent in the idea of establishing an Arab state between the sea and the Jordan River.
Now we must weigh these things carefully: Although Trump’s plan has not yet been officially published, we must examine a number of key questions, the main and most important of which are:
1. Will the Arab autonomy of which the U.S. president speaks be under Israeli sovereignty?
2. Might the application of sovereignty over the communities in Judea and Samaria cause them to cease developing? In other words, what will be the fate of the areas between the communities? Will it be possible to build more communities in these areas or will their legal definition prevent this?
We must remember that striving to solve the demographic problem is not a justification for surrendering one millimeter of the Land of Israel, because if, G-d forbid, the principle that the Land of Israel is entirely ours is breached, it could cause the collapse of the entire ideological structure.
Therefore, we must return to our truth:
We received the Land of Israel from the Almighty, in order to establish in it an exemplary society, to conduct ourselves in the Land according to societal, economic, spiritual and divine ethics, not in theory, but in practice. We cannot escape our mission.
Since leaving Egypt, since we became a People, we have been part of this great mission, the mission that has taken on more dimensions and more intensity with our return to the Land from exile. While in the diaspora we emphasized the worship of the Almighty in personal ways, today, the worship of the Almighty has risen to the practical, national level, relevant to all of us.
We must act for our national future and return to the Passover Haggadah of the Land of Israel. To cling to the 6 passages of redemption and not only to the four familiar ones. While the four familiar passages are based on the message of redemption that Moses brought to the Children of Israel in Egypt are “I will bring you out, I will deliver you, I will redeem you and I will take you to Me as a People” (Exodus 6:6-7), the high point lies in the passage after this (Exodus 6:8): ” And I will bring you in unto the land, concerning which I lifted up My hand to give it to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob; and I will give it you for a heritage. I am the Lord”. These are the six passages of redemption.
Let us pause for a moment on the sixth passage: “And I will give it to you for an inheritance” – this passage points us back to a verse in Numbers 33 “And you shall inherit the Land and settle in it”, where Nachmanides, in his response to Maimonides’ Book of Mitzvot, defines our obligations to the Land of Israel as derived from this verse: “We are commanded to inherit the Land that the Almighty has bestowed upon our forefathers, to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob and we shall not abandon it to the hands of the nations or to wilderness”.
After Maimonides formulates the commandment in positive terms – “we are commanded to inherit the Land” – he adds emphasis and strengthens this by wording it in a negative way as well “and we shall not abandon it to the nations”. This means that we are forbidden to leave the Land under the control of a nation other than our own. The significance of this is that we are obligated and privileged to apply our rule and sovereignty over the Land. (Rabbanit Idit Itzkovitz expanded upon this in her article “The Application of Sovereignty – an Obligation from the Torah”. The Sovereignty Journal, issue no. 7).
Indeed, unfortunately our rule over the Land of Israel still remains incomplete, but we must be grateful and appreciative that we are coming closer, by giant steps, to the sixth passage of redemption “And I will give it to you for an inheritance”.
Dear friends and partners, all of this has come to pass thanks to your work, your persistence and resolution, with the Almighty’s help.
May we be worthy – next year in rebuilt Jerusalem
May we have an uplifting holiday of true freedom,
Happy Pessach,
Yehudit Katsover and Nadia Matar
The Sovereignty Movement founded by Women in Green