The former head of Yesha (Judea, Samaria and Gaza) Council, Yisrael Harel, does some personal, public soul-searching: We invested in the settlement enterprise and succeeded but we neglected policy issues. Women in Green’s Sovereignty Campaign is the Right’s only policy-oriented course of action today, and this campaign will succeed with the correct mindset and planning.

In the talk that he gave this past Friday at the Oz veGaon Nature Preserve, (see link below to the youtube video of the talk)  the former head of Yesha Council, columnist and author, Yisrael Harel, criticized the way the settlement movement has conducted itself, which, according to him, focused on settlement to the detriment of policy issues.

Harel said these things as a sort of personal-public soul-searching, stating: “I admit some guilt for this; we focused on settlements and neglected policy, we neglected legislation. We could have done something. If that were not the case, I would not have said that we were neglectful; rather, I would have said that we were dealing with something else. But we could have had a practical influence on legislation and we did not do this”.

Harel notes that the real reason for this is “that we were focused on practical settlement activities and we succeeded in this, thank G-d, but this is not enough to make a decisive difference and so we must continue with full force doing practical activities, together with a very strong emphasis on policy. At some point when we understood this, we saw that the leaders did not grasp the necessity of this matter. There was a sense that things would work out, but there are things that do not just work out”.

Later on, Harel stated that since its inception, the settlement movement’s policy-oriented activity has been a campaign to apply Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria. With these words, Harel specified the activities of Women in Green in the advocacy-policy arena: “Having said that we do not have enough policy-oriented activism and understanding of policy, and that whatever was done, was done later than should have been, then this praiseworthy campaign, whose purpose is to annex Judea and Samaria, is the only policy-oriented activity being done today and if you”, he said, pointing to the heads of Women in Green, Yehudit Katsover and Nadia Matar, “if you do not weary and if you continue to ensure that there be another generation with the correct political orientation and with the correct structure of this campaign, I believe that the time [for Sovereignty] will come”.

During his talk, Harel gave a long description of his struggle and the struggle of the Institute for Zionist Strategy, which he established in recent years, to promote a Jewish, Zionist constitution for Israel. He criticized the religious and haredi objection to such a constitution and stated that if the nationalist camp does not come to its senses and establish, at least, fundamental laws, Israel’s character will be lost and it will cast off its Jewish and national principles and identity.

He presented his concept in the framework of an analysis of the Institute for Zionist Strategy’s proposal for basic laws and a description of the resistance that he got from the political scene to determining basic Jewish values such as the Law of Return, Israel’s obligation to care for the world’s Jews, the exclusive right for the Jewish People to realize their national home here, promotion of Jewish settlement throughout Israel, the national anthem, flag and other elements. In his opinion, if these elements had come up for discussion forty or fifty years ago, they would have been considered trivial, but today they arouse a sense of discomfort among the politicians, even on the Right, and in the future there will be those who will try to undermine them and uproot them from the State of Israel’s character.

These things were said in another of a series of talks held every Friday at the Oz veGaon Nature Preserve, on the hill near Gush Etzion Junction, which Women in Green established , developed and maintain on a daily basis after the murder of the three youths, may their memory be a blessing, and in their names – Gilad, Eyal, and Naftali.

Link to Yisrael Harel’s talk on the Women in Green youtube channel (in Hebrew)