Trending Topics
|
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=17979
We Are Not Occupiers in Our Own Land
(Israel Hayom) Nadav Shragai - As Simon the Hasmonean put it some 2,200 years ago: "We have not taken foreign territory or any alien property, but have occupied our ancestral heritage, for some time unjustly wrested from us by our enemies; now that we have a favorable opportunity, we are merely recovering our ancestral heritage" (Maccabees 1, 15:33-34). Our friends must finally hear that the historical, religious, legal and emotional links the nation of Israel has to Hebron, Beit El, Shiloh, and Jerusalem are no less than that of the Palestinians. They must hear that we are not occupiers in our own land, and that we are connected to it with bonds of love, the Bible, heritage and nature; that the settlements in Judea and Samaria, as elsewhere in the Land of Israel, are the realization of justice and natural rights. The writer, a journalist and commentator at Ha'aretz and Israel Hayom, has documented the dispute over Jerusalem for thirty years.