An op-ed critiques U.S. representatives Rosa DeLauro and Sean Casten for their views on the West Bank, emphasizing the deep Jewish historical connection to Judea and Samaria. It draws parallels between ancient Roman renaming of the region and Jordan's 1948 labeling after ethnic cleansing. The piece highlights Israeli settlement families as rooted in ancestral laNd and notes repeated Palestinian rejections of statehood offers. It argues that Jewish residents do not need permission from Congress to reside in these areas.
, as well as Judea and Samaria. Reps. Rosa DeLauro and Sean Casten went with J Street. Others went with the U.S. IsraelTrump shouldn’t repeat Obama’s Iran mistake Rep.
Tim Walberg described a region shaped by long-standing disputes and security challenges, but also by the historic connection of the Jewish people to the land and the constructive role Israel plays there today. By contrast, in their recent article about the trip, DeLauro and Casten expose their unwillingness to be moved off positions they already held “over the years. ”They call the region “the West Bank,” as though the name were a neutral term.
Jordan coined the term after seizing the territory through a brutal act of ethnic cleansing in 1948.residents were expelled. Dozens of synagogues were destroyed. A Jewish presence stretching back centuries was erased.
Then Jordan named what it had taken. This would not be the first time an occupying power attempted to weaken the Jewish connection to the land through language. After crushing the Bar Kokhba revolt, Rome renamed Judea “Syria Palaestina,” invoking the Philistines, ancient enemies of Israel, in an effort to diminish Jewish identification with their ancestral homeland. This history matters beyond terminology.
When a region containing Hebron, Shiloh, Bethlehem, and countless other sites central to Jewish civilization is described solely through a modern political label coined by an occupying power that had just ethnically cleansed its Jewish population, an essential part of the moral story disappears. But the moral story is irrelevant to those with closed minds. And with their closed eyes, DeLauro and Casten also didn’t see that communities like Ariel are home to families, schools,what they’d make elsewhere.
The Jews living there are not occupiers passing through. They are building lives in the land of their ancestors and helping it flourish. They also missed the fact that Mahmoud Abbas has remained president since his four-year term expired in 2009, without holding another election. Under his autocratic rule, the Palestinian Authority continues to operate a system of payments to families of terrorists, a practice serious enough to prompt Congress to pass the Taylor Force Act.
They must have forgotten that, in 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat a Palestinian state with a capital in East Jerusalem. Arafat walked away.didn’t forget.
“I killed myself trying to give the Palestinians a state,” he said in 2016. “I had a deal they turned down that would have given them all of Gaza and 97% of the West Bank. ” I personally thank God that Israel did not lose these sacred spaces to appease terrorists, but you can’t say it wasn’t offered. Again and again.
In 2008, Abbas rejected an even more expansive offer from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. In a 2015 television interview, he admitted, “I rejected it out of hand. ” DeLauro and Casten missed the whole picture. They ignored Palestinian political failures, omitted repeated rejections of statehood, and treated a profoundly complex conflict as a morality play with a single villain: the Jews.
Why should a Jewish citizen require permission from Congress or an American president to purchase land legally offered for sale in Judea and Samaria or anywhere in the world? , as a Jew in the Deep South, nobody had anything to say about my decision to live there, work there, and buy a house there.
The Jews of Judea and Samaria especially don’t need DeLauro’s or Casten’s permission to live in lands where Jewish communities existed long before the birth of either Jordan or the Palestinian national movement. The hills of Judea and Samaria have watched conquerors, pilgrims, prophets, empires, journalists, and politicians pass through for thousands of years. Bruce Pearl is the former head basketball coach of Auburn University and chairman of the U.S. Israel Education Association.
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