Kudos to the Knesset for supporting sovereignty
Palestinian terrorism isn’t the main impetus behind the push for annexation. No, the real reason is that Judea and Samaria constitute the biblical heartland of the Jewish people.
By Ruthie Blum
JNS
Jul 24, 2025
Israelis who live on a diet of anti-government slant fed to them by most of the Hebrew media missed a crucial report on Wednesday. Busy focusing on fake news about widespread famine in Gaza and the resumption of haredi-draft-bill negotiations (falsely referred to by the left the “haredi exemption bill”), these hostile outlets didn’t see fit to mention that the Knesset passed a resolution to apply Israeli sovereignty to Judea, Samaria and the Jordan Valley.
Though the resolution is non-binding, which means that it’s more declaratory than concrete at the moment, the fact that it passed by an overwhelming majority is highly significant.
Once the vote was complete—with 71 in favor, 13 against and the rest of the 120 legislators abstaining—Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana said it was a “great honor to be … proclaiming, with a clear voice and a solid majority: This is our land. This is our home. The Land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel.”
He went on to invoke and set the record straight about the decades-old lie surrounding the aftermath of the Six-Day war.
“In 1967, the occupation did not begin; it ended, and our ancestral territories were returned to their rightful owners. We are the original indigenous people of this land. Jews cannot be considered ‘occupiers’ in a region that for 3,000 years has been called Judea,” he said.
Yes, he stated, “These are truths that no false narrative can alter. This is the historical truth, the present-day truth, the parliamentary truth—and the only path to achieving real peace through strength, and to extinguish the false hopes in our enemies’ hearts that we will disappear, be expelled or retreat from our homeland. We are here to stay.”
MK Dan Illouz (Likud)—who, along with MKs Simcha Rothman (Religious Zionism), Limor Son Har-Melech (Otzma Yehudit) and Oded Forer (Yisrael Beiteinu)—submitted the resolution, explained the momentous nature of the move.
“For the first time ever, the Knesset is expressing official support for the application of Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria,” he told JNS. “The message that came out of the plenary is clear: Judea and Samaria are not a bargaining chip [toward a “two-state solution”]; they are the heart of our country.”
He stressed, “This is not a symbolic statement, but the beginning of a national decision. The world does not respect evasions, but a clear stand on our right to the Land of Israel.”
The “national decision” has to be made by the government. Whether it will take the ball and run with it remains to be seen.
The question is whether the Cabinet and prime minister deem the timing appropriate. On one hand, there’s the sense among many politicians in the nationalist camp that Israel should take the opportunity of such a pro-Israel administration in Washington to take the plunge.
On the other, the shaky U.S.-brokered negotiations in Qatar for the release of the remaining 50 hostages held by Hamas are ongoing, and U.S. President Donald Trump’s vision for Mideast peace involves expanding the Abraham Accords. All well and good, but Saudi Arabia and other ostensible potential partners in the region haven’t shed their disingenuous lip-service insistence on Palestinian statehood as a precondition for normalizing relations with Israel.
In the words of baseball legend Yogi Berra, “It’s déjà vu all over again.”
Rewind to the year 2020, during both Trump’s and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s previous terms in office. In January of that year, Trump unveiled his “deal of the century” in the White House with a beaming Netanyahu by his side.
It was what Trump called the “most serious, realistic and detailed plan ever presented—one that could make Israelis, Palestinians and the region safer and more prosperous.”
He might have been right, but the Palestinians weren’t buying any of it—certainly not the part about demilitarization or recognition of Israel as a Jewish state with sovereignty over large swaths of Judea and Samaria, otherwise known and misnamed as the “West Bank.”
Netanyahu clearly knew that this would be their reaction. So, he readily accepted the terms of the plan, and praised Trump to the skies.
“For too long, the heart of Israel has been outrageously branded as illegally occupied territory,” he said. “Today, Mr. President, you are puncturing this big lie. You are recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over all Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria—large and small alike.”
It was after this that Netanyahu began to talk about annexing all Jewish settlements in the Jordan Valley and key areas of Judea and Samaria. At some point in the spring, he went as far as to announce July 1 the actual “target date” for applying Israeli law to the Jordan Valley and much of Judea and Samaria.
It wasn’t to be, however. Netanyahu put it all on hold, if not deep in storage, due to the Abraham Accords, signed on Sept. 15. This wasn’t only as a concession to Trump, whose support for Israel had been so strong.
It was also because of his own longstanding belief that peace in the Middle East doesn’t require the establishment of a Palestinian state. And the normalization agreements with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and subsequently Morocco perfectly illustrated that notion.
Then came the Biden administration, which promptly tried to undermine that very idea. Months later, the Netanyahu-led government was replaced in June 2021 by the Naftali Bennett-Yair Lapid rotation coalition. As a result, the ridiculous mindset about the centrality of the Palestinians to Mideast “peace” returned in full, pathetic force.
A year and half later, Netanyahu was back at the helm in Jerusalem, with a hostile Joe Biden his counterpart in the Oval Office. The animosity was palpable. We’re now learning just how instrumental his administration was in fomenting—and funding—the anti-Netanyahu protest movement.
The Oct. 7, 2023 massacre shifted everyone’s attention to Hamas atrocities and the war in Gaza. Suddenly, after having turned a cold shoulder to the Israeli leader for the 10 months after he formed his right-wing government, Biden made a visit to the Jewish state. At that point, any of the already dwindling discussions of “peacemaking” with the Palestinians evaporated, even on the left.
These were supplanted by an inversion of perpetrator and victim, with Israel being touted by terror-apologists abroad as the former—and Netanyahu blamed at home by his haters for the security failure on Oct. 7, as well as everything that followed.
Criticism from the right has taken a totally different form, of course. Accusations have pertained not to pity for the Gazans, but to an excess of caution in the effort to achieve “total victory.” These have included warnings about the threat of a sequel to Oct. 7 emerging from the Palestinian-controlled areas in Judea and Samaria.
But the constant terrorism emanating from that front isn’t the main impetus behind the push for annexation. No, the real reason is that Judea and Samaria constitute the biblical heartland of the Jewish people.
Israel’s hesitance to assert this fact stems from misguided fantasies of eventual peaceful coexistence and fear of international wrath. That the former has only led to the spilling of Jewish blood and the latter is a constant, no matter what Israel does, was obvious all along to the sector of the public labeled “messianic” and “extremist.”
Oct. 7 caused a host of others to wake up to the reality that ceding rights to the land of Israel arouses more, not less, antisemitism.
The Sovereignty Movement, founded in 2011, explains: “As long as there is no Israeli sovereignty, the nations of the world will continue to view us as ‘colonialist occupiers.’ The issue of Judea and Samaria will always come up for discussion, framed by the false narrative Israel introduced through the disastrous Oslo Accords in 1993: ‘land for peace.’ The application of sovereignty through a government or Knesset decision will put an end to the Arab hope for a Palestinian state west of the Jordan and to the terrorism they use to achieve it. … It is not Arab despair that fuels terrorism, but rather their hope that they still have a chance to take our land. This hope for the establishment of a state in the heart of our homeland must be eradicated once and for all.”
The Knesset’s declaration to that effect is a necessary first step in this necessary and moral endeavor. No wonder the bulk of the local press is treating it like an item not worthy of coverage.
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