Yes, I agree, but in negotiation with the Palestinians in which Israel keeps only its “ancestral land,” as its Proclamation of Independence demands, and the Palestinians get all of “the land of the Philistianes.”
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a shaky coalition government right now. It includes a lot of ultra-conservative religious leaders who will never agree to let the Palestinians have most, and certainly not all, of the West Bank. In fact, they refuse to call it that and call it “Samaria and Judea,” referring to the names of that land when it belonged to ancient Israel.
Netanyahu even has some members of his cabinet who are politically more conservative than him. One is his youthful-looking, de facto Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely. I say de facto because Netanyahu purposely doesn’t have a foreign minister; instead, he is his own foreign minister. But in May this year, he made 36-year old Hotovely his deputy Foreign Minister. The trouble is she’s already popping off with her arch-conservatism that goes beyond that of her boss and has gotten her thrown into his dog house.
Tzipi Hotovely has the right name: she has zip and she’s hot. She became a lawyer in 2003. She was first elected to Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, in 2009, thus at the mere age of 30, as a member of Netanayahu’s Likud Party. She is a practicing Orthodox Jewess who describes herself as ” a right winger” and an “ideological voice” of Likud. She ain’t lyin’. She has been a proponent of preventing Jews and Arabs in Israel from marrying and even prohibiting them from having both business and social relations. She herself married Jewish lawyer Or Alan in 2013 and had a child the next year.
When Hotovely first spoke to Israel’s Foreign Ministry appointees, she suggested they invoke the Talmud when arguing for Israel’s continued occupation of the West Bank. Plus, she recently said the Israeli government will never evacuate any Jewish settlements in the West Bank. (I don’t know if she said “West Bank” or “Judea and Samaria.”) That got her in the dog house. She reportedly was told afterwards not to speak publicly about such matters unless her words were approved in advance by others. You can look on the Internet and see her standing on the Temple Mount waving an Israeli flag and claiming the flag will someday be there. That place is a lightning rod right now, and she looks like a political activist standing there.
Hotovely rejects the traditional two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and so do I. She thinks Israel should annex the West Bank. She told U.S. television broadcaster Glenn Beck that this conflict is not a territorial dispute but a religious one. That turns some heads.
I’d like to know what Tzipi Hotovely thinks of my proposal for solving it, which is based on Israel’s Proclamation of Independence: Let the Jews have their ancestral land, and let the Palestinians have their ancestral land–“the land of the Philistianes.” I think the Palestinians have a stronger genetic link to the ancient Philistines–from whom modern Palestinians derive their name–than to any other people group. This proposal requires Israel have a discussion on what is the Jews’ ancestral land, something Israel has never done. (See my book.)
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