You cannot annex your own homeland.
Judea and Samaria have always been Jewish — and that fact still stands.
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This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.
Israel’s decision to ease land purchase registration in Judea and Samaria has produced an array of international condemnation and biased news coverage that has been as predictable as Newtonian physics.
“It is de facto annexation,” they cried.
In one sense, this characterization is fair enough in that it helps people grasp what it means relative to the status quo of recent decades. Simply put, Israel has declared that land in Judea and Samaria which is not privately owned is now state land, some of which will be put up for sale as it is developed.
Yet, in another sense, it is a terrible description because a country cannot annex its own sovereign territory. All these outraged reactions seem based on the false default premise that Judea and Samaria somehow belong to the so-called Palestinians.
It does not. It is part of Israel. This is simple stuff.
In one sense, it does not matter what foreign chancelleries say because lions do not worry about the opinions of lambs. Yet, because we live in this high-tech monstrosity we call the modern world, Israel must go through the motions of managing its national PR. Naturally, Israel is messing this up because PR is not an Israeli strong point.
Ministers, and not just the Far Right ones, are running around boasting that this is the death knell of any chance of a Palestinian state. This plays well with their constituents but travels poorly with an international community that understands the dispute less than I understand quantum computing.
Public relations has never been Israel’s strong point. The Jewish state cannot articulate simply why it is in the right (and it is!) in its conflict with the Palestinians without descending into convoluted and detailed messaging.
There are many ways Israel can fight a better PR war, but the key one is narrative. Israel’s history is complex, and complexity is a losing approach to communications. Nuance and complexity are important, but they must feed into a single, simple, overarching narrative. The Hamas PR machine understands this. “Free Palestine” is simple to grasp, even though it is fiction.
A narrative needs to have a clear function and audience. Does Israel want a message to unite Israelis? Or to change attitudes towards Israel? These are different objectives that involve different audiences.
Consider a proposed narrative that has gained some currency on social media. Let us call it the “We are the light” narrative. This is powerful to Jewish ears as it plays on foundational Judaist belief that the Jews have been chosen to set an ethical example to the world. In the current moral dystopia, this looks true. Israel is a moral light in a world that has lost its way.
This might be a strong message to unify Israelis and Diaspora Jews. However, if I dust off my old media strategist hat, I can tell you, that this narrative would be a disaster in the wider world. It is religiously based, which is guaranteed to alienate others. It sounds arrogant. No matter how you phrase it, people will hear it as Jews saying, “We are morally superior.” Jews’ lack of PR nous goes way back. The phrase “Chosen People” to express a much weightier and more complicated idea is a big PR fail. This narrative also does not address any of the contentious issues regarding Palestinians, sovereignty, and territory.
Jews are excellent at selling narratives to each other, which is fine if unity is the aim, but bad at communicating with the rest of the world. There is, however, a simple narrative that can unite Israelis and Jews, speak to the international community, have the virtue of truth, and be simple. Here it is: It is our land.
That is it. It stands alone. It can unite Israelis and Jews. It speaks to a wider audience in a way that anyone can understand. They can disagree with it, but they cannot misunderstand it.
A major consequence of the failed 1990s Oslo Accords1 — besides the despicable Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat rejecting it and launching the murderous Second Intifada — is that it gave credence to the idea that Israel should give away its land. Giving away land is stupid. Doing so to a sworn enemy is even more so.
For those who would want to look deeper into the “This is our land” slogan, that is the place to introduce what the PR hacks market as “narrative depth.” This is where Israel’s narrative should break down into four pillars that feed into the single message that Israel is Jewish land: history, law, nation building, and an Israel for all (if peaceful).
So here is a narrative framework.
PILLAR 1: HISTORY
Jews are from Judea. They are the indigenous people of Israel. There have always been Jews living in Israel, including in Judea and Samaria. The four holy cities Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias, and Safed, plus places such as Jaffa and Acre, have had a continuous Jewish presence from before the Roman expulsion of Jews in 70 CE.
There have always been Diaspora Jews trying to get back to Israel because they never lost their connection. Jews face Jerusalem when we pray. Israel features prominently in those prayers. The Passover Seder ends with the recitation of “Next year in Jerusalem.” This is the place to add a powerful religious message (that speaks to some) without having a narrative that relies on it.
Archaeology, history, literature, language, culture, and religious texts — including the Hebrew Bible itself — show that Jews are from Israel and that the Jewish nation is inseparable from it.
This pillar lays out Jews’ right to Israel, including Judea and Samaria, as our homeland.
PILLAR 2: LAW
Israel has strong legal foundations, including its sovereign claim to Judea and Samaria and Gaza.
In 1917, the British Government issued the Balfour Declaration, in which it announced its support for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire.
After the First World War, the League of Nations (the precursor to the equally inept United Nations) partitioned the Ottoman Empire’s territory in the Middle East. These were given to Britain and France as mandates (France got a Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon), meaning they were to be turned into nation-states when they could self-govern.
At the San Remo Conference in 1920, resolutions were passed creating the legal basis to create the British Mandate, incorporating the Balfour declaration and its commitment to creating a Jewish homeland. In 1922, the League of Nations approved the British Mandate for Palestine. The preamble recognized Jews’ historical connection to the land. Article 2 emphasized the development of self-governing institutions in preparation for statehood. Article 6 encouraged and laid the legal foundation for Diaspora Jews to migrate and settle there.
Migrant Jews, through consortia, began buying land for their state (though Jews had been buying land since the 1800s). They paid exorbitant prices to buy land from wealthy absent landowners living in Damascus, Cairo, and Beirut. Much of it was swamp and desert.
Far from opposing this, many Arabs sold their land to Jews, delighted to get such prices for swamp land. By 1947, Jews owned 463,000 acres in Palestine, of which 45,000 acres were bought from the Mandatory government, 30,000 acres from churches, and 387,500 from Arab landowners. Israel is the only state built partly on purchased land.
The customary international law concept of uti possidetis juris preserves the boundaries of colonies emerging as states. It means new states should have the same boundaries as their preceding dependencies — entailing that Israel has a legal entitlement to all British Mandatory Palestine, including Judea and Samaria and Gaza. The British Mandate originally included what is now Jordan (formerly Transjordan), which was carved out in 1921. Jordan, in every sense, is a Palestinian state. Approximately 50 to over 60 percent of Jordan’s population is of Palestinian origin, with some estimates reaching up to 70 percent.
The 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, which sought to divide Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, which the Arabs rejected in favor of war, provided a further foundation for Israel’s legitimacy and legality. The State of Israel declared independence in 1948, was admitted to the United Nations in 1949, and 165 countries recognize Israel as a state.
This pillar lays out Israel’s legal foundation.
PILLAR 3: NATION-BUILDING
Nation-building efforts are an important pillar of the right to nationhood and statehood. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Jews began developing the land. The Ottomans long regarded Palestine as a desert-and-swamp backwater and would burn its forests for fuel for the empire’s steam trains. Jewish pioneers drained the swamps, irrigated the dessert, bred climate-specific crops, developed and introduced world-leading agriculture methods, and transformed arid land into fertile land.
A similar story holds for infrastructure. Jews established towns and cities, built roads, hospitals, schools, universities, legal systems, social welfare programs, defense bodies and infrastructure, and civic institutions such as theatres and orchestras. (What else to do with 300 Russian clarinet players?) This transformed the land, and it continues today with Israel being a global technology, innovation, medicine, agriculture, and military and defense leader.
This pillar lays out that Jews have a right to the Israel because they built it, and can defend it.
PILLAR 4: AN ISRAEL FOR ALL
Israel being a Jewish state does not mean that others are unwelcome, or that there is no place for them. It was always envisaged that a recreated Jewish state would have non-Jewish people. The Balfour Declaration stated it was “clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine…”
Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence states the country “will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”
Israel has the Middle East’s only growing Christian community. Druze fight proudly in the Israel Defense Forces. Arabs are welcome to live in Israel on lands they consider important, to worship freely (except Jihadism), to contribute to the country, and to benefit from its success. All they need to do is live peacefully, not attack Jews or try to bring down the state, and everyone can thrive.
This pillar lays out that Israel recognizes and respects its non-Jewish communities.
Note that this narrative does not mention the Holocaust. This does not mean that Jews should not talk about it. It is a central part of the Jewish story. However, Israel’s narrative needs to normalize Israel as a state, rather than make it exceptional. The Holocaust part of the narrative is a strong example of why Jews must have their own state, but Jews would have a right to their own state even without the Holocaust. Israel’s narrative must be one in which Jews are not victims, but command their own destiny.
This is not, nor is it meant to be, a complete history of Israel. Considerably more narrative depth can be added to each pillar. But it is a narrative structure that underlies what Israel’s core message should be: This is our land.
The Oslo Accords (1993, 1995) were a pair of interim agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization aimed at achieving a peace treaty.
Israel belongs to the Jews. Full stop.
Finally! I have been shouting this for years, Israel’ s PR is terrible. You have managed to provide us with the foundation of a great PR platform