The settlers seem to be the most uniformly despised group in this conflict; more so than the terrorists. Settlements are proclaimed to be an obstacle to peace by the Left, the US Government, the UN and Israel’s critics.
Here is an interesting perspective by Yisrael Har’el, former chairman of the Yesha Council (courtesy of Arutz Sheva):
“The term Judenrein means an area cleansed of Jews. In the past, this German concept was applied throughout Europe. Now we hear American and other liberals saying that Jewish communities on the biblical land of Judea and Samaria, the cradle of the Jewish nation, must be emptied of all their inhabitants, so that even in a Jewish homeland there can be Judenrein areas…To drive out the Jewish community of Hebron, where the matriarchs and patriarchs of the Jewish people are buried and King David first ruled 3,000 years ago, is unthinkable.
The United States is dotted with towns named for biblical cities in Israel: Hebron, Shilo, Bethlehem. But according to the terminology of many in the U.S. press, the Israeli Shilo, the original one, is a ‘settlement,’ and consequently must be cleansed of Jews.
If someone decided to expel Jews from Shiloh, Ohio, or Hebron, Neb., USA TODAY might be among the first to come out against what it would likely term racism. Why then does it support the expulsion of Jews from the original Shilo – the Jewish one? Why are Jews living in their own homeland considered ‘an obstacle to peace’?
…It is not the presence of Jews in the settlements that is a provocation to Palestinians; it is the presence of Jews anywhere in Israel on either side of the Green Line, the 1949 armistice line… [The] demand to drive Jews off their own land to create a Judenrein area, in the land of the Jews, of all places, is the height of hypocrisy by those who claim to be fair-minded advocates of justice in the world.”
