I’ve said it before because you can’t believe how important it is: you will never understand what the “occupation of the West Bank”* looks like till you go there. Judea & Samaria are the biblical heart of Israel and there is no way to deny it. They are also very sparsely populated, even today and even after all the Jewish settlement building. The sense of space and emptiness is hard to convey. You just have to go there.
And here is an open invitiation. If you get to Tel Aviv, drop me a line and I will somehow organise for you to see what the US talk radio host, Lars Larson, saw that prompted him to give this interview to Arutz 7:
It looks like a similar trip that I’ve been on twice with David Ha’ivri (who I noticed lurking in the back of a few of the shots). He wrote the following on Facebook:
More than 70 journalists from major international media outlets toured Samaria on Thursday, as guests of the Head of the Shomron Regional Council Gershon Mesika and the Minister of Information and Diaspora Yuli Edelstein.
Among the participants in the tour was well-known U.S. radio personality Lars Larson, who earlier this week attended a Knesset session on public diplomacy and international media.
Also in attendance were reporters from the British Guardian, China, Germany and the Reuters news agency, as well as journalists from France, Poland, South America, the United States, Radio London and several television stations from Russia.
It was the largest such visit by reporters and senior foreign journalists to take place in the region. The media people were given a comprehensive tour of the communities, industry, agriculture and wineries in Samaria.
Among the stops in the tour were the Lipski factory which employs both Arabs and Jews, Mount Gerizim, the community of Itamar, and the Givot Olam farm.
* I’m only using the terms like occupation, occupied and West Bank because without them, there is much less chance of linkage.
