The events of October 7 indicate more than anything else that Israeli sovereignty over all of the territories of the Land of Israel from the river to the sea is an existential necessity. This is our land, and no one will do the work for us, only a direct Israeli rule will be able to eradicate terror in the territories of the west bank of the Jordan River. What happened in the Gaza envelope will repeat itself a thousand times in Judea and Samaria and any other rule, every other authority, that will be established in the West Bank of the Jordan River, will become a terrorist entity that will pose a constant and existential threat and risk to Israel. On the other hand, consolidating Israel’s security on punitive campaigns in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip will not lead to security – only direct Israeli rule over the entire West Bank of the Jordan River can do so.
I present here the general outlines of a plan for the establishment of one Israel, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. This is a preliminary draft and my hope is that it will spark a national discourse that will lead to its improvement.
Every nation has a right to its land. We do not stand as poor at the entrance to the Land of Israel, and we demand it not only because of our natural desire to live, a desire that exists in every nation: The Land of Israel has been the homeland of the Hebrew nation since the time of Abraham, when it was given to us by God’s command, and to which our ancestors aspired and longed since they were exiled from their land. Throughout all these years of exile, the connection between the Jews and the Land of Israel did not cease, a Jewish presence was always maintained, and throughout all these years no other sovereign nation has clung to it.
For thousands of years, the entire Western civilization, which was created and educated in the spirit of the Bible, knew that the Land of Israel was given to Abraham’s descendants, and even the greatest anti-Semites told our ancestors in the Diaspora, “Jews, go to Palestine”. But for thousands of years, it was only a spiritual homeland, as our ancestors did not inhabit it. The goal of the Zionist movement was to raise the descendants of Abraham in their land and turn it from a spiritual homeland to an actual homeland.
The fact that the Land of Israel was the historical homeland of the Jews was recognized internationally in the Balfour Declaration and especially in the League of Nations Mandate, in which fifty-two of the nations of the world, and in a separate agreement also the United States, affirmed this historic connection and determined that the Land of Israel, on both sides of the Jordan River, would be reestablished as the national home of the Jewish nation. At that time, the political borders of the Land of Israel were also determined and became part of the international law. And so, what is known today as Philadelphi Corridor, is nothing but the international border of the Land of Israel with Egypt, and the latter also recognized this when it opposed any deviation from this line as part of the Israeli withdrawal from Sinai.
Since then, the international status of the Land of Israel has not changed, and as far as international law is concerned, it is still destined to become a Jewish nation-state.
Unfortunately, the establishment of Israel did not transform the Land of Israel from the spiritual homeland of the Jews into the actual homeland of the Israelis. Part of this failure was created by constraints, but much of it was because Israelis continued to relate to their land from a diaspora communal mindset rather than from the mindset of a sovereign nation. Thus, despite the fact that at least its western part has been under full Israeli control for more than fifty years, the Israelis have refrained from imposing their sovereignty there, sovereignty, which is a necessary condition for turning the country into their real homeland.
The events of October 7 indicate that, like any nation, we need a land, and emphasize the fact that the abandonment of the Land of Israel, our historic homeland, carries a heavy price, and what happened in Gaza will repeat itself a thousand times in Judea and Samaria.
As long as the IDF fights valiantly and achieves tactical achievements, a strategic decision is prevented due to the lack of political goals for the war. Thus, the political (and therefore strategic) goal of this war should be the liberation of the western Land of Israel and its transformation into one Israeli state. This is our second War of Independence.
The plan proposed here is based on the historical truth that there is not and never was a “Palestinian nation” in the Land of Israel. This fact also means that there is no positive foundation for peace and welfare on which any other rule in the Land of Israel can be organized, except on the basis of hatred for Israel. This is the fundamental reason why the unprecedented investments of the international community in the “Palestinian nation” have been directed, and will be directed in the future, to building terror infrastructures and corruption instead of to the growth and welfare of the residents of Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip. Thus, the war taking place today in the western Land of Israel is a direct result of the division of the land, and peace can only come with the bringing of the western Land of Israel under the rule of one government – an Israeli government.
Israel will officially announce that it intends to apply Israeli sovereignty over all territories of the western Land of Israel.
Israel will officially announce that the Oslo Accords are null and void and that the legal situation in Judea, Samaria and the situation in the Gaza Strip has returned to the way it was before the agreements.
Israel will act to immediately dismantle the so-called “Palestinian Authority” and its various institutions and organizations and to disarm the armed forces of the Palestinian Authority.
Israel will regain control of all of Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip (hereinafter: Yesha) and establish a military rule there.
Israel will demilitarize Yesha completely and the population there will be disarmed. All terrorist elements that still remain in the area will be eliminated, all terrorist facilities will be destroyed, and thorough searches will be carried out to locate weapons, tunnels, incitement materials, etc. At the end of the operation, no sovereign or armed entity will remain between the Jordan River and the sea except for Israel.
After the occupation and cleansing of the territory is completed, full Israeli sovereignty will immediately be applied throughout Yesha. Yesha residents who are not Israeli citizens will receive a temporary Israeli residency card (which they can replace with permanent residency or citizenship as described below). In the first stage, their status and rights will be the same as before the Oslo Accords, but their movement will be restricted in accordance with security needs.
Since the signing of the Oslo Accords, Israel has accepted the existence of incitement both in the “Palestinian Authority” and in the Muslim public in general. The intensity of the hatred expressed on October 7, and the reports of widespread support for these acts among the general Muslim public in Yesha, are the result of this acceptance.
We can no longer allow incitement in our country. The military rule will take over the civilian system, including the education system, and will directly control its contents, and in the first stage, a process of denazification or radicalization in general, and in the education system in particular, will begin, from which all elements, including religious ones, that encourage and incite hatred of Israel and hatred in general, will be removed. The civilian government will closely supervise the mosques. Any incitement from there will be severely punished.
At the same time, Israel will begin the process of Israelization of Yesha, which will include the assimilation of the Hebrew language at all levels and the use of Israeli national symbols in all public buildings there. Any display or use of national symbols that are not Israeli will be prohibited.
Israel will be directly responsible for the security and welfare of the population and the activities of the various government ministries will be expanded to include this responsibility. Branches of all government ministries will be established throughout Yesha and police stations will be established in each locality.
The public health system in the liberated territories will be merged with the Israeli one, and the Israeli health funds will expand their activities and establish branches throughout the area.
Israel will encourage modernization, industrialization and job creation throughout Yesha, and the process that will begin under the mantle of military rule will continue even after the dismantling of the military government and the full naturalization of the territory.
So far, Arab residents of Yesha have not been offered the opportunity to personally choose how they prefer to deal with Israel’s presence and rule. The decision was always given to another party, first to the Arab states and then to the terrorist organizations.
Applying Israeli sovereignty and restoring personal security to residents throughout the territory, including the personal security of Arab residents who previously suffered from the terror organizations’ reign of fear, will open up the opportunity for every adult resident, or family, to choose for themselves between the following three options:
No one will be forced to decide immediately and the option to choose will remain open to them.
For those Muslim residents of Yesha who do not want to live under Israeli rule at all and wish to emigrate and find their future elsewhere, Israel will assist both financially and in locating absorbing countries and finding them sources of livelihood in them.
After a period of time determined in accordance with security needs, residents with temporary Israeli residency cards will be able to apply for permanent resident status. Receipt of this status will be conditional on an open declaration of allegiance to Israel. The application will be examined and after it becomes clear that the applicant has not been involved in any kind of fighting, terrorism or deliberate harm to the state, the applicant will be able to obtain permanent resident status.
The status of permanent residents will be identical to that of all permanent residents in Israel. They will be able to move freely, work and live all over the country. The main difference between permanent residents and citizens will be that they will not have the right to vote for the Knesset and they will not be subject to the mandatory military service. On the other hand, they will have the right to vote for the local municipality.
For those wishing to tie their fate to Israel and obtain Israeli citizenship, a track for obtaining Israeli citizenship will be established. In addition to the declaration of loyalty, language tests, recommendations, etc., applicants to this track will be required to enlist in the army or national service. Of course, those who collaborated with Israel in the past will benefit from a faster and shorter process. Naturalized persons shall have equal rights and obligations to all other citizens of Israel.
This is a unilateral Israeli initiative to resolve the conflict in the western Land of Israel. This is the only solution proposed today to break the status quo and solve the question of the Land of Israel. The solution proposed here is democratic and for the benefit of all residents of the country.
The adoption of the plan can unite the Israeli people around clear war goals and give impetus and direction to the war that broke out on October 7, because the immediate significance of adopting the plan is the occupation of the Gaza Strip, the imposition of martial law on it and its complete demilitarization.
The decision of the International Court of Justice according to which the continued occupation of Yesha and East Jerusalem violates international law turns all Israeli leaders and IDF soldiers into war criminals and exposes them to international arrest warrants. The determination of the International Court of Justice that Gaza is an “occupied territory”, despite the implementation of the “Disengagement” plan in the summer of 2005, proves that it is no longer possible to continue to avoid resolving the question of sovereignty in the Western Land of Israel through political maneuvers and partial actions. In terms of international law, there is considerable status for an Israeli demand for sovereignty in Yesha, and thus Israel must declare that it contains its sovereignty over Yesha territories and fight for this in the international legal arena as well.
In the absence of a clear plan, Israel finds itself isolated in the international arena. While this isolation is also rooted in anti-Semitism, there is still enough goodwill in the world toward us. Most of the world doesn’t hate us, but simply doesn’t understand us. Our friends also find it difficult to help us because we do not say what we do want and what we do aspire to. Therefore, even if important elements of the international community oppose the proposed plan, and they will probably oppose, then at least this time Israel will be able to strive for international consensus by presenting a clear plan regarding the solution it sees to the conflict in the Land of Israel. It will be the first time since the liberation of Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip in the Six-Day War, that Israel will present a moral position that is understandable to all and based on its national right to its land.
Israel cannot oppose the establishment of a “Palestinian state” or any other entity in the West Bank of the Jordan River without annexing the territories and assuming responsibility for all those living there.
If we don’t take responsibility for Hebron’s sewage, someone else will take it, and they will not only not take care of Hebron’s sewage, but will immediately become a terrorist entity acting against us.
The adoption of this plan will end once and for all the saga of the “Palestinian state”, or “two states for two nations”, which is currently maddening the entire international system. This should be not by saying what we don’t want, but what we do want.
This unilateral initiative is also realistic because the implementation of the plan does not depend on international consensus. The western Land of Israel is effectively in our control, and we must complete this control by applying sovereignty. Of course, we will also have to seek international legitimacy, because without it, sovereignty is ultimately impossible, but the advantage of this initiative is that we are leading the move, and there is a considerable possibility that when it becomes clear to the international community that this solution is both democratic and for the benefit of all the residents of the country, it will accept it.
The proposed initiative aims to establish an Israeli national democracy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, and it is important to emphasize that those Muslim residents of Yesha who choose to join Israel do so as individuals, meaning that they do not and will not have any national rights.
The proposed initiative is for the benefit of all the residents of the Land of Israel, including the Muslim residents of Yesha, whom it liberates from a corrupt dictatorship of terrorist organizations and from a future of poverty and villainy that is expected to them under the “Palestinian state” that the international community wants to impose on them. Instead, the current initiative offers them to be part of a modern, rich and successful country.
It seems that at least in the short term there will be a significant number of permanent residents in Israel. Here it should be noted that two European countries, Latvia and Estonia, have enacted citizenship laws similar to the one proposed here, laws that did not grant citizenship to the Russian-speaking minority among them, but offered a process and conditions under which their decedents could become citizens. The existence of these laws did not prevent Latvia and Estonia from joining the European Union.
It should be emphasized that the initiative does not depend at all on the question of the demographic composition of the western Land of Israel. At the same time, due to existing demographic concerns, it should be noted that according to the American-Israeli Institute of Demography, there are at most one and a half million Arabs living in Judea and Samaria today, and far fewer than this number live in Gaza. Of the Arabs of Judea and Samaria, 300,000 are citizens living within the boundaries of united Jerusalem and are already under Israeli sovereignty. According to a number of calculations made by various research bodies, the numbers are probably even smaller. These numbers differ significantly from those known to the public, since the common numbers are based on estimates by the Palestinian Authority itself, whose goal, of course, is to inflate the number of its residents.
Recently, there has been a trend of disavowing the credibility of the “Palestinian” Central Bureau of Statistics even among Israeli demographers, who have held them reliable until now, following a study by the Begin Sadat Center that exposed the extent of the forgery. Even if these demographic figures are controversial, the proposal for adoption and implementation of the plan does not depend on any demographic data.
Even according to the most extreme estimates of the number of Arab residents of Yesha, there is no danger to what is referred to here as a “Jewish majority” following the annexation. In addition, it can be assumed that at least initially the number of naturalized citizens, that is, those who choose the naturalization option, will be small, so that the impact of annexation on the Israeli political system will be reflected, if at all, after quite a few years.
The annexation will not change Israel’s cultural character either. The cultural character of a country is not a matter of majority or minority, but of cultural strengths. Israel’s cultural strength rests not only on three thousand years of history, but also on the existence of a modern industrial Hebrew society. The elderly among us remember very well that a significant portion of the residents of Yesha spoke Hebrew shortly after the liberation of the western Land of Israel in the Six-Day War. In this respect, it is clear that even after the annexation, the contribution of the Hebrew component to the identity of the land will be decisive.
The goal of this initiative is to erase the Green Line and create a free Land of Israel from the Jordan River to the sea. At the same time, there is no denying that the Green Line has created a socio-economic reality that we will have to deal with for many years. Therefore, there is tremendous importance to development, industrialization, and the creation of immediate jobs in Yesha, partly because in their absence there will be an influx of job seekers to the western part of the former Green Line. To a large extent this is of course inevitable, but we must balance this through the development of Yesha territories, a development that in itself will be a growth engine for all of Israel and will also provide jobs for the residents of Yesha.
The erasure of the Green Line means, of course, the removal of the settlement issue from the political agenda in Israel. Any Israeli will be able to settle wherever they want, and this is subject to the law, of course.
During the 57 years that have passed since the liberation of the biblical heart of the Land of Israel in the Six-Day War, Israel has refrained from exercising its sovereignty in all parts of the western Land of Israel.
It was not the challenges of reality that created an insurmountable barrier to the application of sovereignty – these were only an excuse. It was the desire to avoid applying sovereignty that exploited the challenges of reality and developed them consciously into an “insurmountable” barrier.
We have reached the moment of truth, a moment when it is no longer possible to escape a brave decision.
We must turn the war of horrors that was forced upon us on Simchat Torah 5784 into a war initiated to liberate the land, a war that will bring peace to the western Land of Israel. This is our second war of independence and we must win it.
Every responsible Israeli must gather the strength and courage to break free of the concepts that led us to the greatest of disasters and join this important initiative.
