They're Leaving Our Heart

From Ronen Shoval:

Former prime minister Ehud Olmert said a few days ago: "It breaks my heart to initiate relinquishing sovereignty over the Temple Mount but there is no other choice." * However, conceding the Temple Mount means opting for a one-way road that leads straight to the annihilation of Zionism. And the heart that will be broken will not be that of Olmert but rather that of the Jewish people. There is only one meaning to giving up the Temple Mount: the end of the State of Israel...No one gives up their heart in return for peace. If the aim was peace at all costs, the safest and most immediate way to achieve it would be simply to convert to Islam...

...But you cannot be a Zionist if you are prepared to yield the place that provides us with the moral, historic and religious right to this land - the Temple Mount. It is not by chance that the Palestinians are demanding an Israeli withdrawal from the Temple Mount. The leaders of the Arab world and the Palestinian national leaders understand the significance of symbols...That is why they are not prepared to make concessions. They want to have the symbol. The right to the land. Abbas Zaky, the Palestinian ambassador to Lebanon, said some two years ago: "When the Jews leave Jerusalem, the Zionist ideology will begin to collapse..."

...The Jewish people need to decide between Jewish historic Zionism which views our settling of the land as a moral right, and colonialist post-Zionism which views the Jew as a foreign occupier of his land. It is impossible to maintain a nation-state which negates all connections with the past of the nation. It is impossible to create an ad hoc Zionism which views the Jew who settles in Ramat Aviv as someone moral and the Jew who settles in Jerusalem as a foreign conqueror. Zionism is based on an inseparable connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel.

My feelings exactly.


*

And other feelings

Olmert began his speech with an analysis of the current status of the conflict, speaking eloquently about Israeli “dreams” of and aspirations for a Jewish state. Biblical evidence, he says, demonstrates that the Jewish people are “intricately linked” not only to the land internationally recognized as Israeli, but also to the present-day West Bank...Mr. Olmert spoke quite compellingly about the intimate and long-standing emotional and historical ties of Israelis to present-day Israel and the Palestinian territories. Yet he fails to recognize the equally intimate, long-standing and legitimate emotional and historical ties of the Palestinian people to that same geographical region. Moreover, Olmert spoke at length about how the division of Jerusalem “kills the hearts of every Jew,” yet did not mention the significance of several of Jerusalem’s holy sites — particularly the Haram Ash-Sharif, or Temple Mount — to Palestinian Muslims and Christians.

See, nothing, even abject concessions, work, or convince.


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