The Murder of a Woman in March 1948 in Jerusalem

While browsing through the Jewish Historical Press website, searching for some items, my eye caught this incident from late March 1948:

This version of events leaves us only one clue why would her brother commit murder and kill her.

Her shaven head.  In Paris, women considered collaborators suffered that ignominy. 

I expanded my search.  Here is the HaTzofe account, misspelling her name:

It adds that during her forced detention, she had been interrogated by "one of the underground organizations". They wanted to know details of her connections with Arabs and British soldiers".

Davar, the Histadrut newspaper, adds that she was one of eight women who had been abducted and held by the Lechi.  It is claimed that her relationships with Arabs was well-known.  A few weeks earlier she had injured her foot falling from a British military vehicle. She had requested not to be brought to Hadassah hospital for treatment as it was too "Jewish".

According to this account, her brother had referred to her as a whore who had dishonored the family.

In that connection, I think I once posted about the activities earlier on, during World War II, of Hareidi active opposition to Jewish women dating Allied soldiers.  The group, a spin-off a Neturei Krta, was called Bnei Pinchas.

I found a reference from 1943

and then later, of them threatening to burn down someone's residency, perhaps a bordello:

and there was a suggestion to ban them and confine them to Tzfat:

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A Secret: Twenty-Three Out of Five Hundred

Pierre Van Paassen, who was born in the Netherlands and grew up in Canada, was a journalist.

In 1933 he visited the Temple Mount with a British Intelligence officer, both incognito. They sought an inside look at the radical Islamic movement by listening to the various sermons being preached in regards to the political turmoil that was taking place in then British controlled Palestine.

One of his books lists Jabotinsky as a co-author and he assisted Jabotinsky's movements' spin-off actions.

In another of his books, he writes of a "best-kept secret" by which he meant the Jewish people's, and specifically, Jews of Eretz-Yisrael, participation in World War II.

One of the elements of this secret concerns the saga of an engineers company of 500 Jews in the King's West African Rifles at Mechili, Libya:-

The men of the company, led by Major Felix Liebman of Tel Aviv, were laying down a 12-square-mile minefield against Rommel's advance when they were spotted by German scout planes. To make a long and gripping story short, for several weeks they were strafed and bombed from the air and bombarded by German and Italian tanks. They, in turn, knocked out several score tanks and repulsed wave after wave of German and Italian foot soldiers.

At one point, the Germans sent a soldier with a white flag to offer the company the opportunity to surrender. Liebman rejected the offer, and, pointing to the blue-and- white flag mounted on a makeshift base, told the German: 'We have no white flag; we have only this blue flag of Zion.' The German said with astonishment: 'You are Jews?!’ and left. The siege continued, and by July 2, when the Jews repulsed the last assault, only 23 men were still alive.

That day, a column of trucks came along bearing the remnants of a Free French unit that had held the line against the Germans in a bitter month-long battle at Bir Hakheim and was now retiring to the rear. The French commander was General Marie-Pierre Koenig, who embraced Liebman and emotionally congratulated him and his men for having held out at Mechili. As the exhausted Jews mounted the trucks while the French loaded the remaining equipment, one of the Jews took down the 'Jewish flag' and started to fold it.

Koenig asked why he was folding it. Liebman told him that the British did not permit the Jews to fly it. Koenig retorted: 'I am in command here! I don't give a damn about those regulations! That flag goes on my car in front, next to the [French] Tricolor. That is where it belongs. We have come through victoriously, the two of us.' He then turned to his men and called: 'Legionnaires! The Jewish flag! Salute!' 

Source


From "De Gaulle, Israel, and the Jews" by Raymond Aron

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Don't Forget: "Palestine Was for the Jews"

From Pierre Van Paasen's "The Forgotten Ally" published by Dial Press, 1943:-


"When in later years an Arab nationalist movement was born in Palestine and its leaders, in support of their opposition to the Jewish national home, invoked the correspondence that had passed between Sir Henry McMahon and the Sherif of Mecca at the start of the war and incited the peasants to bloodshed and destruction of property by alleging that Britain had broken her pledge to make Palestine an independent Arab country, Sir Henry McMahon, then long since retired from government service, wrote two letters to clarify the earlier understandings. In the first, dated March 12, 1922, addressed to the British government, he said that he had intended to exclude Palestine from the area of Arab independence as fully as the Syrian coastal regions to the north. In a second letter, addressed to the editor of The Times and published by that newspaper on July 23, 1937, he wrote: 'I feel it my duty to state, and do so definitely and emphatically, that it was not intended by me in giving this pledge (of independence) to King Hussein to include Palestine in the area in which Arab independence was promised. I also had every reason to believe at the time that the fact that Palestine was not included in my pledge was well understood by King Hussein.'" [pp. 115-116]


"Sir Ronald Storrs, who as Oriental Secretary to the High Commissioner (Sir Henry McMahon) handled the Anglo-Arab correspondence, wrote in his [book] Orientations: 'Palestine was excluded from the promises made to the Arabs before those British (military) operations which gave freedom to so large a proportion of the Arab peoples.'" [p. 116]


"In the year 1937, when Palestine was plunged into chaos and bloodshed by the Arabs, and their leader, Haj Hussein Amin, Mufti of Jerusalem, again invoked the McMahon correspondence, William Ormsby Gore, who was attached to the McMahon staff in 1916, stated in the House of Commons, on July 21, 1937, 'that it never was in the mind of anyone on that staff that Palestine west of the Jordan was in the area within which the British Government then undertook to further the cause of Arab independence.' Colonel Lawrence also took the view that Palestine was excluded from the areas in which Britain intended to foster Arab independence and said so in a letter to The Times on September 11, 1919." [p. 116]


As per here.

And a bonus, p. 47-48

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Zionism, Ms. Rose, Evolved From Gaza

I once worked with, or for, Jacqueline Rose. 

Not in the for-pay sense.  I read through a long review essay she composed on a novel Ze'ev Jabotinsky wrote, after we met and discussed matters at my first Limmud. Sorry, can't find that text now. I have also commented on her forays against Zionism.

In an interview with her now, I caught this

She has also written extensively – attracting some criticism – about the history and nature of Jewish nationalism, using the techniques of psychoanalysis to call for it to confront its fractured psyche. “You can feel her pain throbbing through these essays,” wrote the late Peter Preston in a review of her 2007 book The Last Resistance, which sought to track the evolution of Zionism to modern day Gaza.

Let me be concise reacting to this

the evolution of Zionism to modern day Gaza

Zionism, in part, evolved from ancient and pre-modern Gaza. 

In 2005, Israel destroyed Jewish post-1967 Gaza.

That brought us a continuous rain of rockets and mortars.And terror tunnels.

In 1948, the Jewish kibbutz Kfar Gaza was destroyed by invading Egyptian troops.

That brought us the fedayeen and constant, daily terror all throughout the 1950s.

In 1929, the small Jewish community in Gaza City was chased out by the Mufti's terror gangs in an act of ethnic cleansing.

In 1662, Shabbtai Tzvi had himself pronounced Messiah in the sizable and important Torah center that was Gaza.

In the late 16th century, Israel Najara composed the Shabbat hymns we sing at our table in Gaza.

Jews lived in Gaza in the Ottoman period, the Crusader period, the Early Arab period, Byzantine period and all the way back in time to the Talmudic and Biblical period

I  repeat: Zionism evolved from Gaza.

And from Judea.

And from Samaria.

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JVP Supporting Terror

Gaza incendiary kites are terror.

They have burned thousands of dunams in hundreds of fires.

There is the danger they will set alight a children's kindergarten or a residential home or land at an industrial park with much inflammable material.

They have been copied and sent into Jerusalem.

Many of them now also carry explosives.

And here is the ad of Jewish Voice for Peace in the Nation:

Dear Rivka Rebekkah V.:

a.  To free Gaza, remove the Hamas regime.

b.  Incendiary kites are terror.  They are violent.  Their fire and explosives can kill.

c. Trying to destroy a security fence, cross a border and invade another country with the purpose of committing mayhem and murder, is not a popular protest.

d. Israel's security requirements, the result of Gaza's continued terror actions including tunnels and rocket and sniping, is quite justified.

You and JVP are not being "just", not applying "equality" and are quite "undignified".

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My Guess on the Firing of Avi Katz, Caricaturist

One story is here.

The reason for the discontinuing of caricaturist Avi Katz's free-lance employment is

 depiction of Israeli Jewish leaders as pigs

Same here

A veteran Israeli cartoonist was cut loose on Tuesday from the magazine he worked at for nearly three decades over an illustration portraying Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Likud lawmakers as pigs

Another variation:

Mocking celebration of nation-state law, cartoonist Avi Katz depicted Netanyahu as a pig

And it becomes an issue of free speech, as if the Report doesn't have the freedom to employ who it thinks represents the values of its magazine:

Avi Katz’s controversial illustration depicting prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other politicians as pigs defended on freedom of speech grounds

The cartoon:

Okay, it would have been better if he had added some other of the barn animals, you know, for diversity, even if the pigs rule:

But if I had to guess, it was the message

(Note: reproduction for journalistic purposes only)

To interpret the law as discriminatory or as relegating one section of the populace above or below another is simply wrong. The law restated elements of the Declaration of independence and incorporated them as legislation in the form of a Basic Law.

Nothing new intrinsically was done.

Mr. Katz, in my estimation, perverted reality. He did not engage in satire but in false propaganda.

But that's just my guess.

________________

Haaretz now informs us a

similar caricature published over 30 years ago did not stir the same sort of scandal. That caricature was the work of Israel Prize laureate Yisrael Zeev and was published by Haaretz in May 1980 under the headline "Arik's Animal Farm."

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Strategic Property Problem

After exiting the Temple Mount today, I preceded up Chain Street.

At the corner of the street that winds down to the Kotel Plaza, to my left, I spied this sign and considerable renewal construction work:

This building:

The plan:

Now do you recognize it?

Khan died in Jordan. His burial site is here?

We read:

...the Khalidi Library is housed in the turbah, or burial site, of Amir Husam al-Din Barkah Khan and his two sons. Husam al-Din, who died in 1246, was a military chieftain of Khwarizmian origin whose soldiery operated in Syria and Palestine in the 1230's and 1240's. His daughter was married to the formidable Mamluk sultan Baybars (1260-1277), who relentlessly fought the crusaders; Husam al-Din's two sons, Badr al-Din and Husam al-Din Kara, were both military commanders under Baybars. It was most likely Badr al-Din who built the turbah. Although neither Husam al-Din nor his sons died in Jerusalem, their remains were brought there for burial because of Jerusalem's importance as the third holy city of Islam.
The tomb inscriptions in the courtyard of the turbah and on the facade of the library building are the most reliable sources for dating the site. The courtyard inscriptions place Husam al-Din Barkah Khan's death at AH 644, or AD 1240, documenting an initial stage of construction between 1265 and 1280. Another inscription on the street facade dates restoration work to 1390.

And here:

This turba was originally founded in 644/1246 after the death of Baraka Khan (al-Amir Husam al-Din Barka Khan) as a tomb for him and his sons. In the present building, no less than five different phases of construction are discernible; of these, two are Mamluk and one is Ottoman.

And here:

Barka Khan (d. 1246) was a prominent chief of the disbanded Khwarizm Shah army. His tomb in Jerusalem is bound by Tariq Bab al-Silsila Street to the north and Aqabat Abu Maydan to the west and southwest. While not certain, evidence shows that the tomb was built by his son Badr al-Din Muhammad Bey, who was interned [sic: interred] next to his father and his brother Husam al-Din Barka Khan Bey (d. 1263, Cairo), a year after his death in Damascus in 1280. The tomb, therefore, was built sometime between 1246 and 1280. There is some inconclusive evidence that a mosque was also built to form a funerary complex.

The rectangular plan tomb is centered on the formerly enclosed courtyard with tombstones, which is flanked by a small vaulted chamber at the southeast corner and a large rectangular room to the west. Two shops, entered from the street, occupy the northeast corner.

The tomb incorporates the foundation of an earlier structure on the site, and masonry and arches dating from the Crusader period. Only the façade on Tariq Bab al-Silsila survives from the original Mamluk structure, which was modified in 1390 with the addition of a water trough, five apartments and two shops... 
Inside the courtyard, the graves of Barka Khan and his two sons are marked with three shallow cenotaphs along the western wall, which has a doorway leading into the reading room and a window to its left...

As for it being the Khalidi Family Library, see here.

I have nothing against historical renovations.  

I just hope the building does not evolve into a base from which Jews walking to the Kotel could be harassed or even endangered and that whoever authorized this knew what he was doing.

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'There Was A Warning" - King David Hotel UPDATED

'There was a warning' at King David Hotel, July 22, 1946

(h/t+CF)

ADDRESS [OF LORD JANNER] IN REPLY TO HER MAJESTY'S MOST GRACIOUS SPEECH

HL Deb 22 May 1979 vol 400 cc233-432233

Lord Carrington
My Lords, I think we ought to face up to the fact that no country in the world faces Israel's security problems or has so much at stake. Since independence in 1948 her population has increased fivefold. In an area of development, few countries can show Israel's record in agriculture, health conditions, education and industrial development. It is practically the only country in the world that has emerged to independence since the war that has faced these problems at once and has tackled them in a system of democracy.
There is one thing I should like to add. I think it should be said. There is an attempt made to defame the present Prime Minister of the State of Israel—who, incidentally, is here to talk to many 282important people in this country; and I hope your Lordships will forgive me if I leave the Chamber for a few hours later on in order to hear what he has to say. He is speaking in Central Hall, Westminster. As your Lordships know, I am against terrorism of any kind and for any purpose. But I think we must be fair. I was informed that on a radio interview Mr. Begin a few days ago explained the line that his friends took when he said that under no circumstances did they plan attacks on women, children or civilians.

I think the House is entitled to know some facts that I came across in the course of some professional inquiries I have been making in respect of what happened at the time of the King David Hotel incident. I came across them not very long ago; I am saying this with the consent both of the people who have been in touch with me and also of the doctor concerned. I want to wipe away the suggestion that no warning was given. I propose to read a letter from a Dr. Crawford in Bournemouth. I quote: It was very kind of you to phone me today and I sat down at once to write to you". I met Dr. Crawford at another venture of Israel which is well known to many people—the Magem David, which is the Shield of David Ambulance and Health Services. I happened to meet him at a conference held in Bournemouth. Casually he told me that he knew something about this. He says in his letter: "Further to our recent conversation in Bournemouth, I am writing to confirm that the officer"— he spoke about an officer whose name, I am sure, is known to those who were in Palestine— "who wrote to me in 1946 concerning the King David Hotel 'incident' was Major-General Dudley Sheridan Skelton, CB, DSO, FRCS, formerly DGMS in India, Hon Physician to HM The King and to HE the Viceroy of India. He retired from the forces about 1937"— I think that it is of great importance that this attack should be properly and effectively met— "when he was given the rank of Brigadier and was ADMS in the SE Command. It was in this area that I met him in the course of my duties as Assistant Medical Director of the Emergency Medical Services Hospital at Preston Hall Sanatorium, Maidstone, and I worked with him until my transfer to Bournemouth as Medical Superintendent of Douglas House Sanatorium in 1943, but we remained in contact with each other for some years. 

In 1946, he was head of a hospital in Palestine near Jerusalem and was a frequent visitor to the King David Hotel; apparently he was there on the very day of the explosion and he wrote me that 'a warning' was passed on to the officers in the bar in rather jocular terms, implying it was 'Jewish terrorist bluff'. But despite advice to 'ignore the bluff' he decided to leave and thus was out of the hotel when the explosion took place. I kept his letter for many years, but unfortunately, after the death of my wife in 1970 and my own severe illness in 1971, I sold my house and went into a flat and because of limited space I unwisely threw away a lot of my accumulated papers and correspondence, so the letter is no longer available; and Brigadier Skelton has long since died. I hope these facts will be of some help to you. Many of my friends knew this story at the time but few have survived; my sister-in-law will remember it clearly as she was friendly with the Brigadier and lived with us at the time. If you think it worth-while, I could contact her"— I did ask him to contact her and she wrote a letter confirming what Dr. Crawford said.

As your Lordships are well aware, I do not approve of terrorists of any kind. The Prime Minister of Israel explained a few days ago what happened and I hope that the letter I have read out now will, in all fairness, answer the accusation that has been made about this incident. I am very grateful for the attention the House has given me.

And remarks by Menachem Begin as published in Benjamin Netanyahu, ed., "International Terrorism: Challenge And Response," Proceedings of the Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism, July 2­5, 1979, (Jerusalem: The Jonathan Institute, 1980), p. 45 (thanks to DaledAmos)

And see here in 2006.

From a personal reminisce:

"I was having a coffee with a friend when the first minor bomb went off. "I didn’t think much of it at the time because this sort of thing was happening every day...I was sitting by the window when the second bomb went off. It blew the window out completely and threw me across the room."

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New York Times An Agent for Peace Now's Obfuscation

Obfuscation, we all should know, is

the obscuring of the intended meaning of communication by making the message difficult to understand, usually with confusing and ambiguous language

or making

something less clear and harder to understand, especially intentionally

Here is from the website of Americans for Peace Now

The headline's exact wording:

In West Bank, 99.7% of Public Land Grants by Israel Go to Settlers

 Here's a comment of mine at Twitter:

How much of 100% is Area A & B? Area C under full Israeli administration is only 60% of JS/WB & within that are Arab villages.Well, maybe it is confusing for some.

Another:

Another point to the story:"Israel has marked out hundreds of thousands of acres as public land".No. State land status existed since at least 1858 & 1873 Ottoman laws. Israel just confirms that. And "state" means "government", not State of Israel". A bit confusing for sure.

Added:

How much state land was awarded to Jews 

during 1948-1967?

From Lenny Ben-David. 

 I asked the reporter:

You quote in your story Shawan Jabarin. Is he the same Jabarin who was convicted for PFLP activities some years ago?

And, of course, the Mandate's Article 6 is not included (nor a response from a Yesha Council figure and if they refused, that should have been noted):

The Administration of Palestine, while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced, shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage, in co-operation with the Jewish agency referred to in Article 4, close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes.

You've been obfuscated by the New York Times in league with Peace Now.

And an Arab former terrorist.

__________

Elie Pieprz tweets:

No attempt to get response from @odedrevivi or the federal gvt No context of Area A & B under complete PA municipal control 88% of residents are Pal? Really? There are 3.6M Pals in WB?No context of Area A & B under complete PA municipal control88% of residents are Pal? Really? There are 3.6M Pals in WB?

Another.

__________

Received regarding the population stats therein:

the PA always insists on the largest possible figure for the settler population, and OCHA only managed to scrape together a Palestinian population of less than 300,000 for area C by including Palestinian residents of A and B whose municipalities cross over in any part with area C. (Of those, only 67,102 live in municipalities that are entirely in area C, while most live in municipalities whose land is majority areas A/B). The EU estimate of settler population last year was 399,000.
 If you cut the settler population in half, or doubled the Palestinian population of area C, Palestinians would still be in the minority.

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The Jewish Legion Memorial at Shiloh Junction

Yesterday I attended the ceremony during which the Memorial for the Jewish Legion soldiers who fought nearby (see below) was unveiled.

The inscription:

The sculpture:

Me:

Now, what were the soldiers of the Jewish Legion doing in the vicinity?

From two books.

The Story of the Jewish Legion by Ze'ev Jabotinsky:

From Colonel JH Patterson's With the Judeans in the Palestine Campaign:

They marched and bivouacked and fought in Binyamin.

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Okay, I'll Talk About Occupation

For all Birthright participants, past, present and future, who are worried they may not really be told anything on occupation when in Israel (or were told something on their campuses/from friends and were hoping to learn something to combat what they felt are lies), here's the nitty-gritty:

There is an occupation. Two, in fact. At least.

As a result of non-stop Arab terror throughout the 1950s and 1960s (heard of the fedayeen and the PLO's Fatah, all operational before 1967?), Israel was forced to defend itself in June 1967.  Yes, defend.  The administration of the territories taken in that war is a "belligerent occupation". That's the first occupation.

But don't be fooled.  The term "belligerent" doesn't mean that Israel's administration is belligerent (some will try to fool you and rewrite the definition like this: 'Military occupation occurs when a belligerent state invades the territory of another state'. Israel was not 'belligerent' in the way that is phrased. It was threatened, water route closed off, UN supervisors kicked out of Sinai and Jordan actually invaded Jerusalem and shelled Israeli locations. Oh, and there was no "state of Palestine"). The use of 'belligerent' was simply to indicate that it resulted from a war like in this definition: "belligerent occupation [is] established as a consequence of an armed conflict, that is to say through the conduct of hostilities".  And Israel fought a war that was defensive, against hostile countries.  And it was a just war. And justified. And moral.

Just by the way: "the 1949 Geneva Conventions do not contain a definition of belligerent occupation".

UPDATE: Some claim this - "The Fourth Geneva Convention applies to the West Bank, to the Gaza Strip, and to the entire City of Jerusalem, in order to protect the Palestinians living there." Others point to the fact that the Convention is between High Contracting Parties and as there never was a state called "Palestine", and no legal political sovereignty therein, Israel need protect anybody there but not because they are "Palestinians" but because they are humans who deserve humanitarian rights. What anti-occupationists do is to extend this misrepresentation and use humanitarian law to leverage political rights. That's cheating.

The second occupation could very well be the Arab occupation of Eretz-Yisrael but more on that later.

There is nothing wrong in using "Judea & Samaria".

Judea and Samaria (in Hebrew, Yehuda v'Shomron) is the correct name for the territory that Jordan occupied beginning in 1949 until Israel assumed its administration in 1967.  As regards who is the legal sovereign, there is a dispute. So, okay, it's "disputed territory". Some actually think it is "liberated territory".  For sure it was included in the area of the historic Jewish homeland that was to become the Jewish state as decided by the League of Nations in 1922.

The terms Judea & Samaria date back to Biblical times and appear numerous times in the Old and also the New Testament.  The 1947 partition plan borders of the UN used the terms Judea and Samaria. You can find them in many books from centuries ago.  And if we are discussing names, Throughout the 1920s, the Arabs of the Palestine Mandate requested to be termed Southern Syrians and that "Palestine", actually "Southern Syria" be joined to the French mandate over Syria.

About the use of 'West Bank': when the Kingdom of Jordan (remember, the illegal occupier of the territory, having conquered it in 1948) decided to annex the area, it created the tern 'West Bank'. That's it: April 1950.

Are Judea and Samaria "illegally occupied"?  No, Judea and Samaria are not "illegally occupied".

After the Balfour Declaration, the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference and the San Remo Accords of 1920, the League of Nations' decision to create the Mandate for Palestine recognized the Jewish right to settle and live in Judea & Samaria. Yes, here in Article 6:

The Administration of Palestine, while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced, shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage, in co-operation with the Jewish agency referred to in Article 4, close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes.

And do not forget, the Mandate assured that recognition be given 

to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country;

Jordan denied Jews the right of living in Judea and Samaria after the Mufti-inspired pogroms of the 1920s and 1930s and then the 1948 war ethnically cleansed the area of thousands of its of its Jews, some families having resided therein for centuries, as in Hebron and Jerusalem's Old City.  Israel's is the most valid claim to the area.

Let's recall that the Oslo Accords established three geographical areas of jurisdiction in Judea and Samaria  – A, B and C – until a Israeli-Palestinian peace accord could be signed. Those accords did not prohibit Jews residing in Judea and Samaria?  Can you imagine Israel banning Arabs from living in Israel?

Let us borrow these conclusions:

Attempts to present Jewish settlement in ancient Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) as illegal and "colonial" in nature ignores the complexity of this issue, the history of the land, and the unique legal circumstances of this case.

Jewish communities in this territory have existed from time immemorial and express the deep connection of the Jewish people to land which is the cradle of their civilization, as affirmed by the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, and from which they, or their ancestors, were ousted.

The prohibition against the forcible transfer of civilians to territory of an occupied state under the Fourth Geneva Convention was not intended to relate to the circumstances of voluntary Jewish settlement in the West Bank on legitimately acquired land which did not belong to a previous lawful sovereign and which was designated as part of the Jewish State under the League of Nations Mandate.

Bilateral Israeli-Palestinian Agreements specifically affirm that settlements are subject to agreed and exclusive Israeli jurisdiction pending the outcome of peace negotiations, and do not prohibit settlement activity.

Judea and Samaria also possess security value as strategic military requirements.

The area encompasses the southern and northern suburbs of Jerusalem and those to the east of Tel Aviv and the Jordan River to its west.  It includes Israel's central mountain range, and at 1,100 meters above sea level, it overlooks Israel’s largest population center in Tel-Aviv, as well as Israel’s only international airport and as far south as Ashkelon and north to Hadera.

And you should know that Judea and Samaria includes approximately 21% of all territory west of the Jordan River which is a land mass of 3,438 square miles (5,500 square km).  Its length (North-South) is approximately 79 miles (125 km) and varies from 19-34 miles (30-55 km) wide (East-West). Approximately 8% of Judea and Samaria has been developed including all Israeli and Palestinian-Arab development. The built up areas of Israeli settlements cover approximately 1.7 percent of all the land there.

If you have been told there are 'apartheid roads' in Judea & Samaria, there aren't.  The roads are traveled by all, Jews and Arabs.  But, yes, when there is an upsurge in terror and other forms of Arab violence, there will be restrictions.  In the almost 40% of Judea & Samaria that is under the control of the Palestinian Authority, it is illegal for Jewish Israeli citizens to enter or use those roads.

Have I occupied your attention?

There's more to come.

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