The disgrace and folly brought about by countries that recently recognized a "Palestinian state" leaves one positive effect: it removes the last hesitations and pushes Israel to extend its sovereignty over Judea and Samaria.
The conditions for the historic legal and declarative union between the territories liberated in the Six-Day War of 1967 and those Israel retained already in the 1948 War of Independence were in place long ago. Practically speaking, Judea and Samaria have long been an integral part of our country. "It is exactly like any other Israeli city inside the Green Line," one foreign ambassador said in surprise when he visited Ariel with me. Full of prejudices, he had probably expected to find a military outpost populated by civilians, but instead he saw a beautiful, thriving city indistinguishable from its sisters 15–20 km to the west, beyond what, two generations ago, was a temporary armistice line between Israel and Jordan.
That Green Line was never a political border, and neither side regarded it as such. After the Six-Day War, the true second War of Independence, the Green Line ceased to be relevant. Jewish settlement in Samaria, Binyamin, Judea and the Jordan Valley erased it for good. Very soon nearly a million Jews will live in those areas, and only a complete madman can imagine re-cleansing them of Jews and returning them to being Judenfrei, as they were for 19 years, after local and Jordanian Arabs attempted to replicate the wartime crimes of their Nazi mentors.
The Jewish state has, and always had, full legal, moral and historical rights to the entire territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. It could have exercised those rights earlier, and it is regrettable that it did not do so a generation ago. In any event, there is now no reason to wait. Extending sovereignty at this moment is not only possible, it is necessary and unavoidable.
The despicable step by those countries that chose to reward the depraved killers of October 7 and their supporters with a fictitious "state" sharpens the alternatives: in the space between the sea and the river there are only two options, our sovereignty, which means security and prosperity for everyone, or their sovereignty, which plainly means the annihilation of the Jews everywhere, on both sides of the old Green Line.
For years Israel postponed deciding the future of Judea and Samaria, but now further delay is impossible. The alternative to Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria is an Arab terror state that does not even attempt to hide its Islamist intent to slaughter Jews, all of them. Therefore, anyone who opposes applying Israeli sovereignty, whether they realize it or not, supports the alternative of repeated October 7s, until Israel is utterly destroyed.
The tragic experiment of the disengagement from Gaza in 2005 proved beyond doubt a simple truth: in every part of the Land of Israel without Israeli sovereignty there will be the rule of a murderous enemy, and from there evil will come. The only way to prevent a nightmare like the one of October 7, 2023 is to apply sovereignty. Now.
