After months of paralysis, West Bank Jews have finally launched a campaign to resist United States President Donald Trump’s two-state “Deal of the Century.”
Jewish community leaders in the disputed Samaria and Judea regions are now calling for the intensification of resistance efforts during the coming weeks leading up to the July 1 date on which Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu (Likud) is expected to begin the process of applying official Israeli sovereignty to the 30% of the West Bank allowed for by the Trump plan.
“We are very concerned about the ‘Deal of the Century’ but to be concerned is not enough,” said former Q’dumim Mayor Daniella Weiss to journalists on Tuesday.
“We are acting in a very intensive way to completely put aside the whole plan, because this deal, as [US] Ambassador David Friedman explained, has a tight connection between the idea of sovereignty for 30% of Judea and Samaria, including the Jordan Valley, and 70% for a Palestinian state.”
“Except for David Elḥayani, the head of all the heads of the Yesha Council who speaks against the plan, the heads of the Yesha Council sit with ministers, with different representatives of the Israeli government and see how they can improve the map here and there,” she continued.
“To me, it reminds me of the horrible picture of a sack of potatoes being thrown to the yard of a ghetto and people who are terribly hungry all pulling and they take the potatoes in order to survive… They should say no to the entire plan.”
Organizers of the new “It’s all ours” campaign have meanwhile told the press that their efforts to resist the Trump plan will progress in three stages in the coming weeks.
The first stage of the campaign was launched last Thursday night and saw hundreds of Jewish teenagers plastering thousands of fliers along roads and bus stops throughout the disputed territories, warning against “the danger of the division of the land that is on the horizon.”
The “It’s all ours” organizers said that the next phase will include marches and demonstrations throughout Israel’s central mountain region.
The campaign’s third stage is expected to include the establishment of new Jewish communities throughout the West Bank, in Areas A, B and C.
Until now, Jews have been living almost exclusively in Area C — the 62% of the West Bank, which according to the Oslo Accords is under full Israeli control.
Israeli security forces have consistently demolished the handful of small Jewish communities that have been built in Area B, which according to Oslo falls under Israeli security control but Palestinian Authority municipal control.
Israeli Jews have for the most part never attempted to build or live in Area A, which the accords placed under the full security and municipal control of the Fatah-led PA.
The “it’s all ours” leaflets distributed last Thursday declared that “our mission is to break through the current boundaries.”
When campaign organizers were asked by journalists if they saw any strategic value in the State of Israel accepting the Trump plan in order to receive Washington’s backing for at least a partial annexation of the territories, 27-year-old Sarah Miriam Malt of the small Geulat Tzion village firmly rejected the idea, saying that her principles demand opposing any division of the Jewish homeland.
The young mother of four further said that no Jew has any moral right to surrender any land and that the goal of the campaign is to “awaken the public” in the hopes that more will join them in resisting Trump’s plan to partition the country into two separate states.
While it’s important to support all efforts to resist Trump and prevent his plan from being implemented, the most effective method of resistance would be for Jewish nationalists to unite with Palestinian movements committed to a democratic one-state vision for the country.
As counter-intuitive as this might initially seem, West Bank Jews are actually the best sector of Israeli society to engage the Palestinians because they generally tend to have a much deeper and more authentically Jewish conception of national identity and connection to Eretz Yisrael than the westernized liberal Israelis who have until now monopolized Israel’s relations with the Palestinians.
Being the Israelis most fully living their people’s aspirations uniquely qualifies Judeans not only to represent Israel’s actual national interests but also to know where they can compromise in order to address Palestinian grievances.
West Bank Jews and Palestinians could easily become natural allies if they could successfully overcome their baggage with one another. Both inherently see the land as a single unit that should ideally stay undivided so they would simply need to focus their conversations on better understanding each other’s experiences and finding ways to make a single state in the entire country both democratic and fully inclusive while at the same time deeply Jewish according to how Jews need to experience a Jewish state.
West Bank Jewish and Palestinian activists coming together and formulating a path forward that can address what’s most important to both peoples would essentially remove whatever dwindling moral credibility Washington still has to impose or even offer any solution for our country.
As Trump’s efforts to divide our land currently rest on the sharp divisions and bad blood between Israelis and Palestinians, establishing a unified anti-imperialist front would change the game with a resistance that would undermine Washington’s entire foreign policy agenda in the Semitic region.
President Trump is NOT the problem, Netanyahu and Gantz are! Pipi called for two states and has been destroying Jewish homes in Yehuda and Shomron in the cruelest way.