By Ryan Jones - Jerusalem Newswire - December 7, 2005
Not for the first time Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in trying to justify his headlong rush to sever the biblical lands of Judea and Samaria from the State of Israel, Wednesday quoted from Israel's most famous modern leader, David Ben Gurion.
“As the years go by, the image of Ben-Gurion - one of the strongest leaders the Jewish nation has ever had - grows,” Sharon said as he opened a state ceremony for Israel's first prime minister at his burial place in Sde Boker.
Sharon then went on to explain that the silver-maned old man, just like himself, was actually a proponent of territorial concessions for the sake of “peace.”
Quoting from Ben Gurion, Sharon stated that “for peace we are willing to give up some of what we are entitled to. In choosing between having all of the land without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without all of the land, we chose the latter.”
Ben Gurion, of course, was speaking from a position of having political sovereignty over none of the land and working feverishly to secure a national homeland for the Jews on whatever amount of territory possible at the time.
With the memory of the Nazi Holocaust only a few years old, it was a matter of life and death for the Jewish people as a whole.
Sharon, on the other hand, is working to surrender sovereignty over parts of the homeland Ben Gurion in his day could only dream of seeing in Jewish hands.
Ben Gurion was temporarily giving up on gaining control over areas he knew rightfully belonged to the Jewish people in order to secure independence for the Jewish state.
Sharon is planning to relinquish central parts of the Jews' biblical and historical homeland already under their control for the sake of a piece of paper everyone knows will never result in lasting peace.
Naturally, Sharon chose not to quote from Ben Gurion's more famous declaration before the 1937 Zionist Congress in Basel:
“No Jew has the right to yield the rights of the Jewish People in Israel. No Jew has the authority to do so. No Jewish body has the authority to do so. Not even the entire Jewish People alive today has the right to yield any part of Israel. It is the right of the Jewish People over the generations, a right that under no conditions can be cancelled. Even if Jews during a specific period proclaim they are relinquishing this right, they have neither the power nor the authority to deny it to future generations.”
Ben Gurion's failure to insist Judea and Samaria be part of the newborn State of Israel a decade after that statement was a temporary setback in the restoration of the land. However, he never yielded the right of the Jewish people to one day take control of those areas, which they did a short 20 years later.
If Sharon succeeds in reversing that restoration, it is clear the Arabs will flood Judea and Samaria with millions of so-called “Palestinian refugees,” denying future generations of Jews both the right and the ability to even visit those ancient hills over which their ancestors ruled.
And that, according to the first prime minister, Sharon has neither the power nor the authority to do.
Ben Gurion must be rolling in his grave.