The old nursery rhyme is wrong. “Sticks and stones may hurt my bones, but names do hurt me.” We have allowed a term that has become a dirty word to attain acceptability and even righteousness. And it is killing us. The Occupation. The 1,200 kedoshim and the 239 hostages taken on Oct. 7 are the latest victims in a long, tragic history of death and destruction.
Let us be clear. There is no “occupation.” As of 2005, Gaza has not been “occupied” by Israel according to any definition of the word. But that did not stop the murderers of Oct. 7 and the antisemitic hordes around the world who cheer them on. To them, the word “occupation” refers to Jews living anywhere in Israel. As long as t Jews reside “between the river and the sea,” the enemy will continue to murder, rape and kidnap at every opportunity. And if God forbid they succeed in their genocidal quest, they will expand to the rest of the world to search out Jews everywhere. Their Hadith says: “The Jews will fight against you and you will gain victory over them, till the stone says: ‘O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me; so kill him.’”
We must excise the “o”-word from our vocabulary! In 1948, we returned home to our ancient homeland. We are the indigenous people. We are not occupiers, not in Judea, Samaria, Gaza, Tel Aviv, Haifa or Jerusalem! But to remain where we belong, we must stop beating our breasts and accepting the false narrative of terrorists and antisemites. We are home and, with God’s help, never again will we be chased from our homeland of Eretz Yisrael sheleimah.
The “Palestinian people” is a fiction created by antisemitic thugs and terrorists to pull the wool over the eyes of a liberal Western world that was gullible enough to accept this as another civil rights movement. But the conflict was never about the rights of people to live alongside the Jews, but rather their call to murder Jews and take over our homeland. Why are we complicit in our own destruction?
Stop using the fallacious “o”-word (or the “P”-word either, for that matter). Stop looking for “solutions” together with so-called “moderates” who are actually wolves in sheep’s clothing—terrorists such as Abbas and the kleptomaniacal criminals of the Palestinian authority. Stop looking for “solutions” in the failed United Nations (think UNRWA’s collaboration with terrorists and the ineffective UNIFIL in Lebanon) who never even condemned the Oct. 7th atrocities. Stop looking for “solutions” in our Abraham Accord partners whose self-interest currently align with ours, but never have they nor ever will they risk anything for their so-called Palestinian Arab brothers.
HaShem has already given us the solution! In 1967, he gave us a miraculous victory. We failed to say Hallel and appreciate the gift. Instead, we have spent 56 years trying to give away our future, the true “solution.” Let us stop before it is too late.
Remember, we are not “occupiers”; we are home! May HaShem grant us mercy to allow us to stay there.
Professor Linda Allen
Teaneck
