Fight for the Land in the Jewish Settlement of Har Bracha
BibleSearchers Reflections – “One of the fundamental objectives of the Jewish and non-Jewish organizations seeking with their passion to neutralize the basic integral right of the Jewish people to live in their own land, is to attack those whose passions are to help and to assist the Jewish people. In America, American citizens are allowed to go to Mexico and buy a home and no one cares. Chinese come to America and build great communities and proudly call them “China Town USA” and they have the privilege to do so for America was built on the foundation of freedom. That fact does not exist for the Jews in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, or Jordan or anywhere in the Muslim world. The Jordanians, thought to be moderates, will be executed if they sell their home to a Jewish person.
The New York Times international reporters are aptly on the scene doing what they do best, with one exception, they will usually not be fair and balanced providing the same objective journalism that they demand conservative speakers and moderators in the United States on the airwaves. “Fair and balanced” does not exist in their lexicon for the Jewish Orthodox people in Israel.
Yet it is true, many Americans, which Jewish scholars researching believe are the true Lost Tribes of Israel have amazing innate urges no doubt imprinted by the Divine, to help their Jewish cousins reclaim their ancient homeland. What they do not recognized yet, the lands which the Palestinians want for their future homeland are the promised lands that were given to and promised again by the G-d of Israel, according to the sacred oracles of the prophets of Israel, to become the future homeland of the Returning Lost Tribes of Israel.
The facts exist that the Jewish people did not migrated away from Judea and Samaria because of any personal reasons or earth catastrophic changes making the land unfit for them to live, but because they were driven away by the imperial forces of Rome. Over 90% of the Jewish population were either slaughtered or sent into exile as slaves to the rest of the Roman Empire, forbidden ever to return.
The reality factor, not stated in the following article, is the fact that the European countries have funded the Arabs and Palestinians, to the discrimination of the Jewish people with billions of dollars over the last three decades. Also, Muslim charities in the United States as well as all the Arab oil producing states including Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood headquartered in Egypt have all been government, and semi-government benefactors to the Palestinian people.
The Arabian, Syrian and Persian states had shown no desire to teach the Palestinians of Arab Bedouin descent, the ways of autonomous governing, the building of a civilization and social order for a long term possession of a homeland. Neither did they teach them the rules of governance to live in harmony with your neighbors including the Jewish people. Rather they taught them the anti-thesis; to establish a state within a land that was designated to be the homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine with the goal to eventually destroy the State of Israel and remove the presence of the Jewish people from the Middle East, forever.
It is so easy to yield to the urge of demagoguery and begin branding Orthodox Jews, who desire to live on the land that was given to them by the G-d of Israel, as ultra-rightists, anarchists, hard-right factionists, and virulently anti-Arabists. The Arabs and the Jews were living in close proximity to each other 150 years ago in the days of the visits of American author, Mark Twain and Scottish painter David Roberts,
The whole premise of the Palestinian refugee is that they were refugees before the Jews ever began returning to the Land of Israel, for no Islamic country in the Middle East wanted the Palestinians to live in their own national borders. The Balfour Agreement in 1917 by Great Britain designated that the entire Land of Palestine was to be a homeland for the Jews. This was prior to the reaffirmation by the League of Nations in 1922 that the Jews had the right to live in the entire Land of Palestine. This “Land of Palestine” included both sides of the Jordan River, Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. Prior to the 1917 Balfour Agreement, the 1922 League of Nations resolution, the Arab Bedouin populations were present in meager numbers over the prior hundreds of years. Their diminished numbers were attested in the 19th travelogues of Mark Twain and other explorers that testified that Palestine was a desolate land; parched, barren, and depopulated.
Mark Twain (1860) – “A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action…We never saw a human being on the whole route. We pressed toward… Jerusalem…Jerusalem is... lifeless. I would not desire to live there. It is a hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land… Palestine is desolate and unlovely. Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land?
Yet, two decades later after the 1922 League of Nations resolution, with the blessings of the United Nations, this entire land dedicated for a refuge for the Jewish people was partitioned again with unhanded agreements with Abdullah of Jordan, and 80% of the land promised for a Jewish homeland was taken away and transferred back into Arab hands.
The facts of history will attest, the Palestinians were a nomadic people with no ties living in a land. When they lived in Saudi Arabia, they sought to topple the throne of the Saudi king and they were exiled. The Palestinians living in Jordan with Yasser Arafat also planned a coup to overthrow the ruling Hashemite dynasty and they were exiled.
Weeks before the State of Israel was formally declared in 1948, the Egyptian government addressed the Arabs living in Israel to move out of the Land of Palestine so the Egyptian and other Arab countries could kill the Jews living in the land quickly and easily. Suddenly 500,000 resident-Arabs left voluntarily to other Arab nations as two million Jews arrived from the four corners of the globe.
Those who were once non-employed nomads, now employed by Israeli Jews, packed their bags and left in hopes of the promises that they would return and take possession of all Jewish people’s properties that were expected to be destroyed in the Arab genocide of the Jews. The fact that the Arab nations seeking to slaughter the Jews in mass lost the war, also refused to provide a homeland for the Arab Bedouins within their own lands that were now their refugees.
In the months before the final collapse of the rule of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, thousands of Palestinians, living in Iraq, were deported back to Israel. They were found to be plotting against the State of Iraq who gave with great largess money to every family of a suicide bomber fighting the Intifada against Israel.
Let the full historical truth come forth in the revelation of why the Arab countries do not want the Palestinian people to assimilate into their own countries and we come to a certain reality. Unlike America who opened her doors to the peoples of the world, the Islamic Arab states have closed their doors to the Palestinian people and to the Jews.
Yet the prophets also have foretold that when the final conflicts are over, and the Messiah has come, this whole region will have been engulfed in catastrophes associated with fire, that will ravaged the rest of the populations in Damascus, Lebanon, Tyre, Sidon, Ashkelon, Gaza, and the region of Ekron. They will be consumed with fear (Ashkelon), sorrow (Gaza), their hopes crashed (Ekron), and depopulated (Ashkelon). In the era after when the “king of Gaza” will perish, a remnant of these peoples will become believers in the G-d of Israel.
Zechariah 9:6-7 – “And I will cut off the pride of the Philistines (Palestinians),I will take away the blood from his mouth, and the abomination from between his teeth, but he who remains , even he shall be for our G-d, and shall be like a leader (aluf/”peaceful element”) in Judah.
There is no evidence, according to the prophets that a Palestinian State will ever be declared as a national state. There is evidence that Philistia, the fields of Ephraim and Samaria (Shomron) will come under the possession of the House of Joseph. Let us notice that the “Final Solution” to the destiny of the Jews will be to take possession of their tribal homeland in Judea along with the Lost Tribes of Israel who will, in that day, in league with the Jews of Israel, take possession of Judea and Samaria. These facts have already been prophetically determined:
Obadiah 15-19 (parts) – “For the day of the L-rd upon all the nations is near…on Mount Zion there shall be deliverance, and there shall be holiness; the house of Jacob shall possess (the inherited lands of) their possessions, the house of Jacob shall be a fire, and the house of Joseph a flame; but the house of Esau (Petra and Saudi Arabia) shall be stubble; they shall kindle them and devour them, and no survivor shall remain of the house of Esau…
The south shall possess the mountains of Esau (Arabis), and the lowlands shall possess Philistia. They shall possess the fields of Ephraim and the fields of Samaria. Benjamin shall possess Gilead. And the captives of this host of children of Israel shall possess the land of the Canaanites as far as Zarephath shall possess the cities of the South (Negev and Sinai). Then saviors [descendants of Judah (legal Judiciary) and the Lost Tribes of Israel] shall come to mount Zion to judge the mountain of Esau (Middle East and the Land of Arabia), and the kingdom shall be the L-rd’s.
The inheritance of the Lost Tribes of Israel will include the “fields of Ephraim and the fields of Samaria, where the West Bank and the Jewish settlements therein are under international dispute. This is where the “Quartet” is seeking to impose the demands of the House of Esau, called the Royal House of Saud, living in the mountains of Esau (Arabia). There will be no dispute; the West Bank will come under the possession of the House of Joseph and associated with the Return of the Lost Tribes of Israel, who once lived in Northern Europe and America. They will also take possession of Philistia, in the land of Hamas where the Gaza Palestinians live today.
Let us fear not, the G-d of Israel will have the last word. This prophecy for the Lost Tribes of the House of Israel is not conditional, for it is bound by G-d’s Holy Name. We are talking about reclamation and redemption literally for the “Lost Tribers” back to their ancestral homeland. The geo-physical and geo-political conditions will be such, that we will not have any other options.
Ezekiel 36: Ezekiel 36:22, 24-28 (parts) - “Thus says the Adonai G-d, “I do not do this for your sake, O House of Israel, but for My holy Name’s sake, which you have profaned among the nations wherever you went…I will take you from among the nations, gather you out of all countries, and bring you into your own land. Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean; I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols…
I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will keep My judgments and do them. Then you shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers; you shall be My people, and I will be your G-d.”
People are upset, very upset, because they want to abort the prophetic fulfillment of HaShem (G-d of Israel) given in the prophecies by the prophets of Israel. Let us read the four part series, condensed in two parts of the New York Times article titled, “Tax-Exempt Funds aid Settlements in West Bank”;
New York Times at Har Bracha, Shomron, Israel – “Twice a year, American evangelicals show up at a winery in this Jewish settlement in the hills of ancient Samaria to play a direct role in biblical prophecy, picking grapes and pruning vines. Believing that Christian help for Jewish winemakers here in the occupied West Bank foretells Christ’s second coming, they are recruited by a Tennessee-based charity called HaYovel that invites volunteers “to labor side by side with the people of Israel” and “to share with them a passion for the soon coming jubilee in Yeshua, messiah.”
But during their visit in February the volunteers found themselves in the middle of the fight for land that defines daily life here. When the evangelicals headed into the vineyards, they were pelted with rocks by Palestinians who say the settlers have planted creeping grape vines on their land to claim it as their own. Two volunteers were hurt. In the ensuing scuffle, a settler guard shot a 17-year-old Palestinian shepherd in the leg. “These people are filled with ideas that this is the Promised Land and their duty is to help the Jews,” said Izdat Said Qadoos of the neighboring Palestinian village. “It is not the Promised Land. It is our land.”
HaYovel the Jubilee is one of many groups in the United States using tax-exempt donations to help Jews establish permanence in the Israeli-occupied territories — effectively obstructing the creation of a Palestinian state, widely seen as a necessary condition for Middle East peace. The result is a surprising juxtaposition: As the American government seeks to end the four-decade Jewish settlement enterprise and foster a Palestinian state in the West Bank, the American Treasury helps sustain the settlements through tax breaks on donations to support them.
A New York Times examination of public records in the United States and Israel identified at least 40 American groups that have collected more than $200 million in tax-deductible gifts for Jewish settlement in the West Bank and East Jerusalem over the last decade. The money goes mostly to schools, synagogues, recreation centers and the like, legitimate expenditures under the tax law. But it has also paid for more legally questionable commodities: housing as well as guard dogs, bulletproof vests, rifle scopes and vehicles to secure outposts deep in occupied areas.
In some ways, American tax law is more lenient than Israel’s. The outposts receiving tax-deductible donations — distinct from established settlements financed by Israel’s government — are illegal under Israeli law. And a decade ago, Israel ended tax breaks for contributions to groups devoted exclusively to settlement-building in the West Bank.
Now controversy over the settlements is sharpening, and the issue is sure to be high on the agenda when President Obama and the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, meet in Washington on Tuesday. While a succession of American administrations have opposed the settlements here, Mr. Obama has particularly focused on them as obstacles to peace. A two-state solution in the Middle East, he says, is vital to defusing Muslim anger at the West. Under American pressure, Mr. Netanyahu has temporarily frozen new construction to get peace talks going. The freeze and negotiations, in turn, have injected new urgency into the settlers’ cause — and into fund-raising for it.
The use of charities to promote a foreign policy goal is neither new nor unique — Americans also take tax breaks in giving to pro-Palestinian groups. But the donations to the settler movement stand out because of the centrality of the settlement issue in the current talks and the fact that Washington has consistently refused to allow Israel to spend American government aid in the settlements. Tax breaks for the donations remain largely unchallenged, and unexamined by the American government. The Internal Revenue Service declined to discuss donations for West Bank settlements. State Department officials would comment only generally, and on condition of anonymity.
Jewish settlers gathered to dedicate an unauthorized West Bank outpost, Givat Egoz, opposing President Obama's call for a settlement freeze.
“It’s a problem,” a senior State Department official said, adding, “It’s unhelpful to the efforts that we’re trying to make.” Daniel C. Kurtzer, the United States ambassador to Israel from 2001 to 2005, called the issue politically delicate. “It drove us crazy,” he said. But “it was a thing you didn’t talk about in polite company.” He added that while the private donations could not sustain the settler enterprise on their own, “a couple of hundred million dollars makes a huge difference,” and if carefully focused, “creates a new reality on the ground.”
Most contributions go to large, established settlements close to the boundary with Israel that would very likely be annexed in any peace deal, in exchange for land elsewhere. So those donations produce less concern than money for struggling outposts and isolated settlements inhabited by militant settlers. Even small donations add to their permanence.
For example, when Israeli authorities suspended plans for permanent homes in Maskiot, a tiny settlement near Jordan, in 2007, two American nonprofits — the One Israel Fund and Christian Friends of Israeli Communities —raised tens of thousands of dollars to help erect temporary structures, keeping the community going until officials lifted the building ban. Israeli security officials express frustration over donations to the illegal or more defiant communities.
“I am not happy about it,” a senior military commander in the West Bank responded when asked about contributions to a radical religious academy whose director has urged soldiers to defy orders to evict settlers. He spoke under normal Israeli military rules of anonymity.
Palestinian officials expressed outrage at the tax breaks.
“Settlements violate international law, and the United States is supposed to be sponsoring a two-state solution, yet it gives deductions for donation to the settlements?” said Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator. The settlements are a sensitive issue among American Jews themselves. Some major Jewish philanthropies, like the Jewish Federations of North America, generally do not support building activities in the West Bank.
The donors to settlement charities represent a broad mix of Americans — from wealthy people like the hospital magnate Dr. Irving I. Moskowitz and the family behind Haagen-Dazs ice cream to bidders at kosher pizza auctions in Brooklyn and evangelicals at a recent Bible meeting in a Long Island basement. But they are unified in their belief that returning the West Bank — site of the ancient Jewish kingdoms — to full Jewish control is critical to Israeli security and fulfillment of biblical prophecies.
As Kimberly Troup, director of the Christian Friends of Israeli Communities’ American office, said, while her charity’s work is humanitarian, “the more that we build, the more that we support and encourage their right to live in the land, the harder it’s going to be for disengagement, for withdrawal.”
Sorting Out the Facts
Today half a million Israeli Jews live in lands captured during the June 1967 Middle East war. Yet there is a strong international consensus that a Palestinian state should arise in the West Bank and Gaza, where all told some four million Palestinians live. Ultimately, any agreement will be a compromise, a sorting out of the facts on the ground.
Most Jewish residents of the West Bank live in what amount to suburbs, with neat homes, high rises and highways to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Politically and ideologically, they are indistinguishable from Israel proper. Most will doubtless stay in any peace deal, while those who must move will most likely do so peacefully.
But in the geographically isolated settlements and dozens of illegal outposts, there are settlers who may well violently resist being moved. The prospect of an internal and deeply painful Israeli confrontation looms. And the resisters will very likely be aided by tax-deductible donations from Americans who believe that far from quelling Muslim anger, as Mr. Obama argues, handing over the West Bank will only encourage militant Islamists bent on destroying Israel. “We need to influence our congressmen to stop Obama from putting pressure on Israel to self-destruct,” Helen Freedman, a New Yorker who runs a charity called Americans for a Safe Israel, told supporters touring the West Bank this spring.
Israel, too, used to offer its residents tax breaks for donations to settlement building, starting in 1984 under a Likud government. But those donations were ended by the Labor Party, first in 1995 and then, after reversal, again in 2000. The finance minister in both cases, Avraham Shohat, said that while he only vaguely recalled the decision-making process, as a matter of principle he believed in deductions for gifts to education and welfare for the poor, not to settlement building per se.
In theory, the same is true for the United States, where the tax code encourages citizens to support nonprofit groups that may diverge from official policy, as long as their missions are educational, religious or charitable. The challenge is defining those terms and enforcing them. There are more than a million registered charities, and many submit sparse or misleading mission summaries in tax filings. Religious groups have no obligation to divulge their finances, meaning settlements may be receiving sums that cannot be traced.
The Times’s review of pro-settler groups suggests that most generally live within the rules of the American tax code. Some, though, risk violating them by using the money for political campaigning and residential property purchases, by failing to file tax returns, by setting up boards of trustees in name only and by improperly funneling donations directly to foreign organizations. One group that at least skates close to the line is Friends of Zo Artzeinu/Manhigut Yehudit, based in Cedarhurst, N.Y., and co-founded by Shmuel Sackett, a former executive director of the banned Israeli political party Kahane Chai. Records from the group say a portion of the $5.2 million it has collected over the last few years has gone to the Israeli “community facilities” of Manhigut Yehudit, a hard-right faction of Mr. Netanyahu’s governing Likud Party, which Mr. Sackett helps run with the politician Moshe Feiglin.
American tax rules prohibit the use of charitable funds for political purposes at home or abroad. Neither man would answer questions about the nature of the “community facilities.” In an e-mail message, Mr. Sackett said the American charity was not devoted to political activity, but to humanitarian projects and “educating the public about the need for authentic Jewish leadership in Israel.”
Of course, groups in the pro-settler camp are not the only ones benefiting from tax breaks. For example, the Free Gaza Movement, which organized the flotilla seeking to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza, says on its Web site that supporters can make tax-deductible donations to it through the American Educational Trust, publisher of an Arab-oriented journal. Israeli civil and human rights groups like Peace Now, which are often accused of having a blatant political agenda, also benefit from tax-deductible donations.
Jewish settlers mourned after Palestinian attacker wielding an ax and a knife killed a 13-year-old Israeli boy and wounded a 7-year-old in Bat Ayin, a settlement in the West Bank.
Some pro-settler charities have obscured their true intentions. Take the Capital Athletic Foundation, run by the disgraced Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff. In its I.R.S. filings, the foundation noted donations totaling more than $140,000 to (non-existent) Kollel Ohel Tiferet, a religious study group in Israel, for “educational and athletic” purposes. In reality, a study group member was using the money to finance a paramilitary operation in the Beitar Illit settlement, according to documents in a Senate investigation of Mr. Abramoff, who pleaded guilty in 2006 to defrauding clients and bribing public officials. Mr. Abramoff, documents show, had directed the settler, Shmuel Ben Zvi, an old high school friend, to use the study group as cover after his accountant complained that money for sniper equipment and a jeep “don’t look good” in terms of complying with the foundation’s tax-exempt status.
While the donations by Mr. Abramoff’s charity were elaborately disguised — the group shipped a camouflage sniper suit in a box labeled “Grandmother Tree Costume for the play Pocahontas” — other groups are more open. Amitz Rescue & Security, which has raised money through two Brooklyn nonprofits, trains and equips guard units for settlements. Its web site encourages donors to “send a tax-deductible check” for night-vision binoculars, bulletproof vehicles and guard dogs. Other groups urge donors to give to one of several nonprofits that serve as clearinghouses for donations to a wide array of groups in Israel and the West Bank, which, if not done properly, can skirt the intent of American tax rules.
Americans cannot claim deductions for direct donations to foreign charities; tax laws allow deductions for domestic giving on the theory that charities ultimately ease pressure on government spending for social programs. But the I.R.S. does allow deductions for donations to American nonprofits that support charitable projects abroad, provided the nonprofit is not simply a funnel to another group overseas, according to Bruce R. Hopkins, a lawyer and the author of several books on nonprofit law. Donors can indicate how they would like their money to be used, but the nonprofit must exercise “some measure of independence to deliberate on grant-making,” he said.
A prominent clearinghouse is the Central Fund of Israel, operated from the Marcus Brothers Textiles offices in the Manhattan garment district. Dozens of West Bank groups seem to view the fund as little more than a vehicle for channeling donations back to themselves, instructing their supporters that if they want a tax break, they must direct their contributions there first. The fund’s president, Hadassah Marcus, acknowledged that it received many checks from donors “who want them to go to different programs in Israel,” but, she said, the fund retains ultimate discretion over the money. It also makes its own grants to needy Jewish families and monitors them, she said, adding that the fund, which collected $13 million in 2008, was audited and complies with I.R.S. rules. “We’re not a funnel. We’re trying to build a land,” she said, adding, “All we’re doing is going back to our home.”
Yet, it may be in the interest of “fairness” that the New York Times also write an expose on the Islamic charities and their overwhelming evidence of funding terrorist in Israel, America, Europe and even Russia. While we wait…and wait, let us continue to Part Four on the “Unsettled Settlements”.
Credit to Isabel Kershner and Myra Noveck – “Tax-Exempt Funds aid Settlements in West Bank” – New York Times – July 5, 2010
BibleSearchers Reflections Series “Settlements: Jewish Opportunity or Jewish Martyrdom”
You might be Interested – New York Times Pictorial of Jewish Settlements, “Take a Stand, then a Deduction” – Slide Show
To understand more about the Return of the 10 Tribes of Israel,
Contact Kol Ha Tor, the Voice of the Turtledove,
As a Reception from the House of Judah is forming to welcome the returning House of Israel