WhatsappThey weren’t just making a policy statement, but endorsing a future where no Jews would live in Judea and Samaria—a future of erasure.
Jewish families have been banned from living in Saudi Arabia for decades. Is this the model that Democratic House leaders now support for Judea and Samaria?
When 178 House Democrats signed a letter on Sept. 25 to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opposing any Israeli move to annex territory in the West Bank, they weren’t just making a policy statement, but endorsing a future where no Jews would live in Judea and Samaria. Do they believe that Jews should be barred from living in their ancestral homeland—the biblical heartland of the Land of Israel? Is it moral to declare any land off-limits to Jews—to make it Judenrein?
Let’s be clear: A future Palestinian Arab state in Judea and Samaria, as envisioned by the Palestinian Authority and now tacitly endorsed by much of the Democratic Party, would be as Judenrein as Saudi Arabia is today (and as Hitler intended Nazi Germany to be). That is not a slur; it is a fact based on what Palestinian leaders themselves say. P.A. leader Mahmoud Abbas has repeatedly insisted that not a single Israeli—not a single Jew—would be allowed to remain in a future Palestinian state.
This is the same Abbas who wrote his 1982 doctoral thesis on “The Secret Relationship between Nazism and Zionism” and who has questioned the legitimacy of the Holocaust.
While Israel was preparing to enter Gaza City to rescue hostages held by Hamas, these 178 Democrats chose that exact moment to sign a letter, declaring: “We are deeply opposed to proposals for unilateral annexation of territory in the West Bank.”
Let’s translate that. They oppose Jewish communities—and that is all that settlements really are—that exist in areas Israel didn’t control before the 1967 Six-Day War. These so-called “settlements” are cities and towns with schools, synagogues and generations of Jewish families in the historic heartland of the Jewish people: Judea and Samaria.
No settlements were involved in the Oct. 7 massacre. But the Democratic letter paints Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria as an obstacle to peace—not Hamas, not Hezbollah, not the P.A. or the Fatah Party, not decades of terrorism, antisemitic incitement or agreements broken by the P.A.
This isn’t just wrong. It’s morally backwards.
This hostility toward Jews living in Judea and Samaria is discriminatory. It sends a dangerous message—that Jews have no right to live in certain parts of their historic homeland. And it plays directly into the hands of those who seek not just a Jew-free Judea, but a Jew-free Jerusalem—and ultimately, Tel Aviv as well.
The very term “West Bank” is misleading. It was invented after the 1948 war to obscure the Jewish roots of the region. Parts of the so-called “West Bank” are more than 40 miles from the Jordan River—no riverbank is that wide. The historically accurate term is Judea and Samaria, as even the president of the National Religious Broadcasters, Troy Miller, has urged Christian media to use.
Jewish families in Judea and Samaria need more housing, not less. There is no moral or legal reason why any area under Israeli jurisdiction should restrict Jewish homebuilding. If Jews living peacefully in Hebron or Ariel are treated as criminals or obstacles to peace, then the basic right of Jews to live anywhere, especially in Jerusalem–something Abbas has regularly demanded for his state—is at risk.
Let’s also remember: Israel has already given up more than 23,000 square miles of land captured in the Six-Day War, despite Israel itself being just 8,000 square miles in size. From the Sinai to Gaza, Israel has made enormous territorial sacrifices in pursuit of peace—only to be rewarded with more terror, not less.
Many of the Jews expelled from Gaza in the summer of 2005 had already been uprooted once before, when Israel gave up the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in 1982. And what did that bring? Thousands of rockets from Hamas, concrete tunnels filled with terrorists and the atrocities of Oct. 7.
If the Democrats who signed this letter truly cared about peace or the well-being of Arabs in Judea and Samaria, they would criticize Abbas and the P.A. They don’t mention him even once. Not his corruption. Not his repression. Not his refusal to hold elections. Not his failure to honor the Oslo Accords.
If Abbas, soon to be 90 years old, truly wanted peace—and as J Street, which applauded the letter the same day it was issued, loves to claim—then why does he pay terrorists salaries and refuse to recognize Israel as a Jewish state?
This is the real question Democratic lawmakers should be asking. Instead, they chose to attack Jewish communities that embody peace, history and resilience. The only thing the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria are obstacles to is another Oct. 7-like massacre.
The letter these 178 House Democrats sent does not promote peace. It promotes erasure.
