Dear NY Times: Israel cannot “annex” its own land. But it can certainly extend sovereignty over it. - by Jerold Auerbach

In its reflexive critique of settlements — and, indeed, Israel — The New York Times has long been, and remains, either oblivious to history or exceedingly uncomfortable with it. By now it should at least know that a country cannot “annex” its own land. But it can extend sovereignty over it, which Israel is prepared to do.

Jerold Auerbach..
Algemeiner..
25 June '20

“Annexation Looms” headlined a mournful New York Times article (June 19) co-authored by Jerusalem Bureau Chief David M. Halbfinger and Adam Rasgon, Palestinian affairs reporter for The Times of Israel. They cited “respected former Israeli military, intelligence and diplomatic officials” who warn that if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has his way annexation would pose “a grave risk to Israel’s security.” And West Bank Palestinians, the Times reporters asserted, would suffer greatly.

For The New York Times, opposition to Jewish settlements has been an enduring obsession. A decade after the Six-Day War, as handfuls of Israelis returned to restore the ancient Jewish community of Hebron half a century after its destruction in the 1929 murderous Arab riots, a Times editorial warned against the “colonizing” of their Biblical homeland. Thomas Friedman, insisting that settlements were transforming Israel into “an undemocratic apartheid state,” bracketed “crazy” settlers with Palestinian suicide bombers and falsely accused them of assassinating Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. For columnist Roger Cohen, “messianic” settlers were to blame for Palestinian intransigence

But any Palestinian (or Times) fantasy that one day more than 400,000 Israelis now living in Judea and Samaria, the Biblical homeland of the Jewish people, will abandon their communities is inconceivable. Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel has always defined Zionism. The Netanyahu sovereignty plan confirms that historic reality.

(Continue to Full Column)

Jerold S. Auerbach is the author of Print to Fit: The New York Times, Zionism and Israel 1896-2016, selected for Mosaic by Ruth Wisse and Martin Kramer as a Best Book for 2019.