Of all the people I interviewed about where they see themselves in 20 years, Rabbi Dovid Ben Meir answered the most quickly: “Amman.”
Not because a guy with a yarmulke, long beard, and the tassels worn by religious men is dreaming of a vacation in the Jordanian capital.
No, he has another dream: that Israeli sovereignty will one day stretch to the Jordan River and even beyond. It’s a dream that drove him, the son of Holocaust survivors, to leave Chicago at age 17 and never use the return portion of his ticket.
Then he hesitates: reaching Amman may be a little far-fetched. But certainly, he says, by 2035 Israel will have formally annexed Judea and Samaria – the biblical names for the West Bank – less than an hour’s drive from Amman.
It was along this chain of windswept hilltops that the Bible records God promising the land to Abraham and subsequent patriarchs, leading their people to settle, defend, and worship in that land. Today Rabbi Ben Meir and his wife are among the 400,000 Jews who live in the West Bank, which Israel’s army has occupied since the 1967 war.
The parents of nine, they live in a hilltop community that feels almost like summer camp – except for the highly effective security cordon to guard against nearby Arab villages. Shabbat services begin with the clanking of guns on the synagogue floor – many army officers call this home – while kids scamper down the aisles, as they do the empty streets.
The United Nations has declared such settlements illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention, a post-World War II code that prohibits an occupying power from deporting or transferring its civilians into occupied territory. But their population has tripled since the 1993 Oslo peace agreement.
Finishing off his lunch in Jerusalem’s Old City, Ben Meir maintains that Jews not only have a 3,000-year claim to this land – including Judea and Samaria – but indisputably won it with military victories in 1948 and 1967.
“Why do people expect Israel to give back land to people who were involved in the civil war against us and lost?” asks Ben Meir, who devours American history books in his spare time. “If Hispanics started to say, ‘Return California to Mexico,’ what would you do?”
“The US has to tell the Arab world that … there’s not going to be a Palestinian state, we tried and tried and tried and you guys blew it,” he says.
However, in his vision, local Arabs would be offered permanent residency and equality before the law. This would be followed by investment in Arab infrastructure, employment, and economy, along with close supervision of the educational system “to teach them peace.” Eventually citizenship would be an option for those who forswore violence and accepted that Israel holds exclusive national rights to the land.
But being mightier wouldn’t relieve Israel of moral responsibility, he says. He’d like to see Israelis become more reverent to promote more moral behavior on an individual, family, and national basis, including in their dealings with Arabs.
“I believe that’s what we’re called on to be – a holy nation,” he says.
