During the six decades after Israel’s reestablishment in 1948, this country has been ruled by secular prime ministers; and during these decades Israel has not enjoyed a single day of real peace. Is it possible that Israel will not attain real peace so long as her prime ministers are not learned God-fearing Jews?

Secular prime ministers giving away the Land

Ten years elapsed after Oslo 1993, and, contrary to prominent pundits, Israel’s situation grew increasingly grave despite that 1993 Israel-PLO-Palestinian Agreement. More Jews were murdered by Arab terrorists under Ariel Sharon’s secular premiership than under all of his four predecessors.

I find it impossible to believe that a learned God-fearing prime minister would do as badly as Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, and Ariel Sharon. Surely he would not expect peace by yielding Jewish land to murderous Arabs. Surely he would not have deceived his people by engaging in illicit and the clandestine negotiations with such Arabs, negotiations that culminated in the disastrous Oslo Agreement and the entry of Yasser Arafat into the Land of Israel. Surely this land would have more significance for a learned God-fearing prime minister than for the previously named leaders of Israel.

The fact that Arabs are willing to die for this land while Jews like those previously mentioned were willing to yield much of this Land for a nebulous “peace” suggests that the Jews are on the way to losing this land. Have they not already parted with 42% of Judea and Samaria?

Hence, I contend that the ultimate reason why the Jews are losing this Land is because they have elected prime ministers whose secularism constitutes a denial of the Land’s ultimate purpose, which is to make transparent to all mankind the Kingdom of God, and this can only be manifested when the Jewish people live according to His Torah.

The Law of the Land: the Torah

What is crucial here is not the Land but the Torah. It was the Torah that made the Jews a nation even before they possessed the Land. Here is the way the illustrious Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch puts it in his commentary to Deuteronomy 4:5:

An expert speaks

Every other nation became a nation through its land and then made laws for that land. But you became a nation through the Law (the Torah) and received a land for that Law….Your lawgiver—the man from whose hands you received your Law—had never even seen the land, never put a foot into it, he was only the transmitter of the Law, and his grave in the wilderness is God’s seal on the Law, as well as the hall-mark of its everlastingness and unchangeableness.

The Law (the Torah) is absolute and independent, whereas you and the Land are conditional. The Torah does not have to change in accordance with your changing circumstances and that of the Land, but in accordance with your changing faithfulness the fate of the Land changes.

With the Torah in your arms you stood as a nation at the border of the Land on which you were to set your foot, there to bring the Torah to be completely fulfilled; with the Torah in your arms—in days to come when you will have temporarily lost the Land – you will stand again and again as a nation that has no other calling than to live to fulfill this Torah, and to wait for the moment in which entry into the Land that was given to you for this Torah is to be fully and completely realized.

You are the People of the Torah and Israel is the Land of the Torah, but you are not yet the People of Israel and Israel is not yet the Land of the Jews.

Stop electing secular prime ministers

It is futile and increasingly destructive to elect secular prime ministers. Regardless of whether the prime minister is from the Labor or Likud parties, the Jews lose more and more of their Land as well as their lives! They foolishly believe that the next democratic election will somehow produce a prime minister that will bring Israel peace, even if that prime minister, as a secularist, is basically at war with God!

In Israel, the laws of men have replaced the laws of God, and that is why Israeli prime ministers feel free to dispense with the Land of the Jewish people. Their secularism is compounded by their folly.

Consider. Israel is confronted by an uncompromising enemy. Only an uncompromising prime minister can successfully deal with such an enemy. However, a secular prime minister—especially one who wants the world to believe that Israel is a democracy—is not likely to pursue an uncompromising policy toward Israel’s uncompromising foes.

To obtain a learned God-fearing prime minister, two things are necessary. The Jewish academies should include a program designed to produce Torah statesmen. Meanwhile, efforts should be made to reform Israel’s political system to facilitate the election of such statesmen—a subject dealt with in my book Jewish Statesmanship: Lest Israel Fall.☼