Any trusteeship for Palestine will be over the dead body of these rabbis and their followers: >>Rabbis: No government has the right to set up a foreign state in the land of Israel
By Nadav Shragai
"We have never been in such danger as we are now," Rabbi Elyakim Levanon, the rabbi of the West Bank Jewish settlement Elon Moreh, told 500 of his colleagues at a meeting of the Federation for the People of Israel and Land of Israel in Jerusalem yesterday. "The government has decided on alien sovereignty over the Land of Israel, and the earth is burning beneath our feet. We are defending,
with our bodies, against the great danger every single moment, and we have no rear lines. I call upon the great rear line to arise and come to life, from Metulla to the Negev. The truth must be reawakened. And meanwhile we shall remain on the hilltops, as a spearhead with no rear lines."
Former Sephardi chief rabbi Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu told the gathering: "No one in the world, from drawers of water and hewers of stone to prime ministers, has the right to give up one grain of the Land of Israel. The Holy One, blessed be He, gave us the Land of Israel. There is holiness in every single grain." He also said that if a Jew eats the fruit of a tree that a gentile has planted and cultivated in the Land of Israel, he is obligated to tithe
the fruit. Furthermore, "The houses could today be the private property of an individual gentile, but when the messiah comes, we will ask the gentile to pay rent."
Former Ashkenazi chief rabbi Rabbi Avraham Shapira said that handing over territories is a "particularly grave transgression."
The head of the Bnei Akiva yeshivas, Rabbi Avraham Druckman, asked: "Have we been dazzled? Have we been taken over by blindness? The road map is worse than Oslo, and now after more than 1,000 dead and thousands of wounded and
disabled, the eyes of the government have ceased to see."
Beit El Yeshiva head Rabbi Zalman Melamed said that at Yitzhar there was "martyrdom for the sake of the Holy Name. For every outpost that is evacuated, five new ones will arise."
The federation came out with several statements following yesterday's meeting.
"The agreement called `the road map' is in complete contradiction to the wisdom of the Torah;
"It is the right and indeed the duty of every rabbi in Israel to rule concretely to all who ask him what the opinion of the halakha is on every subject about which he is asked, and the sages of Israel must express their opinions on public issues as well;
"No government has the authority to declare the establishment of an alien state or to abandon parts of the Land of Israel to aliens, and everything that is done to this end is null and void in the name of God, the Lord of Israel, who has sworn this and in the name of the entire people of Israel throughout the generations;
"Everyone who has in his power to prevent implementation of the road map agreement and does not prevent it transgress the injunction `Thou shalt not stand in thy fellow's blood;
"The government is prohibited by a clear and absolute Torah prohibition from evacuating an outpost or a settlement. We must act with great dedication to prevent this and to re-erect any place that is evacuated, heaven forbid;
"However, it is necessary to act with great caution and avoid any violence, physical or verbal, both toward our dear brethren, the soldiers and the members of the security
forces, and toward our brethren the settlers;
"We call upon the government and the heads of the army not to put soldiers in a position in which they have to make a choice between their loyalty to the values upon which their way of life is built and military orders." <<
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