Rav Uri Sharki: The nations of the world attack and criticize us because we are not clear about our connection ourselves, and an example of this is the lack of sovereignty. The lack of sovereignty endangers our future.
In a comprehensive interview for the Israeli Broadcasting Corporation, Rav Uri Sharki also speaks of the matter of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria, stating that the fact that the People of Israel alienate themselves from their roots and delays applying its sovereignty over its Land is what causes the nations of the world to attack and criticize us along with our conduct.
Rav Sharki defines the People of Israel’s return to Judea and Samaria in the Six Day War as “going from an unremarkable stretch of beach to the Land of the Bible” and he rejects the attempt to define the historic process as an occupation of extra territory over that which the State of Israel held according to the partition lines.
“In the beginning, the Jewish State was treated as a state of refuge for some poor Europeans who were persecuted by other Europeans. Let’s give them a sandy stretch of beach that no one else is interested in and they will live there quietly. But the moment that the People of Israel reached Judea and Samaria, and Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, the places where Biblical history took place, it became clear that a new identity was resurrected”, said Rav Sharki.
The rabbi was asked why it was, specifically when people returned to Judea and Samaria, the international criticism of the State of Israel and its conduct in Judea and Samaria grew and intensified and he answered that the reason “could not be simpler”, meaning, in his words, that “we do not dare to be who we really are”. To him, the fact that the State of Israel has not applied its sovereignty over Judea and Samaria is an expression of lack of clarity about our national connection to the Land and the original Hebrew narrative.
The rav goes on to speak about the importance of applying sovereignty in Judea and Samaria, stating that “If I do not belong to this place, I don’t belong in Tel Aviv either. They ask, ‘What is the connection between the Land of Judea (Yehuda) to a Jew (Yehudi)’ - but this is a strange question. We do have to deal with the presence of a different population, but this does not make our historic connection with this Land meaningless.”
Rav Sharki believes that if the process of applying sovereignty would cause some sort of political difficulties for European countries or the United States, they would only be short-term difficulties and over the long term, they would not continue. “We are talking about long-term thinking. If you don’t know what you are doing here and why you are here, it endangers your existence in the broad sense, much more than any sort of sanctions over the coming years. We must think multi-culturally and multi-systematically to understand what we are doing here.”
To watch the complete video (The Matter of Sovereignty in One Minute 13:10)