Congressional Hearing on Trump’s “Israel will not annex the West Bank”: The Message for Us: Don’t Even Think About “Two-States”
#1300 December 14, 2025
So it seems not just me but the Congress has concerns over Trump’s “Israel will not annex the West Bank.” But the message for us Jewish grassroots, as one Israeli news service has put it, is that “a two-state solution” isn’t inevitable. It’s unthinkable.
I thought perhaps I was exaggerating my concern when on October 27 I wrote an open letter to the President of the United States that I published as #1293 of these weekly alerts: https://confrontingjewishissues.com/jrv1293/, beginning:
“Dear Mr. President:
“I’m a MAGA Republican grassroots American Jew who just mustered the chutzpah to write a letter of complaint to the President.
“My hope is you don’t fully grasp the unjust double damage in your statement ‘Israel will not annex the West Bank,’ denying our claim to our homeland’s core in the most delegitimizing pejorative terms….”
It turns out I wasn’t. Israel Insider reported this Thursday (9/11/25), which you can read on ZOA’s website https://zoa.org/2025/12/10454172-zoas-morton-klein-quoted-lawmakers-witnesses-spar-over-meaning-of-trumps-veto-of-west-bank-annexation-jewish-insider/
You can read ZOA President Mort Klein’s (by me, sterling) testimony at https://zoa.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/251210_MK-TESTIMONY_CONGRESS_JUDEA-SAMARIA.pdf
(If these links don’t work when you click, paste them into your browser.)
You can read in the Israel Insider article the substance of what the article characterized as “the at-times contentious hearing” between Democrats and Republicans over what the President meant and what should be the “solution.”
It’s not my purpose this week to rehash those Congressional hearing arguments. I write as one grassroots U.S. Jew to my fellows, pleading for us as this Diaspora generation of our people’s three-millennia-long history to stand with our brethren in Israel in defense of our people’s historic homeland, what the League of Nations (endorsed by its successor UN) rightly called our “Jewish national home.”
So what I do want to do this week is state in a few succinct points why we U.S. Jews must unite in stating, as Israel National News put in on November 20, that “a Palestinian Arab state” inside the land of Israel is not just a scenario to be rejected by us in debating with others, but is by us “Unthinkable” – Webster: “not to be considered or thought of, impossible.” I say this appreciating that a fair number of you who put up with me weekly at least acquiesce in “a two-state solution” as inevitable, if not actually advocate for it.
So here’s my pitch to You-Who-Put-Up-With-Me-Weekly why we grassroots U.S. Jews must not even debate over “two-states.”
*** The land of Israel, with historic Jerusalem (Temple Mount, City of David and all) and Judea-Samaria hill country as its heart & soul, is historically [three-millennia physical presence], legally [San Remo, Mandate], equitably [Palestinian Arabs are big majority of three-quarters of Mandated Palestine, judenrein Jordan; and Israel absorbed more Middle-eastern Jews displaced from vast Arab and other Muslim lands than Arabs left tiny Israel], and indispensably [two-millennia Diaspora maltreatment] Ours. We have to have it, not a nine miles wide in the lowland middle Jewish national ghetto.
** Today’s State of Israel is the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea. Every ruler in between was a foreign empire invader – Romans-Byzantines, briefly Persians, Omayyad-Abbasid-Fatimid dynasties, European Crusaders, Turk-Circassian Mamluks, Ottoman Turks, British misruling the Mandate. Palestinian Arabs have ruled the land of Israel never and foreign Arabs only part of the time, 638 – 1099, between European Byzantines and European Crusaders.
*** Resurrection of the 1949 ceasefire lines [not “pre-1967 borders”] would render Israel militarily indefensible and Jewishly meaningless, excluding historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria biblical hill country heartland overlooking the most-populated narrow lowland coastal plain.
*** Don’t call historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria “disputed.” Our adversaries don’t call them “disputed.” They call them “Occupied Palestinian Territory.” We must no less unequivocally affirmatively call them Ours.
*** Don’t demean yourself and us by mouthing yourself the loaded lexicon of Jewish homeland-delegitimizing pejoratives the media and others who don’t like Israel and Jews very much have coined to poison public perceptions:
** Say “Judea and Samaria,” not “West Bank,” which the invader [Trans]Jordan coined in 1950 for the same reason the Romans renamed Judaea as “Palestine,” to disassociate what had been Jewish from Jews. “West Bank” isn’t a synonym of “Judea-Samaria.” It’s an antonym.
** Don’t buy the media’s misleading misstatement that “Judea-Samaria is the biblical name for the West Bank.” Indeed they are biblical names, extending back 3,000 years, but they remained in use all through the centuries, including by the UN itself in 1947: “The boundary of the hill country of Samaria and Judea starts on the Jordan River ….”
** Don’t miscall application of Israeli sovereignty over Judea-Samaria as “annexation.” Webster: “annex” – “to incorporate into a state the territory of another state.” Nor is residing in what’s yours “occupation.” Say “Jewish communities, not “settlements,” which the media lovingly compares sometimes in the same sentence to “Palestinian neighborhoods, towns, villages.”
** “East Jerusalem” isn’t some satellite city of historic Jerusalem. It IS that historic city. The media et ilk call it “East” to pretend that a single city that was divided for nineteen of the past 3,000 years, ending more than a half-century ago, is two separate entities, “East” and “West.” Jews have lived in Jerusalem since King David’s time, relentlessly returning whenever foreign rulers evicted them, and throughout those millennia nobody called Jews in Jerusalem “settlers.” Jerusalem’s been the capital of three native states in the past 3,000 years – Judah, Judaea and Israel – and has had a renewed Jewish majority since pre-Zionists 1800’s Ottoman rule.
** Don’t buy the media’s canard that Jews who claim the entirety of the land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, are “ultranationalists claiming a Greater Israel.” The Palestine Mandate for the Jewish national home included what’s today Jordan, and gave its Trustee, Britain, the right to withhold from it the portion “east” of the Jordan River, which Britain with alacrity did. There was no such provision for withholding from it any territory west of the River, and for the provision allowing it east of the River to mean anything, it had to mean that areas west of the River could not be withheld – subsequent hence invalid 242 and 2334 to the contrary notwithstanding. It’s those who’d perform a second partition of our Jewish national home who advocate a Lesser Israel.
So don’t advocate or acquiesce in a “two-state solution.” Don’t even think about it.
