JRV1309

With Trump This Week Reiterating He’s Against “West Bank Annexation,” What’s a Grassroots U.S. Jew To Do?

#1309 February 15,, 2026

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: The “Two-State Solution” is very much out there, and we have to join with Israelis that to us it’s Unthinkable.

World Israel News reported on Wednesday (2/11/26) a statement this week by President Trump that “I am against annexation,” that “we have enough things to think about now. We don’t need to be dealing with the West Bank.”

This was not new. As a Tuesday (2/10/26) WIN article noted, “while Trump initially appeared to signal at the beginning of his first term that he would support Israel annexing Judea and Samaria, in September he announced that he would not ‘allow’ any change to the status of the area.”

The silver lining, for those of us like me who habitually seek such things in troubling Powers-That-Be pronouncements, is that I put the President’s emphasis hopefully not on his using anti-Jewish homeland pejoratives “annexation” and “West Bank,” but on his “we have enough things to think about now” [emphasis added]. 

But alas this has to be seen in the context of what else President Trump has been thinking about, paragraph 19 of his 21-point “peace plan” for Gaza:

“Once the Palestinian Authority’s reform plan is implemented, conditions may be achieved for a path toward self-determination and the establishment of a Palestinian state. The United States will facilitate dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians to agree on a political horizon for coexistence in peace and prosperity.”  [emphasis hopefully added]

Most of the anti-Two-State-Solution Jewish press articles one reads stress the military indefensibility of “two states along the 1967 [i.e., 1949 ceasefire-only] lines with mutually agreed swaps,” which they’d indeed be.  But I’d have you read a terrific Jerusalem Post article this week (2/8/26, Israel’s Heart is Not in Tel Aviv – It Is In Judea and Samaria – Opinion), 

It warns:

“Most of the nations of the world considers Israel’s control of the historic Judea and Samaria region (what the world calls the ‘West Bank’) as an illegal occupation – and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians who live there as an apartheid.”

And then it says:

“Judea and Samaria are at the historic heartland of the Jewish people. There are locations in that area that stand as living tributes to Israel’s history. These cities are well-documented archaeological treasures that provide strong evidence of ancient Jewish historical presence and rights to the land.

“These places tie directly into biblical narratives of Jewish heritage, from patriarchal times through the periods of the Judges, monarchy, and beyond. They emphasize the continuous Jewish connection through worship, settlement, and governance.”

And after reviewing these sites’ Jewish peoplehood connections, it concludes:

“It’s absurd to deem this as the ‘West Bank’ and Palestinian land. Judea and Samaria are unequivocally the historic heartland of the Jewish people and integral to modern Israel, demanding recognition and preservation against misguided international claims.”

And there’s another place beyond those “1967 lines” that has indelible Jewish connection, historic Jerusalem, three times a native state’s capital in the past 3,000 years, all of them Jewish, with a renewed Jewish majority since pre-Zionist 1800’s Turkish rule. 

So what can we grassroots U.S. Jews do in the light, I would say darkness, of U.S. musing on a Jewish homeland eviscerating “two-state solution”?  I recently wrote here that Democratic Party member Jews should not let that party take them for granted.  That goes too for us in the GOP.  We can’t threaten to vote for the Dems, infinitely stronger for “two-states” than Republicans, but we can make vividly clear to our party our joinder in what an Israeli news outlet recently called “the two-state solution” – “Unthinkable” to Israelis. So …

*** Stop saying “West Bank” and “annexation”

*** Reject that the 1949 ceasefire lines are “the sovereign borders of the State of Israel, known as the Green Line” that the Reform Movement has called them (quoted in Tobin, JNS, 10/31/19, Why Is Reform Widening the Divide Between Israel and American Jewry?), and firmly assert that historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria are intrinsic parts, indeed the heart & soul, of our people’s Jewish homeland of Israel

*** Make clear to your political party, whichever it is, that ripping Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem from our people’s homeland of Israel is as Unthinkable and Existential to us as it is to Israelis (and with control of both houses of Congress this election year on a knife edge, this means something)

*** Express your pride in our homeland and peoplehood.  “Be proud of who you are,” President Trump told us (World Israel News, 12/15/25, After Sydney Massacre, Trump Urges Jews to ‘Celebrate Chanukah Proudly).