23 October 2026
Olives Harvesting: Torah Law vs Turkish Law
Olives Harvesting: Torah Law vs Turkish Law
With the opening of the olive harvest season, terrorism in Judea and Samaria has intensified.
But, the harvest is not only a tool for terror, it’s a way to seize land. Roi Drucker, Regavim’s Judea and Samaria field coordinator, explains how the harvest is the visible part of a much bigger story. Nearly half a million dunams in Area C have been taken over through agricultural encroachment alone, under an Ottoman-era law and with foreign funding.
Agriculture is one of the Palestinian Authority’s main tools for land takeover, as part of the Fayyad Plan. Under Article 78 of the Ottoman Land Code, whoever cultivates land for ten years acquires rights to it.
As of last January: 101,993 illegal structures on some 100,000 dunams — and agricultural takeover covering 448,542 dunams, nine times the size of Tel Aviv.
Rav Dov Lior, former chief rabbi of Kiryat Arba, among others does not recognize Turkish law in Eretz Yisrael. He rules: “The Arabs never purchased the land from the people of Israel or from any individual Jew. It is, therefore, stolen property in their hand.”
And the Rabbi emphasizes: “Jews are permitted to harvest the olives even in areas far from Jewish communities, to publicly demonstrate our ownership of the Land — and in doing so they fulfill the mitzvah of settling the Land of Israel.”
For the full story see: https://hilltopmaccabees.org/2026/10/19/rabbi-lior-fires-back-at-the-gush-etzion-rabbis-harvesting-olives-in-the-holy-land-is-entirely-permitted/
Rav Avi Grossman calls the matter of stopping the Arab pickers, a matter of common sense and pikuach nefesh. https://youtu.be/bAnllsn_z-s?si=G4cuI_9kKslV0V4m
Rav Elisha Wolfson on olive harvesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGpxl2oNnWw
Lenny Goldberg – Olive Branches and Thorny Issues – The Jewish Truth Bomb https://israelnewstalkradio.com/olive-branches-and-thorny-issues-the-jewish-truth-bomb-audio/
Published: October 21, 2026
#55: MK Rabbi Meir Porush - אידיש: הרב מאיר פרוש
For the fifty fifth episode, Shloime sits down with United Torah Judaism Member Of Knesset Rabbi Meir Porush, to talk about being a public servant, the Chareidi draft crisis, and Israel's upcoming elections.
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Did Israeli Politician Ofer Winter Forget Something? האם עופר וינטר שוכח משהו?
Ofer Winter: The only solution for Gaza - emigration!
Yosef Hadad: I will be the first Israeli Arab in the cabinet!
Yosef Hadad: I will be the first Israeli Arab in the cabinet!
Esser Agaroth (2¢):
Ofer Winter was one of the first IDF commanders to arrive at the Gaza border on his own, and to begin engaging the Hamas and civilian invaders on October 7, 2023. The completion of Ofer Winter’s service in the IDF in 2024, or rather his dismissal, did not make any sense.
His conclusion of service was criticized by several in the government. Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich said that he was the only one we know, who did not have anything to do with the failures pre-October 7, and that it should not be up to those, who did fail, to make such decisions.
Since then, Winter has been a critic of the government. Because this, in light of his heroism which preceded this, many have said we had better pay attention to this Jew, as a potential leader. Sure enough, he formed a political party, and is standing in the upcoming elections. Unfortunately for him, the current standing in the polls does not look good.
The number two on Winter’s party list is Arab Christian, social media influencer and IDF veteran, Yosef Hadad. Recently there has been an uproar over whether or not Hadad was in favor, or against, the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Well, I am here to tell you that his position on this matter is irrelevant.
Yet, it is unclear is Ofer Winter realizes the implications of adding a non-Jew to his party’s list of candidates. This is not the first time a non-Jew has been on a center right party’s list. Nor is it the first time in which a non-Jew has been present on a party’s list of candidates including religious (orthodox) Jews. Druze have served of Members of Knesset in the Likud and Israel Our Home Parties. However, this does seem to be the first time a non-Jew has been included on the list of a party headed by a religious Jew.
Either Ofer Winter believes there is no problem with this because or our current situation as a nation struggling with autonomy, or that there is no problem with this in any event. If it is the latter reason, is this because he taught to believe this by his notoriously mamlakhti (diehard state-loyalist) Yeshiva B’nei David? Was this an oversight on the yeshiva’s part? Was it irrelevant to the pre-IDF service curriculum?
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You shall surely set king over you, whom the Lord your God shall choose; one from among your brethren you shall set over you king; you may not put a foreigner over you, who is not your brother. (Deut. 17:15)
A king should not be appointed from converts to Judaism. This applies even if the convert’s ancestors had been Jewish for many generations, unless his mother or father is a native-born Israelite, as Deuteronomy 17:15 states: “You may not put a foreigner over you, who is not one of your brother.”
This does not apply to the monarchy alone, but to all positions of authority within Israel. A convert may not serve as an army commander, a leader of fifty, or as a leader of ten. He may not even supervise the allocation of water from a stream to various fields. Needless to say, a judge or a nasi should only be a native-born Israelite, as it is stated (ibid.): “Appoint a king over you from among your brethren.” This implies that all appointments must only be “from your brethren.” (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Kings and their Wars 1:5 [4])
נתוני ההצבעה הצפויים בבית שמש בפרסון ראשון: הרב מנחם שפירא והרב גרינברג עם פעילים במטה הבחירות של ג'
NO SOUND maybe they will redo the video:
מנהל המחלקה המוניציפלית ויו״ר מטה ארגון מנחם, שפירא, וראש העיר בית שמש שמואל גרינברג קיימו ישיבה במטה הבחירות בעיר. במהלך הישיבה נסקרו נתוני ההצבעה הצפויים בבית שמש, אשר גדלה משמעותית בשנים האחרונות וחצתה לאחרונה את רף 200 אלף התושבים.
22 October 2026
REB SONES: What Arutz Sheva Didn’t Ask Netanyahu Five Days Before the Election
What Arutz Sheva Didn’t Ask Netanyahu
Five days before the election, the prime minister sat for a long interview about Iran, Gaza, Trump, and the small parties of the right. The map he showed on Oct. 18, the army the PA is training abroad, and the armored vehicles approved on his watch never came up.......
On Thursday, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu gave Arutz Sheva an exclusive interview five days before Israel votes. He warned against complacency and against small right-wing parties that may not cross the threshold. He said the Iranian threat is far from over and that the IDF will have to “finish” Hamas and Hezbollah. On Judea and Samaria he spoke of building “at a record rate” and promised: “As long as I’m prime minister of Israel, there won’t be a Palestinian state.”
Here are five questions he was not asked. Each one rests on facts already on the public record, most of them from his own words and his own government. Three concern what his government has done in Judea and Samaria, one concerns what he will not promise, and the last concerns the issue that keeps the other four off the table. Interviews like this one rarely ask such questions, for reasons I come to below, so voters will have to ask them, and get the answers in writing before Oct. 27.
1. Why does your own map give Judea and Samaria to the PA?
“There won’t be a Palestinian state,” he told the interviewers. Four days earlier, on Oct. 18, he presented his national security doctrine in front of a map that labels Judea and Samaria “Palestinian Authority (West Bank)”, on a slide titled “Principal threats: arenas.” Nothing on the slide corrected the label. The report on the doctrine in Arutz Sheva did not mention the map, and the interview did not ask about it.
2. Who lets the PA’s officers out to train?
On Oct. 13 he said Israel was “prepared for every scenario, including a turning of the barrels”, the scenario in which PA forces turn their guns on Israelis. Two days before the interview, HaKol HaYehudi reported that PA officers are training in armored warfare at the Chinese army’s academy in Beijing, after earlier courses in Pakistan and Russia. The Defense Ministry, COGAT and the IDF sent the reporter’s questions to one another, and the Prime Minister’s Office did not answer. Palestinian Authority Arabs in Judea and Samaria leave, as a rule, through a gate Israel controls. Who stamped their exit? The interview did not mention the PA’s forces at all.
3. Who approved the armored vehicles the PA received in 2019?
If the left and the Arab parties win, he warned, “we’re going to have the Oslo disaster on steroids.” In May 2019 I reported for Arutz Sheva that the PA had received ten armored vehicles that entered through Allenby “with Israel’s approval,” and an Israeli source said the transfer had been approved more than nine months earlier, at the Americans’ request, by Avigdor Liberman, then defense minister, and by the prime minister. The prime minister was Binyamin Netanyahu.
4. Will you put sovereignty in writing before Oct. 27?
Asked whether sovereignty over Judea and Samaria is the next step, he said it “was discussed with the president” and that he would “rather do rather than announce.” That is a promise to act later on a policy he will not state now. It is exactly the vote I have argued no one should give away: no signature, no vote. If he means to do it, a signed commitment costs him nothing.
5. Iran is a real enemy. Why should it crowd out every other question?
In the same interview the prime minister described an enemy in bad shape. Iran’s regime, he said, is “crippled” and “on their knees.” Asked whether Iran can produce a nuclear weapon today, he said it still has “problems with weaponization.” In the Hebrew version he went further: of the campaign against Iran, “90% of the job is done”, and 10 percent remains.
Yet he also asked voters to treat the election as a choice about Iran above everything else. In the Hebrew version he called the interview “a rescue call,” not an interview. In English he said: “Either we destroy them, or they destroy us. That’s what the voters have to decide on now.” The same day, Arutz Sheva carried The New York Times‘ report that the United States and Israel are preparing new strikes on Iran that could begin after the Nov. 3 American midterm elections.
None of this makes the threat imaginary. Israel has been in a war with Iran since February, and no one who has run to a shelter this year needs to be told that Iran means to harm us. But the threat has also been the frame of every campaign for a generation. In 1992, Netanyahu told the Knesset that Iran was three to five years away from the bomb, and he has warned of an imminent bomb ever since. I traced that history in “Three to Five Years, Forever”.
A government can fight Iran and still answer for the map, for sovereignty, for the PA’s foreign-trained army and for the armored vehicles of 2019. A danger that is always about to arrive leaves no room to ask about anything else, and that is the problem.
Every stage magician knows the trick: keep the audience watching the right hand, and the left hand can do what it likes. The saw in the magician’s box is real; that is why everyone watches it. For a generation, Iran has been the right hand. While the country watches Tehran, a map with Judea and Samaria marked “Palestinian Authority” goes up on the prime minister’s screen, and PA officers fly home from a tank course in Beijing.
Fighting Iran is a reason to vote with your eyes open, not a reason to stop asking.
MORE HERE: https://jewishhome.news/what-arutz-sheva-didnt-ask-netanyahu/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
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