I Saw the Resurrection of the Dead

 

 

 The Birth of Moshe Rabeinu  

 Batya and Moshe Rabeinu

Yes, Israel Can Apply Israeli Law to the West Bank

 … Nor can it properly limit Israel’s sovereignty over its own territory….. International law’ hardly demands a ‘two-state solution’ to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Tablet Magazine

after all, Judea and Samaria is really ours, 
but the zionist gov won't acknowledge it "legally"

I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank,” President Donald Trump said in response to a question from a journalist last September. The statement is one of the few aspects of his foreign policy that appears to have cheered Democrats. It came after a symbolic, nonbinding vote in the Knesset in support of applying Israeli civil law in the area.

But the Knesset never used the term annexation, and for good reason.

There is a simple, clear rule to determine the borders of new countries, whether they arise from imperial collapse, decolonization, federal breakup, cession, or any other cause. Under the doctrine of uti possidetis juris, a new country automatically inherits the borders of the last top-level administrative unit in that area. In other words, the pre-independence internal boundaries carry over to the new state. The continuity of prior borders is the sole factor, trumping fuzzy and hard-to-administer considerations like ethnic self-determination or historical title.

This rule has been applied to new states from Latin America to Europe. It is a matter of textbook international law. The reasons for it are clear. Demographics and history would give rise to multiple competing claims, whereas uti possidetis provides a unique, unambiguous solution.

To give a recent example, consider Crimea. The territory has been part of Russia for most of the past several hundred years. A majority of inhabitants were Russian speakers. Yet the international community rightly considers Russia’s annexation illegal and regards it as Ukrainian territory to this day—because of the uti possidetis principle. Nikita Khrushchev had redrawn the borders of the Ukrainian and Russian Soviet Socialist Republics to give Crimea to the former. When the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine became an independent state, it automatically inherited the borders of its Soviet administrative predecessor.

Annexation has a very precise meaning in international law: the taking and incorporation by one state of the territory of another state. The actions Israeli politicians have contemplated—applying Israeli civil law in areas that have been under nominal military administration—would not constitute annexation for two related reasons.

First, the area of “the West Bank,” a term coined by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan to refer to the lands it occupied after Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, did not belong to any foreign state when it came under Israeli control in 1967. The law of belligerent occupation, which governs territory taken in war—which is what most people mean when they talk about “Israeli occupation of the West Bank”—applies only to the sovereign territory of foreign states. This covers most cross-border conflicts but not some postcolonial transitions where there is a gap in sovereign control. For example, in 1975, Morocco seized Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony that had not yet emerged as an independent state, despite the national aspirations of its Indigenous Saharawi inhabitants. While there was some tepid United Nations pushback on Morocco’s land grab, it was not treated as an occupation by the United States and the European Union. Today, Rabat’s annexation of the “southern provinces” has been accepted as lawful by much of the world, including the United States and Europe.

Indonesia’s 1962 takeover of the similarly orphaned Dutch New Guinea colony gained universal acceptance. North Vietnam’s forcible incorporation of the entire country of South Vietnam, against the passionately expressed views of its residents, has long been universally accepted, no doubt because of Hanoi’s long-standing claims to sovereignty over both parts of French Indochina—just as Israel has long claimed Judea and Samaria as its own territory under the terms of the League of Nations mandate. In short, it is clear that Jordan was never sovereign in the territory. Thus, there is no basis for legal concepts like belligerent occupation and annexation.

But there is a second reason that Israel’s actions here wouldn’t constitute annexation: Israel itself has a sovereign claim to the territory, which it calls “Judea and Samaria”—a term used for more than 2,000 years, not only in the Bible but also by Roman historians, and by secular authorities including the United Nations up through the middle of the 20th century. Needless to say, a state cannot annex its own territory.

When Israel gained independence, its preceding geopolitical entity was Mandatory Palestine, which included the West Bank (Judea and Samaria), though it was not called that. Indeed, Judea and Samaria was never considered a distinct administrative entity. Under the application of standard rules of international law, the borders of the new state at independence would be the borders of the mandatory territory it succeeded.

The other states that arose in the Middle East from mandatory territories—Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan—all acquired exactly the borders of those entities at the moments of independence. Each of these mandatory borders was drawn in arguably arbitrary ways that included discontented minorities in a larger state, be it Muslims in then-Christian majority Lebanon or the Kurds in Iraq. But in none of these cases have such arguments been seen as a reason to establish minority statelets in the territory of successor states.

Or consider Karabakh, a majority Armenian region within Azerbaijan with a deep Armenian history, which Yerevan took control of in a war with Azerbaijan at the time of the countries’ independence, much as Jordan grabbed the West Bank. With the collapse of the USSR, the two former Soviet republics entered into a protracted conflict over the territory. Yet since Baku captured the territory in September 2023, dislodging the Armenians, no one has treated it as an occupying power. The reason is simple: Karabakh had been within the boundaries of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, and so it automatically became part of the new independent state of Azerbaijan, even though this frustrates the self-determination aspirations of the Armenians there. This territory’s occupation by another country for two decades did nothing to erase Azerbaijani rights. This is a contemporary example of a situation quite comparable to Judea and Samaria being adjudicated by the international community the exact opposite way.

So let us briefly recap the political history of Judea and Samaria. For many centuries, up until 1918, the entire Levant belonged to the Turkish Ottoman Empire. Ottoman rule ended with its collapse at the end of World War I. Instead of taking Constantinople’s territories as colonies for themselves, the Allied powers sought to create independent nation-states—just as they did with the former territories of the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire in Central and Eastern Europe. This process of making new nations out of older multinational empires was overseen by the newly formed League of Nations, which, by the treaty that created it, had the power to administer “mandatory territories.”

The League’s 1923 Mandate for Palestine was designated as a “National home for the Jewish people” and consisted of what we today would call Gaza, Israel, Judea and Samaria, and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in one undifferentiated mass, cobbled together from parts of several Ottoman provinces. The terms of the mandate provided that it could be divided at its natural boundary of the Jordan River to create a Jewish and an Arab entity. The British promptly did just that, with the territory west of the river becoming the Mandatory Territory of Palestine—the Jewish entity. The area east of the river known as “Transjordan,” the Arab entity, was given to Britain’s defeated Hashemite supporters in Iraq and became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in 1946.

Britain then terminated the Palestine mandate in 1948 following a U.N. vote to recognize two states in the remaining “Jewish” part of the mandatory territory—one for Jews and one for Arabs. The Jews accepted this proposal, which had no legal basis in the terms of the mandate but was seen at the time as an attempt to peacefully accommodate the existing balance of power. In other words, partition was a political solution that might allow the United Nations to fulfill in some part the inherited terms of the League of Nations mandate while avoiding what many expected to be a massacre of the Jews by the Arabs. Palestinian Arab representatives, expecting victory, uniformly declined the U.N. partition plan, which therefore did not “create” either Israel or a Palestinian state and has no standing in international law.

Uninterested in partition, five Arab states immediately invaded the mandate territory, with the stated goal “to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state.” Egyptian tanks rolled toward Tel Aviv but were turned back, but managed to seize a sliver of coastal territory that came to be known as the “Gaza Strip.” Similarly, Jordan’s Arab Legion was stopped by Israeli forces on the Samarian ridgeline, but not before it captured a significant part of Mandatory Palestine.

Israel and Jordan signed an armistice agreement in 1949, ending the fighting without agreeing to permanent borders. Jordan remained in control of the Old City of Jerusalem and the surrounding areas. It proceeded to ethnically cleanse every single Jew from this territory, which it then annexed in 1950 and dubbed “the West Bank.” All but a few nations rejected the legitimacy of this move, as Jordan had no credible sovereign claim on the territory, having taken it in a war of aggression.

Quite clearly, when Israel retook this territory in 1967, it was not occupying territory from Jordan, but rather ending Jordanian occupation of a portion of Mandate Palestine, the territory reserved by the League of Nations for a Jewish homeland under the British Mandate. Indeed, to say that “the West Bank” continues to have some special status 50 years after the end of Jordanian occupation is to retroactively give legal effect to the aggression against Israel in 1948. It is to say that to the extent the Arab states succeeded in occupying parts of Mandatory Palestinian territory and ethnically cleansing every single Jew, those areas must permanently remain Judenrein.

It emerges that under widely agreed-upon international rules, Israel has sovereign rights to the territory known to the State of Israel as Judea and Samaria and to many foreign scholars and writers as “the West Bank.” Some want to create a unique carve-out from these rules for the Jewish state.

Those who believe that a peaceful resolution of Israeli-Arab conflict depends on the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state may worry that the legal analysis presented here prevents such a settlement. Indeed, one might suspect that the strenuous denial of Israel’s legal rights has at times been designed to steer it toward what for many decades most diplomats regarded as the ideal solution: two states for two peoples. To date, the track record of that solution has not been a positive one.

However, the law is neutral as to diplomatic solutions. If you like your two-state solution, you can keep your two-state solution. Israel’s sovereign title to the territory does not prevent the country from ceding some or all of Judea and Samaria, or any other part of Israel, for a creation of a Palestinian state or any other type of state or entity—and indeed enables it. What the legal analysis does make clear is there is nothing about the 1949 Armistice Lines that makes them legally mandated borders of such a state, or that obligates Israel to cede all this territory.

Another consequentialist mode of analysis holds that if Israel does have sovereign rights to Judea and Samaria, it would put it in the uncomfortable position of ruling over the Arabs there, which could result in a high percentage of the population under Israeli rule not being Jewish—therefore forcing Israel to choose between being a Jewish state or a democracy. This is a serious consideration that is downstream from Israel’s legal rights. Like the idea of establishing a Palestinian state, or some other form of politically autonomous Palestinian Arab entity, Israel can choose to address its security problems, demographic problems, or regional security problems however it wants. While some of those choices might have better or worse real-world results, “international law” is not a magical formula that can or will compel Israel to make the choices that either its critics or its supporters might think best.

Israel’s sovereign rights over all of Judea and Samaria do not dictate the form of governance there. Indeed, since the Oslo process of the early ’90s, Israel has not governed the Palestinians of Judea and Samaria, who are instead misruled by the Palestinian Authority. Israel neither taxes them nor conscripts them; it does not write their schoolbooks or make their welfare policies or clean their streets. Israel’s current interactions with the Palestinian population focus almost entirely on hard security issues. Given that all nations enjoy an inherent right to self-defense, this would be the case whether the Palestinian areas were technically an independent sovereign or not.

President Trump’s 2020 peace plan, recently reaffirmed in his 20-point plan for peace, contemplated Israel extending its civil law to roughly half of Judea and Samaria, where the Jewish population is concentrated, and leaving the other half for a potential Arab state. This helps explain his comments about “annexation of the West Bank.” However, while Trump does not support Israel applying its law to those areas under Palestinian Authority control, that is not inconsistent with the proposals being discussed in the Knesset.

The so-called annexation plans being discussed in Israel are thus not about the incorporation of foreign territory into Israel proper. Rather, they are about ending the anomalous military administration that has applied in this area since 1967. After the Six-Day War, Israel never fully applied its domestic laws to the territory because it always expected the Arab states to sue for peace, and it was always prepared to transfer to them at least some part of the territory. Until the late 1980s, many Israelis assumed that the party for such negotiations would be Jordan. With the Oslo process, Israel’s “peace partner” became the Palestine Liberation Organization. In both cases, there was no point in hurriedly applying Israeli law to territory that might not remain Israeli because of a negotiated peace settlement.

Israel’s system of military governance in Judea and Samaria was always intended to be temporary. In retaining that system through decades of negotiations with the Palestinians, all of which resulted in their rejection of internationally backed statehood offers, Israel seems to have both severely misjudged the preferences and intentions of its Arab neighbors while also injuring its own citizens, creating a new problem of its own making.

Today, roughly 700,000 Jewish Israelis live in Judea and Samaria—where they have every legal and historical right to live and buy property. Yet Israelis and Arabs alike continue to find themselves governed by an odd patchwork of military regulations that has deliberately never been normalized or transparent to anyone and, over time, has become increasingly unwieldy. Property law is based on obscure Ottoman statutes, permitting for infrastructure projects is difficult and burdensome, and environmental regulations don’t exist for either Jews or Arabs. Clearly, this ad hoc situation is being sustained by a combination of official Israeli delusion and sloth and by external actors whose goal is to make life in these areas as practically unpleasant as possible for everyone.

Five decades of Arab rejectionism interspersed with violent terrorist assaults has made it untenable to continue to hold the legal regulation of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria in limbo. And neither international law nor Western principles of democracy stand in the way of Israel finally applying its own civil law to its own citizens in those areas.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/israeli-law-west-bank-judea-samaria

FOOTNOTE:

Uti possidetis juris (Latin for "as you possess under law") is a principle of international law stating that newly independent states inherit the same administrative boundaries, borders, or territorial demarcations they held just prior to gaining independence. It prevents disputes by transforming, for example, internal colonial or mandate borders into recognized international frontiers. 

Key Aspects of Uti Possidetis Juris

• Purpose: To prevent "fratricidal struggles" and ensure stability by preventing new nations from immediately disputing territory.
• Origin: Derived from Roman law (uti possidetis, ita possideatis), it became standard practice in 19th-century Latin America and was later adopted in Africa and other regions.
• Application: It applies even if previous boundaries were artificial or colonial. It was used to define borders in the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.
• Limitations: It is not a rule of jus cogens (peremptory norm), meaning states can mutually agree to alter these borders. 

The principle is often used to establish that territorial boundaries remain at the moment of independence, often protecting the integrity of the newly created state. 

Rabbi Hoffman: At the Edge of the World: The Mir Yeshiva Students in Vladivostok

At the Edge of the World: The Mir Yeshiva Students in Vladivostok

By Rabbi Yair Hoffman

After traveling nearly 10,000 kilometers across the frozen breadth of the Soviet Union—from the western border near Lithuania, through Moscow, and across Siberia—the students of the Mir Yeshiva finally arrived in Vladivostok in late 1940 and early 1941.

They had crossed eight time zones on the Trans-Siberian Railway, endured days of uncertainty, hunger, and fear, and yet throughout the journey they continued learning Torah. Ki heim chayeinu—for they are our life. Even as refugees, Torah remained their lifeline.

Now they stood at the last stop of the longest railway line on earth. Japan—freedom—lay only two or three days by sea away.  And yet, Vladivostok would prove one of the most terrifying places they would ever wait.

The Last Soviet Barrier

Vladivostok was the Soviet Union’s eastern terminus: a closed military port, heavily monitored by the NKVD, and, ominously, a major transit point for prisoners being shipped to the Gulag camps of the Far East. The same docks from which ships carried thousands of convicts toward Kolyma were the docks from which the Mir students hoped to escape.

By 1940 the city was under extreme security. With war looming between Japan and the Soviet Union, civilian shipping was scarce, schedules were unreliable, and permission to leave the USSR could be revoked at any moment. Foreigners—and especially Jewish refugees—were under constant surveillance.

For the Mir talmidim, Vladivostok represented a cruel paradox: it was the closest they had ever been to freedom, and at the same time a place where everything could collapse instantly.

Under Watchful Eyes

Intourist, the Soviet state travel monopoly, housed the refugees in monitored hotels while they waited for a ship. These were not ordinary lodgings. Conversations could be overheard, movements tracked, and documents re-examined without warning.

The students knew what had happened only months earlier, in June 1940, when tens of thousands of Jewish refugees who refused Soviet citizenship were deported to labor camps in Kazakhstan and Siberia. The fear was constant: one decision by the authorities, one policy shift, and they could vanish into the Soviet interior like so many others.

Some groups waited weeks. Others waited more than two months.

Winter deepened. The harbor began to freeze.

Arrests and a Narrow Escape

The danger was not theoretical. Fifteen Mir students were arrested by Russian police in Vladivostok, sending shockwaves through the entire group. Their detention threatened to unravel the entire escape.

Desperate cables were sent to Rabbi Abraham Kalmanowitz in New York, who had been coordinating rescue efforts and raising funds. Additional money was secured and discreetly deployed. Miraculously, the arrested students were released.

The message was unmistakable: even with visas, even with tickets, nothing was secure.

Any Ship Will Do

Eventually the refugees reached a collective decision. Comfort no longer mattered. They would board any vessel that could take them out of the Soviet Union.

Salvation arrived in the form of small Japanese cargo ships pressed into service for refugee transport. These vessels were no passenger liners. Rabbi Dovid Kviat zt”l, who made the voyage, recalled the conditions vividly decades later: “When we went on the voyage, there was no beds. There was no chairs to even to sit. There was a floor. So we lay down on the floor. A head to head, a foot to foot.”

The ship that carried Rabbi Kviat’s group displaced only two and a half thousand tons—a small vessel for such a voyage across the Sea of Japan. The refugees were transported in several groups, roughly twenty-five to thirty-five passengers per voyage, across to Tsuruga. The process took several weeks as group after group made the crossing.

In total, several thousand Jewish refugees escaped via this route—among them the entire Mir Yeshiva, the only major European yeshiva to survive the Holocaust intact.

The Final Ordeal: The NKVD Inspection

Even boarding the ship was not the end of the fear.

The NKVD conducted exhaustive inspections on the frozen pier. Refugees stood in line as Soviet officers scrutinized every document, searched every bag, and confiscated currency. Many of the visas—especially those issued by Chiune Sugihara—were technically irregular. Everyone knew it.

A single refusal, a single stamp deemed insufficient, could mean being pulled from the line and sent back inland, possibly forever.

Only when the gangway was crossed did the students allow themselves to breathe—yet even then the tension did not break.

Three Days of Suspended Terror

As the ship pulled away from Vladivostok, Soviet officials remained aboard. A Russian Coast Guard vessel followed in escort. No one spoke. The Mir students—young men accustomed to the thunder of Torah debate—sat in silence, watching the gray Soviet coastline recede.

Rabbi Kviat zt”l remembered the moment when everything changed: “When the little ship went out a few miles away from Vladivostok to the borders, a Russian ship came alongside—it took the officer off the ship. Right then we knew we are free.”

And then—spontaneous, irrepressible—the students erupted. “Then we started to sing and dance,” Rabbi Kviat recalled. One of the older bochurim – R’ Harkover began to sing, and the others joined. For the first time in months, perhaps years, they could breathe.

The Storm

But the celebration was short-lived. Almost immediately, the sea turned against them.

“The ship started to jump back and forth,” Rabbi Kviat remembered. “It became a storm. We didn’t know what kind of storm it is. I went up on the deck. I saw one side—the water was sky-high—the other way it was down. In a minute, it was the opposite.”

The passengers quickly realized this was no ordinary rough weather. “The sailors started to also get sick—not only we. We saw the sailors also getting seasickness. We knew this is something unusual, because sailors are used to the sea.”

Most of the refugees were incapacitated, lying on the floor where they had been placed, unable to move. Only two young bochurim seemed immune to the sickness. They moved among their stricken friends, bringing water to those who could not help themselves.

“We was supposed to take two days,” Rabbi Kviat recalled. “It took four days because it was a big storm and a little ship.”

Yet even as the vessel pitched and rolled, even as the students lay ill on the bare floor, they continued to sing zemiros. Torah sustained them still.

The Closing of the Door

The Mir students’ escape was a matter not only of courage but of timing. The window was closing even as they passed through it.

Rabbi Kviat witnessed how narrow that window truly was: “When the last group came to Vladivostok, the Russians stopped allowing ships for traveling. Why? They felt that the Germans would attack them. They had a million soldiers stationed against Japan. They started to move the million soldiers to Europe. So no more trains.”

The Trans-Siberian Railway, which had carried the refugees across the vast Soviet empire, was suddenly converted to military use. The final voyage groups barely made it through. After them, the route was sealed.

Had the Mir students delayed even a few weeks, they would have been trapped inside the Soviet Union—likely forever.

Arrival in Japan

When the ship reached Tsuruga, the contrast was overwhelming. After months under Soviet suspicion, the refugees encountered kindness. Local residents brought food. Bathhouses were opened to them without charge. Doctors refused payment. Members of the Jewish community of Kobe met each ship, guiding the refugees onward and ensuring their care.

For Rabbi Kviat and his fellow talmidim, this was not merely a geographical transition—it was a psychological rebirth.

A World Preserved

From Japan, the Mir Yeshiva would continue to Shanghai, where it survived the war years intact. After the war, the yeshiva re-established itself in Jerusalem and America, becoming a cornerstone of postwar Torah life.

The young men who waited in fear in Vladivostok, who boarded a cargo ship not knowing if they would be allowed to leave, who lay head to foot on a bare floor as a storm raged around them—they became the builders of a renewed Torah world.

Their escape hinged on a fragile chain of unlikely decisions—by diplomats, rescuers, officials, and the students themselves. Had any link failed, had they arrived even weeks later, the Mir would have shared the fate of countless other destroyed institutions.

Instead, Torah survived.

And every beis midrash that traces its lineage to the Mir still carries an echo of that frozen port, that long wait, that terrible storm, and that narrow passage to freedom.

The author can be reached at yairhoffman2@gmail.com

 https://vinnews.com/2026/02/02/at-the-edge-of-the-world-the-mir-yeshiva-students-in-vladivostok/

The Rav Chaim Filag'i Yahrtzeit Event - י"ז שבט

 

IN ADDITION:

Hacham Chaim Palagi was born in Izmir to Cali Kadin and to Hacham Yaakov Palagi in 1788. In 1807, at the age of 19, Hacham Chaim Palagi married, and in 1813 he received his ordination as Hacham Shalem from his grandfather, Chief Rabbi Rishon LeZion Hacham Raphael Yoseph.

Hacham Chaim Palagi did not accept any public position while his father was still living, and it was only in 1828 that he agreed to serve as a dayan in the Rabbinic Court and as Head of the Beit Yaakov Rabi yeshiva in Izmir.

In 1837 Hacham Chaim Palagi was appointed President of the Great Rabbinic Court of Izmir, and in 1857 he was appointed Hacham Bashi, the highest rabbinic office in Izmir.

Hacham Chaim Palagi spoke out for the poor of his community and would reprimand its wealthy individuals in his sermons. He legislated takanot (Halachic enactments) and founded charitable institutions; he toiled to establish a Jewish hospital in Izmir and enlisted the support of renowned philanthropists.

Hacham Chaim Palagi began writing at the age of 16 and is famous for his numerous books, over 80 in number. His books deal in a broad range of topics, and include 7 books on the Bible, 9 on the Talmud, 15 on Midrash and sermons, books on morals, and 24 books on Halacha, Kabbala, Responsa. When he completed a book, Hacham Chaim Palagi would hold a se'udas mitzvah – a consecrated festive meal - and distribute his books gratis. He never sold his books.

On 11 Av, 5601 (1841), a fire broke out in Izmir, destroying the Jewish neighborhood and burning 54 of his books. Over the years, Hacham Chaim Palagi restored many of his writings and had them reprinted, leaving a small number in manuscript form.

Hacham Chaim Palagi passed away 17 Shevat, 5628 (1868). He was buried in the ancient cemetery of Izmir in an official state funeral, attended by Turkish military and state officials as well as representatives of foreign countries.

His books include Pe'ulat Tzaddik LeHaim – his first book, Semicha LeHaim Responsa – which he authored with his grandfather and teacher, Hacham Raphaek Yoseph Hazan – Rachamim LeHaim, Artzot HaHaim, Lev Haim, Haim LeRosh, Kol HaHaim, Matza Haim, Tzeddakah Haim, Pe'ulat Tzaddik LeHaim, Ginzei Haim, and Birkat Mo'adecha LeHaim – his last book, published a day before his death.

A few quotes from the Rabbi on 'Love of Israel' in which he teaches that a person who has no merit of their own has a share in their fellow-person's merit, as they are partners:

All Israel have a portion in the World-to-Come. This can be interpreted to mean that since we share the understanding that "All of Israel are responsible for one another", they are to be considered partners in fulfilling the commandments, and in upholding and studying the Torah. And just as partners share benefits, the People of Israel share each other's merit in one another's Torah and good deeds… The Bible does bring evidence: "And your people, all of them are righteous" – and each has her or his own. Should you ever find totally empty people among Israel, they nevertheless "Shall possess the land for all time". "For all time" means that this includes even those who have nothing of their own.

Pe'ulat Tzeddek LeHaim, p.a, Siach Israel Publishing, Jerusalem 1998

https://hyomi.org.il/eng/mobile/page.asp?id=186