Ex-Defense Minister Arens: 'We Must Build Up Settlements'
“We must strengthen the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria even beyond their natural growth rates.”

by Hillel Fendel, Arutz Sheva
June 5, 2009

Moshe Arens
 

Ex-Defense and Foreign Minister Professor Moshe Arens says, “We must strengthen the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria even beyond their natural growth rates.”

The soft-spoken former Technion professor of aeronautical engineering is not happy with U.S. President Barack Obama’s new aggressive approach to Israel. “We're not used to receiving orders from others," he told Arutz-7's Hebrew newsmagazine on Thursday. "We are an independent country. We hear what the president says, but we are not at Mt. Sinai where we respond, ‘We will do whatever you say.’”

Arens served for six terms as a Knesset Member, was Minister of Defense in four different governments, and was Minister of Foreign Affairs in one. He immigrated to Israel in 1948 from the United States.

Against Outposts, Supports More Construction
Though he objects to what he calls “illegal” attempts by “hilltop youth to form outposts without authorization,” Arens says that the existing settlement communities in Judea and Samaria must be expanded and strengthened even beyond their rates of “natural growth.”

“Our settlement in the Land of Israel is the basic right of the Jewish Nation,” Arens said, “based not only on the Bible and Jewish history, but on international recognition during the times of the League of Nations and the British Mandate.”

“I do not accept the terms of ‘natural growth.’ We are not living in Judea and Samaria because of our ‘natural growth,’ but because of our natural rights.”

“It is incumbent upon us to strengthen the existing communities,” Arens said. “We cannot be like our former prime minister, Ehud Olmert, and like Opposition Leader Tzipi Livni, who deny our natural rights, a basis of Zionism, to live in Judea and Samaria.”