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From the summit of Har Ebal, looking toward Shechem and the surrounding Arab towns, our guide, Israel, pointed just in front of us to the hill of Tammun. “Do you see that little house on the top? It’s a chava, a Jewish farm.” To see it clearly, we needed binoculars: a little house, a corral, and an improvised dirt road. Nothing more.
1 FAMILY + 50 SHEEP
The chavot (farms) project is brilliantly simple, and of strategic, even messianic, importance. A young family with small children settles, with great sacrifice, on an empty hill, and raises 20 to 50 animals: goats, sheep or cows. The animals go out to graze every morning, and the vast territory they cover is now assigned to that Jewish family. One family with a flock covers more territory than any new community could.
THE NUMBERS
Let’s look at the numbers.
In Yehuda and Shomron (Judea and Samaria) about half a million Jews live today, in more than a hundred communities. The entire built area of those communities, all the houses, streets and schools built from 1967 until today, extends over some 8,000 hectares.
There are now about 150 new farms in these territories, inhabited by a few hundred people. How much land do they cover with their grazing animals? About 78,600 hectares. That is 14% of all Yehuda and Shomron.
Read that again: half a million people, building for sixty years, occupy 8,000 hectares. A few dozen brave Jewish families with their flocks cover ten times more! Seventy percent of the land that returned to Jewish hands in these decades returned through grazing, not through construction.
And the pace is accelerating: since October 2023 alone, some 50 new farms have been established.
THE SECRET
Then Israel, our guide, said something I had never heard before.
The Arabs of these territories receive enormous amounts of money. Billions of dollars from Europe, from the United Nations, and even from the US. Why don’t they build? Why don’t they govern more territory, why don’t they have better infrastructure, why don’t they fill these hills with houses and cities with all those fortunes?
The answer, he said, is one word: “corruption.”
The corruption of the Palestinian leadership is legendary. And until this past Wednesday, it truly bothered me. Arafat’s family accumulated a fortune of billions of dollars (see here: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/arafats-billions/). The same goes for the families of the leaders of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.
The international money that was supposed to build cities ended up in personal accounts. But now I understand that while the leaders were filling their pockets, the hills of the Shomron remained empty, waiting for the Jews!
Sometimes Bore Olam intervenes in the minds of the Goyim: He hardens their hearts, as He did with Pharaoh, and perhaps He also inflates their egos and their material ambitions, as with these greedy political leaders. Thanks to their corruption, we can repopulate our land!
MIRACLE
From Har Ebal you can see the past: the altar of Yehoshua’s sacrifices. And you can also see, on the mountains of the Shomron, the little Jewish farms that, with enormous sacrifice, are going up and reclaiming the land of our ancestors.
May HaShem bless and protect all the pioneers who do so much for Am Israel, the Torah of Israel, and the Land of Israel.
PS: If you believe in becoming partners in this remarkable sacrifice, reclaiming the land of Yehoshua bin Nun, Shemuel, and his mother Chana, consider getting in contact with one of the organizations that help these farms and settlements in Judea and Samaria.
I found this website that helps the pioneers of these farms obtain security equipment to defend themselves from the constant attacks by the Arabs around them:
https://israel365charity.com/our-projects/protect-farms-in-judea-and-samaria/
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