| THE LIE Jews living in Judea and Samaria are “illegal settlers” whose mere presence violates international law. |
| THE TRUTH Jews have a continuous biblical, historical, and legal right to Judea and Samaria, even under international law. |
| BACKGROUND On May 6, 2026, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani claimed Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria are “illegal under international law” and accused them of displacing Palestinians. (Ynet News) |
| TRUTH EXPLAINED Judea and Samaria are the biblical and historical homeland of the Jewish people. This is the land where Abraham walked nearly 4,000 years ago, where King David ruled, and where the ancient Kingdoms of Israel and Judah were born. Hebron and the Cave of the Patriarchs — which Abraham purchased — remain among the oldest Jewish sites on Earth. Jews have, by far, the oldest claim to the land. (Times of Israel) Jews have maintained a continuous presence in Judea and Samaria for over 3,000 years — through Roman rule, Muslim empires, the Crusades, Ottoman times, and into the modern era. That presence was temporarily severed by Muslim massacres and ethnic cleansing, not by the communities now falsely labeled “settlers.” (Times of Israel) Jews were displaced by Muslims, not the other way around. In 1929, Muslim mobs massacred 67 Jews in Hebron and drove out the survivors. In 1948, Jordan illegally invaded and occupied Judea and Samaria, expelled every Jew, and banned Jews from their holy sites for 19 years. In 1967, after Jordan attacked Israel, Israel liberated Judea and Samaria in a defensive war. Many communities today were rebuilt exactly where Jews had lived for centuries before being murdered or expelled. This is indigenous return, not colonialism. (WJC), (Times of Israel), (PMW) The word “occupation” has a specific legal meaning: one country controlling the territory of another sovereign state. No Palestinian Arab sovereign state has ever existed in Judea and Samaria — not under the Ottomans, not under the British Mandate, not at any moment in history. The only sovereign states that ever ruled this land were Jewish ones. Israel cannot “occupy” territory that no Palestinian Arab state ever held. (Antonin Scalia Law School), (UN), (Thinc), (PMW) The situation does not fit the definition of “occupation.” Under the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authority exercises full civil and security control over Area A in Judea and Samaria, where most Palestinians live. Israelis are forbidden from entering those areas. This contradicts the very definition of occupation. (UN), (Times of Israel) International law actually supports Jewish settlement. The 1922 British Mandate for Palestine (approved by the League of Nations) explicitly encouraged “close settlement by Jews on the land,” including in Judea and Samaria. Article 80 of the UN Charter preserved these rights, which were never canceled. (Thinc), (PMW), (Times of Israel) Mamdani’s favorite claim — the “Geneva Convention violation” — is a deliberate distortion. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention was written after WWII to stop Nazi-style forced deportations and demographic destruction. Israeli families move voluntarily to their ancestral homeland. The rule does not apply here. (Northwestern University) The standard is applied selectively and hypocritically. If Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria truly violated Article 49, then the same standard would also apply to Turkey’s occupation of Northern Cyprus, Morocco’s in Western Sahara, and China’s demographic engineering in Tibet and Xinjiang — cases involving powers with far weaker historical and legal claims than Israel’s. The fact that it does not shows Article 49 was never originally understood as banning voluntary civilian communities, but rather Nazi-style forced population transfers. (Northwestern University) |
| QUOTES “Under international law, occupation occurs when a country takes over the sovereign territory of another country. But the West Bank [Judea and Samaria] was never part of Jordan, which seized it in 1949 and ethnically cleansed its entire Jewish population. Nor was it ever the site of an Arab Palestinian state.” — Professor Eugene Kontorovich |
| TAKEAWAY Zohran Mamdani’s attack on indigenous Jewish communities has nothing to do with law or fact. It is Islamic propaganda aimed at erasing Jewish history and rights. Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria have a biblical, historical, and legal right to that land. Nowhere else on Earth do people who have lived in a land for thousands of years suddenly get branded “illegal” for living there. Mamdani can keep shouting it, but it doesn’t make it true. |
