More on CNN’s “God’s Jewish Warriors”

Sondra Oster Baras, Director of the Israel office of Christian Friends of Israeli Communities (CFOIC) and one of the people featured in CNN’s “God’s Jewish Warriors,” has written to CNN to complain about “the incredibly slanted presentation” of the show:

There have been exactly 4 Jewish terrorist incidents or attempted incidents and you devoted half the program to them, discussing each one in detail.  The people who support these are a fringe minority and roundly condemned by 98% of the settlement movement.

People like Chanan Porat and myself are the representative, and yet you gave far more time to Yehuda Etzion and David HaIvri and the others who support this position.  If you gave similar time to every single Arab terrorist attack, the show would go on for days if not years. . . .

Also, the legality of the settlements issue was so incredibly biased.  Eugene Rostow, undersecretary of State wrote a seminal article defending their legality in the 80’s, as did the Israeli Supreme Court — yet not a mention was made of that perspective. . . .  Why did you not quote a single legal or historical expert on the other side? 

Eugene Rostow wrote two major articles about the settlements in The New Republic.  In his October 21, 1991 article, he analyzed U.N. Resolution 242, which is supposed to be the basis of the final status negotiations under the Road Map.  Rostow wrote that:

Resolution 242, which as undersecretary of state for political affairs between 1966 and 1969 I helped produce, calls on the parties to make peace and allows Israel to administer the territories it occupied in 1967 until "a just and lasting peace in the Middle East" is achieved.  When such a peace is made, Israel is required to withdraw its armed forces "from territories" it occupied during the Six-Day War — not from "the" territories nor from "all" the territories, but from some of the territories . . .

The British Mandate recognized the right of the Jewish people to "close settlement" in the whole of the Mandated territory.  It was provided that local conditions might require Great Britain to "postpone" or "withhold" Jewish settlement in what is now Jordan.  This was done in 1922.  But the Jewish right of settlement in Palestine west of the Jordan river, that is, in Israel, the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, was made unassailable.  That right has never been terminated and cannot be terminated except by a recognized peace between Israel and its neighbors. . . .

Sondra Oster Baras received a B.A. in History and English from Barnard College and a J.D. from Columbia University Law School.  After briefly practicing law in New York, she moved to Israel in 1984 and joined a group of Orthodox Jews building Karnei Shomron in Samaria — a community that now numbers 7,000 people.  In 1998, she opened the Israel office of CFOIC and today she coordinates much of its community support programs world-wide. 

While she was in Los Angeles earlier this week, we asked her to describe the settlement in which she lives, and — given the nature of her work — to address the oft-repeated assertion that Christian Zionists seek to use Jews to achieve an “end of days” scenario or Armageddon: