“I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank. Nope.” With those blunt words last week, President Trump sent shockwaves through Israel and around the world. A president who once championed Israeli sovereignty has now declared that he will not allow the Jewish people to annex their own biblical heartland. His message was clear: Judea and Samaria are bargaining chips to be traded for his peace plan and business deals with Arab leaders.
Trump’s announcement comes only a few days before Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the year. It is a day when Jews stand before God and repent—not only for personal sins like failing to honor the Shabbat or speaking cruelly to a friend, but for national sins. This year, our greatest national sin has been exposed for all to see: we ourselves have treated Judea and Samaria as negotiable, and so President Trump has simply reflected our weakness back at us.
For more than thirty years, Israel’s leaders have dangled pieces of our inheritance as bargaining chips, pretending that land given to us by God could be exchanged for temporary quiet or international approval. No one reflects this more than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. At times he speaks with the language of strength, promising sovereignty, but he never treats it as a duty—only as a tool to be bartered. Judea and Samaria are not “optional,” yet our leaders behave as if they were.
Trump’s latest plan for Gaza and the wider Arab world only makes that reality explicit: Israel will be barred from applying sovereignty over its biblical heartland. That clause is not an American invention. It is the direct result of our own equivocation. Netanyahu has not been betrayed by Trump; he has been exposed.
The prophet Joel condemns the nations that divide God’s land: “I will gather all the nations, and I will bring them down to the Valley of Jehoshaphat; and I will contend with them there concerning My people and My heritage Israel, whom they scattered among the nations, and My land they divided” (Joel 4:2). Notice His words: “My land.” Not Israel’s to barter, not the UN’s to parcel out, not America’s to approve or forbid. God calls it His land, yet for thirty years we have acted as though it were negotiable. That is our sin.
Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook taught that repentance is not only individual but national, and that national repentance cannot be avoided. An individual Jew may choose to ignore his personal sins, but the Jewish nation will always be forced back toward its national destiny. Yom Kippur is therefore not only about refraining from gossip, or lust, or anger. It is about correcting the betrayal of our people’s purpose. National repentance means rejecting the Oslo mentality, ending the shameful division of our homeland into “Areas A, B, and C,” and declaring once and for all that Judea and Samaria belong only to Israel.
Let us be honest: this is not about Trump. It is about us. We have treated sovereignty as a political tool instead of a divine mandate. We have allowed thirty years of cowardice to harden into policy. And unless we repent, we will go on hearing the nations tell us what we ourselves have already implied: that God’s land is negotiable.
Yom Kippur is our moment to break that cycle. Repentance means course correction. It means ending the double talk and declaring that the land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel under the sovereignty of the God of Israel. If we cannot say that with clarity, we will have betrayed not only ourselves but generations of Jews who prayed for this moment.
