Israel projects strength abroad but struggles to protect its citizens at home - opinion

Yet in Judea and Samaria, Jewish families continue facing terror attacks weekly, decade after decade. Stones, firebombs, shootings, stabbings. The response too often feels inconsistent, hesitant, and insufficient.

Why this glaring gap?

Because in Judea and Samaria, Israel has never clearly defined who the enemy is.

This confusion has deep roots. In a March 1994 Channel 1 television interview, during a wave of terror attacks while the Palestinian Authority was being established under Oslo, prime minister Yitzhak Rabin explained his reasoning:

“The Palestinian Police will fight Hamas without B’Tselem, without the High Court, and without Mothers Against Silence.” He was admitting that Israeli human rights organizations, the Supreme Court, and public advocacy groups constrained the IDF’s ability to fight terror, and he hoped the PA would act without those constraints.

However, just a few months later, Yasser Arafat was recorded in a South African mosque stating that he signed Oslo not as a peace agreement, but as a tactical move, invoking Muhammad’s Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, a temporary truce designed to lull an enemy before resuming war.

Yet official Israeli policy still treats this as a population with whom we must coexist, rather than one whose governing ideology is openly hostile to Jewish life.

This is not ancient history. Consider what has happened in recent weeks alone:

Eighteen-year-old Yehuda Sherman, patrolling near Eilon Moreh, was deliberately rammed off the road by a local attacker and killed. Near Efrat, young pioneers establishing the farm Kochav Yehuda to prevent illegal land seizures were evacuated by Border Police while local Arabs celebrated. Hours after the forces left, those same individuals stoned Jewish residents. An armed Efrat resident who fired warning shots to stop the mob was arrested. The attackers were not.

In the Shomron, a Jewish teenager suffered a critical head wound when an Arab threw a rock at close range. A soldier intervened and likely saved the boy’s life.

Then came the decision that sent the clearest signal of all: the IDF Chief of Staff removed the entire Netzah Yehuda Battalion from the very area where that attack occurred, citing the “improper” handling of a CNN journalist who had been interfering with counterterrorism operations. Whatever the details of that incident, the message heard on the ground was unmistakable: our soldiers do not have unconditional backing. Terror escalated, and more Jewish blood was spilled.

When Israel confronts Iran or Hezbollah, there is no ambiguity. These are enemy entities, and we act accordingly, with defined objectives, rules of engagement, and political backing.

The PA, by contrast, is treated as something in between: not quite an enemy, not quite a partner, a status that satisfies no strategic logic. The PA funds terrorism through its Martyrs Fund. Its official educational materials teach children that murdering Jews is honorable. Its leadership has rejected every serious offer of a negotiated resolution.

The population that has lived under this ideology for decades voted for it, celebrates its results, and in many documented cases actively participates in it, including sending their children to internationally funded PA schools, where they are taught to glorify violence against Jews and the destruction of Israel.

Yet, the government did not do that in Judea and Samaria, because it failed to recognize that the population is an enemy. This is a price thousands of families throughout Israel have paid with the loss of loved ones. All those lives could have been saved had the Israeli government treated the population in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza exactly as the enemy population in the Golan Heights.

Avida Bechar, a survivor of the October 7 massacre at Kibbutz Be’eri, who lost his wife and son and his leg in the attack, has said publicly: “I am glad it happened to me here and not in Judea and Samaria, because if it had happened there, people would have said it was only because of where we live.”

Israel does not need new military technology or additional battalions. It needs moral and strategic clarity.

That means designating the Palestinian Authority as the terror-sponsoring entity it is. It means applying a consistent, decisive policy in Judea and Samaria rather than improvised responses that change in response to media pressure, and it means being honest with the Israeli public about what we are facing.

Let us protect our people at home with the same determination we show against distant threats. Otherwise, Israelis, left, right, religious, and secular, will continue to pay the steep price of loss at the hands of the 1,400+ year motivated jihadi ideology from the population in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria.

It’s time we listen to October 7 Be’eri survivor Avida Bechar. He has already paid the price for this mistake of refusing to call them an enemy population, and he’s warning the rest of us not to pay it again.