Aviv Maor was eighteen years old when a Palestinian terrorist stabbed her to death on Route 71. Shimshon Mordechai, sixty-eight, was run over and killed in Beit She’an by the same murderer. That was two weeks ago—December 25th. The headlines have already moved on.
I am furious.
Not just at the terrorist. Not just at the Arab terrorist village of Qabatiya that produced him. I am furious at us—at our numb, pathetic response to Jewish blood spilled on Israeli roads.
We know the world doesn’t care about murdered Jews. October 7th made that crystal clear. The international community accuses Israel of a fictional genocide but has nothing to say when Jewish teenagers are butchered. Fine. We’ve learned that lesson.
But do we care? Do the Jewish people themselves care?
If we truly cared—if Jewish blood still mattered to us—we would be in the streets. We would be outside the Knesset, outside the Defense Ministry, refusing to leave until the government acts. We would demand they punish our enemies so severely that every potential terrorist would be petrified to touch a Jew.
Instead? The IDF will demolish a house and make a few arrests. Politicians will shoot off some angry tweets. Within days, everyone moves on.
Aviv loved nature and animals, rode horses, photographed the Jezreel Valley, and cared for injured animals. She was a devoted sister and loving daughter. University, career, marriage, children, grandchildren—her entire future stolen in seconds by a jihadi terrorist.
This is the price we’ve accepted for the right to live in our homeland?
We are God’s chosen people. He did not choose us to be victims. He did not choose us to be sheep slaughtered by terrorists. He chose us to sanctify His name, to build a Jewish state where Jewish life is sacred and protected.
Aviv Maor’s life is worth more than the entire miserable town of Qabatiya.
Her blood cries out from the ground. But we’ve stopped listening.
We’ve perfected the routine. Jews are murdered, victims identified. Politicians send condolence tweets. The Defense minister threatens retaliation. An IDF spokesperson announces an operation. Eventually, the terrorist’s house gets demolished—and then the terrorist’s family is compensated by the Palestinian Authority for their “sacrifice.”
And we wonder why it keeps happening.
The math is simple. If a terrorist murders two Jews, we get two days of outrage before the news cycle moves on. Four Jews? Maybe we stay angry through the week. But either way, within days, we’ve accepted it. Moved forward. Paid the tax.
We’ve grown comfortable with periodic Jewish deaths. As long as the body count stays manageable, as long as attacks don’t cluster too closely together, we can absorb it. This is what passes for normal now.
There’s no such thing as “lone-wolf terror.” That phrase is a lie—a convenient fiction security officials use to avoid uncomfortable truths. Ahmed Abu al-Rov didn’t materialize from thin air. An Arab-Israeli citizen employed him, housed him at Kibbutz Mesilot, gave him a vehicle, enabled his freedom of movement. He came from a village where he was raised on hatred, where murdering Jews is celebrated as heroism.
What happens to Qabatiya now? Life continues. The village remains. And in a few years—or months—it will likely produce another killer.
This is what happens when a society falls asleep.
Decades ago, Israel conducted reprisal operations. When Jews were murdered, there were immediate, devastating consequences. Our enemies learned to fear the price of Jewish blood. But criticism grew—from within and without. We absorbed naive Western sensibilities about proportionality and restraint. We convinced ourselves that Jewish strength was somehow immoral.
So we stopped. We became “civilized.” And Jewish blood became cheap. An eighteen-year-old girl gets butchered on the side of a highway, and two weeks later, no one remembers her name.
The fiction of the Oslo Accords still haunts us. Areas A, B, and C—as if parts of our homeland belong to our enemies, as if we need permission to defend ourselves in Judea and Samaria. The Palestinian Authority violated every Oslo obligation years ago. We owe them nothing. Yet we still operate under constraints that exist only in the minds of leftists and European diplomats.
The situation will change when our enemies understand there is no acceptable price for Jewish blood. When attacking a Jew means consequences so severe, so total, that the cost becomes unbearable.
It will change when we stop accepting Jewish deaths as background noise.
It will change when we remember what it means to value our own lives.
But today? We’re asleep. Numb. Shuffling through the motions of grief without the fire that should consume us when our children are murdered.
Aviv, I’m sorry. Your nation failed you. We’ve become a people who can tolerate your murder as just another headline in an endless cycle. You deserved better—a country that would stop at nothing to protect you, that would make your murderer’s village understand the consequences of producing terrorists.
You deserved to live.
Maybe we’ll wake up someday. Maybe we’ll rediscover what it means to be proud Jews who refuse to accept our own destruction. Maybe we’ll find the courage to do what survival demands.
But not today. Today we’re still asleep.
