Another day in our homeland, another attack that should shake every Jew — and every honest observer — out of complacency. This time it happened near Ateret, a Jewish community in the Binyamin region of Samaria, just north of Jerusalem. This is the biblical heartland, the very center of ancient Israel — and today, a frontline of daily terror.
Yesterday, a civilian noticed a suspicious man with a backpack walking along Route 465. Soldiers approached to question him. In an instant, he pulled out a knife and stabbed them. Thank God, our soldiers were lightly injured and the terrorist was eliminated. By afternoon, Israel had already moved on, as if the attempted murder of Jews in Samaria is simply what mornings look like.
This isn’t “violence.” It is terrorism — a steady stream of terrorists emerging from the same communities, with the same motivations, rooted in the same ideology. And Israel, unbelievably, has learned to absorb it and live with it.
If a particular region or county in the United States produced thousands of terrorists who stabbed soldiers, shot families, and plotted bombings with the goal of destroying the United States from within, you can be sure that President Trump would use every tool at his disposal to utterly destroy this threat at its root. He, and the American people, wouldn’t tolerate it for a day.
Yet Israel tolerates it every day, 365 days a year. That is the tragedy. We have been trained to accept the unacceptable — to live with the threat of terror in our supermarkets and gas stations — and to call it “managing the conflict.”
This numbness is exactly the mindset that ruled on October 6. And disturbingly, it still shapes policy in Judea and Samaria. The IDF continues to take out individual terrorists after attacks, but it does not dismantle the ecosystem that produces them. This is rooted in a fatal misconception — the belief that Israel is fighting discrete “terror organizations.” It is not. When 80% of the Arab population openly supports these terrorists, the problem is not a handful of cells. Israel is facing a population that sees itself at war with the Jewish state. And war cannot be won through police-style raids against individuals while leaving the evil society that produces them intact.
Judea and Samaria are not peripheral territories that can be negotiated away. They are central to our people’s history — the land where Hebron, Shiloh, Beit El, and Shechem are located. This is where Abraham walked, where Joshua conquered, and where King David ruled.
The Torah also speaks directly to the consequences of failing to establish stable and uncontested Jewish rule in this land. God warns: “But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the Land from before you, then those whom you leave over will be as spikes in your eyes and thorns in your sides, and they will harass you in the land in which you settle” (Numbers 33:55).
This is not a blanket rejection of non-Jews living in Israel. The Torah recognizes the ger toshav — the resident stranger — a non-Jew who lives peacefully and loyally under Jewish sovereignty. The warning in Numbers is directed specifically at those who reject Jewish rule and aim to undermine it. In our time, this verse refers to the great majority of the Arab population in Judea and Samaria that supports Hamas, celebrates murderers, and sees itself as part of an ongoing war against the Jewish state.
What is the path forward? The humane, realistic, long-term solution is voluntary emigration — not as a slogan, but as policy.
For decades, Israel’s leaders have been paralyzed by myths about Arab population numbers — myths manufactured by the Palestinian Authority for political leverage. The PA grotesquely inflated its figures, counting the long-dead, counting permanent emigrants, even including people born in the 1800s. Independent researchers show the real population is around 1.6 million, not the fantastical 3 million Israel has been told to fear. The demographic “threat” was largely fabricated to intimidate Israelis into surrendering land and to make them believe that emigration of the Arab population is a pipe dream.
The truth is, a steady and significant trend already exists: roughly 20,000 Arabs per year voluntarily leave Judea and Samaria, mostly young people seeking a future not shackled to the corruption and authoritarianism of the Palestinian Authority. This is a real, ongoing phenomenon. Israel has never built a policy around it — but it should. Encouraging emigration is humane, legal, and already happening on its own. Israel simply needs to stop ignoring the opportunity.
Those who stay must live here as loyal residents under Jewish rule — the Torah’s ger toshav, not the “spikes and thorns” it warns about. Those who refuse that basic condition should simply leave. Let them build their lives elsewhere, and let Israel secure its own land in peace.
The attack near Ateret is not an exception. It is a warning. We can either return to our senses, recognize that we are in a population-scale war for our ancestral heartland, and pursue the only humane path forward — or remain numb until the spikes and thorns pierce us again, just as the Torah foretold.
