There is a Hebrew word that should be carved over the entrance to the Knesset and every officer’s training course in this country, and it is not a word any MK or officer wants to hear: “Conceptzia". The fixed idea, the prevailing delusion, immune to evidence, that told the General Staff in 1973 that Egypt would not dare to attack, and told it again in 2023 that Hamas was deterred, domesticated, busy with governance and work permits and Qatari cash.
Two delusions, two catastrophes. The first cost us the near-loss of the state and thousands of our sons. The second gave us the slaughter of the seventh of October: roughly twelve hundred murdered, the wounded beyond counting, women raped beside the corpses of their families, the country knifed in its own heart. The Conceptzia is not a mistake the army made once and learned from. It is a way of seeing, and it is still in command.
You can watch it operate in miniature in the hills of Samaria, where this week the Shomron brigade commander dismissed the security coordinator of Yitzhar. Not a hothead, not a liability, but a man who has held the post for more than a decade, who carries a division commendation, who is first to every incident and who treats the wounded with his own hands before any ambulance arrives. His crime, in the language of the IDF Spokesman, was “repeated incidents of exceeding authority." Translated out of bureaucratic Hebrew into plain speech, his crime was that he was too good at the job, too far forward, too unwilling to wait for permission while Jews were in danger. He did not fit the Conceptzia. So he was removed.
The enemy understood the message a great deal faster than we did. Within a day the news had traveled to every village in the area, and the Arabs of Madama, who sit right beside Yitzhar, did what they have always wanted to do and now felt free to do: they set fires meant to burn Jews out of their homes. The blaze spread across the hillside, and the residents of Yitzhar - the very people whose guardian had just been stripped from them - went down themselves to beat back the flames, waiting too long for an official force to arrive. This is what the dismissal purchased, and it purchased it immediately. Remove the man who makes the enemy hesitate, and the enemy stops hesitating.
I have seen the Conceptzia with my own eyes, and it is both a surreal and disheartening thing to behold. A squad of Border Police, trained and equipped for war, marching in full combat gear up to a new outpost near Ariel for the purpose of what, exactly? Hunting the men who plan our murders? No. Their mission was to deliver a closed military zone order to a handful of Jewish teenagers whose offense was trying to hold our land against the slow, patient, EU-funded campaign to take it. Elsewhere the same army confiscates the goat herds that those same young people use to keep the land in Jewish hands, as though a flock of goats were the threat to the Jewish state. We send our finest to chase children and impound livestock, and we call it management and order. It is not order. It is the Conceptzia in uniform.
Meanwhile the actual campaign proceeds without interference, because the Conceptzia is constitutionally unable and unwilling to see it. The plan the former Palestinian Authority prime minister Salam Fayyad sketched years ago, to build a Palestinian state not by negotiation but by facts on the ground, illegal homes and roads and schools laid down across Area C and much of it underwritten by European money, is not a theory in a position paper. It is happening on every ridgeline in Judea and Samaria.
Another PA former prime minister, Mohammad Shtayyeh, said it without the slightest embarrassment: the struggle is not about bread, it is about land, and the Ministry of Agriculture is the first line of that struggle. They have told us, in their own words, that the olive tree is a weapon. And so it is. Investigations have documented how Hamas funds and distributes hundreds of thousands of trees, planted by deliberate design near roads and Jewish communities, to seize ground and to give a gunman cover. The shepherd attacked near Gal Yosef was ambushed from behind exactly such a tree.
Here is the part that should make every taxpayer and voter in this country sit down before reading further. While our soldiers raid the terror nests of Kabatiya and al-Yamun in the dark, risking their lives in villages that celebrate the men who kill us, the Civil Administration spends our money by daylight developing the agriculture of those same villages: their cucumber growers and their fish breeders and their pineapple farmers in the most hostile corners of Samaria, complete with requests for reservoirs and infrastructure to push that cultivation across a hundred thousand more dunams. We fight the enemy with one hand and we irrigate his fields with the other. There is no cleaner portrait of a state both quietly and foolishly at war with itself.
And if anyone still clings to the comforting fantasy that all of this is a tragic misunderstanding to be dissolved with a little prosperity, the Arabs themselves have already answered the question. In Khalil Shikaki’s latest survey, two full years after the massacre and after everything that has rained down since, a majority of Palestinians still say the seventh of October was the correct decision, and in Judea and Samaria that figure climbs to fifty-nine percent. Nearly seven in ten oppose disarming Hamas even when the stated alternative is a return to open war. They are not in the least confused about who they are or what they want. We are the confused party here. Tragically, the delusion is entirely and exclusively ours.
None of this, let it be said plainly, is the fault of the soldier or the officer in the field. Our young men and women are heroes in the most literal sense of the word, willing to run straight into fire for a stranger for no reason other than that the stranger is a Jew. But heroism at the bottom cannot rescue a system that is sick at the top. Courage cannot compensate for a political caste and a high command that does not understand the war it is actually fighting, that punishes its most effective defenders, that mistakes the people holding the land for the danger and the people seizing the land for partners.
Reinstate the man you dismissed in Yitzhar. Stop funding the enemy’s harvest. Support the efforts to maintain Jewish mastery over the Jewish homeland and heartland. And above all, name the enemy honestly, because a country that refuses to see who is trying to kill it has already lost the first and most important battle. We have buried enough of our children on the altar of the Conceptzia. And if you don’t free your minds from this uniquely pernicious enslavement, the next catastrophe is not a question of whether. It is only, as it always was, a question of when. G-d Forbid…
Daniel Winston is an American-Israeli marriage therapist, trainer of therapists, lecturer and author. He volunteers in the IDF reserves, as an MDA medic, in Zaka, and in the Israel Police Search and Rescue Team. His articles have appeared in Jewish News Syndicate, Israel National News, The Jerusalem Post, Breitbart and elsewhere.