Daniel Winston is an American-Israeli marriage and family therapist, lecturer, and author who studied with Dr. David Schnarch, creator of the differentiation-based Crucible Approach, from 1998 until Schnarch's death in 2020. He runs twelve-hour intensive therapy sessions for couples and has trained more than 150 senior therapists worldwide in the Crucible Approach. He serves in the IDF reserves and volunteers as a Magen David Adom medic, with ZAKA, and on the Israel Police Search and Rescue Team. His website is DanielWinston.com.
We told you so.
We know how those four words land. Smug, ungracious, unbearable in the mouths of people you spent years dismissing as fanatics. But there are moments when decency itself demands that the warning be repeated to the faces of those who ignored it the first time, because the price of the first refusal was paid in funerals. This is one of those moments.
In 2005, as the bulldozers and the buses came for the Jews of Gush Katif, we said plainly what would follow. We said that uprooting thriving Jewish communities and handing the territory to our enemies would not buy peace, it would buy rockets. We said that retreat under fire teaches the enemy that fire works. We said that the vacuum would not stay empty, that it would fill with the most violent and committed force available, and that Jewish blood would pay for the experiment.
For this we were called obstacles to peace. We were called messianic, primitive, drunk on theology, deaf to the modern world. The enlightened class - the columnists, the diplomats, the professors, the foreign ministries, the talk-show sages, the entire Leftist illuminati - explained to us with weary patience that we simply did not grasp the complex realities that they, in their sophistication, understood so well. We were the past. They were the future. We were sentiment. They were strategy.
They were wrong. We were right. And Jews are dead because of it.
The disengagement did not produce a Singapore on the Mediterranean. It produced Hamastan. Within two years the rockets came in their thousands, then the wars came in their seasons, and then, on a Sabbath morning in October 2023, the experiment delivered its final invoice: the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, roughly twelve hundred murdered in a single day, babies and grandmothers and young people at a music festival, hundreds dragged into the tunnels. The very ground from which Israel had withdrawn “for peace" became the launching pad for the worst massacre in the state’s history.
And let no one pretend October 7 was the first bill. The dead did not begin arriving in 2023. They had been arriving for decades, in installments, every time the enlightened consensus was proven catastrophically wrong and refused to learn. Oslo was sold as the end of the conflict, and we buried the victims of the buses it produced, the pizzerias and Seder tables and discotheques turned into slaughterhouses in the Second Intifada, more than a thousand Israelis murdered while the smug architects of the process collected their prizes and their honors with the greatest sincerity and faux humility of self-proclaimed saviorsof Israel. Each time, the same enlightened voices that had promised peace moved seamlessly to explaining why the carnage was somehow Israel’s fault, or an aberration, or a reason to concede still more while droning profoundly about “sacrifices for peace".
This is the pattern, and it never changes. You promise peace. We warn of blood. You sneer. The blood comes. You blame us for noticing. And then, with the bodies barely buried, you propose the very same concession again, dressed in a fresh euphemism, certain that this time the ideology you refuse to take seriously will behave exactly the way your theories require.
So hear us now, because we are telling you again, and hear the half of the warning you like even less.
There is today a heavily armed and extensively trained Palestinian force growing on the high ground above Israel’s narrow center, on the ridges that look down on Rosh HaAyin and Kfar Saba and the dense heart of the country. Look honestly at what it is being taught. Not crowd control and traffic stops, but tens of thousands of armed personnel, elite formations, and foreign combat training abroad. Tactical parachuting. Armored personnel carriers. Heavy machine guns, RPGs, and sniper systems. Explosives and breaching drills, room-to-room urban warfare, night fighting, and instruction in artillery and armored-corps operations. No police force on earth needs to learn how to jump from aircraft, breach a building under fire, or maneuver an armored column. Those are not the skills of law enforcement. They are the skills of an army preparing to conquer ground, and the ground in question overlooks your home. There are serious people in capitals across the world who want to reward October 7 with a Palestinian state on exactly that terrain, and who once again promise that demilitarization clauses and foreign monitors and solemn signatures will keep the guns away. We have heard this song before, and it was scored for funerals.
Now watch where the enlightened state pours its fury. Not on the men drilling with RPGs and breaching charges on those heights. On a handful of young Jews in tents on a windswept hill. And before you recite the catechism about settler violence, understand that the charge is a canard inflated beyond all proportion to reality by a clucking class that thinks nothing of swallowing whole the figures fed to it by the United Nations, an institution that has never met an accusation against a Jew it did not find sweetly credible. There are real cases, yes. They are a fraction of what the indictment pretends, and a great many even of those are self-defense, Jews protecting their homes and their flocks from assault. Strip away the inflation and the self-defense and you are left with a thin residue of genuine wrongdoing that no one defends. So ask yourself the only question that matters: are those few cases worth your life? Is settling that score worth handing the high ground to the men who want to butcher you and are training to do so better? Because whatever you make of their manners or their politics, those young people are the living tripwire on the ground, and presence is deterrence. A Jew on a hill is a fact the enemy must reckon with. An empty hill is an invitation. They are doing, at real personal cost, the one thing that actually slows the next catastrophe, and for it they are hounded by the very class that will cluck its tongues in mourning the loudest when the catastrophe arrives.
So forget, for one election, your voting habits. Whoever you are, however far to the left, however deep your contempt for the settlers and the knitted kippot and everything you imagine they represent, this is not the moment for the luxury of tribal loyalty. The ridge above your apartment in Gush Dan does not check your ballot before it opens fire. Survival is not a left-wing value or a right-wing value; it is the precondition for holding any values at all. So answer honestly, before the next siren: how many more deaths before you have had enough of your suicidal Conceptzia? How much more failure do you need before you stop voting for the captains of these delusional and fatal philosophies? If you love your children more than you love your disdain for the right, then this once, vote for the people who will not hand those hills to the men who want you dead.
And understand the thing the whole debate keeps getting backwards. The disaster does not need a state. It does not need a flag, a UN vote, a passport, or a seat in any chamber. Jew-killers do not pause at the absence of sovereignty. They were murdering Jews long before anyone offered them a country, and they will murder more whether or not the world hands them one. Statehood would not create the danger. It would arm it, legitimize it, and tie Israel’s hands behind its back while it grows. But the gun on the hill is already loaded. A state would merely be the permission slip.
Understand, too, what this is and what it is not. It is not a victory lap. There is no satisfaction in having been right about Gush Katif, because being right meant attending the funerals. The prophet Jeremiah took no pleasure in watching Jerusalem burn exactly as he had warned it would; he wept. We are not gloating. We are pleading, in the only voice left to people who warned once, were mocked, were vindicated by slaughter, and now watch the same fatal logic gathering itself for a second performance on even deadlier ground.
You owe us no apology - we never wanted one, and an apology would not return a single child taken from a kibbutz. What you owe is something harder. You owe us your attention, this one time, before the next invoice arrives. You were certain in 2005, and your certainty was buried with our dead. Spend it more carefully now. The ridges above Gush Dan are not an abstraction, and the next “Conceptzia" will not announce itself before it kills.
We told you so. We are telling you again. For the sake of the living, do not make us tell you a third time over fresh graves.
