More than 20 years ago, a grassroots proposal sought to empower civilian defense in Judea and Samaria. Its relevance has never been greater
When I wrote the “Yesha Defense Initiative” over two decades ago, I began not with a statistic, but with a scenario.
It is 2:45 a.m. on a Tuesday in Israel. The streets of Judea and Samaria—our biblical heartland, Yesha—are quiet. But in the IDF war rooms, there is chaos. Confirmation has just arrived: forty platoons of Palestinian mechanized armor are on the move. They are headed for the yishuvim, our homes.
The security coordinator of a target community, the ravshatz, is notified. He has twenty minutes. Twenty minutes before three Palestinian BRDM2 armored vehicles smash through the community’s simple yellow sliding gate. Twenty minutes to decide whether to activate his civilian rapid response team or accept the official recommendation to prepare for evacuation. I wrote the stark truth: “Either way many of your neighbors will be killed. And the ravshatz is utterly powerless to do anything… And he knows it better than anyone.”
This grim scenario was my opening salvo. As a resident of Nachaliel, I circulated this draft briefing book in the shadow of the Second Intifada as a desperate plea and a detailed strategic proposal. My core argument was that our entire security doctrine was fatally flawed, leaving our communities totally vulnerable to a catastrophic, coordinated “first strike.”
At the time, our vision was dismissed by officials as alarmist. But read today, the document I wrote resonates with a chilling prescience. It was my meticulous, passionate, and detailed articulation of a strategic nightmare, one that foresaw a specific mode of attack that the official consensus deemed impossible.
Continue reading on Jewish Home News.
No comments:
Post a Comment