Terror waves in Israel as not as deadly as they used to be in the past, with the most difficult case being the 2000-2005 Second Intifada, during which 1,400 soldiers and civilians were killed sometimes including entire families.
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The war was fought on the border, the home front, intersections, on the way to school, on busses, cafes, pizzerias, the seam zone and the front line, on the streets, and was designed to destroy us from within.
Just over a week ago, another terror wave began in Israel that we cannot let exacerbate like in the past. Back then, it took the Sharon government many bloody months to launch Operation Defensive Shield military.
In 2022, the reality is even more complex: Israel faces not only an external threat, from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank but also an internal one, from some Arab Israelis living among us.
The riots that took place in mixed cities across Israel last May were a wake-up call. Have we learned the lesson? Since then, not only have Hamas and the Palestinian Authority continued to incite against Israel, but also the Arab Israelis living within our midst.
The elephant in the room that we refuse to address is present and significant, and is the root of all the incitement and terrorism: the growing obsession of Israeli Arabs with so-called nakba, the "catastrophe" of the exodus of Palestinian refugees from Israel in 1948, not just as a heritage, consciousness, and theoretical matter, but as the foundation of thought and consciousness and as real practical hope.
As one Jaffa resident put it, "At the end of the day, Arab Israelis are Palestinians and our identity is the Palestinian identity."
In the last few years, many of them took the definition of their identity to the extreme, emitting the Israeli component from it completely. They say they are first and foremost Palestinians, and only then Israelis, by virtue of citizenship.
Terrorists that have been captured by the Shin Bet security agency say even harsher things during interrogations.
Muntasir Ahmed Ali Shalabi, who killed 19-year-old Yehuda Guetta in a drive-by shooting attack in Samaria in May 2021, explained why he perpetrated the attack as follows, "According to religion, I am allowed to harm and even kill whoever takes my land."
When the interrogator said, "To the best of my knowledge, you live in a large villa in [the Arab town of] Turmus Aya," Ali Shalabi said, "I meant you took houses in Ashdod and Haifa."
Add to this the unlimited supply of weapons in the Arab sector in Israel and Judea and Samaria. The Bennett-Lapid government is now trying to fix the long-standing neglect in this matter of the Netanyahu administration, and those of his predecessors.
Tackling the problem with surgical precision alone is not enough. We need a comprehensive and extensive campaign, including the appointment of special and many forces to this task. As long as there are weapons in the Arab sector, someone will get their hands on it.
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