Taking Counter Terrorism Lessons in Samaria

Not your mother’s adult ed class

A few nights ago I was picked up at my Tel Aviv hotel and whisked out across the Green Line to what’s known in the New York Times as the West Bank but hereabouts, and in the Bible, as Samaria.

My new friend Or Hickry, a Yemenite Jew who works for Shurat HaDin (Israel Law Center) was taking me to classes he and others had set up up in the small, roughly two hundred families, settlement of Karmel Tzur. Almost all Orthodox Jews of various stripes, the residents of this settlement, one of four in the Gush Etzion region, are under frequent attacks from nearby Arab villagers, sometimes by rocks or similar, but other times by lethal weapons.

The people there are well aware that much of the world excoriates them for supposedly appropriating Arab land, but it’s worth noting that there have been Jews in Samaria for 3500 years. This was Abraham’s land. Also worth pointing out for advocates of the two-state solution, as I once was, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas has repeatedly insisted that no Jew would ever be allowed to live in a putative Palestinian state,. Two million Arabs live in Israel.

But it’s not my intention to rehearse all the arguments, many too familiar, on West Bank territory or statehood. The residents of Karmel Tzur that I met seemed perfectly decent and friendly folks to me. Most of them were middle-aged women with many children, their husbands off for months at the southern and northern borders defending their country. Thus they were alone against the Arab villagers and were anxious, for reasons that should be obvious, to learn self-defense from the course. Some had bullet proof cars.

The class began in a classroom, actually more of a community rec room, where an instructor gave oral instructions about how to deal with dicey situations, i.e when driving through an Arab village, often a necessity for them, stay at least three meters behind the car ahead so you can swerve quickly. He also gave advice about how to deal with being followed, to be especially cautious if there was someone in the back seat of the car behind you, the position from which terrorists usually fire when they attempt to pass you. When they do come up alongside you, ‘ speed up but slam on the breaks and let them slide by. They rarely make u-turns in those situations. (This was advice I wasn’t in a hurry to test.)

But the more dramatic part was outside. Everyone practiced in the darkness, including your humble scribe, being terrorist and driver to understand how to handle ourselves in the various situations. The instructor in this instance was a grizzled veteran of Sayeret Matkal, Israel’s storied equivalent of our Delta Force. When I took my turn at wheel running a gauntlet of rocks (balloons filled with water for the exercise) he asked me what I have learned from the experience. I tried to answer but realized, not for the first time, what a poor candidate for special forces I would have made.

(Mock Hamas tunnel at Hostage Square)

The last few days Sheryl and I have been visiting Oct 7 memorial sites—the Nova Festival near the Gaza border and the seemingly endless display of cars destroyed by Hamas, often with people in them, also the small city of Sderot where terrorists successfully raided the police station, now rebuilt.

Today, Saturday, we were at Hostage Square opposite the Tel Aviv Museum of Art just after three hostages were released in another Hamas manipulated nauseating dog-and-pony show. These shows are new versions of the familiar Pallywood productions from the days of the alleged targeting of the child Mohammed Al-Dura, a lie that went round the world to be commemorated on postage stamps. This latest round is in exchange for 183 terrorists, some with enough blood on their hands to fill a bathtub).

We had expected to visit the kibbutzim on the border that had been so brutally attacked, but the residents have had enough of us well-wishing supporters overwhelming their privacy and have made it difficult to enter. It’s hard to blame them so we easily complied.