For thirty years, I have raised my children in Judea and Samaria. If you ask people what the hardest part of mothering here is, they will guess it’s worrying about their safety.
They are wrong.
The hardest job, the one that keeps you up at night long after the kids are asleep, is teaching your children not to hate.
When you raise a family here, terror is not a newspaper headline. It is the physical landscape your children play in every afternoon.
My kids grew up playing in Gan Shalva, a playground named for Shalva Uzana, a 24-year-old kindergarten teacher murdered at the entrance to our community on her way to work.
They met their friends at Nethanel Square, named for 14-year-old Nethanel Riachi, gunned down in his school dorm alongside his classmate Avraham Setton.
Across from my children's grandparents’ house is Zalman Shlein Street. Zalman was a contractor who employed workers from Gaza in the 1980s. Every single day, he set a table and fed them dinner. He bought clothes for their kids. He sent gifts home to their families.
One afternoon, his own crew murdered him at the work site.
Almost every community in Judea and Samaria has its own version of Gan Shalva, Nethanel Square, and Zalman Shlein Street.
And then there is the Fogel family. In March 2011, in Itamar, two Palestinian Arab teens climbed a fence at night and stabbed to death Ehud Fogel, his wife Ruth, their eleven-year-old son Yoav, their four-year-old son Elad, and their three-month-old baby Hadas. Killed in her crib.
For six months after that night, I could not sleep. I would lie awake, getting out of bed a dozen times to check the locks, the window latches, the shadows outside. A hundred times a night, fighting off an armed intruder in my own mind.
And around all of this, the electric fence.
Almost every Jewish community in Judea and Samaria is surrounded by one. Sensors. Armed guards. Infiltration sirens that go off when someone climbs the perimeter. My children have run to safe rooms during infiltration sirens their whole childhood, the same kind of siren sounded on October 7.
We did not walk in the surrounding hills. We did not enter Arab villages. We did not stop at gas stations in the wrong areas. For safety and by policy, we lived inside a perimeter.
And during these thirty years, we have watched the neighboring Arab villages expand with no control, often stopping only at the fence.
You try to shield your children. You turn off the news. But trauma moves by osmosis.
It travels through school corridors, playground chatter, and the sudden, suffocating silence of a mother holding her breath.
How do you explain trust to a teenager when the school bus driver, who drove the special-needs kid next door every day for a year, suddenly became the gunman who walked into Merkaz HaRav and murdered eight teenage students?
You do not have an answer. So you tell them the only thing you know how to tell them.
For over thirty years, I have sat at my kitchen table having the exact same conversation with each of my children, over and over again:
"Mom, do all Arabs want to kill us?"
"No. That is not true."
"I hate them and want to hurt them back!"
"No. We do not use violence, and we do not hate."
"How do we know who to trust?"
"I do not know."
And then the hardest line of all, the one I had to repeat until my voice shook:
"The moment we start hating them, the moment we want to kill them just because of who they are, we become like them."
I did not fight that battle for three decades just to watch the world rewrite our history.
Today, a third generation is growing up in Judea and Samaria.
Young. Exhausted. Sick and tired of living in the shadow of fear. They carry decades of secondary PTSD in their bones. They watched their neighbors murdered. They ran to safe rooms during infiltration sirens their whole childhood. They walked to school past the square named after the 14-year-old boy shot in his bed. They grew up inside the electric fence.
For sixty years, Jewish blood in Judea and Samaria was treated by the international community as white noise. Nobody wept for our sleeping children. Nobody held press conferences for babies murdered in their cots. It was taken as an acceptable baseline: Arabs kill Jews, and Jews absorb the funerals.
The same international community that has spent sixty years using the words "apartheid" and "wall" and "confinement" to describe what Israel does never used those words for what we actually live inside.
The wire was around us. We were confined. We were behind the wall. And the world called us the oppressors.
Now this young generation is building open farms without fences. They are refusing to act like targets. They are standing up to defend their land. They are adopting Yosef Trumpeldor’s 100-year old slogan "Where the Jewish plow stops, the border begins." More often than not they are fighting off attacks.
And suddenly the entire global apparatus has found its voice.
Suddenly every diplomat, news anchor, and human rights group is screaming about "settler violence."
If you care about settler violence, I am asking you to do two things. Google "West Bank terror" today. See what comes up. It will be pages and pages of "settler violence" with hardly any mention of Arab violence.
And now ask yourself if you have ever heard of the Fogel family, Shalva Uzana, Nethanel Riachi, Avraham Setton, Zalman Shlein or any other one of the hundreds upon hundreds of Jewish victims of terror. Then ask yourself why.
Let me be unmistakably clear.
I am not ignoring or excusing Jewish civilian violence against Arabs. Those incidents happen. I do not support vigilante violence. I do not excuse lawlessness. I spent my adult life fighting to ensure my children never adopted the tactics of our enemies.
And as a society, Israel investigates them, prosecutes them, and condemns them. We investigate our extremists. They celebrate theirs.
What I am naming is scale, silence, and inversion, that decades of unceasing terror against Jewish children was treated as an acceptable baseline, while a fraction of a fraction of that violence in the other direction became the international community's obsession.
I will not sit quietly while a cynical global narrative converts sixty years of unceasing terror against Jewish mothers and children into a villain arc, while ignoring the generational trauma that brought us to this hour.
We raised a generation to value life in the middle of a war zone. We did our job.
It is time the world held itself to the same standard of truth.