Selective security for Israel’s citizens amounts to an elective surrender |
In the months since October 7, Arab and Jewish Israelis have learned to live with a new vocabulary of fear: Rockets, Hostages, National emergency, and mass demonstrations. This vocabulary had further solidified under the two wars with Iran in June 2025 and March 2026. But there is another word that has quietly entered our lives, especially in parts of the country that rarely make front-page headlines: abandonment.
A few weeks ago, my ear caught a line from a song played in my son’s room, by one of his favorite artists – Jimbo J. The line goes: “We’ve dialed 100, 100 times. A 100 100s are not answering.” If you want to call 911 in Israel, you dial 100. With that, the line’s meaning is: We called the police a hundred times. A hundred cops are not answering. A painfully accurate description of the artist’s experience in a kibbutz in the Gaza envelope on the morning of October 7th. And yet, little had changed.
In Arab local authorities all over Israel, nightly shooting by machine guns had become the new norm. Just weeks ago, a criminal organization used military-grade drones to drop grenades from the sky over a........