Passover is coming, and the warnings we once ignored feel impossible to ignore now.

Twenty-four years ago tonight, families sat down for a Passover Seder at the Park Hotel in Netanya. They weren’t soldiers and they weren’t targets. They were Jews marking a story of survival. A terrorist walked into that room and detonated a bomb, turning a Seder into a massacre and murdering 30 people while wounding more than 140 others, leaving the dining hall in chaos and destruction.

That night was not just an attack. It was a warning about what happens when a system is allowed to glorify violence, reward it, and prepare for it while the outside world continues to call it “peace.” It was a warning that wasn’t fully taken seriously.

And on October 7, we paid for it again.  Not in theory, but in bodies. What had been dismissed as rhetoric became operational. What was assumed to be contained became a massacre.

October 7 was the event. October 8 was the realization. We stopped assuming and started looking at what is actually being built. That shift is not ideological. It is empirical. And now, new evidence suggests it may have come just in time.

That is what makes recent reporting, cited by Jewish News Syndicate and based on a Regavim analysis, almost impossible to ignore.

The report describes how the Palestinian Authority security forces are building an offensive capability for a potential surprise attack, including a 65,000-strong “shadow army” of combat-trained personnel (some with past terror convictions)  equipped with grenade launchers, machine guns, armored vehicles, and armor-piercing munitions, according to the report.

This is the kind of evidence the October 8 mindset is built on. Not what is said, but what is being built.

These claims deserve scrutiny. But, they do not exist in isolation and sit within a broader pattern that has been visible for years and has never been clearly confronted nor dismantled.

The Palestinian Authority presents itself externally as a governing partner for stability. Internally, the picture has long been more complicated. Multiple monitoring organizations, including IMPACT-se and Palestinian Media Watch, have documented recurring examples within educational materials and official messaging: figures involved in attacks presented as “martyrs,” maps that at times omit Israel entirely, and messaging that has honored individuals who carried out violence.

This is not about a single textbook or an isolated statement. It is about a pattern that continues to exist alongside the Palestinian Authority’s “pay-for-slay” system, which provides financial stipends tied to acts of violence. The result is not mixed messaging. It is a structure in which the language of peace and the incentives of conflict run in parallel.

Before October 7, these contradictions could still be explained away. After October 7, they cannot. We have already seen what happens when intent is underestimated and capability is allowed to grow. Gaza was treated as containable. It was not.

The question now is whether we are repeating the same mistake but this time in Judea and Samaria. 

The modern two-state framework rests on basic assumptions: that leadership is preparing for coexistence, that institutions are aligned with stability, and that international funding is building the foundations of peace. These are not aspirations. They are prerequisites. If they do not hold, the framework does not hold.

A state is not defined by borders alone. It is defined by intent and capability. If intent remains unresolved while capability continues to expand, what is being built is not a peaceful neighbor but a future threat.

The Park Hotel Passover Massacre was not the beginning, and October 7 was not the end. Both were preceded by warning signs that were visible before they turned into tragedy. That is the uncomfortable reality: the patterns were there. They were simply not taken seriously.

This is not an argument against Palestinian self-determination in principle. It is an argument against ignoring reality in practice. Western funding is not neutral. It builds institutions, reinforces incentives, and shapes outcomes. If it supports systems that reward violence or fail to dismantle the patterns that sustain it, then it deserves far greater scrutiny than it currently receives.

After October 7, the margin for illusion is gone. We have already seen where these patterns lead when they are ignored.  If the same dynamics were allowed to develop again, the result would not be peace.

It would be another massacre — one that, once again, would have been visible in advance.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)