The State That Punishes Jews for Defending Themselves — And the Jews Who Can’t Stop Voting for It

In recent days, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the Samaria Regional Council’s security department took several concrete steps against Yitzhar that significantly weakened the community’s ability to manage its own security. The army removed the keys to the local armory from the Ravshatz’s (Civilian Security Coordinator) control, while Yossi Dagan’s Samaria Council cut off a key security post from regional updates, halted work on an important lighting project along the northern security road, and froze the recruitment of new members to the yishuv’s rapid response team.

These measures followed the dismissal of the yishuv’s long-serving Ravshatz, Levi Yitzchak Feilent, after the community refused to accept an official replacement without consultation. Authorities justified the dismissal on the grounds of “exceeding authority.” However, the subsequent actions taken against the entire yishuv — removing access to weapons, cutting security information, halting a public safety lighting project, and freezing new recruits — cannot be explained as routine discipline of one individual. These are collective punitive measures targeting the community as a whole.

At a general assembly held this week, residents decided that Feilent would continue in his role regardless of the official decision, and that the yishuv would cut off contact with the army and the regional council’s security department until he is formally reinstated. Notably, the assembly rejected a proposal to temporarily raise taxes by 45 shekels per month to fund his salary. Residents explicitly argued against the tax, warning that it could create a “permanent” situation and reduce pressure on the authorities.

Despite this refusal to normalize the situation, the community’s central demand remains the restoration of the previous security model. They want their chosen Ravshatz returned, they want local control over the armory restored, and they want to resume the previous working relationship with the army and the regional council. In practice, the yishuv is fighting to return to the status quo that existed before the dismissal and the subsequent punitive measures.

This focus on restoration reveals a deeper pattern. While the rejection of the tax shows some resistance to simply accepting the new reality, the overall response still treats the problem as a temporary disruption that can be solved by going back to how things were. There has been little public discussion about why a Jewish state is prepared to weaken a community’s security infrastructure when that community insists on choosing its own security coordinator.

The punitive steps taken against Yitzhar — removing access to weapons, cutting information flows, and freezing security projects — are not routine administrative actions. They are direct measures that increase the vulnerability of Jewish residents. These steps were taken because the yishuv refused to accept a decision imposed on it from above. The state has shown that it is willing to punish Jewish communities for attempting to maintain independent control over their own security when that control conflicts with official preferences.

Most residents in Yitzhar and similar communities continue to participate in and legitimize the very system that has demonstrated this willingness. They continue to vote for parties that sustain the current structure of authority over security in Judea and Samaria. They continue to send their children into frameworks run by that same system. And they continue to treat each round of pressure as an unfortunate incident rather than as part of a consistent pattern in which the state is prepared to endanger Jewish lives in order to maintain control.

This pattern of rationalization is not unique to Yitzhar. It reflects a well-documented psychological mechanism known as System Justification Theory.

Developed by psychologists John Jost and Mahzarin Banaji, System Justification Theory posits that human beings have a fundamental, driving psychological need to believe that the existing social, economic, and political systems they live under are fair, legitimate, and justifiable.

The alternative is simply too terrifying to contemplate. If you admit that the system you rely on for survival is fundamentally indifferent to your safety or actively hostile to it, it causes massive existential dread and shatters your entire worldview.

To protect themselves from that psychological terror, voters engage in massive cognitive gymnastics. They treat each round of state pressure, each withdrawal of security, as an unfortunate incident. They compartmentalize it, saying things like “the regional commander is just a tough guy making a point” or “the Defense Minister is playing politics right now, but the state itself is still looking out for us.”

By framing the hostility as a series of isolated anomalies, they protect their belief in the inherent goodness of the state.

If they were to connect the dots and admit a consistent pattern, if they acknowledge that the state is structurally prepared to endanger them to maintain leverage, then they would have a moral obligation to fundamentally alter their relationship with the state. They would have to stop complying.

And that is a leap most people are deeply afraid to make. It is so much easier to believe the system is basically benevolent but occasionally flawed, rather than accepting that the system is functioning properly and simply does not care about you.

They are trapped in a feedback loop. They legitimize a system that repeatedly endangers them because confronting the reality of their situation requires a level of disruption to their identity and civic duty that they are just not prepared to handle.

This is precisely why simply demanding the return of the previous arrangement — even while refusing to fund it themselves — does not break the cycle. As long as communities continue to treat each act of collective punishment as an isolated incident rather than as evidence of a deeper structural problem, the state retains the ability to repeat the same pressure whenever it chooses. Communities will continue to find themselves responding to the latest crisis rather than confronting the system that produces these crises in the first place.

Until citizens begin to treat these incidents not as temporary disruptions to be reversed, but as evidence of a deeper and ongoing willingness by the state to punish Jewish self-defense, the cycle of abuse will continue.

The alternative is to build political power capable of resisting this pattern. This would require forming a localized political bloc across affected communities that conditions its votes and support on concrete guarantees of security autonomy, refusing to join national coalitions unless those conditions are met in writing and in practice.

The real question is not whether the Ravshatz will be returned.

The real question is how long communities in Judea and Samaria are prepared to tolerate a system that repeatedly weakens their security, restricts their ability to defend themselves, and then expects them to continue legitimizing it with their votes, their service, and their silence.