The battle behind the story: Victim-blaming as a new tactic

The terrorist attack in Samaria on July 24 left Israelis grieving not only for the lives that were lost, but also for something else. Within hours, parts of our own public discourse had already begun telling the story in ways that shifted sympathy away from the victims and toward those responsible for their murder.

Bnaya Melet and Yuval Ezra were murdered during a confrontation with Palestinian terrorists. One of the eyewitnesses, someone I know personally, later described how several people had already recognized the danger posed by the sheikh who had led the group there, shouted for security forces to stop him and called for decisive action before it was too late.

His account immediately reopened a question that has accompanied Israel for years: When does an obvious threat become one that may be neutralized before innocent people are murdered?

As I listened to him, my mind went back to August 2021 and the murder of Border Police soldier Barel Hadaria Shmueli. His murder shook me to my core. Week after week, terrorists approached the Gaza security fence, testing Israeli restraint while soldiers operated under increasingly controversial rules of engagement.

Then came the moment that shocked the country: a terrorist walked directly up to a military position and shot Barel through a narrow opening at point-blank range. At the time, many Israelis felt that something fundamental had changed. The enemy had learned not merely our military capabilities, but our hesitation—and had incorporated that hesitation into his own tactical planning.

That debate has never really disappeared. Yet after last Friday’s attack, it was not only the operational failures that left so many Israelis shaken. It was what happened next.

Within hours, much of Israel’s mainstream public discourse was no longer centered primarily on the terrorists or the ideology that drove them. Instead, the conversation increasingly shifted toward the “cycle of violence,” the complexity of the conflict and renewed warnings about so-called Jewish extremism.

In some discussions, the implication became that Jews who choose to live in or even travel through parts of their historic homeland should not be surprised when violence follows. More extreme voices went further still, portraying the sheikh not as a terrorist but as someone defending his people against armed Israeli settlers. The facts had not changed, yet the story through which those facts were understood already had. Increasingly, the question was no longer why innocent Jews had been murdered, but why they had been there in the first place.

It was outright victim-blaming.

On a personal level, something seemed to break in many Israelis. The grief remained, but it was joined by something else—something harder to describe, yet impossible to ignore: a profound sense of betrayal.

Those of us who remember the Oslo years remember hearing victims of terrorism described as “the price of peace.” It was a painful expression, one that many of us rejected even then, but at least the victims were still recognized as victims. This time, many Israelis watched as the public conversation shifted with astonishing speed until the terrorists themselves increasingly came to occupy the moral center of the story. For many people, that crossed a line unlike anything they had experienced before.

The battle against terrorism, therefore, begins long before the first shot is fired. It also continues long after the attacker is neutralized, in the stories a nation tells, the history it teaches and the values it passes on. History shows that nations often become vulnerable only after they lose confidence in themselves, until they can no longer distinguish between victim and aggressor, between good and evil, or between truth and the narratives designed to replace it.

The encouraging truth is that this process is not inevitable. The story can be reclaimed. National identity can be strengthened. Historical confidence can be restored. Children can once again be taught the story of the civilization they have inherited without apology and without shame.

That responsibility belongs to parents, teachers, journalists, public leaders, celebrities and every citizen who refuses to surrender the truth.

In the end, the battle for the story is not separate from the battle against terrorism. It is one of its most important fronts because societies that know who they are tend to be much better equipped to recognize those who seek to destroy them—and to find the moral clarity to stand against them.