If Israel seeks a real and lasting victory over Iran, then it must also act in Judea and Samaria, as well as Gaza.
The Middle East is changing before our eyes. If this transformation is to guarantee Israel’s security, Israel must take one additional critical step—one that will finally prevent the establishment of an Iranian-backed state in the heart of our land.
The campaign against the Iranian threat sharpens several fundamental insights regarding not only Israel’s security, but its future and very existence. Among them is a strategic truth: the threat to Israel does not come only from Tehran itself, but from Iran’s ambition to surround Israel with a hostile ring of fire waiting for the order to strike.
Iran has attempted to build this suffocating ring wherever a complete or partial vacuum of governance has emerged—whether in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, along the Iran-Iraq border or in other locations throughout the Middle East. Iran identifies such governmental vacuums and quickly inserts its poisonous tentacles into them, using them to establish its influence and threaten Israel’s future.
The above reality raises a basic question that every Israeli—and certainly every Israeli leader—must ask: Can Israel allow another such hostile entity to remain, this time in the very heart of the country?
The question isn’t merely rhetorical. Since the Oslo Accords, a hostile entity, armed from head to toe, has existed within our own land—in Judea and Samaria, as well as in Gaza—that operates on every front to undermine Israel’s right to exist. Today, it openly identifies with the ayatollah regime in the Islamic Republic, and its leaders and supporters have been seen celebrating on rooftops when Iranian missiles target and strike Israeli civilian centers.
The population of this entity largely descends from labor migrants who arrived in the land mainly during the first third of the 20th century and continued to come afterward. They came because of economic hardship, not because of any historic national right.
Later, these groups—originating from Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Africa—were consolidated under the false narrative of a “Palestinian people” demanding a state of their own, while their national aspiration has consistently been the destruction of the State of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.
Israel is currently in the midst of a war whose consequences are dramatic for the entire region. As he promised immediately after Oct. 7, 2023, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is leading efforts to reshape the Middle East. Within this context, the current war must also bring about a dramatic change in addressing the internal threat in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip.
It must be remembered that Judea and Samaria are not just another area on the map of the Mideast. They form the mountain ridge overlooking Israel’s coastal plain, where the majority of the country’s population lives.
The distance from Ariel to Kfar Saba is only about 20 kilometers (about 12 and a half miles). The distance from Gush Etzion to Jerusalem is measured in minutes. A brief glance at the map makes it clear that this is one continuous geographic space—from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.
Beyond the security and geographic considerations, Judea and Samaria are also the heart of Jewish history. Shechem, Beit El, Shiloh and Hebron are not merely points on a map; they are the places where the identity of the Jewish people was formed.
Gaza, too, is an integral part of Israel’s history. When the Jewish people returned to their land in modern times, they did not return to a foreign country, but to their historic homeland, which, incidentally, is also recognized as such in the Quran.
The Green Line, established after Israel’s War of Independence as part of the 1949 Armistice Agreements, was never intended to be a permanent political border. It merely reflected the positions of the forces on the day the ceasefire took effect, not the historical or geographic boundaries of the land.
Decades have passed since then, and reality itself has blurred that line. Israeli citizens live, work and move within a single space that connects the cities of the coastal plain with the communities of Judea and Samaria.
Nearly one million Jews live beyond the Green Line, in hundreds of communities throughout Judea and Samaria and in the northern and eastern neighborhoods of Jerusalem. Roads, industrial zones and infrastructure connect the different parts of the country in practice, demonstrating that this is, in fact, one shared living space.
And yet, despite all this, official Israeli sovereignty has still not been applied to Judea and Samaria.
At a time when Israel is acting with full strength and determination to remove the Iranian threat from its citizens, it is essential to ensure that such a threat will not take root in the heart of the country or in Gaza. As long as Israel does not apply its sovereignty over Judea, Samaria and Gaza, the option of establishing that “Palestinian state” remains alive.
True stability in the region will be achieved when the option of establishing such a terrorist state is permanently removed from the table, and when political reality aligns with historical, geographic and practical reality. Applying Israeli sovereignty over Judea, Samaria and Gaza is a necessary step—one that can and should be taken precisely during wartime.
Such a step would make clear to the entire world, to our neighbors and to ourselves that no hostile entity will arise in the heart of the land or in the Gaza Strip. Applying sovereignty would enable the dismantling of the Palestinian Authority and other terrorist organizations, and allow the creation of a framework that would return the Arabs of Judea, Samaria and Gaza to the countries from which they came.
Today, there are 22 Arab states and 57 Muslim states around the globe. Opposite them stands only one Jewish state—smaller even than the U.S. state of New Jersey.
Historic moments of regional transformation sometimes create rare opportunities to shape a new and more secure reality. Israel now stands at one of those rare moments. If we seek to ensure a true and lasting victory—one that prevents the next threat—we must, following victory over Iran, apply Israeli sovereignty across the entire land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
Israel’s security depends as much on controlling its own heartland as on distant battlefields—and we must never lose sight of that reality.
