Beit Furik Is Everyone’s Problem

The smoke crawled through Beit Furik, a night swallowed by the stench of soot and hate in disguise. There they were — masked Israeli terrorists, cloaked in the collaboration of darkness, torching homes, burning cars, erasing lives. And the army? Soldiers stood present but passive, more witnesses than enforcers, circling the scene as flames devoured the village. No arrests. No questions. The next morning’s official response felt like a poor excuse, a glib cover for more profound silence.

These masked men, perhaps from Itamar, from other hardened settlements fed by an ideology of domination, see themselves as agents of twisted justice. The excuse, they said, was an attack on an Israeli man, a flock of sheep stolen as if that were justification enough to reduce a village to cinders, to unleash a vengeance spreading like gunpowder. On one side, an army that barely stirs; on the other, hooded men who wield violence as law in an occupied territory that should already know peace.

Calling them anything other than “terrorists” would be to shut our eyes to the truth. These men raid unarmed villages, leave lives in ruin, and vanish like shadows by dawn. It’s not about defense, not even retaliation — it’s cowardice; it’s terror. And yet our society seems all too willing to let them carry their banners as patriots when they’re simply extremists hiding behind hoods, miles away from any cause we could dignify.

So, I ask myself: What shred of humanity remains when we justify attacks on the innocent with threadbare excuses and a warped sense of morality? I walk this land that I call my own, where the love of country blurs into unquestioning loyalty, where criticizing an act like this is seen as treason. But how can I love Israel and not scream when this land becomes a stage for homegrown terrorists? It isn’t justice that’s gone wrong; it’s those who define it — and if we fail to see this, it’s because the smoke of complacency has already blinded us.

If we stay silent before these hooded faces who bring terror into the occupied territory, then the problem isn’t theirs — it’s ours. Loving this land does not mean disregarding the violence that corrupts it. And if we don’t raise our voices against these radicals, we’re merely part of that smoke, that burning ember that still smolders, consuming what ought to be a home for us all.