Then come the admissions. The officer acknowledges that cameras were hacked on October 7, 2023; passwords have been changed, systems audited. Before the massacre, local squads trained twice a year. The Magen 48 program, named in memory of the 48 members of the security squads killed that day, now has them drill eight times, up to an eighth session devoted to extreme scenarios. The squads have received weapons, protective gear and drones — a capability that did not exist before — to see in real time what is happening in and around the village. An app, Netz, alerts and coordinates the defenders the way the Home Front Command's app does for the general public.
The most telling detail lies in one example the officer gave: a resident of Be'eri can belong to the security squad and work in Tel Aviv during the day. To keep a force on site, three reserve units — Avshalom, Oz and Yael — were created, and their soldiers housed in the communities. Every brigade commander approves a defense plan for each community, with a "defense file" listing threats, responses, procedures and population. Like a military base, as JNS sums it up.
Here is what that says. The State of Israel no longer promises its border citizens that the army will be there in the first minutes. It gives them the means to hold those minutes themselves, and it pays for it. That is a lesson in strategic humility: the end of the illusion of the smart wall that would replace men. It is also — and this is our social reading — a state that stops resting security on volunteerism alone. Paying civilians to keep watch at night is recognizing that security is a public service, not a charity residents perform for themselves.
That is a lesson in strategic humility: the end of the illusion of the smart wall that would replace men.
But the most important sentence in the briefing almost slips by: this system "mirrors the local defense array that has protected the communities of Judea and Samaria for more than twenty years." In other words, the kibbutzim of the Gaza border, which were never ideological outposts in the Israeli imagination, are adopting in 2026 the model forged by the communities the world press casts as "the problem." Those communities had long known what Be'eri and Nir Oz paid for on October 7: on a border, the front line is the village gate.
The names of the new units say the rest. Avshalom, for a pre-state Irgun fighter; Oz, for Nahal Oz and Nir Oz; Yael, for three fallen paratroopers of the 55th Brigade. The Zionist right, the kibbutz, the army: three families of Israel inside the same fence. And what if that were the real lesson of October 7: there are no longer two Israels, one beyond the Green Line and the other sheltered behind the wall. Every community in Israel is now a border. They have just learned to defend themselves the same way.
