Peloni: Highly recommended article. Following his and his wife’s visit to Kibutzim which were attacked on October 7, 2023, Dr. Robert Malone offers some insightful reflections on the importance of an armed population, the success which even unarmed courage can obtain, and the realities of life which face Israelis on a daily basis while still facing imminent tragedy with only one of these assets readily available to them due to egregious governmental restrictions and an enemy willing and able to exploit these facts as the terrorist allied world media remains almost exclusively supportive of perverting the truths which Malone correctly describes.
Notes from the Israeli frontier, part one
Dr. Robert W. Malone | Aug 01, 2026
Israeli building code has required a reinforced concrete room in every new residence since 1992. It is called a mamad. Steel door, blast shutter, filtered air, poured walls. Americans pay extra for this and call it a storm shelter. Israelis get it standard, the way we get a smoke detector in the hallway.
The mamad was designed for rockets. Rockets give you fifteen seconds, and then the danger passes. Nothing in that threat model calls for a lock or a barricade on the inside, so most units have neither. The handle is held by hand, or it is not held at all.
On the morning of October 7, 2023, families in the kibbutzim of Be’eri, Kfar Aza, and Nir Oz held those handles while heavily armed terrorists on the other side pulled. Some held for six hours. Some held while the house burned around them. When pulling failed, the murderers fired through the door at the handle, working to destroy the hands holding it. After the parents died, so did the twin five-year-old girls of smoke inhalation – as they had been tucked away in the safe room. Only the family dog survived. Once painted white, the black walls tell the tale of death and destruction.
When the door held, they burned the house. Fire is what defeated the mamad. A room built to keep you alive for fifteen seconds becomes an oven once the building around it is alight, and its air filter was designed for a chemical agent rather than for smoke. The attackers carried accelerant and threw Molotov cocktails through windows, using fire to drive families out of shelters they could not otherwise breach. More than seventy percent of the homes at Nir Oz burned. Six houses in the entire kibbutz were left untouched. Elderly residents who could not walk died in their beds.
A wealthy and technically superb country wrote one threat into its building code. A different threat arrived.
The arithmetic comes first. A raider chooses the time and place. A defender must guard them all. No amount of virtue, vigilance, or wealth changes that equation.No amount of virtue or vigilance changes that ratio, and wealth does not improve it. A frontier settlement in 1840 and a kibbutz in 2023 faced the same problem, except that the kibbutz faced it on a shorter clock, because the raid arrived by paraglider.
The strategy, tactics, and economics of captives were also remarkably similar. Comanche raiders killed adult men and took women and children. The selection was deliberate, and both sides knew it. Ransom followed, funded on the Spanish and Mexican side through the rescate system and by the Church.
A reliable buyer creates a standing bid, and a standing bid raises the expected return on acquisition. Every individual redemption was a mercy. The aggregate of those mercies was a price signal that manufactured more captives. Any reader who understands why price controls produce shortages already understands why organized ransom produces abductions.
Terror belonged to the same system. Deliberate atrocity and the display of bodies by native populations in the southwest made pursuit unattractive and resistance more expensive than accommodation. It also emptied territory.
Through the 1830s and 1840s, Comanche and Kiowa raiding hollowed out the northern Mexican states, and whole districts were abandoned. Raiding by the light of the full moon became a calendar of dread that Texans later called the Comanche Moon. DeLay (2008) argues that this depopulation created the conditions for the American conquest of northern Mexico in 1846. The thousand deserts of his title are those abandoned settlements. The haunting images of deserted Southwestern churches and settlements so often portrayed in popular films have their basis in this history. I was struck by how much the burned-out, bullet-riddled kibbutzim along the Gaza border resembled those cinematic archetypes.
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