A Greater Danger than Oct. 7th: An Illegal Army of 70,000 8.7 Miles Away

New York (VINNEWS/Rabbi Yair Hoffman)

Years ago, the following question was posed to a Chareidi anti-Zionist Posaik. Rabbi Pesach Lerner, then the vice-president of the National Council of Young Israel, was trying to arrange a protest in Washington against what the State of Israel was doing.

They were soliciting congressmen to support the Oslo Accords and for the US to provide funding for the Palestinian police force to buy weapons.

The Posaik answered that Bnei Torah should go and protest.

He explained: “Normally, we do not do these things and leave it to the Zionists. But now that the Zionists have gone crazy and are endangering Yiddishe neshamos, we have to take the role of what the Zionists used to do — and if they become normal again, then we can go back to being against the Zionists.”

That was more than three decades ago. The Zionists never became normal again. And the small police force that American congressmen were being lobbied to arm has become an army of some 70,000 men sitting fourteen kilometers from Kfar Saba.

There is an important concept in the upcoming parsha – self-interest destroys perception: ki hashochad y’aveir einei chachamim (Devarim 16:19). Chazal note that it does not say the shochad blinds fools — it blinds the wise.  October 7th should have been foreseen.  The wise were blinded.  But they are also blinded to something that is happening under Israel’s noses.

What Was Actually Signed

Under Annex I of the Interim Agreement, the “Palestinian Police” was to be a policing body — maintaining public order, preventing crime, protecting infrastructure, and, notably, combating terrorism and preventing incitement. The entire force was capped at 30,000: 12,000 in Judea and Samaria, the rest in Gaza. In Judea and Samaria they were permitted 4,000 assault rifles, 4,000 pistols, up to 120 machine guns, and 15 riot vehicles. In Hebron, after IDF withdrawal from H-1, exactly 400 policemen with 200 pistols and 20 vehicles.

Israel also retained an absolute veto. The text is not ambiguous: any candidate Israel objected to “shall not be recruited.”

The Numbers

The breach began before the ink dried. A U.S. State Department report from November 1995 already put the force at 18,000 when the ceiling at that stage was 9,000. By 1997 it stood at roughly 32,000. In 2001 — the year Israel itself designated the Presidential Guard’s “Force 17” and the Tanzim as terror organizations — approximately 40,000. By 2003, some 52,000. By 2006, 61,051.

Today the figure stands at roughly 70,000 — nearly six times the agreed ceiling, in the territory closest to Israel’s population core.

A 2023 DCAF report, relying on PA-supplied data, claimed only 34,000. Lt.-Col. (res.) Maurice Hirsch, whose recent study assembles this record, demonstrates why that figure cannot be believed: a 25 percent collapse in manpower would show up in payroll. It does not. The PA’s own Ministry of Finance reports salary payments to the security apparatuses of 3.153 billion shekels in 2017 — and 3.078 billion shekels in 2025.

A Police Force Doesn’t Learn to Parachute

The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reported 1,335.6 criminal offenses per 100,000 residents in 2024 — low by international standards. There is no crime wave requiring 70,000 armed men.

Nor does ordinary policing require armored warfare, artillery, sniping, heavy machine gun crews, and parachute training. Yet that is the curriculum. And the one thing these forces demonstrably do not do is dismantle Hamas and Islamic Jihad cells in their own cities.

An entity that trains for war, arms for war, and declines to fight terrorists is not a police force.

The Precedent Nobody Wants to Name

There is a reason this pattern feels familiar to anyone who has read the history of the last century.

The Treaty of Versailles imposed limits on Germany that were considerably more detailed than anything at Oslo. Articles 159 through 213 capped the German army at 100,000 men, all long-service volunteers, with no conscription permitted and an officer corps limited to 4,000. The Great General Staff was abolished outright.

The navy was capped at 15,000 men, six pre-dreadnought battleships, six light cruisers, twelve destroyers, and twelve torpedo boats. Submarines were forbidden entirely. Military aircraft were forbidden entirely — not limited, forbidden. Tanks, armored cars, and artillery above 105mm were prohibited. Arms imports and exports were banned. The Rhineland was demilitarized. An Inter-Allied Control Commission was established to verify compliance on the ground.

Every one of those provisions was evaded. Hans von Seeckt kept the General Staff alive by renaming it the Truppenamt. The Black Reichswehr concealed manpower beyond the cap. Under the 1922 Treaty of Rapallo, Germany trained inside the Soviet Union — a fighter pilot school at Lipetsk, a tank school at Kama near Kazan, a chemical weapons facility at Tomka. A German submarine design office operated in the Netherlands under a Dutch corporate name. Pilots trained under civil aviation cover through Lufthansa and Junkers. The Control Commission was withdrawn in 1927, and after that nobody was even pretending to check.

Then came the open phase. Hitler withdrew from the League of Nations and the disarmament conference in October 1933. In March 1935 he announced that the Luftwaffe already existed, and days later announced conscription and an army of thirty-six divisions — roughly 550,000 men, five and a half times the treaty limit. This was a public, unambiguous repudiation of a binding treaty by a state that had signed it.

Three months later, Britain signed the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, unilaterally granting Germany a navy at 35 percent of Royal Navy tonnage and effective parity in submarines — the very submarines Versailles had banned outright. A signatory to the treaty legitimized the breach in writing. In March 1936 Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland with a force so small that his own generals had orders to withdraw if France so much as moved. France did not move. By 1939 the 100,000-man army was several million.

The mechanism is identical: a cap, a quiet violation, a louder violation, foreign powers who fund and train rather than enforce, and a long stretch of years in which everyone agrees that confronting the problem would be destabilizing. The confrontation is not avoided. It is only postponed, and the price rises every year it is postponed.

Fourteen Kilometers

On October 7, roughly 6,000 terrorists crossed out of Gaza. The deepest penetration reached Ofakim — 22 kilometers.

Now apply that radius to Judea and Samaria. From Qalqilya to the Mediterranean is fourteen kilometers.  Inside that circle sit Kfar Saba, Ra’anana, Hod Hasharon, Herzliya, and the industrial spine of the country. The force positioned there is more than ten times the size of the invading Gaza force. Hundreds of its members participated in Arafat’s terror war between 2000 and 2005. Since then it has grown 400 percent.

The Point of the Story

The Posaik’s answer was not a political position. It was a halachic assessment of sakanas nefashos. Yiddishe neshamos were being endangered, and that obligation does not care which camp is holding the pen.

Nothing in the intervening thirty years has changed that calculus except the arithmetic, which has gotten worse. Hirsch’s recommendations are modest and obvious: reduce the forces to the agreed size, end the foreign military training and assistance, restore genuine oversight of recruitment and weaponry, and prepare Israel’s defenses accordingly.

The conception that held until October 6, 2023 — that a hostile armed force sitting adjacent to civilians could be managed, contained, bought off, and ignored — was tested. It failed.

The world had already run that experiment once, on a continental scale, and the results were in the encyclopedias long before Oslo was drafted.

The same conception is currently in force fourteen kilometers from Herzliya.

Whoever is still telling the government that this force is a partner is making the identical argument that was made about the Rhineland, with a shorter drive to the sea.

May Hashem protect His people.