Mordechai Sones · Journalist. Editor of Jewish Home News.

Outside the normal channels, because the normal channels were blocked or compromised.

For forty years I have taken what I saw to the people whose job it was to act on it, and when they did not act, I acted. At fifteen I left high school to work on the staff of Senator Frank Murkowski of Alaska, doing research on foreign security assistance and sitting in, when the legislative assistant could not, at the Senate Intelligence Committee's briefings. In 1998, in Nachaliel in the hills of Binyamin, I heard Arab militias training at night with live fire, and so did some forty other communities. I warned the rabbis. I briefed the chairman of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. The Prime Minister's Office answered that the gunfire was "weddings." So I opened an office of my own, found out what was training around us and with what, and published the Report through a policy research center, which asked the army, the Defense Ministry, the Prime Minister's Office and the Yesha Council about it before printing. Three did not answer. The Council's spokesman rejected it outright.

I have done the same at every stage since, from Washington in 1986 to Jewish Home News today: tell the ones responsible first, and when they do nothing, do it in the open.

Why go on, when nobody appointed me? Because the Torah puts the duty on the one who saw. "לֹא תַעֲמֹד עַל דַּם רֵעֶךָ": do not stand by the blood of your fellow (Vayikra 19:16); and the Rambam rules that one who heard that harm was being plotted against his fellow "and did not reveal it to his fellow's ear and inform him" has transgressed it (Laws of the Murderer and the Preservation of Life 1:14). The sources are on the page The duty to warn.

I am not a rabbi and I issue no rulings. I hold no office and belong to no party. I say what I saw and what they answered, and the Creator judges. What our votes bought is also something I saw, and I say it; the halachic question it raises goes to a beit din, not to me.

The test of any of it is whether what I wrote came true. "אֵיזֶהוּ חָכָם? הָרוֹאֶה אֶת הַנּוֹלָד": who is wise? The one who sees what is coming (Tamid 32a). Below: what I wrote, when, and what followed.