The Long Brief: Where Israel Must Stand
How National Priority Areas quietly decide which parts of Israel live, grow, and get defended first.
Shalom, friends.
While the world argues slogans about “two states” and “occupation,” the state is doing something far more important to reality. It is deciding, in concrete and budgets, which communities Israel cannot afford to lose and which ones it can afford to neglect. Those decisions are being made right now — in the Gaza envelope, the Galilee, the Negev, and across Judea and Samaria.
Since October 7, the stakes shifted. Iran’s proxies are pressing on every front. The government is rebuilding the south, reinforcing the north, advancing roads (and, fingers crossed, builds) in E1, and hardening the ridge. At the same time, some development towns are still struggling, parts of the Arab and Bedouin sectors remain lawless and under-governed, and the official “priority” lists still fail to match the real threat landscape. If we don’t understand how National Priority Areas actually work, we miss the story of where the country is going — and what the state is preparing for.
We were asked by a family from shul, in the States, about some of these areas: Who would want to live there? And raise children? Why would anyone? They’ve been to Israel and plan to go back. They consider themselves Zionists. Yet, it’s hard for people to see past the narrative in the Western press. This is meant to address that somewhat. Some of those questions require personal answers. The answers herein are meant to be more of why it is necessary. Not from a religious perspective (though that can give many reasons), but out of practical needs—of both individuals and the state.
This Long Brief lays out the logic beneath the slogans: how Israel built artificial depth where none existed, how incentives and infrastructure become instruments of sovereignty, how Judea and Samaria sit at the center of the priority system whether diplomats like it or not (spoiler alert: they don’t), and what happens when the state loses the discipline that kept it alive. If you want to understand where Israel will still be standing in twenty years — and which communities will be carrying the line for the rest of us — this is something you need to read.
Geography as Destiny and the State’s Countermove
Israel doesn’t get to pretend geography is neutral. The country sits on a strip of land so narrow that a jogger could cross it. The coastal plain holds most of Israel’s people, industry, and infrastructure. It is overlooked by the high ground of Judea and Samaria. That ridge has shaped every war, every deployment, and every national decision since 1948. A hostile force sitting there can watch the entire coastal region and tear through it. Israel has no natural depth, so it has spent 75 years building artificial depth through people, towns, roads, and stubborn presence.
National Priority Areas are the state’s quiet answer to this problem. Rather than just a budget gimmick, they’re strategic placement instructions. When the government classifies a region as an NPA, it is sending a signal: these communities matter more because the country cannot survive without them. That signal drives tax relief, subsidized mortgages, roads infrastructure, and education budgets. It shapes migration. It tells the bureaucracy where to act first and, by extension, where the IDF can rely on civilians as anchors. The entire apparatus is a national triage system. Limited resources. Unlimited threats. Choose wisely.
NPAs sit at the crossroads of security doctrine, demographic strategy, and social cohesion. Ignore any of the three and the whole system buckles. You cannot secure the Galilee without Jews living there. You cannot stabilize Jerusalem without strengthening its flanks. You cannot claim strategic necessity in Judea and Samaria while starving those communities of infrastructure. Presence is security. It is deterrence. It is continuity.
This is why Judea and Samaria sit inside the priority logic regardless of public opinion on the international stage. Regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum, every Israeli knows that Judea and Samaria are integral to their security. Successive Israeli governments—left, right, and unity—treated the high ground east of the Green Line as vital terrain, even when they avoided the formal NPA label. They understood that losing those heights invites danger into the country’s core. They understood that Jerusalem’s security begins miles east of the city, not at its municipal boundary. They understood that the E1 corridor between Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim is not a development idea but a strategic hinge linking the capital to the Jordan Valley and the country’s eastern shield.
Israel cannot afford to let geography dictate vulnerability. So the country fights back with demography, infrastructure, incentives, and the one thing its enemies underestimate—Israelis who insist on living where the state needs them most.
The priority map is the discipline that turns exposed frontier into defensible homeland. And if the country wants to endure the next twenty years, that logic must remain sharp, unapologetic, and grounded in the same simple principle Ben-Gurion understood on day one: the state survives where its people stand.
How the State Built Depth Where None Existed
Israel didn’t stumble into the priority system. It engineered it under fire. The first governments faced a problem no Western state had encountered: a newborn country with no strategic depth, no resources, and a flood of immigrants equal to its entire existing population. Geography was hostile. Borders provisional. Neighbors were armed and waiting. The state had to decide—immediately—where Jews would live so that the country itself could live.
Early leadership understood that survival wasn’t only about winning battles. It was about putting people in the right places. Ben-Gurion kept reading the map like a battlefield. The Galilee was thin. The Negev was empty. The frontier towns were too few and too fragile. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Jews—Holocaust survivors, Jews expelled from Arab lands—were sitting in transit camps crowding the center. Leaving them there would be malfeasance. So the state moved them. Built towns for them. And, through them, anchored the periphery. Statecraft in the most literal sense.
Those development towns—Dimona, Beit She’an, Kiryat Shmona—were civilian outposts designed to hold the borders while Israel built an army, a government, and an economy. Every new neighborhood was a bet against encirclement. Every school built in the desert was an act of national insurance.
Then came 1967, and with it, a complete recalibration of vulnerability. Basically overnight Israel gained the defensive terrain it always lacked—the mountain ridge of Judea and Samaria, the Golan Heights, the Jordan Valley. For the first time, Israel could look down at the threats instead of up at them. That changed everything. You don’t need a PhD in geopolitics or advanced training in warfare to see the implications. Whoever controls the ridge controls the heartland. Whoever holds the Jordan Valley controls the eastern gateway. Whoever secures Jerusalem’s flanks keeps the capital from returning to a frontline ghetto.
Israel acted accordingly, and—contrary to later political mythology—it was the Left that codified this logic first. The Allon Plan laid out the contours: Israeli communities on the valley floor, Israeli presence along the hilltop arcs, and defensible lines that would not bend to diplomatic fashion. Rabin reaffirmed this openly in 1995. A united Jerusalem, Ma’ale Adumim included. Israeli control of the Jordan Valley “in the broadest sense.” Jewish presence on key highlands. Survival instructions delivered on the floor of the Knesset.
The difficulty came not from strategy but from optics. Formally designating Judea and Samaria as NPAs would have handed Israel’s adversaries an easy propaganda victory. So the state adopted a different method: priority without declaration. It built roads, extended utilities, incentivized families, and quietly treated the strategic blocs as essential organs of national defense. While the paperwork broadly avoided the words, it’s clear the policy did not.
By the 1980s and 90s, NPAs finally entered the bureaucracy as formal categories. Dozens of government resolutions divided the country into Priority A and B zones, each with its own suite of benefits. But even then, the real map lived outside the documents. Successive governments—regardless of where they fell on the political spectrum—slid Judea and Samaria communities onto the priority tracks through parallel budgets, special exemptions, and the Settlement Division. The courts might quibble with the classifications. Diplomats would grumble. The state kept building.
The result is what Israel operates with today: a priority system that grew out of necessity, was formalized reluctantly, and functions as a hybrid—part law, part doctrine, part improvisation. The Jerusalem/Ma’ale Adumim/Jordan Valley corridor sits at its center. It was Rabin’s axis of security. It remains the backbone of national planning. It tells you more about Israeli statecraft than any ministerial press release.
The state understood that it could not afford passive geography. So it created active geography—settlement as shield, demography as strategy, infrastructure as sovereignty. The early governments built a country under siege. And they left behind a template that still guides the system. Hold the high ground. Populate the frontier. Deepen the periphery. Secure Jerusalem. Never allow emptiness where enemies could stand.
If Israeli leaders forget why the system was built, they risk unraveling the logic that kept the country alive. The priority map wasn’t invented to win arguments. It was invented to prevent funerals.