Terrorist attacks like the one we suffered last week, and we may suffer more soon, could loosen our grip.
Dealing immediately with fear and loss of meaning is our first task now - and it's not new.
This is a 102-year-old struggle, and our situation is now much better than it was at the beginning.
This is what Moshe Beilinson, the gifted Masai of the Zionist labor movement, wrote in the face of the gnawing despair in the summer of 1936 (in the real "second intifada"), when the Palestinians launched a murderous attack: "Until when? So they ask. Until when? ... "In all the enemy camps wherever they are, he will know: there is no way to break Israel in his land, because the necessity of life is with him and the truth of life is with him, and there is no impossible way to come to terms with him. This is the purpose of the campaign."
In 1936 it was a very distant strategic goal.
Today it is closer, but we have not yet reached it.
Israel's power in his country, in Beilinson's words there, has not yet predetermined the defeat's hopes of destruction.
We are a regional power, but we have not yet defeated the Palestinians.
Still, today we can imagine a victory - a future situation that will deprive the Palestinians of the ability to dream of the abolition of the Jewish state.
A necessary (though not sufficient) condition is the establishment of collective emotional stability in the face of terrorism.
An obsessive broadcast of videos from security cameras on TV channels is, for example, a surefire way to upset the public.
The goal of Islamic terrorism is to throw Israeli society off balance, so our goal is the opposite: not to panic and not to
delude.
The Zionist labor movement erred and went the way of Oslo, because it was tired and deceived itself that we had already won the battle with the Muslim Arabs over the country, and now we only have to determine the victory in a peace agreement.
Underlying that illusion was, among other things, emotional fatigue, and it is the deep cause of Rabin and Peres' blindness in the face of the terrorist campaign of Fatah and Hamas.
Another emotional fatigue is at the root of a tendency that there is on the right, to mistakenly believe that we have the ability to win in this campaign by landing one winning blow on the enemy.
Reality repeatedly refutes this assumption, because one blow, no matter how heavy, cannot displace the Palestinians' hopes of overcoming us, finally, thanks to the very large home front they have in the Sunni Muslim world around us.
And when the characteristic mistake of the right is disappointed, despair can erode us to the point of real risk.
Therefore, it is worth moving away from the concept of "Zebang and we're done."
Arik Sharon's shouts of "who is in favor of eliminating terrorism" at the Likud Center were detrimental at the time, as was the bitterness today on the part of Benjamin Netanyahu who did not "eliminate" terrorism once and for all.
To defeat the Palestinians requires long breathing, firmness and steady intelligence.
Emotional stability is not enough, of course.
Tools and conditions need to be trained for victory in this historic struggle.
When HaMoked may, unfortunately, become a terrorist minority among Muslim citizens in Israel, the most important tool is the Israel Police, an organization whose internal weaknesses have long been exposed to our eyes.
The government did not deal with the corruption that pervaded the police, and during the long terms of the governments of Netanyahu, Olmert, Sharon and Barak, the construction of its power was neglected and it was allocated short budgets.
The conclusions of the "Light Committee" denied the responsibility of the Arab society for the intifada in 2001, threw unjustified blame on the police and feared its officers.
The weighted result was her reluctance to deal with crime enclaves in Muslim society, and already during Operation Wall Guard we saw that they were developing into enclaves of terror.
In order to rehabilitate the police and to win the battle against Islamic terrorism, we must get rid of the tendency to deny the threat, as the "Commission of Light" does, and also refrain from using excessive force, which could exacerbate the alienation of non-terrorist Muslim citizens.
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