Proclaiming Justice with Laurie Cardoza Moore

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Oren Seliger: I’ll give you an example. Two weeks ago, I visited a farm in the Benjamin region of Judea and Samaria. This farmer, on October 20th, 2023, two weeks after the start of the war, was attacked with his herd. He’s a 20-year-old kid. He saw ten Arabs from a nearby village coming towards him and he quickly called the security manager of the nearby community.

It took them ten minutes to get to him, but in those ten minutes, he was attacked. He was hit on the head with an axe. Today, half of his skull is plastic.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: I’m Laurie Cardoza Moore, and this is Proclaiming Justice Podcast.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are back at NRB 2026. Today, I’m going to introduce you to Oren Seliger. He is the Director of Strategy and Development for Yesha Council in Israel. Now, I have longtime friends who were involved in the Yesha Council, so it’s great to see you all here. Thank you so much for coming. Tell our audience a little bit about Yesha Council and your reason for coming here to NRB.

Oren Seliger: First of all, it’s my first time, and I’m completely wowed by what I’m seeing here and the people I’m meeting. As an Israeli, I’ve been in Israel now since 1993, so quite a long time. Coming here and feeling the support, the love, and the Zionism, I’m just wowed. It’s so touching. Having all my kids having been through the army and through everything going on now in Israel with the war, seeing the support here is really heartwarming.

The Yesha Council is the governing body for all of the communities, 24 municipal councils, 180 communities, and 140 farms in Judea and Samaria. Judea and Samaria is the West Bank, but today we only call it Judea and Samaria, obviously.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: You mean the Judea and Samaria that’s so controversial these days?

Oren Seliger: No longer controversial. I think pretty much everybody’s in agreement that, especially after October 7th, it can only be Judea and Samaria. It can only be part of Israel, of modern Israel. The original Israeli state from 2,000 years ago was in Judea and Samaria. The coastal plain was Philistine; it wasn’t even part of Israel. What we call "small Israel," the 1948 to 1967 Israel, was not Israel back in the time of the Temple.

There was a lot of taxation that happened for the Philistines. We know the story of Samson. Samson was taken down to Ashkelon and to Gaza, which were not Jewish at that time. Today, obviously, the entire land is promised from God to the tribes of Israel, and that’s why we’re there today. Judea and Samaria today has grown to have close to 560,000 Jews living in it, as I said, in over 180 communities. Sixty-nine new communities were announced in the last three years.

I joined the Yesha Council just a year ago. My background is high-tech. The last 17 years of my career before joining, I was in Cisco Systems. I was a Director of Customer Success in Central and Southern Europe. But I decided, with my kids all in the army and doing what they can for the country, I had to stop putting money in Cisco’s pocket and do something for my country. I joined the Yesha Council.

The mandate that I received from Israel Gantz and from Omer Rachamim—Israel Gantz is the Chairman of the Yesha Council, Omer Rachamim is the CEO—was to look at October 7th and what happened leading up to October 7th, and how do we prepare Central Israel and Judea and Samaria for a similar type of attack from the Arabs in Judea and Samaria.

We know today that the reason the Palestinian Authority doesn’t have elections is because if they did, 87% of Arabs in Judea and Samaria would vote for Hamas. They are all, still today, knowing what they know about the atrocities of October 7th, very much in favor of what happened. We know today that there were plans and still are plans to attack Central Israel from Judea and Samaria.

The Gaza envelope communities, the Jewish communities in the Gaza envelope, those around the Gaza Strip, are about 60,000 to 70,000 people. The communities or the Israeli cities that border Judea and Samaria are about five and a half million people. So, if there is an attack from Judea and Samaria into Central Israel like there was on the Gaza envelope communities, the atrocities would be tremendous.

Fortunately, Sinwar expected there to be an uprising and attacks on October 7th in Central Israel as well from the Arab villages of Judea and Samaria. For multiple reasons, which I really can’t talk about here, that didn’t happen, much of it by luck and not by planning. But we do know that there were arrests made a couple of days before the attack in Qalqilya, which borders Kfar Saba in Central Israel, and apparently, there were plans to infiltrate and invade Kfar Saba, Ra'anana, Herzliya, Netanya, and Rehovot.

When I was brought on board to the Yesha Council, the goal was to look at what happened and preempted October 7th and plan and do what we can to make sure it doesn’t happen in Central Israel and in Judea and Samaria. One of the things that we know is that in 2022 and 2023, there was a lot of intelligence that could have been shared publicly that wasn't, regarding what was happening inside Gaza—that the Hamas were planning and exercising invasion scenarios.

There’s something called the Jericho Document, which was something that Israeli military intelligence had hacked in late 2022, which specified exactly how they were going to do an invasion, and that’s exactly how they did it on October 7th. But that wasn’t shared publicly. They really thought the military had it under control. One of the lessons learned is that we have to make these things known, shout these things loud and wide to make sure everybody knows what’s going on.

The Yesha Council, as the governing body, is intimately connected to all the municipalities and to all the security operation centers that exist throughout Judea and Samaria. What we’re developing now is called the Judea and Samaria Situation Room, the JSR. The JSR is basically a hub that takes all this security information. We are connected through Telegram, email, WhatsApp, etc., to all their feeds.

We’re now creating one center which has all the intelligence happening across Judea and Samaria. We also have Arabists that are part of our team that are listening in and looking at Arab social media and understanding where security issues are bubbling up there, connecting that with the military and connecting it with the other information that we have, and then having one story.

The reason I’m at NRB is because the output of what we’re doing, we understand, is not something which is just for security, but it’s also for diplomacy, to make sure that the world understands what’s happening. We’re actually going to have a push feed via email, Telegram, WhatsApp, and SMS to broadcasters and influencers that are looking for actual truthful information coming out of Judea and Samaria.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: That’s a great idea. Coming from someone who’s always looking for content to share.

Oren Seliger: Anytime anything happens in Israel, I’ve spoken to a lot of people here, and they say when something happens, everybody has a personal friend or contact they ask, "What’s really happening?" Here, we’re doing it in a very structured way. I would say until today, Israel in general has not been successful at doing PR for Israel, and Judea and Samaria even worse.

Here, what we’re building is a structured, managed, proactive center which will provide this information. So, instead of getting the feeds from Peace Now or from WAFA, the Palestinian Information Authority, or from Haaretz, etc., which are very left and not promoting pro-Jewish, pro-Judea and Samaria, pro-Israel values, here we’re looking to make sure that information gets out to set and transform the global narrative about Judea and Samaria.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: That’s fantastic because didn't you just have a major issue or confrontation where Ambassador Huckabee intervened? The Arabs that live in the surrounding communities called themselves Christians and said that it was the members of Judea and Samaria that were setting churches on fire and burning fields.

Oren Seliger: Correct. This happened in Taybeh. There is an archaeological site there; it’s not a church, it’s where a church used to be. Arabs set fire to the fields next to the site and said the Jews are burning down churches. There is no church. There is an archaeological site, and Jews weren’t even there.

It took three days for someone from the Yesha Council to go and actually do a video, review, interview, and figure out that wasn't it and put it to rest. But at first, it made a lot of noise. As you said, what’s really critical is to set the first impression and get the facts out there first, instead of being reactive. What we had to do in that case was to react.

What this center will do, 24/7—I’m an Orthodox Jew, we keep the Sabbath, but we have provision to actually do this on the Sabbath because it’s so critical and life-saving—the goal here is to make sure that we see the security details, we understand that it’s correct, and we have multiple sources of ways to make sure that the event that we’re seeing is corroborated. Then we create from that a communication source.

It goes from the real-time security department—as I said, we have Arabists looking at social media. We also want to do a deep dive into this event: where did this happen from? I’ll give you an example. Two weeks ago, I visited a farm in the Benjamin region of Judea and Samaria. This farmer, on October 20th of 2023, two weeks after the start of the war, was attacked with his herd. He’s a 20-year-old kid.

He saw ten Arabs from a nearby village coming towards him and he quickly called the security manager of the nearby community. It took them ten minutes to get to him, but in those ten minutes, he was attacked. He was hit on the head with an axe. Today, half of his skull is plastic. He’s still going through rehab. But even though he’s going through rehab, he’s married, has a two-year-old, they’re expecting their second child, and he started a new farm.

He has 350 sheep. A month ago, one of his workers was attacked again. Four pickup trucks came and they attacked him, injured him, and stole his sheep. It was picked up by the media, left-wing media, when they went to get their sheep back. In the photos that you see of them getting their sheep back, you see a Hebrew letter which is spray-painted on the sheep to identify it as part of his. But it was talked about as settlers attacking Palestinians.

In the end, what happened here? They were attacked. The goal here, then, is to make sure that we get the narrative out there first and have them respond. It’ll be video footage, it’ll be text, it’ll be interviews. The reason I’m at NRB today, my goal is really to build relationships with people like yourself that can actually be the recipients of this information and this technology.

My goal at NRB is to build relationships with 30 to 50 different broadcasters and influencers that we can then roll this out to. We’re right now in test mode. We’re going live at the end of March, so the timing of NRB is perfect. We’re doing also diplomatic engagement in the sense that people come to Israel, and I bring them on tours to meet the farmers.

I call it "Behind the Headline Tours" because behind the headline means that you’re seeing what the New York Times or Washington Post is reporting about the settler violence, and then you’re coming and you’re meeting a family with three kids that are running a farm, waking up at 5:00 AM in the morning, working until 10:00 at night, and then also staying awake to protect the sheep at night. They are basically modern-day Zionists.

My grandparents, my mother’s parents, moved to Israel in 1933. They were one of the founders of a Kibbutz in Beit She'an Valley. They too managed the land and with their feet made Israel into what it is today. These kids are the modern-day settlers of Israel. It’s the same as then. In Judea and Samaria, especially after October 7th, we realize not only is this our biblical homeland, but it’s the requirement for strategic depth to protect the rest of Israel.

The goal of this center is not only to protect Judea and Samaria but also to protect pre-1967 Israel—so Kfar Saba, Ra'anana, Netanya, Herzliya, Jerusalem—because they’re not aware of what’s happening.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: Ladies and gentlemen, what Oren is talking about here, some of you may recall the news that was coming out about the incidents he just told us about. This is the reality of the truth. This is what the world refers to Judea and Samaria—the world refers to this area as the West Bank. It’s not the West Bank. It’s the biblical heartland. They call it the spine, the backbone of Israel, this whole region.

Oren Seliger: Another important thing to notice in terms of the geography and topography: there’s the coastal plain, and Judea and Samaria is the high ground. You go to parts of Judea and Samaria and you stand there, and with binoculars, you’re looking into apartment buildings in Tel Aviv, in Petah Tikva, in Kiryat Arba, in Ra'anana, just from there. If that is the heartland of a Palestinian state, Israel is decimated.

80% of Israel’s population lives between Holon and Hadera, which is the thinnest part of Israel. I live across the Green Line; I live in Samaria. If I get on my bicycle and I ride to the beach of Herzliya and Tel Aviv, it’s 45 minutes. That section of Israel, the middle part of Israel where most of the population lives, is between 16 and 20 kilometers wide. In miles, that’s 12 miles wide. There’s no strategic depth. Judea and Samaria, although it’s our biblical homeland, creates that strategic depth to be able to protect the most population centers of Israel, and that’s why it’s so critical that we’re there.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: Absolutely. Well, Oren, how can people learn more if there’s media that is interested in getting—because you’re going to be rolling out this new program in March?

Oren Seliger: It’s already now physically existing; we’re running it in pre-production mode to make sure all the systems work. End of March, we’ll actually start to communicate out, and we’d love for people to sign up and register. Easiest is just to contact me at oren—O-R-E-N—at myyesha—M-Y-Y-E-S-H-A—dot org dot IL. Or you can reach out to me on WhatsApp, and you can find me on Facebook and Instagram as well as on X.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: Very good. Thank you so much for taking time to speak with us today. Appreciate it. God bless you. Thank you again for joining me on this edition of Proclaiming Justice. Please share this podcast with your family and friends. For more information about how you can get involved, please visit our website at pjtn.org. As a PJTN watchman, you can help us keep up the fight to preserve our freedom for our children and their children for such a time as this.

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