Daniel's been watching the footage, and he's got a set of questions that cut right to the thing people keep dancing around. He wants to know when settler violence actually began as a pattern — not the odd incident, but the recurring phenomenon. Why the IDF seems unwilling to act, or worse, why we keep seeing soldiers standing by while attacks happen, sometimes even joining in. And if Israel were serious about stopping it, whose job would that actually be — the army, the police, the border police? He's asking whether the failure is institutional, political, or both. And he wants our best read on it.
So let's start at the start — when did this actually become a pattern, not just isolated incidents? Because I think most people, if you asked them on the street, would point to the last decade or so. The "price tag" graffiti, the mosque arsons, the olive grove burnings. They'd say it's a post-disengagement phenomenon, maybe post-Oslo at the earliest.
Right. And the right-wing line is that this is a handful of thugs, a recent thing, bad apples. And if that's true, the fix is simple — arrest the bad apples. But if it's been going on for decades and nobody's ever really been held accountable, that's a different diagnosis entirely. That's not a policing problem. That's something structural.
It's the second one. The documented pattern goes back to the early 1980s. You get the rise of Gush Emunim, the settler movement that saw settling the West Bank as a religious imperative, not just a security buffer. And you get figures like Rabbi Meir Kahane, who was openly advocating for organized violence against Palestinians — not as a fringe position, but as a political platform. He got elected to the Knesset in 1984 on exactly that message. The first attacks that fit the modern template — masked men, torched cars, orchards destroyed, the perpetrators vanishing into settlements where no one saw anything — start showing up in the early eighties and they never really stop.
So this predates the first intifada.
By years, yeah. And that's an important point because the standard narrative is that settler violence is a reaction to Palestinian violence — that it's retaliatory, defensive. But the timeline doesn't support that. The first intifada kicks off in 1987. The settler attacks are already an established pattern by then. And the thing people get wrong is they think the organized "price tag" attacks — that's the term for retaliation against Palestinian resistance or government restraint — started recently. The term is newer, coined maybe in the late 2000s, but the practice isn't. You see it emerge as a named strategy in the 1990s, and it escalates dramatically after the 2005 Gaza disengagement. The idea was brutally simple: if the government evacuates settlements, we make the cost unbearable by burning Palestinian villages. Deterrence through collective punishment.
And the government at the time condemned it.
Verbally, every time. Sharon's government in 2005 issued statements. Olmert's government after that. Netanyahu's governments, repeatedly. But here's the through-line that matters: from the 1980s to right now, the prosecution rate for settler violence has barely budged. Yesh Din, the Israeli human rights group, has been tracking this for years. Over ninety percent of complaints filed by Palestinians about settler violence are closed without indictment. Ninety percent. That's not a glitch in the system — that is the system. If you had a ninety percent failure rate in any other domain of law enforcement, you'd call it a collapse. Here, it's just the baseline.
So when Daniel asks why the IDF seems unwilling to act, the answer starts there — with the fact that acting was never really the expectation. The system was never calibrated to produce enforcement. It was calibrated to produce the appearance of a functioning legal order while delivering impunity.
And to understand why, you have to understand the legal architecture. This is where it gets strange, and I think it's the part that's hardest for outsiders to wrap their heads around. The West Bank is under military occupation, which means Palestinians there are subject to military law. But Israeli settlers — civilians living in the same territory — are under Israeli civilian law. Two populations on the same land, two completely different legal systems.
Which is, just on its face, a remarkable thing to say out loud. We have two people standing on the same hilltop, and which legal system applies to them depends entirely on their ethnicity. That's the architecture.
That's the architecture. And it creates this bizarre jurisdictional fracture. If a settler attacks a Palestinian, the crime doesn't fall under the military courts. It falls under the Israel Police. The IDF is the occupying power, it controls the territory, but it doesn't have criminal jurisdiction over Israeli civilians. That's the police's job. But here's the problem: most of these attacks happen in Area C, which is the sixty percent of the West Bank under full Israeli military control. The Israel Police has very limited presence there. They operate out of a few stations — you can count them on one hand — they don't patrol routinely, and they often need IDF coordination just to get to a crime scene.
So walk me through what actually happens when an attack occurs. Let's say it's two in the morning, a group of settlers comes into a village in Area C, they set fire to a car, they beat someone, they leave. Someone calls it in. What happens next?
The call probably goes to the Palestinian Authority police first, because that's who villagers can reach. But the PA has no jurisdiction in Area C — they can't operate there without Israeli coordination. So they pass it along. By the time the report reaches the IDF or the Israel Police, the attackers are long gone. If the police decide to investigate — and that's a big if — they need to get to the scene. That means coordinating with the IDF for access, because the roads are under military control and the police don't just drive around Area C freely. By the time they arrive, it's been hours. Evidence is cold. Witnesses are terrified. The settlers are back in their settlement, which the police also can't just enter without coordination. And the whole thing grinds to a halt before it even starts.
So the IDF is there, but it's not their job to arrest settlers. The police have the job, but they're not there. And the border police?
The border police sit in between — they operate under police command but have military training and work closely with the IDF. They're kind of the hybrid force. In theory they could enforce, and sometimes they do. But in practice, they're deployed for specific missions — checkpoint security, riot control, counterterrorism operations. They're not doing routine policing. They're not walking a beat in the South Hebron Hills. So what you get is a jurisdictional triangle where everyone can point at someone else. The IDF says it's a police matter. The police say they can't access the area without military support. The border police say they weren't tasked with it. And nothing happens.
It's almost elegant in its dysfunction.
It is. And you can see how, if you wanted to design a system where nothing ever gets done, this is exactly what you'd build. You'd split jurisdiction between three forces, give none of them clear authority, make coordination mandatory but cumbersome, and then under-resource the whole thing. The result is that everyone's responsible and no one's responsible.
That's the institutional architecture. But Daniel's also asking about what we keep seeing on video — soldiers not just standing aside, but participating. And that's a different category of problem. That's not a jurisdictional gap. That's something else.
The May 2026 incident in Khirbet Abu Falah is the one that's been hardest to ignore. B'Tselem documented it in detail. It's in the South Hebron Hills. Settlers and soldiers attacked the village together. Two Palestinians were killed by gunfire. A third died from tear gas inhalation — and that's a detail that matters, because tear gas is a military munition. The soldiers didn't separate the attackers from the victims — they were part of the attacking group. They were using their equipment, their weapons, their tear gas, in coordination with civilian settlers.
That's not standing aside. That's joining in.
And it's not an isolated case. B'Tselem has documented multiple incidents in the last few years where the line between soldier and settler attacker blurs or disappears entirely. It's the logical endpoint of a system where soldiers are trained to see Palestinians as the threat and settlers as the people they're there to protect. If you're an eighteen-year-old conscript stationed near a settlement, and a group of settlers shows up angry, your entire training tells you these are your people. The Palestinians are the security risk. Intervening against the settlers — physically restraining Israeli civilians who look like you, sound like you, share your national identity — is not something most soldiers are trained for or comfortable with. And there's a career calculus too.
Say more about that. What actually happens to a soldier who does intervene?
There are documented cases — not many, because not many soldiers intervene — where a soldier pushed back against a settler and got reprimanded for it. Sometimes it's formal. Sometimes it's informal — your commander pulls you aside and says you've created a political problem. In at least one case I'm aware of, a soldier who physically stopped a settler from attacking a Palestinian farmer was transferred to a different unit because the settler leadership complained. Meanwhile, soldiers who stand aside face no consequences at all. The incentive structure is completely clear: if you act, you risk your career, possibly legal trouble, and you definitely make enemies of a politically powerful constituency. If you do nothing, you go home at the end of your shift. Now ask yourself what any rational eighteen-year-old is going to do in that situation.
So the footage isn't a bug. It's what the incentive structure produces.
And the footage keeps coming because everyone has a phone now. Palestinian villagers film. Settlers sometimes film themselves — there's a whole genre of settler social media where they document their "operations." Soldiers have bodycams in some units, though those recordings rarely surface unless someone leaks them. But the volume of video evidence has exploded in the last few years, and it hasn't changed the prosecution rate. That ninety percent figure holds. Video of the crime doesn't matter if no one opens a file.
Which brings us to Daniel's next question. If Israel were serious — serious — whose authority would enforcement actually fall under? Who's supposed to be in charge?
The Israel Police has formal criminal jurisdiction over Israeli civilians in the West Bank. That's the legal answer. If you look at the statute books, that's where the authority sits. But the IDF controls the territory, and the police can't operate independently in Area C without military coordination. So in practice, enforcement would require the IDF to actively support police operations — providing access, securing areas, sharing intelligence, sometimes providing transport. And that requires a decision from the political echelon. The defense minister, the prime minister, the cabinet. Someone with authority over both the military and the police has to say: this is a priority, make it happen.
So we're at the political level now.
We've been at the political level the whole time, honestly. The jurisdictional confusion is real, but it persists because no government has ever made resolving it a priority. Successive Israeli governments — left, right, and center — have condemned settler violence in public statements while expanding settlement infrastructure and appointing ministers who are ideologically aligned with the settler movement. You can go back and read the statements from Rabin's government in the nineties, from Barak, from Sharon, from Olmert, from Netanyahu, from Bennett. The condemnations are almost word-for-word identical. And during all of those governments, the settlement enterprise grew. No minister has ever been fired for failing to stop settler attacks. No police commissioner has lost their job over a ninety percent case-closure rate. The political cost of inaction is zero.
And the political cost of action?
Potentially enormous. The settler movement is a powerful political constituency. It's organized, it votes, it has parties that represent it in the Knesset, and those parties are frequently part of the governing coalition. A serious crackdown would mean deploying police in force to settlements, arresting Israeli citizens for attacking Palestinians, and prosecuting them in Israeli courts — which would be seen by the settler movement and its political representatives as a betrayal. You'd have coalition partners threatening to bring down the government. You'd have protests. You'd have rabbis issuing statements. No government has been willing to pay that price. Not one.
So Daniel's question about whether the failure is institutional or political — the answer is both, and they reinforce each other. The institutions are set up to fail, and the political leadership benefits from that failure. Or at least finds it more comfortable than the alternative.
The term that keeps coming up in the research is "permission structure." The combination of legal ambiguity, institutional buck-passing, and political protection creates an environment where violence is not just tolerated but predictable. If you know there's a ninety-plus percent chance nothing will happen to you, and you believe you're defending your land and your people, and your political leaders talk about settlement expansion as a national priority, and the soldiers standing next to you aren't going to stop you — what exactly is supposed to stop you? Your own conscience? That's a lot to ask of anyone, let alone someone who's been told their whole life that this land is theirs by right and the people living on it are obstacles.
That's before we get to the more recent escalation. B'Tselem documented what they called an increased Israeli effort to complete ethnic cleansing of the South Hebron Hills during January 2026. Systematic violence and displacement. That's not random attacks by thugs. That's a campaign.
The language is strong, and I know people will push back on it. But the documentation is specific. Villages being emptied, access roads blocked, water sources damaged, shepherding grounds made inaccessible. And when Palestinian families leave — which is the point — they're replaced by settler outposts. Sometimes within days. The distinction between settler violence and state policy starts to collapse when the outcome is the same and nobody in uniform stops it. When a family leaves because their water has been poisoned and their sheep have been stolen and their children are terrified, and then a settler outpost appears on that land with military protection, it's very hard to argue that what happened was just some criminal activity the state failed to prevent. It looks a lot more like a division of labor.
Let me push on one thing, because Daniel's asking about solutions too. The US and EU have imposed sanctions on settler leaders in the last couple of years. Has that changed anything on the ground?
Not in terms of Israeli enforcement patterns. The sanctions target individuals — visa bans, asset freezes — and they're symbolically significant. They signal that the international community sees a problem the Israeli government won't address. But they haven't shifted the domestic political calculus. If anything, they've been used by the right wing as evidence that the international community is hostile and can't be trusted, which hardens the political dynamic further. The sanctioned settlers become heroes. They get fundraising campaigns. They get speaking invitations. It's almost a badge of honor.
External pressure hasn't worked. Internal accountability doesn't exist. The jurisdictional structure is designed for inaction. Where does that leave us?
It leaves us with a system where the question isn't "why does enforcement fail" but "is the system designed to fail." And I think the evidence points toward yes — not necessarily in the sense of a conspiratorial master plan where someone sat down in 1982 and drew up a blueprint, but in the sense that no one with power has ever had both the means and the motive to fix it. The people who could fix it benefit politically from not fixing it. The people who want it fixed don't have the authority. And the victims have no recourse. That's a stable equilibrium. It's been stable for forty years.
Let's spell it out. Palestinians in the West Bank are under military law — they can be detained without charge, tried in military courts with conviction rates over ninety-nine percent. Settlers get Israeli civilian law, with all the procedural protections that implies — habeas corpus, evidentiary standards, appeals courts, the whole thing. So you've got one population that faces near-certain prosecution and another that faces near-certain impunity, living on the same hills.
When a settler is charged — which happens in less than ten percent of cases — they go through the Israeli civilian court system, which means proper evidentiary standards, defense lawyers, appeals. The system is working as designed for them. For Palestinians filing complaints, the obstacles are enormous. They have to file at Israeli police stations that are often inside settlements, meaning they need permits just to get there. Permits that are hard to get. Then they need to find a translator. Witnesses are afraid to testify because they've seen what happens to people who do. Evidence gets lost. Investigations drag on for years and then get closed. And even if a case somehow survives all of that, the complainant has to navigate a legal system in a language they don't speak, in courts they need special permission to enter, with lawyers they can barely afford.
Even the ten percent of cases that get opened aren't necessarily going anywhere.
Yesh Din's data shows that even among opened cases, the attrition rate is brutal. Cases get closed for "lack of evidence" or "unknown perpetrator" even when there's video. The standard of evidence that would be sufficient for a Palestinian defendant is somehow never sufficient for a settler defendant. And look, I want to be precise here — we're not talking about a system where someone is sitting in a room saying "let's protect the settlers." It's more subtle than that. It's a system where the default settings are all calibrated in one direction. The burden is always on the Palestinian complainant to prove everything, overcome every obstacle, jump through every hoop. And the system never reaches out to help. It waits for the complainant to fail, and then closes the file.
That's the thing that's hard to explain away as bureaucratic inefficiency. When the standard shifts depending on who the accused is, that's not inefficiency. That's a structural bias.
No, it's discrimination built into the enforcement machinery. And it's been documented so thoroughly, by so many organizations, over so many years, that pleading ignorance stopped being plausible a long time ago. Everyone in the system knows. The police know. The military prosecution knows. The political echelon knows. The question is what they choose to do with that knowledge. And the answer, for forty years, has been: nothing.
Which brings us to a jurisdictional puzzle that our producer Hilbert knows more about than he probably wants to. Hilbert, you were inside this system. You saw the machinery from the inside. Tell us about two thousand three.
Hilbert: Two thousand three. I was a civilian contractor for the Israel Police. They hired a small team — maybe six of us — to map jurisdictional boundaries in the West Bank. The specific question was: which force had authority on which road, which village, which hilltop. The idea was to build a database that would tell every patrol, every dispatcher, exactly who was responsible for what. No more jurisdictional fog. No more pointing fingers.
A database that would eliminate the ambiguity. That was the official goal.
Hilbert: That was the pitch. We spent fourteen months on it. Drove every road we could get access to. Some of them we couldn't — settlers had blocked them, or the army had them closed, or they were just too dangerous. We mapped anyway, using satellite imagery and old British mandate survey maps. The British had done incredibly detailed surveys in the 1940s. We overlaid those with modern satellite data and ground-truthing. By the end we had a complete jurisdictional map of Area C, down to the individual structure level. Every house, every barn, every water tower.
What happened to it?
Hilbert: It was finished. Tested. Approved by the technical team. And then shelved. Never deployed operationally. The official reason was budget — no money to integrate it into the dispatch system. The real reason, and everyone on the project knew it, was that nobody wanted to know the answer. If you know exactly who's responsible for every meter of road, you can't pretend it's someone else's job when something happens. The ambiguity is the point. It's the grease that keeps the machine running.
The ambiguity was the point.
Hilbert: I had one map — I still have it — that showed a single olive grove near Yatta where jurisdiction switched three times depending on which side of the tree you stood on. The east side was IDF. The west side was police. The access road was border police. Three different forces for one grove. That's not a bug — that's the whole system. You build a jurisdiction that no one can navigate, and then you act surprised when enforcement doesn't happen. It's like designing a car with three steering wheels and then wondering why it keeps crashing.
That's an almost perfect metaphor. Three steering wheels, and each driver thinks one of the others has control.
Hilbert: If you ask who's driving, they all point at each other. Meanwhile the car is heading straight for the village. I saw it happen. We all saw it happen. And we built the tool that would have fixed it, and they put it in a box.
Do you still have the maps?
Hilbert: They're in my garage. Six boxes of them. Nobody ever asked for them back. I kept a set because I knew — I knew — that if I didn't, they'd disappear. And I wanted a record. I wanted proof that someone had tried.
The institutional failure has a paper trail. Literally. Six boxes of it in Hilbert's garage.
Hilbert: The database still exists somewhere on a police server, I assume. I checked a few years ago and the files were still there, just never connected to anything operational. But the maps — those were the working documents. Hand-annotated, updated as things changed on the ground. Which they did, constantly. A new outpost goes up, the jurisdictional lines shift. A road gets blocked, the patrol route changes. We were mapping a moving target, and the people who commissioned the project knew that. They just didn't want the finished product to exist in a usable form. Because a usable map would create accountability.
Connect those dots. How does a map create accountability?
Hilbert: A usable map creates a record. Someone calls in an attack, the dispatcher pulls up the grid, the system says which force is responsible, and that force either responds or it doesn't. If it doesn't, there's a record of that. A timestamp. A log entry. Someone can go back later and say: the system identified this as a police jurisdiction, the police were notified at 2:14 AM, and they didn't arrive until 6:30 AM. Why? The current system — and I mean current, I doubt much has changed — is designed to avoid creating records. No record, no accountability. No accountability, no problem.
The police leadership at the time — were they pushing for this to be deployed?
Hilbert: Some of them were. The project had a champion in the planning division, a deputy commissioner who wanted to fix the jurisdictional mess. He'd been dealing with these coordination failures for years and he was tired of it. He retired in two thousand five. His replacement canceled the deployment within three months. Said it was a waste of resources. Didn't even look at the final product, as far as I know. Just killed it. The maps went into storage, and I took a set home because I'd spent a year of my life on them and I wasn't going to watch them get thrown in a dumpster.
The system is designed to fail — and when someone tries to design a fix, the fix gets killed by the next person in the chair. Which leaves us with one last question. If external sanctions haven't changed enforcement patterns, and internal accountability mechanisms don't exist, and the jurisdictional structure is deliberately opaque, and attempts to fix it get buried — what would actually change things?
That's the hardest question. A change in political leadership might shift priorities, but the institutional inertia is enormous. You'd need a government willing to take on the settler movement directly, and that's a coalition-breaking proposition. A Supreme Court ruling could force the state to explain why it operates two justice systems in the same territory, but the court has been reluctant to wade into occupation law in a comprehensive way. They'll rule on specific cases — this checkpoint, that detention — but they won't touch the architecture.
Or the structure of the occupation itself is the barrier. As long as you have one population under military law and another under civilian law on the same land, the enforcement asymmetry is baked in. You can't fix the symptom without addressing the cause. The dual legal system isn't a flaw in the occupation — it is the occupation.
The footage from twenty twenty-six suggests things are moving in the opposite direction. The Khirbet Abu Falah attack wasn't a case of soldiers failing to stop settlers. It was soldiers and settlers operating together. The distinction between settler violence and state violence is collapsing. When you have combined operations — and that's what B'Tselem documented, a combined attack — you're not looking at a failure of enforcement anymore. You're looking at a merger. The mask is off.
That's the thing I keep coming back to. The official position is that settler violence is condemned, it's criminal, it's a few extremists. But the video shows soldiers and settlers attacking together. The prosecution data shows near-total impunity. The jurisdictional system is designed to avoid accountability. The political leadership has never paid a price for any of it. And when someone tries to build a tool that would fix even the technical part of the problem, the tool gets buried. At some point, the gap between the official position and the observable reality becomes the story. The gap is the story.
The misconception most people have is that settler violence is a new phenomenon driven by a fringe group of extremists. The reality is that it's been documented since the early nineteen eighties, it follows a consistent pattern of impunity, and the institutional and political structures that enable it have been in place for decades. The second misconception is that the IDF is simply unable to stop these attacks due to operational constraints. The failure is not logistical — it's institutional and political. Soldiers who intervene face consequences. Soldiers who stand aside do not. That's not an operational constraint. That's a choice.
It's a choice that's been made consistently, by successive governments, across the political spectrum, for forty years. The footage keeps coming. The prosecution rate stays at ten percent. The maps sit in Hilbert's garage. And the question Daniel asked — whose job is it to fix this — has an answer that nobody in power wants to give. It's everyone's job and no one's job. And that's not an accident.
We should thank Hilbert Flumingtop for producing, and for the maps that are still sitting in his garage apparently. Six boxes of accountability waiting for someone to ask for them.
This has been My Weird Prompts. If you want to reach us, email the show at show at my weird prompts dot com. We'll be back soon.
