Settler violence in the West Bank is no longer a story confined to left-leaning media. In recent months, it has opened prime-time broadcasts on major Israeli channels, been documented by international cameras, and acknowledged by the security establishment itself. Yet the question most coverage avoids is a different one: what allows it to happen again and again. The incident in Tayasir is a good place to begin asking it, not because it is exceptional, but because it is one of a series of recent events pointing to a pattern still unfolding in these very weeks.

On March 26, settlers established an outpost and attacked Palestinians with clubs in the village of Tayasir in the northern West Bank. Israeli forces arrived hours later. They did not dismantle the outpost. They did not arrest the attackers. The force that arrived pushed away a CNN crew. One soldier came up from behind photographer Cyril Theophilos and put him in a chokehold, bringing him to the ground. Another, who identified himself as Meir, explained to a reporter, with the calm tone of someone discussing a development timeline: “It will become a legal settlement, slowly, slowly.”

In a prolonged wartime reality, the tendency to view every event through a security prism intensifies. Precisely for that reason, however, the ability to distinguish between a threat and a violation of the law becomes more critical, not less. When........

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