A sovereign state alone determines where its soldiers fight, which civilian presence it can defend and how it resolves the political future of millions of Palestinians. No faction may manufacture danger, commandeer the army, convert casualties into political authority and bind future governments through a rewritten past.

On Friday, a group of armed settlers entered a Palestinian area near the village of Tell in Samaria, the northern West Bank. Not a military mission, not an operational need and not the defence of a community: a provocation. The IDF had to divert forces from their missions and extract the instigators. Major Yuval Ezra was killed.

Benyahu Malt was not the soldier the state sent into that arena; he was one of its instigators. The army paid the price.

Months earlier, the pattern recurred in Lebanon. Zeev Ehrlich was brought into a combat zone for an archaeological tour. An IDF force encountered the enemy, and Sergeant Gur Kehati was killed. There too, a civilian initiative diverted the force from its mission and turned a soldier into a rescuer.

In both, the story was rewritten: those who created the danger were cast as its victims, while the soldiers who died were conscripted posthumously to justify the ventures that had dragged them to their deaths. Myth replaced inquiry, halo replaced accountability, and disaster licensed the next adventure.

Whoever........

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