This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.

In the village of Jalud near Nablus on Monday, a group of settler extremists reportedly set fire to a building and beat up a 14-year-old Palestinian boy, in what nowadays constitutes a relatively minor incident of Jewish violence in the West Bank.

According to Army Radio reporting, some 12 settlers were involved in the attack, and Israeli soldiers stood by and watched for several minutes while it was going on. Army Radio said the soldiers (un)involved were from a reservist unit trained in handling nuclear, biological, and chemical materials (abach in Hebrew) rather than in confronting Palestinian or Jewish terrorism, but were deployed to the West Bank because of the IDF’s chronic manpower shortage.

In a statement, the IDF confirmed that a Palestinian had been injured in the incident “and evacuated for medical treatment.” It said that the troops “acted to disperse the gathering using crowd control measures, questioned the civilians at the scene, and detained an Israeli civilian, who will be transferred for further handling by Israel Police.”

One Israeli was indeed arrested. He was brought to court and released on Tuesday.

The radio outlet’s military reporter added on Wednesday morning that many of the assailants made no attempt to hide their faces, evidently unconcerned by the possibility that they would be detained, much less brought to justice. He further noted that the identities of many settler extremists involved in a soaring number of attacks on Palestinian civilians in recent weeks are known to the Shin Bet security service, which has not been taking concerted action against them.

With Jewish terror in the West Bank thus largely unconstrained, the left-wing Yesh Din human rights organization reported earlier this month that there were 378 incidents of settler violence against Palestinians and their property during the nearly six weeks of the war with Iran between February 28 and April 8, when national attention was elsewhere, in which eight Palestinians were shot and killed, and 200 were injured.

The IDF’s Chief of Staff, Eyal Zamir, last month condemned settler violence, which has also seen attacks on soldiers, calling it “morally and ethically unacceptable” and noting dryly that it was also a major strategic impediment. But he has proved unable to tackle it effectively.

The IDF is supposed to intervene, and to detain the perpetrators of such attacks, but broadly prefers that the police make such arrests. And the principal responsibility, and some of the capacity, indeed, rests with the police and the Shin Bet. Both the police and the Shin Bet are legally permitted, for instance, to gather intelligence on Jewish citizens in the West Bank; the IDF is not.

In the complex, confusing distribution of responsibility and authority in the West Bank, the paramilitary Border Police are supposedly subordinate to the IDF. The blue-uniformed Israel Police has a Judea and Samaria District force, responsible for a very large area with a relatively small number of personnel. Even were these various components of Israel’s defense and security apparatus encouraged by their senior commanders and political masters to try to crack down on........

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