The siege of two Palestinian families in the village of Qusra turned a local episode of settler violence into a crisis of state responsibility. Israeli soldiers repeatedly tried to remove the settlers, only to see them return. The military remained nearby but failed to provide the families with lasting security in their own homes.
Against that backdrop, Defense Minister Israel Katz proposed removing the army from the role of protecting Palestinians from violent Israeli settlers and transferring that responsibility to the police. On paper, it looks like an administrative adjustment. Politically, it could alter the very character of Israeli control over the occupied West Bank.
The complication is that Israel’s police answer to National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, one of the government’s most prominent representatives of the settler movement. He has openly praised those who establish unauthorized outposts while repeatedly minimizing the broader scale of violence directed at Palestinians.
As **Daycom** has previously noted, the West Bank increasingly resembles not a territory temporarily administered under military occupation, but a space being absorbed through institutions. Changing which arm of the Israeli state is responsible for policing Palestinians could become another step in that process.
Under international humanitarian law, the occupying power bears responsibility for protecting civilians in territory under its control. Since Israel captured the West Bank in 1967, the military has remained the principal institution capable of enforcing order across dozens of Palestinian communities.
Transferring that role to the police presents an immediate practical problem. Police resources in the West Bank are smaller, and the political chain of command raises questions about whether the system would confront violent settlers as forcefully as it confronts Palestinians.
Qusra made that contradiction unusually visible. Settlers erected a tent near one of the besieged homes even after the military had declared the area a closed zone. Soldiers dismantled the structure, but those creating the threat remained nearby.
At that point, the issue was no longer a shortage of force. The Israeli military is capable of complex operations across large areas, yet it struggled to guarantee that two families could safely remain inside their own homes.
That points to a different weakness: political uncertainty over whether the state is prepared to confront the violent edge of the settler movement at all.
For years, Israeli governments have portrayed settler attacks as the work of a small fringe. That framing made it possible to separate violence from the broader settlement project and avoid the question of systemic responsibility.
But the scale of the problem has changed. Palestinians have been killed in settler attacks, while beatings and the burning of homes, vehicles and mosques have become recurring features of the conflict. The more often such incidents occur without swift arrests or meaningful punishment, the less convincing the argument about a handful of extremists becomes.
Inside the Israeli military, the frustration is also becoming more public. Hundreds of reservists have urged the armed forces to act decisively against nationalist violence, which a growing number of Israelis now describe as “Jewish terrorism.”
Their complaint is not directed only at the attackers. Soldiers are repeatedly placed between Palestinian civilians and armed or aggressive Israelis without a clear political signal about how far they are permitted to go in restraining settlers.
That creates one of the most dangerous forms of institutional paralysis: security forces possess the means to act but cannot be certain that political leaders will support them after they use those means against citizens of their own state.
Former police commanders have raised similar concerns about political influence. Israeli police have confronted settlers forcefully in the past. The question now is whether commanders can be expected to do the same under a minister who publicly admires people establishing new outposts.
Katz’s proposal is therefore much more than a bureaucratic dispute between two agencies. If the army withdraws from direct responsibility and civilian police assume a greater role, the line between military occupation and de facto annexation could blur further.
Israeli settlements in the West Bank already possess roads, local governments, civilian services and political representation. Transferring additional responsibilities from military administration to Israeli civilian institutions would deepen that integration without requiring a formal declaration of annexation.
For Palestinians, this creates a stark problem. Their safety would become increasingly dependent on institutions of a state whose government includes political forces openly committed to expanding the settlement enterprise.
The dispute over Qusra is also unfolding in the middle of an election campaign. Settler violence has become a test of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and of its willingness to enforce the law against one of its own political constituencies.
Opposition figures are using the crisis as evidence that the state is losing control. Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, himself deeply rooted in settler politics, has described such attacks as terrorism and argued that Israel should suppress them without waiting for pressure from abroad.
Gadi Eisenkot, the former military chief who has emerged as a leading contender for prime minister, has framed Qusra as a sign of government weakness. His criticism goes to the heart of the problem: the state is leaving the army to manage a political conflict that civilian leaders refuse to define clearly.
Ben-Gvir offers the opposite interpretation. He acknowledges that some settlers should be arrested, but insists that the central threat comes from Palestinian violence. The creation of new outposts remains, in his worldview, not a security problem but a positive ideological project.
That divide helps explain why enforcement is so inconsistent. To one part of the state, violent settlers are lawbreakers. To another, they are the vanguard of a territorial project worthy of political protection.
When those two logics coexist inside the same government, law enforcement becomes selective. Soldiers receive contradictory instructions, police operate under political pressure, and judicial penalties often fail to create meaningful deterrence.
The result threatens more than Palestinian security. It weakens the Israeli state’s ability to claim that it controls the use of force consistently across the territory it governs.
Qusra is revealing precisely because the immediate confrontation is so small. This is not a mass uprising or a battle involving thousands of armed men. Two families and a group of settlers were enough to expose deep contradictions between the army, police and political leadership.
Israel may possess one of the region’s most powerful militaries, but military superiority cannot solve a problem if the state has not decided against whom it is prepared to use its authority.
That is why settler violence is becoming less a question of isolated attacks and more a question about the nature of Israeli rule in the West Bank.
If the authorities are unwilling to protect Palestinians from violent Israeli civilians, then the issue is no longer whether the army or the police is more effective.
It is whether the state still sees itself as an arbiter between two populations — or is increasingly choosing the side of one against the other.
