The failure of the Israeli government to restore state authority has drawn the attention of the world and the international community to the scale of the flaws and contradictions that now govern Israeli society today. The problem is not merely related to the field failure of the Israeli army, police, and Shin Bet, but rather to state policy in dealing with settler terrorism in the West Bank since October 7th. This has manifested in widespread criticism that was not limited to human rights organizations; rather, voices of condemnation and denunciation of settler attacks were heard from allied governments and even from within the Israeli domestic front—which is preparing for elections—that showed a different handling of institutions, in terms of assaulting police officers and causing injuries among their ranks by settlers.
In other words, it demonstrated the decline in the deterrence capability of the occupation forces regarding settler attacks, the increase in deliberate settlement expansion movements, and consequently the increase in internal security burdens to be added to security challenges whose scope is expanding to reach the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the Arabian Sea, the Gulf, the Mediterranean Sea, and others.
UN figures speak for themselves as a result of the increase in settler terrorism and attacks. The United Nations warned two months ago of the increasing pace of these attacks against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, with more than 1,430 attack incidents documented during the current year, alongside the displacement of large numbers of Palestinians as a result of these attacks and operations to evacuate Palestinians from their homes. Furthermore, an analysis published by the Washington Institute concluded that settler attacks have witnessed an increase in scale, organization, and severity over the past three years.
Here, the international dimension of the issue emerges. The scenes of settlers dreaming of implementing their ideological projects in the occupied West Bank while defying the occupation forces, preventing the implementation of an Israeli Supreme Court ruling, burning Palestinian properties, and uprooting their trees, while the state fails to return Palestinians to their homes—each incident of this type does not remain confined to a Palestinian village, but quickly transforms into an image spreading across global media, adding a new layer of criticism directed at Israel regarding its policy in the occupied Palestinian territories. The events of Jalud came at a time when international criticism of settler terrorism is escalating, making the ability of the occupation institutions to contain the repercussions of these events even more difficult.
All of this imposes a difficult equation on the occupation government amidst fierce elections whose aftermath will be significant. The international community has begun to grow weary of worn-out justifications that these cases are individual and isolated, which serve to cover up the government's inability to halt these attacks and its laxity in upholding the rule of law—something Israeli governments boast about as a democratic state that maintains the rule of law. What happened in Jalud is not a battle over a Palestinian house or village; rather, it is a battle that reveals the true face of Israeli society as it trends toward extremism and exposes intentions and policies toward the occupied West Bank that become apparent to the international community day after day.
