Israeli Press
Jerusalem Post says Katz never cleared his settler-policing plan with commanders
Image credit: Israel Katz — Itzhak Harari via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0) · License
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Israel's defence minister announced during the Qusra siege that the army would hand responsibility for settler violence to the Israeli police. The Jerusalem Post reported on Tuesday that he had not asked the army first.
Yonah Jeremy Bob and Jonah Davidov wrote that Israel Katz made the announcement without coordinating it with the relevant military authorities, and that until a meeting on Monday many of the officers involved did not even understand what was being proposed.
The paper set out the obstacles in the way. The IDF's Central Command holds ultimate authority in the West Bank under the law of belligerent occupation, which makes a straight transfer to a civilian police force a legal question rather than an administrative one.
Mixed incidents raise a second problem the paper put plainly: if settlers and Palestinians clash, the army cannot handle only the Palestinian half while the police handle only the Jewish half.
Bob and Davidov also expect resistance from the army's legal division, the attorney-general's office and Israeli human rights organisations, and they noted that petitions to the High Court, American diplomatic pressure and the October election could each delay the plan or end it. Negotiations, the paper wrote, could take months.
The paper's editorial board goes further#
The Jerusalem Post's editorial board devoted its Tuesday column to the same order and called the announcement a mistake in its own right.
The idea is worth discussing, the editorial said, but a change this radical in an arena this volatile should not be announced before it has been planned. It listed the legal questions, the manpower the police do not have, the operational difficulties and the likelihood of a High Court challenge, and concluded that the combination could delay, dilute or block the transfer entirely.
What the argument is actually about#
Katz framed the order as a division of labour when he issued it. The army's job is to fight Palestinian armed groups and defend the borders and the settlements, he said; all responsibility for civilian matters and public order would go to the police.
The reason it arrived when it did is documented on one hill. Settlers besieged three houses at Ras al-Ein in Qusra from 9 August, and the army did not remove them — the same failure that has now drawn a public rebuke from the American ambassador and a run of critical Israeli coverage.
For Palestinians in the West Bank the substance of the dispute is narrower than the language suggests. Both bodies in the argument already exist, both already operate in the same territory, and the record of each on settler violence is a matter of published numbers rather than of intention.
The police answer to Itamar Ben Gvir, whom IDF and Shin Bet officials have repeatedly accused of obstructing the arrest and prosecution of violent settlers — an accusation the Jerusalem Post recalled in the same report.
What has not been proposed, in either the ministry's order or the papers arguing about it, is a change to the legal architecture underneath: Palestinians in the West Bank remain subject to military law and military courts, and Israeli settlers on the same ground remain subject to Israeli civil law. Tuesday's argument was over which Israeli force enforces the second system, not over the existence of the first.
