What is Actually Going on in Qusra?

It’s the end of August. Chofesh hagadol is over, thank God, and tomorrow morning the kids go back to school. In Jerusalem that means moving season is at its peak, because nobody switches apartments in the middle of a school year, which in turn means the pakachim are out in force writing tickets to moving vans parked exactly where moving vans have always parked. Next Sunday the courts come back to full capacity, after the recess that runs from July 21 through September 5 every year, partly because judges have children too and there’s nowhere to put them. And ten days ago the Green Line (Not THAT Green Line!) finally opened, the first new light rail line in this city in fifteen years, seven kilometers from HaTurim down to Malha, only about a decade behind schedule. They handed out popsicles at the new stations. You can now get to Teddy Stadium, the Pais Arena and Malcha Mall without a car.

Not on game days, though. The station next to Teddy shuts during major matches and concerts and everyone gets walked over to the Malha Mall station instead, for reasons of security and crowd control. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. But do contemplate that for a second, because I’m going to come back to it. This is a state that plans crowd control for a soccer match.

School calendars, parking enforcement, court recesses, a tram line. Boring, unglamorous, functioning government, all of it happening this week, in a country that is simultaneously in the middle of an election campaign and a war. It works. Mostly it works.

An hour or so north of my apartment there is a Palestinian village called Qusra, and it does not work there at all. Saturday afternoon, dozens of Israeli settlers walked into Qusra, southeast of Nablus, started throwing stones at a house, and then took the house over while the family was still inside. The owner is a man named Louay Adli. He told CNN that he called the police, and that while he was on the phone the crowd outside kept growing until there were sixty or seventy men. He and six other people ended up on the roof because they couldn’t breathe inside. Video CNN obtained appears to show settlers throwing rocks at one side of the house while soldiers worked the other side.

Then Israeli security forces arrested Adli. Blindfolded him. Warned him not to go back to his own house. He wasn’t the only one. Saddam Oday, another man trapped in that house, told the Times of Israel the army fired tear gas inside and detained the residents while letting him go, and Ynet reported six Palestinians detained on Saturday while the IDF and Border Police announced no detainees at all.

The army says it found dozens of rioters barricaded inside a Palestinian home and dispersed them using various means. N12 reported last night that more than seventy people took part, that the Shin Bet and the police have the names of some of the organizers, and that arrest warrants have been issued. Some of the suspects are in hiding, and locals are helping them stay hidden.

It’s Monday. Warrants out, names known, faces on video, and not one arrest.

I should say why I’m writing this, because I hadn’t planned to. A friend sort of asked me to. She’s American, she made aliyah years ago, she’s raising her kids here, and she has been a Zionist her entire adult life. Yesterday she put a question up in public: could somebody please explain what is actually happening in Qusra. No slogans, she said. No propaganda from either direction. She’d read the reporting and still couldn’t find a serious account from the settlers involved, or from anyone who actually knew the ground. Why that house. Why that village. What happened before the part we’re all being shown.

What came back was a comment thread.

She then went and did the work herself, which is more than most of the people answering her had done. This is the answer I owed her, written out properly, relying on decades of my own efforts to present the whole situation as fairly as possible. And here’s the whole thing, as fairly as I know how. What happened, what each side says about it, and then the question I actually care about, which is how sixty men take an occupied house in daylight, in front of the army and the police, in a country that can work out how to move ten thousand football fans away from a tram station.

What happened

Qusra is a village of about 5,400 people in the Nablus Governorate. The houses at the center of this story are in Area B, which under Oslo II means Palestinian civil jurisdiction and Israeli security control. Israeli settlement there isn’t permitted. Not under international law, and not under Israeli law either, which is the part that matters for everything that follows.

In January, a group of Israelis put up an outpost called Tel Talpiot on the hill above those houses. Illegal. Dror Etkes of Kerem Navot, which has monitored settlement construction for years, points out that the hill sits at a strategic point between six Palestinian villages, which lets you dominate a lot of farmland and squeeze those villages back toward their built-up cores. Haaretz counted around thirty outposts in Area B now. Tel Talpiot isn’t a one-off. It’s a method.

August 4, shortly before midnight. A Palestinian American family named Abu Ridi had hired contractors to put a fence around their property. The contractors were working when settlers drove up on an ATV. The family called the police. Soldiers came, and arrested the workers. The settlers who were trespassing left on their own, unescorted. There’s security camera footage, published by The Intercept, and the army’s response was that the soldiers’ conduct didn’t meet IDF standards.

August 9. Israelis affiliated with Tel Talpiot set up structures at the entrances to three houses on the edge of the village. Over the next few days somebody cut the cables connecting those houses to the electricity grid and to their own solar panels, and damaged the water pipes. About fifteen people from two families were stuck inside, including at least two children.

August 12. The army’s first real attempt to clear the outpost didn’t work. Overnight they came back, took the structures down and detained one Israeli. Footage from earlier that week appeared to show soldiers praying with the settlers instead of removing them. The IDF said it would take disciplinary action.

August 13, and this one is worth sitting with. The army ordered the residents out of two of the houses, and then backtracked. Some of them said afterward that they still hadn’t been let back in.

August 14. Dozens of Israeli activists, Jews, showed up with food for the besieged families and had to leave it a few meters short of the entrances, because the Border Police stationed there wouldn’t let them hand it over. The same day, Border Police took down yet another structure the settlers had erected. No arrests. Also the same day, France publicly called on Israel to arrest and prosecute the people doing this.

August 17. A UNICEF team finally got water, food, medicine and hygiene supplies through, and municipal crews repaired the lines that had been cut. Loui Ridi, the American citizen who owns one of the houses, flew in from Ohio to sit in it himself.

August 19. Haaretz reported that roughly fifteen settlers were still moving around inside the closed military zone, on friendly terms with the soldiers guarding it. An Israeli anti-occupation activist who entered a closed zone elsewhere that day was arrested.

Al Jazeera has also reported that the army put a gate on Qusra’s main entrance and added three roadblocks at Ras al-Ain in the last week of August, cutting farmers off from the land below. I couldn’t find that in any Israeli outlet or wire service, so weigh it however you weigh Al Jazeera. The closed military zone itself is confirmed by the Times of Israel.

Then Saturday, which you already know about. Same day, in the neighboring village of Jalud, settlers went after a Palestinian family and the NBC News crew that had come to interview them. A woman was hospitalized in Qusra. At least five Palestinians were hurt in settler attacks across the West Bank that day, and the Jerusalem Post put it at eight.

The case for the hilltop

Somebody should make the settlers’ argument, so here it is, made mostly by Elisha Yered, a veteran outpost activist who’s become the closest thing this crowd has to a spokesman.

Yered says the hill is high ground with real strategic value. He says they believed the Palestinian Authority was paving roads up there and putting up buildings in order to take control of the area, so they got there first. He says there have been terror attacks on settlers at the site since the outpost went up. And he denies that the canopy they erected near the families’ houses stopped anyone from coming or going. He told JNS that the whole thing began when Jewish shepherds put up a shade structure on the slopes during the heat wave, that nobody acted violently toward the family, and that nobody prevented them from leaving or returning home.

Preemption, a land claim, self-defense. It’s a coherent argument and you should take it seriously enough to notice what it doesn’t cover, which is cutting a family’s water.

One thing about Yered that I think you’re owed, having just read his case. In August 2023 he was one of two Israelis arrested on suspicion of causing the death of Qusai Maatan, a 19-year-old Palestinian killed during confrontations in the village of Burqa. He was later released. Before that he’d been the spokesman for Otzma Yehudit MK Limor Son Har-Melech, and he has written publicly that Hawara should be erased with no apology, that the enemy needs to bathe in his blood, and that if the security establishment won’t take revenge then brave Jews will rise and do it themselves. That doesn’t make his argument about the hilltop wrong. It’s context you should have while you weigh it.

Three claims, and where they come from

There’s a second version of this story going around Israeli Facebook and WhatsApp right now, and it’s being passed along by sincere people who feel, not unreasonably, that the coverage they’re reading is missing something. I chased the three load-bearing claims. Here’s where I landed.

That there was gunfire from the besieged house toward the Jewish hilltop, and rocks thrown at Israelis from around the property. This one has names on it. Yered told JNS in mid-August that gunfire had been directed at Tel Talpiot from the vicinity of the home several weeks earlier, and that Palestinians had planted explosive devices in the area. The Israel Guys, the media arm of HaYovel, an evangelical organization that has brought Christian volunteers to work in Samaria since 2004, made the same claim in a video, with the presenter saying a source had sent him footage of roughly ten shots fired from the house, of which only the last few were caught on camera.

So it isn’t a rumor with nobody standing behind it. What it also isn’t is confirmed. No date, no incident, no injury, no police statement, no IDF statement, and no reported investigation into shots being fired at an outpost, which is not the kind of thing that usually passes without comment.

I’ll give the claim this much, though, because it isn’t invented out of nothing. Palestinians in Qusra throwing stones at Israelis who come onto village land is real and it’s old. When the farmer Mahmoud Odeh was shot dead near Qusra in 2017, the IDF’s own account of that day was that dozens of Palestinians had thrown rocks at an Israeli youth group hiking in the area. That’s a genuine pattern, which is exactly why a 2026 version of it travels so easily.

That Qusai Abu Ridi, the brother who actually lives in the house, was filmed taking part in an assault on a Jewish shepherd who was held down while somebody raised a pickaxe over his head. This comes from the same video, where the presenter says the owner of the house tried to decapitate a Jewish shepherd with a hoe and was stopped in time by rescue forces. Two problems arrive before you even get to the evidence. Qusai Abu Ridi is not the owner of the house. His brother Loui is. And the presenter says footage exists but doesn’t play it, in a segment where he does play the gunfire clip. Beyond that I found nothing. No report, no police statement, no charge, in any language.

There’s also a specific trap here worth naming: the Palestinian teenager whose death Elisha Yered was arrested over in 2023 was named Qusai Maatan. The brother in the Qusra house is named Qusai Abu Ridi. Two different men, one killed and one under siege, and one first name between them. That is precisely how a comment thread produces a fact.

Assaults on Jewish shepherds by Palestinians are not a fantasy. There are documented, named, dated incidents this year in Binyamin, in Har Hevron, in Gush Etzion, some of them serious, most of them barely covered. I found none in Qusra and none involving anybody named Abu Ridi.

That the house is a nearly million-dollar mansion. The video that seeded most of this calls it a villa built by a wealthy Palestinian-American and never puts a number on it anywhere. The million appears to have been added somewhere downstream, by somebody else, after the claim left the video. No valuation exists in any source I can find, in any language. What does exist: Loui Ridi told CBS News he started building it in 2023 on land his family owns, because he wanted his daughters to have a home in the village he grew up in. The Times of Israel describes it as the house he has been building, present tense. And Ynet reported that construction stopped when the contractor and his workers walked off the job because they feared for their lives. Big, unfinished, and unpriced.

Not finding something isn’t the same as it being false, and I’d genuinely like to hear from anyone who has the footage. But apply the test that actually matters here. Israel holds security control in Area B and arrests Palestinians there routinely, on considerably less. If there were video of Qusai Abu Ridi swinging a hoe at a Jewish shepherd’s head, he would not have spent August giving interviews to CNN and the Times of Israel while soldiers stood outside his door. He’d be in Ofer. If ten rounds had been fired at Tel Talpiot from that building, there would have been an operation, not a stalemate. The absence of any arrest doesn’t prove the claims are false. It’s a very loud silence.

It’s also worth weighing what the same sources say about the parts we can check. The video says the reports that power was cut and food was running short seem unlikely and aren’t backed by any evidence. Those are documented by JTA, by Walla, by the UN team that had to deliver water, food and medicine on August 17, and by the municipal crews that came out to repair the severed lines. Yered told JNS that nobody prevented the family from leaving or returning home, which is contradicted by the residents, by the UN, by AP photographers, and by the IDF’s own investigation, one strand of which is examining how those families came to be evacuated from their own houses. Neither of them checked. They assessed.

One more thing about the timing. That video went up around August 12, when the story really was a handful of teenagers under a tarp, and its argument was that the international outcry was wildly overblown. Seventeen days later, seventy men took a house.

And here’s the part that matters most. Suppose every one of those three claims turns out to be true tomorrow. Suppose there was gunfire, and Qusai Abu Ridi is on video with a hoe, and somebody produces an appraisal. None of it would explain cutting the water to a house with children in it, none of it would explain three weeks of siege, and none of it would be a defense to sixty men taking somebody’s home on a Saturday afternoon. We have courts for the first two. Context tells you how a situation got here. It doesn’t tell you that what happened next was okay.

Updated September 1. An earlier version of this post said, of the claim that gunfire came from the house: “I couldn’t find this anywhere. Not in Hebrew, not in English, not in the settler press, not from the IDF, not from the police.” That was wrong, and I’ve removed it. Elisha Yered made the claim to JNS in mid-August, and The Israel Guys made it in a video around the same time. Two named sources, not a rumor in a group chat, and I should have found them. What hasn’t changed is that no police statement, IDF statement, investigation or arrest has ever been reported in connection with any of it.

The part nobody outside Israel is reporting

Yisrael Ganz runs the Yesha Council, the umbrella body for the settlement municipalities, and heads the Binyamin Regional Council. He is not a moderate. In the same breath in which he denounced Qusra he demanded the government cancel Oslo outright and permit Jewish building across every open area of the West Bank.

And he said the events in Qusra were serious, and not the movement’s way, and that nobody gets to privately decide to plant an outpost in the yard of somebody’s house, even when there’s a claim that the house is illegal, even when there’s a fight over the land. No justification, he said, for violence against uninvolved people or against the security forces.

Shai Alon, who heads the Beit El council, went on Ynet and called them criminals who are doing damage to Israel and to the settlement enterprise that can’t be undone.

Mike Huckabee, the American ambassador, a man who has supported Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria his entire public life, called the people besieging those houses Israeli terrorists. Then he amplified Ganz and came up with a distinction: settlers aren’t the problem, unsettlers are.

Even Ben Gvir, who runs the police, told Reshet Bet that he admires the people building outposts but that some of them need to be stopped.

In sum, that’s the Yesha Council, Beit El, the American ambassador and the national security minister, all on the record, all before Saturday. Hold onto that, because I’m going to come back to how long it lasted.

What Qusra Says

Youssef Hassan, whose house was one of the three, described settlers coming at night to look in the windows and shout, and said he was afraid the family’s food would run out. Qusai Abu Ridi said that after three weeks nobody in the house was sleeping, that they stayed up watching the security camera feed because the settlers could show up at any hour. His brother Loui, the one who flew in from Ohio, said they were still under siege with the military all around the house.

Abdel Azim Wadi, Qusra’s mayor, says the army has been protecting the settlers rather than removing them, and he points at the footage of soldiers praying with them.

What the residents are actually afraid of isn’t the next stone. It’s that this has a shape and they’ve seen the shape before. Mahmoud Tubasi, from Jalud one village over, told +972 that settlers from Tel Talpiot put up an outpost next to his house in April and later tried to set it on fire, and that in July they took over another house between his property and the village and besieged him for more than two weeks so he couldn’t go out for food or water. Same outpost. Same method. Loui Ridi’s own neighbor already left. The fear in Qusra is that once the reporters go home, the thing finishes.

One more, and I’ll flag the source: +972 Magazine, which has a clear point of view and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. They report that in March alone an armed settler killed Amir Odeh on the road leading to these very houses, and that a settler serving as a soldier killed two brothers in nearby Qaryut. The incidents are documented. Read the outlet with whatever grain of salt you keep on hand.

The army

Nobody can accuse the IDF brass of staying quiet about this.

Back in March, Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir called settler violence morally and ethically unacceptable, said it was intolerable that in the middle of a multi-front war the army has to deal with a threatening minority from within, and told the authorities to uproot it. During the siege he ran a situational assessment, sent an infantry battalion, and ordered every force in the West Bank to review its rules of conduct and use of force.

On August 14 the IDF spokesperson’s office confirmed to the Jerusalem Post that Qusra would be investigated and the findings brought to Zamir. Serious incident, the representative said. It will be investigated. Per N12, the probe covers why it took soldiers 48 hours to clear the outpost the first time, why it took another day to clear it again after the extremists came back, the conduct of the troops who were sent to evacuate it and didn’t, and the way the Palestinian families got evacuated from their own homes after being told to leave.

That was two weeks before Saturday.

On Thursday, two days before Saturday, Zamir ordered an elevated level of readiness across the West Bank because of escalating tensions, including preparation for immediate deployment of extra units and battalions.

And then an outpost sat in a family’s yard for three weeks and sixty men took a house on Saturday and left. When CNN asked about Adli, the arrested homeowner, the army said it had used proportionate force against a Palestinian who was resisting and throwing stones.

Part of the gap here really is structural, and I don’t want to be unfair about it. Israel never annexed the West Bank, so enforcement authority sits with the military, but soldiers aren’t trained or authorized to arrest Israeli civilians. They can hold someone briefly and hand him to the police, who frequently let him go without charges. Security officials have described the resulting blind spots themselves. The army is responsible in Areas A and B, the police in Area C, and the delays in coordinating police entry are long enough that the evidence goes cold.

But then there’s the other part. In May, Central Command chief Avi Bluth admitted out loud that there’s discrimination to some extent in how Israeli and Palestinian stone-throwers get handled, and noted that any incident where soldiers open fire on Jewish stone-throwers has severe consequences for the soldiers. Put yourself in the boots of a twenty-year-old holding a rifle and run that math. It takes about a second.

Meanwhile the army has been telling Army Radio it’s cancelling and postponing Shin Bet-requested arrests of Palestinian terror suspects because its forces are tied up managing settler violence. Read that twice. We are letting terror suspects sit because our guys are busy with our other guys.

The government

Netanyahu said nothing for three weeks. The Times of Israel reported that the Americans were leaning on him to say something.

On Saturday he finally condemned what he called criminal acts of violence in Qusra and Jalud, by a handful of rioters who are breaking the law, doing a grave injustice to the law-abiding Jewish community, interfering with the IDF, and damaging Israel’s standing in the world.

Go back over that list of injuries and see whose name isn’t on it.

His office then put out a video explaining that these were a small group of rioters, many from broken homes. I’ve read that sentence a dozen times now. The Prime Minister’s Office is offering a sympathetic sociological account of people who haven’t been questioned, let alone charged, on the same weekend that the actual victim spent the night in custody.

Herzog was better, calling it a direct and flagrant defiance of the laws and values of the State of Israel. The Foreign Ministry called it a disgrace. The EU envoy came to the village on Sunday.

Netanyahu also pointed to vehicles that had been seized at the scene. Haaretz reported those weren’t the cars the settlers used.

And Huckabee, who two weeks ago said Israeli terrorists, condemned Saturday’s attack too, but by then the people responsible had been downgraded to a small group of thugs. Fourteen days. That’s the shelf life of a consensus in this country.

Which brings me to the defense minister, and I’m going to take my time here because Israel Katz has been the single loudest signal in this whole business.

January 2025: Katz did away with administrative detention for Jewish suspects in the West Bank. It remains in use against more than three thousand Palestinians.

July 2026: Bluth appealed the release of a settler suspected of a violent assault in March. Katz told him not to renew the restraining order, went on Channel 14, and announced he was replacing the most senior officer in the West Bank. The IDF responded that this hadn’t been coordinated with anyone and wasn’t happening.

August 14, five days into the siege: Katz announced he was taking civilian enforcement over Israelis away from the army altogether, on the grounds that fighting Israeli crime in the West Bank isn’t the IDF’s job, and that the military exists to fight terrorism and defend the borders, not to chase youth in the hilltops. His office said the directive followed a meeting with Zamir. The Jerusalem Post reported the plan itself was not coordinated and might yet be blocked.

Youth in the hilltops. A family had no water and the defense minister called it a youth problem.

And in his Likud primary campaign videos, Katz ran through his achievements: 104 new settlements approved, 160 farms legalized, some 40,000 people removed from West Bank refugee camps, and the cancellation of administrative detention orders against settlers. He put that last one in an ad. As a selling point. Liberman said Katz was working for the Likud Central Committee instead of for the security of Israeli citizens, and the Times of Israel editorial page read the videos as a man who has worked out that the more hawkish he sounds the better he does.

Why oh why is this happening

Here’s the number that explains more than any of the politics.

Yesh Din, an Israeli organization, has tracked 1,701 police files on ideologically motivated offenses by Israelis against Palestinians in the West Bank going back to 2005. Indictments in 6.6 percent. Convictions in 3 percent. Around 84 percent closed because of police failures, and 64 percent closed on the grounds that nobody knew who did it, which is a remarkable thing to conclude about a phenomenon this thoroughly filmed. By 2023 most Palestinian victims had stopped bothering to report it.

Added September 1. A reader asks why I didn’t mention Regavim’s report. Fair question, so here it is. In June 2025 the Israeli NGO Regavim published a 125-page study called “False Flags and Real Agendas,” subtitled “‘Settler Violence,’ a Modern-Day Blood Libel.” Regavim obtained the underlying OCHA spreadsheet that the UN doesn’t publish, 8,332 entries from January 2016 through April 2023, stripped out every incident with no Israeli civilian involved, and was left with about 2 percent. Cross-referencing that remainder against police and Shin Bet records, Naomi Linder Kahn says most of it was Jewish self-defense or undetermined two-way scuffles. The report cites Temple Mount visits logged as storming Al-Aqsa, school trips to Shiloh and Herodium, car accidents and a dog bite as things counted in the settler violence column. It also names Yesh Din, whose numbers I’ve just used, as one of the sources of the narrative it’s attacking.

The part of it that actually bears on what I wrote above is this: Regavim says police data it obtained by freedom of information request shows closure rates for alleged Jewish nationalist crime tracking the national closure rate for crime generally. If that holds up, my 94 percent means the Israeli justice system closes most files, not that this category gets special treatment. I’d want to see the comparison done properly before I accepted it, because a national closure rate includes every stolen bicycle, and the question here is closure rates for violent crime where suspects are identified.

But take the whole argument at its strongest and it still doesn’t reach Qusra. Regavim’s case is about how a database gets built. Nothing in this post comes from OCHA. Seventy men, faces on video, warrants issued by the Shin Bet, an investigation the IDF opened into itself, and no arrests. There is no methodology dispute that explains that.

That’s twenty years, including governments of every composition. If you were hoping I’d tell you this is what happens when Smotrich and Ben Gvir get cabinet seats, I can’t, and anybody who does is selling you something. The non-enforcement was built long before these people showed up. They inherited it.

What they added was the removal of the last few brakes. Ben Gvir has run the police since January 2023, and IDF and Shin Bet officials have spent the whole time accusing him of blocking or slow-walking the arrest and prosecution of violent Jewish extremists. Katz killed administrative detention. The Jerusalem Post’s own defense correspondent laid out the resulting arithmetic: if you’re a Jewish extremist in the West Bank, and you know the defense minister might have your back, and Ben Gvir already has the police, why not.

Then there’s the calendar, which I don’t think you can leave out. The Knesset dissolved on July 17 and we vote on October 27. The Likud primary was held on August 17, right in the middle of the siege. Smotrich, the finance minister who holds authority over the Civil Administration, is polling at or under the threshold, with one Walla survey putting Religious Zionism at 2.6 percent and out of the Knesset entirely. Ben Gvir is polling eight to ten and climbing. The two men who control the police and the Civil Administration are both fighting for their political lives on the same flank, the defense minister has turned leniency toward settlers into a campaign credential, and the prime minister has no reason on earth to spend capital on this before the vote.

Sunday the police and the army spent the day blaming each other in public, which was its own kind of clarifying. Moshe Pinchi, who commands the Judea and Samaria police district, went on the radio and said the army should have detained the rioters instead of dispersing them, that Area B is the military’s responsibility, and that the Border Police there were under army command anyway. IDF sources had been briefing that it was the police who dropped it.

I don’t think anybody gave an order not to make arrests on Saturday. That’s the part that should worry you. Nobody had to. Every person in that chain of command has spent three years learning precisely what it costs to act and precisely what it costs not to, and on Saturday they did the arithmetic and behaved accordingly.

This is the state that closes a tram station on match night because ten thousand people leaving a stadium at once is a problem worth planning for. It has the capacity. It plans. It enforces. It writes tickets to moving vans in my neighborhood this week. What it does not do is arrest sixty Israelis whose faces are on video, and that isn’t sluggishness or confusion or some tragic gap in the org chart. It’s a set of incentives working exactly the way incentives work.

Five days before the raid, Avi Bluth sat in a closed-door security assessment with Netanyahu and warned, per Channel 12, that Palestinian terrorism has dropped sharply over two years but that nationalist crime is the one match that could set the whole place alight in an instant, and that the army’s attention keeps getting dragged off counterterrorism to deal with it. Netanyahu reportedly asked Zamir what the plan was if the West Bank went up. Zamir reportedly said they hadn’t come prepared to present that.

How we’ll know

There’s a clean way to settle the argument I’ve been having with myself for three weeks.

If the arrests and the indictments show up after October 27, then this was about the election, and the system works fine as soon as nobody’s standing on the hose. If the numbers after the election look like Yesh Din’s twenty-year average, then the election was never the problem, and we’ve been telling ourselves a story about a handful of bad apples for two decades while something else ran underneath it.

I know how I’d bet. I’d love to lose.

Loui Ridi is an American citizen who flew from Ohio so he could sit in his own living room, because sitting in it was the only way to keep it. Youssef Hassan’s kids spent their nights listening to men shout through the windows. Louay Adli called the police while sixty men surrounded his house, and the police came, and the men went home, and the police arrested Adli.

Every institution in this country with any authority over the matter has said out loud that Saturday was criminal. The faces are on video. The Shin Bet has names. Warrants have been issued. It’s Monday and not one of those seventy people has been arrested, and the only men taken into custody at that house were the ones who lived in it.

Until that changes, the rest of what any of us says about this is kind of, mostly, you know, inconsequential.