The Match Has Hands
The West Bank is not approaching ignition by itself. Every “match” has a hand that strikes it—and an institution that sees the flame, possesses the power to intervene, and chooses whether to act.
Major General Avi Bluth, the IDF’s Central Command chief, reportedly warned Israel’s political leadership that one match could ignite the West Bank. That match, he said, was nationalist crime. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu then asked what plan the military had prepared for such an eruption. IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir reportedly answered: “We did not come prepared to present that at this meeting.”
The exchange is extraordinary, but not because Israel’s senior officials have suddenly discovered settler violence. According to figures attributed to the security establishment, serious incidents increased by 63 percent during the first half of 2026. What is extraordinary is the language through which a process produced by identifiable people, institutions, decisions and omissions becomes a match mysteriously waiting to ignite.
A match, however, does not light itself. Someone strikes it, someone supplies the fuel, and someone removes the firebreaks. Someone watches the smoke and decides that intervention can wait. Someone receives information but declares it insufficiently specific. Someone possesses authority but declines to use it.
Metaphors become dangerous when they remove the hands from the event. “Escalation” begins to resemble weather. “Tensions” rise. “The West Bank” erupts. “Israel” responds. “The Palestinians” retaliate. Each collective noun acquires a body, intention and voice, while the actual distribution of knowledge, authority, initiative and omission disappears.
This is not merely an imprecision of journalistic language. It is one of the principal mechanisms through which responsibility becomes simultaneously universal and impossible to locate. If “Israel” is responsible, almost everyone can be accused while no particular decision point has to be identified. If “the settlers” are responsible, the assailants become visible while the institutional conditions that allow repeated violence can remain unnamed. If “the army” failed, the phrase may conceal radically different actions by commanders, soldiers, police officers, ministers and legal authorities.
The collective noun is therefore both too large and too convenient. It includes people who resisted the policy, people who enabled it, people who benefited from it, people who knew and people who possessed entirely different capacities to intervene. It creates the appearance of moral severity while often protecting the locations where responsibility could actually attach.
While completing my book After Nuremberg: What Survives When a Regime Dies, I repeatedly encountered the same methodological problem. Nuremberg belongs here as a method of distinguishing organized causality from attributable responsibility, not as an analogy between Nazi Germany and Israel. Such an analogy would be historically false and morally grotesque.
Nuremberg confronted crimes produced through ministries, military commands, police institutions, administrative chains, professional expertise and information systems. Yet a ministry cannot possess mens rea, a procedure cannot be imprisoned and an information bottleneck cannot feel guilt. Structures can explain how an outcome became possible or reproducible, but responsibility requires another question: who acted, authorized, knew, assisted, concealed, refused or failed to perform an identifiable duty? The distinction does not weaken judgment. It makes judgment possible.
The present violence in the West Bank requires the same precision. An individual who assaults a Palestinian is responsible for an act. A police officer who possesses information and authority but fails to investigate occupies another relation. A military unit ordered to separate populations may have different powers from the police responsible for arrest. A minister who allocates resources, changes enforcement priorities or provides political protection occupies yet another position. None of these forms of participation is identical, and precisely for that reason none should be dissolved into the fog of “Israel.”
The Qusra case exposes this architecture almost diagrammatically. Settlers were photographed around Palestinian homes. The IDF reportedly transferred dozens of images to the police. Police representatives responded that the material did not specify what the photographed individuals had done and therefore did not provide a sufficient basis for arrest.
Information travelled. Operational responsibility did not travel with it.
This is not a minor technical failure. It is the point at which a system can produce evidence without producing accountability. One institution documents presence. Another demands attribution of conduct. The passage between them fails. Everyone can then say that something was done: soldiers arrived, photographs were taken, information was transferred, police reviewed it. The procedure moves while the situation remains unchanged.
Institutional complexity becomes an alibi when we refuse to examine its internal gates. Who was required to identify the photographed individuals? Who could obtain testimony? Who decided that the available information was insufficient? Who possessed the authority to remove the assailants? Who was informed that Palestinian residents could not return safely to their homes? What decision followed from that knowledge?
These are not questions of bureaucratic pedantry. They form the map of responsibility.
The claim that violent settlers constitute only a small minority does not answer them. Numerical size and causal weight are different things. A small group can acquire enormous operational significance when enforcement is weak, political signals are permissive, institutional duties are fragmented and victims cannot obtain protection. The relevant question is not how many Israelis commit the violence. It is how a limited number of perpetrators repeatedly acquire the capacity to shape the lives of a much larger population.
Calling them terrorists may be justified, but classification is not interruption. A state can name conduct correctly while leaving intact the configuration that permits it to recur. The label then becomes another completed administrative act: the phenomenon has been condemned, the appropriate moral vocabulary has been supplied, and responsibility can once again evaporate between institutions.
The same caution applies to the word “anarchy.” What is occurring may look like the absence of government, but selective non-enforcement is not necessarily an absence of order. It may be an order in which protection, mobility, investigation and coercion are distributed asymmetrically. Anarchy suggests that the state has disappeared. The more troubling possibility is that different components of the state remain present while the relations among them repeatedly produce non-intervention.
This is why the reported exchange between Netanyahu, Bluth and Zamir matters. A senior commander identifies a foreseeable ignition point. The prime minister asks for a plan. The chief of staff says that no plan was prepared for presentation. Each statement identifies a different institutional position: warning, political inquiry and operational preparedness. The next question cannot be whether “Israel understands the danger.” Israel is not a mind.
Who understood it? When did they understand it? What authority did they possess? What did they prepare? What did they decide not to prepare? Which warnings altered action, and which merely entered the archive of things everyone later claimed to have known?
The match metaphor is therefore accurate only if we complete it. The West Bank may indeed be close to ignition. But the match is not an external event arriving from nowhere, and the fire will not be produced by history acting on its own.
The match has hands. So do the institutions that could have taken it away. Political responsibility begins by identifying both.
Yochanan Schimmelpfennig
