The major story in Israel today is one that, until now, had received remarkably little attention: the ongoing terror campaign of violence and intimidation by settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank. Today, the story moved to the center of the national agenda when the IDF intervened, and failed.
It begins in the West Bank village of Qusra, south of Nablus, where a group of settlers established an illegal outpost that blocked access to the entrance of a Palestinian family’s home. The settlers effectively trapped the family inside, preventing them from coming and going in an apparent effort to force them to leave.
The army finally decided to intercede. Central Command chief, Avi Bluth arrived with a group of soldiers to remove the settlers and restore the family’s access to their home. The settlers confronted the soldiers and blocked the road. The army withdrew.
So, despite all its strength, the IDF was unable to clear a path for a Palestinian family to enter and leave its own home in the face of resistance from a group of settlers.
We keep hearing from Prime Minister Netanyahu and others that those responsible for settler violence are “a small group of delinquents” who come from across the country and do not necessarily live in the settlements.
Tonight, however, I heard something that did not fit Netanyahu’s reassuring characterization. A man in his fifties spoke proudly of having sent his sons to block the army and drive the Palestinians from their homes. “This is the way we regain control of the Land of Israel,” he said. I fear he is not alone. The IDF Chief of Staff has now ordered additional troops into the West Bank to bring the settler violence under control.
And the confrontation in Qusra is not the only reckless absurdity the IDF is being forced to deal with. For the past several weeks, a group of Israelis have repeatedly crossed the border into Syria. They belong to a fringe organization that advocates Israeli settlement in Syrian territory, based on the belief that parts of Syria belong to the biblical Land of Israel.
Leave aside for the moment the legal implications, the damage to Israel’s international standing, and what such actions do to any prospect of eventually reaching peace with Syria. There is a much more immediate problem: Israeli soldiers are being forced to cross into Syria, track these people down, and bring them back.
Reservists who have already spent week after week away from their families in order to protect the country are instead being forced to spend part of that time running around inside Syria chasing Israelis who deliberately crossed the border and should never have been there in the first place.
Do any of them end up in jail? No. Do any of the settlers who attack Palestinians, including those who attacked soldiers today, end up in jail? No. That lack of consequences is a large part of the problem. It is time to stop describing settler violence as the wayward actions of a handful of fringe kids and recognize it as something broader and far more deeply rooted.
THE COUNTRY HOLDS ITS BREATH OVER TWO MISSING ISRAELIS
Another story leading the news in Israel today is the disappearance of two Israelis, a mother and daughter who traveled to Prague and then to Vienna and have not been heard from since. They have made no contact with their family, and so far there has been no indication of what happened to them. People here are naturally fearing the worst
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AN UNEXPECTED CONVERSATION IN A TEL AVIV CAB
Today we had a very interesting cab ride. I don’t usually take cabs in Tel Aviv; most of the time I either walk or scooter. But with the temperature hitting 91 degrees today, Amy and I decided to take a cab both ways.
The first interesting moment in the ride, beyond the fact that we knew from his name that our driver was Arab, came when Sami told us to make sure we put on our seat belts. He, however, was not wearing his. We asked why not. Sami said he needs to be able to get out of the car quickly if he is attacked, something I gather happens with some regularity to Arab cab drivers. It was a small but sad and revealing insight into a reality I had never really thought about.
Sami went on to explain that before an Arab man marries, he is expected to provide the bride’s family with 50,000 shekels’ worth of gold. More important, he said, is making sure your children are taken care of. His approach is to put money aside for his son so that the boy can become a doctor without worrying about money and still have enough to marry when he finishes medical school.
He also mentioned that he plans to take a second wife because, he said, there are not enough men for the women, a point I did not quite follow. Having two wives, he insisted, was perfectly acceptable, and he did not particularly care whether his current wife approved.
By this point, it was clear that Sami was Bedouin. Polygamy is illegal in Israel, although the practice persists in parts of Bedouin society, where some men have two or more wives.
Sami is only 28 and plans to take his second wife by the time he turns 30. He also told us that his family keeps all its savings in gold. His mother alone, he said, has about $300,000 worth, which the family hides when they leave home.
Toward the end of our ride, I asked Sami about politics. He said he always votes and that this time he will vote for Ra’am, Mansour Abbas’s party. Abbas, he told us, is the only politician interested in finding solutions rather than talking in clichéd slogans about the Palestinians and other nationalist concerns. In Sami’s view, Abbas is genuinely trying to improve people’s lives rather than simply making speeches. That is why he will vote for him.
Sami travels an hour and a half each day from home to drive a cab in the Tel Aviv area.
REPORTED OR NOT, THE ANTISEMITISM STAYS ONLINE
A Report from HO:PE, the Hate Online: Preparedness and Empowerment Project
Four out of five antisemitic posts reported by Jewish community members across Europe were still online months later, and formally flagging them to the platform made almost no difference to whether they came down. That is the central finding of the final audit from HO:PE, the Hate Online: Preparedness and Empowerment project run by the World Jewish Congress with European Union funding under the CERV program.
Between February 2025 and April 2026, community members submitted 754 reports through a purpose-built tool, giving a URL, naming the platform, and classifying the content against the IHRA working definition. A liveness check in May 2026 found 613 of those posts, 81.3%, still publicly accessible
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Of the 277 that users had also reported to the host platform, 19.5% had been removed. Of the 477 they had not reported, 18.2% had been removed. The gap between doing something and doing nothing was 1.3 percentage points.
Facebook produced the clearest example of how little formal reporting appears to matter. It accounts for the largest share of the dataset, at 259 reports; its users reported content to the platform at by far the highest rate of any service, 76.1%; and it removed just 13.9%, the lowest rate of any major platform
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Instagram received formal reports on only 13 of its 196 incidents and removed 12.2% overall. X, also with 196 incidents, removed 14.8%.
TikTok is the exception, and it is not a marginal one: 64.4% removed overall, 70.6% of what was reported to it, and 62.5% of what was not. It is the only platform in the study where most antisemitic content came down. That single divergence undercuts the standard industry defense, because whatever TikTok is doing is being done at scale, under the same law, on content the report describes as sitting at the severe end of the range, including Holocaust glorification.
The content itself clusters at the violent end. Dehumanization is the single largest category, at 135 reports, followed closely by general calls for harm to Jewish people, at 133; add incitement in the name of a radical ideology and world-conspiracy material, and four categories cover 56% of everything submitted.
Facebook’s volume is driven substantially by a body of Arabic-language posts celebrating Iranian missile attacks on Israel and describing Jews with the apes-and-pigs slur. Incitement to violence had the highest removal rate of any group, at 34.9%, which is the report’s one moderately encouraging figure. Israel-related antisemitism had the lowest, at 5.2% of 97 reports. Within that category, content equating Israeli policy with Nazism was removed in none of 28 cases.
Users also reported Israel-related content to platforms at a rate of only 12.4%, against 61.2% for incitement, and the report’s tentative reading of that gap is the most quietly damning thing in it. People had learned which complaints go nowhere and stopped filing them.
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