A woman in a vest marked "press" was knocked to the ground, kicked, and robbed of her camera and phone by masked men. Now the U.S. Embassy wants arrests and convictions. Good. Say it again and mean it, because Palestinians have been waiting for that sentence for years.
The olive harvest is not a battlefield. It is farm work, done by families who have done it for generations. Every autumn it also becomes a recurring test of whether Israeli authorities will protect Palestinians from settler violence. Every autumn they mostly fail. The Israeli rights group Yesh Din has documented for years that the great majority of Palestinian complaints about settler violence end with no indictment. Violence with near-guaranteed impunity is not a breakdown of the system. It is how the system operates.
That is why the response to Friday's attack deserves scrutiny as much as the attack itself. The prime minister's office condemned the violence, then immediately blurred it: circumstances unclear, objects thrown on both sides, fireworks at Jewish youths. The Binyamin Regional Council went further and said Palestinian Authority activists had been sent to "provoke" settlers. Consider what that claim concedes. If people picking olives are a provocation, then the real grievance is that Palestinians are present on the land at all.
The symmetry is false, and everyone involved knows it. One side wears masks and operates in a landscape where the army is often nearby and prosecutions are rare. The other side carries baskets and ladders. When the military says it fired toward someone holding a "sharp object," remember that harvesters carry cutting tools. I don't know what happened in that specific moment, and neither does anyone reading a press statement. But a state that routinely treats Palestinians as threats and settlers as a policing problem has earned doubt.
The journalist matters here, and not because her injuries count for more than those of the Palestinians beside her. She matters because she is the one person in that scene whose suffering forces Washington to speak. The several Palestinians hurt on the same day will not get an embassy statement. Most will not get an investigation anyone follows. Levine was wearing the protective gear that is supposed to make a journalist untouchable, and she was beaten anyway. The attackers took her equipment, which suggests they understood that a camera is evidence.
American officials should also face their own record, and so should Democrats, who have too often offered concern without leverage. The Biden administration sanctioned a handful of violent settlers, a modest step that at least acknowledged the problem. The Trump administration rescinded those sanctions at the start of its term. Now the embassy asks for convictions while Washington has dismantled much of the pressure that might produce them. Demanding accountability while sending weapons and diplomatic cover on autopilot is a press release, not a policy.
The Left's position should be plain. Aid to Israel should come with enforceable conditions on the protection of civilians in the West Bank. Settlers who commit violence should face sanctions and prosecution. Journalists need protection, and the Palestinians around them need it just as much.
Israeli police say they have opened an investigation. Fine. Judge it by results, not announcements. Watch for names, arrests, indictments and convictions. If an American with a press badge and a hospital bed in Ramallah cannot produce them, then Palestinians in Burqa, Turmus Ayya and Abu Falah can draw their own conclusions. They already have.
