Two young Israeli soldiers are dead, and that is a real loss to their families. Anyone on the Left who treats it as an abstraction has lost the moral thread. Staff Sergeant Ron Yonatan Roytman and Sergeant Yuval Shai Svilem were 20-something conscripts. Their deaths deserve grief, not a shrug and not a "context" lecture delivered over their graves.
But grief is not a strategy, and what Benjamin Netanyahu announced is not security policy. It is a performance of vengeance with a legal problem attached.
The prime minister says residents of the Hebron neighborhood where the two gunmen lived will be evacuated while troops search house to house. Those residents did not pull a trigger. Neither did their children, their elderly parents, or the neighbors whose only connection to the shooters is a street address. Removing a civilian population from their homes because of what two men did is collective punishment. The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits it in Article 33, in plain language. Israel's own leaders have long preferred euphemisms like "operational needs" and "infrastructure." The phrase "evacuated" tells you what is actually happening.
The strongest counterargument deserves a fair hearing. The military says it found weapons and ammunition in the attackers' vehicle and claims they were planning to hit civilians. A state cannot ignore that. It has a duty to find who armed them and whether more weapons are stored nearby. Fine. Targeted, warrant-style searches, arrests and investigations are what a state does when it wants to find weapons. Clearing a neighborhood and sealing a city is what a government does when it wants to be seen punishing someone. If the goal were purely to find weapons, you would not need to empty the homes first.
And it has never worked. Decades of home demolitions, closures, curfews and cordons have not produced quiet. They have produced the next generation of men with nothing to lose. Every Palestinian family pushed out of their home for the acts of a stranger becomes a family with a new, permanent grievance. Rights groups, UN human rights bodies and independent security analysts have made this argument for years, and the record gives them little reason to relent.
Then there is Hebron itself, which is not a neutral stage. It is the one Palestinian city where a few hundred settlers live in the middle of a town of hundreds of thousands, protected by a large military presence. Palestinians there have lived for years under closed streets, checkpoints and movement restrictions that exist to serve that arrangement. Israelis call this security. Palestinians who live inside it call it what it is: a system in which one group's safety is built out of another group's freedom. A shooting at a junction near such a place is not a bolt from the blue. Explaining it is not excusing it. Refusing to explain it is how you guarantee the next one.
Notice also what does not trigger a cordon. Settler violence against Palestinian villages has surged, documented by the UN and by Israeli rights groups like Yesh Din, and prosecutions are vanishingly rare. No prime minister announces that settlers' neighborhoods will be emptied for house-to-house searches. The principle on offer is not "violence has consequences." It is that Palestinian violence has consequences for entire communities, and Israeli violence against Palestinians has almost none.
Politics is the unspoken driver. Netanyahu leads a coalition that depends on partners who want more annexation, more settlement and more force, and he faces an election that cannot be postponed forever. A highly visible crackdown after a deadly attack serves him and his allies. It will not serve the soldiers who will be sent to enforce it, or the next unit stationed at that junction.
This is where American Democrats should stop mumbling. Washington supplies the weapons and the diplomatic cover. A party that claims to believe in international law and equal human dignity cannot keep treating each of these episodes as an unfortunate local matter. Say clearly: the killing of soldiers is wrong, and so is punishing families who did nothing. Both are true. A policy built on pretending only one of them matters will keep burying young people on both sides.
