The murder of two Israeli soldiers in the West Bank is the jumping-off point for a large-scale invasion of the Palestinian territory, a move that would further test the nation’s fraying relationship with the United States. In the wake of the soldiers’ deaths on Friday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is promising to search and seize […]
Page A221From§Eachthe evening edition — 24 October 2026
THE SAME WORD
Netanyahu unveils a West Bank demolition model, plans to expand it to other cities.
As it ran on the front
Hang on, I've got it here somewhere — I write everything down, which is half the reason the glovebox doesn't close right anymore. Here. August 31st. Common Dreams, retired Israeli generals, touring the West Bank, telling the New York Times what they'd seen. They weren't describing the army. Write this part down twice if you have to — they were describing their own government, for permitting what the settlers have been doing to Palestinian families living there. "Ethnic cleansing" is the phrase the generals used. Their own government. I got that backwards the first time I read it, and I don't like getting a thing backwards twice.
Sixteen days after that — September 16th — a human rights group out of Israel, B'Tselem, puts out a report titled "The Elimination Project." A man named Ori Givati, who's with them, says the policies in that report aren't a stack of separate incidents. His exact words, because I checked them twice — "one very coherent logic." Very coherent. That's not a word I added. That's his.…
…(cont) A month later, October 16th, a photojournalist for the Washington Post, Heidi Levine, sixty-three years old, is attacked by settlers near a place called Abu Falah. There's film of it. And the Prime Minister's office puts out a statement saying the facts "remain unclear and are under investigation." Is a camera unclear? I don't know whose job it is to answer that.
Three days after that — October 19th — another American, a man named Mohammed Sakat, in a town called Turmus 'Ayya. Settlers burn his house, beat him. I won't call it a report, because it isn't one — it's a journalist on the ground, Jasper Nathaniel, who posted what he saw, and the wire carried his count: over a dozen masked men. I'll leave the number where he left it.
Four days after that — Friday just gone — two Israeli soldiers are shot dead near Hebron Junction. Within hours the Prime Minister is standing at the scene, and I wrote down what he said because I wanted it exact: "We will destroy this place and completely transform it." House to house. Evacuate the residents. Remove the weapons. And then the part I keep flipping back to: "We will consider expanding this model to other cities as well."
How many houses is that? I don't know. Nobody's put a number on it yet, and I'd rather have the number than the word he reached for instead — something "that has never been done before." Has it not? Or has nobody counted the times?
I was putting the notebook away — had it half in my coat pocket already, standing out by the car, the one that won't turn over under forty degrees — when it came back to me. You dismantle things in a garage. A shelf. An engine block somebody left half-finished. Plywood, usually — something nobody downtown signed a permit for.
So — hold on, before I put this away for good — forty-six days before the shooting at Hebron Junction, the word on the wire was "dismantlement," and the thing being dismantled was a handful of outposts nobody had a permit for. Structures. And this week a deputy of his used the same word on something that was never built with anyone downtown's permission at all — the government the Palestinians live under. A shed, then a government, and now a city. What hasn't that word been pointed at yet?
“This isn't a counterterrorism operation, it's a word laundering itself through the news cycle: outposts got "dismantled," then it was a government, now it's homes outside Hebron. Two soldiers are dead and the response, in his own mouth, is "a model to expand to other cities" — that's a rollout, not a crackdown. Watch what gets called "unclear" the next time there's a camera running.”
“Look, two soldiers are dead, the Prime Minister has every right to secure the area — that's just security policy, full stop. The "model" language, every government describes its operations in confident terms, that doesn't mean — did I say "model"? That's his word, I'm not defending the word choice, I'm defending the operation. Which, yes, involves demolishing homes, but that's — it's complicated.”
Earlier in this story
- Unauthorized settler outposts and the Palestinian Authority receive the same verdict from Netanyahu's government: dismantlement. By Lou · the morning edition, 23 October 2026
The receipts
Israeli forces on Friday began demolishing homes and businesses and forcibly evacuating residents near Hebron in the illegally occupied West Bank following a Palestinian resistance attack that killed two Israeli soldiers. "First, we will destroy this place and completely transform it, but we will do something that has never been done…
· 'This Is Ethnic Cleansing': Retired Israeli Generals Decry Settler Terrorism Against West Bank Palestinians from the morgue, 31 Aug 2026
· "The Elimination Project": Israel’s Systematic Dismantling of Palestinian Life in West Bank: B'Tselem from the morgue, 16 Sep 2026
· US Officials Face Fresh Pressure After Another American 'Brutalized' by Israeli Settlers in West Bank from the morgue, 19 Oct 2026
· 'Monstrous': Netanyahu Casts Doubt on Filmed Israeli Settler Attack of American Journalist from the morgue, 16 Oct 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.