Israel bars European lawmakers who came to watch the olive harvest its settlers are burning; it votes Tuesday

…(cont) So walk me through the morning. They come to the window with the passports. Somebody takes them. Somebody checks something — a list, a screen, a call to an office. Then somebody says no, and somebody hands the passports back. How many people is that, four? Does the one at the window know why, or do they just read what comes up?

I ask because of the toll plaza on the way in. The one in the booth has a job, and the job is not deciding. They can't turn me back over my fan belt. Somebody in an office decided what that booth does and wrote it down, and the booth does it. So I keep looking for the office.

And what were they coming to watch? Same page: "Earlier this month, Israeli settlers attacked the farm and attempted to burn its poultry shed before being repelled by local residents." On the 16th, roughly 80 masked men came down on an olive grove near Abu Falah, hurled rocks, torched the trees, and brutalized a Washington Post journalist, Heidi Levine. Eighty men in a grove, five legislators at a bridge, and the ones who got stopped were the five. Which window did the eighty come through?

The dates sit close together. On Friday the prime minister's own statement — I copied it exact — ordered the army to "immediately impose a lockdown on Hebron and prepare for a full lockdown of the entire" West Bank, after a gun battle that left two Palestinians dead and at least five Israeli soldiers wounded, which the statement blamed on Hamas. Since Friday, over 3,000 Palestinians have been displaced from their homes in Hebron. And Monday — the same Monday as the bridge — a UN-mandated commission filed nineteen pages finding Israel has committed "war crimes and the crimes against humanity of extermination, persecution, torture, rape," and that genocidal acts continue in Gaza after what the report calls the so-called ceasefire. Israel condemned the report. Tuesday, they vote: the first election since October 7th, 2023, with Likud trailing in the polls.

Here's my trouble. In September the attorney general moved the E1 settlement deadline past the election — moved, not cancelled, and the finance minister fumed. In August a rights monitor counted more than 11 million tons of debris hauled out of Gaza, remains and evidence likely in it. This month the army ran a surprise-attack exercise big enough that an expert on the right's own network reached back to the 1973 war. And the big pro-Israel lobby, last week, turned out to be spending millions without putting its own name on it. Each of those took somebody at a desk with a form. Can you walk me through who sat at which one?

Oh — excuse me, before you take your coat. One word has been following me around since the bridge and I apologize for circling back to it. That Friday statement names everyone who ordered it: an emergency meeting, the security cabinet, the top military advisors, a post on social media. Is there a line anywhere on tomorrow's ballot where a voter is asked about the full lockdown?