Keating suspects Israel is regretting its failure to do anything about the epidemic of of violence and vandalism committed by West Bank settlers against their Palestinian neighbors and their property:
While the attacks have been widely condemned in Israel, the response by authorities can charitably described as sluggish. According to one report, between 2005 and 2013, 992 investigations of complaints of Israeli violence against Palestinians were launched but only 7.8 percent of them led to indictments.
As Daniel Byman and Natan Sachs have argued, a large part of the problem is the state of legal limbo created by the occupation of the West Bank. While Israeli police have authority over criminal disputes between Israeli citizens, “the military governs most aspects of public life, from security to construction permits,” and with the overall level of violence low until the last few weeks, the Israeli Defense Forces felt little public pressure to focus on protecting Palestinians from settler violence. Despite this, the IDF has on several occasions been the target of settler attacks.
Jonathan Schanzer profiles the settler gang known as “Price Tag”, which is responsible for many such attacks:
Price Tag is more a network than a group, because its cadres — religious, teenage Jews living in the settlements and in Israel alike — operate informally, leave no electronic trail of their activities, and seem to know how to elude detection from authorities. They are so elusive, in fact, that Israel’s vaunted internal security services has made only a handful of arrests since the acts of vandalism, usually marked by graffiti bearing the words “price tag” in Hebrew, began in 2008.
Some, including Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon, have called Price Tag a terrorist movement. This is debatable, because its activities have been limited to acts of vandalism and destruction of property. But Israeli officials I spoke to this week began to speculate that if the network was responsible for the murder of Abu Khdeir, it would have graduated into the realm of terrorism. Price Tag, at least so far, has not been linked to the murder. But amid the unrest that is now spreading across East Jerusalem, the Arab areas in Israel’s northern “triangle,” and parts of the West Bank, it is clear that the network poses dangers to Israeli security.
The Dish 