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Perspective Shift

You read this story from where you sit.
Want to read it from somewhere else?

We'll re-present the same story as a thoughtful proponent of the settler-state convergence would. Not to convince you. To let you actually meet the argument.

Choose a vantage
Admission of state violence
A senior commander has openly confirmed what Palestinians have long described: a deliberate shoot-to-kill posture in the West Bank, with looser fire rules, explicitly unequal treatment of Jewish and Palestinian stone-throwers, and death tolls unmatched in nearly six decades.
Deterrence-that-works frame
Aggressive rules of engagement and 1,500 dead militants over three years explain why no third intifada has erupted; the quiet on the streets is the product of credible force, and easing up would invite the violence Israel has successfully suppressed.
Settler-state convergence
The real story is a security establishment fused with the settlement project — a settler commander coordinating 150 outposts, government millions flowing to the militias under anti-violence branding, and lethal force reserved almost exclusively for Palestinians.
Retold from the other vantage
Steelman · slot C
One project, two uniforms
An anti-occupation Israeli analyst would argue —
Strip away the framing of "army versus settlers" and look at what Bluth actually described: a settler officer commanding the West Bank, 150 outposts established in Area C in coordination between his troops and the settlement movement, and 130 million shekels routed to those same settler councils under an "anti-violence" label. The differential fire policy he admitted — kill Palestinian stone-throwers, absorb the "sociological implications" of not shooting Jewish ones — is not a glitch in a neutral security system; it is the operating logic of a single integrated project in which the army is the armed wing of expansion. The occasional friction with hilltop youth is a family quarrel. The structure underneath is one apparatus, with state lethality pointed in one direction and state money flowing in the other.

If this read like a fair rendering of the argument — even when you disagree — it's doing its job. Steelmen aren't aimed at persuading you; they're aimed at what the other side actually believes when they're thinking clearly.