The entire front of a building on the northern edge of Huwara was pitch-black from the fire that had been set alight outside its door the previous night by Israelis living in the nearby settlements.

The arsonists had gathered pallets from outside the neighbouring shop and used them as a bonfire. The fire would have been much stronger if some of the pallets hadn’t been laden with plastic bottles which, on melting, emptied their water onto the flames. 

“The fire didn’t come into the building,” said home owner Mamdouh Admadi, whose daughter and grandchildren were inside last Sunday night when the rampage began. “But it was filled with smoke. Luckily the paramedics got there and evacuated them in time before anyone suffocated.”

One of the paramedics who had stopped by on the Monday morning to help Mr Admadi remove some personal papers from the house said: “The Israeli soldiers helped us evacuate the family but it would have been better if they had stopped the settlers from setting the house alight.” 

Major-General Yehuda Fuchs, Commanding Officer of the IDF’s Central Command, is ultimately responsible for everything that happens in the West Bank and on Tuesday, 36 hours after the rampage, he finally faced the cameras.

“The responsibility for what is happening in Huwara lies with the IDF Central Command, it lies with me,” he said. “No matter the reason — I bear the consequences. This event in Huwara is a pogrom that was done by outlaws.”

If it was so awful, why did his soldiers — whose base, the Samaria Brigade’s headquarters, is a couple of minutes’ drive from north Huwara — not intervene to stop it getting out of control?

“We did not prepare for that amount of people and the way they arrived, to the extent and intensity of the violence they demonstrated and the organisation they carried out,” said General Fuchs.

“This is a bad incident that was not meant to happen and I was meant to have prevented it. It is a shameful incident of outlaws who acted neither with the values I grew up with nor those of the state of Israel nor those of Judaism.”

Another IDF officer, a veteran of many years’ service in the West Bank, said to me that “every word Fuchs said is correct, but it should have been said years ago. And something done about it.”

The general was basically admitting that, in the aftermath of an attack on Israelis in the West Bank such as the murder of the brothers Hallel and Yagel Yaniv by a lone gunman on Sunday, the IDF automatically expects settlers to attack Palestinian citizens.

It has become routine over the years and the army has given up trying to prevent it from happening. And as long as it was just a couple of dozen vigilantes, it could be “contained”. Even the settlers were surprised when 400 of them turned up. But other than the number of attackers and houses and cars they set alight, it was routine.

Fulfilling the term

New governments usually have more than two months before their first end-of-term report.

But a short tweet from Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, the day before his sixth government reached that mark, underlined just how chaotic this short period has been for him. 

“We formed a strong right-wing government and it will fulfil its term,” he tweeted. Just like that. Without any context.

הקמנו ממשלת ימין חזקה והיא תמלא את ימיה.

— Benjamin Netanyahu - בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) February 28, 2023

Benjamin Netanyahu's tweet

The backdrop for Mr Netanyahu’s sudden expression of confidence in his own administration was a series of tremors, nothing close yet to an earthquake, shaking the coalition.

The first came on Monday when the members of Jewish Power boycotted a special Knesset session called by the opposition, which presented 40 MKs’ signatures. This means the prime minister has to sit and listen to them for a couple of hours before making a statement of his own, which is then voted upon.

Members of the coalition parties are expected to attend as well, in solidarity with the prime minister. Jewish Power refused, preferring to meet instead at the illegal outpost of Evyatar, just south of Huwara. They protested at what they call the government’s “policy of containment of terror”.

Even without their presence the government had a majority supporting Mr Netanyahu’s statement, but he was furious at their absence and a briefing war raged throughout the evening between his office and that of Jewish Power leader Itamar Ben-Gvir.

The next tremor came on Tuesday at noon when deputy minister Avi Maoz, sole MK of the proudly homophobic Noam Party, announced he was resigning, though he promised to remain in the coalition.

His reason was the foot-dragging over setting up the new “Jewish
Identity Directorate” Mr Maoz had been promised in the coalition agreement.

An hour later came news of another semi-resignation. Jerusalem and Heritage Minister Meir Porush announced he was renouncing his ministerial responsibility for managing the annual Lag Ba’Omer pilgrimage on Meron Mountain.

Mr Porush’s United Torah Judaism party was also claiming that some of the promises of additional funding for Charedi education had not been fulfilled in the new budget and was therefore threatening not to vote for coalition legislation.

No one at this point is threatening to leave the coalition but the series of tremors was enough for the prime minister to tweet that his government was “strong”.

Likud members are blaming their coalition partners for being “impatient” and “ungrateful to Netanyahu, who has delivered a government they could have never dreamed of”, as one put it.

But that’s exactly the problem of this coalition. It is too cohesive.

Israeli coalitions in the past have almost always represented a wider range of often contradictory positions.

This meant that each party knew there were limits to what legislation and policies it could demand. The balance allowed governments to focus on a number of key issues.

But the majority won by the Likud and like-minded religious and far-right parties meant that the partners maximised their demands and Mr Netanyahu was forced to accept most of them. At least on paper.

But even if it can ignore the opposition, a coalition still has its own limited bandwidth.

Fulfilling their demands necessitates laborious bureaucratic procedures, splitting up existing ministries and moving units and powers to new ones. Ministers currently holding those powers are loath to relinquish them and few if any civil servants are interested in heading these new quangos.

Two veteran officials told me this week they had turned down offers for positions which under different circumstances would have been their dream career move. “Working for this chaotic government would be career suicide,” one of them explained.

Mr Netanyahu, who is focused on trying to push through the government’s main policy — the judicial overhaul — while trying to keep an eye on Iran’s rush to nuclear capability and prevent the West Bank from descending into chaos, doesn’t have time to sort out the squabbles of his 33 ministers, an unprecedented number even for Israel’s normally inflated cabinets.

The members of the Netanyahu government are like children whose dream of being locked up overnight in a sweet shop has come true. The problem is that they’ve all been locked up together in the same sweet shop for the past two months.