On Saturday afternoon masked Israeli terrorists attacked a convoy of French, Belgian and Polish diplomats in Taybeh and beat a French mayor with metal bars. By Saturday evening the Israeli army had called it a "severe act of violence" by "Israeli rioters". Foreign minister Gideon Sa'ar had condemned it. Israel Police had opened an assault investigation and sent the file to the Foreign Ministry to identify the attackers. Army Radio's own reporter had filmed the mayor, Bernard Baudoux, sitting in the dirt in his tricolour sash beside a consular car. Marco Rubio said Washington was "very disturbed by those images". We covered all of it.

Then, on Saturday night, Benjamin Netanyahu's office issued a statement of denial. It referred to an "alleged attack on European diplomats". It said "the more serious the accusation, the greater the demand for compelling evidence." It said the footage "alone do[es] not establish the complete sequence of events or individual responsibility". It said the diplomats had "entered a sensitive area with a history of confrontations without prior coordination with the IDF". And it suggested the whole thing might be "a coordinated campaign to smear Israel and the Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria during the annual olive harvest". The prime minister of Israel, on the same night his army, his foreign minister and his police had all said it happened, said it might not have, and that if it had, the diplomats had brought it on themselves, and that the real victims might be the men in the masks.

Imagine Barack Obama's office saying that the beating of a French mayor by masked Americans on American-controlled land was "alleged", that the video did not establish responsibility, and that France might be running a smear campaign. There would not have been a European government left speaking to him by Monday. Netanyahu said it on Saturday, and by Sunday morning there were still no arrests, for this, for the beating of Heidi Levine the day before, or for any of the weekend's attacks on Palestinians. Baudoux, from Taybeh, had already said what the statement would mean before it was issued: "If settlers are behaving like this, there is a tolerance on the part of the Israeli government." The tolerance has a signature now.