Daniel sent us this one — he's asking about the Oslo Accords division of the West Bank into Areas A, B, and C, and specifically what shared control in Area B actually looks like on the ground. When the system works as designed, how does that overlap between Israeli security and Palestinian civil administration function? Who has jurisdiction for law enforcement? And then he gets wonderfully specific — if you get a speeding ticket in Area C, is it the Israeli army or the Israeli police who write it? And is the law for Israeli citizens in the West Bank the same as inside the Green Line? This is one of those questions where the answer reveals more than most people want to know.
It really does. And I love that someone finally asked about the speeding ticket, because that's the kind of granular detail that makes the entire architecture visible. Most coverage of Area B stays at the level of political abstraction — "shared control," "joint responsibility" — and you walk away with no mental picture of what happens when an actual human being breaks an actual law on an actual road. But that's where the system lives or dies.
The checkpoint, the courthouse, and the traffic stop. That's the whole thing right there.
So let's orient first, because the geography matters. Oslo Two, signed September twenty-eighth nineteen ninety-five, carved the West Bank into three jurisdictional zones. Area A — roughly eighteen percent of the territory — full Palestinian civil and security control. Those are the major Palestinian cities, Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, Jericho. Area C — about sixty percent — full Israeli civil and security control. That's where the settlements are, the Jordan Valley, most of the open land. And then Area B, which is about twenty-two percent, covers more than four hundred Palestinian villages and towns, and that's where we get this hybrid.
The hybrid was supposed to be temporary.
Right, that's the thing. Oslo envisioned a five-year transitional period leading to a final status agreement. Area B was designed as an interim zone that would gradually transfer to full Palestinian control. That transition never happened. So we've now had this supposedly temporary arrangement running for over thirty years, and it's become the permanent reality. The core tension is that Area B was built as a bridge to somewhere else, but we're all still standing on the bridge.
A bridge that's been under construction since nineteen ninety-five. So let's start with that speeding ticket, because it's the perfect entry point into how jurisdiction actually works. Walk me through it.
Okay, so imagine you're driving through the West Bank. The first thing you need to know is that who pulls you over depends on three things — your identity, the exact patch of asphalt you're on, and the nature of the alleged offense. If you're an Israeli citizen speeding in Area C, it's the Israel Police — specifically the Judea and Samaria District of the Israel Police, which is a civilian police force operating in the territories. They handle traffic enforcement for Israelis in Area C. If you're a Palestinian speeding in Area C, it's the Israeli military — specifically the Civil Administration's traffic unit or a military police patrol.
Same road, same speed, same violation — different enforcement agency based on identity.
Now move to Area B. A Palestinian driver speeding in Area B is under Palestinian Authority traffic law enforcement. PA police handle that. An Israeli driver speeding in Area B — still under Israeli military law, because Israel retains what's called "overriding security responsibility" throughout Area B. And traffic enforcement for Israelis falls under that umbrella.
An Israeli driver in Area B is never getting pulled over by a PA police officer.
And this isn't a matter of practice or custom — it's baked into the legal architecture. The PA has zero jurisdiction over Israeli citizens anywhere in the West Bank. That goes for civil matters, criminal matters, traffic matters — there is no scenario where a PA police officer can lawfully issue a citation to an Israeli citizen.
Which raises the question — what happens if a PA officer tries?
We have a real case study for that. In twenty twenty-three, in the village of Umm Safa, which is in Area B, an Israeli settler was detained by PA police for alleged assault. The PA police held him briefly before transferring him to the IDF, and that brief detention sparked a full-blown political crisis. The Israeli government treated it as a violation of the Oslo framework — the PA exercising police authority over an Israeli citizen. The officer involved was reportedly arrested by the IDF later. The message was clear: even a few minutes of PA custody over an Israeli is treated as a breach of the entire arrangement.
The PA's policing authority in Area B exists, but it has a hard boundary — it stops at the edge of Israeli identity. Which means "shared control" doesn't mean two governments sharing the same population. It means two governments operating on the same territory but over entirely separate populations.
That's the cleanest way to put it. And it's the key to understanding why "shared control" is a misleading phrase. It's not a condominium where both parties govern the same people. It's a jurisdictional sorting mechanism — the system assigns you to a legal track based on who you are, not just where you are.
Like having two entirely separate legal universes occupying the same physical coordinates.
And they intersect in strange ways. Take a car accident in Area B involving an Israeli driver and a Palestinian driver. The answer is both, and neither fully. Israeli military police investigate the Israeli driver. PA police investigate the Palestinian driver. They may coordinate through what are called District Coordination Offices — the DCOs — but they don't share evidence freely. So you have two parallel investigations, two separate legal proceedings, and no single authority that can look at the whole incident.
That sounds like a system designed to produce two different versions of the same event.
It inevitably does. And that's not a failure of the system — it's what the system was built to do. The Oslo framework was designed around the principle that Israelis and Palestinians would be subject to their own respective authorities, even when they occupy the same space. The assumption was that this separation would reduce friction during the transitional period. In practice, it creates parallel realities.
Let's go deeper on the legal architecture. You mentioned that Israeli citizens in the West Bank are subject to Israeli military law, not civilian Israeli law. But that can't be the whole story — there must be some connection to the Israeli legal system inside the Green Line.
Right, and this is where it gets legally intricate. Israeli citizens in the West Bank are formally subject to the military orders issued by the IDF's area commander. That's the legal basis. But — and this is the crucial but — the military law incorporates large chunks of Israeli civilian law by reference. So traffic laws, planning and building laws, criminal law — the military orders essentially say "the applicable Israeli statute applies here." This means that in practice, an Israeli settler who commits a crime in the West Bank is tried under procedures that closely mirror civilian Israeli law. They have the right to counsel, they can appeal to the Israeli Supreme Court sitting as the High Court of Justice. The military courts for Israelis operate with civilian-style evidentiary rules.
It's military law in name, civilian law in substance.
For Israelis, yes. And that's a deliberate design. It allows Israel to maintain the legal fiction that the West Bank is not sovereign Israeli territory — hence military law rather than direct application of Israeli law — while ensuring that Israeli citizens there enjoy legal protections equivalent to what they'd have in Tel Aviv. For Palestinians, the situation is completely different.
Walk me through the Palestinian side of this.
Palestinians in Area B are subject to a layered legal regime. The baseline is Jordanian law — Jordanian criminal code, Jordanian civil law — because Jordan administered the West Bank from nineteen forty-eight to nineteen sixty-seven, and that legal infrastructure was never fully replaced. On top of that, you have Palestinian Authority legislation passed since the PA was established in the mid-nineties. And on top of that, you have Israeli military orders — thousands of them — issued since nineteen sixty-seven, which can override both Jordanian and PA law.
Three layers of law from three different sovereigns, none of which fully recognize each other.
Here's where the charge matters. A Palestinian from Area B who commits theft — that's a non-security offense. They're arrested by PA police, tried in a PA court under PA law, and serve time in a PA prison. Same person, same village, throws a stone at an IDF checkpoint — that's classified as a security offense. Now they're arrested by the IDF, tried in an Israeli military court, and serve time in an Israeli prison.
The same person, the same location, different legal universes depending entirely on how the charge is classified.
"security offense" is defined broadly. Stone-throwing qualifies. So does "incitement." So does membership in an organization designated as a terrorist group by Israel. The classification power effectively determines which legal track you end up on, and that classification is made by the Israeli military, not by a neutral arbiter.
Which gives the military prosecutor what amounts to a jurisdictional switch — they can flip a case from PA courts to military courts just by how they frame the charge.
And the conviction rates tell the story. Israeli military courts have a conviction rate for Palestinians above ninety-five percent, according to Yesh Din's twenty twenty-three report. Administrative detention — detention without trial — is used extensively for security cases. So the procedural protections that exist for Israelis in the military court system are largely absent for Palestinians. Different defendants, different rules, same court system.
The same institution operating in two completely different modes depending on who's in the dock.
That's the dualism. And it's not hidden — it's the explicit architecture. The Oslo Accords created separate legal tracks by design, and the military court system was adapted to serve both. For Israelis, it's a civilian-style court in a military uniform. For Palestinians, it's a military court with military evidentiary standards and military conviction rates.
Let's talk about how the coordination is supposed to work. You mentioned the District Coordination Offices — the DCOs. What are they, and how do they function when they're functioning?
The DCOs are joint Israeli-Palestinian committees established under Oslo. There are several of them, each covering a different district of the West Bank. They're staffed by Israeli and Palestinian liaison officers, and their job is to coordinate security and civil matters. In theory, they handle handovers of suspects, coordinate patrol movements, manage emergency responses, and resolve disputes about jurisdiction.
"In theory" doing a lot of work there.
It always does. In practice, the DCOs have become increasingly dysfunctional. The PA has used security coordination suspension as a political lever multiple times — most recently in twenty twenty-four, after the Gaza war escalation, when the PA suspended coordination for several months. During that period, Area B effectively became ungoverned for routine policing. PA police stayed in their stations. The IDF didn't patrol Palestinian villages. Crime rates spiked in places like Jenin and Tulkarm.
When the coordination mechanism breaks, Area B doesn't default to one authority or the other — it defaults to a vacuum.
And that vacuum is particularly dangerous because neither side wants to be seen filling it. The PA can't be seen coordinating with Israel when public sentiment is inflamed — it undermines their legitimacy. And Israel doesn't want to send troops into Area B for routine policing because that would look like reoccupation and would trigger international condemnation. So both sides have an incentive to stay away, and the result is a governance gap that armed groups are happy to fill.
That's the perverse incentive you mentioned. The PA avoids confronting militant groups in Area B because it lacks the authority to use force independently — any major operation would require Israeli coordination, which is politically toxic. Meanwhile, Israel uses the security override to conduct raids that further undermine PA legitimacy. Both sides are trapped in a dynamic that weakens whoever tries to govern.
That's the fundamental instability of Area B. It was designed for a transitional period where both sides were moving toward a final agreement. In that context, short-term coordination problems were manageable because you were building toward something. But when the transition never ends, the coordination problems compound. Every DCO breakdown makes the next one more likely. Every raid erodes the PA's credibility a little more. Every vacuum creates space for militants.
Let's get into the civil administration side, because that's where a lot of the everyday friction lives. PA runs schools, health clinics, garbage collection, municipal services in Area B. But Israel controls the Civil Administration — a unit of the Israeli Ministry of Defense — that has authority over building permits, water connections, and road projects, even in Area B.
And this is where "shared control" becomes deeply asymmetrical. The PA can plan a school, allocate the budget, hire the teachers — but if the Civil Administration denies the building permit on security grounds, the school doesn't get built. The PA administers services within a physical infrastructure that it cannot independently expand or modify.
The PA is essentially a service provider operating on someone else's property.
That's a sharp way to put it, and it's not far off. The PA is responsible for delivering education, healthcare, sanitation, and municipal services to the Palestinian population in Area B, but it cannot independently build the facilities those services require. Every new classroom, every water pipe, every road extension needs a permit from the Civil Administration. And the permit approval rates are stark.
Give me the numbers.
In twenty twenty-five, according to Peace Now data, the Civil Administration approved zero building permits for Palestinians in Area B. Meanwhile, over twelve hundred permits were approved for Israeli settlements in Area C. That's not an anomaly — it's the consistent pattern. The planning system is structured so that Palestinian construction in Area B is essentially frozen while settlement construction proceeds.
That's not a system that's failing — that's a system achieving exactly what it was designed to achieve.
This connects back to the legal architecture. The planning laws that apply in the West Bank are based on the Jordanian planning law from nineteen sixty-six, as modified by Israeli military orders. The planning committees are appointed by the military, not elected. Palestinians have minimal representation. The process is opaque, and the criteria for denial are broad — "security reasons" can cover almost anything. So you have a planning regime that gives Israel effective veto power over all Palestinian development, even in Area B where the PA is supposedly the civil authority.
This is why I keep coming back to the phrase "division of labor" rather than "power sharing." The PA does the work of governing — running the schools, collecting the trash, managing the clinics — but Israel holds all the structural levers. The PA can decide what to teach in the schools, but it can't decide where to build them. It can hire doctors, but it can't connect the clinic to the water grid without a permit.
The water infrastructure is a whole separate layer of control. The West Bank's water resources are managed by the Israeli water authority Mekorot and the Civil Administration. Palestinian communities in Area B often depend on water allocations that are determined by Israeli authorities. During summer months, many Palestinian villages face water shortages while nearby settlements have uninterrupted supply. The differential isn't always a matter of policy — sometimes it's infrastructure that was built under occupation and never upgraded — but the effect is the same.
We've got legal dualism, planning control, water allocation, security override — all stacking up to a system where "shared control" means the PA administers daily life within parameters set entirely by Israel.
That's the thing — when people hear "Area B has shared Israeli and Palestinian control," they imagine something like a joint municipal government. Two mayors, a shared council, collaborative decision-making. That's not what this is. It's a division of labor where one party — Israel — retains ultimate veto power over everything that matters structurally, and the other party — the PA — does the day-to-day service delivery.
Like a landlord who lets you paint the walls and arrange the furniture but retains the right to enter at any time, veto any renovation, and ultimately evict you.
That's the dynamic. And the landlord, in this analogy, also controls the water and electricity.
Let's return to the original question — is the law for Israeli citizens in the West Bank the same as inside the Green Line? We've touched on this, but I want to make it explicit.
The short answer is no, but it's designed to feel similar. Israeli citizens in the West Bank are not subject to Israeli civilian law directly. They are subject to Israeli military law. However — and this is the key qualification — the military law incorporates Israeli civilian law by reference for most matters. So the substantive rules are often identical, but the legal source is different, and the institutional pathway is different.
That difference matters in concrete ways.
For example, an Israeli settler who commits a crime is tried in a military court, not a civilian court. The judges are military officers, not civilian judges. The prosecutors are military prosecutors. The venue is a military facility, often inside the West Bank. Now, the procedures are designed to mirror civilian procedures — right to counsel, right to appeal, evidentiary rules — but the institutional context is different. And for certain offenses, the military law can be harsher. The military courts have broader detention powers, broader search powers, and different sentencing guidelines.
It's civilian law delivered through a military pipeline.
That's a good way to think about it. And the pipeline matters. When you're tried in a civilian court in Tel Aviv, you're in the Israeli judicial system that operates under the Basic Laws and the full constitutional framework. When you're tried in a military court in the West Bank, you're in a system that derives its authority from the military commander's orders and the laws of belligerent occupation — even if it's applying Israeli substantive law. The legal theory underlying your trial is different, even if the outcome looks similar.
For Palestinians, as we've discussed, the pipeline is entirely different — military law, military procedures, military conviction rates, and no incorporation of Israeli civilian protections.
The asymmetry is the point. The system is designed to give Israelis the maximum possible legal protection while maintaining the formal occupation framework, and to give the military maximum operational flexibility over Palestinians while maintaining a veneer of legal process.
Let's talk about what happens when the system breaks down — because the breakdowns are becoming more frequent and more consequential. You mentioned the twenty twenty-four DCO suspension. What did that actually look like on the ground?
After the October seventh attacks and the subsequent Gaza war, the PA announced it was suspending security coordination with Israel. This wasn't unprecedented — they'd done it before during periods of tension — but this suspension lasted longer and had more severe effects. For about three months, the DCOs essentially stopped functioning. The joint patrol coordination ceased. The handover mechanisms for suspects stopped. The routine communication channels went dark.
In Area B specifically?
In Area B, the PA police largely retreated to their stations. They weren't conducting routine patrols, weren't responding to most calls, weren't making arrests for non-security crimes. The IDF, for its part, wasn't filling the gap — because entering Area B for routine policing would be politically explosive and operationally costly. So you had what amounted to a policing vacuum in over four hundred Palestinian villages and towns.
Nature abhors a vacuum.
Crime rates spiked dramatically. In Jenin and Tulkarm, which are Area A but the dynamic affected adjacent Area B villages, armed groups expanded their presence. Car theft rings, which had been somewhat suppressed by PA-Israeli coordination, resumed operations. Domestic violence calls went unanswered. Property disputes turned violent because there was no police response. It was a real-time demonstration of what Area B looks like without the coordination mechanism.
The entire edifice depends on a coordination process that either side can suspend at any time for political reasons.
Both sides have incentives to suspend it. For the PA, suspending coordination is one of the few leverage points they have — it signals displeasure to Israel and to the international community without actually ending the Oslo framework entirely. For Israel, allowing the coordination to lapse serves the argument that the PA is not a reliable partner and that Israeli security control needs to be more direct.
Which creates a doom loop. Each suspension erodes trust, which makes the next suspension more likely, which erodes trust further. Eventually the coordination mechanism becomes so brittle that it breaks permanently.
We're seeing that brittleness increase. The suspensions have become more frequent since twenty twenty-two. The periods of functional coordination are getting shorter. The PA's credibility with its own population erodes every time it resumes coordination after a suspension, because the resumption is seen as capitulation. So the PA has to extract visible concessions to justify resuming coordination, which Israel is increasingly unwilling to give.
Given all of this — the legal dualism, the planning control, the coordination breakdowns — what's the framework for understanding what Area B actually is? Because "shared control" clearly doesn't capture it.
I think there are three frameworks that help. The first is what we've been describing — Area B is a division of labor, not a power-sharing arrangement. The PA delivers services, Israel controls the structural levers. The PA is a service provider operating within parameters set by Israel.
That's framework one. What's the second?
The second is that Area B is an instability machine. It creates perverse incentives for both sides. The PA can't govern effectively because it lacks real authority, but it can't cede authority because that would mean political irrelevance. Israel can't allow the PA to collapse because that would mean direct reoccupation of Area B with all the costs that entails, but it can't allow the PA to become genuinely sovereign because that would threaten settlement expansion and security control. So both sides are locked into maintaining a system that neither is satisfied with.
Keeping the patient alive but never letting them recover.
And the third framework is that Area B is a sorting mechanism — it sorts people by identity, not by territory. Your legal rights, your court system, your police force, your planning permissions — all determined by whether you're Israeli or Palestinian, not by where you happen to be standing. The territory is the same; the law is different depending on who you are.
That third framework is the one that the speeding ticket reveals most clearly. Same road, same speed, same violation — different enforcement agency, different court, different law, different outcome, based entirely on identity.
That's not a bug. That's the architecture. The Oslo Accords were built on the principle of separation — separate legal systems, separate authorities, separate populations. The assumption was that this separation would reduce conflict during the transitional period and lead eventually to a final status agreement where the separation would be resolved into either two states or some form of confederation or whatever the parties agreed to. But the transition never ended, so the separation became permanent, and the inequality embedded in that separation became structural.
What does that mean for the future? If the Oslo framework is effectively dead — as many analysts argue — what replaces Area B?
That's the open question that nobody has a good answer to. There are roughly three scenarios. One is annexation — Israel formally extends sovereignty over parts of the West Bank, including parts of Area B, and the hybrid arrangement is replaced by direct Israeli rule. That was floated seriously during the first Trump administration and could return.
Full PA control — Area B transitions to Area A status, and the PA assumes both civil and security authority. This is what Oslo originally envisioned, but it requires an Israeli government willing to cede security control, which seems unlikely given the current political landscape and the security establishment's deep skepticism about PA capabilities.
More of the same — the hybrid limps along, the coordination mechanisms continue to erode, the governance vacuums grow, and Area B becomes increasingly ungovernable. This is the default scenario, and it's the one we're currently living in.
None of those are particularly encouraging.
No, and that's the tragedy of it. The Oslo framework was a genuine diplomatic achievement — it created a structure for managing a conflict that had seemed intractable. But it was designed as a bridge, and bridges aren't meant to be lived on. After thirty years, the bridge is crumbling, and nobody can agree on where the other side is.
The speeding ticket question — which seems almost comically specific — ends up revealing something profound. The West Bank has no single legal geography. It's a patchwork of jurisdictions that sort people by identity, not by location. And that sorting is the system working as designed.
When someone asks "who gives me a speeding ticket in Area C," the answer isn't just a bureaucratic detail — it's a map of power. The Israeli police handle Israelis, the military handles Palestinians. In Area B, the PA handles Palestinians for non-security matters, the military handles Israelis for everything, and the military handles Palestinians for anything classified as security. The same physical space, multiple legal realities.
If there's one thing to take away from all of this, it's that the complexity isn't accidental. The system is complicated because it's managing a fundamental contradiction — two peoples claiming the same land, with radically asymmetric power, under a legal framework designed to be temporary. The complexity is what allows the contradiction to persist.
The speeding ticket is a tiny window into an enormous machine. And the machine is working. The question is whether it's working toward something, or just working to keep itself running.
That's the unsettling implication. The system produces outcomes that look chaotic from the outside — jurisdictional confusion, parallel legal tracks, coordination breakdowns — but from the inside, it's a remarkably stable architecture of control. It's been running for thirty years. It can probably run for thirty more.
Whether it should is a different question. But how it works — that's what we've been trying to unpack here. And I think the speeding ticket got us about as close as anything could.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the Soviet Union during the nineteen sixties, civilian radio receivers were deliberately engineered to be incapable of picking up certain frequencies. This was ostensibly a national security measure, but it had an unexpected side effect: the restricted bands happened to align perfectly with the wavelengths preferred by migratory storks passing over the Outer Hebrides, creating a bizarre situation where Soviet citizens could occasionally hear faint stork chatter on supposedly blocked frequencies, leading some rural communities to believe the birds were foreign spies transmitting coded messages.
I have so many questions and I'm not sure I want any of them answered.
The storks were the deep state all along.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for somehow finding that fact. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review wherever you listen — it helps. You can find all two hundred episodes at myweirdprompts dot com.
I'm Corn.
I'm Herman Poppleberry. We'll be back next week.
