That's a huge problem (immediate, unjustified escalation to violence becoming the norm) and:

> The main justification floated is that the car was "going fast" and thus made the undercover Israeli soldiers feel unsafe.

"I feel unsafe" has become the catch-all excuse for everything in the recent decade. It's used to justify everything from Karen complaining about someone's behavior in public to people calling the cops on someone for looking at them wrong, to making a scene on a public bus, to police officers jumping the gun and escalating to violence, all the way to war crimes. When did "I feel unsafe" become this ultimate i-can-do-anything-and-avoid-responsibility card? Like a magic spell that you can cast before doing something crazy. It's like that old "He's coming right for us" South Park joke, but instead of being a joke it has real life and death consequences.

Most people will never interact with a cop on duty outside of a speeding ticket or some other mundane encounter. A major chuck of what many people think about police comes from TV and movies.

It's impossible to overstate the influence of Dragnet (the OG police procedural from the early 50s) alone on the widely held idea that police are mostly heroic and good. Police procedurals are still extremely popular, they overwhelmingly portray law enforcement in an extremely idealized way.

There are exceptions (The Wire, The Shield), but they are noteworty in that police are not heroes.