By Melanie Phillips, JNS
Israel has allowed its enemies to defame victims of attack as perpetrators.
Earlier in the week, an Israeli man was murdered and three other people were injured in a stabbing and car-ramming attack at the Gush Etzion junction in central Israel.
This attack barely registered among Western media outlets. Gush Etzion is a major crossroads in the “West Bank,” the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria. The West views the Jewish residents of these territories as illegal and violent “settlers” rather than the victims of attack.
The Israeli government has allowed a situation to develop to the point where Israel’s enemies have been able to defame the Jewish residents of these territories, who are subjected every day to murderous Arab attacks or terrorist threats, by painting them instead as the perpetrators of violence.
The “settler” attacks are actually being carried out by no more than 200 or 300 extremist Israeli delinquents out of a population of some 450,000 Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria. That violence, directed at Israeli soldiers and police as well as Arabs, is certainly serious and out of control.
On Monday, following the dismantling of an illegal Israeli outpost, dozens of Jewish extremists attacked an Arab village and wounded several Israeli Border Police officers.
Last week, such extremists torched and defaced a mosque in an Arab village. A day earlier, dozens of them set fire to vehicles and other property in two Arab villages and targeted factories and farmland.
These escalating attacks have drawn condemnation from Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, and Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog.
Even the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, issued a rare rebuke when he told the weekly cabinet meeting that Israel would “take very forceful action’” against such attacks “because we are a nation of laws, and a nation of laws acts in accordance with the law.”
Netanyahu’s strictures were long overdue.
During October, the IDF recorded 86 incidents of “nationalistic crime” compared with 25 in the same period last year. Since the beginning of the year, Israeli defense authorities have recorded 704 incidents of “nationalistic crime” compared to 675 in the whole of 2024.
Most of those who are arrested are released within a short time. That might mean that in most of these incidents, the suspects were blameless.
However, the ultra-nationalist Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister who’s been in charge of policing since 2022, is known for his hardline attitude towards the Palestinian Arabs and instinct to excuse Jewish misdeeds. According to Israel’s Channel 12 news, there’s been a 73% decline in the number of investigations opened into these “nationalistic” attacks since 2023.
The commander of the police division in Judea and Samaria is under investigation for ignoring such nationalist violence in order to curry favor with Ben-Gvir. This indolence, as well as the violence itself, is totally unacceptable. These thugs need to be arrested, prosecuted and jailed, and this violence has to be stopped.
This is not just because such criminality is a stain on Israel’s moral character, important as that undoubtedly is. It’s also because “settler violence” is being used to defame all Israeli residents of these territories—and thus to demonize Israel itself in the eyes of the rest of the world as irredeemably violent and rapacious in its aim to steal “Palestinian” land.
The truth is that reports of “settler violence” are overwhelmingly exaggerated and distorted. A report published in the summer by Regavim, the Israeli organization that monitors Judea and Samaria, found that some 90% of incidents of violence attributed to Jewish residents by the United Nations in recent years were fabricated.
Such incidents were either misclassified as attacks by Jews on Arabs, whereas they were, in fact, Arab attacks on Jews, or they involved anti-Israel provocations orchestrated by Palestinian and foreign left-wing activist groups.
Video footage has shown such incidents in which Arabs launch violent attacks on Israelis who are being set up to react with force. That reaction is filmed by far-left activists and selectively edited to exclude the provocation, and then the video is made available to the United Nations or Western media outlets.
In any event, Arabs attack the Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria an estimated 60 times more frequently than attacks upon them by Jews. Between 2019 and 2022, Israel’s Shin Bet security agency recorded 25,257 Palestinian Arab attacks on Jewish residents in these territories.
In 2024, according to figures published by Rescuers Without Borders, Palestinian Arab terrorists targeted Israeli Jews in Judea and Samaria at least 6,343 times, murdering 27 Israelis and wounding more than 300 others. These attacks included 3,668 instances of rock-throwing, 843 attacks with Molotov cocktails, 671 attempts to blind drivers with laser pointers, 526 explosive charges, 364 cases of arson and 179 terrorist shootings.
According to the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Centre, following the ceasefire agreement in the Gaza Strip, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad began to shift the center of the “resistance” to Judea and Samaria, encouraging attacks on Israeli security forces and civilian residents.
Last month, according to the Meri Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, the Palestinian Arab media center Me’ata, which monitors the “struggle against the occupation,” noted an attempt to escalate “resistance” actions against Israelis, galvanized by the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli prisons as part of the ceasefire agreement.
Some 356 “popular resistance actions” were documented that month in Judea and Samaria and eastern Jerusalem, including planting and detonating explosive devices, shootings, an attempted vehicle-ramming attack, rock-throwing, and attacks with Molotov cocktails and fireworks. A further 302 such attacks were documented in September and 263 in August.
In May, a pregnant Israeli woman was shot and killed in Samaria on her way to give birth; the baby died the following day.
These attacks are virtually never reported in Western media. The lives of “settlers” are deemed worthless. The Jewish victims of murderous violence have effectively been dehumanized by the so-called civilized West, which ignores any evidence that challenges the monstrous lie it tells itself of innate Israeli evil.
But Israel itself is also at fault here. It never tells the world about the scale and nature of these Arab attacks in the “West Bank” and their strategic purpose in the war to destroy the Jewish state.
It never tells the world about the manipulative stunts by anti-Israel activists and their U.N. accomplices to transform Israelis from victimized residents of the disputed territories into “violent settlers.”
It never publicly corrects the neuralgic and false belief fueling this defamation—that Israel is in “illegal occupation” of the “West Bank.”
It never explains that the most violent parts of these territories are under Palestinian Authority control. It never reveals that Israelis are forbidden under Israeli law to enter some of these areas because of the likelihood that the Palestinian Arabs will lynch and murder them.
Israel never tells the world these things partly because it regards these disputed territories as a can of worms that it has no wish to pry open. That cowardly position feeds in turn into the broader problem that the Israeli government simply doesn’t take seriously enough the need to protect its reputation in the world.
And that’s largely because it sees little point in doing so on the grounds that the West, with antisemitism hardwired into its culture, is irredeemably hostile not just to Israel but to the Jewish people.
The result has been that lies have gone unchallenged, that many people of goodwill in the West have been persuaded that the “violent settlers” are preventing peace in the Middle East—and that too many Diaspora Jews have fallen for this lie, too.
Failing to deal with its violent extremists is in itself a stain that besmirches Israeli society. It is also strategically stupid—by a country that doesn’t even have a strategy for defending its reputation against existential attack.
The result is that both the Israelis living in the “West Bank” and the beleaguered Jews living in a viciously hostile Diaspora have been left high and dry in trying to cope with the onslaught of malicious lies. It’s high time that was changed.
