Amnesty-UK Horrified at Israeli ‘Settler’ Violence, Doesn’t Notice Palestinian Jihad Violence

The two NGOs that are running neck-and-neck in the anti-Israel NGO sweepstakes this year, as they have every year for at least the past two decades, are Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International. In late August, HRW issued its report accusing the IDF of “gunning down Palestinian children,” a report that was based on exactly four cases of Palestinian mid-to-late teenagers (not “children”) who were killed by the IDF. HRW singularly failed to explain just how potentially deadly were the attacks by those teenagers on the IDF soldiers, who hadlarge rocks, Molotov cocktails, and fireworks hurled at them by those innocent “children.” Nor did the HRW mention the fact that the “children” whom Israel is accused of having “gunned down” were not innocents, but proudly claimed as members by Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Now Amnesty-UK has offered its own report a few days after HRW presented its findings. The Amnesty report deals not with the putative sins of the IDF and the Israeli police, but with those mad-dog Israeli “settlers” who supposedly attack innocent Palestinians out of sheer hate; it’s just as meretricious as the HRW report. More on the Amnesty-UK charges against those “settlers” can be found here: “Amnesty horrified at “settler violence.” Palestinian violence, not at all.” Elder of Ziyon, August 29, 2023:

Amnesty-UK tweeted, “”According to the UN, more than 100 incidents of settler violence a month have been reported against Palestinian civilians in the occupied West Bank this year.”
I am in no way condoning violence by anyone.

But there is a Palestinian organization, Maata, that eagerly counts cases of Palestinian violence – which it calls “resistance operations.”

Are there 100 incidents a month? Well, in July, they counted 1,132.

During the month of July, the West Bank and occupied Jerusalem recorded an escalation in various forms of resistance operations, including shooting operations, armed clashes, and effective run-over and stabbing operations, which led to the killing of (2) Israelis, and the wounding of (50) soldiers and settlers with various injuries, bringing the occupation death toll to rise.

The total number of operations that were monitored during the month, according to the Palestine Information Center – Maati –  was 1132 acts of resistance, including 97 shootings and armed clashes with the occupation forces….

In other words, even if we accept the figure for settler violence against Palestinian civilians that the UN — not exactly an unbiased source — provides, of about 100 incidents a month, this pales beside the figure of 1,132 incidents of “resistance operations for the month of July.”

Furthermore, the Amnesty-UK report fails to consider the nature of the “settler” violence, which consists overwhelmingly of property damage — mostly uprooted olive trees, or damage to cars, including arson, or to houses. There is much less physical violence than is meted out by the Palestinians to Israeli civilians. In fact, during the ten years from 2010 to 2019, “settler violence” resulted in 22 Palestinian deaths, or about two Palestinians killed each year in encounters with settlers. Most of those deaths were not the result of unprovoked settler assaults, but took place in violent encounters between the two groups. In most cases of settler attacks, they have been prompted by some prior act of violence by Palestinians — the wounding or killing of Israeli civilians — that finally pushes the settlers beyond endurance, and they respond with violence of their own.

The attacks by the Palestinians on Israeli civilians are not directed at property, remember, but at people. As I noted above, just in July, according to the Palestinian group Maata (as quoted by Elder of Ziyon),which keeps track of the number, and kind, of “resistance operations,” the Palestinians engaged in “shooting operations, armed clashes, and effective run-over and stabbing operations, which led to the killing of (2) Israelis, and the wounding of (50) soldiers and settlers.”

During the first half of the year, Maata counted 6,704 “resistance actions” which Maata called “a remarkable and qualitative escalation in the forms of popular and armed resistance.”  That’s not 100 attacks a month – it is 1,100 attacks a month. They claim over 400 attacks of incendiary devices including IEDs, Molotov cocktails and fireworks, and hey say they destroyed 175 Israeli vehicles.

They might be exaggerating. But that is part of the point:  they are so proud of attacking Jews that they want to make the militantsappear  as effective as they can. To them, these are heroes.

Israelis do not consider settlers who attack Arabs for no reason to be heroes.

Where are the BBC stories about these statistics? Where are the Amnesty memes condemning them?…

What Amnesty-UK does not include in its report is the following:

There are eleven times as many Palestinian attacks on Israelis each month — 1,1322 such attacks for July, as there are about 100 “settler” attacks on Palestinians. The data is readily available from a Palestinian group, Maata, but Amnesty-UK, and the BBC, have chosen not to report this information. Why not?

Nor does Amnesty-UK describe the very great difference in the nature of the attacks by Israeli settlers and by Palestinians. Typically, settlers have “rampaged” — the verb of choice for those wishing to blacken their name — in Judea and Samaria after being provoked by some act of extreme violence, as the murder of Israeli civilians such as the Yaniv brothers, or Lucy Dee and her two daughters. The settlers, as noted above, pull up olive trees, damage or even set fire to cars, and sometimes attack Palestinian houses. The Palestinians, by contrast, in their attacks are hellbent on wounding or killing Israelis, who in the Palestinian view are all “settlers,” even if they live in Ashdod or Tel Aviv.

It’s hard to decide which NGO has been more unfair to Israel in this latest competition of trafficking in untruths: is it Human Rights Watch, with its charge that the IDF has been “gunning down Palestinian children,” or Amnesty-UK, that reports on Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians, but says not a word about the more than ten times as many Palestinian terror attacks on Israeli civilians that provoke those settlers? Shall we call it a ghastly tie?