We’ve all heard the tales of those wild-eyed, kippah-covered, and Biblically bearded “settlers” — the name given with malice aforethought to a subset of the 520,000 Israeli Jews who live in Judea and Samaria, where Jews have lived for 3500 years, and is part of the territory that, according to the Mandate for Palestine, is open to Jewish settlement. Yes, those terrible “settlers” are depicted as perennially on the rampage, cutting down “Palestinian” olive trees, bashing “Palestinian” automobiles, and threatening those peaceful “Palestinians” with violence. Is it just possible that Western journalists greatly exaggerate these reports, and that the violence that the “Palestinians” commit in Judea and Samaria is much greater than the violence they suffer? Naomi Kahn has written about the true state of affairs here: “West Bank’s mountains and molehills: Is Israel’s settler violence real? – opinion,” by Naomi Linder Kahn, Jerusalem Post, January 9, 2026:
Our news feed runneth over with horrific accounts of bloodthirsty, rampaging hordes of kippah-clad Jews attacking innocent Arab villagers. Foreign governments have gone far beyond condemnations and applied direct sanctions of the sort usually reserved for internationally designated terrorists or drug cartel kingpins.
Experts in sociology, criminology, political science, and religion continue to provide learned analyses of the causes and objectives of the reported surge in settler violence, and anti-Israel forces have justified the mass murder or ethnic cleansing of Jews on this hyper-inspected “phenomenon.”
Perhaps we ought to take a moment to figure out if settler violence is really “a thing.”
Media reports and foreign sanctions are based on a damning dataset, provided by the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) through the “Data on Casualties” dashboard, which claims to include only incidents verified by two independent, impartial sources.
Predictably, and unfortunately, OCHA does not share the data outside of its own circle of “humanitarian agencies.” In order to inspect and analyze this data, researchers at Regavim, an Israeli research group dedicated to Zionist land policy, obtained it through the intervention of a French criminologist.
Apparently, OCHA has a very good reason for hiding the actual data and instead presenting its own version of reality: Regavim analyzed over 8,300 “incident reports” on settler violence spanning a six-year period, which included the months following the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas War in October 2023.
The first finding of note, before analyzing the incident reports themselves, concerns the sources: The overwhelming majority of incident reports were supplied by only one source: the Palestinian Ministry for Resistance to the Settlements, or extreme anti-Israel organizations.
Regavim also found that more than 95% of the reported incidents were either gross inversions of reality (i.e., Arab violence against Israelis), misrepresentations of incidents that either didn’t involve violence, didn’t involve settlers, or didn’t occur in Judea and Samaria (confrontations with IDF forces, non-Muslim visits to the Temple Mount described as “storming al-Aqsa,” road improvement projects classified as ”invasion or confiscation of Palestinian property,” elementary school visits by Israeli children to historic or religious sites that were classified as “trespass” – even dog bites and car accidents….
But if the facts are so unequivocal, why is the general impression so skewed? That, my friends, is the definition of a blood libel.
Perhaps those “terrible settlers” in Judea and Samaria are not so terrible after all. Perhaps that “tsunami of anti-Palestinian violence” that is attributed to them has never materialized. Perhaps the world’s media ought to stop relying for its information about the “settlers” and their so-called “rampages” on a source other than the Palestinian Ministry for Resistance to the Settlements. And perhaps those realizations just might open minds to the possibility that those “settlers” are not as they have been painted.
Namer says
The Times of Israel appears to be printing a lot of disinformation apparently. I guess their refusal to work or allow conscription of their young men into the military is all a lie too.
Larry Estavan says
Naomi Khan, and the Regavim Movement is amazing –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UH9xpAT3f8&t=452s
࿗Infidel࿘ says
All muslims should leave Judea, Samaria and Israel, and go to Turkey or Qatar. I read somewhere that Turkey is happy to take people, if they are muslim. So there’s their opportunity
James Lincoln says
Infidel,
If they don’t leave voluntarily, the Israelis should kick them out.
Every last one.
nicholas william tesdorf says
Jordan invaded Judea and Samaria in 1948. The Jordanian administration of the West Bank officially began on 24 April 1950. Israel retook the area in 1967 following the Six-Day War. Jordanian administration ended. The area is now again part of Israel and Israelis are entitled to live anywhere there. Arguments to the contrary are specious.
mgoldberg says
from Hugh’s article referencing elder of ziyon’s article back in june of 2025: “The UN has claimed that there have been “6,285 incidents of alleged violence against Palestinians in Judea and Samaria that reportedly occurred between January 2016 and the end of April 2023.” Subtract from that total the number of Jewish visits to Temple Mount (hardly “acts of settler violence), the visits by Jews to archaeological sites (which strengthen the Jewish claim to the land in Judea and Samaria, the infrastructure buildup, the car accidents that leave an Israeli car on Arab land, the Israeli hikers who by mistake trespass on Arab land — all of which the UN wrongly counts as “settler attacks” — we are left with a total of 833 acts of “settler violence” over close to eight years, or about 100 a year. The UN includes in that number of alleged acts of “settler violence” by Israelis those where Palestinians were wounded or killed while they were engaged in acts of terrorism. Does that make sense?
Once we examine those 833 alleged acts of “settler violence,” we find that only about half did not involve Palestinian terrorism against those “settlers.” So instead of 6,285 acts of “settler violence” over seven and a half years, which is the figure provided by UN, we in fact arrive at a very different figure: about 416 such acts, not 6,285, over 7 ½ years.
Finally, Israel’s Shin Bet records 6,068 serious attacks by Palestinians (shootings, stabbings, suicide bombings, etc.) against Israeli civilians over only two years, 2020-22. That is, there are fifteen times as many Palestinian attacks in just two years as the number of “violent settler attacks” in 7 ½ years.
The UN does not release any figures on Palestinian violence against Israelis. I wonder why?”
skeptiker says
Die sogenannte Siedlergewalt war schon immer eine gern verbreitete Lüge, wie der Apartheitsstaat Israel, das unterdrückte palästinensische Volk, die Hungersnöte und die vielen zivilen Opfer in Gaza.
Der Widerstand der Siedler ist gerechtfertigt und verdient meine volle Unterstützung. Wohin kann gespendet werden?
skeptiker says
Der Widerstand der Siedler ist gerechtfertigt und verdient meine volle Unterstützung. Wohin kann gespendet werden? Gibt es ein Spendenkonto?
dumbledoresarmy says
There was another very eye-opening article in the Jerusalem Post, recently, entitled “Modern Blood Libel: when Jewish self-defense gets labelled ‘settler violence’. The authors, Yehudit Katsover and Nadia Matar, started by stating “Once again, Israeli and international audiences are being flooded with videos allegedly proving what has become known as ‘settler violence’.
**This type of campaign resurfaces with striking consistency, often ahead of diplomatic events or renewed calls for territorial withdrawals, precisely when political pressure is being mobilized against Israel. This is not a coincidence**…
“… every sensational video should raise an immediate question: What happened BEFORE the camera was turned on? Experience teaches us that the critical context is almost always missing.
‘One incident from several months ago illustrates the pattern all too well.
“A widely circulated video showed what appeared to be a Jewish shepherd attacking an Arab and stealing his mobile phone.
‘Even well-meaning viewers concluded, ‘This is settler violence’.
BUT the full story, uncovered after a brief investigation, revealed something very different. Two young Jewish shepherds were grazing their flock on land belonging to their community, when a group of Palestinian Arabs arrived and began throwing stones. One shepherd was struck on the head and seriously injured.
(so much for all those Useful Idiots in the west who like to claim that ‘stone-throwing’ by Arab Muslims is harmless – dda).
‘His companion began filming the Arab attackers, at which point he himself was assaulted, beaten, and robbed of his phone.
‘The attackers fled toward their village.
‘Refusing to surrender evidence of the assault, the shepherd pursued them, entered a building where the phone was hidden, and managed to retrieve it. Yet only that final confrontation – the moment he reclaimed his stolen phone – was filmed and distributed.”
(And the Muslims had the hide to claim that this was an eevil Joooo stealing the phone of a poooor ‘Palestinian’.. in a complete reversal of reality! BTW, of course, the Israeli investigators would easily have been able to establish that the phone in question belonged to its Jewish owner and did NOT belong to an Arab Muslim!)- dda).
‘Yet only that final confrontation – the moment he reclaimed his stolen phone – was filmed and distributed.
‘The violent attack on the Jewish shepherds, which preceded it, was erased from the narrative.
‘And this is not an isolated case. It is a method.’ END QUOTE.
One wonders just how long it will be before footage of some of the grossest atrocities carried out by Hamas and other Gazan Muslims on October 7 2023, or footage of abuse of the Jewish hostages, will start being circulated – suitably ‘doctored’ – as proof! proof! that the eeevil Joooz carry out atrocities against the poor innocent ‘palestinians’.
gravenimage says
+1
Andrew Knight says
I love Jewish people. This simple fact has made me always skeptical about these reports of settler violence; but it is good to have some confirmation of my instincts. Thanks!