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. These thugs need to be arrested, prosecuted and jailed, and this violence has to be stopped. It’s also because “settler violence” is being used to defame all Israeli residents of these territories — and thus to demonise 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 organisation that monitors Judea and Samaria, found that some 90 per cent of incidents of violence attributed to Jewish residents by the United Nations in recent years were fabricated. The broader problem is 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.
