Did you know that “settler violence” has its own Wikipedia entry? It is defined as Arabs being “the target of violence by Israeli settlers and their supporters, predominantly in the West Bank.” There is, however, another violence, that of linguistic violence, targeting Jews repatriated in their reconstituted historic national homeland.
The term was popularized following the 1989 publication of David Weisburd’s Jewish Settler Violence: Deviance as Social Reaction. In his study, he focused on concerns with crimes of “altruistic” law violations. By that he meant violating the rules and laws of a society in the name of “higher” laws and in response to another group’s violence.
That Wikipedia entry, some 6000 words long at present, contains little indication that the messaging which is driving the “settler violence” campaign is incorrect. It also elides the sources for the data. The numbers come from various anti-settlement NGOs like B’tselem, Peace Now, and Yesh Din or from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian territory (OCHA), which is supplied by Palestinian Authority operatives. They are not objective in the least. Overall, the media and diplomatic campaign is predicated on weak data.
On December 29, last month, Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for the UN Secretary-General, did note concern both for “settler violence and attacks on Israelis by Palestinians” as “extremely alarming.” That, however, pales to the US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller asserting, as he did on December 19, that “Israel… need to do more to police and prevent extremist settler violence in the West Bank” as well as the additional announced imposition of visa restrictions on “violent Jewish extremists.”
The issue has become not only a media trope but a very blunt weapon wielded even by US President Joe Biden among others to browbeat and psychologically force Israel to kowtow to their policies.
As several recent studies and op-eds have detailed, there has not been a significant increase in Jews being violent against Arabs in Judea and Samaria since the beginning of the current Gaza war compared to the period of January-July 2023. There certainly has been no uptick or “surge” in settler violence in October-November as compared to the same period in 2022.
Is there no surge in settler violence?
The problem begins with the facts. The OCHA database, a prime source, announces that it “needs to be validated by at least two independent and reliable sources.” And there is the rub. Years ago I inquired if their staff ever actually do on-site review or rather trust someone like Ghassan Daghlas, the PA’s head of settlement monitoring for the northern West Bank? No response was forthcoming.
On the other hand, I have not found any foreign body having included information provided by Rescuers Without Borders (SSF) which comes directly from the emergency medical units operating in Judea and Samaria as well as official IDF and Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) data. Their reports appear hourly on the Telegram platform.
Now, however, it appears there may be a more invidious scenario presented to foreign bodies in which no small part of the data on “settler violence” is simply not true.
IN A soon-to-be-published academic article, 54 pages long, in Cambridge University Press’ International Annals of Criminology, Dr. Michael Wolfowicz and Esther Salama, of the Hebrew University’s Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law, the point is made that there is “a surprising lack of quantitative research on the issue.” In other words, it is quite possible that many of the figures cited, as I point out above, are not authentic or well-founded.
A central finding of theirs is that “open sources are subject to various limitations, including missing data, selectivity bias and misreporting. Of particular concern is that the geopolitical context of the study may exacerbate reporting bias.” Another is that statistically, Jewish violence is more “sensitive to serious incidence of Arab violence, such as shootings, stabbings, and vehicular attacks” rather that “the more frequent acts of low-intensity violence in the form of Molotov cocktails.”
A second forthcoming report, authored by Shomron Regional Council in conjunction with Mattot Arim, an Israeli NGO, reaches a parallel conclusion: The UN, chief source for the mainstream media, and, presumably, the US State Department (which refuses to reveal its sources), is not credible. The UN “falsely generates defamatory settler violence content.”
This includes conflating extensive violence against settlers with infrequent settler violence and calling both “settler-related” violence; ignoring that the large majority of Arab deaths were the result of IDF arrest raids; as well as the inclusion of incidents of alleged “settler violence” without requiring proof. Instances of lawful self-defense are also listed as “settler violence.”
A significant percentage of events which took place in Jerusalem were not violent but sensationalist Arab media reports portraying Jews entering the Temple Mount using the terms “storming” or “invading.”
In summary, serious investigations do not exist nor is there true transparency. Another review undertaken, by the Regavim NGO, is yet to be published.
Whereas Matthew Miller, State Department spokesman, spoke on December 6 of “unprecedented levels of violence by Israeli extremist settlers targeting Palestinians and their property,” that characterization is overblown and unsupported rhetoric. Moreover, there was no recent uptick or “surge” in settler violence. Israeli media reported in early November that compared to 2022, “there has been an overall almost 50% decrease in incidents in which Jews were engaged in violent offenses in Judea and Samaria.”
Nevertheless, fourteen countries, including Canada, Britain, Australia and France, and the EU, issued a statement on December 15 denouncing “Israel’s failure to protect Palestinians and prosecute extremist settlers.” In the face of such diplomatic steps, what is not so innocent, in addition, is the almost total lack of input by Israel’s government to thwart this campaign, most notably, refusing to supply the data from the security services that would offset the calumnies.
Worse, it is an undermining failure in its lack of confronting a very real violent diplomatic anti-Israel offensive.
The writer is a researcher, analyst, and opinion commentator on political, cultural, and media issues.