Repost: WSJ, "U.N. Fudges the Data on West Bank Violence"
I’m exhausted by the endless goalpost-shifting. It’s never about solutions, just scapegoating. Since the latest war, this has only intensified. Brands like Dr. Bronner’s, that have no skin in the game at all, still want to profit from the moment. So if “Gaza” sounds too thorny, they pivot to “settler violence.” Ole reliable!
Why? Because the phrase “Jewish settlers” has gone mainstream. People who can’t even find Israel on a map repeat it like gospel. It’s always paired with mockery, “something something promised to them 6 million years ago!” Yes, haters can mock the Holocaust and 3,000 years of history in one go.
I’m never going to defend “settler violence,” but I will put it in perspective, the exact same way I put low income neighborhood violence in perspective. Some points on Judea and Samaria are far more nuanced than the claims the geniuses at Dr. Bronner’s or Ben & Jerrys know:
There’s Jewish–Arab coexistence in Areas B and C. No Jew is safe in Area A (under PA/PLO control). Because of this, many local Arabs want Israeli citizenship, not Palestinian.
Many Palestinians openly reject Gaza’s leadership and culture. Abbas has repeatedly rejected Hamas rule since the war. There was also civil war.
Some Arab villages are home to literal millionaires. And I joke about going to their malls, because, believe it or not, there are 5-story malls in parts of the disputed territories.
The violent “Hilltop Youth” faction is likely a few dozen individuals, overhyped even by some on the Israeli right. I’m taking this from endless firsthand accounts. There are ~2,000 more Hilltop Youth, who certainly tarnish our name, but don’t engage in violence.
Before I entertain a real discusion on the topic, there are two questions I ask, yet to be answered:
Why are only Jews called “settlers” here—never Arabs, Bedouins, or others building illegally?
If the IDF defends Jews, but the PA/PLO fails to defend Arabs, doesn’t that reveal who’s more state-worthy under any basic social contract theory?
Enter this WSJ piece. Yes, it cites Regavim, a right-wing Israeli NGO. Take it with a grain of salt. But their data at least tries to be accurate, unlike the ideological dogma flooding global headlines. And I do care about data more than chants.
To be clear: I don’t condone Hilltop Youth violence. Yet I find it absurd how global attention fixates on a handful of incidents here while ignoring entire cities elsewhere—cough cough St. Louis or Baltimore—with daily bloodshed. The double standard of “Jew = settler” and “Arab = native” is infuriating. Smotrich has 13 generations of family history in Jerusalem. Call that what you will, but “settler” feels like a stretch. Ben Gvir has Kurdish-Iraqi Jewish ancestors who were kicked out of their homeland. Where exactly is he supposed to go? Yes, they’re gross individuals, but have some consideration that Ben Gvir going back to Iraq would be labelled “settler” and Iraqi Arabs going to Hebron could be incorrectly labeled indigenous.
Here’s the WSJ write-up: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/united-nations-settler-violence-data-israel-west-bank-palestinians-regavim-0186d648
Houses in the Israeli settlement of Psagot in the West Bank in May
U.N. Fudges the Data on West Bank Violence
Even Palestinian terrorists are counted as victims of Israeli settlers.
The Editorial Board; Jun 11, 2025
Who’s terrorizing whom in the West Bank? President Biden had one answer, backed by United Nations data, and built an unprecedented sanctions regime to address Israeli “settler violence,” a suddenly ubiquitous term. On Tuesday the U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Norway announced sanctions on two Israeli ministers. But the data doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
A new report by Regavim, a right-wing Israeli NGO, takes the trouble of scrutinizing the statistics from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), on which the Biden case relied. Poring over the U.N.’s list of 6,285 violent incidents by settlers from January 2016 through April 2023, Regavim noticed something: “The UN database includes thousands of clearly non-violent incidents in its count of violent events.”
Every visit by Jews to the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site, which is administered and venerated by Muslims too, is counted as settler violence. So are class trips to archaeological sites, traffic accidents, state infrastructure work and trespassing by hikers. Other incidents are in Jerusalem, which isn’t a settlement.
None of this is what “settler violence” summons to mind. Filtering out the thousands of such cases leaves 833 alleged incidents of nationalist violence resulting in bodily harm—a definition the U.N. claims to apply—over the 7½-year period.
But those don’t hold up either. The Orwellian U.N. counts Palestinians harmed in the process of committing terrorist attacks as victims of settler violence. In about half the 833 cases, the U.N. also records the victim’s “involvement in clashes,” leaving it unclear who started it. In 117 of the cases, the U.N. says Israeli security forces, not settlers, are to blame.
Meanwhile, 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. Including some “less serious” attacks more than triples the number. Violence by Israeli settler radicals in remote outposts is a real problem. Yet the liberal picture of the West Bank—wanton violence by Israeli civilians against peaceful Palestinians—is an inversion of the daily reality.
I’ve been to the Temple Mount. The UN might log that as “settler violence” just because I’m Jewish. But what actually happened? Nothing. A quiet visit, some kind cousins took my photo, and I left peacefully. A few months later, others went and the media exploded. Same act, different narrative.
The story isn’t about what happens. It’s about who’s doing it.
Even if there were zero violence in the disputed areas, and even if Arab citizens proudly waved Israeli flags, the word “settler” would still get hurled like a slur. It's not about geography. It’s about erasing Jewish legitimacy. The extremists still rant about “settlers” in Gaza, even though Israel left Gaza in 2005. They call Tel Aviv a “settlement.” They call everywhere with Jews a settlement.
That’s how you know this isn’t about peace. It’s about pushing Jews into the sea. The same people who are chanting “no one is illegal” and “we are all migrants” in the U.S., right now, demand that Jews are treated like trespassers in their ancestral homeland, in their next sentence. Ask them to explain the clear hypocrisy, and the goalpost will shift again.
