(JNS) Having a military or intelligence background is no guarantee of being politically neutral or accurate in your conclusions. That’s something that’s been proven over and over again in both the United States and Israel. And that’s especially true for the Jewish state, where the leadership of its citizen army has, from its origins in the pre-state era, always been mixed up in politics. And that seems to have also applied to those who played key roles in its intelligence establishment.
That’s why seasoned observers should be taking the letter sent to President Donald Trump by a group of 550 retired Israeli senior military and intelligence officers under the cover of a group called Commanders for Israel’s Security (CIS) with a shovel full of salt. The goal of the missive is for the United States to pressure the Israeli government. The signers want Washington to push Jerusalem to crack down on what it calls a “rising swell in Jewish settler terror activity.” They claim the consequences of this will be greater than those of the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre and the war that resulted from it.
It’s all about politics
But those who have embraced the letter’s narrative need to understand what this controversy is really about. There is no epidemic of “Jewish terrorism” because such claims are, in the vast majority of cases, not merely false but motivated by something other than moral outrage about criminal behavior. The point of the exercise isn’t a righteous stand against lawlessness or cruelty that undermines Israel’s reputation before the world. It’s about Israeli politics and the effort to defeat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this fall when the country goes to the polls.
The CIS letter is roughly analogous to the one signed by 51 former US intelligence officials who claimed in the last weeks of the 2020 presidential election that the revelations about corruption on Hunter Biden’s laptop were “Russian disinformation.” As it turned out, it was nothing of the kind; the letter was a political influence operation organized by President Joe Biden’s campaign. In the case of the CIS letter, it, too, refers to a largely mythical threat—settler violence—and its purpose is entirely political.
The message of the letter isn’t likely to influence the Trump administration, but it is resonating with many American Jews. The claims that “settler violence” is not merely rising but creating both a security crisis and a moral catastrophe for a nation whose government is somehow complicit in this crime wave have become a constant theme for critics of Israel. Worse than that, it is now widely accepted among liberal Zionists. Writers like New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who is an ardent supporter of Israel though also a bitter foe of both Netanyahu and Trump, have taken up the issue as something that Israelis and their friends should view as a serious threat to the cause of the Jewish state.
Jewish virtue signaling
The refrain of “settler violence” has been used as an excuse to support efforts to sanction Israelis and Zionist organizations in Judea and Samaria. And the reaction from much of the Jewish establishment, as well as many ordinary Jews who consider themselves pro-Israel, is horror at the way these allegedly bad settlers are tarnishing the good name of Israel and all of the Jewish people. Such sanctions have the enthusiastic support of groups like the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.
Essentially, the settler-violence narrative has become the focus of a broad-based virtue signaling on the part of much of American Jewry. The point is to make it clear that they want nothing to do with a population of hooligans whose actions, which supposedly terrorize innocent people, are both immoral and exacerbate an already intractable conflict.
To understand the letter and the way the issue is being used both in Israel and especially in the United States, you need to decode the language of those putting forth the proposition that settlers have embarked on a wave of terrorism that threatens to blow up the region. It can be found in the sentence that follows the phrase about the settler violence in which the retired officers complain about something else. They’re also opposed to the Israeli “government policy of choking the Palestinian Authority (financially and otherwise).”
By this, they are referring to efforts by Jerusalem to hold the corrupt PA accountable for its ongoing subsidization of terror. Despite the passage of laws like the Taylor Force Act, which bans US aid to the Palestinians as long as they continue their “pay for slay” policy, whereby salaries and pensions are given to those who wound and murder Israelis and others. Money is also given to the families of terrorists, which only enables the violence.
The retired officers, however, are against such accountability. In a throwback to the misguided policies of both the US and Israeli governments during the heyday of the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, they believe that ignoring Palestinian violence and their fomenting of hatred for Israelis and Jews is essential to keeping the hope of a two-state solution alive.
Matan Vilnai, the leader of the CIS, is a retired general who had a brilliant military career that included leading an element of the 1976 Entebbe rescue mission in which the only casualty among forces was the current prime minister’s brother, Yonatan (“Yoni”) Netanyahu, who was killed while leading the effort. Vilnai went on to become deputy chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces. Like everyone else on the list of former officers, he’s entitled to respect and admiration for his courage and service to Israel. But he’s also a former failed politician who represented the now-defunct Labor Party in the Knesset and served in ministerial positions, and was later appointed Israel’s ambassador to China.
Reviving ‘land for peace’
The point of CIS is to promote the policies Vilnai championed during his time in politics, such as the Oslo-era idea that Israel could trade “land for peace” to end the Arab-Israeli conflict. Its members have every right to advocate for that position, but Americans, who are inclined to stand up and salute any veteran of the IDF, Mossad or Shin Bet, should also understand what this means.
This concept, along with associated beliefs about propping up the PA and delegitimizing the more than half a million Jews who live in “settlements” over the Green Line whose existence makes it harder for Israel to surrender territory, isn’t just an expression of the politics of the Israeli past. They were literally and figuratively exploded by the PA’s rejection of Israeli offers of statehood in 2000, which was followed by the Second Intifada (2001-2005), a terrorist war of attrition that took the lives of more than 1,000 Israelis and far more Palestinians. They were further discredited by what happened after the late Prime Minister Ariel Sharon withdrew every soldier, settler and settlement from the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2005. That led directly to the creation of a Hamas terror state that ruled Gaza from 2007 to 2023 and ultimately to the assault on southern Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023.
For the overwhelming majority of Israelis, the idea of reviving “land for peace” isn’t just ill-advised. It is utter insanity since that would enable the Palestinians to repeat the atrocities of Oct. 7 from the vastly larger and more strategic areas of Judea and Samaria. Unlike most liberal American Jews, who still back the idea of a two-state solution, they have been paying attention to what the Palestinians say, believe and do—and know that Israel has no viable peace partner.
The war to destroy the Jewish state, no matter where its borders might be drawn, is inextricably linked to the Palestinians’ sense of their national identity. That’s why they’ve consistently rejected every peace offer and compromise, including those that would have given them an independent state, for the past century.
Even Netanyahu’s main opponents in the upcoming Knesset election disavow any intention of pursuing such a path. But in the meantime, groups like CIS, along with American organizations like J Street, keep promoting these debunked notions. That is why they are desperate to portray Jews who live in Judea and Samaria as a menace not merely to their Arab neighbors, but also to the Jewish state and its standing in the world, in addition to the US-Israel relationship.
Debunking a false narrative
The truth about settler violence contradicts not merely the assertion of the CIS and those regurgitating it in America, like Stephens. Though the Times columnist and others have mocked Netanyahu’s claims that the problem is confined to approximately 150 “juvenile delinquents,” once you take a deep dive into the statistics about settler violence, you realize that he might not be entirely wrong about that claim.
As JNS has reported, the assertion that Jews living in Judea and Samaria have been regularly engaging in a crime rampage is based on reports that classify a great many things that no objective observer would call “Jewish terror.” A Kohelet Policy Forum report on the subject by Israeli legal scholars Eugene Kontorovich and Avraham Shalev details the facts that many of the alleged acts of settler violence consist mainly of Jews doing things like visiting the Temple Mount in Jerusalem or creating infrastructure in their communities.
More important is the fact that many of these alleged instances of Jewish terrorism represent incidents in which Jews have defended themselves against acts of Arab terror. They also include times when the IDF has conducted counter-terror operations.
The narrative about settler violence also ignores the context of life in the territories. Arab violence and terrorism aimed at Jews is a daily occurrence. It is so common that only the most violent incidents involving deaths at the hands of Palestinian terrorists are reported, even in the Israeli press. The hundreds of thousands of Jews living in communities in the heart of their ancient homeland face constant harassment and violence. Rock-throwing at vehicles—something that American prosecutors would have no qualm about classifying as attempted murder since it is done with the express intent to harm the occupants of the car—is a constant threat. As anyone who has taken the trouble to visit these “settlements” knows, Jewish towns and villages, as well as farms, must be guarded around the clock to protect their inhabitants.
The number of acts of Arab violence in the territories far outnumbers even most of the exaggerated claims of settler crimes.
That’s not to say that a tiny minority of the Jewish population of these communities has never crossed the line from active defense to acts of retaliation. And when they do, they are often arrested by Israeli intelligence units and subject to the full force of the law. But such incidents are a small percentage of overall actions that the United Nations or others call settler “violence.”
So, to argue as Stephens does, that Netanyahu is lying and that a nation that can order its forces to perform amazing acts of derring-do when fighting Iran, Hezbollah or Hamas could, if it wished, put a quick end to a major crime problem is not merely missing the point of what is actually happening in Judea and Samaria. It’s a false claim whose purpose is to bolster the idea that Netanyahu’s government is hopelessly compromised by the presence of parties, like those led by ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. The assertion is that these controversial parties and leaders that support the Jews of Judea and Samaria have prevented the prime minister from doing his duty to uphold the law.
There are reasonable, even strong, arguments to make that someone like Ben-Gvir, who does and says things that are irresponsible and undermine Israel’s reputation, is a liability to Netanyahu. In private, the prime minister probably thinks that himself. Netanyahu would almost certainly prefer some of the center-left parties as coalition partners for Likud and will likely try to get them to join him if he gets the chance to form another government after the Oct. 27 election. But except for the national unity government that existed for a time after Oct. 7, they have refused to join Netanyahu due to personal feuds. That has ensured that Ben-Gvir, Smotrich and the ultra-Orthodox parties are the Likud’s only available partners.
Seen from this perspective, the entire discussion becomes easily understandable as a tactic to persuade people not to vote for Netanyahu or his allies.
Plenty of legitimate reasons exist for Israelis not to want Netanyahu to continue in office, including his lengthy tenure as prime minister and the fact that Oct. 7 happened on his watch. Yet it should be remembered that his most likely would-be successors were just as guilty as Netanyahu of subscribing to the “conceptzia” idea that Hamas could be bought off from attacking Israel as it did that Black Shabbat. That goes double for everyone in the military and intelligence establishment that sold Israelis this false doctrine. Indeed, the entire point of the CIS initiative is to replicate the pre-Oct. 7 situation in Gaza in Judea and Samaria, with the same tragic results its most likely consequence.
And that’s a reminder to those citing the CIS letter that blind faith in military and intelligence officials—many of whom, like Vilnai, have political motives—is almost always a mistake.
Coercing Israel
Once you strip away the skewed statistics, emotive rhetoric and virtue-signaling about disassociating from Jews who are “bad” settlers, the talk of settler violence is revealed as a political tactic aimed at toppling Netanyahu. The main reason why the Israeli opposition and its allies in the United States talk about the subject is to paint the Jewish population of the territories as a bunch of violent thugs, and in doing so, convince the electorate that they should be sacrificed in some chimerical “land for peace” agreement.
Yet since the Israeli left knows very well that the Israeli public will never vote for such a thing, they must resort, as they have for decades, to pleas for Washington to pressure Jerusalem to adopt policies the voters have rejected, as well as to efforts to delegitimize the prime minister and his allies.
Those whom American supporters of Israel look to as champions of their cause, like Stephens, should not have fallen for this tactic since it does as much harm to Israel’s reputation as it does to the government. That he and others like him have done so speaks volumes about their hostility to Netanyahu and Trump. Stephens’ readers deserved better from him.
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