(JNS) Settlers. Colonists. By now, there is hardly any need to add the adjective “violent.” In the imagination of much of the world, it is simply taken for granted.
Anti-Israel propaganda has chosen above all to showcase young hooligans with long sidelocks—armed, aggressive and violent. We have seen them on television screens around the world, including those who descended on the Palestinian village of Qusra. They are violent, persistent and damaging to Israel.
But the automatic response to the word “settler” is increasingly similar to the response elicited by the word “genocide”: horror, followed by rejection of Israel.
It is a sophisticated game. It creates the illusion of a simple solution: Remove the settlers from Judea and Samaria and establish a Palestinian state there. The obvious danger of creating the conditions for another Oct. 7 is pushed aside.
Eight arrests by Israeli police, the presence of the Israeli army and condemnations of the violence by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and almost the entire Israeli public do little to dent the sweeping international accusation of colonialism or the portrayal of Palestinians exclusively as victims.
This narrative has found a willing audience at the United Nations.
A resolution of the UN Human Rights Council that referred to settlers as “Nazis” followed hours of hostile testimony. Yet when Maurice Hirsch, a researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Foreign Affairs, requested just 90 seconds to present a defense, he was denied.
Who are these “settlers”?
They number about 770,000 and constitute a socially and educationally diverse population. They live in areas that came under Israeli control in 1967 after Jordan entered the war against Israel. Jewish communities were subsequently established there under governments led by Labor figures such as Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, and the territory was later divided into administrative areas under the Oslo Accords of the 1990s.
Their towns and farms stand on land where the geography of Jewish history can be traced name by name, back to biblical times.
Jordan’s sovereignty over Judea and Samaria was never widely recognized internationally. Yet since 1967, Israel has faced a demand rarely imposed on a country that has emerged victorious from a defensive war: Hand the territory to enemies who continue to educate their children toward the destruction of the Jewish state.
There are violent and racist young people among the settlers. There are also extremists and terrorists. They must be stopped and prosecuted.
But turning their crimes into an indictment of an entire population is something else entirely.
See related: VIDEO PODCAST: “Settler violence” vs Palestinian terror
The blood libel of mass settler criminality owes much to reporting by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), based heavily on testimony hostile to Israel. It creates a picture in which Palestinian violence and the security reality confronting Israeli Jews all but disappear.
The numbers tell another story.
In 2024, there were 6,300 terrorist attacks against Jews in Judea and Samaria, resulting in 27 murders and 300 wounded. In 2025, there were 5,051 attacks, resulting in 24 murders and 400 wounded.
Deaths also occur during clashes that follow Palestinian attacks. The case of 15-year-old Muhammad Naasan is, unfortunately, one such example. Today, he is being glorified in Palestinian media as a shahid (martyr).
None of this excuses Jewish violence. Israel has an obligation to stop it. Those who attack innocent Palestinians must face the law.
But Israel’s fundamental security dilemma will never be solved by portraying Palestinians solely as victims or by collectively criminalizing the settlers.
The demonization of the settlers has instead become another means of avoiding the central issue: Palestinian rejectionism and the continuing determination of Israel’s enemies to destroy the Jewish state.
Israel, for its part, remains determined to prevent that outcome and to maintain borders that can protect its citizens.
Europe seems unwilling to understand what should by now be obvious.
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