Everything about Israeli ‘settler violence’ is backwards.
In the West Bank, ongoing violence against Jews requires "context," while Jewish violence is disproportionately the focus — because few people understand the facts on the ground.
Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.
There has been a nasty spike in violence in Judea and Samaria, and it is not the Jewish settlers attacking Palestinians that you keep reading about.
Two Israeli soldiers were stabbed in an attack a few days ago, just a few hours after another was injured in a car-ramming. Understanding the frequency of such attacks is essential to grasping what is happening in the area.
The much-reported rise in Jewish extremists attacking Palestinians has not sprung out of nowhere. Since the October 7th massacre and kidnappings in 2023, attacks against Jews in Judea and Samaria have surged.
In 2024, there were 6,828 attacks, more than 18 a day, against Jews — in the form of shootings, stabbings, car-rammings, and other incidents, according to the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency. It is astonishing that only 46 people have been killed.
The post–October 7th surge began from levels already vastly higher than generally appreciated because the mainstream media does not report them. In 2023, there were 3,436 Palestinian attacks against Jews in Judea and Samaria, almost 10 a day. This is the backdrop against which the rise in Jewish attacks against Palestinians this olive-harvest season must be seen. Jewish attacks, which dominate international headlines, are at record levels at 752 so far this year, according to the Israel Defense Forces. This is up from the 675 incidents recorded in 2024.
The data is unequivocal: Palestinian terror targeted at Jews dwarfs Jewish attacks on Palestinians. Most Jewish deaths and injuries in Judea and Samaria come from terror attacks, whereas most Palestinian deaths and injuries come not from Jewish settlers or civilians, but from Israeli security forces confronting the Palestinian terrorists behind the thousands of attacks. Yet most people are unaware of this because the international media applies such intense scrutiny to Jewish attacks on Palestinians. The result is a skewed narrative in which Jews, particularly settlers, are cast as the overwhelming aggressors, despite the data showing the opposite.
The IDF estimates that there are 300 to 400 Jewish extremists, including about 50 hardcore ones, behind the recent attacks on Palestinians. Not all of them are settlers. Some come from other parts of Israel, or from illegal outposts, showing that the phrase “settler violence” is a loaded, reductionist caricature.
Some argue that Israel does not do enough to curtail this violence, although Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered the evacuation of 14 illegal outposts and the removal from Judea and Samaria of some 70 Jewish extremists, prompting a riot from Jewish extremists.
And here is where it becomes complex: Three primary motivations drive the Jewish attacks on Palestinians, and all of them can be true (or intermittently and overlappingly true) at the same time. Extremism is one. Some are fanatics, Jewish supremacists, and thugs.
Vigilantism is another. With so many Palestinian attacks, it is unsurprising that there is violent pushback. The third, and most underreported, motivation is that some Jews set up illegal outposts to prevent the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority from building illegally and expanding their tenuous claim.
When news bulletins discuss Judea and Samaria, they present it as a single place under Israeli occupation and omit key facts. Under the Oslo Accords1 from 1993 to 1995, Judea and Samaria was divided into Areas A, B, and C. The Palestinian Authority administers Area A fully; in Area B it also administers but shares security responsibilities with Israel. Most Palestinians live in Areas A and B. Israel administers Area C, which is where the Jewish settlements and illegal outposts are situated.
This complicated arrangement was designed to allow as many Palestinians as possible to govern themselves while a final agreement was worked out, one intended to include the territory and borders of a Palestinian state. It remains in place 30 years later because the Palestinian Authority walked away from the accords and initiated the Second Intifada, murdering more than a thousand Israelis from 2000 to 2005, including hundreds in Israel proper.
The violence taking place today is in Area C, which is under full Israeli control, including the issuance of building permits — making the Jewish settlements entirely legal, a fact rarely reported. Area C is rocky highland, sparsely populated, and mostly State of Israel land.
What is illegal are the Jewish outposts beyond the settlements, anything built on privately owned Palestinian land, and almost all building the Palestinian Authority undertakes without Israeli approval. Palestinian Authority construction in Areas A and B is legal.
The so-called “Hilltop Youth,” a group of about 100 young Jews who establish illegal outposts, do so partly because they are messianic extremists, but partly to stake a claim so the Palestinian Authority cannot build there illegally. Both these things are true at once. The world is complicated, and few places are more so than Judea and Samaria.
There are vastly more illegal Palestinian buildings than Israeli ones, making it darkly comedic that Jewish construction is cast as the central problem. The Palestinian Authority has built 81,317 illegal Palestinian structures in Area C, compared with 4,111 illegal Israeli structures (which includes absurdities such as bathroom extensions built during periods of settlement freezes).
This extensive illegal Palestinian construction is what those Jews establishing illegal outposts are trying to stop. The Palestinian Authority’s goal is to build extensively in Area C to create so-called “facts on the ground” for any future political settlement — despite showing no interest in such a settlement.
This is why Israeli authorities do not crack down on the illegal outposts as harshly as many would like. It is not merely corruption or ideological sympathy with Jewish settlers, but because Israel also wants to stop the Palestinian Authority’s illegal land grab. This is why Israel sometimes normalizes (legalizes) outposts, for which the strategic rationale is entirely understandable. However, it is also true that some Jewish extremists use these illegal outposts as staging grounds for raids on Palestinians and as hideouts from Israeli authorities.
None of this nuance and context permeates the mainstream narrative. In its place are headlines about “rampaging settlers” supported by — yawn — “the most Right-wing government in Israel’s history.” This is the standard pablum and perfumed hysteria from The New York Times, the BBC, The Washington Post, and other mastheads as tired as I am on a Sunday morning.
There is no question that Jewish attacks on Palestinians — whether in the name of extremism or vigilantism — are reprehensible. Those responsible should be arrested, tried, and punished if found guilty. However, these attacks are vastly fewer than terror attacks against Jews.
The problem in the way much of the international press reports this story is one of emphasis and proportion. When Jews are the victims of violence, the story is usually ignored, downplayed, or quickly contextualized away; when Jews are the perpetrators, the story is magnified and treated as emblematic of Israeli aggression and the conflict’s root cause.
Consider these few illustrative examples of the daily terror with which the half-million overwhelmingly peaceful Jews in Judea and Samaria live. I have chosen these because they occurred in the six months before the October 7th pogrom, allowing us to see the problem’s scale with less distortion.
In April 2023, a Palestinian terrorist opened fire on a British-Israeli family’s car in the Jordan Valley, killing two teenage sisters and their mother. The slaying shocked Israel. Thousands attended their funerals in pouring rain. It received only modest international coverage because the victims were Jews. Contrast this with the coverage recent Jewish attacks on Palestinian olive groves receive, and you begin to appreciate that media reporting is disingenuous.
In June 2023, two Palestinian gunmen opened fire at a gas-station diner near the Eli settlement, killing four Israelis (including a teenage boy) and wounding four more. Hamas proudly claimed the “heroic” attack. Israeli news covered it extensively, complete with grieving communities and victim profiles. International coverage, by contrast, was perfunctory.
Within 24 hours, attention pivoted to the Israeli response, in which a few enraged settlers burned a car and some fields in a nearby village. The response, in which fortunately no one was harmed, garnered more international coverage than the massacre. It was framed as evidence of a “cycle of violence,” rather than a clear asymmetry between deliberate mass murder and a fringe vigilante act.
In August 2023, a Palestinian terrorist shot a Jewish father and son from point-blank range at a car wash in Huwara. It received almost no foreign coverage. Reuters, almost snidely, called it a “suspected Palestinian shooting,” and wrote no follow-up stories. In the weeks that followed, when the IDF raided the terror cells responsible, reporters produced reams of damning coverage of alleged Israeli brutality and stories about how Palestinians were living in fear of settler retaliation.
This lopsided emphasis distorts public understanding of the conflict, making Israelis — and Jewish settlers in particular — seem like the antagonists, when the moral valence runs precisely the opposite way. Media reporting inverts the situation’s morality: Jews are depicted as chiefly culpable for the violence despite far more often being the victims of it.
Another aspect missing from the mainstream narrative is that conflict is not the only interaction between Jewish settlers and Palestinians. They live economically intertwined lives, work side-by-side in the dozens of major industrial complexes in Area C, and there are as many peace activists on both sides as there are agitators. This does not get reported because it would expose two major lies the media loves to peddle: that Israel is an apartheid state and that Jewish settlers are violent extremists.
This matters because media narratives shape international perceptions, diplomacy, and policy. When audiences are inundated with stories of settler attacks but rarely hear about the vastly higher number of daily terror attacks that Israelis face, it distorts their perception of the conflict.
This warped framing emboldens extremists and removes responsibility from the instigators. It also feeds antisemitism by reinforcing the pernicious notion that Jewish lives somehow matter less, or that Jewish suffering is deserved.
The Oslo Accords are a pair of interim agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization: the Oslo I Accord, signed in Washington, D.C., in 1993; and the Oslo II Accord, signed in Taba, Egypt, in 1995.