Jewish terrorism is not the issue.

When Jews commit violence, it becomes an indictment of Zionism. When Arabs commit violence, it becomes a conversation about context. See the difference?

An Israeli settler from the “Hilltop Youth” movement (photo: Wikipedia)

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There are Jews in Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank) who commit serious crimes against Palestinians.

Some have assaulted innocent people. Some have destroyed property, burned fields, vandalized homes, and participated in acts intended to frighten Palestinian communities. When violence is deliberately used against civilians for political or ideological purposes, it can reasonably be described as terrorism. Jewish perpetrators should be arrested, prosecuted, and punished under Israeli law.

That should not be difficult to say. Indeed, it is not.

But neither should this: Jewish terrorism is not the central issue facing Israel, it is not an existential threat to Zionism, and it is not remotely comparable in scale, organization, reach, or purpose to the terrorist movements that have spent generations attempting to destroy the Jewish state.

The phrase “Jewish terrorism” is increasingly being used not merely to describe specific crimes, but to construct an entire political theory. According to this theory, violence committed by a small group of Jewish extremists in Judea and Samaria represents “a direct threat to Israel’s security and statehood, and thus to Zionism itself.”

That formulation came this week from Bret Stephens, the generally pro-Israel New York Times columnist who occasionally seems compelled to remind his audience that he, too, is willing to place Jews in the dock. It is the familiar performance of respectable Jewish criticism: Exaggerate a marginal phenomenon, elevate it into an existential crisis, and then present the willingness to condemn one’s own people as evidence of moral seriousness.

That is an extraordinary claim.

Even the Israeli critics making the accusation estimate that the population involved numbers only a few hundred people. These extremists may be dangerous. They may disgrace the communities from which they emerge. They may inflame tensions, provoke retaliation, damage Israel diplomatically, and undermine confidence in Israeli law enforcement.

But a few hundred lawbreakers do not pose a direct threat to the existence of a nuclear-armed state with one of the most capable militaries and intelligence systems in the world.

Words must retain proportion. A vandal is not an army. A mob is not a national movement. An illegal outpost is not an international terrorist network. A few hundred extremists are not a civilizational threat to Zionism.

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The expression “Jewish terrorism” does something rhetorically powerful: It attaches the identity of an entire people to the crimes of individuals.

When Jews commit politically motivated violence, their Jewishness quickly becomes the story. Their crimes are examined for what they supposedly reveal about Judaism, Zionism, Israeli society, the settlement movement, Jewish theology, and the moral legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty itself. The perpetrators are rarely permitted to remain perpetrators. They become symbols.

Their actions are treated as evidence of something diseased within the Jewish national project. Their existence supposedly proves that Zionism has become corrupted, that Israeli society is collapsing, or that the Jewish state is turning into the very thing it was created to resist.

No comparable intellectual machinery is required when Jews are the victims. When a Palestinian attacks an Israeli, the perpetrator is regularly placed inside an elaborate architecture of explanation: “occupation,” poverty, checkpoints, humiliation, dispossession, despair, trauma, settlements, hopelessness, or resistance.

The violence is not necessarily approved, but it is contextualized until personal responsibility begins to disappear. The Jewish attacker represents his civilization. The Palestinian attacker represents his circumstances. The Jew is examined for ideology. The Palestinian is examined for grievance. The Jew’s violence is said to reveal the true nature of Zionism. The Palestinian’s violence is said to reveal the unbearable conditions under which he lives.

This is not moral consistency. It is a double standard disguised as sophistication.

Context matters in every conflict. It can help us understand how people become radicalized and how violence can be prevented. But context cannot be selectively deployed as an exonerating force for one population and withheld as an aggravating factor from another.

If history, fear, collective memory, religious conviction, insecurity, and political frustration help explain Palestinian violence, then they also form part of the environment in which Jewish extremism develops. Explanation is either available to everyone or it is an excuse reserved for the favored side.

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Violence in Judea and Samaria does not take place inside a laboratory. It takes place inside one of the world’s longest-running national, territorial, and religious conflicts. The parties disagree not only about borders but about history, sovereignty, indigeneity, security, sacred land, and whether Jewish political independence should exist at all.

The territory of Judea and Samaria is itself contested. Contrary to modern folklore, it is not occupied or conquered or colonized; it is, in fact, disputed.

Whatever language one uses, violence there did not suddenly appear because several teenagers became unruly on a hilltop. It exists within a conflict in which Arab nationalist and Islamist movements have repeatedly used violence against Jewish civilians and have often framed that violence as both a national struggle and a religious duty.

The modern conflict has included riots, massacres, hijackings, suicide bombings, shootings, stabbings, kidnappings, rocket attacks, and the mass murder and kidnappings of October 7th.

That does not make every Palestinian guilty. It does not justify attacks on Palestinian civilians. It does not give Jewish extremists permission to appoint themselves judge, jury, and army. But it does expose the absurdity of discussing Jewish violence as though it were the original engine driving the conflict. It is not.

Jewish extremists did not create Hamas. They did not create Palestinian Islamic Jihad. They did not invent the rejection of Jewish sovereignty. They did not initiate the campaigns of international terrorism that have targeted Jewish communities, Israeli embassies, airplanes, schools, restaurants, buses, holiday celebrations, and synagogues for decades, in Israel and across the world.

The conflict would not disappear tomorrow if every violent Jewish extremist were arrested tonight. That is the test of whether something is truly the issue.

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“Jewish terrorism” has not produced a global movement that causes Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, or anyone else to fear entering their houses of worship across the world.

There is no international Jewish terrorist infrastructure recruiting followers in dozens of countries, publishing instructions for indiscriminate attacks, building proxy armies, taking territory, firing rockets at foreign cities, or promising religious rewards for the mass murder of civilians.

There are violent Jewish extremists. There is not a global Jewish terrorist movement.

The distinction is enormous.

In 2025, antisemitic attacks produced the highest number of Jewish deaths worldwide in more than three decades. Jews were killed at a Hanukkah celebration in Australia, in attacks in the United States, and outside a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur. A Tel Aviv University study found that most physical attacks were carried out by individual white supremacists or radical Muslims.

This is what transnational ideological hatred looks like. It follows Jews across borders. It reaches them in synagogues, schools, community centers, museums, supermarkets, and public celebrations. It does not care whether its victims live in Tel Aviv, Manchester, Sydney, Buenos Aires, Paris, or Washington.

Yet the phrase “Jewish terrorism” is often discussed with greater civilizational alarm than ideologies that have actually built international movements around the killing of Jews and other supposed “infidels.”

Strategic judgment requires scale. A government must distinguish between a domestic law-enforcement problem and an organized international enemy. It must recognize the difference between criminals who damage the state and movements whose stated purpose is to destroy it. Confusing the two does not demonstrate moral seriousness. It demonstrates analytical failure.

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Zionism is the belief that the Jewish People possess the same right to political independence, national self-determination, and physical security that other peoples claim for themselves. A few hundred Jewish extremists cannot negate that right.

French terrorism would not eliminate France’s right to exist. American political violence would not dissolve the United States. Islamist terrorism does not invalidate the sovereignty of every Muslim-majority country. Palestinian terrorism is almost never presented as proof that Palestinians have forfeited their right to national aspirations. Only Jewish wrongdoing is regularly used to place Jewish statehood itself on trial.

Why, then, does “Jewish terrorism” receive such extraordinary attention? Partly because democratic countries are rightly expected to police their own citizens. Israel should be held to the standards it claims to uphold.

But there is another reason: Jewish violence is useful to people who want to reverse the moral structure of the conflict. It allows them to transform the Jewish state from the target of organized campaigns of destruction into their supposed source. It changes the conversation from the ideologies and armies confronting Israel to the sins within Israel.

Instead of Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, international jihadism, and the global normalization of antisemitism, the discussion centers on several hundred Jewish extremists. The exception becomes the essence, the fringe becomes the nation, and the vandal becomes Zionism.

And once “Jewish terrorism” is declared a direct threat to Zionism, Zionists themselves are pressured to spend their energy proving their moral worthiness by denouncing people they never supported and crimes they never committed.

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