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There is a strange ritual that now takes place whenever an Israeli extremist attacks a Palestinian in the West Bank.
Within hours, the phrase appears everywhere: “settler violence.”
It appears in headlines, diplomatic statements, United Nations briefings, political letters, NGO reports, and social media posts. The individual perpetrator quickly becomes something larger than himself. He becomes a “settler.” The settlers become a movement. The movement becomes Israel. Israel becomes the Jews.
And Jews, eventually, become the defendant.
Every country has bad actors, agitators, hooligans, extremists, and criminals. Yet virtually no one treats them as proof of some deeper national pathology. We do not routinely speak of “French violence,” “Australian extremism,” or “South African criminality” as though the actions of a fringe automatically define an entire society.
Israel, contrary to the way it is so often discussed, is a normal country. That means it contains the full spectrum of human behavior: the admirable, the ordinary, the ugly, and occasionally the criminal. It has laws. It has courts. It has police. It imperfectly prosecutes people who break laws, just like every country.
The fact that this apparently needs to be explained is itself revealing. Israel is so often denied the basic presumption granted to every other country: that the actions of its worst citizens are not necessarily a definition of the nation as a whole.
What makes Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank) different is that the territory itself is technically disputed. Its ultimate political status has never been resolved by a final agreement. We are not simply talking about “Palestinian land” upon which Jews inexplicably appeared. It is disputed territory at the heart of the Jewish People’s ancestral homeland.
Ironically, some of the loudest voices invoking “settler violence” are also the biggest proponents of indigeneity and decolonization (except, apparently, when it comes to the Jews).
The very names Judea and Samaria are Jewish names, rooted in Jewish history thousands of years before the modern Israeli-Palestinian conflict existed. Hebron, Shiloh, Beit El, and the hills of Judea are among our foundational places. Jews did not invent a connection to this land in the past century, and describing every Jewish presence there as though it were an act of alien colonization erases that history. The remarkable thing is how often the Jewish claim to the land is treated as though it does not exist at all.
None of this justifies violence, but it should make one thing obvious: When two peoples claim the same land, and one of those peoples is told that living in the heartland of its own ancient civilization is inherently illegitimate, tensions are hardly surprising.
That is precisely why the Western conversation surrounding “settler violence” is so revealing. The problem is not that the West notices Jewish violence. The problem is what the West does with it.
An Israeli extremist commits a crime, and suddenly people are having a conversation about Israeli society as a whole, Zionism, settlements, “occupation,” Jewish nationalism, and whether Israel has become irredeemably radicalized. A Palestinian extremist commits a crime, and an entirely different vocabulary often appears: context, despair, resistance, grievance, trauma.
One side’s violence becomes an indictment. The other side’s violence becomes a sociology lesson. And that disparity becomes even more astonishing once you look at the historical record.
There is no honest history of this conflict in which organized Palestinian Arab political violence began only recently. It did not begin with settlements. It did not begin with Netanyahu. It did not begin with Ben-Gvir. It did not even begin with the State of Israel.
I like to start this conversation in 1834, when local Arabs revolted against Egyptian rule in Ottoman-era Palestine. And still, Jewish communities in Safed and Hebron were attacked and plundered.
By the British Mandate period that began in 1920, the pattern becomes much clearer. In 1929, Arab violence swept through Jewish communities amid agitation surrounding Jerusalem and the Western Wall. One hundred thirty-three Jews were killed.
Then came the Arab Revolt from 1936 to 1939. It was simultaneously a revolt against British rule, a Palestinian nationalist uprising, and a campaign against Zionism. Palestinian Arab rebels attacked British installations, Jewish communities, civilians, and Palestinians accused of collaboration. Hundreds of Jews were killed. The Arab Higher Committee demanded an end to Jewish immigration precisely when European Jews were desperately searching for somewhere to escape an increasingly murderous continent.
Then the State of Israel was created in 1948, and the violence did not disappear; it evolved. By the late 1960s, Palestinian factions had pioneered a form of international terrorism deliberately designed to put their cause on television screens around the world.
Planes were hijacked. Civilians were repeatedly taken hostage. Airports were attacked. Israeli athletes were murdered at the Munich Olympics. Schoolchildren were taken hostage and killed at Ma’alot. Civilians were massacred on Israel’s Coastal Road.
The 1968 hijacking of El Al Flight 426 helped inaugurate an era in which Palestinian factions turned international aviation into a battlefield. “Black September” was not only responsible for the Munich massacre, but also for other kidnappings and killings, and the “Black September” seizure of the Saudi embassy in Khartoum was conducted with longtime Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s knowledge and approval.
Then came the First Intifada, which should not be rewritten as nothing but terrorism. It included strikes, boycotts, demonstrations, civil disobedience, and a mass uprising. It also included stones, Molotov cocktails, firearms, explosives, and attacks that killed Israelis.
Then came the Oslo Accords. Israel recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization, by then a full-blown terrorist organization. The Palestinian Authority was created. Israeli leaders gambled that territorial compromise could begin replacing violence with diplomacy.
And then came the Second Intifada, which was dramatically more violent than the first and featured waves of suicide bombings deliberately targeting Israeli civilians at restaurants and cafés, on buses and at bus stops, and in shopping centers, nightclubs, and hotels.
The Dolphinarium bombing killed teenagers. The Sbarro restaurant bombing murdered families. The Park Hotel bombing slaughtered Israelis celebrating Passover. Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, and other organizations turned ordinary Israeli life into a battlefield.
Then came Hamas’ takeover of Gaza, then rockets, then tunnels, then Palestinian Islamic Jihad, then October 7th.
On that day, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups did not merely attack Israeli soldiers. They entered Israeli civilian communities. They went house to house. They murdered families. They attacked a music festival. They kidnapped children, women, elderly people, and foreign nationals. Approximately 1,200 people were killed and roughly 250 were abducted.
Yet somehow the Western intellectual conversation keeps rediscovering “settler violence” as though political violence entered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when a Jewish extremist threw a rock at a Palestinian. That is historical amnesia.
There is another uncomfortable distinction: When an Israeli attacks an innocent Palestinian, the Western instinct is often to ask what this tells us about Israel. When a Palestinian attacks an innocent Israeli, the Western instinct is often to ask what happened to the Palestinian.
What conditions produced him? What grievances radicalized him? What political process failed him?
If those are legitimate questions, then apply the same intellectual generosity universally. If Palestinian terrorism requires context, Israeli violence requires context. If Israeli extremism implicates Israeli political culture, then Palestinian extremism requires examination of Palestinian political culture. If Israelis must confront the radicals among them, Palestinians must confront the radicals among them.
And if support for violence among Israelis is considered evidence of a frightening social pathology, then the West should be equally interested when Palestinian polling demonstrates support for terrorism.
The Israeli who assaults an innocent Palestinian is responsible for his own crime, but the same standard must finally apply in reverse as well: Palestinians must be granted the moral agency to be responsible for their own crimes.
There is something profoundly patronizing about a worldview that attributes virtually unlimited moral agency to Jews while endlessly searching for structural explanations for violence committed against them. Israelis choose, Palestinians react. Israelis have ideology, Palestinians have grievances. Israelis commit violence because of what they believe, Palestinians commit violence “because of what Israel made them become.”
That is not equity. And it helps explain why a tiny country of barely 10 million people receives such extraordinary scrutiny.
Violence is hardly an Israeli invention. Sudan entered 2026 amid what the United Nations describes as the world’s largest humanitarian emergency, with nearly 34 million people requiring humanitarian assistance. Haiti recorded more than 9,000 homicides in 2025 amid extraordinary gang brutality. Across Myanmar, Congo, Syria, Nigeria, Sudan, Haiti, and elsewhere, civilians are murdered, displaced, raped, kidnapped, and terrorized on an enormous scale.
These conflicts are sometimes reported, but few become the permanent moral theater that Israel has become. Israel’s behavior is analyzed not merely as foreign policy but as a referendum on Western morality, colonialism, racism, nationalism, religion, indigeneity, and oftentimes the legitimacy of the country’s very existence.
Some of the attention has perfectly understandable explanations. Israel is a democracy. It is a Western ally. Journalists have far greater access to Israel than to many dictatorships and failed states. Many people living in the West have deep religious, historical, political, and strategic connections to the land.
But stop pretending that universal principles are universal when they are applied with microscopic scrutiny whenever Jews possess political power.
That is ultimately what is so fascinating about the obsession with “settler violence.” The West spent centuries knowing Jews primarily as a powerless minority. Jews could be persecuted, expelled, massacred, discriminated against, pitied, protected, emancipated, and assimilated.
But Jews exercising sovereignty — with an army, borders, police, political factions, and the capacity to defend ourselves — are something much of the world still appears unable to process normally. Suddenly every Jewish criminal becomes a sociopolitical metaphor. Every Israeli extremist becomes Zionism. Every failure of Israeli law enforcement becomes evidence about the character of the Jewish state.
No country should receive immunity from scrutiny, but while we are talking about political violence, tell the whole story.
Talk about 1834. Talk about 1929. Talk about 1936. Talk about the hijackings. Talk about Munich. Talk about Ma’alot. Talk about the intifadas. Talk about the relentless terror attacks. Talk about Hamas. Talk about Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Talk about rockets fired at population centers. Talk about October 7th. Talk about more than a century in which violence has repeatedly been employed as a political instrument in the struggle against Zionism and Israel.
And then ask the question Western discourse almost never seems as interested in asking: Why is an Israeli extremist so easily understood as a product of Israeli society, while a Palestinian extremist is so easily understood as a product of Israel?
There is nothing wrong with condemning “settler violence.” The double standard begins when those two words are treated as an explanation for the essence of Israel — while generations of violence against Jews are treated merely as a tit-for-tat conflict.
Excellent piece. And one more question: why do we Jews ourselves decry these Jewish acts of violence? Must we denounce every Jewish thief and hoodlum to establish our virtue? Is Israel avoiding any punishment of the miscreants and, if so, must we in the Diaspora hasten to chastise them?
Hi Joshua,
We Jews are held to a higher standard. That's not necessarily a bad thing. The problem with the settler violence is that the Police and soldiers approve it, and don't protect the Palestinians whose homes or land the settlers are taking. That, to me and the rest of the world, is a crime and should be stopped, as it's wrong and hurts Israel's reputation immensely. It sends the message that we are amoral people.
Stopping settler violence will go a long way to repairing Israel's reputation.