The “settler violence” campaign, which claims that violence against Arabs by Jewish “settlers” spiked post-Oct. 7, 2023, is based on fraudulent numbers, according to a report published on Sunday.
The campaign’s goal, according to the report, is to defame not merely the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria, but the Israeli army and by extension the entire State of Israel.
The 125-page report, “False Flags and Real Agendas,” produced by Israeli NGO Regavim, describes the “settler violence” smear as a “modern-day blood libel.”
The report dissects the narrative and the numbers behind the slander, which went into overdrive following the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack. A flurry of news items appeared in the liberal mainstream press in the United States and elsewhere about escalating “settler violence” in Judea and Samaria.
These reports claimed that Jewish violence had increased in retaliation for the Hamas massacre. “The breadth and intensity of the violence has revived memories of the ‘nakba,’ or catastrophe, during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced from their homes, never to return,” reported The Washington Post on Nov. 9, 2023.
In February 2024, the Biden administration, for the first time, sanctioned Israelis it claimed had engaged in violence against Arab civilians, citing “high levels of extremist settler violence, forced displacement of people and villages and property destruction.” It would sanction more Israelis in subsequent months, along with certain pro-Israel NGOs. (Regavim was threatened with sanctions though none were applied.)
The Biden White House justified its interference in another country’s internal affairs by claiming that Israel’s government had not done enough to “hold accountable extremist settlers who commit acts of violence,” in the words of then-State Department spokesman Matthew Miller.
While the Trump administration has cancelled the sanctions, other countries, such as France, have gone still further, calling for the recognition of a Palestinian state. One of their arguments is that the Palestinians require a state to protect them from violent “settlers.”
The campaign received a “shot of steroids” after the Oct. 7 attack because those promoting a Palestinian state felt the need to create moral equivalence between “Hamas and settlers,” Naomi Kahn, director of the International Division at Regavim, told JNS.
If Jewish residents just want to live in peace while the other side engages in mass murder, it’s much harder to justify kicking the former off their land. So it’s necessary to demonize the Jewish side, she explained.
However, the smear campaign goes beyond the issue of Judea and Samaria, she said, noting there’s a reason the radical groups behind the campaign repeatedly claim Israeli soldiers “accompany” the Jewish attackers.
“More than delegitimizing the Jewish presence there, it’s about delegitimizing the moral standing of the IDF. It’s portrayed as the army that allows this immorality to happen. By attacking the army of the Jewish state, you attack the entire Jewish state,” she said.
The problem for those looking to delegitimize Israel through the “settler violence” claim is that the data doesn’t support their narrative.
Regavim’s report notes that “a core part of this targeted defamation activity” is produced by groups with severe anti-Israel bias, such as B’Tselem and Yesh Din, which started collecting Arab testimonies of “settler violence” in 2005.
In 2008, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) followed suit and started publishing numbers based on reports and data from these left-wing groups. It is the “authoritative,” supposedly objective, source cited most in the media.
The United Nations pays the salaries of some of the groups that supply the numbers, according to Kahn. “They pay them to create the narrative, and then they take that narrative and say, ‘Here’s your proof.’ But they’ve paid them to create that proof. It’s very circular.”
None of OCHA’s sources can be considered impartial or independent, she noted. “The Palestinian Authority’s Colonization & Wall Resistance Commission is not an objective source. It’s like quoting the Hamas Health Ministry.”
For its report, Regavim obtained 10 years of detailed incident reports from OCHA. It found that the vast majority of incidents, 98%, didn’t involve Jewish civilians at all.
“We took out all of the incidents in which there were no civilians involved on the Israeli side, meaning these were clashes with the IDF. We were then left with only 2% of the original number,” said Kahn.
“We analyzed that 2% and we cross-referenced it by date and location with the police and Shabak [Israel Security Agency] reports. What we found was in an overwhelming majority of cases, it was self-defense by Jews, or it was undetermined—a two-way scuffle. So you can’t actually call that settler violence,” she said.
According to B’Tselem’s own data, in 2022 every Palestinian recorded as killed by Jewish civilians in Judea and Samaria was “in fact killed as a result of either an attack or attempted attack carried out by that individual or by another Palestinian,” Regavim’s report notes.
Other incidents classified as “settler violence” included Jewish hikers entering archaeological sites in Samaria (no clashes involved), car accidents, road paving by the Israeli government and in one particularly absurd case, “an Arab worker who was bitten by a dog in the settlement where he was employed.”
Although OCHA claims each incident is verified by two independent sources, Regavim learned this is not the case. “Almost none of them were. The ones that had two sources—it was actually the same source under two different names. They would use the Arabic name and the English name for the same Palestinian Authority ministry,” said Kahn.
While Regavim stressed that Jewish violence does exist, and should be punished when it occurs, the numbers it says are so small as to be negligible.
“If you’re an American living in a city with a population comparable to that of Area C [the Israeli-controlled part of Judea and Samaria], you’re more than 300 times more likely to be the victim of violent crime than you are if you’re an Arab living in Area C,” she said.
“Israeli police statistics for violent incidents nationwide place Judea and Samaria at the bottom end. It’s the least violent society in Israel. So to say that this is a problem, that settlers in Judea and Samaria are violent, is simply a lie,” she added.