The new blood libels

History repeats itself. The examples below, separated by hundreds of years, depict the same disturbing phenomenon: Even a fact-defying theory propagated by established institutions can lead to blind acceptance by the masses, which, in turn, can end in bloodshed.

On March 23, 1475, in the city of Trent, Italy, on the eve of Good Friday, a two-and-a-half-year-old toddler, Simon, went missing. During the next few days, an extensive search was instigated, which included searching Jewish homes in the area on suspicion that they were involved in kidnapping the child. The Jewish community searched for him frantically in fear of being blamed for his disappearance. He was not found.

After three days, the cook of a rich Jewish merchant, Samuel, went to the water cellar to fetch water and found Simon’s body. Immediately, Samuel and two Jews went to report to the authorities that the body had been found. The Catholic Church concluded that the Jews killed the boy to use his blood for making Passover matzahs. Indeed, the town doctors said that the body had been exsanguinated.

The entire Jewish community was tortured until some confessed to the crime. Samuel and 14 others were burned at the stake, and within the next 20 years all Jews were expelled from the district.

We know, of course, that blood libels like this were an antisemitic invention. However, did the public at the time have any reason to doubt the Church?

Yes, anyone with an open mind should have been convinced by the following facts:

1. The owner of the well was the one who announced the discovery of the body by his cook. This alone should have cast doubt on the owner’s guilt.
2. It is clear from the Bible, of which the Church should have had in-depth knowledge, that Jews are prohibited from eating even animal blood, let alone human blood.
3. Infanticide was quite common in the pagan world. For example, the Carthaginians practiced it extensively and tophets (burial grounds of children’s ashes) have been found in many archeological excavations. One of the great revolutions of Judaism was that it declared infanticide an abomination.
4. “Thou shalt not murder” is one of the Ten Commandments.

Thus, it was patently ludicrous to believe that Samuel killed Simon. Yet 15 Jews were burned, and an entire community was exiled because of this claim made by the most revered institution of the age: the Catholic Church.

Fast-forward more than half a century. Today, among the most revered institutions is the United Nations. Its pronouncements are constantly echoed and amplified by the international media. The United Nations claimed that more than 70,000 people were killed in the Gaza war, that there was famine in Gaza, and that Israel committed war crimes by bombing hospitals and mosques. Many others accuse Israel of “genocide.”

Easily verifiable facts show that:

1. The ratio of civilian to military fatalities in Gaza was, at worst, 2:1, which is lower than in any other urban conflict in history.
2. Recent U.N. data shows that the diet in Gaza is not inferior to that of some Western countries.
3. Hospitals and mosques were used for military purposes and thus lost their protection under the Geneva Convention.
4. There was never an Israeli declaration of intent to exterminate the population in Gaza.
5. The overall population in Gaza increased in the last three years, which renders any claim of genocide absurd.

Given all this, it is patently ludicrous to believe that there is an Israeli “genocide” in Gaza. Yet we witness innumerable worldwide protests calling for the destruction of the State of Israel. The “protesters” support terrorists who raped young Jewish women, burned Jewish babies, and murdered Jews of all ages and Holocaust survivors.

There has been an over two-fold rise in the number of antisemitic assaults in the Western world and close to 70% of religion-based hate crimes in the United States are against Jews, though Jews comprise only slightly more than 2% of the population.

Yet news of yet another supposedly Israeli-caused humanitarian crisis is scorching the media. The United Nations has another important body called the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). OCHA counted around 6,000 cases of settler violence against Arabs over the past year. So, the media is bleating that the settlers are a violent society. Formerly colonialist countries like Britain have declared the Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria illegal and enacted a boycott on their products.

It is not difficult to verify the following facts:

1. OCHA counts pilgrimages to the Temple Mount, kids hiking through Arab olive orchards, infrastructure work by the Israeli government and the army on “Arab” lands, and protection against Arab provocations as cases of “violence.” They also count Arab terrorists shot by the Israel Defense Forces as murders by settlers.
2. In practice, there were a total of 15 criminal indictments against Jewish criminals in Judea and Samaria (compared to 4,063 against Arabs) in 2025. According to the Regavim movement, the indictments against Jews are three times higher than against Arabs for similar offenses.
3. The number of Jewish residents in Judea and Samaria is about half a million. The number of Arabs in that area is somewhere between 2 and 3 million. In the city of Petach Tikvah, where I live, there are about 250,000 inhabitants, roughly half the Jewish population of Judea and Samaria. Yet in Petach Tikvah, 400 criminal investigation files were opened in 2025.
4. According to IDF figures, there are about 8,000 incidents of stones and Molotov cocktails being thrown at Jews in Judea and Samaria every year—that is, more than 20 a day.

While we may split hairs over which criminal incidents should count as “violent,” there is one thing all agree on: The most serious crime is murder. If we want a uniformly agreed-upon measure for how violent a society is, we should use the number of murders committed by members of that society.

The following table compiles 2025 numbers from the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, IDF data and justice-system statistics. For the sake of a fair comparison, the numbers were normalized to the number of murders per million people. In the case of a smaller population, the actual number was increased proportionally. In the case of a larger population, the number was decreased.

The events being compared are: the number of murders in Petah Tikva (by no means a violent city), the number of murders among illegal immigrants living in South Tel Aviv (immigrant murdering immigrant), the number of Arabs murdered by Arabs in the Israeli Arab sector, the number of Jews murdered by Arabs in Judea and Samaria, and, finally, the number of Arabs murdered by settlers in Judea and Samaria.

The one Arab killed by a settler was a woman killed by a stray bullet fired into the air during an Arab attack. The shooter is on trial for reckless homicide.

One can assume that there is no society on earth where there is no crime. But the above table speaks for itself.

Clearly, declaring the settlements illegal, boycotting their products and accusing their population of being systemically violent is no more legitimate than burning 15 Jews for supposedly murdering a child and drinking his blood. It seems that not much moral progress has been made since 1475.