During the High Holidays, American synagogue pulpits rang out with sermons calling on Jews to hold themselves accountable for bad conduct. The Days of Awe are a time when we are supposed to conduct a cheshbon nefesh, or “accounting of the soul,” to acknowledge our sins, repent and resolve to be better in the coming year.
But this year, that theme of accountability was utilized to make more than a general point about repentance. In some congregations, rabbis picked up on one of the most ubiquitous storylines about the Middle East in the last year to make what they considered to be a nuanced and moralistic argument about the need to recognize Jewish misbehavior and the imperative for holding the wrongdoers accountable.
Condemning the ‘bad Jews’
Outrage over “settler violence”—the claim that the several hundred thousand Jews living in Judea and Samaria, enabled and encouraged by the government of Israel, have engaged in an epidemic of violence against Palestinian Arabs—has become a ubiquitous theme of discourse about the Jewish state. And it was perfect fodder for rabbis who wanted an avenue to virtue-signal some distance from the Jewish state without crossing over to territory in which they could be credibly accused of aiding and abetting those who are opposed to its existence.
Condemning the so-called “settlers,” who are the allegedly “bad Jews,” and not all of Israel is the chief liberal Zionist talking point these days. Above all, it’s a way to take sides in an Israeli election that has American liberals rooting hard for the defeat of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition partners, who are being held responsible for the behavior of the settlers.
However, there are two problems with this argument in which American Jews are being called upon to condemn “Jewish terrorism” with the kind of fervor that many of them have lacked when confronting the propaganda spread by Hamas terrorists and their supporters.
One is the fact that claims about a wave of such actions are largely false and constitute an effort to distract the world from the fact that an actual epidemic of Arab terrorism in Judea and Samaria dwarfs the statistically far smaller instances of Jewish violence.
The other is that the talk about Jewish terrorism is going to be the wedge issue that Democrats plan to use not just to enact sanctions on Israelis if they win control of Congress next year. It’s also how they hope to begin the process of splintering the U.S.-Israel alliance.
Opposition to Israel has become not just normative; it’s the view of the majority of those who identify as members of the party. Democrats are rallying behind even openly antisemitic figures like Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, their nominee for a U.S. Senate seat in Michigan, who won his primary by campaigning on the traditional trope of hatred that Jews and their allies were conspiring to buy Congress.
What sanctions really mean
With so many of their supporters still believing that they have been insufficiently hostile to Israel since the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab terror attacks on Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023, sending a message to Jerusalem appears to be a priority for Democrats. As reports in The Hill and other publications have made plain, if they regain control of Congress in the midterm elections come November, expect them to pass legislation that will start by targeting the Jews of Judea and Samaria, who are being vilified around the world as criminals.
That will do nothing about security for Arabs or Jews in the region that most non-Israelis still wrongly label the “West Bank.”
In addition to bolstering the claim that the United States must punish “bad” Israelis, they are also sure to say that it will help pave the way for a two-state solution. That’s a claim we’ve heard from some European countries that have embraced sanctions against Israel, such as the pronouncements from British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband, which have gone as far as to falsely assert that Israel is “ethnically cleansing” the West Bank when nothing like that is remotely possible, let alone happening.
The real purpose of his rhetoric is to appease the red-green alliance of Israel-hating Marxists and Islamists that his Labour Party needs to maintain its grip on power. The goal isn’t peace. It’s to treat the Jewish state as an international pariah—something that grants an unmerited victory to Hamas terrorists and others whose objective is Israel’s destruction and Jewish genocide.
Some Jews, especially liberal ones, persist in ignoring logic and evidence for magical thinking about “land for peace” solutions that will end the conflict, which were so widespread after the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993. The history of the last century should have reminded everyone that Palestinians have zero interest in a two-state solution.
But in the last three decades, anyone paying attention to the Middle East should have realized that a never-ending war against the Jewish presence in the land of Israel is inextricably linked to Palestinian national identity. Even liberals ought to know this; however, they are so alienated from Netanyahu and the Jewish right for political and religious reasons that they believe that it is still incumbent on them to go on treating Jews living in the heart of the Jewish homeland as illegitimate.
The folly of ‘two states’
There is no consensus in Israel about whether to extend Israeli law to Judea and Samaria. But there is also no debate about the existential threat that turning the territories into a sovereign Palestinian state would pose. Repeating the experiment tried in 2005, when the late Prime Minister Ariel Sharon withdrew from the Gaza Strip—thus ultimately paving the way for Hamas to create an independent state in all but name there—in the far larger and more strategic Judea and Samaria, would not be so much ill-advised as utterly insane. That was obvious before Oct. 7; after that orgy of mass murder, torture, rape and kidnapping. Now, it is unavoidable.
Yet it is a given that the next Congress controlled by Democrats, which might happen as soon as January, will legislate sanctions against Jews living in the territories and anything produced there, regardless of whether or not they are involved in “settler violence.” As we’ve seen with past efforts in Europe and the United States to smear this population, a limited version of antisemitic BDS will target those who not only defend themselves against Arab terror but who advocate for Jewish rights there.
If they are given the chance, it’s clear that congressional Democrats will cloak their discriminatory actions by saying the purpose is to prepare the way for a two-state solution, which will not be treated as merely a theoretical goal to which they aspire. The so-called progressives that dominate House and Senate caucuses view it as a scheme to be actively pursued by means of sanctions and lawfare aimed at delegitimizing the Jews who live in the territories, as well as any Israeli government that won’t bow to their demands.
And it won’t stop at merely a sanctions regime against settlers.
Given the influence and star power of people like El-Sayed (whose victory in November is by no means assured, though he is currently leading in Michigan polls) and the left-wing congressional “Squad,” whose ranks are certain to continue to increase in January, expect more efforts to ban the sale of weapons to Israel that failed while still gaining the backing of most Democrats in the current Congress.
The question is whether they will do so with the acquiescence or even active support of those people—both Jewish and non-Jewish—who will assert that it’s a necessary response to what they wrongly perceive as Israel’s rejection of peace by holding onto this land and letting Jews live there.
The truth about ‘settler violence’
The problem is that the settler-violence narrative isn’t merely a distortion of the truth about what is happening in the region. It’s being weaponized by those with both an axe to grind against Netanyahu and his right-wing supporters, coupled with those whose hostility extends to all of Israel.
There are instances when a small minority of Jews living in Judea and Samaria have engaged in unprovoked and/or illegal violence against local Arabs. Criminality, whether the work of Arabs or Jews, deserves to be condemned, as Netanyahu himself did earlier in the week when a group of rioters attacked both Palestinians and troops of the Israel Defense Forces, who were there to protect them.
But the overwhelming majority of incidents labeled as “settler violence” are altercations, where a closer look reveals that it was Jews defending themselves against Palestinian terrorism or merely actions (such as Jews praying on the Temple Mount), where their so-called crime is merely being Jewish in a place where some people don’t wish them to be.
The real epidemic of violence in Judea and Samaria comes from a stepped-up campaign of terror against Jews coming from Hamas and its vast network of sympathizers there. Indeed, on the eve of Kol Nidre—when some American rabbis felt the need to inveigh against the settlers—a Jewish father of six children was murdered by an Arab gunman in Samaria. Three days later, the son of Yechiel Leiter, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, was gravely wounded during a Palestinian car-ramming attack.
That is the context in which any discussion of what is occurring on the ground in the territories should be held. Yet many American Jews seem either unaware or uninterested in the daily toll of terror attacks on Jews in Judea and Samaria, while swallowing whole the exaggerations and outright lies about Jewish terrorism.
Those Israelis who are pushing this narrative—like the group of 550 retired Israeli senior military and intelligence officers under the cover of a group called Commanders for Israel’s Security (CIS) who sent a letter to President Donald Trump urging him to pressure the Israeli government—have a political motive. They have been trying to topple Netanyahu by one means or another for years and hope the issue will help defeat him in the Knesset election.
But even those pro-Israel Americans who sympathize with that goal should understand how this issue is being misused by those who have broader objectives than merely changing the Israeli government.
The prospect of sanctions of any kind on Israel—and what may soon follow them—highlights the stakes in the midterms for the pro-Israel community. Those pushing the settler-violence narrative should understand the consequences of pretending that a relatively small problem of Jewish misbehavior, which is opposed by virtually all Israelis, is more important than the far larger question of widespread Arab terrorism. That is to say, terrorism enthusiastically supported by the vast majority of Palestinians and financially subsidized and honored by the so-called “moderates” who autonomously govern the Palestinian Authority.
Some may do this out of a desire to undermine the US.-Israel alliance. Others, like many of the rabbis who denounce the settlers, are acting on a vain hope of re-establishing their moral bona fides vis-à-vis those on the left who libel all supporters of the Jewish state as supporters of “genocide.” Either way, they should understand that even if the actions of a tiny fragment of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who live across the “Green Line” are opposed, the smearing of an entire population is aiding those who wish to isolate and destroy Israel, not change its government.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
