Fact Check: Settler Violence Claims vs. Reality in Judea and Samaria

Everyone, there was a terrorist attack in in Judea

that wounded five Israelis. I think as of now that's what it is. And

I want to show you how the Western media reports this and I want to use that as a way to talk about the whole issue of

settler violence that I get asked about every single day. Here, take a look. Netanyahu orders lockdown of West Bank

after Hamas shooting wounds five Israelis. At least they mention it's Hamas and that they wounded five

Israelis in a terrorist attack, but the headline is that Netanyahu's ordering a lockdown. But it gets worse if you, you

know, at least that, you know, they're that at least mentions the terrorist attack. But look at this headline from

the CBC. Israeli soldiers fatally shoot two Palestinians

near Hebron. Netanyahu orders West Bank lockdown. That's the headline. They were carrying out a terrorist attack. Army

says it stopped a terror attack that injured at least five. Meaning, it's a claim by the Israelis that there was a

terrorist attack, but the headline is that the Israelis killed two Palestinians. Look, I want you to

understand something. This event was not a freak event. It wasn't some rare explosion of violence

in an otherwise quiet place. Last year alone, there were more than 5,000 attacks on Jews in Judea and Samaria.

That works out to to about one every two hours day and night for a full year. 24 Israelis were murdered and more than 170

were seriously injured. Now, let me ask you, when the international media starts talking about violence in in Judea and

Samaria, do you hear about that? You don't hear Palestinian terror, you

hear settler violence. You hear it from the UN, you hear it from the European Union, from the BBC, from the New York

Times. A few years ago you heard it from the White House under Biden. And it was used to justify sanctions on Israeli

citizens. So today, I want to do something that

that we should be doing more of and that not enough people are doing. And and is I want to look at the numbers. So,

almost every story about settler violence goes back to one source, and it's called the United Nations Office

for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, known as OCHA. And they keep a database on their website of settler

violence, and it claims to document all these incidents all the It has a uh

a number of lists of incidents of settler-related violence, settler-related violence. It's a very

interesting term. And there's an Israeli organization, a very important one, I've mentioned them before, called Regavim.

And they went through that database line by line. It They took a uh

uh the data from 7 and 1/2 years, from January 2016 to April 2023. And they read every single entry and

looked up what the incident was. They did the research. There was 8,332 incidents. So, the UN lists, "Wow,

during that time period, there were over 8,000 incidents of settler violence." But they call them incidents involving

Israeli settlers and other Israeli civilians. 8,000, that's the number that gets quoted. So, let's open it up and

see what's inside. Well, it turns out that about 20% of the incidents didn't happen in Judea and Samaria. They

happened in Jerusalem. But because the Palestinians and the pro-Palestinian crowd don't recognize Israel's

sovereignty over Jerusalem, acts of violence in Jerusalem are called settler violence. It's nothing to do with it.

Okay, whatever they are, they're not settler violence. That's 20% of them. There's another 16% that are about the

Temple Mount. Literally, in this database, a Jew visiting the Temple Mount, visiting the holiest site in

Judaism, or confrontations between Muslims on the Temple Mount and Israeli police on the

Temple Mount, because there's riots there all the time. Or it just literally a Jew going up to

pray on the Temple Mount gets counted in the UN database as an act of settler violence. I kid you not. About 19% of

what the report calls are I'm sorry, are what the report calls general complaints.

Things like trespassing. In practice, that means Israeli hikers and tourists walking somewhere. No one was hurt,

there was no violence, but they they're included in there as settler violence. Okay? The database also includes

tourists at archaeological sites, legal infrastructure work being carried out by the State of Israel. They call

that violence. They call that like, you know, it's violating Palestinian land. Traffic accidents are listed in there.

Regavim went through every one of them, and this is what they found when they looked up the incidents. Car accidents

were called settler violence. And then there's the question about the sources. About a thousand of the

incidents rest on a single source, the Palestinian Authority's District Coordination and Liaison Office.

Okay? In the database, that one source is actually presented as two sources, so it looks like corroboration, but it's

the exact same source. Now, when Regavim filtered out everything that isn't actually an

allegation of Jewish nationalist violence against against Arabs causing physical harm, actual

violence, when they filtered everything out, all that was left were 833 incidents, 10% of

the original list, spread out over 7 and 1/2 years. That comes out to about nine allegations a month, and these are all

allegations. Remember that. Okay? None of This is just any allegation. In other

words, understand what this report is. When you hear in the media that there's a report of thousands of incidents, it

doesn't mean that anything was proven. Anytime there's any allegation by any Palestinian body that there was a

settler violence, it gets recorded as an incident without any proof whatsoever. Okay? It's nothing to do with how it got

adjudicated later on. So, of those 833 alleged incidents where there was

actually violence. 48% of them almost half only say that there was involvement in

clashes without saying who started anything. And dozens of them, when you look up the incidents, are clear cases

of Palestinian terrorist attacks on Jews filed under settler violence. Let me give you a few examples.

Because this is where, you know, because the details is where this really comes alive.

April 2018 a Palestinian from the Balata refugee camp tries to stab Israeli citizens at

the Mishor Adumim industrial area. An Israeli civilian stops him. Stops the terrorist.

The terrorist is wounded in the course of being stopped from stabbing someone.

And he dies the next day. So the UN recorded this as settler violence.

And his death the next day was also recorded as a as a separate act.

Okay, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. His His attack His attack was called Palestinian violence. The attack on him was called

settler violence. You get You get how that was? It was two incidents. Two incidents of violence where he was

trying to stab someone and was stopped and was killed in the process. November 2017, the village of Kusra

a group of young Israeli hikers is attacked by dozens of Palestinians throwing rocks. One of the attackers One

of the One of the Palestinian attackers grabs a gun from a security guard and threatens

to shoot the kids. They run and hide in a cave. The IDF comes and rescues them. One of the adults with the group had a

gun and opens fire and open fire and kills one of the attacking terrorists. The UN's version of it was that a

48-year-old farmer was working his land and 15 armed settlers came and shot him. Okay?

Or January 2023, at Kafr Ni'ma, the UN's description of the event was that a 42-year-old Palestinian was on his way

to check his land and was shot by a settler. But,

there's security camera footage, and you know what it recorded? He came to an Israeli farm, Havat Ephraim, he stabbed

an Israeli there, and another Israeli shot him, and they found a second knife on his body. This is the pattern, okay?

We We can go on all day. The terrorist becomes is is is now a farmer,

an attack by him becomes an attack on him. The Israeli who defends himself becomes the

aggressor. That's what this is. Now, according to OCHA's own database, in

2023, from January up until October 7th, the famous October 7th, seven Palestinians in the West Bank were

killed by Israeli settlers, okay? Seven. That's the number that went out. And

B'Tselem, a far-left Israeli NGO that's no friend of the settlers, actually published how each of these people died.

But they buried it deep in their online database, but here's some of what they wrote.

Uh for ex- There was one case. Here's Here's Here's some of these deaths. Abd al-Kareem Badia, age 21, was shot by a

settler after entering a settlement armed with knives and explosive devices. But that's he's a victim of settler

violence. Tarek Ma'ali, age 42, was shot by a settler after trying to stab that same settler in a

field. Get that? And Muhamed Shehada was a Hamas

terrorist. In June 2023, he opened fire outside the community of Eli, murdered four Israelis, two of them were

17-year-old boys. An armed civilian shot him dead at the scene.

He's also counted. Another terrorist, a Hamas gunman who murdered four Jews, is counted by the UN as a victim of settler

violence. Do you understand this? Now, you might assume that after October 7th, the picture changed and this is

when the settlers went on a rampage, but it's not true. Cuz according to OCHA's own numbers, in the first 2 years after

October 7th, a total of 13 West Bank Palestinians were killed by Israeli civilians. 13 in 2 years and that almost

all of them, I think all except one, are cases of self-defense and there was one who was run off the road by rock

throwing by Israelis and and the passenger in his car killed and the perpetrators of that are sitting in

prison. Now, think of what I told you at the beginning.

There have been more than 5,000 attacks on Jews in the past year in Judea and Samaria.

Terrorist attacks. More than 5,000 in 1 year and 24 Israelis murdered.

Regavim also went to the Israeli police with a freedom of information request. Between 2014 and 2024,

the Judea and Samaria district opened 1,356 files on suspicion of Jewish nationalist

violence or settler violence. That's over 10 years. And some of those files turned out to be

about things like car theft and drug possession. But the indictment rate against Jewish

Israelis for nationalist offenses is three times higher than against Arabs for the same kind of offenses. So, the

system is actually harder on Jews. Anyway, a senior senior police officials have

said on multiple occasions that the overwhelming majority of the complaints that they receive about settler violence

turn out to be false. They say that the complaints are filed by left-wing and anarchist activists

whose goal is to inflame things, but remember what I told you, to get into the OCHA database at the UN, all you

need is a claim. All you need is the complaint. It gets registered as an incident.

You see? That's the way it works. Now, there are Israelis who attack

Palestinians, like I told you about that one case with the with the rock throwing on the

car. There are cases, it does happen. Things get tense, there's interactions. It's real, and if any Israelis take the

law into their own hand and attack and carry out attacks, it's wrong and should be prosecuted, and it is.

It is. It is prosecuted. Look. Is violence a defining feature of half a

million Jews living in Judea and Samaria? No.

It's not. The data says that it's not. It's marginal, it's prosecuted, and it's

dwarfed by orders of magnitude by the violence perpetrated against that community by

the Arabs. Now, why does all this matter? It matters

because the narrative isn't a statistic, it's a moral framing. Once you have a frame that says settlers are violent,

every incident falls into that. And then people are like, "Well, the settlers are violent." The terrorist

with the knife is now a farmer, a hiker is now a trespasser. When four Israelis or five Israelis are injured in an in a

shooting attack near Hebron, the story is set so that when the when the terrorists are neutralized, that's the

story in the CBC. Regavim titled their report a modern blood libel. You can go to their website

at the Regavim website and download it. The modern blood libel. It's a strong phrase,

but it's actually it's it's it's a good it's a good phrase. It's a blood libel repeated until it

becomes the prevailing wisdom, the common knowledge, settler violence. You know, the Torah warns us about this

in Sefer Shmot, in the book of Exodus chapter 23, you shall not carry a false report, do not join hands with the

wicked to be a malicious witness. You shall not follow the many to do evil. Look at the progression in the

verse. First, the false report, then the malicious witness, then the warning about following the

many in doing evil. That's the way it works. That's what this database the OCHA

database is. It's a false report repeated by the many. So, next time you hear the phrase settler violence, and

you'll you'll hear it all the time, ask yourself what's in the number. And remember all the data that I told

you here. And now I want to end this video. I want to show you a clip of a of a

video that was put out uh an excerpt of a video that was that was put out by the Prime Minister's Office.

Okay? Um the

Prime Minister Netanyahu's office wanted to wanted to deal with this, you know, wanted to respond

to the to this issue because there's all these allegations of the settler violence that are going around

everywhere. And um

And so, they made a video about it. And there's some And there's some excellent people working in the Prime Minister's

Office. And Doron Spielman is one of is one of Netanyahu's spokespeople.

And he made this video, and I think he did an outstanding job. I'm going to put the video I'm going to put a link to

this video from the Prime Minister's Office in as the pinned uh comment to this video. You should

watch the whole thing. Some of the data in this video is the same as the data that I've shared with you, but he shares

a lot more and a lot more background information. But, he also included a fascinating uh anecdote where he went

out on location and interviewed a couple. I want to share this with you right now.

Here we go. Oops. Let's pull it up. It is right here. >> I went into the field and met two

people, David and Rachel Stern. These are two people that OCHA puts in the reports and wants us to think of as

violent settlers. This is a real event. Let's take a look. >> We're back in Huwara.

Take me back to your experience here. What happened on that day when Dave was driving?

>> Three and a half years ago, March 19th, we were driving through through Huwara. It was a rainy day.

>> We entered the village Huwara. As we approach the traffic circle, we both notice there's a man standing

wearing a black hoodie that he is hiding one of his hands.

>> I said to Dave, "Why is he hiding his hand?" Dave didn't have a chance to answer. The

terrorist, now we know he was the terrorist, turns towards the car, looks at us with a very, very like hateful

look, and immediately pulls out a weapon. >> The moment I see the gun, I also draw my

pistol. And he opened fire. He was about 1 m in front of the car. He was extremely

close. His first bullets hit me. I was It was two bullets in my right arm. One bullet

came as I turned to draw my pistol through my shoulder into my chest. One bullet hit me in the head.

>> [music] >> I stopped breathing from stress, and I thought to myself, "I'm never going to

see my kids again." And then I realized, "Oh my god, my kids are going to be orphaned of both of their parents."

>> I fired through the front windshield at him, and I hit him in the chest and the shoulders, and one of my bullets hit

him in the hand and the gun fell out of his hand. >> I look at Dave and I just like my heart

stopped because he had blood spraying from his forehead. From the middle of his forehead to the

mirror. And and he's just it looked like he was riddled with bullet with bullet wounds

and and I just screamed out in Hebrew, my husband is injured. He has a bullet in his head. It's in his head and

>> At this point many many residents of the village about 40, 30 to 40 people from the village came out and they were

surrounding the vehicle and they were filming us. >> They were laughing at us.

>> They were laughing at us. >> at us. They were whistling at us and they were filming us. They had their

phones out. Why is nobody coming to help us? We were just waiting basically. Every second felt like like an hour.

>> Did you know that the bullets you fired to protect yourself against that terrorist specifically that event is

recorded in the United Nations as a Jewish settler attack against innocent Palestinians?

>> It's unbelievable. It's despicable. It's a complete inversion of reality. >> Would they have preferred that they not

react? That we get killed? That we get shot? Maybe maybe.

That's a question. Why they're choosing to lie about this. That's that's my question.

>> What we just saw happen >> All right, there you go. Um and you should watch the full video.

It's an excellent it's a very well done video. I'm also happy to see the Prime Minister's office putting out excellent

material like this. But you see that story. They defended themselves against a

terrorist attack and in the process of defending themselves that guy Dave shot the terrorist. And that exact incident

that incident is recorded in the OCHA database as an act of settler violence.

Again, there is some settler violence, but understand the magnitude of the Arab violence

against Jews is is just many, many times more. Hundreds of times more

than any acts of violence going in the other direction. And the vast majority of the

uh almost all of the violence in the other direction is in self-defense.

And this is a very carefully calculated campaign. They bring reporters, they bring photographers, they bring

videographers out there. They provoke and then they film the part where there's retaliation. This happens all

the time. We have to be on our guard and we have to stand for the truth. Please share

this video widely and do your own research for yourself if you want. Drop a comment or if you have

something else to say, you want to know more about this, let me know what you think about this. And please, please

share this video. God bless.