The Media’s Lies About ‘Settler Violence’

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No one denies that some “settlers” — Jews living beyond the Green Line — have visited violence upon some Palestinians in Judea and Samaria. But the number of such attacks, what prompted them, and just how violent they were, are being reported on in ways that provide a misleading picture of what is actually going on. The reporting has been hostile and grossly inaccurate. More on this misreporting can be found here: “How Misleading Journalism Fuels a Destructive Narrative on Israeli Settler Violence,” by Channa Rifkin, HonestReporting, August 26, 2024:

There is a certain kind of journalism that is born out of ignorance, with an unwillingness to be fair. It’s the worst kind of journalism, especially when the writer fills his or her article with deep inaccuracies along the way.

This is an ongoing trend when it comes to Israeli settler violence and IDF activities in the West Bank. Let’s be clear: HonestReporting is not here to defend any political stances or make excuses for violence.

However, it is necessary to point out where the media got their facts wrong. This is true for Christina Lamb’s “Gun in hand, the Israeli settler tells the Palestinian: I will kill you” that she wrote for The Sunday Times.

Implication that Israeli settler violence is common & accepted by all settlers

But many in both communities believe that Israel has opened a second front in the West Bank where Jewish settlers backed by the government have ramped up occupation and violence against Palestinians to unprecedented levels.

The media have a tendency to group a fringe minority of Israeli settlers with the settler population as a whole. This creates a picture that all settlers are violent and extreme, while the overwhelming majority of them do not engage in violence and are simply Israeli citizens who, for any number of different reasons, live over the so-called Green Line….

There are 700,000 Israelis who live “over the Green Line” and can be considered “settlers.” How many of those 700,000 have been trying to terrorize Palestinians? A few hundred? Yes, at most. Between 2010 and 2019, the Arabs claim that a total of 22 Palestinians were killed by settlers.That means about two Palestinians have been killed by “settlers” each year. Yet the media make us believe that dozens of Palestinians are being attacked and killed by “rampaging settlers” every year. It isn’t true. In the same decade, 203 Israeli civilians — most of them in Judea and Samaria — were killed by Palestinians. In these stories about the terrible “settlers” that fact is never mentioned.

This isn’t to say that Israeli settler violence isn’t a problem. It is real, unfortunately. As Lamb wrote, Shin Bet head Ronen Bar recently warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant of the “indescribable damage” settler violence is having on Israel….

The settler violence most often takes the form of throwing rocks at Palestinians, damaging their houses, vandalizing and setting fire to cars, and cutting down olive trees. All deplorable, but remember the context: in many cases these “rampages” take place after a settler or a settler family has been murdered. This part of the story is often not reported.

Another major point here is the way Lamb paints an image of West Bank cities like Hebron as a “ghost town,” when in fact, it is quite the opposite. Unfortunately, this is a common trope in the media, as there is a tendency to interview politicized organizations like B’Tselem or Breaking the Silence rather than more neutral experts.

B’Tselem is a left-wing Israeli human rights group dedicated to blackening the image of the “settlers”; it is not a neutral reporter either about conditions on the West Bank or about settler behavior, including attacks on Palestinians. It has an agenda: it wants Israel to leave the West Bank, and is prepared to exaggerate stories about “settler violence.”

The reality is that Israel, under the Hebron Protocol Netanyahu signed in 1997, has control of only about 20 percent of the city. With that in mind, Palestinians, so-called human rights groups, and others paint a picture of Hebron and other cities as suffering from Israeli military oppression. The reality is that in Hebron, the genuine issues and friction between Palestinians and Israelis are confined to only a small part of the city, most of whose more than 200,000 residents live under the full control of the Palestinian Authority.

Hebron is not a “ghost town,” but a flourishing city, the largest Palestinian city in the West Bank; it has 250,000 Arab inhabitants, and produces 30% of the Palestinians’ GDP. The city’s Palestinian residents are ruled entirely by the PA. Israel only rules over the 1,100 Jewish inhabitants, who are effectively walled off in a small slice of the city — a kind of ghetto — from which they are not allowed to enter the Arab-populated areas. It is they who are “locked in,” not the Palestinians.

As for “Do Not Enter” signs, those are aimed not at Palestinians but Israelis, to prevent them from entering Palestinian towns and villages where they may be at risk of becoming victims of terror. And it is this terrorism that necessitates military checkpoints in place for security purposes.

An offensive lack of fact-checking

In addition to the bias, there is also a fact-checking issue. It’s difficult to tell whether this is intentional ignorance, or lazy journalism. A faulty photo caption is not usually the journalist’s responsibility but is indicative of the manner in which the subject matter is being dealt with by editors….

For the wild inaccuracies in that excerpt alone, Christine Lamb ought to be fired from The Times.

Christina Lamb should have told her readers that only two Palestinians are killed by “settlers” each year, while at least ten times that number of “settlers” are killed by Palestinians in Judea and Samaria. She ought to explain that the “settler violence” does not occur in a vacuum, but most often is unleashed after Palestinian attacks, including the murder of families driving in the West Bank. The “Do Not Enter” signs are not meant to keep in Arabs, but to keep out Jews from entering Arab areas where they stand a good chance of being attacked and even murdered. She should not have described Ashkelon, a city on Israel’s coast, far from the West Bank, as a “settler” town. There are no “settlers” in Ashkelon. Finally, she really must report more fully on the many, and various, attacks by the Palestinians that make life so dangerous for Jews in Judea and Samaria. But she won’t, for she has decided that the Israelis are brutish oppressors who make life miserable for the Palestinians, “whose land they have stolen.” She should be fired by the Times.But don’t worry. She won’t be, and if by some mischance she were, she would be snatched up by Al Jazeera, where she can continue to spew her anti-Israel venom to her heart’s content.