Could ‘extremists’ just be Jews defending their right to exist?

Jewish leaders in the diaspora last week called on Israel’s President to take “urgent action” over “Jewish extremist terror” in the West Bank and many people who are passionately pro-Israel support the leaders’ stand.

Me, not so much. I’m not a hard-liner and probably would not vote for Bibi if I lived in Israel. I’m just an old-fashioned Zionist who believes in the inalienable right of the Jews to dwell peacefully in their tiny slice of the Levant but I utterly reject the diaspora leaders’ call because I believe that “Settlers” have become to the Jewish community what “Zionists” are to the haters in the wider community and believe it is a perception created in the exact same way.

Indeed, even calling them “Settlers” is to accept an egregiously prejudicial Palestinian premise that was handed on a silver platter to the world by the Israeli Left in the 1970s and has been endlessly exploited and amplified across the subsequent decades by the carefully selective reporting of the “West Bank”, and by the “Settlers” actions repeatedly portrayed as “unprovoked violence.”

Undeniably there has been violence by Jews directed at Palestinians. Undeniably it is embarrassing to liberal, Western Jews. And undeniably the violence by “Settlers” has resulted in harm to some innocent Palestinians, which is deeply regrettable. But that does not mean Palestinians are “innocent” in this. And to frame it that way, with West Bank Palestinians portrayed purely as “victims,” and “Settlers” as “aggressors” is to play the Israel-haters game of ignoring inconvenient truths, context and reality.

I am not, by the way, condoning violence, but to call it “Jewish extremist terror” is to swallow whole another Palestinian premise —  that the violence was “unprovoked” when probably it was not. But then Jewish leaders — and most  Jews — would not know that it was not “unprovoked” because of the way the West Bank is covered and headlines, such as the BBC’s “Palestinians warn of expanding settler violence in West Bank” and “Palestinian man killed as death toll from West Bank settler violence climbs”, or The Guardian’s “‘The settlers brought the violence’: the ethnic cleansing of a West Bank village” which all endorse the Palestinian narrative which is that these “extremist” Jews go on a violent rampage because, well, they are violent and “extremist”. This narrative is subtly reinforced by polite Israeli society, which deems West Bank Jews if not “extremist” then certainly embarrassing.

There is a competing “Settler” narrative: that they are responding to violent acts of often small-scale terrorism directed at them.

But which narrative is heard? Which one is echoed by the Israeli Left; amplified by the BBC, The Guardian, and The New York Times, and given further impetus by poisonously prejudiced documentaries by known apologists for Palestinian violence.

As an example, it was asserted that last week “extremists” went on a rampage after a “traffic accident”. However, the “Settlers” claim — with some justification and hard evidence — that Palestinians deliberately rammed a car resulting in the death of a young man. It is a similar scenario to one included in Louis Theroux’s perfidiously anti-Israel documentary, when “Settlers” were shown setting a car alight, allegedly for no other reason than that they were Jewish “extremists.” Video-footage showed the “Settlers” were retaliating to an act of terrorism that was, of course, not shown in the documentary.

To get a clear idea of decades of Palestinian violence in the West Bank, I asked  ChatGPT for a rundown of attacks. After telling me it was “complex” and “tied to the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict” it offered a long, long list of attacks, confirming that, for the most part, “extremist violence” by “Settlers” is a response to unremitting, unprovoked Palestinian violence. (Unprovoked that is, except by the presence of Jews on the West Bank which might suggest to a fair-minded person that the Palestinians are actually doing the ethnic-cleansing they accuse the Jews of.)

As ChatGPT’s long, long list of terrorist attacks by Palestinians in the West Bank does not mention the fact that Israel controls the West Bank because it won a war begun by its enemies in 1967, rather than by conquest, colonzing or imperialism, let me make that clear. It might also be helpful to understand that the stigmatizing of West Bank Jews as “extremists” began when the then Left-wing Israeli governments which hoped to exchange the West Bank for permanent peace with the Palestinians began describing those who opposed their ban on West Bank settlements as “extremists” and “obstacles to peace”.

ChatGPT goes on to say that attacks on “Settlers” in the “territories” – which have included stabbings, shootings, ramming attacks and Molotov cocktails – worsened after the Oslo Accords, when much of the West Bank and its cities were given to the Palestinians as an autonomous territory. Attacks included roadside shootings, stabbings, car bombs, ambushes, vehicle attacks, rammings and drive-by shootings.

Of course, the horrific large-scale attacks made it into the headlines, such as the slaying of five members of the Fogel family in Itamar in 2011 when the family’s three-month-old baby girl Hadas was decapitated — a detail that may not have been included in the reports by the BBC, The Guardian or The New York Times. Then there was the 2017 murder of the Solomon family in Halamish, and the June 2014 kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers in Gush Etzion. And of course, in April 2023 Rebetzin Lucy Dee and her two daughters were gunned down by Palestinian terrorists as they were driving on a highway resulting in the death of Rebbetzin Dee and one daughter.

But many attacks, though deadly or causing grievous, life-changing injuries, are small-scale so they are mostly ignored by foreign media. The retaliation, of course, is not ignored and there is always plenty of coverage given to every ugly, “extremist” sound-bite promising revenge or – as this week –  a right-wing minister toasting the passing of a bill for capital punishment for convicted terrorists – alongside every doleful Palestinian sound-bite expressing victimhood.

With the harm to “innocent” Palestinians highlighted, reported and labelled as “Jewish extremist terror” while the provocation is all too often down-played or ignored entirely, it is really no surprise that some of the most passionate Zionists believe that “Settlers” are “bad”, “evil”, and “extremists”. I find this puzzling. Most Jews are able to see with absolute clarity how the constant repetition of libels and lies and the omission of context, – augmented by biased media coverage – has established an anti-Israel narrative and made Israel a “pariah state” to many. Yet when the exact same techniques have been used for decades to demonize and dehumanize “Settlers”, we utterly fail to see it. Combine that myopia with 50 years of the Israeli Left’s systematic denigration of “Settlers”, and it is hardly surprising that Jews chime in with the condemnation, and “Jewish leaders” are calling on the president to curb “Jewish extremist terror”.

The “Settler violence” may make many of us feel uncomfortable and embarrassed, but what if we’ve been deceived as the wider world has been deceived about Israel — and by the same route? Maybe “Settlers” are to Israel and the Jewish Diaspora what “Israel” and “Zionists” are to those who hate us? Maybe the “extremists” are just Jews defending their right to exist.