I am an “Armed Settler.” Here Is What the Media Never Tells You.

I am an “armed settler.”

Today I took 150 Jewish children on a camp trip. To do that, I needed a security detail worthy of a foreign diplomat entering a war zone.

We think we know what the international media means when it writes about “armed settlers.” Let me tell you what they never mention.

Our organization runs camps for immigrant children and children of Israeli reservists. Today, we launched our first camp trip of the summer in Judea. We take these children specifically to the mountains their ancestors walked, prayed over, and built for thousands of years.

Every field trip in Israel requires security authorization from the Ministry of Education. You do not just give them your destination; you upload every single road you plan to drive on, every path you plan to walk, every stop you plan to make. For each segment, they tell you what security you need. A regular bus? A stone-proof bus? A bulletproof bus? How many armed guards? How many medical personnel?

For today’s trip, we needed three armed guards, three medical personnel, stone-proof buses, and a twenty-five-minute detour to avoid a route requiring bulletproof buses, a risk we were not willing to take.

That is what “armed settler” means in reality.

We are armed because Palestinian stone-throwers have killed Jewish children on those roads. We are armed because Palestinian gunmen have shot Jewish families driving those routes. We are armed because our government agencies calculate, road by road, meter by meter, where our children will be attacked if unprotected. We are armed the way a mother in Sderot is armed. We are armed the way a father in Kfar Aza was armed on October 6th, 2023, and was not armed enough on October 7th.

Now look at what “armed settler violence” looks like on the other side of this ledger.

Since 1967, roughly 3,000 Israeli civilians have been killed by Palestinian terrorists. Children, grandmothers, teenagers on buses, families in restaurants, babies in strollers. For most of this period, civilian Jewish-on-Palestinian violence was so rare that no one bothered to keep formal statistics. Individual incidents, such as Baruch Goldstein in 1994 or the Duma arson in 2015, are famous specifically because they were the horrific exceptions. You could count them on the fingers of two hands across nearly six decades.

Consider the dataset international bodies and the press love to cite: the B’Tselem database of Palestinian fatalities, which attributes 134 Palestinian deaths to Jewish civilians across the last 26 years since 2000. They brandish these figures as proof of systemic “settler violence,” but strip away the propaganda and look at what the narrative facts actually show.

Roughly half of those cases involve Palestinians who were killed while actively perpetrating lethal violence, terrorists shot mid-attack while stabbing, shooting, or ramming civilians, alongside violent agitators hurling firebombs and rocks at moving family cars on shared highways. Another 40% stem from agricultural, grazing, and land disputes in Area C, the smaller part of Judea and Samaria containing Jewish towns and villages. These are tense, physical friction over land boundaries where drawing a weapon occurs under disputed, high-stress circumstances.

When you isolate the genuine, bad-actor vigilante violence committed by Jewish extremists against non-combatants, you are left with fewer than 20 cases in a quarter of a century, less than one a year.

Every single one of those rare cases is an outrage. When they occur, they are met with horror across the entire Israeli political spectrum. The Prime Minister condemns them. Opposition leaders condemn them. Rabbis condemn them. The perpetrators are arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced by our justice system.

Meanwhile, for the past two decades, polls conducted by Palestinian institutions themselves have consistently shown that upwards of 70% of Palestinians support violence against Israeli civilians, from Second Intifada suicide bombings to the barbaric October 7 massacre. One side treats violence against civilians as a moral catastrophe; the other treats it as a legitimate strategy. That is the moral asymmetry the phrase “cycle of violence” is designed to obscure.

To equate a mother defending her family from a firebomb on a highway to a vigilante raid is a deliberate lie. The statistics don’t reveal a campaign of settler aggression; they reveal an armed civilian population forced to defend its children against relentless, lethal terror.

So, do you want to see armed settlers for yourself? Look at 150 Jewish kids on a summer trip, their armed protection, and the land their ancestors have walked for three thousand years.

We are the armed settlers. Look at our faces and tell me who the threat actually is.