The World’s View of Settler Violence Is All Wrong
New York Times columnist Bret Stephens (whom I greatly admire) is a staunch Zionist and defender of Israel, but even he jumped on the settler violence bandwagon with a column from July 28 titled “A Blunt Warning for Israel,” in which he expressed his dismay over settler violence and the damage it’s inflicting on the Zionist problem. He quoted from a letter that Matan Vilnai, a retired deputy chief of staff of the IDF, wrote to President Donald Trump, saying that although the IDF excels at squashing terrorism on its military fronts, the government has constrained the military from acting to suppress settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. Vilnai warned that the failure to act threatens the security of Israel and the interests of the United States in the region.
Stephens agreed, writing that “Anyone who cares about Israel’s well-being shouldn’t be silent about anti-Palestinian settler terrorism in the West Bank and the nothing-much-to-see-here policy of Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister. That’s not only because the terrorism is a menace to Palestinian lives and property, or an affront to Jewish ethics, or a stain on Israel’s reputation — though it’s all those things. It’s also a direct threat to Israel’s security and statehood, and thus to Zionism itself.”
He then went on to detail the sharp rise in settler violence, citing statistics that showed an increase of 682 incidents in 2025 over the previous year.
For the record, I agree with everything Stephens wrote. Settler violence, which I too call terrorism, is a disgrace and a shanda and a chillul Hashem.
But Stephens is looking at this all wrong. And so is Vilnai, well-intentioned though he may be.
The first thing that jumped out at me when I read about Vilnai’s letter is that we Jews have been down this road before — many times before, in fact. Here are three examples that barely represent the tip of the “we are our own worst enemy” iceberg.
After the death of their mother, the Hasmonean Queen Salome, brothers Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II fought over the throne. Their followers formed factions and appealed to the Roman general, Pompey. Yet a third faction appealed to Pompey to abolish the monarchy altogether.
The consequences of appealing to an outside authority have reverberated through the generations. Pompey supported the cause of Aristobulus, marched on Jerusalem, besieged it, captured it, and brought Jerusalem under Roman dominion in 63 BCE. Involving Pompey in their dispute cost the Jews their independence from Rome.
In 70 CE, the Temple would be destroyed and the Jews driven into exile. And that’s why we are where we are.
Fast forward a millennium or so, to the 13th century. Maimonides’ books on philosophy, drawing from Greek sources, caused a stir in the Jewish community. Some thought they were great. Others thought they should be banned. The zealous faction, the one in favor of banning, approached the Dominicans and told them they should be concerned too, claiming that the books contained heresies. (There is some dispute among historians whether the Dominicans got involved of their own accord or not, but this is the traditional Jewish account.)
The Dominicans behaved exactly as you would expect well-brought-up, well-trained Dominicans to behave: They seized Maimonides’ books and burned them.
The zealots were properly horrified by an outcome they should totally have seen coming.
Fast forward another half a millennium. The scene is 18th-century Poland. The controversy: the rabbis versus the Frankists. The rabbis complained to the Christian authorities about this heretical sect, and many Frankists were arrested. But then came the plot twist: The Frankists sought protection from a powerful bishop, who sided with the Frankists and ordered a public disputation between the two factions. After the disputation, the bishop ruled that the Frankists won. He punished the rabbis with financial penalties and public flogging and confiscated copies of the Talmud — which he burned, of course.
This happened over and over again throughout our history, and we never learned our lesson. We never learned that it’s a terrible idea to ask powerful rulers to intervene in our internal squabbles. I guess we’ll have to see how this latest iteration plays out. I predict that nothing good will come of it.
That said, we have to grapple with the complete lack of perspective that Stephens and Vilnai displayed.
But first, some throat clearing: Yes, settler violence is a stain on Israeli society. Yes, it’s a threat to Israeli security. Yes, it unnecessarily inflames tensions. Yes, it’s morally repugnant. Yes, the Israeli government could be doing more to suppress it. All that is true. But a lot of things can be true at once.
First, let’s talk about context. Whenever Palestinians engage in violence against Jews, we are expected to contextualize it. When Jews engage in violence, they are just bad, period. No context is ever given or even allowed to be presumed.
Well, I’m here to provide the context.
An Arab media outlet called “Mo3ta” tracks the incidents of Palestinian violence against settlers, as they are very proud of it. An X user helpfully posted a screenshot of a web page from Mo3ta that details the actions taken against Israelis from January 2018 to August 2026. I verified that the screenshot comes from the Mo3ta website.
You can view the screenshot here.
The claims shatter the narrative about settler violence versus Palestinian violence. The outlet reports that in those 103 months, the Palestinians engaged in 62,308 acts of violent confrontation with Israelis, which works out to about 605 incidents per month. These include shootings, stabbings, car rammings, stone throwing, suicide bombings, throwing grenades, burning tires, all the usual stuff.
Stephens cites a Times of Israel statistic of “867 incidents of nationalistic crime and settler violence in 2025.” That works out to about 72 per month. According to this Palestinian source, that means that there are about eight times more attacks on Israeli settlers than there are on Palestinians.
The problem may be far worse. According to data from the Regavim study and my interview with a Hebrew University academic who is an expert in this area, the ratio of attacks are 100 Palestinian attacks to 1 Israeli attack. One hundred to one. Let that sink in.
According to the United Nations data, which counted 8,332 incidents from January 2016 to April 2023 of settler violence, that works out to about 95 incidents a month, which is still far lower than the Palestinian incidents. But it’s even less than that if you filter out the false data (read my article on this). Once you do that, the incidents drop to about 5 per month.
This is not to excuse Israelis but to point out that the violence isn’t happening in a vacuum. When you only describe one side of the story, you get a crazily skewed version.
My point is that Palestinian violence toward Israelis is many orders of magnitude greater, yet you only hear about the far lesser (though still reprehensible) settler violence.
Why does the media report only half the narrative? Indeed, we could fairly ask why the Israelis only track the data one way. To borrow a Yiddish word from my father, it’s modne. I can understand why the media presents a one-sided narrative — I’m not shy about calling out Jew hatred — but why the Israelis? I don’t have an answer for you guys on this one.
I’ve banged my drum about the second aspect of this skewed perspective a billion times, but it bears repeating.
Israel makes up 0.013% of the land area of the planet Earth. Its conflict with the West Bank Palestinians is nothing compared to what’s going on between gangs in Chicago, let alone a truly massive conflict like the one in Sudan that has left roughly a half a million dead in the same time span as the Gaza war. (The true number is likely in the millions, since the number of infants alone who have died from starvation is said to be over half a million.)
By contrast, Sudan makes up 0.37% of Earth’s land mass. Sudan is about 28 times larger than Israel. Can we think about this for a minute?
The massacres in Sudan are so heavy the blood can be seen from outer space. Hello, world? Focus, please!
There are truly horrific things going on in the United States right now on a much smaller scale than Sudan but nevertheless on a much grander scale than settler violence, but let’s pick Chicago again because it’s an easy example (and I already wrote about it so I can save time on the research). Chicago’s population is half that of the West Bank, but about 200 people die each year from gang-related violence alone. In the West Bank, Palestinian civilians killed by settlers — I make this distinction because the IDF conducts operations against Hamas cells in the West Bank, and I’m not including that in my tally — plus settlers killed by Palestinians total up to twenty per year. That means that proportionally, 40 times more people are killed every year in Chicago by gang violence. The fact that the world is up in arms about settler violence but couldn’t care less about what’s going on in Chicago or other cities in the U.S. and around the world — and Sudan, and Yemen (85,000 children dead from starvation), and all the rest — means they don’t give a hoot about innocent people dying. This is not about compassion for the innocent; this is about hating Israel.
From the way the settler violence is reported, you would think that hundreds of thousands of settlers engage in violence against Palestinians; the true number is in the low hundreds. I will concede the point that it takes only a handful of people to terrorize a population, but it must be understood that all the other Israelis, which is really the whole population minus a handful, don’t support what these hoodlums are doing. Even the settlers themselves decry their actions. They are a minority of a minority of a minority.
Imagine what the news would look like if every incident of gang violence all over the United States was always front-page news. That’s what the news media is doing with Israeli settler violence. If the media regarded Israel the way it regarded every other country in the world, settler violence wouldn’t even make the news, let alone the front-page news.
But that’s not the world we live in.
We live in a world in which high-ranking Jewish officials do not learn history’s lesson about the consequences of appealing to powerful non-Jewish rulers.
We live in a world in which only half the story about Israel is reported, shearing off the context in which the violence occurs.
We live in a world in which the global population fixates on the actions of a tiny, minute, infinitesimally small fraction of the world, blowing it up into the hugest, biggest, most important story of all time.
It makes complete sense that the story of settler violence in a country whose population is about the same as New York City’s would be front-page news. It also makes sense that in Israel, Israelis like Vilnai would freak out about it. But even in Chicago, Chicagoans don’t freak out about gang violence. Even the ones who live with it daily don’t freak out about it.
Instead of freaking out about it, the Jewish writers and activists who are anxious about this issue should instead be asking why this is even on anyone’s radar. And they should answer that question in their columns, because the answer is as plain as the noses on their faces.