WhatsappI spent an afternoon last week doing something international journalist are unwilling to do.
I read every single case in the B’Tselem database of “settlers violence” against Palestinian casualties.
All 134 of them. In 26 years, going back to the year 2000.
When I’ll tell you what I found you’d blood will boil.
But yes, thisis the entire dataset international media has been screaming about. Twenty-six years. 134 deaths.
Israel has half a million Jews living in Judea and Samaria. Two million Palestinian neighbors. Twenty-six years of overlapping farmland, shared roads, tense afternoons, and everything in between. And this is the number that supposedly proves we are a wave of armed settler violence sweeping the West Bank.
But that is not even the punchline.
Because when I actually read the cases, here is what is in that number.
Half of them, roughly 66 cases, were Palestinians killed while actively trying to murder Jews. Stabbers shot mid-stab. Shooters killed while shooting. Ramming drivers stopped before they could hit the next Jewish family. Firebomb throwers neutralized while throwing firebombs at moving cars with children in the backseat.
These are not victims of settler violence. These are terrorists killed while committing terror attacks.
Another 30%, roughly 40 cases, were killed during land disputes adjacent to Jewish communities. At best boundary disputes. At worst encroachment and trasspassing. The kind of high-stress friction that ends badly for someone. Every one of these should be investigated, and Israeli police do investigate them. But calling them “settler violence” is like calling every bar fight where someone eventually died a targeted assassination.
Which leaves us with 26 cases across 26 years of actual bad-actor Jewish extremist violence against Palestinian non-combatants (and that’s if we take B’tselem’s highly skewed descriptions at face value).
One per year.
Every one of those cases is a real outrage. Every one causes horror across the Israeli political spectrum. When Amiram Ben-Uliel was convicted of murdering the Dawabsheh family in Duma in 2015, he received three consecutive life sentences.
That is what we do with our extremists. We hunt them down, prosecute them, and put them away for the rest of their lives.
Unlike Palestinians who pay for slay.
Now compare that to what happens on the other side.
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. Suicide bombings during the Second Intifada. The kidnapping and murder of Jewish teenagers. The barbaric October 7 massacre, which the majority still calls the correct decision.
One side treats violence against civilians as a moral catastrophe. The other side treats it as a legitimate national strategy, and pays lifetime salaries to imprisoned terrorists and the families of dead ones.
That is the moral asymmetry the phrase “cycle of violence” was invented to obscure.
So the next time you see a headline about “settler violence,” here is what you are actually reading about:
Fewer than one incident per year, in a population of half a million, prosecuted by our courts, condemned by our leaders, and rejected by our society.
Compare that to thousands of Israeli civilians killed by Palestinian attacks since 1967.
That is not a cycle of violence.
That is a war one side wages against the other while the other side defends its children and puts its own criminals in prison.
Look at the numbers and tell me who the story is really about.
UPD, upon repeat analysis, the distribution changed slightly and the numbers in the post have been updated, but the substance stays exactly the same)
