Enough with the Blood Libels – There Is No “Settler Violence”

Peloni:  “Say it clearly and loudly: there is no settler violence.”   I simply could not agree more.  Do not give this blood libel air to breathe.

They are trying to manipulate your consciousness through the blood libel known as “settler violence.”Do not be dragged into this false discourse. Before you condemn, stop and think for a moment…

Yehudit Katsover and Nadia Matar

Once again, we are witnessing videos that serve the “settler violence” campaign—a campaign that raises its head whenever the left identifies an opportunity for diplomatic pressure that could lead to further Israeli withdrawals.

The purpose of the blood-libel campaign against the Jews living in Judea and Samaria (labeled in English “settlers” but really should be called “inheritors of the land”) is to serve as a tool in the hands of those demanding their uprooting and expulsion from Judea and Samaria and the establishment of an Arab terror state in the heart of our land. It is entirely possible that the current timing of the renewed push of the false and libelous “settler violence” campaign was chosen due to the Prime Minister’s visit to the White House and the left’s hopes for American pressure to force Israel’s willingness to establish a Palestinian state.

In the face of this campaign of lies and defamation, we must stand firm with a decisive response whose headline is clear: there is no settler violence! To clarify this, we will begin with the obvious—unlike what occurs among the Arab enemy, where education toward hatred of Jews and the aspiration to kill Jews begins even before kindergarten and only intensifies over time, among Jews there are no people who wake up in the morning burning with a desire to attack Arabs for no reason. Jewish lives revolve around a normative daily routine of work, study, and family life.

Because this fact is well known, clear, and self-evident, when we are exposed in the media or on social networks to a widely circulated video showing a Jew who supposedly attacks an Arab, before rushing to condemn and defame, stop for a moment, take a deep breath, use your brain, and ask the necessary question: if a Jew arrived at such a situation, it is entirely possible that this is a completely different event—that it is part of a broader story deliberately not presented to us. Someone is trying to manipulate our consciousness in order to weaken the people of Israel and the State of Israel.

In these lines we wish to present one incident that occurred several months ago—one example that illustrates many others:

One day we received an agitated phone call. On the other end of the line was a distressed friend who told us how shocked she was by a video she had seen showing a Jew attacking an Arab and stealing his mobile phone. “Settler violence is shocking,” she concluded.

As we listened to her shock, it was already clear that this was a biased video backed by “consciousness engineers” and experts at manipulating the minds of innocent viewers. Nevertheless, we needed to present this friend with verified facts to prove that she too had fallen victim to the illusions of blood libels. The facts indeed arrived after an inquiry that took a little over a day. The story, as we suspected, was completely different:

It involved two young Jewish shepherds grazing their flock on pastureland belonging to a nearby Jewish community. A group of Arabs arrived at the scene and began throwing stones at them. One of the stones struck the head of one of the Jewish shepherds, who fell to the ground bleeding. The injured shepherd’s friend pulled out his phone and began filming the Arab attackers. When they realized they were being filmed, they attacked him, beat him, stole his phone, and began fleeing toward the Arab village from which they had come.

The shepherd did not give up and bravely pursued the fleeing rioters. He reached the village, entered a building where one of the rioters was hiding with the phone, struggled with him, and extracted the device from his hands. Friends of that rioter (in other words, a terrorist) filmed the struggle and the moment when the shepherd reclaimed the phone that had been stolen from him, and immediately distributed the end of the story detached from everything that had occurred beforehand. Thus, we are presented with an entirely different spectacle: a Jew beating someone and stealing a phone, instead of the true story of a Jew fighting to recover his phone, which contained footage of rioters who had attacked him and his friend.

Such incidents occur again and again throughout Judea and Samaria. There is no settler violence here, but rather straightforward self-defense.

Another incident occurred just in recent days, in which footage was circulated showing a reservist allegedly running over a praying Arab. Knowing the Jewish population of Judea and Samaria, we know full well that no one simply gets on a tractoron and runs over Arabs during prayer. However, the quick tendency to react from the gut without thinking lead to condemnations and rejection. Therefore, once again, the recommendation is to pause, breathe, and think before responding.

In this most recent incident, the truth became clear the following day. Once again, it was an attack on Jewish shepherds. This time, after the shepherds called for help, that same reservist arrived at the scene and, alone, managed to drive away the Arab rioters. Instead of being praised for his swift action in defending the shepherds and for his effective activity without fear, even as one man facing the rioters, he was met with condemnation, attacks, and accusations. After the true circumstances of the event became clear, did any of those who condemned and defamed him apologize?

Defamation of this kind has been repeatedly directed in recent years at hilltop youth and at the residents of the farms—noble-spirited and idealistic people who abandoned comfortable bourgeois lives and invest all their strength, resources, and energy in the people of Israel and the Land of Israel. Yet the day will come when we all look back, remember their deeds, and thank them for safeguarding national lands and maintaining a presence on the ground.

In summary, the next time you encounter a supposedly “shocking” video, do not fall into the trap of blood libels and consciousness manipulation. Do not rush to condemn. Do not become a plaything in the “settler violence” campaign, whose goal is to turn the residents of Judea and Samaria into a cruel demon that must be fought and expelled from its land—our G-dgiven Biblical heartland. At a time when settlement is developing and discourse about sovereignty is returning to the table, do not be dragged into the places the radical left is trying to pull us toward.

Say it clearly and loudly: there is no settler violence. There is self-defense by Jews living in their land