The Settler Violence Myth

How a flawed narrative about Jewish settlers in Judea and Samaria became a global campaign—and a weapon against Israel

by Gadi Taub | Tablet | July 3, 2025

Click photo below to revisit Naomi Kahn’s important discussion on the ruse of Settler Violence.

In the popular imagination, Jewish settlers in Judea and Samaria are armed gangs rampaging through Palestinian villages and towns and terrorizing the Arab population with impunity. The coverage of the recent clashes in and around the town of Kafr Malik provides a good case in point. “Police free all settlers detained in Wednesday’s deadly rampage of Palestinian village,” read a headline in The Times of Israel last week. “Settler attacks on Palestinians throughout the West Bank have been taking place on a near-daily basis with almost complete impunity, in what has sparked mounting sanctions from Western governments,” the report added, with palpable outrage. How could these perpetrators of a “deadly rampage,” which resulted in the death of three Palestinians, be set free?

Left out of this neat tale is that the three Palestinians weren’t killed by “violent settlers.” Rather, they were shot by the IDF, which was returning fire as it came under attack by gunmen in the village of al-Mughayyir. But this example of media coverage has long been the norm. And now that sectarian agitprop is mainstream in the United States, activists have started to frame their stories accordingly for a specific U.S. audience on the right, emphasizing that the settlers were persecuting Palestinian Christians. Hence, one such activist posted a video on X claiming that “settlers” were “attacking the Christian village of Taybeh … setting homes on fire and shooting at residents.”

That none of this happened doesn’t matter, clearly. What the world sees, over and over—and is then understandably outraged by—are settlers killing Palestinians with no punitive action by the Israeli government. Instead, the takeaway is that the authorities are either turning a blind eye or, worse, encouraging the violence with nods and winks.

Except that’s a manufactured fiction. A recent Israeli study explains how in detail.

The report, published in April by the Regavim Movement, an Israeli NGO (cofounded by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich long before he entered politics) that focuses on land allocation, is a 125-page deep dive into the extent of the settler violence phenomenon.

Even as it acknowledges that some violence by settlers—at times animated by nationalistic passions—the report shows that in contrast to the cartoonish public image, there is, in fact, very little such violence. Moreover, whatever violence exists, the report goes on to say, it is actively and effectively handled by law enforcement. The reason we do not know this, the report contends, is because of a well-orchestrated and lavishly funded information campaign, which has blown a marginal phenomenon out of proportion to advance a political agenda: the two-state solution. By framing the problem as one of “extremist” settlers victimizing the Palestinians, the solution seems self-evident: Remove the settlers to make room for a Palestinian state.

This campaign brought together a broad coalition of actors, foreign and domestic: boycott, divest, and sanction (BDS) supporters, Palestinian politicians, peace processors, left-wing Israeli members of Knesset, protesters opposed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a host of “human rights” NGOs, several foreign governments, the Biden administration, the European Union, and the United Nations. The left-leaning press within and outside Israel played an important role, too, in keeping the topic on the agenda, as did some in Israel’s security establishment.

The way the op generally works is that human-rights organizations collect “evidence,” which the United Nations then compiles. Politicians repeat the “evidence” laundered by the United Nations, and the press disseminates it. Then, if there’s still any doubt, videos on social media “prove” it, showing settlers looting, harassing, and assaulting the local Palestinian population—sometimes lethally.

By any measure, the campaign has been successful: Settlers are known the world over as a violent, extremist group who are responsible for keeping the conflict festering. More importantly, the Biden administration weaponized the op to set up a sanctions machine against Israel. Other states have since followed suit. Most recently, on June 10, the foreign ministers of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom imposed sanctions on two Israeli cabinet ministers, Smotrich and Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, for “inciting violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.”

The Regavim report uncovers the reality distorted by years of propaganda.

Where does the data come from? Anecdotal evidence aside, the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) maintains an online database of incidents involving settler violence. The database is based on an updated Excel sheet that is not publicly available on the site, but was obtained by Regavim. The Excel sheet “includes 8,332 ‘incidents involving Israeli settlers and other Israeli civilians’ that occurred in the West Bank or Israel (not in Gaza) between January 11, 2016, and April 30, 2023.”

**This story originally appeared in Tablet magazine, at tabletmag.com, and is reprinted with permission.