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No one denies that some “settlers” — Jews living beyond the Green Line — have visited violence upon some Palestinians in Judea and Samaria. But the number of such attacks, what prompted them, and just how violent they were, are being reported on in ways that provide a misleading picture of what is actually going on. The reporting has been hostile and grossly inaccurate. More on this misreporting can be found here: “How Misleading Journalism Fuels a Destructive Narrative on Israeli Settler Violence,” by Channa Rifkin, HonestReporting, August 26, 2024:
There is a certain kind of journalism that is born out of ignorance, with an unwillingness to be fair. It’s the worst kind of journalism, especially when the writer fills his or her article with deep inaccuracies along the way.
This is an ongoing trend when it comes to Israeli settler violence and IDF activities in the West Bank. Let’s be clear: HonestReporting is not here to defend any political stances or make excuses for violence.
However, it is necessary to point out where the media got their facts wrong. This is true for Christina Lamb’s “Gun in hand, the Israeli settler tells the Palestinian: I will kill you” that she wrote for The Sunday Times.
Implication that Israeli settler violence is common & accepted by all settlers
But many in both communities believe that Israel has opened a second front in the West Bank where Jewish settlers backed by the government have ramped up occupation and violence against Palestinians to unprecedented levels.
The media have a tendency to group a fringe minority of Israeli settlers with the settler population as a whole. This creates a picture that all settlers are violent and extreme, while the overwhelming majority of them do not engage in violence and are simply Israeli citizens who, for any number of different reasons, live over the so-called Green Line….
There are 700,000 Israelis who live “over the Green Line” and can be considered “settlers.” How many of those 700,000 have been trying to terrorize Palestinians? A few hundred? Yes, at most. Between 2010 and 2019, the Arabs claim that a total of 22 Palestinians were killed by settlers.That means about two Palestinians have been killed by “settlers” each year. Yet the media make us believe that dozens of Palestinians are being attacked and killed by “rampaging settlers” every year. It isn’t true. In the same decade, 203 Israeli civilians — most of them in Judea and Samaria — were killed by Palestinians. In these stories about the terrible “settlers” that fact is never mentioned.
This isn’t to say that Israeli settler violence isn’t a problem. It is real, unfortunately. As Lamb wrote, Shin Bet head Ronen Bar recently warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant of the “indescribable damage” settler violence is having on Israel….
The settler violence most often takes the form of throwing rocks at Palestinians, damaging their houses, vandalizing and setting fire to cars, and cutting down olive trees. All deplorable, but remember the context: in many cases these “rampages” take place after a settler or a settler family has been murdered. This part of the story is often not reported.
Another major point here is the way Lamb paints an image of West Bank cities like Hebron as a “ghost town,” when in fact, it is quite the opposite. Unfortunately, this is a common trope in the media, as there is a tendency to interview politicized organizations like B’Tselem or Breaking the Silence rather than more neutral experts.
B’Tselem is a left-wing Israeli human rights group dedicated to blackening the image of the “settlers”; it is not a neutral reporter either about conditions on the West Bank or about settler behavior, including attacks on Palestinians. It has an agenda: it wants Israel to leave the West Bank, and is prepared to exaggerate stories about “settler violence.”
The reality is that Israel, under the Hebron Protocol Netanyahu signed in 1997, has control of only about 20 percent of the city. With that in mind, Palestinians, so-called human rights groups, and others paint a picture of Hebron and other cities as suffering from Israeli military oppression. The reality is that in Hebron, the genuine issues and friction between Palestinians and Israelis are confined to only a small part of the city, most of whose more than 200,000 residents live under the full control of the Palestinian Authority.
Hebron is not a “ghost town,” but a flourishing city, the largest Palestinian city in the West Bank; it has 250,000 Arab inhabitants, and produces 30% of the Palestinians’ GDP. The city’s Palestinian residents are ruled entirely by the PA. Israel only rules over the 1,100 Jewish inhabitants, who are effectively walled off in a small slice of the city — a kind of ghetto — from which they are not allowed to enter the Arab-populated areas. It is they who are “locked in,” not the Palestinians.
As for “Do Not Enter” signs, those are aimed not at Palestinians but Israelis, to prevent them from entering Palestinian towns and villages where they may be at risk of becoming victims of terror. And it is this terrorism that necessitates military checkpoints in place for security purposes.
An offensive lack of fact-checking
In addition to the bias, there is also a fact-checking issue. It’s difficult to tell whether this is intentional ignorance, or lazy journalism. A faulty photo caption is not usually the journalist’s responsibility but is indicative of the manner in which the subject matter is being dealt with by editors….
For the wild inaccuracies in that excerpt alone, Christine Lamb ought to be fired from The Times.
Christina Lamb should have told her readers that only two Palestinians are killed by “settlers” each year, while at least ten times that number of “settlers” are killed by Palestinians in Judea and Samaria. She ought to explain that the “settler violence” does not occur in a vacuum, but most often is unleashed after Palestinian attacks, including the murder of families driving in the West Bank. The “Do Not Enter” signs are not meant to keep in Arabs, but to keep out Jews from entering Arab areas where they stand a good chance of being attacked and even murdered. She should not have described Ashkelon, a city on Israel’s coast, far from the West Bank, as a “settler” town. There are no “settlers” in Ashkelon. Finally, she really must report more fully on the many, and various, attacks by the Palestinians that make life so dangerous for Jews in Judea and Samaria. But she won’t, for she has decided that the Israelis are brutish oppressors who make life miserable for the Palestinians, “whose land they have stolen.” She should be fired by the Times. But don’t worry. She won’t be, and if by some mischance she were, she would be snatched up by Al Jazeera, where she can continue to spew her anti-Israel venom to her heart’s content.
@Adam
The attack in Jit was the result of continued attacks in the area against Jews. Here is a comment by Ayelet Lash which she posted at the time:
There is a great deal of resentment and commentary about how the people of the J&S are being abandoned as these attacks take place quite routinely. People feel abandoned and unsafe, as Elitist generals such as Fox plan and practice scenarios in which the Jews of J&S might need to be contained. The pressure resulting from these abuses is significant, and the apprehension that these communities are isolated and unprotected was always going to have an effect. I am quite surprised that this attack was actually as limited as it was, as they could have done a great deal more damage than they did do.
One thing more to recognize, is that this was just a few days after Yonatan Deutsch was murdered from a passing car, and at the time of the attack on Jit, there was still no capture of Yonatan’s murderers. As fate would have it, his assassins were eliminated two days after the Jit attack. I don’t know that Yonatan’s death had anything directly to do with the attack on Jit, but many people at the time did reference his murder as the Wester media storm was built up around Jit, during which time Yonatan’s death failed to make more than a mention, if that, in these same Western publication sites.
And let us not forget the report of months past in which it was revealed that the same planned attack which was mounted against the Otef was being planned against J&S, and it was in this same moment that the reprehensible Fox was caught with his training maneuvers to contain the Jews of J&S. All of this along with the mysterious knowledge that the army abandoned the people of the Otef for nearly a full day without any explanation, while the same management remains in place in the Army.
So, you asked what the background of the assault on Jit might be. Well, this is just my own input of course, but I would suggest that the random attacks on the people of J&S (which continue to this day) along with the sense of abuse and alienation from the forces to whom they should seek protection is at least part of the explanation.
This is my comment about the Jit-Yitzhar incident, copied here from my comment about it under General Avivi’s report. The comment is more a propos here.
This is a genuine, not a rhetorical question. Does anyone who writes or comments for Israpundit know what the background is of the alleged attack on an Arab village bt 100 oe more “settlers” about a week ago, people who covered their faces with masks?
Since this was a highly unusual event in Judea and Samaria, I am left puzzled by it. It was obviously terrible publicity for Israel, and playrd right into the hands of Mahmoud Abbas & co., lending some plausibility to their longstanding claims that the Jewish ‘settlers” in Judea-Smaria are terrorists. It played right into the hands of Blinken and the pro-Iranian, pro-PLO, pro-Hamas etc. crowd in the U.S. State department, for the same reason.
But what was the context of this unusual incident. Why were the “settlers” from the Jewish village of Yitzhar so angry at the nearby Arab village of Jit? Was is the context?
The “settlers” were said to come from the “settlement” of Yitzhar, which as a population of only about 2,000 people or less. The “settlers” are said to have burned down many houses in the Arab village, which I think is named Jit or something like that, often with many people still inside the buildings when they were burned down. However, all of these people were evacuated safely from the burning buildings. The “settlers” are also alleged to have shot and killed one Arab resident and wounding several others before lleaving the village and returning to their own homes nearby.
The IDF and the border police arrived within minutes of the alleged attack, rescued all of the people who were trapped in burning buildings, and broke up the riot, forcing the Jewish alleged rioters to return to their nearby village. However, they were criticized for not making any arrests.
Following these criticisms, the border police did identify four Israeli individuals from Yitzhar as suspected rioters and arrested them. They are allegedly being held at a police station somewhere without access to legal counsel. The Honenu organization, a pro-settler human rights organization, that provides legal counsel to Israelis accused of committing terrorist acts, has been denied access to these prisoners,
To recapitulate, can anyone give us the back storry to this unusual event?
I commented on this situation under General Avivi’s report, which is the first article in today’s Israpundit. I particularly referenced the recent alleged attack on an Arab village called Jit, allegedly by residents of a nearby Jewish “settlement” of Yitzhar. Please have a lok at my comment there. It would have made more sense if I had placed this comment in this space rather than below General Avivi’s article.
This sounds like a task for Mossad. Some low level re-education might work.
As the UK and Ireland become Muslim countries their Israel and Jew hatred will only increase. The governments, police, bureaucracies, education and press establishments and the totally corrupt judicial system will guarantee that.
The Opposition: Tommy Robinson, Katie Hopkins, Nigel Farage and Douglas Murray and a few other decent human beings that are totally outnumbered.
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