by Melanie Phillips
Violence in the “West Bank” is being malevolently misrepresented.
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| Protesters demonstrate at Paris Square in central Jerusalem against attacks by extremist Jewish settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank, Sept. 2, 2026. Photo by Yonatan Sindel/Flash90. |
As every part of the “Gaza genocide” mass libel is exposed as a total fabrication, the new mass libel of “settler violence” has replaced it.
From the politicians, NGOs and mainstream media that promulgated the genocide lie, there’s been no acknowledgment of the collapse of the grotesque falsehoods they promoted about starvation and wanton killing of health workers and journalists that have fueled unprecedented attacks on Jews throughout the West.
Instead, without drawing breath, they’re promoting the new purported Israeli mass atrocity of “settler violence.”
This is doing far more damage than the genocide charge. That was patently preposterous, an inversion of the reality of genocidal Palestinian Arab attack and Israel’s supremely just war of self-defense.
By contrast, the claim of “settler violence” carries an element of truth that is being vastly exaggerated to damage the State of Israel itself.
The narrative in the West is that fanatical and violent Israeli “settlers” harass and attack local Arabs to drive them off their land, so that these ultra-nationalist religious Jews can erect yet more “illegal” outposts in a land grab across the “West Bank” of Judea and Samaria.
In recent days, this has spawned a sub-narrative of violent “settlers” laying siege to Arabs cowering inside their homes in the villages of Qusra and Jalud.
There’s no doubt that there’s a problem with fanatical Israeli youths attacking Arab property or mosques that has not been properly addressed. The Israel Defense Forces have now arrested a 19-year-old Israeli over the disturbances in Qusra. The authorities should have shut this problem down, but reprehensibly have not.
But these violent Israelis are very small in number.
David Zini, the head of the Israeli Security Agency (or Shin Bet), has said there’s a hard core of 70 to 100 offenders, mostly not even “settlers” at all but delinquent youths from elsewhere in the country.
Other Israeli sources put the number of these delinquents at between 200 and 500.
But half a million Israeli residents live in these disputed territories—overwhelmingly law-abiding people. And while they are being grotesquely defamed across the West, they are coming under violent and sometimes murderous attack by Arabs every single day.
The overwhelming majority of attacks in these disputed areas are by Arabs on Jews—thousands of incidents of rock-throwing, stabbings, arson, car-rammings, criminal damage and murder.
Moreover, the stories of these sieges have another side.
Last Shabbat, there was a reported siege of an Arab house on Talpiot hill near Jerusalem, with masked Israelis arriving by car.
But according to local Israeli residents, dozens of masked Arab rioters from the nearby village of Kfar Qasim, accompanied by foreign media photographers, ascended the hill, threw stones at residents, and set up barricades to thwart the arrival of IDF forces.
More Arabs then reportedly entered an abandoned house, barricaded themselves inside, and threw stones from it at the Jews in an attempt to brand the incident as another “siege.” Videos shot by local Israeli residents showed masked Arabs throwing stones while foreign journalists stood behind them filming.
On the same Shabbat, masked men described as “settlers” attacked an NBC crew in nearby Jalud. The American journalists were investigating a very similar claim that settlers had “besieged” an Arab family’s property.
The NBC footage itself shows masked men driving directly up to a camera crew, attacking them and leaving. But there was no evidence that these were even Israelis, let alone “settlers.”
There’s also a pattern of American involvement in these situations.
Loui Ridi, a Palestinian American from Ohio who lives full-time in America, said he built his house—the “siege” house—in Qusra three years ago.
In The New York Times, Ridi acknowledged that a week after the siege began, he returned to the house carrying an American flag “as a signal to the American people and the U.S. government to take action” and “impose sanctions on these settlers.”
As Reuters reported, when Ridi arrived, he made his way to Qusr “accompanied by several journalists.” Has anyone ever heard of a siege that a person actually joins behind the siege lines from outside, while brandishing a flag and accompanied by a phalanx of journalists? Does that sound like desperation—or a political stunt?
All these accounts are obviously difficult to verify. But media reports of “settler violence” don’t even acknowledge there’s another side to these stories. Nor do these journalists ask any blindingly obvious questions.
For example, why do so many foreign film crews just happen to be on the scene when Israeli “settlers” launch their unprovoked attacks? Or why are there multiple similar claims of sieges on family homes on the same day?
Or why do spontaneous attacks on local Arabs by Israelis coincide with the regular arrival of foreign activists who provoke the IDF and create violent disturbances, as was filmed in Hebron—by another amazing coincidence—last Shabbat?
The overwhelming majority of attacks in these disputed areas are by Arabs on Jews—thousands of incidents of rock-throwing, stabbings, arson, car-rammings, criminal damage and murder.
In recent days, while politicians and journalists whipped up “settler violence” claims into a feeding frenzy, residents in the Judean hills reported that Arabs from a local village had infiltrated the grazing areas of an Israeli farm and scattered lethal poison hidden inside the herds’ drinking troughs.
Jewish shepherds who arrived to find their dying goats—videos of which were posted on social media—said they were attacked with stones by dozens of Arabs lying in wait nearby.
Jewish residents say farmers’ herds are regularly being stolen and turning up in the Arab casbah. When IDF troops go in to retrieve them, they are set upon by hundreds of Arabs with stones and fireworks.
Israelis’ extremist or revenge attacks on Arabs, their homes or their mosques are happening, and they are shocking and inexcusable—as are their nihilistic attacks on IDF soldiers. But this is a highly complex situation that’s being weaponized to delegitimize and destroy Israel itself.
Western media and politicians never acknowledge attacks on the “settlers,” who have been effectively dehumanized.
The prevailing unwisdom is that they shouldn’t be there in the first place because they are in “illegal occupation of Palestinian land.” So if they are attacked or even murdered, they’re asking for everything they get, and their plight doesn’t even deserve a mention.
Apart from the callous inhumanity of this attitude, it also displays gross ignorance of history and international law.
Unfortunately, a significant number of IDF members and police, who are on the left along with most mainstream Israeli media outlets, also hate the “settlers” and produce a distorted picture on which the venomous West greedily feeds. And Israeli politicians, including the prime minister and president, have merely condemned the Israeli “rioters” and refrained from presenting the other side of the story.
Those who assume that this means the “settler violence” canard is true would do well to remember how in 2000, the Israelis leapt to take responsibility for the apparent shooting and killing of a Palestinian Arab child, Mohammed al-Durah, when a demonstration in the Gaza Strip during the Second Intifada apparently came under IDF fire.
Subsequent evidence revealed that the boy had not been killed and that the whole demonstration was staged.
But the Israelis were less concerned with establishing the truth than with tamping everything down and making the issue go away. The result was a libel against Israel that incited untold numbers of killings, including the murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl.
The same politically craven thinking seems to be operating here. Israel is now under enormous pressure over “settler violence” from both the Trump administration and American Jews, for whom this has become the No. 1 issue because they, too, believe the distorted accounts.
In addition to finally dealing properly with the true miscreants, Israel should not only be responding with the real story behind these “settler attacks,” including the role of foreign provocateurs. It should be telling the world that its citizens have the legal right to live in these disputed territories. It should also be publicly listing every single Arab attack on these Jewish residents.
But as ever, the Israeli government thinks there’s no point trying to persuade the incorrigibly anti-Jewish West of the truth and justice of Israel’s cause.
The result is untold damage being done to the Jewish state, as yet again it fails to engage with the war being waged against it on the battleground of the mind.
Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for The Times of London, her new book, Fighting the Hate: A Handbook for Jews Under Siege, has just been published by Wicked Son. Her previous book, The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West and Why Only They Can Save It, was published in 2025. Access her work at: melaniephillips.substack.com.
Source: https://www.jns.org/opinion/column/melanie-phillips/the-new-libel-to-destroy-israel
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