by Mike Wagenheim
JNS got a rare look at closely-held U.N. information, which critics say is used to claim Jewish attacks against Arabs in Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem are growing.
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The Judea and Samaria security barrier as seen from
Kibbutz Meirav, with Jalbun and Jenin in the background. Photo by Doron
Horowitz/Flash90. |
The United Nations agency responsible for reporting on Israeli “settler violence” says it only makes its data available to selected organizations, “primarily to protect people’s privacy.”
Regavim, an Israeli nonprofit that is dedicated to protecting Israel’s national lands and resources, issued a report in April titled “False Flags and Real Agendas.”
The analysis cited what it said is flawed and misleading data in the annual report on settler violence published by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA.
The U.N. agency relies on poorly-sourced and fraudulent figures, which inflate actual incidents of violence committed by Israelis against Arabs in Judea and Samaria and eastern Jerusalem, according to the report.
The OCHA report claimed that there was a dramatic jump in settler violence during the Israel-Hamas war. Reportedly rising attacks on Arabs led, in part, to U.S. and European sanctions against Jews residing in Judea and Samaria.
The U.N. agency doesn’t share its data publicly, which made it hard for Regavim to analyze it. (OCHA requires a password to access it.)
After JNS sought comment several times from OCHA, Jens Laerke, the agency’s deputy spokesman, said “the data has a degree of personal detail that is needed for partners providing aid, but not for public consumption.”
“In other words, it is primarily to protect people’s privacy,” he said.
Laerke used the example of a burned orchard.
“Partners may use detailed data from OCHA to understand which families depended on that land, how they were affected and what support they may require,” he told JNS. “This level of detail is shared with partners providing aid.”
OCHA makes anonymized statistics available to the public “to allow for trend analysis while protecting people’s privacy,” he said.
Naomi Khan, director of Regavim’s international division, would not say how her group was able to access the OCHA database and compile a report. JNS did not see any personal information in the materials it viewed.
“If only the organizations providing ‘humanitarian aid’ can see the data, and thus critique it, due to privacy concerns, and only the U.N. decides who its ‘partners’ are, we are all outside of this closed tautological circle,” Khan told JNS.
OCHA “positioned itself as the policeman, judge, jury, court stenographer, reporter and PR agent,” she said. “There is no point at which its decisions or judgment can be called into question or even examined. The accused have no recourse.”
Only those with access to the data can see that OCHA repeatedly uses only one source for its data—the Palestinian Authority’s District Coordination and Liaison Office, according to Khan.
The U.N. Agency cites both of the recognized initials for the office—DCO and DCL—making it appear as if they are separate sources, Khan said.
“The bias is baked in, but only laid bare if the sources are revealed,” she told JNS. “The sources are revealed only to ‘partners’—the very same people, more or less, who provide the ‘data.’”
Laerke told JNS that “OCHA’s public statistics on incidents involving settlers only include incidents that result in casualties, property damage or both.”
Its closely held data tells a different story.
Regavim allowed JNS to view its breakdown of the more than 8,000 incidents of settler violence culled from OCHA’s database.
“Buried between the lines is the inescapable conclusion that the State of Israel itself, or its various arms, which continue to provide the lions’ share of most vital forms of ‘humanitarian aid’ to the Palestinian Arabs in Judea and Samaria—drinking water, electricity, food, jobs, medical care—are not ‘partners’ and therefore are not privy to the OCHA data,” she said.
“Nor are they considered reliable sources of reporting on Arab violence,” Khan told JNS. “This is what accounts for the absurd underreporting of Arab violence and the outrageous inclusion of official Israeli activity in Area C in the data.”
The breakdown shows repeated incidents of Israeli government construction and infrastructure work in Area C of Judea and Samaria, which is under full Israeli civil and security control, labeled as settler violence, trespass or property damage.
“While settler violence can in some cases occur in relation to government activities, the latter as such are not classified as settler violence,” Laerke told JNS.
That appeared to contradict the detailed Regavim breakdown that JNS viewed.
“If Israel paves a road in Area C, or puts up electrical poles, or it corrects sewage systems or brings more water delivery systems, they call that settler violence-slash-trespassing,” Khan said.
She drew JNS’ attention to several examples in the OCHA database. “It’s not, of course,” she said. “It’s nonsense.”
Khan also pointed to examples of permitted agricultural work on Israeli state land by Jewish communities, which OCHA classified as settler violence.
Laerke told JNS that OCHA’s “reporting threshold means that OCHA statistics on settler violence doesn’t include incidents where settlers merely visited a site within the occupied Palestinian territory.”
“This threshold is applied equally across all areas of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem,” he said.
That also did not appear to match the Regavim breakdown of OCHA’s database, which includes examples of visits by Jews to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site, that were classified as incidents of settler violence, even when no violence was documented.
“Every ascent of the Temple Mount by a non-Muslim is recorded as an incident of settler violence, of storming Al Aqsa,” Khan told JNS.
Those visits accounted for “hundreds” of reported incidents of settler violence, Khan said.
Mike Wagenheim
Source: https://www.jns.org/un-agencys-data-on-settler-violence-only-available-to-its-partners/
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