February 23, 2026

Two realities coexist today: some settlers are violent – but crying “Settler Violence” distorts, weaponizes and essentializes. The charge slurs all settlers to question Israel’s legitimacy.

At 11:25 AM on Nov. 15, A., a 65-year-old lawyer serving his 166th day in reserves since Oct. 7, 2023, received a disturbing report. He was running a war room in Benjamin Region, the heart of Biblical Israel, an hour from Jerusalem. “It looks like Arabs spread poison in the grazing area,” a local Jew, who looks like the Settlers’ “Poster Child,” sporting a scraggly beard, big kippah, and bigger gun, texted.  Two goats died. One was saved by an Israeli veterinarian. Experts from the Israel Nature and Park Authority found deadly dates and poisoned bread that turned bluish. An Israeli police forensic team surrounded the planted poisons with red tape featuring black Hebrew letters. A screenshot of WhatsApp on Nov. 15 from al-Mughayyir records villagers celebrating the death of “the settlers’ goats.” Tracking footprints back to Al-Mughayyir, Israeli soldiers arrested a Palestinian. Yet headlines exaggerating “Settler Violence” and forever demonizing Israel, indict the Israelis for crimes committed against them, screaming: “ISRAELI COLONIZERS POISON SHEEP IN AL-MUGHAYYIR, KILLING THREE.”

An AI Gemini analysis of “Arabs poisoning goats West Bank” only reports “incidents of Israeli settlers poisoning Palestinian-owned livestock. … The search results do not contain recent reports of ‘Arabs poisoning goats in the West Bank.’” The Settler Violence was “reported by organizations like B’Tselem, WAFA (Palestinian news agency), and Al Jazeera, often citing Palestinian shepherds and local organizations.”

Weeks earlier, another Arab villager from Abu-Falah claimed “settlers” threw Molotov cocktails through the window, burning his house. “Where’s the broken glass?” the arson investigator asked. “Where did the fire start?” Eventually, he found a faulty fuse box that ignited an electrical fire.

Salem lives. Ours is an age of Manufactured Manias, Evil Essentialism and reputational witch-burnings. In May 2020, anyone who doubted America was systemically racist, was deemed racist. That September, advocates of returning children to school following COVID shutdowns were called child-killers. Across the aisle, too many Republicans blame Jan. 6, 2021 on “the deep state.” 

Predictably, while “everyone” knows that Israel’s supporters are genocidal, racist, settler-colonialist, oppressive Zionists, a new canard emboldens Hamas: Settler Violence.

Manufactured manias take kernels of truth, good values, popular targets, then go all accelerator, no brakes. Especially regarding Israel, many manias essentialize. Wearied by the sustained delegitimization campaign against Israel, even many Israel supporters treat many Israeli failings as immutable. The fury escalates. Random acts become intentional, systemic. And rather than critiquing what Israel does, too many regret that Israel is.

Clearly, violent settlers behaving monstrously should be prosecuted.  And their minimal numbers should make this problem easily solvable.

A fresh IDF report catalogues 867 incidents of “nationalistic crime last year. Approximately 300 extremists have committed these attacks, with 70 “hardcore” offenders  – 39 of whom are under restraining orders.

Still, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has stomached too many thugs and vandals for too long.  As a sovereign state, Israel mustn’t tolerate any violence, especially vigilantes or politically-motivated attacks.

Charging “Settler Violence” casts Israel as oppressive, and Palestinians as the innocent “oppressed.” One libel feeds another. Amnesty International’s website proclaims: “State-backed Settler Violence” highlights “the urgent need” to end “Israel’s system of apartheid.”

Most reports of “Settler Violence” exaggerate. Reporters ignore Palestinian provocations and downplay Palestinian terrorism. Those spins implicate 750,000 overwhelmingly law-abiding Israelis, including 220,000 Jerusalemites. This “Settler Violence” framing perpetuates the Palestinian libel treating Jews as settler-colonialists rather than a people with 3,500-year-old ties to the Jewish homeland – on both sides of the Green Line.

In today’s all-or-nothing debates about Israel, Bash-Israel-Firsters ignore the hyperbole, while Israel’s defenders minimize the problem. OCHA, The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, tracked an admittedly disturbing uptick in anti-Palestinian assaults by Jews in Judaea and Samaria – from 540 incidents in 2021, to 1,500 in the first eleven months of 2025 – injuring over 1,000 Palestinians and harming 4,200 trees or saplings.

Note the gap between these numbers and the IDF’s. Trusting the U.N. to track Palestinian claims is like trusting Iran to chair Human Rights Watch. In Tablet, Hebrew University’s Gadi Taub publicized a Regavim study analyzing 8,332 reports of “Settler Violence,” from 2016 and 2023. The number included 2,047 times settlers were “victims of violence.” Outrageously, “OCHA counts any Jewish pilgrimage to the Temple Mount, no matter how peaceful, as ‘settler violence.’” OCHA lists “tourists visiting archaeological sites,” contested infrastructure work, “traffic accidents,” and Jews defending themselves against Palestinian terrorism. Regavim, a pro-settler NGO, claimed less than 10 percent of the 8,332 incidents involved Jews attacking innocent Palestinians.

Reports of “Settler Violence” blossom with biased descriptions and without context. Reporters rarely mention that from Oct. 7, 2023 through April 2025, Palestinians launched 8,670 terror attacks in Judea and Samaria – killing 86 Israelis. Security forces thwarted thousands more. Videos online showing aggressive settlers attacking often skip the preceding provocations.

I recently visited “A.” and his unit, reservists patrolling a tinderbox sector – with the instigators living cheek-by-jowl. “Hilltop youth” with long side-curls and super-sized skullcaps roam freely with goat herds, grazing ever-closer to al-Mughayyir – dominated by a Hamas-loving clan. International observers and left-wing Israelis visit, calling themselves a “protective presence.” Occasionally, they discourage violent Jews. But theirs is often a “provocative presence” – yelling in settlers’ faces, as others film, trying to provoke violent reactions to go viral. Amid it all, these mostly middle-aged reservists try keeping order, staying safe and getting home to the wife and kids.

My reservist host logged some Jewish attacks, but registered many more Arab assaults. Palestinian villagers rolled burning tires down from their hilltop homes, threw stones, and threatened to mob the young shepherds approaching their home turf – other sectors experienced shootings and bombings.

Stunned to see Jews blamed for Palestinian crimes he documented, this senior lawyer marveled: “It’s classic projection” – accusations in a mirror. “The Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels vowed: ‘we’ll find you guilty of the crimes we commit.’”

The first field where the Palestinians poisoned the sheep illustrates another under-reported story. The IDF chopped down the trees, fueling charges of Israelis harassing Palestinian farmers. But a memorial Israeli flag, roadside, marks where Palestinian terrorists ambushed two Jews. Until the IDF operation, Palestinians used the trees for cover to bombard passing drivers with rocks and Molotov cocktails.

Biblical or Messianic claims motivate some settlers. But many more emphasize security, explaining that expanding their presence by roads, on hilltops, saves lives by discouraging attacks. Still, altogether, the built-up areas of Israeli settlements barely cover 2% of the sparsely-populated West Bank.

The resulting news coverage exaggerates “Settler Violence” while minimizing “Palestinian Terrorism.” Gemini’s AI reports “that while Palestinian attacks occur at a higher frequency and are more lethal … the term ‘settler violence’ receives disproportionately higher engagement and attention.” Posts emphasizing “settler violence, especially those with video clips showing property damage, injury, or confrontation” generate “high impression counts (up to 1.2 million impressions in the first week for some clips).” This makes “Settler Violence” a “high-impact narrative.” A Jewish People Policy Institute analysis found over 5,500 media mentions of “Settler Violence” in August 2025 versus 1,500 mentions of Palestinian violence.

This is churnalism not journalism – pushing an agenda to agitate.

Exaggerating “Settler Violence” advances Palestinians’ narrative denying Jews’ ties to their Biblical homeland. British and Jordanian diplomats defined the Jordan River’s “West Bank” – ad-Diffah l-Garbiyyah – geopolitically only in 1949. It’s been the Jewish tribal area of Judea and Samaria for millennia.

The “West Bank” describes the territories Jordan snatched after invading Israel during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence – defined by “the Green Line,” recalling the colored pencil used to draw the armistice lines. The U.N. never recognized these territories as Jordanian from 1949 through 1967. After Israel won them in its 1967 war of self-defense, U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 endorsed returning some “territories” not all “the territories,” in exchange for peace.

Whatever endgame one endorses, rejecting Jewish ties to that territory negates Jews’ historic ties to their homeland.

Today’s Middle East is complicated. Fanatics from both side instigate. But concluding “they’re equally violent” or “everyone lies” is morally obtuse. Like every country, Israel has violent criminals; but as a democracy, Israel prosecutes them, and has a citizenry that mostly denounces them – as do most Jews worldwide. Alas, too many Palestinians celebrate their terrorists, spreading their lies worldwide.

Exposing “violent settlers” highlights criminal behavior that should be controlled. Lying about “Settler Violence” unfairly demonizes Israel, again.

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Gil Troy is an American presidential historian and a Senior Fellow at the JPPI, the Global Thinktank of the Jewish People. His latest E-book, “The Essential Guide to Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism and Jew-hatred” was just published and can be downloaded on the JPPI  – Jewish People Policy Institute – Website.

In my senior year of high school, I served as the student body President of my student government. On October 7th, 2023, I stayed up for what felt like an eternity into the darkest hours of the morning, watching the news with my mom. The next day, rather than seeing coverage of the attack in Israel, I watched protests across the nation and at universities erupt against the Jewish state and its people.

Nearly a year later, during my freshman year at UCSB, while interviewing to be an On-Campus Senator, I was asked publicly about my Jewish identity. I answered honestly, but for the first time ever, I was afraid of being openly Jewish. I hesitantly shared that “I go to Hillel, but really just for free dinner on Friday nights!” To all but one of the students on the other end of the interview, that answer disqualified me as a candidate.

After weeks of anxiously awaiting the outcome, one of the Senators on the committee, who has since become one of my best friends, called me privately. He was at a loss for words and, to lessen the impact on me, said I did not get the seat due to “ideological differences.”

I have since learned that he was the only Senator who voted for me. Yet, out of five open seats and six applicants, I was the only one rejected because the other students on the committee believed I was unfit, as I had claimed a connection to Hillel, a Jewish nonprofit organization they perceived as “Zionist.” The result was so clear early on that one of the Senators even joked, “Well, do we even have to calculate the votes?”

In short: “You did not get the position because you are Jewish.”

I had been thrown into a war and a history far larger than myself, not because of my politics, but because of my identity. Because I was born into the traditions of dipping apples into honey, of singing half-broken Hebrew at thirteen during Bar Mitzvah. From that moment on, I understood how antisemitism often disguises itself as the “progressive” anti-Zionism.

I had always believed merit, good character, and honest effort would protect me from discrimination. I learned the painful reality that Jews are often cast as villains in narratives that demand simple enemies. While I empathize with the frustrations of the loss of innocent life in Gaza, some of the college students on the committee, who claimed to stand for the oppressed, chose to practice exclusion where they wielded power. In the name of social justice, they had become discriminators.

The war in Gaza and its humanitarian toll are devastating and impossible to ignore. I consider myself a critic not only of Israel’s but of all governments. However, I am able to differentiate between an administration and its people, a distinction that seems to grow ever rarer in mainstream and student narratives.

But many who claim to champion human rights forget that criticism must come with responsibility. Pro-Palestinian protestors routinely collapse Jews and Israelis into a single political entity, including Israelis who oppose the war, those who protest the Netanyahu government, and Jewish students who simply want to improve their college campuses.

Now, as the elected leader of the student Senate since winning my race last Spring, I often think about that day as a freshman. How one answer I gave about my identity has now changed the trajectory of my life.

Contrary to the anti-Israel protest signs around campus, anti-Zionism is often a form of antisemitism. By cloaking itself in the language of “moral superiority,” the word anti-Zionist is too often used as a modern mask for antisemitism, all without guilt. Though it may seem controversial, for me, it comes back to simply asking myself: if the students on the other side of the computer screen were not antisemitic, why did they assume they knew my political leanings, my beliefs on the war, and my morals? The answer is that they did not care about my politics — they only cared about my DNA. If only they had asked, and not reached a conclusion based on my identity, they would have realized that many Jews, students like me, have a lot more in common than we think.

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Evan Sussman is a sophomore at UCSB studying political science and history and serves as the First President Pro Tempore of the ASUCSB Senate.

It’s been a rough few weeks for the spoken word. Many reminders of things better left unsaid. Cringeworthy statements uttered without rebuttal. What passes for public debate nowadays is coarsened, debased and filled with falsehoods.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was in Munich showing off her foreign policy bona fides by scolding the Germans for supporting Israel and its genocide of the Palestinian people. Clearly, Germans needed a crash course on mass murder taught by a failed bartender.

Predictably buffoonish and tasteless, it never occurred to Ocasio-Cortez that she brought the wrong message to the one country with a moral duty to defend Jews. With the Holocaust perpetually on their collective conscience, Germans (except for nearly one million Syrian refugees with their stowaway antisemitism) saw October 7, 2023 for what it was: an attempt to finish the job that Hitler started.

Back home in the United States, the freedom-to-write human rights group, PEN America, retracted an earlier public statement condemning the cancellation of Israeli stand-up comedian Guy Hochman’s shows in New York (protesters blocked the entrance) and Beverly Hills (the venue was targeted with threats of violence). The Beverly Hills performance could have been salvaged had Hochman been willing to publicly condemn his country. He refused. PEN initially supported his stance, stating that “placing a litmus test on someone to appear on stage” violates the very essence of free expression.

Soon thereafter, however, the organization had a change of heart. Free speech absolutists are not as categorical as they once were. The absolute now comes with an all-forgiving sliding scale. Free speech takes a back seat to a social justice crusade that is principally anti-American, anti-Western Civilization, anti-white and, of course, antisemitic.

Free speech absolutists are not as categorical as they once were. The absolute now comes with an all-forgiving sliding scale. Free speech takes a back seat to a social justice crusade that is principally anti-American, anti-Western Civilization, anti-white and, of course, antisemitic.

Upon further reflection, PEN decided that before taking the stage, the Israeli comedian must undergo a thorough self-debasement and a complete disavowal of his homeland. PEN failed to comprehend the irony of its hypocrisy. Not only had it forfeited any pretense to anticensorship, but it made itself the butt of any good comic’s social commentary.

PEN’s moral and institutional downfall was clearly foreshadowed. In February 2024, 500 writers signed a letter demanding that PEN condemn Israel for “murdering writers” in Gaza. Yes, when people think of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, they immediately conjure images of Faulkner and Fitzgerald. Back in 2015, PEN bestowed its Freedom of Expression Courage Award to the surviving cartoonists of the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo. Several hundred PEN members opposed giving the prize—effectively siding with terrorists over cartoonists.

Nearly the entire staff of Charlie Hebdo was slain by terrorists as punishment for mocking Islam, and its Prophet, on exactly seven covers of the magazine. Over a decade and nearly 550 covers, Catholicism was satirized 21 times. And yet the Vatican didn’t issue a Christian fatwa to murder artists packing pencils and inking pens.

Imagine if the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-days Saints took the same barbaric umbrage over “The Book of Mormon.”

All of this was reminiscent of the UCLA campus during the 2023 academic year. Israel had gone to war against Hamas in Gaza. Qatari-funded professors incited keffiyeh-masked, slogan-chanting, hooky-playing students into antisemitic orgies that clearly violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act—if civil rights applied to Jews in America, which apparently they did not. Students “glorified the martyrs” by preventing Jews from getting to class unless they publicly renounced any fealty for Israel.

Such is the present condition of free speech, which often protects vulgarity, trounces viewpoint diversity and penalizes truth. The First Amendment has been degraded, and the censorship of Jews is an all-too-common occurrence.

Bookstores have quietly refused to carry books by Jewish authors. Speaking venues open to all authors now maintain an unspoken anti-Jewish blacklist. Neutral sites are afraid of the backlash from allowing a pro-Israel author to take its stage. I know this firsthand as the author of “Beyond Proportionality: Israel’s Just War in Gaza.”

The marketplace of ideas has ceased to be fully stocked because all ideas are no longer welcome. So much for Jews controlling Hollywood, mass media and book publishing.

Georgetown Law School hired a new dean, Liz Magill, who lost her old job as president of the University of Pennsylvania soon after her atrocious testimony before Congress concerning allegations of antisemitism at her school. When asked whether calling for the “genocide of Jews” violated Penn’s anti-harassment policy, she infamously remarked that it was “a context-dependent decision.”

Translation: If one frames speech as an attack against Israel, Israelis or Zionists, and in support of Palestinians, one can say and do almost anything and get away with it at Penn—including advocating for the killing of Jews on campus.

Would calling for the lynching of Blacks also be “context-dependent”? I assume Georgetown, as a Jesuit University, asked Magill whether she now has a more humanistic understanding of the First Amendment? (She wasn’t even correct on the law, a more troubling aspect of this appointment.) Jesuits, after all, are known for their common decency, a quality apparently anathema to Magill.

With New York City digging itself out of its signature black snow—the amalgamation of urban grime and canine poo—Nerdeen Kiswani, a pro-Palestinian Islamist, added to the list of objections her religion has toward Western ways. This time: dogs as household pets. She wrote, “Finally, NYC is coming to Islam. … Like we’ve said all along, they are unclean.” She later claimed it was a joke.

Florida’s Republican Congressman Randy Fine instantly took to X and responded, “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.”

An ugly retort if there ever was one. On the other hand, the crude congressman is referring to a woman who on October 8 glorified and justified everything Gazans had done to Israelis the day before—the gang-rapes, beheadings and torching of infants. Her entire American existence is dedicated to supporting terrorism, spreading hatred of Zionists, denouncing America and Israel, and silencing victims of sexual assault—both Jewish and Muslim.

There are vulgarities in both directions.

We are surely not living through the Golden Age of political discourse. President Trump calls his many enemies “losers.” The once high art of witty put-downs has long lost the argument to guttural trash-talkers.

We are surely not living through the Golden Age of political discourse. President Trump calls his many enemies “losers.” The once high art of witty put-downs has long lost the argument to guttural trash-talkers.

In Europe, which has fewer free speech protections, the congressman’s remark would rightly be taken as hate speech. French actress Brigitte Bardot was arrested several times for statements about Muslims, also involving animals: “They will slit the throats of . . . our sheep, they will slit our own throats one day and we will have earned it.”

Of course, nowadays, many Europeans have sympathy for Fine’s intended meaning: Wherever there is Sharia law, public streets are overtaken by “no-go zones” and calls to prayer, Sharia courts usurp secular ones, grooming gangs roam in predatory fashion, and “immodestly” dressed women are hassled.

Now we see kicking man’s best friend to the curb all because dogs, too, offend Muslims. What, specifically, doesn’t offend Muslims?

That’s the point Secretary of State Marco Rubio more elegantly made at the Munich Security Conference—a far cry from AOC’s abysmal oratorical pratfall. Rubio said that Europeans should spend less time fretting about being accused of xenophobia and Islamophobia, and more time reclaiming national sovereignty and cultural heritage.

To do otherwise is to doom Western Civilization, and honest, truthful, civilized speech.

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