Jews don’t cause antisemitism. Antisemites do
Washington Examiner · RC · trust 43/100
If an Israeli attacks an innocent Palestinian , arrest him. Prosecute him. Punish him. But do not make Jews everywhere answer for him. Do not use his crime to indict more than half a million Israelis living in Judea and Samaria, the State of Israel, Zionism, or Jews around the world. That distinction should be obvious. Increasingly, it isn’t.
Washington is again consumed with “settler violence.” On Aug. 26, 45 senators, led by Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ), Adam Schiff (D-CA), and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to take stronger action against violence by Israelis in Judea and Samaria. On one fundamental point, I agree: violence is violence, and Israel should investigate it, arrest those responsible, and prosecute them when the evidence warrants it. Israel does. Just this week, Israeli police arrested suspects in investigations of recent violence against Palestinians.
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I defend the Israelis who live in Judea and Samaria — their right to live, raise families, build communities, and remain safe there — and I reject the increasingly common caricature of “settlers” as a monolithic population of violent extremists. But I do not defend violence or terrorism: If an Israeli commits an unjustified act of violence, hold that individual responsible. What I resist is turning the crime of an individual into the guilt of a people, and that’s where this debate becomes about something much bigger than Judea and Samaria.
When the accused is Jewish , something peculiar happens to the language of responsibility. The crime of an individual Israeli becomes “settler violence.” “Settler violence” becomes an indictment of the settlers. The settlers become an indictment of Israel. Israel becomes an indictment of Zionism. Eventually, Jews everywhere are put on trial.
And we see where that leads. A Jewish-owned business is vandalized. A synagogue is targeted. A Jewish student is expected to denounce Israel before he’s welcome in certain spaces. Different Jews. Different cities. Different circumstances. The same perverse logic: something happened in Israel, therefore a Jew here can be made to answer for it. That isn’t accountability. It is collective guilt, and collective guilt has always been one of antisemitism’s most reliable weapons.
Washington’s focus on “settler violence” spans administrations and parties, from Biden-era sanctions on individual Israelis to lawmakers now pressing President Donald Trump to revisit the issue. The issue resurfaced with a New York Times Aug. 31 report citing former Israeli military, intelligence, and political officials, including allegations by former IDF Central Command chief Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fox, that Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich had possibly undermined enforcement against Jewish extremists — an accusation Smotrich strongly rejected.
Israelis are having a legitimate argument among themselves about security, policing, and political responsibility. But a different argument is happening outside Israel: the suggestion that crimes committed by individual Israelis say something about the legitimacy of Jewish life in Judea and Samaria, then about Israel, Zionism, and ultimately Jews. They don’t.
As someone who studies and teaches at Ariel University and has spent years among the people who actually live in Judea and Samaria — Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike, engaging with both Israelis and Palestinians — I can tell you the place bears little resemblance to the caricature the word “settler” now conjures.
More than half a million Israelis live in Judea and Samaria, across roughly 150 communities. They do not share a single politics, religious observance, or worldview, and the overwhelming majority are not violent extremists. The data used to portray them deserves criticism, too: A Regavim analysis of the United Nations’s “settler violence” database found that, of more than 8,000 logged incidents, roughly 90% involved no settler violence at all. Its analysis found entries involving trespassing disputes, infrastructure activity, and even confrontations in which Palestinians attacked Israelis, and the Israeli response was subsequently recorded as “settler violence.”
There is another distinction too often erased by the label “settler violence”: the difference between aggression and self-defense. Israeli civilians in Judea and Samaria live with the threat of shootings, stabbings, car-ramming attacks, infiltrations, and other Palestinian terrorism , and are sometimes forced to defend themselves, their families, or their communities. Yet even defensive force can be stripped of its context and circulated around the world as another example of “settler violence.” That distinction matters: If a Jewish resident initiates an unjustified attack, prosecute him — but if a Palestinian terrorist attacks a Jew who fights back, that self-defense doesn’t become “settler violence” simply because he’s Jewish and lives in Judea and Samaria. Context matters: Self-defense is not terrorism. None of this means there are not Jews who engage in extremist violence — it does happen, and it is prosecuted. But my argument doesn’t depend on a broad claim that every Israeli is innocent. It depends on something simpler: Jews are not collectively guilty when an Israeli isn’t.
Israel has institutions to investigate, arrest, and prosecute violent crimes, and Israeli police and the Shin Bet are doing exactly that in current cases. That means the state treats such violence as a crime.
The Palestinian Authority presents a very different record. For years, it has operated the notorious system commonly called “pay-for-slay,” providing financial benefits to imprisoned terrorists and the families of attackers — a practice Congress targeted directly with the Taylor Force Act. That cannot honestly be compared to Israeli security forces arresting Israelis…
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