According to the UN, I - an American - am a "violent Jewish settler" ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Thursday, June 12, 2025

According to the UN, I - an American - am a "violent Jewish settler"

"Settler violence" is in the news again.

The UK and others have sanctioned two Israeli ministers, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, for "inciting violence" by settlers, citing UN statistics on violent incidents in the West Bank.

What is considered "settler violence," according to the UN?

The Israeli NGO Regavim issued a report last April that examined a UN database of 6,285 incidents of alleged violence against Palestinians that reportedly occurred between January 2016 and the end of April 2023.

It included every single time Jews were allowed to visit the Temple Mount - 1,361 "incidents."

Temple Mount, March 6, 2019 (screenshot from Mrs. Elder)

Well, my wife and I ascended to the Temple Mount in March 2019. We got a personal tour from Rabbi Chaim Richman of the Temple Institute. We even prayed there.

According to the UN, my wife and I - Americans - are violent Jewish West Bank settlers, and we are statistics in the UN database that "prove" how violent Jewish "settlers" are. And the same methodology is used by the UK, today, to support their contention that Jewish settler violence is a huge problem now.

The Wall Street Journal summarized the Regavim report today:

Poring over the U.N.’s list of 6,285 violent incidents by settlers from January 2016 through April 2023, Regavim noticed something: “The UN database includes thousands of clearly non-violent incidents in its count of violent events.”
Every visit by Jews to the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site, which is administered and venerated by Muslims too, is counted as settler violence. So are class trips to archaeological sites, traffic accidents, state infrastructure work and trespassing by hikers. Other incidents are in Jerusalem, which isn’t a settlement.
None of this is what “settler violence” summons to mind. Filtering out the thousands of such cases leaves 833 alleged incidents of nationalist violence resulting in bodily harm—a definition the U.N. claims to apply—over the 7½-year period.
But those don’t hold up either. The Orwellian U.N. counts Palestinians harmed in the process of committing terrorist attacks as victims of settler violence. In about half the 833 cases, the U.N. also records the victim’s “involvement in clashes,” leaving it unclear who started it. In 117 of the cases, the U.N. says Israeli security forces, not settlers, are to blame.
Meanwhile, Israel’s Shin Bet records 6,068 serious attacks by Palestinians (shootings, stabbings, suicide bombings, etc.) against Israeli civilians over only two years, 2020-22. Including some “less serious” attacks more than triples the number. Violence by Israeli settler radicals in remote outposts is a real problem. Yet the liberal picture of the West Bank—wanton violence by Israeli civilians against peaceful Palestinians—is an inversion of the daily reality.

At the very least, 94% of the "violent settler incidents" are fictional. Instead of three a day, there were at most one a week. Which is far fewer than the number of Palestinian violent incidents in the same areas, which include Molotov cocktails and pipe bombs. Here is the Shin Bet report from July 2023 (the last English report they published):

This isn't one violent incident a week. This is ten incidents every day!

And this is the problem we have seen for decades. The media, the UN and NGOs can easily make any party look bad by choosing their own definitions, their own framing, their own context, and also what to omit from their reporting. So while there are dozens of wars happening now, tens of millions of refugees, and real starvation with thousands dying, the media and UN and even Israel's "allies" twist the data to make it appear to casual consumers of news that there is only one conflict (OK, two, if you include Ukraine), only one set of victims, only one set of displaced persons and only one (wholly fake) "famine" in the world.

And an examination of even the most extreme of statements by Ben Gvir and Smotrich indicate that while they support tough action against Palestinian terrorists, they do not incite violence from Jewish settlers, at least not directly. In 2023, Ben Gvir told settlers directly, "We must not take the law into our own hands. The one who needs to deal with terrorism and deter it is the Israeli government and not the citizens." And even at the very same time that Smotrich said his widely condemned statement that the village of Huwara should be wiped out - a statement he later apologized for - he said “We shouldn’t be dragged into anarchy in which civilians take the law into their own hands.”

They want swift and uncompromising action against terror by the state. This is not incitement for settlers to rampage through Arab villages, as the UK and others are saying by accusing them of. The truth is the opposite of the reporting, and calls for the state to be aggressive against terrorists is not inconsistent with what Western leaders say all the time. (To be sure, they support settlers and try to find valid reasons for settler violence that does occur. That is a far cry from incitement to terror, and their reactions to real unprovoked settler violence proves this.)

The "settler violence" meme is an excuse by Great Britain and others to appear "even handed" to their large numbers of Muslim residents, who protest daily, in a vain attempt to placate them. It is in their political interest to inflate the problem of Jewish settler violence way beyond the truth and to suppress any reports of Palestinian violence that do not result in deaths.

How do I know? Because they consider me a "violent Jewish settler."