Ignoring violence against Israelis

  Full article at https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/ignoring-violence-against-israelis/  

There has been a lot written lately about "settler violence" in Judea and Samaria, focusing on recent "settler rampages" and attacks on Palestinians harvesting their olive crop.

The UN has an entire bureaucracy (the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA) devoted to cataloging the "precipitous rise in settler violence." It has a "Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967" who harps on "settler violence" non-stop, as well. The UN claims that in the first ten months of 2021 (latest statistics available) there were 410 attacks by settlers against Palestinians – 302 attacks against property and 108 against individuals.

As Bennett said recently, "In my view, this violence by Jews, which does not reflect the half million normative Israeli citizens in Judea and Samaria, is shameful, and whoever does it wants to dismantle Israeli statehood… I will not allow this to continue." Indeed, in December he convened Israeli security chiefs and ordered them to use all the tools necessary to put an end to such violence.

Foreign Minister Lapid responded this week to the Jewish organizations, also assuring them that Israel is cracking down on violence against Palestinians. At the same time, Lapid warned that "we should not allow (reports of such violence) to be abused to tarnish the entire State of Israel or to be manipulated by those who seek to delegitimize the State of Israel."

Lapid's caveat is in place not just because "settler violence" is not representative of most Israelis and most settlers. Lapid's caveat is in place because the focus on isolated settler violence (yes, in the grand scheme of things we are speaking of isolated incidents!) obscures the far greater violence perpetrated in the West Bank every single day by extremist Palestinians against non-violent Israelis.

According to an important new study published this week – which unsurprisingly was ignored by the global media, by the UN, by "human rights" NGOs, and even by American Jewish organizations – in 2021 there were over 4,000 rock and bomb throwing incidents in Judea and Samaria, perpetrated by Palestinian extremists and terrorists against Israeli Jews.

These attacks included over 500 Molotov cocktail attacks (firebombs), leading to the injury of more than 150 Israelis. There was a 210% rise in rock throwing incidents in 2021 over 2020, and a 156% rise in bomb throwing incidents in 2021 over 2020.

Col. Hirsch, who was head of IDF military prosecution in Judea and Samaria until 2016, adds that Palestinian terrorists are incentivized twice over to commit acts of violence: once by weak Israeli prosecution, and once again by the Palestinian Authority's pay-for-slay program, which provides NIS 600 million a year in salaries for jailed terrorists and their families.

Col. (res.) Amir Avivi, CEO of Habithonistim, believes that the entire issue of "settler violence" has been blown out of proportion by ill-meaning NGOs and European governments, and this certainly this is true when compared to Palestinian attacks on Israelis. "Without meaning to diminish the ugliness of extremist attacks on Palestinians," he says, "300 or so attacks a year against Palestinian property and 100 attacks against individuals pales in comparison to 4,000 Palestinian rock and bomb attacks a year aimed at killing Israeli civilians!"