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Israeli lawmakers ask White House for proof backing its ‘blood libel’ against settlers

Recent false US accusations of a rise of Jewish violence against Arabs in Judea and Samaria are a tactic to ‘pave the way’ for a Palestinian state, says one, Ariel Kallner.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Twenty-three Knesset members sent a letter to the White House Sunday asking that the president provide proof for his administration’s recent accusations that there is a major problem of Jewish violence against Palestinians in Judea and Samaria, Israel Hayom reported Monday.

While starting off expressing gratitude for American support of Israel’s fight against Hamas, they asked President Joe Biden to back the claim with numbers, because, they wrote, “The data at our disposal indicates that the scope of these incidents is limited to a very small number of isolated events, which pales in contrast with the vastly larger scope of violent incidents perpetrated by Palestinian Arabs against the residents of these same Jewish communities.”

As members of the Knesset Caucus to Combat Antisemitism and Delegitimization, the MKs asked that the Americans stated that “Battling violence is an objective that we share – but our efforts must not stray from the facts and the truth. With this in mind, and to be more efficient partners in the battle against violence and vigilantism, we hope that you will kindly share your source material with us.”

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Israel keeps track of all terrorist incidents that occur within its territory. In the first nine weeks since Hamas fighters set off the war by massacring 1,200 people and taking some 250 hostage, the uptick in violence in Judea and Samaria came overwhelmingly from the Palestinian side. Jews suffered from a whopping 1,388 attacks, including 70 drive-by shootings, 143 fire-bombings, 287 attacks using explosives, and 569 stoning attacks. At least 52 Israelis were injured and three were murdered.

This count does not include the six IDF soldiers injured in two car-ramming attacks within the last week, two of them seriously.

Meanwhile, according to police statistics, over the same time period, there were some 100 Jewish nationalist “incidents,” which is a drop of about 50% from the same period last year.

Caucus head Ariel Kallner (Likud) told the Hebrew daily that the purpose of “smearing” the Jewish residents of the region was to advance the “two-state solution” that Biden has always advocated.

“We all condemn violence, but here we are talking about a combination of blatant lies, data manipulation and false accusations from nothing, all for the purpose of smearing the settler public in order to pave the way for a Palestinian state, as has already been exposed in documents from the New Israel Fund,” he charged.

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The “blood libel” of “settler violence” must be “cut off at the root,” he said, when it is the Jewish residents who “have for years been subject to violent attacks by an Arab society that largely also supports the October 7 events.”

A recent Palestinian poll showed that 82% of Palestinian Arabs approved of Hamas’ surprise attack in which the Gazan terrorists massacred 1,200 people, including the elderly and infants, and abducted some 250.

Defending this population is especially necessary now, he said, “considering that these pioneers are today also on the front lines of the Gaza war and even in the north, which is sadly also reflected in the high number of KIAs in the fighting who are from Judea and Samaria communities.”

Last month, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the U.S. would impose visa restrictions on Israelis living in Judea and Samaria whom the administration has categorized as “violent settlers,” telling a press conference that the White House was “looking to the Israeli government to take some additional steps to really put a stop to” the alleged violence.