Israeli 'settler violence' a blood libel used to exert political pressure on Jewish state - opinion

Hamas terrorists murdered Jews, raped Jewish women, mutilated Jewish babies, and kidnapped hundreds of Jewish hostages. Hamas indoctrinates the children in Gaza with Nazi propaganda and steals humanitarian aid from civilians. You would assume that would be sufficient to convince Israel’s closest allies to sanction Hamas, but instead, it seems that Israeli Jews are in the crosshairs of America.

In Israel, over the years, the two-state fairytale has been discredited time and time again and has been firmly rejected by the people of Israel since October 7. Hamas does not want a two-state solution. It wants a one-state solution in which all the Jews are rounded up and either killed or pushed into the sea. The allegedly “moderate” Arabs in Judea and Samaria have shown that the vast majority of them support the October 7 massacre. Yet outside of Israel, far beyond the reach of the terrorists who wish – in their own words – to repeat October 7 again and again, the world is reaching for its two-state happy ending. They so badly want it that the UK, France, and even America threatened to unilaterally establish a Palestinian state, thus forcing a two-state solution on Israel.

To justify this terror-rewarding move, there was a need to show the violence from Israel’s side, namely “settler violence.” The blood libel of so-called “settler violence” is a cynical weapon used as part of a broad international strategy to exert political pressure against Israel. The goal is to punish Jews for living in their ancestral homeland and to suffocate the Jewish towns in Judea and Samaria until, eventually, they are kicked off of their land. Instead, that land would be given to Arab terror cartels that could establish a terrorist state within striking distance of Jews, thereby enabling them to take the massacre of October 7, 2023, to the next level.

This so-called “settler violence” is such a serious problem that the President of the United States issued an executive order with sanctions, and the UK government issued travel and visa bans and froze the bank accounts of four Israeli Jews.

One of those Jews is Ely Federman. While Ely was fighting to defend Israel from Gaza terrorists, the UK government froze his and his wife’s bank accounts. Ely was not convicted of assaulting Arabs. His international crime, which international bodies have sanctioned by removing his and his wife’s ability to buy groceries, is that he lives on Meitarim Farm in Mount Hebron, a farm that is the target of terrorist attacks by nearby Arabs and the international anarchists who back them.

The campaign of this blood libel

The “settler violence” blood libel campaign has been going on for the past seven years, led by extreme leftist organizations such as B’Tselem, Yesh Din, Breaking the Silence, and others that receive large financial grants from Europe. Before October 7, the goal of this campaign was to delegitimize Israel and demonize Jews who dared to live in the land of Israel. Since October 7, the “settler violence” blood libel has been used to erode international support for Israel and force a false moral equivalency between the terror, murder, mayhem, and war crimes of Arab terror cartels and Jewish families who dare to live on their own land.

Anti-Israel groups argue that legal and governmental authorities in Israel are not functioning properly and, therefore, the international community must intervene to save the victims of the violent settler Jews. The results they seek are the results we are seeing now: international sanctions against Jewish people, Jewish elected officials, Jewish soldiers, and even Jewish institutions and business entities. The fact that America is trying to continue with even more sanctions on elected officials in Israel is extremely disturbing and does not seem to represent the deep friendship between Israel and the United States or the democratic values that both countries stand for. 

Israel’s unity government should be commended for standing up with one voice to say “no” to foreign governments that seek to reward terror cartels with unilateral recognition of statehood. But Israel must also fight back against the “settler violence” blood libel, which was used to push the two-state fairytale that, when left unchallenged, led Israel to the brink of an existential international threat.

Israel’s story will never end, but the “settler violence” blood libel and the two-state fairytale can and must come to an end.

The writer, an attorney, is deputy director of the Kohelet Policy Forum.