After dismantling B'Tselem's list "settler violence" victims, I keep hearing the same pushback on my post.
"Yes, the fatality numbers are low. But non-lethal settler violence is rampant and undercounted. What about the thousands of incidents international organizations track every year? The property damage? The intimidation? The harassment?"
Fair challenge. So I looked at the" thousands of incidents."
Here is what I found.
The UN office called OCHA, the one that produces the "settler violence" statistics international media loves to quote, has an internal database of incidents.
Accept you cannot see it. OCHA has locked it behind a registration process that does not actually let anyone register.
Regavim obtained the internal spreadsheet the database is using and analyzed it. Case by case. Yes, Regavim is a right-wing Israeli organization focused on land use in Judea and Samaria. I know what you are going to say.
Here is what you should also know. OCHA itself relies heavily on data from B'Tselem, a left-wing Israeli human rights organization. B'Tselem is the source I analyzed independently last week. My analysis showed that B'Tselem's database includes active terrorists killed while committing attacks and files them as victims of settler violence.
So on the left, B'Tselem is manufacturing the same statistics. On the right, Regavim is doing the exposé. And in the middle, OCHA is refusing to let anyone see the raw data.
Until OCHA becomes transparent, this is what we have to work with. And what we have is damning.
OCHA filed 8,332 incidents leading to injury "involving Israeli settlers" between January 2016 and April 2023. Seven and a half years of data.
Here is what is actually in those 8,332 UN incidents.
2,047 of them are actual violence by Palestinian Arabs against Israelis. Nearly a quarter of the "settler violence" database is Palestinian attacks on Jews. The UN files it in the same folder.
Which leaves 6,285 cases against Palestinians. Sounds terrible. Then you look at what is actually in them.
1,704 cases happened in Jerusalem. Not in settlements. Not by settlers. In Jerusalem, a city with a mixed population where any friction between Jews and Arabs gets thrown into the settler-violence bucket.
1,361 cases involved Jews visiting the Temple Mount or clashes between Israeli security forces and rioting Muslims. Zero settlers involved. Filed under "settler violence" anyway.
1,613 cases were complaints about "entering land", meaning a hiker walked somewhere a Palestinian claimed as his. No physical assault. No property damage. No violence at all. Someone took a walk. Filed as settler violence.
96 cases were state infrastructure projects. Israeli government road-paving and construction. No settlers involved. No violence. The state of Israel building a road is officially "settler violence" in the UN database.
2,039 complaints alleged property damage or assault with no physical injury. Which is not what a database of injuries inflicted by settler violence is supposed to contain in the first place.
Add it up. Take out Jerusalem, take out the Temple Mount, take out the hikers, take out the road-paving, take out the complaints without injury.
You are left with 833 incidents. Out of 8,332.
Ten percent.
And that ten percent still contains problems.
404 of the remaining 833 are listed as "involvement in a clash", meaning two people fought and the UN could not determine who started it. Not settler violence. Two-way friction.
117 more are attributed by the UN itself to Israeli security forces, not to settlers or civilians.
Dozens more are actually Palestinian terror attacks in which the attacker was shot in self-defense by the Jewish target. A stone-thrower shot after wounding a driver on Route 60. A rioter killed by a driver after his car was smashed. An attacker who stabbed a guard at Karmei Tzur and was shot by another guard.
The UN files these as settler violence against Palestinians.
The Palestinian was the attacker. The Jew defended himself. And in the UN's database, the Jew is the perpetrator.
There are traffic accidents in there.
A Palestinian worker bitten by a dog at his workplace. Filed as settler violence.
Let me say this clearly.
The UN office that shapes global discourse about "settler violence" is running a database in which more than 90 percent of the entries are a blatant lie.
Jerusalem incidents. Government construction. Hikers. Palestinian attacks in which the attacker was shot in self-defense. Traffic accidents. Dog bites.
And they will not let you see the database.
Because if you could see it, the entire international narrative about a wave of Jewish settler violence would collapse in an second.
The left-wing organization is inflating the numbers. The right-wing organization is exposing them. The UN is hiding the source data. And in the middle, half a million Israeli Jews, including 150,000 children, are being smeared as an armed wave of extremist violence based on statistics that do not survive contact with sunlight.
Regavim did the analysis. My analysis of B'Tselem last week showed the same exact pattern.
And while you and I cannot look at the OCHA database the way Regavim did, you can go into the Btselem database and read cases of Palestinians stabbings, firebombing and car ramming classified as "victims". It's right there in the open (for now).
The UN is not a neutral data source. Until they open their database to public scrutiny, they are a bad actor, producing statistics designed to smear an entire population.
Every headline you have ever read about "settler violence" traces back to numbers like these. Every foreign minister who has ever quoted UN data on the West Bank is quoting this.
Ten percent real. Ninety percent invented.
Until OCHA opens the database, this is what we have to work with. And what we have is enough.
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