If an Israeli attacks an innocent Palestinian, arrest him. Prosecute him. Punish him. But do not make Jews everywhere answer for him. Do not use his crime to indict more than half a million Israelis living in Judea and Samaria, the State of Israel, Zionism, or Jews around the world. That distinction should be obvious. Increasingly, it isn’t.
Washington is again consumed with “settler violence.” On Aug. 26, 45 senators, led by Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ), Adam Schiff (D-CA), and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to take stronger action against violence by Israelis in Judea and Samaria. On one fundamental point, I agree: violence is violence, and Israel should investigate it, arrest those responsible, and prosecute them when the evidence warrants it. Israel does. Just this week, Israeli police arrested suspects in investigations of recent violence against Palestinians.
I defend the Israelis who live in Judea and Samaria — their right to live, raise families, build communities, and remain safe there — and I reject the increasingly common caricature of “settlers” as a monolithic population of violent extremists. But I do not defend violence or terrorism: If an Israeli commits an unjustified act of violence, hold that individual responsible. What I resist is turning the crime of an individual into the guilt of a people, and that’s where this debate becomes about something much bigger than Judea and Samaria.
When the accused is Jewish, something peculiar happens to the language of responsibility. The crime of an individual Israeli becomes “settler violence.” “Settler violence” becomes an indictment of the settlers. The settlers become an indictment of Israel. Israel becomes an indictment of Zionism. Eventually, Jews everywhere are put on trial.
And we see where that leads. A Jewish-owned business is vandalized. A synagogue is targeted. A Jewish student is expected to denounce Israel before he’s welcome in certain spaces. Different Jews. Different cities. Different circumstances. The same perverse logic: something happened in Israel, therefore a Jew here can be made to answer for it. That isn’t accountability. It is collective guilt, and collective guilt has always been one of antisemitism’s most reliable weapons.
Washington’s focus on “settler violence” spans administrations and parties, from Biden-era sanctions on individual Israelis to lawmakers now pressing President Donald Trump to revisit the issue. The issue resurfaced with a New York Times Aug. 31 report citing former Israeli military, intelligence, and political officials, including allegations by former IDF Central Command chief Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fox, that Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich had possibly undermined enforcement against Jewish extremists — an accusation Smotrich strongly rejected.
Israelis are having a legitimate argument among themselves about security, policing, and political responsibility. But a different argument is happening outside Israel: the suggestion that crimes committed by individual Israelis say something about the legitimacy of Jewish life in Judea and Samaria, then about Israel, Zionism, and ultimately Jews. They don’t.
As someone who studies and teaches at Ariel University and has spent years among the people who actually live in Judea and Samaria — Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike, engaging with both Israelis and Palestinians — I can tell you the place bears little resemblance to the caricature the word “settler” now conjures.
More than half a million Israelis live in Judea and Samaria, across roughly 150 communities. They do not share a single politics, religious observance, or worldview, and the overwhelming majority are not violent extremists. The data used to portray them deserves criticism, too: A Regavim analysis of the United Nations’s “settler violence” database found that, of more than 8,000 logged incidents, roughly 90% involved no settler violence at all. Its analysis found entries involving trespassing disputes, infrastructure activity, and even confrontations in which Palestinians attacked Israelis, and the Israeli response was subsequently recorded as “settler violence.”
There is another distinction too often erased by the label “settler violence”: the difference between aggression and self-defense. Israeli civilians in Judea and Samaria live with the threat of shootings, stabbings, car-ramming attacks, infiltrations, and other Palestinian terrorism, and are sometimes forced to defend themselves, their families, or their communities. Yet even defensive force can be stripped of its context and circulated around the world as another example of “settler violence.” That distinction matters: If a Jewish resident initiates an unjustified attack, prosecute him — but if a Palestinian terrorist attacks a Jew who fights back, that self-defense doesn’t become “settler violence” simply because he’s Jewish and lives in Judea and Samaria. Context matters: Self-defense is not terrorism. None of this means there are not Jews who engage in extremist violence — it does happen, and it is prosecuted. But my argument doesn’t depend on a broad claim that every Israeli is innocent. It depends on something simpler: Jews are not collectively guilty when an Israeli isn’t.
Israel has institutions to investigate, arrest, and prosecute violent crimes, and Israeli police and the Shin Bet are doing exactly that in current cases. That means the state treats such violence as a crime.
The Palestinian Authority presents a very different record. For years, it has operated the notorious system commonly called “pay-for-slay,” providing financial benefits to imprisoned terrorists and the families of attackers — a practice Congress targeted directly with the Taylor Force Act. That cannot honestly be compared to Israeli security forces arresting Israelis accused of violence.
Nor should Palestinian terrorism disappear from the discussion whenever “settler violence” makes headlines. Palestinian terrorist attacks killed 96 people over the past three years, while Israeli security forces thwarted 3,446 attacks in that same span — the product of sustained counterterrorism operations in Judea and Samaria. But one person’s crime cannot define hundreds of thousands of Israelis who had nothing to do with it, nor should Israel’s prosecution of violent offenders among its own people be equated with a Palestinian Authority that has a continued history of financially rewarding terrorists and their families.
There is something else lost when “settler” becomes synonymous with “extremist”: Jewish life in Judea and Samaria did not begin with the modern settlement movement. Jewish life in Hebron — the burial place of Abraham and Sarah, the city where David was first crowned king — dates back to the Bible, and its Jewish community was massacred by Arab rioters in 1929, decades before Israel existed or anyone spoke of “settlements.”
None of this resolves every political argument about the future of Judea and Samaria, but it should dispel the fiction that Jewish history there began with Netanyahu, Smotrich, or the modern settlement movement. Jews are not foreigners to their own history.
“Settler” should simply mean someone who lives in Judea and Samaria — a description, not an accusation. Instead, it has stopped describing where someone lives and started describing a false narrative of what someone supposedly is: violent, fanatical, illegitimate. That shift in language is what turns one man’s guilt into everyone’s — and suddenly antisemitism isn’t bigotry. It’s explained as a reaction.
That is the dangerous endpoint of this logic. The vandalized business, the targeted synagogue, the pressured student — none of it has anything to do with an Israeli they’ve never met, thousands of miles away. Yet Jews are routinely expected to account for Israel in a way no one expects of other ethnic or religious groups.
Americans already understand why that logic is wrong. An Islamist terrorist does not make American Muslims collectively responsible for terrorism. A crime committed by a black American does not justify racism against black Americans. Assigning collective guilt to a racial, ethnic, or religious group is bigotry. Jews deserve the same standard.
You don’t have to support every Israeli policy to understand this, or agree with me about the political future of the region. You only have to believe in a basic principle of a liberal society: people are responsible for their own actions.
Israel should prosecute Israelis who commit crimes, as any democracy governed by law should, and Washington should judge Israeli policy on facts and demand accountability where it is warranted. But accountability has a boundary: Guilt belongs to the guilty.
An Israeli criminal is responsible for his crime. A Palestinian terrorist is responsible for his terrorism. And an antisemite is responsible for his antisemitism.
Every time antisemitism is explained as something Jews brought upon themselves — because of Israel, Zionism, Gaza, settlements, or the actions of some Israeli somewhere — an ancient prejudice is being given a modern alibi.
BRAD LANDER THOUGHT HE WAS AN ALLY. THE MOB JUST SAW A JEW
Jews do not have to earn the right not to be hated.
We do not cause antisemitism.
Antisemites do.
Yuval David is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, news commentator, filmmaker, and actor, and an internationally recognized political advocate and adviser combating antisemitism, extremism, and disinformation while advancing democratic values, human rights, and the U.S.-Israel relationship. He is a fellow at the Middle East Forum, co-founder of the Jewish & Indian Alliance and the Mosaic Impact Labs, a councilman and U.S. representative of Voice Of The People, and teaches and studies in the graduate school of Ariel University in Judea and Samaria. He advises government leaders, diplomatic missions, NGOs, and policy organizations, and appears regularly across major American, Israeli, and international news networks.