The leftist ministers in the Lapid-Bennett government are on a rampage against the Jewish settlements. Channel 13 News reported Tuesday night that due to the shortage of police in the “explosive district” of Judea and Samaria and the “continued violence by extremist settlers and the hill youths,” Defense Minister Benny Gantz has hatched a plan with Internal Security Minister Omer Barlev to replace police officers doing office work back in headquarters, and free up those cops to deal with those hordes of violent Jews in the territories. Ah, and according to Channel 13, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is also in on this decision.
Efrat Council Head Oded Revivi tweeted in response that while senior IDF officers are complaining they don’t have enough manpower to deal with the proliferation of Arab violence against Jews, illegal Arab construction in Area C, and so on, the Defense Minister goes ahead and volunteers soldiers to the Minister of Internal Security so there would be someone to deal with the Jewish violence. This while his own ministry has reported that in 2019 there were 36 price tag incidents and in 2021 only 7.
Haaretz, that notoriously unbiased arbiter of things Zionist, on Wednesday went to war against folks like Revivi, as well as MKs Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, who’ve been claiming that “settler violence” amounts to less than one percent of the Arab violence Jews face in Area C every day. So Haaretz (תקיפות והשחתות בלי אכיפה: כך נראית “תופעה שולית” של אלימות מתנחלים בגדה) went to the B’Tselem database and reported that the NGO has identified this year a 28% increase in the number of cases of violence by settlers compared to last year. And what were the real numbers? 192 compared to 247. That’s B’Tselem, the organization that spends day and night trying to incriminate Jews. The same B’tselem that turned an electric short that took out the power in their Jerusalem office, blamed it on right-wing sabotage. They only came up with 247 cases of “settler violence” in 2021 – without any mention of context, such as, what did the Arabs do first.
Over on the settler side, they would gladly tell you that their name for 247 Arab attacks with knives, stones, Molotov Cocktails, ramming cars is “last week.” The fact that Ha’aretz and B’Tselem couldn’t come up with more and at the same time they and the Blue&White, Labor, and Meretz ministers had nothing to say about the daily count of dozens of violent attacks on Jews in Judea and Samaria, indicates that the forces of evil in Israel’s government are on the march, and may be synchronizing their efforts to demonize half a million Jews.
Yochai Damari, Head of the Mount Hebron Regional Council, on Tuesday, tried to present evidence of the disproportionate number of Arab versus Jewish cases of violence to Minister Barlev and Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai who visited his neighborhood.
“In this area alone in the past year hundreds of stones and dozens of Molotov cocktails have been thrown at the settlers and three Jewish shepherds have been injured in the past two weeks by Arab violence,” Damari tried to impress upon the bigwigs.
Finally, even though the Channel 13 report suggested that Prime Minister Bennett supported the Gantz-Barlev move to increase police action against Jews in Judea and Samaria, the body of the report had nothing to say to support this. The most recent tweet from Bennett on the issue was posted Tuesday afternoon and stated:
“The residents of Judea and Samaria suffer from violence and terrorism every day, for decades. They are the protective wall for all of us and we must strengthen and support them, in words and deeds. There are marginal incidents in every community, they need to be addressed with all the available means, but we must not generalize against an entire public.”