State Dept. Spokesperson Matthew Miller on Thursday reported that “President Biden and Secretary Blinken have been clear that the levels of violence we have seen in the West Bank over the past few months are unacceptable. Violence in the West Bank surged to alarming levels in 2023. This includes unprecedented levels of violence by Israeli extremist settlers targeting Palestinians and their property, as well as violence by Palestinian extremist militants against Israeli civilians.”
Reality Check:
In mid-November, Central Command Commander Major General Yehuda Fox, no great lover of the settlement enterprise, with the elected officials of Binyamin Regional Council reassured them that as far as he was concerned, the accusations regarding settler violence were libelous.
“99% percent of the hilltop youths do no harm to anyone, neither the army nor anyone else. There is no such concept as ‘settler violence.’ I’ve been saying this on numerous occasions. There are violent incidents in all kinds of places around the country,” Fox reiterated.
Following the campaign in Israel, Europe, and the US to condemn “settler violence” during the months of Operation Iron Swords, right-wing MKs demanded to hold a debate on the subject and compel additional IDF representatives to reveal the sources of data that were published recently which applied a very broad brush to include many disparate events in the same category.
For example, graffiti by Jewish settlers and Arab attempts to lynch Jews are included under the same heading of “serious attacks.” Events are often recorded from a point well into their progression, without a clear depiction of whether the incident was initiated by Jews or Arabs, or whether the Jews acted in self-defense.
Israeli law enforcement officials tend to create symmetry in the violence perpetrated by Arabs and Jews, when in reality there is no equality in the number of terrorist incidents, and who initiates the first blow. To get those “equal” figures, the record keepers classify graffiti by Jews as violence, while the only recorded violent incidents perpetrated by Arabs are those with physical victims.
The most serious problem in this area stems from contradictory information that’s being provided by different law enforcement agencies. The Israel Police has been consistently showing a dramatic drop of more than 50% in nationalist crime by Jewish settlers, but the Shin Bet and the IDF are offering vastly different statistics, and none of these agencies makes an attempt to compare and synchronize the data.
As a result, different news outlets in Israel have been known to report a drastic reduction in “settler violence” concurrent with reports on a drastic rise in the same phenomenon, often in the same week. Those reports are more often than not based on partial, not to say cherry-picked data, serving political agendas rather than a serious pursuit of the truth.
International news outlets such as the NY Times and ABC News go one step further and publish data provided by anti-Israel entities such as B’Tselem on “settler terrorism,” with yawning gaps between those reported and reality on the ground.
DON’T CONFUSE BIDEN ET AL WITH THE FACTS
None of the above is of any interest to the Biden White House which on Thursday weaponized its “settler violence” as a tool for pushing through the two-state agenda. On Thursday, NSA’s John Kirby told reporters:
“I think you all saw that today the President signed a new executive order that will implement new measures to address actions that undermine peace, security, and stability in the West Bank.
“This EO will allow the United States to issue financial sanctions against those directing or participating in certain actions, including acts or threats of violence against civilians, intimidating civilians to cause them to leave their homes, destroying or seizing property, or engaging in terrorist activity in the West Bank. And the State Department also today issued four designations under this new executive authority.”
A reporter asked Kirby: “Is this a signal to those officials in the Israeli government who openly support and facilitate such violence, including Itamar Ben Gvir, who supply the weapons to these people who perpetrate?”
You get it? National Security Minister Ben Gvir has been involved in a massive effort to arm standby squads across Israel, to prevent a repeat of the October 7 massacre, when unarmed Israeli civilians were butchered in their homes. This commendable move to save Jewish and Arab lives has now been turned into his arming settlers and sending them to go massacre PA Arabs.
Kirby’s response: “I think it’s a signal to the whole world how seriously President Biden takes this violence against the settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.”
Did you catch that? Gone is State Spokesperson Matthew Miller’s note about “as well as violence by Palestinian extremist militants against Israeli civilians.” For Kirby and Biden, it’s Jews killing Arabs all the way down.
Kirby added about the President, “He’s been very, very clear on that for a long, long time. It’s got to stop. It’s unacceptable. It’s a detriment to peace and security, certainly there in the West Bank but to the Palestinian people in general.”
Miller stated clearly: “Today’s action follows on the step we took in December to impose visa restrictions on dozens of individuals for contributing to violence and instability in the West Bank. There is no justification for extremist violence against civilians, whatever their national origin, ethnicity, or religion.”
And the clincher: “Under the authority granted by that order, the State Department is today imposing financial sanctions on four Israeli nationals for their destabilizing acts in the West Bank.”
ASK WHAT YOUR COUNTRY CAN DO TO YOU
The four victims of Biden’s flammable rage are David Chai Hisdai, Einan Tanjil, Shalom Zicherman, and Yinon Levy.
A reporter asked Miller, “Do you have any indication that any of these four people have any assets that could actually be targeted?”
Miller suggested asking the Treasury Dept., and added, “When we impose financial sanctions of this nature it is not just a question of assets that can be frozen. It’s also a question of transactions that individuals and organizations take that may flow through or in some way interact with the US financial system, which, as you know, a good deal of transactions that take place all over the world tend to do.”
Take a look at the executive order (Executive Order on Imposing Certain Sanctions on Persons Undermining Peace, Security, and Stability in the West Bank), it certainly drops everything and the kitchen sink on the four victims – and there very likely won’t be any PA Arabs added to the mix any time soon. Even if the four don’t have any assets in the US that the government can freeze, or aren’t planning to come visit, the Treasury dept. may choose to order their Israeli banks to cut them off.
Hisdai was involved in the protests in Huwara following the double murders of Jews who passed through.
Tanjil was convicted in a plea deal of a 2021 attack on leftist activists during an olive harvest in Surif outside Hebron.
Zicherman was accused but not convicted of throwing a rock at a car with leftist activists near Mitzpeh Yair. His trial is still going, so this is a case where the Biden folks sanction an innocent-until-proven-guilty individual.
Levy is also still in court for intimidating PA Arab villagers and bulldozing structures and infrastructure in Susya after October 7.
Will there be more? It all depends on how fast B’Tselem and other enemies of Israel submit to the Americans their lists of Jews they hate in Judea and Samaria.
For now, the White House is not planning to go after Ben Gvir and Smotrich, mostly because, you know, they are law-abiding individuals. But it might happen, depending on how badly Biden is willing to lean on Netanyahu to let them go and start a new coalition government ready and willing to place the noose of a Palestinian State around our noose.
