Mike Pompeo may rank among the most pro-Israel Secretaries of State in history, but the folks serving under him at Foggy Bottom are as anti-Israel as they were when John Foster Dulles ordered Ben-Gurion to get the IDF out of the Sinai peninsula.
The State Department’s recent 2019 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Israel, West Bank, and Gaza grossly misrepresents the level of daily violence by Arabs in Judea and Samaria, according to rightwing activists.
Instead of presenting a coherent examination of the facts, the State Dept. report copies verbatim the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs figures:
As of December 9, UNOCHA reported 101 incidents of Palestinians committing violent acts against Israeli civilians in the West Bank, primarily stone throwing, which represented a 49 percent decrease from 2018.
This is juxtaposed with the same group’s report on Jewish violence:
During the same timeframe, UNOCHA identified 330 incidents of settler attacks that resulted in Palestinian fatalities, injuries, or property damage, which represented an 18 percent increase from 2018.
But according to open data from the IDF and the Shin Bet, available in English, the number of Palestinians’ assault against Israelis in 2019 was 15 times greater that 101. The IDF reported 290 Molotov cocktails and 1,469 stone-throwing incidents in 2019, and the Shin Bet reported 1,327 terror attacks during the same period.
Ezri Tubi, head of the Boomerang Fighting for Israel organization which produces fact-filled videos about the Arab-Israeli conflict, says he sent a detailed report on Arab violence against Jews in Judea and Samaria to the US Embassy in Jerusalem in early 2020, with data similar to the IDF and Shin Bet reports. It was ignored. Ezri contacted the embassy, where he was told, “Our report is not intended to serve as a catalog of all allegations of human rights violations in the given year, but a document outlining facts relevant to human rights concerns.”
“Instead of admitting the truth and apologizing for a false and distorted report that has been published repeatedly for decades, the State Department continues to claim innocence, insisting it is being objective,” Ezri said.
“It should be noted by the authors of the report that behind the reported numbers of hundreds and thousands of Palestinians attacks against Israelis there are people who have been stabbed, and had incendiary bottles and stones thrown at them,” Ezri said.