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Source: https://www.jpost.com/international/article-895954
The EU's Distorted Narrative on Settler Violence
(Jerusalem Post) Herb Keinon - The EU's decision on Monday to sanction settlement organizations under the guise of "settler violence" was praised by Belgian Foreign Minister Maxime Prevot who said, "Extremism and violence carry consequences." If only that were true. If it were true, then Belgium, along with Britain, France, Canada, and Australia, would not have rewarded the Palestinians with statehood recognition in the fall of 2025, less than two years after Palestinians in Gaza carried out mass acts of unspeakable barbarism. No, this measure is about drawing a distorted equivalence between Israelis and Hamas. Prime Minister Netanyahu said Europe had "exposed its moral bankruptcy by drawing a false symmetry between Israeli citizens and Hamas terrorists." Let's be clear: there are acts of violence by Jews against Palestinians in Judea and Samaria, and they are deplorable. They should be unequivocally condemned and fully prosecuted under the law. But acknowledging the existence of violent incidents is not the same thing as accepting the grotesquely inflated narrative that has grown around it. Between 2019 and 2022 there were 24,808 incidents of Palestinian stone-throwing and firebomb attacks against Jews - not including shootings, stabbings, or explosive devices. Yet it is "settler violence" that has become the focus of international sanctions campaigns and diplomatic outrage. Why? Because this is about delegitimization. The organizations targeted by the EU include Amana, which deals with developing and financing Jewish communities, and Regavim, which focuses on opposing illegal Palestinian construction on state land, including projects supported by the EU. That is what this is really about. As Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar explained, Israel "will continue to stand for the right of Jews to settle in the heart of our homeland," and "no other people in the world has such a documented and longstanding right to its land as the Jewish people have to the Land of Israel." When the EU adopts a narrative that inflates fringe violence into a defining characteristic of the more than 900,000 Jews living beyond the Green Line, including Jerusalem, while downplaying decades of Palestinian terrorism, it ceases to be an honest broker, loses its ability to be taken seriously in Israel, and instead becomes a political actor advancing a predetermined outcome.