Police were on high alert in Samaria this weekend after an arson attack ravaged the Gilad Farm (Havat Gilad) community. Today, the Police spokesperson’s unit published what might look like a mundane announcement to the untrained eye – but is in fact, a dangerous piece of anti-Israel propaganda. Here is the police statement (along with the attached photo):
“During a patrol by Border Police fighters in Judea and Samaria near Kedumim, three Israelis were spotted at a gas station filling fuel in containers and aroused the suspicion of the officers. Upon inspection, assault weapons, face masks, and license plates belonging to another vehicle were found in their car. The suspects were transferred for interrogation at the police station in the Samaria District and at its conclusion were detained. Tonight, during an operation by Border Police fighters in the Kedumim area, after fires that raged in the area, the force noticed a vehicle that aroused their suspicion at a gas station, after it was observed filling several containers with flammable material.
According to the three, aged 18-20, residents of the area, they did this for the purpose of filling fuel for agricultural equipment, however they could not explain the findings of the search in their vehicle in which Border Police fighters located assault weapons, masks, a knife, and two license plates of another vehicle that had previously been taken off the road. The three suspects were arrested and transferred together with the seized findings for interrogation at the Ariel station of the Samaria District and at its conclusion were detained. Today the suspects will be brought before court.
Israel Police together with the security forces condemns violence wherever it may be. We will continue to act to arrest those rioters, the violent extremists, we will interrogate them and bring them to the full extent of the law.”
2+In fact, these are people who fought the horrific fire at Gilad Farm on Saturday afternoon. They came to the gas station to fill jerrycans for the blowers with which they fought the fire. They had face coverings in the vehicle because they were fighting the fire, in a storm of smoke like most firefighters. They also had a Leatherman multitool in the vehicle which the police statement calls an assault weapon. They were driving their yeshiva’s vehicle, standard practice for people in religious communities who share transport.
2+The court understood all of this and released them to one-day house arrest with the consent of the police after the judge made it clear to the police that this case was going nowhere. But in the meantime, another piece of news about ‘settler violence’ has taken hold – and the damage has been done.
You have to understand what the “settler violence” campaign actually is. It is a strategic effort to criminalize the presence of Jews in Judea and Samaria, and every antisemitic outlet that runs with it, at home or abroad, leans on the same claim: that the Israeli state itself backs the violence. The police and the IDF know this, and they are desperate to prove otherwise. So they go looking for scalps to bring in. Three teenage firefighters filling jerrycans became the scalps this weekend. And in producing that headline, the police handed the very propagandists they claim to oppose their next piece of raw material – and here’s why it’s so dangerous.
2+That material does not stay in a police blotter. It becomes the data point cited three steps later in a UN dashboard, a sanctions memo, an antisemitic European Commission foreign policy chief’s press release. Consider what Professor Eugene Kontorovich of George Mason University Law School and Naomi Kahn of Regavim’s International Division found when they finally got their hands on the raw data behind the UN agency OCHA’s “settler violence” dashboard, after the UN refused to release it and Regavim obtained it through a French criminologist instead.
Of more than 8,300 incident reports on settler-related violence spanning seven years, over 2,000 turned out on inspection to be Arab violence against Israelis, filed under the wrong heading entirely. Of the roughly 6,300 that remained, Kontorovich and Kahn found that more than 95 percent either did not involve settlers, did not involve violence, or did not take place in Judea and Samaria at all. What was left, mostly, could not be distinguished from Israelis defending themselves against Arab terrorists.
The category itself is built to inflate. The UN’s own fine print counts a Palestinian shot while attempting to murder Israeli civilians in their home as a “victim of settler violence.” Vandalism and graffiti make the list. An Israeli walking up to the Temple Mount makes the list. Meanwhile, actual attacks on Israelis are filed under a separate “nationalist crime” category that only registers when someone dies. And the two independent sources OCHA claims to draw from turn out, per Kontorovich and Kahn’s review, to be the same single source appearing twice under different names.
None of this is academic. The Biden-era Treasury sanctions program built on this data targeted, according to Kontorovich, exclusively Israelis. An entire IDF unit was placed under sanction before the designation was walked back. The EU’s parallel track has gone after Regavim itself, an organization that does litigation and construction advocacy, not violence. And because Israeli banks and credit card companies fear losing access to the EU market, groups like Regavim now find themselves frozen out of ordinary financial services at home, with no Israeli law requiring any of it.
This is the machine a police statement like this feeds. A false “settler violence” accusation is not a local embarrassment that gets corrected in a courtroom two days later. It is raw material for a data pipeline that ends in sanctions, in banking restrictions, in the argument that Israel cannot be trusted to govern its own citizens in Judea and Samaria, let alone extend sovereignty there. International pressure, more than any legal or logistical obstacle, is what has kept Israeli law from ever being applied to Area C since 1967. Every fabricated “settler violence” story is a brick in that wall.
This weekend, the three young volunteer firefighters from Kedumim were fighting a fire that local politicians implied that Arab arsonists set, while Israeli reporters said local Arabs fired flares at the aircraft trying to extinguish it. Nearly thirty homes were ravaged by fire, and over 110 families were displaced. But the police spent their weekend building a case against the Jewish firefighters.