Let me introduce myself: I am Dr. Moshe Dann, a historian, a writer, and a journalist, and I live in Jerusalem. I have spent much of my life studying the past, but today I want to talk about a phrase that has become a weapon in the present: “settler violence.” The words appear everywhere—in headlines, in diplomatic speeches, in social media debates, in the resolutions of international bodies. Most people who repeat them have never met a settler, never walked through the hills of Judea and Samaria, never stood in the old streets of Jerusalem and felt the weight of Jewish history. They do not know what the term means, and that is exactly why it is dangerous. “Settler violence” is not a neutral description of wrongdoing. It is a political slogan dressed up as a legal category, promoted by Haaretz, the Jerusalem Post, and other left-leaning media in Israel and abroad. It is exaggerated, dishonest, and deliberately vague. The term links “settlers”—Jews who live in Judea and Samaria, in the biblical heartland of the Jewish people, and in eastern Jerusalem—with violence. It is meant to create a cognitive association, to make the public think of a Jew guarding his home as the moral equivalent of an Arab terrorist who blows up a bus. It accuses Jews of terrorism and equates Jewish self-defense with Arab terrorism. Those who use the term do not care about Arab violence; they say, in effect, do not worry about the terrorists, blame the Jews for “settler colonialism.” It is a way of turning the victims of aggression into the aggressors, and that is the first step toward justifying the destruction of Israel.
To understand why that framing is so perverse, we need to recall the facts of law and history. International bodies and many journalists repeat the claim that Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria and eastern Jerusalem are “illegal under international law,” citing the Fourth Geneva Convention. But the Fourth Geneva Convention forbids the transfer of populations into territory taken from another country that has legitimate sovereignty. That does not apply here. Jordan and Egypt were never legitimate sovereigns of these lands. They seized them illegally during the 1948–49 war, when Arab armies invaded the newly restored Jewish state in an attempt to destroy it. The territory that came to be called the West Bank and Gaza had been designated by the international community as part of the Jewish National Home. Jordan’s annexation of the West Bank was recognized only by Britain and Pakistan. Egypt’s occupation of Gaza was never recognized as lawful by anyone. When Israel took control of these areas in 1967, after a defensive war against another attempted invasion, it did not take them from a lawful owner. There was no sovereign country whose rights under the Geneva Convention could be violated. The legal case against the settlements collapses under the weight of historical fact. Yet the phrase “settler violence” is used to smuggle that false legal theory back into the conversation. It creates a mental picture of Jewish colonists stealing Arab land, when in fact Jewish farms and communities are established on land that has been Jewish for thousands of years, while Arab towns and villages expand with little notice or objection. The label “settler violence” is the bridge to the older charge that “Jews are stealing Palestinian land,” and from there to the accusation of apartheid. The term is not a report; it is a narrative. It tells the world that Jews are always the aggressors, Arabs are always the victims, and the very presence of a Jew east of the Green Line is an act of violence.
This false narrative did not emerge in a vacuum. It is part of a long history of Israeli offers and Arab rejections. In the late 1980s, after the first intifada, Israeli governments decided to try diplomacy with the Palestinian Arab leadership. They signed agreements with Yasser Arafat, the terrorist leader of the PLO, and created the Palestinian Authority. The Oslo Accords gave Arafat control of land, a flag, and a quasi-state. In exchange, Israel asked for peace. What did Israel receive? Arafat rejected the most generous offer ever presented to the Palestinians, and instead launched the second intifada—a war of suicide bombers in buses, restaurants, and Passover seders, a war that killed more than a thousand Israelis. Then came the Disengagement from Gaza. In 2005, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered Israeli soldiers and police to expel ten thousand Jewish residents from their homes in Gaza. Families were dragged away weeping. Synagogues were destroyed. Greenhouses were given to the Palestinians. It was a painful sacrifice, made in the sincere hope that Israel’s withdrawal would bring calm. Instead, Hamas took over Gaza, and the territory became a launching pad for rockets, tunnels, and terror. The world did not thank Israel for this sacrifice; it simply moved the goalposts. The demand was no longer just about Gaza; it was about Judea and Samaria. The same forces that applauded Palestinian statehood never mention this history, because the truth undermines their story. The official narrative is simple: the Jews come, the Arabs suffer, and therefore all Jewish presence is violence. The more painful truth is that Israel keeps giving away land, and extremist ideology keeps filling the space.
While Israel was making concessions, the Palestinian Authority was institutionalizing terrorism through its infamous “pay-for-slay” policy. The PA pays monthly salaries to Palestinians who are imprisoned for terrorist attacks against Jews, and it pays generous allowances to the families of suicide bombers and other terrorists. The more Jews a terrorist kills, the more money his family receives. This is not a rumor or a right-wing talking point; the PA publishes its own financial records and celebrates these payments as matters of national pride. The international community, including Israel’s own legal advisors and many of its political and military leaders, did very little to confront this. There were a handful of exceptions—the 2018 Taylor Force Act passed by the United States Congress, and the 2023 decision by Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich to stop transferring tax funds to the Palestinian Authority because it was financing violence. But these were exceptions. The world preferred to talk about “settler violence.” Think carefully about the timing. The phrase was not a central part of the international vocabulary during the second intifada. It was not used to describe the years of stabbings, car rammings, and rocket attacks. It was barely mentioned before the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023. The term only became a global accusation after the worst single-day attack on Jews since the Holocaust. That alone tells us what the phrase is really for. It is not about violence; it is about delegitimizing Jewish existence. It is a way of saying that the only real threat to peace is not Arab terrorism, not pay-for-slay, not the education of children to hate, but the presence of Jews in the land of their ancestors.
October 7 changed everything, yet the world immediately began using the same tired language. Hamas terrorists crossed the border from Gaza and slaughtered men, women, children, and elderly people; they raped, tortured, burned, and mutilated; they took hostages into tunnels and held them under unspeakable conditions. The bodies were still being identified, the families were still mourning, when journalists and diplomats began promoting the canard of “settler violence.” The term was adopted by international media and by governments that had not yet taken in the horror of the massacre. It was used against Jews who took up arms to defend their communities, against farmers who refused to abandon the land after an invasion, against anyone who believed that Jews are allowed to live safely in their own homeland. Recently, prominent figures—the Pope, representatives to the United Nations, and even American Ambassador Mike Huckabee—have used “settler violence” to criticize Israel. European countries and other nations have initiated boycotts of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, not because those communities have been proven guilty of criminal activity, but simply because they exist. These boycotts are not about justice; they are about demonization. They announce to the Jewish people that their self-defense is aggression and that their attackers are victims. This is a moral inversion so profound that it would be laughable if it did not have such serious consequences. Whenever an individual Israeli or Jewish resident crosses the line, that person should be held accountable. But to turn isolated incidents into a category called “settler violence” while ignoring the state-sponsored terrorism of the Palestinian Authority is not honesty; it is propaganda.
I have lived in Jerusalem for many years. I have studied Jewish history, and I have watched this conflict from close range. I know that words can be as destructive as weapons, and “settler violence” is one of those words. It is used to demonize Jews who are defending themselves and their communities. It is used to ignore Arab Palestinian terrorism and to turn the perpetrators into the victims. It is used to justify boycotts and sanctions against Jews in Judea and Samaria, and to demand the creation of a Palestinian state in Gaza and the heartland of Israel—a state that, in the ideology of its supporters, would be one more step toward Israel’s destruction. The phrase “settler violence” has become a convenient tool to promote a narrative that has nothing to do with peace and everything to do with power. It says to a family that has returned to the land of its ancestors: you are not the owners of this land; you are intruders. It says to a father who grabs his rifle to protect his children from terrorists: your act is indistinguishable from the act of the terrorist who wants to cut their throats. It says to the world: do not look at the incitement, the payment of terrorists, the cult of death, the massacre of October 7; look only at the Jews who try to survive. I refuse to use that phrase, because it is a lie. If we truly care about peace, we must stop using slogans that are designed to demonize one side and excuse the other. We must look honestly at the violence that threatens Israel and the Jewish people. The real violence is the terrorism, the pay-for-slay, the incitement, the refusal to accept Jewish sovereignty anywhere. The real violence is not in the existence of a Jewish farm on a hilltop; it is in the effort to uproot it. The Jewish people are not settlers in their own homeland. We are not colonizers. We are returning home, and no amount of verbal manipulation can erase that truth.