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British Outlet Suggests Every Israeli in West Bank Is Unhinged Settler Baying for Blood
Illustrative: View of Ma’aleh Adumim in Judea and Samaria on Jan. 1, 2017. Photo: Yaniv Nadav / Flash90.
Hundreds of thousands of Israelis live in the West Bank. Known in Israel by its historical name of Judea and Samaria, the area contains cities that are home to tens of thousands of people.
The urban center of Ariel, for example, has a university that was founded more than 40 years ago. The area is bustling with houses, schools, shops, and parks. Ariel is home to the young and old — to teachers, taxi drivers, business owners, and students.
In short, places like Ariel are filled with ordinary people.
Why, then, did British news and opinion site UnHerd suggest in a recent piece by foreign correspondent David Patrikarako, that everyone living in the West Bank is a marauding zealot out for Palestinian bloods?
Patrikarakos reports:
Beyond the trauma of the war in Gaza, there is another trauma in the West Bank: Israeli settlers. There are more than 450,000 Israeli settlers (and more than 100 Israeli illegal outposts) in the West Bank, with an additional 220,000 living in East Jerusalem. Since October 7, their thieving and violence has gone into overdrive. The UN humanitarian office has recorded more than 250 settler attacks, which resulted in the murder of eight Palestinians, including a child, and injuries to more than 70 others. Since late October, more than 1,000 Palestinian residents have fled several West Bank villages, claiming that Israeli settler violence and threats had driven them out.”
Patrikarakos’ journey through the West Bank, with his theatrical descriptions and selective encounters, reads more like a scene from an apocalyptic novel than a piece of objective reporting.
The portrayal of anyone and everyone could not be less subtle: they are religious fanatics who are hellbent on driving out every last non-Israeli man, woman and child — by violent means if necessary.
This is a gross generalization that ignores the myriad reasons people choose to live in the West Bank, including historical and legal justifications, while reducing their motivations to divine real estate deals.
The article charges hundreds of thousands of peaceful, law-abiding Israelis with being responsible for a handful of isolated incidents of violence toward Palestinians.
The depiction of all Israelis living in the territory as extremists sharply contrasts with that of the Palestinians, who are simultaneously portrayed as defeated victims and successful resisters:
I later meet Mustafa Barghouti, who leads the Palestinian opposition party, Palestinian National Initiative. We gather in a boardroom in his office nearby (most things are nearby in Ramallah) where a large photo of the Dome of the Rock stretches across a wall. ‘Please record me. I like to be recorded,’ he says, in a joking reference to the mass surveillance Israel subjects Palestinian leaders to […]
‘We are already in an intifada,’ he says. “What does it mean? Self-organisation, self-reliance, and defying Israel measures. The IDF cannot enter any town or city without being confronted by young people who try to resist in non-violent ways.’ But these confrontations can easily slip into violence, which in this region easily expands.
That Patrikarakos fails to challenge Barghouti’s characterization of the Palestinian intifadas as “non-violent” is simply astounding, and ignores the reality of these dark periods that were characterized by horrific violence meted out against Israelis and Jews, including suicide bombings, stabbings, and Molotov cocktail attacks.
In the next paragraph, Patrikarakos is forced to acknowledge Barghouti’s cognitive dissonance, noting that while he “appears sincerely to want peace,” in a later interview with CNN, Barghouti claimed “no Israeli civilians were killed on October 7.”
It takes considerable mental gymnastics and boundless determination to cast Barghouti as a moderate and peace-seeking Palestinian, while also accepting that he has denied the biggest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
The role of Palestinian terrorist groups, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad, in fomenting violence in the West Bank is also glossed over throughout the piece, with the implicit suggestion instead being that Israeli counterterrorism raids exist in a vacuum.
In the last paragraph of his article, Patrikarakos laments the likelihood of further violence. He contends this violence will result from young Palestinian men having “no hope of finding a job,” leading them to “drift toward organised violence and extremism” — a perspective that omits any consideration of the antisemitic and anti-Israeli incitement that is pervasive in Palestinian society.
And this core message of the piece: Palestinians lack agency and are entirely at the mercy of a much stronger and inflexible Israel.
The post British Outlet Suggests Every Israeli in West Bank Is Unhinged Settler Baying for Blood first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Iran Says Eight Arrested for Suspected Links to Israel’s Mossad Spy Agency
The Mossad recruitment ad. Photo: Screenshot.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said on Saturday they had arrested eight people suspected of trying to transmit the coordinates of sensitive sites and details about senior military figures to Israel’s Mossad, Iranian state media reported.
They are accused of having provided the information to the Mossad spy agency during Israel’s air war on Iran in June, when it attacked Iranian nuclear facilities and killed top military commanders as well as civilians in the worst blow to the Islamic Republic since the 1980s war with Iraq.
Iran retaliated with barrages of missiles on Israeli military sites, infrastructure and cities. The United States entered the war on June 22 with strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.
A Guards statement alleged that the suspects had received specialized training from Mossad via online platforms. It said they were apprehended in northeastern Iran before carrying out their plans, and that materials for making launchers, bombs, explosives and booby traps had been seized.
State media reported earlier this month that Iranian police had arrested as many as 21,000 “suspects” during the 12-day war with Israel, though they did not say what these people had been suspected of doing.
Security forces conducted a campaign of widespread arrests and also stepped up their street presence during the brief war that ended in a US-brokered ceasefire.
Iran has executed at least eight people in recent months, including nuclear scientist Rouzbeh Vadi, hanged on August 9 for passing information to Israel about another scientist killed in Israeli airstrikes.
Human rights groups say Iran uses espionage charges and fast-tracked executions as tools for broader political repression.
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Body of Idan Shtivi, Murdered on Oct. 7, Retrieved from Gaza in Special IDF Operation
Idan Shtivi. Photo: Courtesy of the family
i24 News – The body of Idan Shtivi, a 28-year-old murdered by Palestinian jihadists at the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023, was recovered in a joint operation by the IDF and Shin Bet in central Gaza, it was cleared for publication on Saturday.
Shtivi’s remains were returned to Israel alongside the body of Ilan Weiss, another hostage killed during the October 7 massacre.
“Idan Shtivi was abducted from the Tel Gama area and brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists after acting to rescue and evacuate others from the Nova music festival on October 7th, 2023. He was 28 years old at the time of his death,” read an IDF press release.
“Following an identification process conducted at the National Center for Forensic Medicine, along with the Israel Police and the Military Rabbinate, the Hostages and Missing Persons Headquarters notified his family.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Shviti “was a gifted student of sustainability and governance, and a courageous individual” who acted heroically on October 7, helping others flee.
“He was killed in the process and his body was abducted to Gaza by Hamas. My wife and I send our heartfelt condolences to the Shtivi family. So far, 207 hostages have been returned, 148 of them alive. We will continue to act tirelessly and decisively to bring back all our hostages—living and deceased.”
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Woman Stabbed at Ottawa Grocery Store in Latest Antisemitic Attack
A social media post by the alleged attacker, Joseph Rooke of Cornwall, Ontario. Photo: Screenshot via i24
i24 News – The stabbing of a Jewish woman at an Ottawa grocery by a man with a long history of antisemitic posts on social media, the latest antisemitic hate crime in Canada, sparked outrage and prompted condemnation from officials including the prime minister.
Both the victim and the attacker are in their 70s. The woman is reportedly in serious condition.
The suspect was identified as Joseph Rooke, who has authored a series of lengthy rambling screeds on social media, ranting against Israel and Jews.
“Judaism is the world’s oldest cult,” he writes in one post, going on to say “over time jews have become insidious in governments, businesses, media conglomerates, and educational institutions in order to do what they do better than anyone else. Jews are the world’s masters of propaganda, gaslighting, demonization, demagoguery, and outright lying. Using their collective wealth they have become masters of reprisal.”
“I am under no obligation whatsoever, legal, moral, or otherwise, to like jews and I do not. If that means I meet the jewish definition of an anti-semite, so be it.”
Canada has seen a steep spike in antisemitic attacks over the past two years, including a recent incident in Montreal where a Hasidic Jew was beaten in front on his children.
After Prime Minister Mark Carney condemned the incident, many, including former Israel’s ambassador the US Michael Oren, pointed out that Carney’s rhetoric and policies contribute to the increasing insecurity of Canada’s Jewish community through uncritical embrace of outrageous and easily disprovable allegations that Israel and its supporters were guilty of the worst crimes against humanity.