SAMARIA, Israel – The plight of an Arab-American and his family in Judea and Samaria has gained international attention from the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, the media, and on Capitol Hill.
Arab-American Loui Ridi says he contacted the embassy after violent settlers harassed his family for weeks near the village of Qusra.
“I asked the U.S. embassy, I made it here, but now I’m under siege. I’m demanding that they need to remove the siege out of the house from the settlers and the IDF, and I need a basic demand (to be fulfilled): (to be) able to move freely, get my own supplies, my own food from the village,” Ridi explained.
He complained that Jewish settlers put a tent next to his house, refused to leave, and continued to bother his family. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee called the harassment “unacceptable behavior.”
He remarked, “When you engage in activity that is intended to change the behavior and to create fear in an individual, an entire society, or a community, that is the definition, the historic dictionary definition of terror. So, I don’t know what else to call it.”
Huckabee added, “The tragedy is that this represents a tiny, tiny minority.” “They are hurting Israel. They’re hurting its reputation, and they are hurting the Jewish people.”
Yisrael Ganz, governor of Judea and Samaria, told CBN News that violence can’t be tolerated and lawbreakers must be punished.
Ganz noted, “I said – it’s very clear as a first beginning – we not only condemn violence, we operate, we work against villains. We push the police, we work with the police and with the army to prevent any violence. And anyone – anyone – it doesn’t matter what’s his name, where he comes from, that will break the law and will take his own end will be punished by the law.”
Luke Hilton from the podcast The Israel Guys, took interest in the story.
“So the world saw headlines that said, ‘Palestinian-American Arab family is trapped inside their home. Israeli violent settlers are laying siege to them. They can’t even get out for food, for water, etc.'”
That led Hilton to take a closer look. He disputes characterizing the incident as a “siege,” insisting that video of the situation tells a more complicated story.
“So we dug in,” he told us. “We talked to our local sources here on the ground. We looked at the Hebrew media that’s being reported from inside Judea and Samaria. And we looked at the videos, the photos, and we found out that as is the case so many times, what was happening behind the headlines was a very, very different picture.”
“There was no siege as far as we could tell,” Hilton concluded.
Still, he observed, that doesn’t make the perpetrators innocent. “Now, what these Israelis were doing, was it legal? Obviously not camping out on someone’s front lawn, whether it’s illegal or not, it’s not something that’s okay. And that’s, that’s called the law, right? That’s basically Israel dealing with those who are breaking the law. The problem is that the world turned it into an international headline.”
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According to Hilton, the house in question has also been used to provoke the settlers.
He explained, There’s actually video of Arabs throwing rocks from his rooftop in his courtyard…and the locals (Arabs) engaging with violence with local Jewish shepherds, and such awful terrorism, and then, after a time, the locals (Israeli) began to get fed up with this.”
Ganz points out that Qusra has a history of terror.
“And they talk about violence. No one, no one talks about almost every single day that my people had been attacked by terrorists. No one can – you know, they spoke about Qusra – do you know that the army operates there every single day? And one came in suddenly when you have people open a tent, a tent, in a backyard of someone; it became settler violence.”
Here in the heart of Judea and Samaria, accusations of settler violence are making headlines around the world. But some here say that there’s another story behind the headlines: that the issue is being used to present Jewish communities as an obstacle to peace and build international pressure for a Palestinian state.
The United Nations claims that “settler violence” has reached unprecedented levels.
Ramiz Alakbarov of UNSCO, the Office of the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, stated, “So far this year, the U.N. has documented more than 1,430 incidents involving Israeli settlers that resulted in casualties, property damage or both, affecting approximately 260 Palestinian communities.”
Meir Deutch, Director of the Regavim Movement in Israel, responded to the U.N.’s contention. He told us, “We’re not saying that there’s no violence in Judea and Samaria. That’s not the case. There are issues, and there are cases where people carried out disgusting things, and they should be put into jail, you know? But the fact that the whole world was talking about this issue – we have to ask the question – why? Why is this the case?”
Regavim, created to protect Israel’s land and national interests, examined the U.N. database on “settler violence,” which reported more than eight thousand incidents from 2016 to 2023.
“Our people here in the office pored over them for more than a year, going through each and every one of these cases. Guess what? More than 95% of these cases out of the more than 8000 cases, more than 95% had nothing to do with settlers. And it had nothing to do with violence,” Deutch said.
He adds that the review found examples that call into question the U.N.’s definition of “settler violence.”
“Each time a group goes up to the Temple Mount, that’s considered as storming (the) Al Aksa (Mosque), a settler violence action. Israel, the State of Israel, in an area where it has all the right to pave roads, when the State of Israel paved roads in area C (of Judea and Samaria), that’s counted as settler violence.”
Deutch also says some NGOs deliberately provoke settlers to get a reaction, then edit video to portray the settlers as the aggressors. Deutch believes the pattern serves a larger political agenda.
“I believe that the reason why the whole world is talking about this is for one purpose only, which is creating the Palestinian terrorists’ state in the heart of our homeland to create the support of the international community in a way where the Palestinians are seen as victims, as the people that need defense from the State of Israel.”
Regavim Spokesperson Naomi Kahn also sees a familiar bias at work.
“It’s a circle,” she explained. The United Nations receives its reports from the Palestinian Authority and various E.U.-funded NGOs. It publishes them on U.N. stationery, and it puts it on UN websites. And then foreign governments and the E.U. itself say, ‘Well, look, the United Nations says there’s all this settler violence, so there is settler violence.'”
Kahn insists the reports have real-world consequences.
“From there to the media, it’s a very easy step. And from there to actual real-life impact on the ground in terms of diplomatic isolation of Israel, trade embargoes, economic sanctions, international tribunals, claims of ethnic cleansing. All of these things are based on this extremely, highly funded, extremely maliciously created narrative that is based on absolute lies,” Kahn told us.
International pressure for a Palestinian state raises the question of whether settler violence is truly a security issue or whether it’s become a political weapon. Some here believe that the ultimate debate is about those who belong here and who will determine the future of Judea and Samaria.
