Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee who is likely to lead the panel if Democrats take over the House, said on Oct. 18 that Washington Post photographer Heidi Levine, European diplomats and Palestinian olive harvesters were the targets of “brutal attacks.”
“Prime Minister Netanyahu must act now to stop settler violence, protect civilians and ensure those responsible are brought to justice,” he stated. “The impunity must end.”
If entrusted with the House panel gavel in the next Congress, “I will advance the West Bank Violence Prevention Act to impose targeted sanctions on those who commit or support this violence,” he stated. “Those responsible must face consequences.”
On his congressional website, Meeks, who represents New York’s 5th Congressional District, including much of southeastern Queens and the largely Jewish enclave of Far Rockaway, warns of holding actions of individual criminals against entire communities.
“I strongly oppose policies that demonize or target entire immigrant communities based on the actions of a few,” Meeks states. “Most immigrants are law-abiding, hardworking members of society, who contribute to our economy and enrich our neighborhoods.”
“A just system must distinguish between those who pose a real threat and those seeking a better life and focus enforcement accordingly, with fairness, due process and respect for human dignity,” he states. (JNS sought comment from Meeks.)
Democrats who are quick to identify Israeli ‘settlers’ as perpetrators of violence in Judea and Samaria are often less willing to identify the demographic groups responsible for violent crime in their own districts, according to Rafael Mangual, senior fellow and head of research for policing and public safety at the Manhattan Institute.
“When it comes to crime in their own district, then they have to actually account for their records and the decisions that they make,” Mangual told JNS. That’s always going to be a much less comfortable route for people.”
On domestic crime, Democrats tend to emphasize social conditions, including poverty, education and economic inequality, while Republicans favor an “enforcement-centric approach,” Mangual said.
Focusing on gun control, for example, rather than “the core of the problem, which is how their policies interact with the criminal justice system and create the conditions for more gun violence than we ought to have,” also allows Democrats to avoid scrutiny of their own criminal justice policies, according to Mangual.
“It’s a politically effective way to deflect from issues that they’re less comfortable talking about,” he said.
That dynamic is inverted when it comes to Israel, he told JNS.
“They get social credit within their political bases in terms of talking about settler violence and and taking up the side of the Palestinians on issues between them and Israel,” he said. “I think the dynamics are just inverted.”
At least a dozen Democratic members of Congress have publicly condemned what they describe as “settler violence” in Judea and Samaria in October alone.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who co-sponsored legislation restricting arms sales to Israel, decried what he described as violence by “right-wing vigilantes” on Oct. 16.
“Are we going to tolerate accelerating vigilante violence against Palestinian civilians and foreign observers by right-wing vigilantes who operate with government protection?” the Jewish congressman stated.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who has accused Israel of “genocide” and claimed that armed Israeli settlers detained him during a July visit to Judea and Samaria, stated on Oct. 16 that Israeli settlers “operate with impunity.”
“We need to cut off aid to Israel that is used to fund settler activity and stop the sales of these weapons,” he stated.
Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), who opposed a 2024 congressional resolution denouncing the United Nations for placing Israel on its list of countries accused of violating children’s rights, warned on Oct. 16 against what he called “violent land grabs” in Judea and Samaria.
“Attacks like this one pave the way for the violent land grabs taking place throughout the West Bank and push us further away from peace,” he stated.
Maurice Hirsch, a former senior military prosecutor for Judea and Samaria and longtime legal adviser on counterterrorism policy, told JNS that American politicians use the term “settler violence” unfairly, implicating hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have committed no crimes.
Those politicians “are besmirching an entire law-abiding population,” Hirsch told JNS.
“There are 750,000 law-abiding settlers, and they’re talking about settler violence as if the settlers are violent.”
“If you had 10 black people in any one of their jurisdictions, would they be talking about black violence or Islamic violence?” Hirsch told JNS. “Absolutely not.”
Hirsch argued that the same terminology would be considered discriminatory if applied to other populations.
“When you say it’s ‘settler violence,’ what you’re really saying is it’s Jewish violence,” he told JNS. “The Jews are violent.”
Jews who commit violence against Arabs “don’t represent the settler movement. They don’t represent the State of Israel,” Hirsch said. “They’re doing tremendous damage to the State of Israel, and everybody would be happy if they were behind bars.”
Hirsch questioned whether U.S. politicians condemning the violence are interested in distinguishing between individual perpetrators and the broader Israeli population.
“Their goal is not to talk about the actual violence in any way, shape or form,” he told JNS. “Their goal is to undermine and delegitimize Israel.”
Naomi Linder Kahn, director of the international division of Regavim, an Israeli nonprofit that monitors land-use and enforcement policies in Judea and Samaria, told JNS that much of the international criticism of “settlers” rests on what she said is misleading United Nations data.
Regavim examined 8,333 incidents of “settler violence” that the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs recorded over a decade.
“What we found was that 95% of the reports of settler violence that OCHA is reporting on either didn’t involve settlers, didn’t involve violence or didn’t happen in Judea and Samaria,” she said.
Of 59 Palestinian fatalities attributed to Israeli civilians in data from the U.N. agency, Regavim classified 26 as self-defense and 24 as deaths caused by Israeli security forces, not Israeli civilians. Of the remaining nine, four involved unidentified perpetrators, two remained before the courts, one was self-inflicted and another was reportedly missing from the dashboard.
That left “one verified incident of unprovoked violence that resulted in an Arab fatality,” Linder Kahn told JNS. “One.”
The U.N. definition of settler violence is so broad that it includes incidents with no physical confrontation, according to Linder Kahn.
“There’s an incident where a dog bit an Arab laborer. That’s ‘settler violence,’” she said. “There’s an incident where a cow was hit by a tractor. Settler violence.”
Asked if American politicians apply a different standard when discussing violence involving Jews, Kahn said, “Of course.”
“That’s obvious from the data,” she told JNS. “You have a willing audience.”
“Congressmen in Michigan, that’s a great example, whose last name is El-Sayed or Omar or Tlaib or whatever it is,” she said, of Michigan Senate Democratic nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.).
“They’re a willing audience,” she said. “They’re waiting for this false narrative so that they can have a weapon, and they have the weapon. The weapon has been prepared for them.”
If asked to identify the demographic groups responsible for the most crime in their own districts, those same politicians would likely say that doing so is racist, she said.
“‘We don’t profile,’” they might say, according to Linder Kahn.
“They only profile us,” she said. “They don’t profile anybody else. Very convenient.”
Mangual told JNS that avoiding discussion of demographic patterns in American crime statistics can ultimately hurt the communities most affected by violence.
“I think if we’re being completely honest, which we know we should be, we ought not obfuscate the reality that crime is very hyper-concentrated geographically and demographically, both in terms of victimization and perpetration,” he said.
“There’s more danger in trying to avoid the realities,” he told JNS.
Over the past two decades, politicians on the Left have pushed the idea of “disparate impact with respect to criminal enforcement,” according to Mangual.
But that notion “that we ought to expect equal outcomes across different culturally identifiable groups when it comes to criminal justice enforcement” is misguided, he said.
“Criminal victimization isn’t evenly distributed, nor is criminal perpetration,” he said.
Mangual pointed to New York City, where he said black and Hispanic people have accounted for at least 95% of shooting victims in nearly every year since 2008.
“Those two demographic groups do not constitute anywhere close to 95% of the population,” he said. “If we were to ignore that, that would mean deploying police resources in a way that doesn’t reflect that reality. That would mean systematically denying those very groups and neighborhoods the protection that the crime statistics suggest that they should have.”
“If what we want to do is produce equal outcomes with respect to enforcement, the only way that we can do that is to exacerbate the already unequal outcomes with respect to criminal victimization,” he told JNS. “I think that’s wrongheaded.”
FBI data breaks down its data on offenders of hate crimes in terms of “race” and “ethnicity.” Of the anti-Jewish hate crimes that the FBI has recorded this year, the bureau states that about 40% of offenders were white and 10% black. Hispanic or Latino offenders accounted for about 4%. The offender’s race was unknown in about 42% of cases.
Hirsch called the disparity “hypocrisy of the very first order.”
Democrats are “applying a Jew-specific standard” he said.
“In every single one of the jurisdictions that these people are talking from, there are antisemitic crimes,” Hirsch said.
“Nowhere is there 100% law enforcement, but that’s what they’re demanding of Israel,” he said. “Why aren’t you doing more? Why aren’t you people doing more to stop antisemitism, Mamdani and the likes?”
Zohran Mamdani, mayor of New York City who has also denounced Israel regularly, has seen antisemitic hate crimes surge 182% in his first month in office. Jews, who are about 10% of New Yorkers, have been the targets of more than half of the city’s religion-based hate crimes since then.
“Not only are they not doing anything to fight antisemitism, they’re fueling the flames,” Hirsch told JNS. “It’s a complete double standard, where Israel is held to an invented standard that they themselves don’t apply, and then vilified when they don’t meet the invented standard.”
Democrats speaking out about Israel ought to condemn the “day-to-day terrorism of the Palestinians” as well, according to Hirsch.
“Not only are they not condemning it, in many cases they are justifying the terrorism,” he said. “It’s all part of that double standard.”