The Settler Blood Libel: How Taybeh Became a Case Study in Manufactured Outrage

Israel is falsely accused of targeting Christians while being attacked for defending the Druze minority in Syria. So what else is new?

Taybeh, a sleepy Christian village in the West Bank with a population smaller than a Manhattan apartment building, has now become the latest epicenter of international outrage. NBC breathlessly informs us that the Church of St. George al-Khadr, dating back to the fifth century, now stands in the shadow of settler violence and desecration. Cue the outrage. Cue the headlines. Cue the Jordanian king who refuses to allow Gaza residents to seek safe haven in his country.

"Settler violence targeting Palestinians has spiked," warns the UN, claiming over 700 incidents in the first half of the year. A horror movie with no actual footage. Just numbers. Always numbers. Numbers from whom? From OCHA, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs—an organization so invested in truth, it includes traffic accidents and archaeological tourism in its violence statistics.

The Patriarchs weighed in. Their statement, dripping with the language of victimhood and urgency, lamented the “direct and intentional threat” to their peaceful community and the “systematic attacks against Christians” in the Holy Land. And of course, they confidently blamed the Jews.

There’s just one problem: it didn’t happen that way. Not even close.

According to multiple reports from Israel365 News and confirmed by the Binyamin Regional Council, the blaze that damaged part of Taybeh’s Christian cemetery wasn’t caused by settlers, but by Arabs. The intent? Target grazing land used by a nearby Jewish farm. The result? A fire that spread unintentionally. The response? Jewish farmers ran to put it out. That’s right—the so-called arsonists were also the firefighters. But no matter. The narrative had already gone global.

Ambassador Huckabee Being Given a Tour of Anti-Israel Fan Fiction

No comment from Israeli police. No retraction from NBC. No apology from King Abdullah II of Jordan, who called it a “blatant violation of the sanctity of the dead.” You know what else violates the sanctity of the dead? Blaming the wrong people, in service of a lie.

This is not a one-off. Days before the Taybeh fire, a so-called “settler attack” in the Binyamin region turned out to be a pre-planned Arab ambush using rocks, slings, and Molotov cocktails. One Jewish teenager was seriously wounded. A Jewish shepherd was murdered. But these are mere footnotes in a media narrative that demands villains—and always finds them in Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria.

Regavim, an Israeli NGO that monitors and pursues legal action in the Israeli court system against any construction lacking Israeli permits undertaken by Palestinians or Bedouins in Israel and in the West Bank, released a report titled "False Flags and Real Agendas." It lays bare the data shell game: Of the 8,332 so-called incidents of “settler violence” between 2016 and 2023, a whopping 2,047 involved settlers as victims. Of the remaining 6,285, 20% didn’t even take place in the West Bank. Over 1,600 cases were filed under such chilling crimes as “trespassing”—defined as Jews hiking. Another 2,000 had no injuries at all.

After filtering out the noise, Regavim found 833 incidents over seven years that might involve actual violence. Many of those were clashes with no way to determine who initiated them. In 117 cases, the supposed aggressors were Israeli security forces, not settlers. Another 59 involved both. And here’s the real kicker: several “victims” were in fact armed terrorists killed in the middle of attacking Jews.

Let’s recap. A Hamas terrorist guns down four Jews—including two minors—near Eli, and is killed by a passerby. The UN counts him as a victim of settler violence. A Palestinian man armed with explosives infiltrates a settlement and is shot. Victim. Another attempts a stabbing and is killed. Victim.

This isn’t data collection. It’s blood libel with Excel.

The myth of the Settler Menace has taken root in the global imagination. The new twist? Settlers aren’t just racist now. They’re anti-Christian.

Hence the viral posts: "Settlers attack Christian village! Burn down church! Shoot at residents!" All unverified. All inflammatory. All untrue.

Meanwhile, the real body count tells a different story. In 2024, at least 22 Israelis—civilians and soldiers—were murdered by Palestinian attackers in the West Bank and Jerusalem. In 2025, that number is already in the double digits—no UN spreadsheet for them.

Matan Peleg’s book: “A State for Sale: How Foreign Countries Interfere with Israeli Policy (Hebrew), similarly cites an IDF report that tallies 6,633 incidents of Palestinian terrorism against Jews in 2021; that’s roughly 24 times the yearly average documented in the OCHA data, which listed 2,047 cases over seven and a half years. Take 833, figure the Regavim report arrives at, and divide it by the number of years. In that case, we get an average of 110 cases of settler violence a year—a fraction of yearly Palestinian violent attacks.¹

And of course, the critics claim Israeli authorities turn a blind eye to settler violence. But the opposite is true: indictment rates for Jews in nationalist violence cases are three times higher than for Arabs. Police pursue complaints against settlers with zeal—so much so that most cases are dismissed as baseless. Many originate with NGOs and anarchist groups whose stated goal is to provoke incidents for global headlines.

And the clerics? Instead of lamenting the decimation of the Palestinian Christian community due to Hamas and Fatah intimidation, they blame the Jews. Patriarchs Pizzaballa and Theophilos speak of “systematic attacks” with all the gravitas of men who haven't read the reports—or worse, have and don’t care.

The truth is simpler, and far less convenient: Judea and Samaria are not plagued by bands of Jewish marauders. They are under siege from coordinated propaganda campaigns and premeditated acts of terror disguised as resistance. And every time the international community buys in—every time a journalist files a story without verifying a claim—they empower the actual aggressors.

Israel’s latest sin is defending Druze civilians from jihadist militias in southern Syria. António Guterres, ever the high priest of moral inversion, condemned the loss of life—without mentioning that the “civilians” were militants from al-Julani’s former al-Qaeda franchise. The Guardian dutifully declared “Israel launches bombing raids in Syria and Lebanon,” as if targeting terrorist strongholds and preventing regional ethnic cleansing were just acts of random malice. Axios, always eager to please whatever White House faction despises Netanyahu most this week, ran with anonymous quotes suggesting Trump’s allies are split over Bibi’s defense of Druze villages. Because what matters to these off-the-record aides is not being loyal to President Trump but fueling Tucker Carlson’s anti-semitic conspiracies.

This grotesque inversion— where Israel is falsely accused of targeting Christians while being attacked for defending the Druze minority in Syria isn’t just dishonest. It’s not just immoral. It’s laughably transparent. If it weren’t so pathetically obvious, it might even be dangerous.

But make no mistake: the goal of this campaign isn’t criticism. It’s conquest. It’s to do what neither Hamas, nor Iran, nor Hezbollah, nor even the UN and its NGO auxiliaries have managed to accomplish: bring Israel to its knees. Strip it of legitimacy. Starve it of allies. Reduce it from a sovereign nation to a pariah. The latest installment is using Taybeh to drive apart Christians and Jews who support Israel by seeking to portray Israeli settlers as hell-bent on wiping out the last remnant of Christian Arabs in the West Bank, when in fact, the Palestinian Islamists and the Palestinian Authority have completed the job.

Israel’s opponents are seeking to eviscerate Israel because they fear its power and potential. They are desperate. Bereft of ballistic missiles and military force, they are desperately launching as many lies as possible to bring down the Jewish state.

But they have failed. Indeed, the words of Isaiah about the Jewish state and Jewish people ring truer in this era than perhaps in any other: "your angry enemies lie there, confused and humiliated. Anyone who opposes you will die and come to nothing."

1. The Regavim report cites Shin Bet data from around the same time that counts 6,068 cases of serious Palestinian terrorism in 2020 through 2022, which notes only attacks that result in serious injuries and death. The IDF includes less serious cases and reports a total of 20,582.