Bret Stephens is one of the most respected defenders of Israel in American journalism. That is precisely why his recent New York Times column on “settler terrorism" is so damaging. It is also far from reflecting the truth.
Stephens argues that anyone concerned about Israel should condemn anti-Palestinian Arab violence by Jews in Judea and Samaria. On that point, he is right. Any Jews who burn mosques, attack innocent Arabs, destroy property or take the law into their own hands should be arrested, prosecuted and punished. Such conduct is criminal, morally indefensible and strategically harmful. No serious defense of Israel requires defending lawlessness. Almost all Isrraelis, including those in Judea and Samaria, agree to that.
But Stephens does something else. He presents the few episodes of Jewish violence largely outside the environment of Palestinian Arab terrorism in which Israelis in Judea and Samaria live. He then uses this one-sided picture to reinforce his continued belief in Palestinian Arab statehood. The result is not moral clarity. It is moral judgment without perspective-and political prescription without evidence.
Because Stephens is widely regarded as a principled defender of Israel, his words carry unusual authority. When he adopts the familiar libel of “violent settlers" confronting essentially passive Palestinian Arabs, he does more than criticize criminals. He gives credibility to a narrative that turns a small number of Jewish offenders into representatives of an entire population while pushing Palestinian Arab violence to the margins.
The Problem Is Real-but Stephens Distorts Its Scale
Stephens cites Israeli security data showing 867 incidents of Jewish “nationalistic crime" in 2025, up from 682 in 2024. That increase is serious and should not be minimized. Yet the same Israeli data, reported by The Times of Israel, provide context Stephens neglects: security officials estimate that approximately 300 Jewish extremists are involved, with about 70 considered the hard core behind the most serious attacks. The government says 150 are involved. And of the 867 recorded incidents, 128 were classified as severe. Many are 'taking the law into your own hands' responses to Arab attacks by youth who have had it with Arab terror, wrong as their actions are. And in a population of half a million, whether of Jews or non-Jews, there will be law breakers who must be apprehended.
Israel’s security establishment recorded 660 attacks by Jewish extremists against Palestinian Arabs during the first half of 2026, as well as 45 attacks against Israeli security forces. That is a surge that makes decisive law enforcement more urgent. It does not, however, convert an incident count into a population count or justify collective guilt.
Three hundred offenders are three hundred too many. But they do not represent the approximately half-million Jews living in Judea and Samaria. Even 1,000 offenders would amount to roughly two-tenths of one percent of that population. To attach the conduct of a few hundred extremists to the word “settler" is to place an entire civilian population in the dock. They are not "settlers" anyway. They are Jews living in their ancestral homeland.
The category itself is also imprecise. The total of 867 includes a broad range of “nationalistic crime," while the Palestinian Arab figures distinguish major attacks from stone-throwing and firebomb incidents. Comparisons must therefore be made carefully. Yet even the same security report Stephens invokes recorded 57 Palestinian Arab terrorist attacks in 2025 that killed 20 people, along with another 1,015 incidents of stone-throwing and firebombing. Israeli forces also arrested 3,486 wanted Palestinian Arabs and seized 1,373 weapons.
Stephens finds space for the first set of figures but not the second. That omission fundamentally changes the picture and his veracity.
The Violence He Leaves Out
The events of the past several days illustrate the danger of reporting this conflict through a single moral lens.
Near the Palestinian Arab village of Tal, the Israeli military said civilians hiking in a Palestinian Arab-controlled area were attacked. It was Area B where Israel is in charge of security and the group of hikers had coordinated their plans with security authorities. Palestinian Arab officials said armed Israelis approached homes and initiated the confrontation. This was proven to be untrue. Video showed a Palestinian Arab (later identified as a sheikh) grabbing an Israeli weapon; the military said he then opened fire. Two Israelis were killed. Four Palestinians were killed in the ensuing shooting.
Some have claimed the Israelis should not have entered the area. But entry does not confer a license to attack or kill. Nor does presenting the incident simply as another case of settler aggression.
That same week, four Palestinian Arabs were arrested in connection with the assault of an off-duty Israeli soldier near Susya and the theft of his rifle. Near Itamar, a 51-year-old Israeli who went to help extinguish a fire was seriously wounded in a Palestinian Arab stabbing attack; in a separate incident near Ganim, an Israeli soldier was stabbed. Seven Palestinian Arab suspects were also arrested after an Israeli was injured after they initiated a violent confrontation near a farm outside Beitar Illit.
These events do not excuse the retaliatory attacks that followed the Tal confrontation. Israelis reportedly set fire to mosques, vandalized Palestinian Arab property and left revenge graffiti. Israeli security forces properly condemned those acts and opened investigations. Revenge is not self-defense, collective punishment is not justice, and a mosque is not a legitimate target.
But that is precisely the point. The reality is a dangerous cycle involving Palestinian Arab terrorism, local confrontations, Jewish vigilantism, retaliation and political exploitation. To extract only Jewish attacks from that cycle and label the totality “settler terrorism" is not analysis. It is selection. Minimal research on Stephen's part would have revealed why Palestinian Arabs are attacking farms and hilltops settled by Israelis - they prevent the PA from implementing Fayyad's detailed plan for isolating Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.
Melanie Phillips has described this process as turning “Jewish victimisation into Jewish aggression." Her formulation identifies the distortion. Palestinian Arab attacks are treated as individual and episodic; Jewish attacks are treated as collective and explanatory. A Palestinian Arab assailant is a Palestinian Arab assailant. A Jewish assailant becomes proof of what “the settlers," Israel’s government and sometimes Zionism itself supposedly are.
This double standard does not merely defame law-abiding Israelis. It also obscures the security environment in which they live: shootings, stabbings, vehicle attacks, stone-throwing, firebombing, agricultural theft, arson and attempted infiltrations by Palestinian Arabs. A journalist may condemn Jewish violence absolutely without pretending that it arises in a vacuum.
A Political Letter Is Not a Neutral Security Assessment
Stephens relies heavily on a letter to President Donald Trump from the self-titled Commanders for Israel’s Security, issued in the name of hundreds of retired Israeli security officials and led by former deputy IDF chief of staff and Labor Party member Matan Vilnai. The letter warns that violence could ignite the region and alleges that members of the Israeli government shield Jewish extremists from law enforcement, an accusation they deny.
Its warning should be taken seriously.
Yet the letter is also a political intervention by an organization with a defined anti-Netanyahu policy agenda. Military rank does not transform political judgment into revealed truth. Retired generals may be knowledgeable, patriotic and profoundly mistaken. Israel’s history provides ample evidence of senior security officials misjudging Palestinian Arab intentions, the durability of deterrence and the consequences of territorial withdrawals.
Stephens treats the letter, written during an election period, as proof of his thesis rather than as one side of a political and security dispute. Respect for expertise does not require surrendering independent judgment.
The Non Sequitur of Palestinian Statehood
Stephens concludes by writing, “It’s why I still believe in a Palestinian state."
Why should violence by a few hundred Jewish extremists establish the wisdom of creating a sovereign Palestinian state? The conclusion does not follow from the premise.
Law enforcement and statehood are separate questions. Israel should suppress Jewish vigilantism because it is criminal and dangerous. But whether a Palestinian Arab state would live peacefully beside Israel depends on Palestinian Arab institutions, political culture, security control and acceptance of Jewish national rights-not on whether Israeli police successfully arrest Jewish hooligans.
The historical record must be stated accurately. It would be wrong to claim that no Arab has ever recognized Israel. Egypt, Jordan and the countries that joined the Abraham Accords have done so. In 1993, the PLO formally recognized “the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security."
The unresolved question is more fundamental: Have Palestinian Arab national institutions accepted Jewish sovereignty as legitimate, permanent and the end of the conflict?
The answer remains no. Mahmoud Abbas has repeatedly refused to recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. In May 2026, he again declared that the Palestinian Arab refugee issue must be resolved through “return and compensation." A Palestinian Arab state alongside an unextinguished claim by millions of Palestinian Arabs and their descendants to settle within Israel is not a two-state solution. It is a Palestinian Arab state plus a continuing mechanism for dismantling the Jewish one.
Hamas is even clearer. Its 2017 policy document accepts a state on the 1967 lines as a possible “formula of national consensus," but refuses to recognize Israel and retains the goal of liberating all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The PLO’s foundational 1968 charter declared armed struggle the only route to “liberate Palestine" and rejected Jewish national ties to the land. The PLO’s 1993 recognition was important, but three decades of incitement, rejected compromises and unresolved final claims make it impossible to treat a diplomatic letter as proof of a settled Palestinian Arab acceptance of Jewish sovereignty.
The current political facts are no more reassuring. The Palestinian Authority has held no presidential election since 2005 and no legislative election since 2006, when Hamas won. It does not govern Gaza and has no monopoly on force. An October 2025 Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research poll found that 69 percent opposed disarming Hamas even if disarmament were required to prevent renewed war. Sixty-nine percent opposed a demilitarized Palestinian state coupled with normalization, and 41 percent chose armed struggle as the most effective route to statehood.
These figures do not prove that every Palestinian Arab rejects coexistence. They prove that the political, institutional and ideological prerequisites for peaceful statehood do not presently exist.
Perspective Is Not an Excuse. It Is a Requirement.
Jewish criminals in Judea and Samaria must be stopped. Israel should apply the law consistently, protect innocent Palestinian Arabs, reject revenge attacks and remove political impediments to prosecution. Jewish ethics and Israeli security demand nothing less.
But perspective is not an excuse for wrongdoing. It is the minimum requirement for understanding it.
Bret Stephens condemns real Jewish crimes, but he embeds them in a false picture: Palestinian Arab violence recedes into the background, a few hundred Jewish extremists become “the settlers," and their crimes somehow become an argument for granting sovereign power to a divided Palestinian Arab polity in which Hamas remains armed and popular.
That is not a defense of Zionism. It is a dangerous confusion of moral accountability with strategic surrender.
Stephens’s reputation makes the column more damaging, not less. Readers who would dismiss the same indictment from Israel’s habitual enemies may accept it from him as a balanced judgment. Yet balance cannot be achieved by conceding a distorted narrative and adding a brief condemnation of the other side.
Israel must enforce the law against Jews who attack Arabs. It must also refuse to let the crimes of a tiny minority erase the sustained violence directed at Jews, delegitimize Jewish life in Judea and Samaria, or become the latest pretext for creating a state that has not demonstrated either the capacity or the will to live permanently beside the Jewish one.
Moral clarity without perspective is not clarity. It is blindness.
Notes and Sources
[^1]: Emanuel Fabian, (https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-settler-violence-rose-by-27-in-2025-severe-attacks-spiked-by-over-50/).
[^2]: Reuters, [“Israel launches military operation after deadly clash near Palestinian village," July 24, 2026](https://www.reuters.com/world/one-killed-two-injured-shooting-incident-west-bank-2026-07-24/).
[^3]: Ynet, [“Palestinian attackers beat an off-duty IDF soldier and steal his rifle near Susya," July 27, 2026](https://www.ynetnews.com/article/h1i11kdshzx).
[^4]: Emanuel Fabian, [“2 Israelis hurt in separate stabbings in West Bank," *The Times of Israel*, July 23, 2026](https://www.timesofisrael.com/man-seriously-wounded-in-stabbing-near-west-bank-outpost-palestinian-attackers-killed/).