In mid-August, two stories sat together in the Israel News section of the Jerusalem Post app. The first reported that a Jewish shepherd had been attacked by 30 masked Palestinian Arabs in Judea and Samaria, and that gunshots had been fired at an Israeli community. The second reported that Palestinian Arabs say settlers want to expel them and kill them, and that "Jewish extremists" had returned to Kusra. Two items, side by side, in a section that holds four.
Within a short time the shepherd was gone. Not buried, not demoted, gone from the section entirely. The Kusra piece remained pinned at the top of the list while newer articles were stacked beneath it, which means the editors made two separate decisions in the same window of time. They decided that a story about Arabs attacking a Jew had exhausted its news value in a matter of hours. They decided that a story about Jews as aspiring murderers had not.
That is not bias in the ordinary sense. Bias is a framing, a sympathetic quote placed high and an inconvenient fact placed low. What happened here is a prior judgment about what qualifies as an event at all. A Jewish shepherd assaulted by a murderous mob in his own pasture registers as an isolated occurrence. Palestinian Arabs alleging that their neighbors intend to exterminate them registers as a phenomenon, and phenomena earn placement. The paper decided which was which before either story was filed, and the decision does not bend to what actually happened on any given morning.
If that were the whole of it, one could call it careless editing. It is not the whole of it, and the reason is buried in the Jerusalem Post's own archive.
On June 19, 2025, the paper published a piece in its Settlement Affairs section under the headline "Fact, fiction, or both: A closer look at settler violence in the West Bank." The article reported on Regavim's 125 page study, "False Flags and Real Agendas," which obtained the underlying spreadsheet that the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs does not publish and examined its 8,332 entries covering January 2016 through April 2023.
The article quoted Naomi Kahn, director of Regavim's international division, stating that ninety eight percent of the recorded incidents involved no settlers, no violence, or did not occur in Judea and Samaria at all. It reported that the UN database counts Jews visiting the Temple Mount, supervised school visits to ancient sites, traffic accidents, road paving by the government, and Arabs shot while attempting to stab or shoot Jews.
It quoted Kahn's observation that nothing in the UN database is verified and nothing is corroborated, and her warning that the consequences are not rhetorical but material, running through sanctions and arms embargoes. It reported Regavim's finding, drawn from Israel Police data obtained under a freedom of information petition, that case closure rates for alleged Jewish nationalist crime track the national average for closures generally.
The Post published all of that. Its own reporter counted the pages. Given its prior and subsequent record of coverage on “settler violence", it's actually astonishing they published it at all - but here we are.
The paper went back to work as though none of it existed.
In the fourteen months since, the Post has covered settler violence at a pace approaching the weekly. In that coverage, OCHA figures appear as facts, sourced to the United Nations and passed to the reader without qualification. The paper’s own audit does not travel with them. The single substantial reappearance I can locate came earlier this month, in an analysis piece supplied by The Media Line rather than produced by the Post's own newsroom, and even there the reference arrived pre-neutralized by an editorial line assuring readers that Regavim's methodological criticism does not establish that most reported attacks were misclassified.
This is worse than ignorance, and it should be named accurately. Ignorance is a failure. What the Post has done is quarantine. The findings were admitted to the building, filed under a specialty column, framed as an open question rather than a result, and then sealed off from the reporting they bear on directly. The institution knows. The institution has decided that knowing will not be permitted to change anything.
Ask why. A newspaper that had genuinely absorbed the Regavim material would have to write differently. It would have to attribute rather than assert. It would have to note, each time it cited a UN incident count, that the underlying database has been examined line by line and found to be built on categories that do not mean what the label says they mean. That single sentence, repeated in the ordinary course of reporting, would change the register of every story. It would convert a settled fact into a contested claim, which is what it is. The Post is unwilling to pay that price, and the unwillingness is the tell.
Nor is the cost confined to wounded feelings in Judea and Samaria's communities,(and yes, they know there is a small, marginal group that has engaged in vandalism which the communities condemn). That UNdatabase is the evidentiary spine of European sanctions, British sanctions, asset freezes and travel bans imposed on Israeli citizens, on communities, on IDF units, and on Regavim itself. When an Israeli newspaper reproduces a narrative built on that spine while holding its own reporting on the spine's defects in a drawer, it is not covering the campaign. It is supplying the campaign with domestic credibility no foreign ministry could manufacture on its own.
Nothing serves those who wish to punish Jews in Judea and Samaria quite like a Jerusalem paper collusively confirming that the charges are sound.
They should be ashamed. They will not be. Shame requires believing you are in the business of telling readers what happened, and that is a business that seems to have been abandoned in this case.
