The U.S. State Department has included extensive reporting on alleged "settler attacks" on Arabs in Judea and Samaria in its annual terrorism report, marking a shift in how the State Department handles the issue after the end of the Trump administration.
The 2020 report on terrorist violence, released Thursday, includes three paragraphs reporting on alleged acts of "settler violence", the most it has included in years.
The incidents have become a point of contention between the Biden administration and the government of Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, disrupting efforts by both sides to keep relations on an even keel.
Violent attacks by both Jewish settlers and Palestinian Arabs have increased over the past year, according to the report.
A 25-year-old Israeli Jew was ambushed and killed in his car by Arab terrorists on Thursday.
The Israel-Judea and Samaria section of the 2020 State Department report begins, as it has for years, with an accounting of Palestinian Arab terrorist attacks on Israelis and notes the cooperation between Palestinian Authority and Israeli forces in preventing the attacks.
Then it shifts to reporting on alleged attacks by Israeli Jews on Palestinian Arabs or their property, citing claims by left-wing non-governmental organizations in Israel.
“Israelis living in the West Bank also committed a variety of physical attacks and property crimes against Palestinians, some of which caused serious injury, according to Israeli human rights organizations and media reports,” the report said.
The reports on allegations of settler violence under the Trump administration were never longer than a paragraph, sometimes only two sentences. Moreover, the Trump administration stopped citing human rights groups in its second report, for the year 2017.
The report issued last year, for the year 2019, removed the word “settler” entirely. Trump administration officials, including former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and former ambassador to Israel David Friedman, sought to bring State Department nomenclature.
The Biden administration’s return to citing human rights groups for information and statistics is significant given Israel’s decision this year to ban six Palestinian non-governmental organizations from operating.
Israeli officials have said that the Biden administration’s focus on "settler violence" is “obsessive,” The Jerusalem Post reported this week. But one Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the Bennett government was not concerned that the Biden administration was overly concerned with the issue.
Officials of the Biden and Bennett governments are endeavoring to keep any bickering behind closed doors, wishing to avoid the open confrontations that marked the 12 years that Benjamin Netanyahu was prime minister.
The reporting on alleged attacks by Israelis against Arabs in Judea and Samaria also noted that Israeli law enforcement was often the victim of settler attacks and noted Israeli efforts to constrain the phenomenon.
1 comment:
The filthy Treasonous Communist America hating DemonRats and that demented Alzheimer diseased treasonous filthy sewer rat sitting in the White House, not only want to destroy their own country and change it into a Marxist socialist hell like a Venezuela or Cuba. But also to destroy Israel and all of western civilization.
These evil monsters are a bigger danger to the world than all of the terrorist organization combined .
These monsters must be destroyed and eradicated exactly just the Nazis were 76 years ago
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