US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee struck a very different tone on Monday than the one he used a week earlier. After a terrorist stabbed an Israeli in Samaria, Huckabee wrote on X that the attack “won’t get the international attention that attacks on Palestinians receive, but it’s a daily occurrence that Israelis have to live with,” adding a prayer for the “Peace of Jerusalem.” IDF soldiers killed the terrorist responsible. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “No terrorist has a hiding place,” and commended the troops who “engaged the terrorist and eliminated the terrorist who carried out the attack in Samaria.” Defense Minister Israel Katz went further, warning that any attempt by terrorists to stage an Oct. 7-style invasion of Israeli communities or troops in Judea and Samaria would trigger “an all-out war.”
That was a strikingly different Huckabee than the one who, six days earlier, stood in the Arab town of Turmus Ayya and pronounced Jewish residents of the region terrorists.
On September 5, Huckabee visited Turmus Ayya and met with Palestinian Americans who told him that local Jews were harassing and intimidating them. He left convinced. He posted a video of Jewish men driving a security vehicle near the village, describing what he had heard as “criminal & terrorist actions” carried out by “a band of trespassers who brazenly roam through property of lawful property owners.”
The men in that video were not trespassers. One of them was providing security for his own community.
Amishav Melet, a Jewish resident of the Shiloh-area communities, identified himself on X as the driver of the vehicle Huckabee filmed. A local shepherd had reported unusual vehicle traffic near the edge of Turmus Ayya, in an area where Jewish residents say they have suffered repeated arson and attacks. Melet drove out to check, notifying the IDF first, as security protocol requires. “Well, that was me,” he wrote to Huckabee after Shabbat ended. “I was the driver of the Ranger you filmed.”
Melet did not stop at correcting the record on his own role. He told Huckabee that Turmus Ayya has monuments honoring men Israel considers terrorists, that local officials and educators there have documented links to incitement and violence against Jews, and that Jewish residents of the Shiloh area have logged hundreds of attacks against them over the past year, including stone-throwing, arson, and shootings. He disputed footage that local ambulance personnel had shown Huckabee, saying it had been edited to remove the moment an ambulance blocked an IDF vehicle while soldiers were being stoned, forcing the soldiers to extricate themselves and clip the ambulance in the process. Melet identified himself as a bereaved brother; his brother Benayahu was killed by terrorists in Samaria weeks earlier while defending hikers from attack.
Former US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman also pushed back on Huckabee’s framing, opening his response with warmth before delivering a pointed warning. “To my dear friend Mike Huckabee,” Friedman wrote. “No one doubts where your heart is. Your support for Israel is unwavering and historic.” He then challenged the premise driving international coverage of the region. “There is violence in Judea and Samaria; there has been for many years,” Friedman wrote, “but Jews don’t wake up in the morning saying ‘I’m going to go kill a Palestinian today.'” He noted that the opposite is demonstrably false: hundreds of Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria have been murdered by Palestinian terrorists. Friedman argued that most Palestinian residents of the region supported the September 11 and October 7 attacks and back Hamas, and that Jewish violence, where it occurs, happens overwhelmingly in the context of self-defense by isolated farms and communities facing repeated Arab attacks. “Jews need to defend themselves,” he wrote. “Some acts of defense are debatable, some may be inappropriate. But they are acts of defense nonetheless against ruthless thugs that simply refuse to live in peace on any terms with their Jewish neighbors.”
Friedman also flagged something distinct about the Turmus Ayya visit itself: the emphasis on the American citizenship of the Palestinian residents Huckabee met. Turmus Ayya has an unusually large population of Palestinian Authority Arabs holding US passports, and Friedman argued that citizenship and imagery are being deliberately folded into the campaign against Jewish communities. “The Palestinian-Americans who had no difficulty building beautiful houses in the area are now draping American flags on their houses so that attacks against them, which they instigate, can be filmed as attacks against America,” he wrote. “It’s all a cynical campaign and its roots go back more than a century.”
Friedman did not dispute that genuine wrongdoing by Jews damages Israel’s international standing. But he rejected the idea that this justifies leaving Jewish communities undefended, and he warned that labeling Jews who fight back as “terrorists” hands a victory to the same anti-Israel campaign Huckabee has spent years opposing. “Unfortunately, labeling the Jews who fight back as ‘terrorists’ is a win for the anti-Israel PR machine who then create a moral equivalency between both sides,” he wrote. Huckabee had said Saturday that any Jews committing real violence represent only a tiny minority of the population living in Judea and Samaria. Friedman’s answer was that the qualifier will not survive contact with the media. “Your correct observation that the Jews committing acts of violence are a tiny fraction of the total Jewish population is a distinction entirely lost on the media, who have a false narrative to uphold.”
This was not the first time Huckabee had been misled. In August, after Israeli settlers surrounded the Qusra home of a Palestinian American named Loui Ridi, Huckabee called the siege “a horrific act of terror” and told Reuters that those responsible could face US sanctions, invoking the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not steal.” Days before the Turmus Ayya visit, arsonists torched a mosque and spray-painted Huckabee’s name on the wall along with a note claiming credit “from the terrorist.” Huckabee responded, “You admitted who you are; you’re terrorists.” He estimated that of the roughly half a million Israelis living in Judea and Samaria, the men behind such attacks represent “a very tiny minority.”
Each time, Huckabee has accepted the first account he heard as the full account. Each time, the fuller picture told a different story. That pattern fits neatly into something much bigger than one ambassador’s misjudgment: a documented, years-long campaign to manufacture the appearance of rampant “settler violence” where the data show something else entirely.
Journalist Amit Segal, one of Israel’s most influential political commentators, laid out the numbers in a widely read analysis. Citing research by Dr. Michael Wolfowicz, a criminologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Faculty of Law, Segal examined a United Nations database recording 5,656 incidents of “settler violence” against Palestinians between 2016 and 2022. Of those, 1,600 occurred in Jerusalem, and almost all of them involved Jews ascending the Temple Mount or police confronting Arab rioters there. Jerusalem is not a settlement, and Jewish ascent to the Temple Mount is lawful.
The remaining incidents fare no better under scrutiny. When Muhammad Abd al-Karim Marshoud attempted to stab Israeli civilians in Ma’ale Adumim in April 2018 and died of his wounds the next day, the UN database logged his shooting and his death as two separate acts of settler violence. When 30-year-old Yotam Ovadia was stabbed to death by a Palestinian terrorist in 2018, the UN recorded his killer’s neutralization as an act of settler violence too. Traffic accidents in which Israelis struck Palestinian pedestrians were counted the same way. Segal’s conclusion, once the fabrications and mischaracterizations are stripped away: roughly twenty genuinely violent incidents a month remain, most of them mutual and many reported only by Palestinian sources with no independent verification. Compare that to the IDF’s own figures: 25,257 Palestinian terror attacks on Israelis in Judea and Samaria between 2019 and 2022 alone, a rate exceeding 500 a year, a number that climbed to 763 last year.
The Regavim Movement reached the same conclusion through a different route. Its 125-page report, “False Flags and Real Agendas,” analyzed the same UN database that feeds foreign governments and international media their information on the region. Regavim found that more than 98% of incidents classified as “settler violence” were, in fact, clashes between Arabs and IDF soldiers in which no Israeli civilian was present. Many of the remaining incidents were cases of Jews acting in self-defense, or terrorists killed or wounded mid-attack, or lawful infrastructure work carried out by the State of Israel in Area C, or peaceful, supervised visits by Jews to the Temple Mount and historic sites. The report also found that Israel Police data show over-enforcement against Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria alongside a strikingly low rate of enforcement against nationalist crimes committed by Arabs, even in cases involving serious or life-threatening violence.
Regavim Director General Meir Deutsch put the purpose of the campaign in stark terms: “The Palestinian Authority and advocates of a Palestinian state in the heart of the Land of Israel are not only de-legitimizing the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel, they are legitimizing violence and sanctioning bloodshed of Israeli soldiers and citizens.” Deutsch added that after years without pushback, “the time has come to tear away the mask of lies.”
Huckabee himself supplied the clearest description of what his own credulity rewards. Speaking in Turmus Ayya, he explained his approach to diplomacy in terms borrowed from raising children and training dogs: “If there is a behavior that you want more of, you reward the behavior, and you get more of that behavior.” By that same logic, an American ambassador who broadcasts unverified accusations against Jewish communities, based on a single village’s narrative and a misidentified security patrol, is rewarding exactly the campaign that Segal, Wolfowicz, and Regavim have already exposed. He is not the first American official to fall for it. He should be the first to stop.
