Illegal Israeli settlement outposts are seen from Palestinian bedouin Nayef Kaabnah's property on the edge of Taybeh, the only Christian village in the West Bank, on, August 27, 2026, according to reports. Debbie Hill/UPI/Shutterstock See more of our coverage in your search results.
Add The New York Post on Google Britain announced this week that it will ban imports from Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria and sanction companies that help those communities grow.
France and Canada are following its lead, while other European countries are considering similar restrictions.
Their case rests heavily on the claims that Jewish settlements in what they call the “West Bank” are illegal and that “settler violence” has reached epidemic proportions.
Before governments start boycotting Jews for where they live, we ought to take a hard look at both claims.
Start with the land itself. “Judea and Samaria” are ancient names for the Jewish heartland, found in the Bible and familiar to Christians around the world.
Israel liberated the territory from illegal Jordanian occupation in the Six-Day War of 1967, after Jordan attacked Israel.
So the claim that Jewish settlements there are illegal are at best arguable and at worst flat-out wrong.
The Oslo Accords later divided it into Areas A, B and C, leaving Area C under full Israeli control pending a final accord that the Palestinian Authority never agreed to.
Instead, Palestinian terrorists murdered more than 1,000 Israelis in suicide bombings, shootings and other attacks.
Today, hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jews live in Judea and Samaria alongside Palestinian communities where terrorist organizations continue to operate and Israelis can risk their lives simply by making a wrong turn.
In 2024 alone, Palestinian terrorists carried out more than 6,300 attacks against Jews in Judea and Samaria.
That included rock-throwing, Molotov cocktails, roadside bombs, concrete dropped on passing cars and lasers aimed at blinding drivers.
Twenty-seven Israelis were killed, more than 300 wounded.
Yet listen to the international debate and you would think the great security crisis in Judea and Samaria is “settler violence.”
Some Jewish residents do commit violence. They should be arrested and prosecuted.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demonstrated that again recently after masked men attacked an NBC News crew and a Palestinian woman.
He condemned the attackers within hours, while Israeli forces confiscated vehicles linked to suspects.
But the statistics used to construct a much larger narrative are purposefully twisted.
Much of the reporting relies on a United Nations database treated as a running scoreboard of settler crimes.
A 2025 study by Israeli security expert Gabi Siboni compared the UN’s count of roughly 1,800 settler-related incidents with Israeli law enforcement’s numbers for the same period.
Police opened 967 investigations; 61 led to indictments.
The Kohelet Policy Forum, examining an earlier version of the UN data, found it included confrontations with Israeli security forces and events involving no violence at all.
We saw the same rush to judgment last year when Jews were accused of torching a 5th-century church in the Christian village of Taybeh.
There was a fire nearby, but the church wasn’t touched. Israeli investigators found no damage, while video showed young Jewish men from a neighboring farm running toward the flames with firefighting equipment.
The fire was real, but the story built on top of it wasn’t.
So, yes, condemn violence and hooliganism. Arrest the perpetrators. Prosecute them.
But don’t turn the crimes of a few into an indictment of hundreds of thousands of Jews while treating vastly more numerous Palestinian attacks against those Jews as background noise.
Britain says its new policy isn’t a boycott of Israel, only of Jews and businesses in Judea and Samaria. So Jews can live and do business in certain places but not in others.
We’ve seen that in the past. That’s called a ghetto.
Florida Rep. Randy Fine has already warned that British companies complying with such a boycott could themselves face exclusion under Florida’s anti-boycott law.
Other states and the federal government should follow suit.
Europe has a long and ugly history of deciding where Jews may live and with whom people may do business.
Before Britain and its neighbors head down that road again, they ought to check both their own history and their facts.
Bruce Pearl is the former head basketball coach at Auburn University and chairman of the board of the US Israel Education Association.
