Gershon Baskin’s recent harangue against “settler violence” and the Israeli government contains not even a hint of serious analysis. It is a sordid exercise in projection that repackages ancient antisemitic tropes.
In fact, Baskin peddles two blood libels: the “Jewish settler violence” blood libel and the “Jewish right-wing extremist politicians” blood libel.
Both aim to demonize and delegitimize more than half a million Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria and to facilitate their ultimate removal through escalating diplomatic pressure, sanctions, boycotts, territorial strangulation, and terrorism, making the heart of the Land of Israel Judenrein.
Whereas medieval libels accused Jews of poisoning wells or murdering non-Jews for ritual purposes, today’s version is a carefully constructed inversion of reality amplified by hostile governments, foreign-funded NGOs, the UN, the EU, and fringe Israeli voices, such as Baskin’s, who accuse Jewish civilians in Judea and Samaria of waging a systematic “one-sided war” on Palestinians and on Israeli democracy itself.
Baskin has carved out a special place for himself in the pantheon of mouthpieces for hostile foreign forces that seek to terminate the Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria.
His credentials are outstanding: his Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information received millions in funding from foreign governmental aid agencies, including Sweden’s Sida, the UK’s DFID, the Netherlands’ DGIS, Swiss Development Aid, and USAID, to promote a two-state “solution” that would mean the destruction of Jewish communities – first in Judea and Samaria, and Jerusalem, and then in the rest of Israel.
Baskin also serves as co-director of the Holy Land Bond, a UK-registered impact investment fund dedicated to “Palestinian housing… in East Jerusalem” – the capital of Israel, lest someone need reminding.
It should therefore come as no surprise that Baskin’s “opinion” is proffered in the perverse language of inherent Jewish supremacism, messianic conspiracy theories, and collective guilt for isolated incidents of Jewish misdeeds. These are the classic tools of antisemitic demonization.
The facts that might easily disprove Baskin’s claims are out there, but he has absolutely no relationship with them: hard data collected and analyzed by Regavim in a report titled “False Flags and Real Agendas” takes apart the prime sources of this blood libel, examining the UN’s reporting of over 8,300 “settler violence” incidents from 2016 to early 2023 to reveal the fraud.
Roughly 90% of reports are outright fabrications, malicious misrepresentations, or irrelevant complaints that have nothing to do with violence, nothing to do with “settlers,” or nothing to do with Judea or Samaria (the “West Bank”).
Refuting Baskin's claims
Baskin's claim that Israeli democracy is on the brink of collapse also holds no water. The rate of indictments against Jews accused of violence is significantly higher than against all other types of offenses, and the rate of crime – of any kind – is lower in Judea and Samaria than anywhere in Israel and among the lowest in the western world.
In stark contrast, Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) data documents thousands of Palestinian terror attacks annually – stabbings, shootings, Molotov cocktails, vehicular rammings, stonings, and more – that have killed and wounded hundreds of Israelis.
Decrying the “messianic takeover” of Jewish extremists is rich when it comes from someone who seems never to have heard of jihad, Pay-for-Slay, or “From the River to the Sea.”
Nor has Baskin ever heard of the massive program of illegal land grabs that the Palestinian Authority and its European benefactors have been perpetrating against the State of Israel for decades – all well-documented in Regavim reports.
The PA’s unrelenting violations of international law – all of them funded and defended by the same European concerns that fund Baskin’s various enterprises, as well as Peace Now, B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence, Rabbis for Human Rights, and other Israeli nonprofits of their self-hating ilk – have resulted in a fully armed, commando-ready army at our doorstep, poised for the next October 7.
If this God forbid comes to pass, it will be the culmination of decades of Arab rejectionism enabled by voices like Baskin’s that prefer Palestinian “state-building” over confronting our enemies’ eliminationist ideology.
Baskin’s selective vision is not limited to the facts; it extends to the perversely selective definition of Judaism he advocates.
“We are losing the Judaism of human dignity,” he lamented, without any regard for the rights and dignity of the overwhelmingly law-abiding, idealistic Jewish pioneers of Judea and Samaria or for the elements of Judaism he prefers to ignore altogether, particularly the Divine commandment to reclaim and settle the Land of Israel.
Baskin’s universalist quasi-Judaism seeks to sever our covenantal roots, to supplant our national heritage, and to erase the redemptive purpose of our return to our ancestral homeland.
The real war on Israeli democracy is not being waged by a small group of hotheaded Jewish extremists; it is being waged by foreign governments and their NGO proxies who weaponize “international law” against Jews, fund the quiet Arab takeover of Israel’s heartland, and demonize Jews and the Jewish State while excusing Palestinian rejectionism and terror.
For the majority of Israelis, the lesson of October 7, 2023, is that excusing or ignoring Arab aggression is immoral and dangerous. Baskin’s op-ed exemplifies the ideological pathology behind the blood libel, and it behooves each of us to call it by name.
The writer is a diplomatic liaison of Regavim.