They aren't "settlers" and they are overwhelmingly the victims of violence
Six hours before the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, Netanel Shukrun, a father of six, was killed when a terrorist opened fire on his car. Netanel used his last seconds of life to tell his son to run. An hour later, a terrorist tried to ram soldiers at a checkpoint. An hour after that, an Israeli who took a wrong turn into a village in the Hebron Hills was attacked and wounded. Forty minutes later, another attempted ramming targeted Israeli troops. Ten minutes after that, a vehicle with no license plates tried to run down two Israelis. Simply another average day in Judea and Samaria.
And people wonder why Israelis tire of the endless accusations of settler violence.
By August 11, the Foreign Ministry had counted 896 Palestinian terror attacks in Judea and Samaria since the start of 2026, with four Israelis murdered and 119 wounded. Over the first half of the year, the security establishment recorded 660 incidents of Jewish nationalist crime, in which six Palestinians were killed and 140 wounded. For the first time, the two columns look almost the same size, but only if you leave out the attacks that would have happened: in 2025 alone, the Shin Bet foiled 1,374 significant attacks, 717 of them shootings and 630 bombings.
Statistics do not justify violence, and this government’s loss of control over the territory is a case of criminal negligence and moral indifference. But for all the talk of how settler violence radicalizes Palestinians, you might expect someone to spare a word for the Palestinian violence that radicalized the settlers.
I do not expect Netanel Shukrun’s name to travel far. No matter how often Israelis point out that Jews in Judea and Samaria are in greater danger than Palestinians, sympathy only flows one way. The international press has settled on a story about the region, and a father murdered on his way home from a swim with his son is not part of it. If the killing is noticed at all, expect a long paragraph on settler violence. The implication, never stated outright, is that people like Netanel brought it on themselves.
So it is worth asking plainly: what did Netanel Shukrun do to deserve death? Was it the swim, or that ancient offense of being a Jew in the wrong place?
The liturgy of Yom Kippur is preoccupied with death. For 25 hours, Jews argue their case before God. They admit to arrogance, stubbornness and baseless hatred, and ask to be absolved and inscribed in the book of life for the coming year. Netanel Shukrun will not get a hearing. In the eyes of the world, he was sealed in the book of death for one unforgivable sin: he lived on the wrong side of the line.