Over the weekend, a group of armed Israeli settlers in the West Bank staged an attack on American journalist and Drop Site News contributor Jasper Nathaniel and a group of Palestinians he was accompanying. Footage recorded by Nathaniel, a U.S. citizen, shows more than a dozen masked men chasing him and his group down a dirt road.
Already horrifying, the story soon became even more egregious. When Nathaniel contacted the U.S. Embassy to report the attack, he was told that his own government could not protect him. As independent journalist Jeremy Loffredo—who was recently detained by the IDF for the “crime” of doing journalism without military permission—observed on X:
If an American tourist was being chased and attacked by masked & armed government-backed terrorists in any country other than Israel, it would immediately become a major diplomatic crisis with wall-to-wall media coverage.
He’s absolutely right.
The episode Nathaniel documents is not an anomaly but part of what MAGA luminary Tucker Carlson calls America’s “ongoing humiliation ritual”—the decades-long pattern of Americans being detained, harassed, attacked, and even killed by Israeli settlers and soldiers with complete impunity.
Recall how, in 2022, the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper while wearing a press vest, an execution the Biden administration helped Israel bury. Just a few months ago, 20-year-old Saif Musallet, a U.S. citizen from Florida, was beaten to death by settlers in the West Bank while Israeli soldiers blocked medical aid from reaching him (The IDF says it was deescalating a conflict caused when rocks were thrown at the settlers). His killers remain free. With the unconditional support of a bipartisan majority of lawmakers in Washington, Israeli officials correctly believe that when they target Americans, they have nothing to fear.
The attack on Nathaniel by armed Israeli settlers is therefore not an isolated incident but routine behavior from an increasingly radicalized and fanatical society. For decades, even supposedly progressive foreign policy voices in Congress, like Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, have insisted these settlers are somehow separate from the “real Israel.” But a growing number of Americans recognize that argument for the fraud it has always been. The settlements are sadly not an aberration, but an expression of mainstream Israeli values that are completely incompatible with our own.
As the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has documented, settler violence is state violence. Settlers burn homes and olive groves, attack farmers with clubs and guns, and terrorize Palestinian villages under the direct protection of Israeli occupation forces—with total confidence that they will never face punishment.
While settler violence is condoned and even facilitated by the Israeli government, it is antithetical to the basic moral tenets codified in all Abrahamic religions, including Judaism. Evidently, the elementary “thou shalt nots” simply do not apply to Israeli settlers, who steal, burn, and kill with state protection.
The moral bankruptcy at the core of Israel’s expansionist national project is why a global propaganda apparatus is necessary to sustain it: Without that apparatus, Americans would quickly see that their own government is funding and providing cover for the kind of violence they deplore. Americans—especially conservative factions—hold sacred private property rights, self-government, the rule of law, and the belief that all are equal under it. Though it is hailed as the “only democracy in the Middle East,” the state of Israel denies those basic God-given liberties to Palestinians in the occupied territories.
As a result of viral videos like Nathaniel’s, an increasing number of Americans now view Israel and its society as violent and extremist—and Israel, along with its foreign lobby, knows it. That is why, as Drop Site News reported, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs has commissioned polling firms to conduct surveys, focus groups, and message-testing aimed at distorting American perception of Israelis and Palestinians. The “best tactic,” to combatting the catastrophic PR problem created by Israel’s genocide and livestreamed assault on Palestinian life, according to the Mark Penn / Stagwell research, is to foment fear of “radical Islam” and “jihadism,” framing Israel as a Western bulwark against barbarism.
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Even Tucker Carlson—who has done more than any major broadcaster to expose the power of the Israel lobby and question the foundations of America’s alliance with it—prefaces his critiques by saying he “likes Israel” or “doesn’t care about Israel.”
But to those who say that they don’t care—that Israel’s wars and expanding settlements have nothing to do with us—the U.S. has not merely supported Israel’s repression of the Palestinians but, by gifting it weapons and shielding it with diplomatic cover, has become an active participant and co-signer of the Greater Israel project. Nearly every bomb that kills civilians in Gaza was “Made in the USA,” while American tax dollars fund the rifles that kill journalists in the West Bank. Even Israel’s vaunted Iron Dome air defense system—backed by both parties in Congress, from Republican Ted Cruz to Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—grants Israel license to wage wars of aggression, intercepting any retaliation so that it can bomb with impunity, confident that no consequence will ever reach it.
By underwriting this arrangement, we implicitly endorse not only Israel’s aggression abroad but its fanatical social order at home. Across the Middle East, people see Israel—rightly or not—as an extension of American power. Every missile strike, dead Palestinian child, and settler ambush feeds the perception that America is an enemy of Mideast Muslims. As long as that arrangement continues, Israel’s impunity will remain our humiliation—and its moral rot will be our own.
