Excerpt from Liel Leibovitz in Tablet Magazine:
Let us, then, turn to the records of that notoriously Zionist agency [ed., sarcasm], the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, which has maintained a database on Israeli and Palestinian casualties in the “occupied Palestinian territory (OPT)” since 2008 and publishes regular “Humanitarian Situation Updates” and reports. The OCHA’s database and reports are used widely by the media, NGOs, and the Office of U.S. Security Coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA)—run by the partisan Lt. Col. Mike Fenzel until the end of 2025—which in turn briefed members of Congress and fed the violent-settler narrative.
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Once you study OCHA’s criteria for determining violence—as my colleague Gadi Taub did recently in Tablet—you learn a valuable lesson in creative methodology. For instance, what counts as “settler violence”? The answer, unbelievably, includes everything from any instance in which Israeli settlers were victims of violence, to every reported incident that ended with no injury or damage to property on either side, to every clash between Israeli police and Palestinians on the Temple Mount, even when precisely zero Israeli civilians are involved and even when said riots were sparked by the Palestinians.
And speaking of the Temple Mount, OCHA counts every single visit by a Jew to the site where the ancient temple once stood as an act of settler violence. Since I, too, make a point of ascending to the mountain—located, you’ll recall, right above the Kotel, smack in the heart of Jerusalem—according to the OCHA, that makes me, a Jew who simply wants to pray in the exact location where Abraham bound Isaac, a Very Violent Settler™.