Each week, the media pushes many narratives related to Israel and the Middle East. And each week, some are misleading. At HonestReporting, we know our readers are confronted by friends, family, colleagues and classmates who trust the spin they read and see. So each week, we will take a few of the week’s bigger stories and present the facts in a format to help you make the case for the truth.
Key Talking Points
- Dutch Luggage Searches: When a misread wine label can mean a year in prison, the Netherlands is not just boycotting settlements. It is deterring travel to Israel.
- Settler Violence Language: Crimes by a small group of extremists demand arrests and prosecutions, not language that brands an entire community as criminals.
- Google Maps Imagery: Buildings Hamas turned into military targets are evidence of Hamas’ strategy, not Israel’s intent.
The Netherlands Is Searching Travelers From Israel
On September 22, a new Dutch law took effect banning goods made in Israeli communities in the West Bank, eastern Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Days later, passengers arriving at Schiphol on an El Al flight from Tel Aviv were forced to run their luggage through customs scanners, and some had their luggage searched for anything made in the “illegal” communities.
The potential penalties are draconian: up to six years in prison or €103,000 in fines for deliberate violations, and up to a year in prison for unintentional ones.
This policy is discriminatory on its face. Products produced in neighboring Arab communities, or even by Arabs on adjacent streets, are perfectly legal. However, there is something larger at play here than a policy targeting settlements. The Dutch policy could have a major chilling effect on all travel to anywhere in Israel and thus result in a de facto boycott of tourism to Israel.
It is often difficult to know exactly where something is produced. This policy effectively criminalizes misreading a label or even purchasing something that isn’t clearly labeled. It also imposes harsh and unreasonable penalties that effectively equate a tourist misreading a Hebrew wine label with a criminal engaged in serious smuggling operations.
It is astonishing that a tourist who does not understand exactly which town produced a trinket could face a year in a Dutch prison.
Why would anyone take the risk of travel to Israel when they will be treated like a presumed criminal on their return?
Illegal Actions by “Settlers” in the West Bank Are Characterized as “Pogroms” or Government-Sanctioned
Violent actions in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) should be categorically condemned whether perpetrated by Arabs, Jews or anyone else. This is true whether or not the person lives in the West Bank and whether the intended victim is Israeli or Palestinian. All efforts should be made to maintain peace and quiet in the area.
All of that said, the highly inflammatory language around attacks by purported settlers is problematic and skews the reality of the situation.
The reality is that a small group of young extremists is taking the law into their own hands and perpetrating crimes, sometimes violent, usually against their Arab neighbors. The total number of injuries has been low, deaths almost nonexistent, and even property damage relatively minor.
That does not make their actions any more tolerable or acceptable, and they must be investigated, arrested, and fully prosecuted. However, that also does not make their actions a pogrom, or ethnic cleansing or genocide or any other inflammatory word designed to make their wholly illegal actions seem government-sanctioned or to stain the entire Israeli, or settlement, population by association.
Criminals should be treated as such. Almost all settlers are not criminals, do not engage in violent or harmful actions, and simply want to live peacefully in the land of their ancestors. They should not be demonized or dehumanized, and they should not be stigmatized based on the actions of a small problematic group from their community.
Imagery Now on Google Maps Is Being Used To Argue Israel Committed Genocide
The imagery that recently appeared on Google Maps is not new, and it is not evidence of a genocide occurring. It does not show that Israel engaged in indiscriminate or intentional attacks on the civilian population.
There have been tens of thousands of indiscriminate attacks in the last three years. Attacks with genocidal intent were carried out regularly, on October 7 and in the years since. None of these attacks were perpetrated from Israel. 100% were launched from Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Iran, targeting Israeli Jews, Arabs and Druze alike.
What the Google images show is the destruction of selected infrastructure in certain areas in Gaza as a result of a war that Gaza itself initiated. The extent of the damage can be explained by the fact that Hamas, and others, used residential, commercial and industrial infrastructure for military purposes.
Tunnel infrastructure extended below homes, schools, mosques and hospitals. Buildings were consistently found to be booby-trapped with explosives. Most of the devastation shown was caused by demolition by heavy construction equipment and explosives on the ground, almost always when buildings were already empty, not by indiscriminate aerial bombardment of still heavily populated neighborhoods.
Destruction of buildings, buildings used for military purposes, is not in any way, shape or form, an indication of a genocide occurring. Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people. In fact, the very low death rate in relation to the destruction of booby-trapped buildings and infrastructure demonstrates the exact opposite. The target was military infrastructure, not people.
The truth is this: Given the population density of Gaza and Israeli military capabilities, had Israel intended to commit a genocide after October 7, it would have been completed within a week. No satellite image of a destroyed building can show an intent that Israel’s own actions disprove.
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
