2025 was 'deadliest' year for antisemitic attacks in over 30 years, report finds
Anti-Defamation League SVP of International Affairs Marina Rosenberg explains how antisemitism has become normalized as violent attacks have plagued Jewish communities around the world.
Let's call it what it was: masked settlers ambushing an NBC News crew and local Palestinians in the West Bank village of Jalud is an indefensible, unacceptable criminal act. This wasn't a "clash." It was an assault on journalists doing their jobs and people going about their daily lives.
Prime Minister Netanyahu condemned the attack, calling it a "criminal act of violence" committed by "a handful of rioters" who "harm Israel's standing in the world." Israeli security forces have confiscated three vehicles and opened an investigation — as Netanyahu called upon them to arrest those involved and deal with them to the full extent of the law. Sadly, this is not the first time, and Israel must show zero tolerance for such behavior by a lawless fringe — with arrests, prosecutions and prison sentences.
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Masked Israeli settlers attacked an NBC News crew on Saturday in the West Bank. (NBC/screen shot)
But there's another important story here, and it's about the press itself. For over two years, Hamas and Gaza dominated nearly every broadcast, every U.N. session, every campus protest. That unparalleled coverage eclipsed the humanitarian crisis in Sudan, where the number of people in dire need of help is estimated at over 33 million (!) with close to 12 million people displaced from their homes.
However, even as the war in Gaza came to an end, global newsrooms didn't move on. They moved over. Judea and Samaria, also known as The West Bank, became the new venue of choice, the fresh well of footage and outrage needed to keep the anti-Israel narrative running at full volume. The war may be winding down. The narrative apparatus built around it is more active than ever.
Sauvignon Blanc wine grapes are harvested at dawn for Shilo winery on August 26, 2020 at the Gvaot Olam farm in the West Bank Jewish settlement of Itamar. (David Silverman/Getty Images)
Acts of violence, such as the one in Jalud, are real and deserve coverage — but so does an enormous amount of violence elsewhere that never gets a fraction of this attention. Attacks on religious minorities across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East routinely go unreported by the very same networks now camped out on the West Bank. Meanwhile, an isolated incident involving Israel — even one carried out by a small band of extremists the Israeli government itself condemns — has dominated the media for days.
The lesson audiences absorb, whether intended or not, is that violence only matters when Jews or Israel are on one side of it. That selective spotlight doesn't stay contained to foreign policy debates. It filters into U.N. resolutions, into government statements, into placards at protests and finally into open hostility toward Jews who have nothing to do with those acts at all.
An Israeli soldier is seen during a protest in the town of Beita, in West Bank on July 26, 2024. (Wahaj Bani Moufleh/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)
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Lost in all of this is scale. The extremists carrying out these attacks are a minority of the minority, the very fringe among more than 500,000 Jewish residents living peacefully in Judea and Samaria, the biblical heartland of the Jewish State. The 'unesttlers' was how U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee recently described them in an X post, "The "unsettlers" betray the State of Israel, Judea/Samaria residents, civil law & the Torah."
Extremist settlers run from an Israeli military vehicle around Palestinian houses in the village of Qusra in the West Bank, on Aug. 13, 2026. (Zain Jaafar / AFP via Getty Images)
The overwhelming majority are ordinary families: teachers, farmers, students, commuters who live under the daily threat of stabbings, shootings, and car-rammings that rarely make headlines anywhere. For example, only last week, a 16-year-old Palestinian jumped from behind and stabbed, moderately injuring a 24-year-old Israeli who stopped to shop near the village of Auja in the Jordan Valley. Where was this victim or his family interviewed? What coverage was given to the hateful education that propels a 16-year-old to viciously attack another person with a knife?!
The media's insistence on treating a fringe group as representative of that entire population — while ignoring the terror those same families face — isn't just lazy. It's a distortion that criminalizes an entire community and propels hatred and acts of violence on a global scale.
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Anti-Israel activists protest outside the United Nations headquarters in New York, on April 7, 2025. (Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Antisemitism doesn't erupt in a vacuum. It needs a story, a grievance, a reason for outrage and there is no easier vehicle to manufacture one than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Under the political charade, the ugliness under the cloak is clear: Israel is the Jew among the nations, and what is disguised as "political reporting" is really a biased attack on that Jew, the one and only Jewish state in the world.
When newsrooms chase Judea and Samaria the way they chased Gaza, amplifying the fringe, ignoring real terror and ignoring the peaceful majority, they aren't just shaping coverage, they're feeding the oldest hatred with the newest headlines.
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No Jews, no news has ever been truer, or more dangerous.
