Trudy Rubin, a columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer, claims her writing “tries to make sense of the world’s chaos and conflicts.” At this, her latest column, “Violence by extremist Israeli settlers against Palestinian civilians on the West Bank threatens new Mideast flash point,” totally fails. Instead, Rubin either presents a deliberately misleading picture or demonstrates a shockingly superficial understanding of the conflict. Her narrative, of absolute Israeli responsibility and guilt for the ongoing conflict, is undermined by the facts.
Consider five egregiously false claims made in the column.
Lie #1: There is “a potential new Mideast flash point sparked by messianic Israeli settlers on the occupied West Bank.”
This is demonstrably false, both in terms of timeline and attribution of blame.
The West Bank is not a “new” flash point. Violence has sadly been a constant feature in the territory for decades. During the so-called Second Intifada (2000-2005), for example, there were hundreds, if not thousands, of Palestinian attacks, including over 130 suicide bombings.
While settler violence has grown in recent years, the figures still pale in comparison to Palestinian violence toward Israelis. Data from the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, shows that in 2025, there were 845 incidents of settler violence. That same year, there were 4,744 Palestinian attacks on Israelis.
When CAMERA compared Shin Bet data on Palestinian attacks with U.N. data on settler attacks (data which is vastly overinflated) for 2018-2023, the same trends still showed. Even with the U.N.’s overinflated data, Palestinian attacks exceeded settler “attacks” by 2.5 to five times.
It is plainly dishonest to portray the violence as driven by Israelis when Palestinians are carrying out 5.6 times as many attacks.
Rubin’s claim relies on ignoring data and history. In effect, her article functions by ignoring all the violence by Palestinians so she can argue all the violence is by Israelis.
Lie #2: “Far-right extremists are even encouraging Jewish-Arab violence atop the Temple Mount…”
Rubin hyperlinks the words “encouraging” through “Temple Mount” to a January 2023 New York Times article, “Hard-Line Israeli Minister Visits Volatile Jerusalem Holy Site,” about Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s visit to the site. While Rubin is trying to cast blame on Israelis, ironically, her own source shows the only ones “encouraging Jewish-Arab violence” were Palestinians.
Indeed, the very first sentence states that the “threats of violent repercussions” and “furious reactions” were coming “from the Palestinian leadership.” As the article explains, the Palestinian Authority treated the mere presence of the Jewish minister at the Temple Mount as a “flagrant attack.” Hamas called his visit “a detonator” that would trigger an explosion.
In response, Ben-Gvir stated: “The Temple Mount is the most important site in the world to the Jewish people, and we will protect the freedom of movement for Muslims and Christians, but also for Jews who wish to visit the mount.”
That is, while Ben-Gvir may be controversial, he was promising to protect freedom of movement for all religions. Meanwhile, Palestinian leadership were threatening and encouraging violence in response. A few weeks later, a Palestinian terrorist murdered seven Israelis at a synagogue in Jerusalem.
Perhaps Rubin believes that Palestinians can’t help but to become violent at the mere sight of Jews at a Jewish holy site. Such a racist, infantilizing view of Palestinians would be alarming. Similarly, to believe that a Jew is encouraging violence by simply existing at the Temple Mount represents a morally perverse worldview.
Lie #3: “When Palestinians are offered nothing — meaning no political future or rights — they have nothing to lose. Unfettered occupation and ethnic cleansing will provoke resistance and terror attacks.”
Palestinians have been offered exactly these things. Many times. Israel has repeatedly agreed to or offered its own peace proposals that would give Palestinians their own state all the way back to 1947 (the U.N.’s Partition Plan) and as recently as 2008 (PM Olmert’s offer of 94 percent of West Bank and Gaza with additional five percent of neighboring Israeli territory, plus east Jerusalem). Every single time, Palestinian leadership said “no.” The last time, PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas refused to even give a counterproposal.
The idea that “occupation and ethnic cleansing” provoked the “resistance and terror attacks” is, again, to omit history (and to render the concept of ethnic cleansing devoid of meaning).
Israel was invaded the moment it was born, two decades before any “occupation” began. It was constantly attacked by Arab terrorists between 1948 and 1967, a period in which Jordan, not Israel, controlled the West Bank. In fact, during that period, it was Jews who had been ethnically cleansed from the West Bank, including the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem, Hebron, and areas like Gush Etzion.
Readers should ask Trudy Rubin what “provoked” that ethnic cleansing and those terror attacks?
Lie #4: “And unless a newly elected leadership permits the rebuilding of the West Bank’s Palestinian Authority, the body which technically governed Palestinians, there is no authority to counter Hamas. Bibi [Netanyahu] did everything he could to destroy and bankrupt the Palestinian Authority.”
Little effort is needed to expose this absurdity as one need only recall a single historical event. In 2006, the year after Israel unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza Strip, Hamas won the Palestinian legislative election in the territory. It then violently expelled the Palestinian Authority from the entirety of the Gaza Strip. Netanyahu would not become prime minister until three years later in 2009.
That is, the PA’s incompetence long preceded any alleged effort by Netanyahu to “destroy and bankrupt” it.
Lie #5: “What is clear is that Bibi’s tolerance of Jewish terror is leading to a clash in the West Bank, and is aimed at driving the population of Gaza out into the Sinai Desert by keeping two million Palestinians underfed, without schools or medicine, and living in tents.”
The suggestion that “Jewish terror” in the West Bank leads to Gazans in Egypt’s Sinai Desert is causally incoherent. Rubin’s other claim that Israel is “keeping two million Palestinians underfed” is empirically false.
Much could be said about the herculean effort to fabricate the existence of a “famine” in Gaza. But one data point, above all, exposes the claim. According to the U.N.’s own data on the standard indicator used by the World Health Organization, the acute malnutrition rate in Gaza is substantially below that of neighboring Arab countries like Egypt and Jordan. In fact, it appears to be likely below what the rate was in Gaza before the war began on October 7, 2023.
Consider another significant data point. The U.N. claims 62,000 metric tons of food needs to enter Gaza every month. Between the start of the ceasefire in October 2025 and mid-July 2026, on average over 200,000 metric tons of food entered Gaza every month.
No one, except Hamas itself, is keeping Gazans underfed.
Far from making sense of the world, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Trudy Rubin is starving her readers of the actual facts.