I’m aware that publications hostile to Israel have, for at least ten years, been publishing stories with the headline ‘Settler runs over Palestinian child.’ There are some variations. They may say ‘Jewish settler’ and occasionally the victim will be a woman but, several times a year, the headline will specify a child, boy or girl, age 5 or 8 or sometimes a teenager. Usually, the running over is described as deliberate and the consequence as fatal.

These stories then acquire a momentum of their own, appearing on anti-Israel and anti-Jewish social media. Reports of a road death in April will run for a couple of months before being replaced by a new story with the same headline but citing a different location in the disputed territories. The child may be a different gender from the previous victim and a year or two older or younger.

I became aware of the regularity of these reports by perusing online Corbyn-supporting forums. Once the report has been posted, members of the forum vie with each other in expressing the greatest possible outrage, which always involves imputing inhumanity to the Israeli settlers, Zionists and very often, Jews in general.

I googled on ‘Settler runs over Palestinian child,’ and copious items appeared, all originating from Middle Eastern sources and getting plentiful exposure on English-language forums. I selected one report for each year and made a collage of screen shots, shown below, which is how I usually display antisemitism on Corbynist forums. I then tweeted the image.

It wasn’t until today that I realized a tweet didn’t permit enough words for me to explain the significance of the collage. I deleted my tweet. I thought perhaps someone would take the reports at face value, and believe that settlers deliberately run over Palestinian children on at least a quarterly basis.

If we are not there, how can we know what’s happening? How can we know what isn’t happening? Nevertheless, for the members of, for example, ‘Truthers Against Zionists [sic] Lobbies,’ such reports confirm everything they already believe.

The report I saw yesterday was in fact on the Truthers Against Zionists Lobbies forum, alongside some gross examples of holocaust denial, so these are not people with any kind of credibility and the reports of regular infanticide by murderous drivers are extremely suspect.

A month later, there are new ‘Settler runs over child’ stories doing the rounds. Someone on  Twitter yesterday posted a photo of a child with fatal injuries, said to have been inflicted by a settler in a car. I also found an article debunking one of these accounts. Yet still they come.

I wrote this post a few years ago but obviously the reports continue. Here is a sample of the 2020 crop.