Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman gently chided the current ambassador, Mike Huckabee, whom he said he considers a personal friend and a friend of Israel, over his use of the “settler violence” label after visiting Turmus Ayya, an Arab town near Ramallah in Samaria, Saturday and calling for “severe consequences” for Israelis who engaged in violence against Arabs in Judea and Samaria.

Calling Huckabee “my dear friend,” he wrote on X that “no one doubts where your heart is. Your support for Israel is unwavering and historic.”

He then went on to explain the context of the violence: the violent, relentless attacks by Arabs against Israeli settlers, which prompt reactions that, while sometimes inappropriate, usually constitute self-defense.

“Jews don’t wake up in the morning saying ‘I’m going to go kill a Palestinian today,'” Friedman wrote. “The opposite, of course, is not true — hundreds and hundreds of Jewish residents of J&S have been murdered by Palestinian terrorists.”

He also cautioned Huckabee on how this libel is being used against Israel by its enemies.

“The ‘settler violence libel is being used, as you recognize, as part of a coordinated PR effort by the same people who falsely accuse Israel of genocide,” he added. “The Palestinian-Americans … are now draping American flags on their houses so that attacks against them — which they instigate — can be filmed as attacks against America. It’s all a cynical campaign and its roots go back more than a century.”

Friedman explained that observing that only a tiny fraction of settlers engage in violence is a distinction the media does not recognize.

“Unfortunately, labeling the Jews who fight back as ‘terrorists’ is a win for the anti-Israel PR machine who then create a moral equivalency between both sides. Your correct observation that the Jews committing acts of violence are a tiny fraction of the total Jewish population is a distinction entirely lost on the media, who have a false narrative to uphold,” he said.