US anti-settler sanctions barely scratch the surface

 

By James M. Dorsey

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 This week’s US sanctioning of an Israeli-government-backed vigilante settler group constitutes a weak shot across Israel’s bow as the United States and Europe mull also sanctioning ultra-nationalist members of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s cabinet.

Senior executives of the sanctioned group, Hashomer Yosh, which focuses on protecting settler outposts in the occupied West Bank, have close ties to National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, the two cabinet members that the US and Europe may sanction. Messrs. Ben Gvir and Smotrich themselves are settlers.

The Biden administration announced the sanctions as Israel launched its largest military campaign in the West Bank in more than two decades, targeting Palestinian militants, according to the military.

Palestinians fear the raids signal an expansion of the Gaza war to the West Bank.

While sending a signal, the sanctioning of Hashomer Yosh barely scratches the surface in a country in which ultra-nationalists pursue annexationist and supremacist policies with Mr. Netanyahu’s approval, albeit at times tacitly, and where blood-curdling anti-Palestinian statements by government officials, lawmakers, and pundits are part of the daily political diet.

The administration could have sent a far stronger signal if it had acted against Messrs. Ben Gvir and Smotrich, who have backed and encouraged vigilante settler attacks on West Bank Palestinians and Israeli military officers and units that protect the militants as they launch their assaults.

Last week, Ronen Bar, the head of Israel’s domestic security agency, Shin Bet, warned in a letter to Mr. Netanyahu, members of his government, and the attorney general that militant vigilante settlers posed a serious threat to national security, a sentiment echoed by the Biden administration, and should be considered terrorists.

Mr. Bar said he wrote the letter “with pain and great fear, as a Jew, as an Israeli, and as a security official.” The security chief said the militants’ terror campaign was “a large stain on Judaism and on all of us.”

Mr. Bar charged that ultra-nationalist leaders like Messrs. Ben Gvir and Smotrich were “willing to jeopardise the state’s security and its very existence” in the name of their ideology.

Mr Bar’s notion of what Judaism stands for contrasts not only with Messrs. Ben Gvir and Smotrich’s view but also with that of some prominent mainstream Diaspora religious Jewish leaders, even if Shin Bet stand accused of being a critical node in the repression of Palestinian national aspirations and alleged war crimes committed by Israeli forces.

Interviewed on BFM TV, France’s most-watched channel, French Chief Rabbi Haim Korsia expressed a supremacist disregard for Palestinian lives.

Asked why, almost 11 months into the Gaza war, 40,000 Palestinian deaths should not be condemned on the same terms as the killing by Hamas of some 1,200 people during the group’s October 7 attack on Israel, Mr. Korsia argued that there was no equivalence between the loss of innocent Jewish and Palestinian lives.

“They are not of the same order,” Mr. Korsia said.

Mr. Korsia’s views, like Mr. Netanyahu’s insistence that Gazans need to be deradicalised and re-educated, resonate in an ultra-nationalist tent camp near the Erez Crossing between Israel, and Gaza, where militant settlers wait for an opportunity to resettle Gaza almost two decades after Israeli troops withdrew from the Strip, dismantling Israeli settlements.

Asserting Arabs expelled her grandparents from pre-Israel Palestine, Texas-born Arielle, a proponent of ethnic cleansing, rejects the notion that she is a settler colonialist.

Arielle, a Texas-born settler, advocates expelling Palestinians from Gaza. Source: YouTube

It’s “not really colonialism… “I’m just coming back, fulfilling (my grandparents’) dream… I think colonialism gets a bad rap like genocide is bad. But colonising places that are genocidal and have bad ideologies, it’s good to come in and correct their views… We’ve got to ask other countries for help,” Ms. Arielle said.

She asserted that Spain was willing to resettle “a couple of million” Gazans, while Russia would accommodate “a couple of thousand… Palestinianism and ethnicity is an ideology. It’s an ideology that says they want Jews dead, and so, we want them as far away from Jews as possible.”

This week’s Israeli military operations in the West Bank likely buoyed Ms. Arielle and her cohorts.

Source: X

If decades of settlement expansion and more recently stepped-up settler vigilantism did not already communicate Israeli intentions, Foreign Minister Israel Katz left no doubts in his defense of the West Bank military operations.

Mr. Katz asserted that Iran was attempting to create a Palestinian resistance infrastructure similar to Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon by providing funds and smuggling weapons from Jordan into the West Bank.

“We must deal with the threat just as we deal with the terrorist infrastructure in Gaza, including the temporary evacuation of Palestinian residents and whatever steps are required. This is a war for everything, and we must win it,” Mr. Katz said on X.

Israel has yet to issue evacuation orders like it does in Gaza. Even so, residents of the Nur Shams refugee camp, one of this week’s Israeli targets, said the military was allowing civilians to leave voluntarily.

Israel targets Nur Shams. Credit: The New Arab

While Gaza’s population of more than two million people has been forced to leave their homes, residents of the West Bank have not endured the scale of bombardments, raids, and evacuation orders that Gazans experienced.

Nevertheless, like in Gaza, Israeli raids on West Bank cities and refugee camps have focused as much on pursuing militants as on the destruction of infrastructure and the meting out of collective punishment.

Wafa, the news agency of the internationally recognized, West Bank-based Palestine Authority, said Israeli troops had moved in on hospitals, hindered ambulances at one medical facility, and bulldozed infrastructure, including roads and water supplies, in Jenin, Tulkarem, and Tubas, hotbeds of Palestinian activism.

Israeli analysts said the bulldozing of roads is needed to unearth improvised explosive devices.

In March,  Shin Bet  said it had foiled attempts by Iran to smuggle large amounts of advanced weapons into the West Bank.

Senior officials of Al Fatah, the backbone of the Palestine Authority, have warned of Iranian agitation.

Credit: Israel Hayom

Earlier this month, Al Fatah Central Committee member Abbas Zaki asserted, “There are brigades being formed. People are selling jewelry, and they are getting aid from Iran, Hezbollah, or wherever. They are fighting, and they know that they will be killed, their homes will be demolished, and their families will be destroyed, but defending one's homeland has no price.”

In April, Mr. Zaki favoured Iran having a nuclear weapon as his Al Fatah movement accused Iran of trying to sow chaos amid a surge in intra-Palestinian violence in the West Bank.

“We stand on the lookout for foreign interference, specifically Iranian interference, in Palestinian internal affairs. We will not allow the exploitation of our sacred cause and the blood of our people,” Al Fatah said in a statement.

Unlike Al Fatah, Mr. Katz ignored the fact that Israel’s Gaza war conduct and long-standing undermining of the Palestine Authority rather than allegiance to Iran fuel Palestinian militancy on the West Bank.

As a result, many West Bank Palestinians see Hamas as the only group willing and capable of standing up to Israel.

Former Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad: Source: Foreign Policy

To counter Israel’s increasingly evident annexationist and supremacist approach as well as the radicalization of Palestinian youth, former Palestine Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad recently argued that the international community needed to “work around” Israeli rejection of the notion of an independent Palestinian state.

To achieve that, Mr. Fayyad suggested enshrining the Palestinian right to statehood in international law with a United Nations Security Council resolution. The move would ensure that Palestinians no longer “need to audition for (national rights) that no other people in the world” had to do, Me. Fayyad said. In other words, Mr. Fayyad proposed equating Palestinian and Israeli rights.

“That’s when you begin to see a little bit of balance restored… It’s no longer acceptable for the needs of one party to be prioritized over the needs of another party,” Mr. Fayyad said.

A close associate of Mohammed Dahlan, a United Arab Emirates-backed former Fatah official touted as a potential post-war Gaza leader, Palestinian activist Samer Sinijlawi noted, “You can feel there is a cocktail of anger, sadness, grief, hatred that is prevalent in both societies, but this is because of the 7th of October and the war. It is not whom the Palestinians really are, nor the Israelis.”

Samer Sinijlawi. Source: The Jerusalem Strategic Tribune

Drawing on his personal history, Mr. Sinijlawi, a close associate of Mohammed Dahlan, a United Arab Emirates-backed former Fatah official touted as a potential post-war leader of Gaza recalled, noted “As a teenager, I began throwing stones in the streets of my city because I wanted to ‘free Palestine from the river to the sea.’ I was put in jail. Three months later, (Palestine Liberation Organisation chairman Yasser) Arafat announced the Palestinian Declaration of Independence to establish a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders… I and the other inmates in my section…jumped in jubilation upon hearing the news.”

Today, Mr. Sinjlawi argues that according to Palestinians the status of entitled human beings Israelis claim for themselves is the key to resolving the Israeli Palestinian conflict.

“You need to relieve the Palestinians from the humiliation. You need to guarantee Palestinians that their human dignity is respected, Mr. Sinijlawi said.

Echoing Mr. Sinijlawi’s campaign for dialogue, Israeli journalist Amnon Levy countered long-standing Israeli notions of survival.

“You can't live forever by the sword. Without peace, Israel will not survive in this region… It will not be easy to re-establish the dialogue channel with the Palestinians. The destruction we’ve wracked in Gaza leaves as serious and painful a scar as the October 7 massacre created in us… But they too will have no choice but to overcome… Now is the time for moderates to make their voices heard. Now is the time to shout, there is no military solution,” Mr. Levy said.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.