Biden urged to introduce new sanctions in an unexpected direction

There are growing calls for Joe Biden to use his new executive order imposing sanctions on militant Israeli settlers to also target political leaders, including government ministers responsible for orchestrating attacks on Palestinians, The Guardian writes.

Pro-Israel groups and others in the U.S. say the order is a potentially major blow to the West Bank settlement movement, in part because financial sanctions could prevent even Israeli banks from doing business in some occupied territories.

Human rights groups also want to see measures put in place to stop U.S. organizations from donating tens of millions of dollars to settlers each year.

The Biden administration has not said how broadly it would apply the order after initially imposing sanctions on just four settlers responsible for escalating attacks on Palestinians, including the expulsion of entire villages from their homes.

Josh Paul, a former State Department official who resigned over U.S. arms supplies for Israel’s current war in Gaza, argues that the order is worded broadly enough to allow the administration to target those who enable and facilitate the surge in killings, beatings and forced displacements. This is driven in part by far-right members of the Israeli government, such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who intend to expel Palestinians as a step toward annexing all or part of the occupied territories.

“I think the order can and should apply to members of the current Israeli government, including Ben-Gvir, but not only,” said Josh Paul. – The order is a small step forward and gradual. On the one hand, I would say that it certainly doesn’t go far enough. But it also has the potential to be used much more widely than it has to date.”

Michael Schaeffer Omerman, director of Israel-Palestine research at Democracy for the Arab World Now, a group founded by slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, said if sanctions were applied more widely, they could have a significant impact.

“The potential is to completely cut off funding for the settlement movement and the organizations that support it. This is a very wide and powerful weapon. But we have to see how they use it,” he said.

Josh Paul suspects the order is a warning shot to pressure the Israeli government to rein in the settlers, who often operate under Israeli military or police protection, for fear the violence could escalate into a full-blown conflict in the West Bank. But he wonders whether Biden is interested in addressing the broader issue of settlements and the 700,000 Israelis living in the occupied territories as an obstacle to peace.

“The problem is not forced settlers. They are low hanging fruit. The problem is the settlement enterprise, and this enterprise is funded, supported, made possible by private donations from the US and the tacit support of the US government. From time to time, secretaries of state or presidents appear to condemn announcements of new settlements, but then do absolutely nothing to prevent this construction,” he said.

Others see the order as a chance to change the face of the settlement movement.

T’ruah, a New York-based group of rabbis who advocate for human rights, hailed Biden’s order as “a really positive first step that has a lot of potential.” But T’ruah director Rabbi Jill Jacobs said the White House should take action by targeting “the real leaders of the violent settler movement, including the heads of the organizations that incite that violence.”

“There are a number of settler organizations in Israel whose leadership has been charged, and in some cases even convicted, with incitement and terror. The next step is to look at the leaders of these organizations,” she said.

Jacobs argues that the move would include far more prominent figures than the four little-known settlers already sanctioned, including current and former members of the Israeli parliament. She said Biden’s order should also be used to cut off American funding to extremist Jewish groups in the occupied territories, including some with close ties to the Kach movement, founded by American-born extremist rabbi Meir Kahane and banned in Israel as a terrorist group.

“They also fund yeshivas like Od Yosef Chai in Yitzhar, one of the most extremist settlements. Settler attacks often occur from this settlement, incited by rabbis at the yeshiva,” she said.

In a rare prosecution of Rabbi Yosef Elitzur of Yitzhar, he was convicted three years ago of inciting violence against Palestinians. Another yeshiva rabbi has written a book arguing that religious law allows Jews to kill non-Jewish babies because of “the future danger that would arise if they were allowed to grow up to be evil people like their parents,” The Guardian explains.

In 2015, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that at least 50 organizations across the United States were involved in fundraising for Israeli settlements.

T’ruah previously asked U.S. tax authorities to investigate several U.S. groups it accuses of funding Lehava, Yitzhar Yeshiva and other settlements with a history of violence or extremist groups. These include the New York-based Israel Central Fund, which also helps finance the Israel Land Trust, which is responsible for expelling Palestinian families from their homes to make way for Jewish settlers.

Jacobs claims that money collected in the US also goes to Honenu, a group linked to Ben-Gvir that pays cash to Israelis convicted of terrorism, including Yigal Amir, who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.

Another American group, Friends of Ir David, funds Elad, the Israeli settlement organization responsible for the forced relocation of Palestinians, as it seeks to “Judaize” occupied East Jerusalem.

Biden’s order bans individuals from traveling to the United States and freezes their assets there. It quickly became apparent that the measures could have a significant impact on settlers who do not have a direct connection to the US after Israeli banks froze accounts belonging to the targeted individuals under US law.

Omerman argues that imposing sanctions on a wide range of settler leaders and those who support them could have real consequences.

“Let’s take someone living in a settlement. He has a mortgage. If he is on the sanctions list, what happens to the mortgage? Will the Israeli bank cancel it? Does the Israeli government create a bank just to issue mortgages to settlers, which is then itself subject to sanctions. The Jewish National Fund and the World Zionist Organization are involved in allocating and providing land to settlers, which is inherently part of the system,” he said.

“But none of this happens without political will. We don’t know what the red lines are, the triggers that the administration has set domestically as it looks to expand sanctions. If they don’t at least offer a second round, then they won’t create deterrence. It seems ridiculous to impose sanctions on these four people who are nobody, but in fact it is not aimed at them. This is directed against the Israeli government.”

Josh Paul believes the Biden administration is genuinely concerned about events in the West Bank.

“I think the Biden administration understands the enormous and imminent risk of the collapse of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which would be an absolute disaster,” he said.

But Paul added that the sanctions order was also a domestic political move taken in the face of sharp criticism from Arab American voters and many other liberal Democrats over Biden’s support for Israel’s attack on Gaza even as the death toll of Palestinians rose to dozens thousand.

“I had a conversation with an Arab-American activist a couple of days ago who told me that settler sanctions were announced and they got 50 messages from the administration saying, ‘Look what we’re doing, isn’t it great? ?’ So it shows that there is an inherently political aspect to this,” Paul said.