A New Departure on Israel
Last month, Joe Biden took an action against Israel that no U.S. president has ever done: He levied sanctions against four Israeli West Bank settlers for violence against Palestinians and Israeli peace activists.
The move — tentative though it might be — did not gain much publicity for several reasons. It dealt with the West Bank — where settler-committed violence is increasing — when most attention is focused on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. It was a baby step, applying only to a handful of settlers, although far more Israelis are perpetrating violence against Palestinians, often with the collusion of the Israeli army. The sanctions were portrayed by some as only symbolic, a bone thrown to disaffected Arab and Muslim voters in the United States. And, finally, news of the Biden administration announcement was drowned out by the noisy and messy presidential election and the threats to democracy posed by Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee.
“The situation” Biden charged in an Executive Order announcing the sanctions, “in the West Bank — in particular high levels of extremist settler violence, forced displacement of people and villages, and property destruction — has reached intolerable levels [when was it tolerable?} and constitutes a serious threat to the peace, security, and stability of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel, and the broader Middle East region.” Settler violence, the order asserted, “undermine[s] the foreign policy objectives of the United States,” especially threatening potential progress toward reaching a two-state solution.
Biden’s description of the actions of some settlers, accurate though the words are, do not begin to describe the horrors occurring daily in the West Bank. Settlers are taking advantage of the chaos on Gaza — which commands the world’s attention — to continue their land grab in what many Israelis call Judea and Samaria.
Jewish settlements in the West Bank are illegal under international law, but many of the popup settlements are illegal under Israeli law as well. Yet the Israeli Defense Forces frequently look the other way when Jewish extremists seize Palestinian land and move in, putting up tents or living in mobile homes. The right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ignores settler violence — and the building of settler outposts — since the continuing land grab creates facts on the ground that are helping pave the way for a future annexation of the West Bank, which is clearly the goal of many in the current Israeli government and of nationalist Zionists who dream of a greater Israel occupying all the land from the sea to the river.
One settler told The New Yorker’s Shane Bauer that the land she and her husband live on in the Jordan Valley “doesn’t belong to us…. It’s not like we bought the land from someone.” But, she said, pointing toward nearby Palestinian farmhouses, “if we weren’t here right now, they would be.” Other settlers forcefully have evicted Palestinians from homes they have lived in for generations. Often the evictions are accomplished through beatings and even murder. And, then, there are more subtle ways to seize Palestinian land, such as by diverting water — always in short supply in the West Bank — from Palestinian villages to Israeli settlements.
Forcible eviction of Palestinians has been the policy of Jewish extremists for decades, but the violence has intensified since the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack. One settler group posted an online a threat: “You started a war, you’ll get a Nakba!” a reference to the permanent displacement of Palestinians during the 1948 Israeli war for independence. (Nakba means catastrophe in Arabic.)
Tamping down his longstanding support for Israel cannot be easy for Biden. The president entered the Senate nine months before the Yom Kippur War! Support for Israel in those years was truly bipartisan and a keystone of American foreign policy. Unlike younger, progressive Democrats — during whose entire lives Israel has been an occupying power — Biden grew up when Israel was struggling to survive, surrounded by hostile Arab neighbors bent on its destruction. A generational divide among all Americans probably reflects a similar divide among American Jews. Older Americans view Israel as a beleaguered, plucky democratic upstart; younger Americans view Israel as an occupying power denying Palestinians a homeland.
But it is becoming increasingly difficult for all Americans to ignore the actions of West Bank Jewish settlers and to pretend that the Netanyahu government has any interest in treating Palestinians with justice. The Biden administration now recognizes that if Hamas must be defanged as a prelude to Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, so must the settler movement. Both Hamas and the settlers are an obstacle to peace, and the power of both must be eliminated. (As sometimes happens in history, two antagonists — in this case Hamas and the settler movement — share a common interest in continuing chaos.)
Biden is also beginning to understand — at least I hope he is beginning to understand — that evenhandedness also requires strong measures to rein in Israeli violence in Gaza. David Ignatius reports in The Washington Post that because of the intensifying human catastrophe in Gaza the U.S. administration is considering ways to prevent Israel from using American weapons in an attack on the densely populated area around the southern city of Rafah, where tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians from war-ravaged areas of northern Gaza are housed in squalid conditions. No decisions have been reached, writes Ignatius, but even pondering such a move suggests that disagreements with Israeli leaders over the conduct of the war in Gaza have reached a new level.
The Netanyahu government will not last forever. It may well be gone when the current war ends. Biden clearly needs to show some semblance of evenhanded treatment of extremists on both sides if the United States is to play a role in any postwar settlement. The test for Biden will come when — there is no if about it — he has to respond to continuing settler violence.
No doubt, some of Biden’s motivations are political, a response to domestic pressure. But that is the way democracy works. Sometimes a mixture of politics and the wish to do what is right produces a just and moral result.
Posted March 8, 2024