DEFUND THE WEST BANK SETTLEMENTS

Over the past two weeks, Israel and the “unofficial”settlement enterprise that has been going on in violation of international law since the early 1970s have both gotten a crash course in coercive diplomacy.

In the first few hours and days after the Biden Administration announced last week that it was placing financial sanctions on four extremist Israeli settlers, there was confusion in Israel about what it all meant.

Demonstrating he knew nothing about what he was talking about, Kach Crazy/Domestic Terrorist/Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich told fellow membersw of he extremist wing of the Knesset that, “it is not possible for an Israeli citizen with Israeli money in an Israeli bank to be deprived of rights and assets due to an American order.”

By the next day, Yinon Levi - one of the sanctioned settlers, a violent extremist who the Biden Administration said was involved in forcing Palestinian communities off their land - found his personal and business accounts had been frozen by Israel’s Bank Leumi. A second sanctioned settler discovered his account at a state-owned bank had been frozen.

The banks understood something the Israeli finance minister didn’t grasp: the United States is a very powerful country.

Putting financial sanctions on four individual settlers is - by itself - a woefully inadequate response to what President Biden described as “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”

However, these sanctions are the softest of the economic weapons that were created in the executive order. Using the full range of sanctions could very well defund the entire Israeli settlement enterprise. And, because the Israeli economy is not distinct from the settler economy, imposing sanctions on that scale could force a reckoning over Netayahu’s actions for which Israelis are entirely unprepared.

Not only does Biden’s executive order allow sanctioning of violent Israeli settlers, it also includes those complicit in, or who plan or direct settler violence, including official Israeli state organization that engage in - or whose leaders engage in - violence against Palestinian civilians.

This includes IDF soldiers who don’t enforce the law against settlers they see committing acts of violence and domestic terrorism. It has long been documented that Israeli soldiers have accompanid and participated in settler violence against Palestinians. Both settlers and the IDF share the same objective of forcibly displacing Palestinian communities.

In the case of Yinon Levi, the evidence of the IDF’s role in his terrorist activities is clear. A week after he was sanctioned for his role in forcible displacements, his wife, Sapir, stated: “Every time there is a problem in the area with Arabs, we call the army and they come and they do what they do. We have the full backup of the army. If Biden has a complaint to us, he can talk to the army.”

The day after the news went out that the banks were sanctioning the domestic terrorists, the Israeli public broadcast station Kan 11 News reported the United States is preparing to add IDF officers to the sanctions list if the Israeli Military Advocate General does not provide the State Department with satisfactory answers to its questions about IDF involvement in sanctionable activity within 60 days. If the Advocate General does not provide the information, the State Department will add IDF commanders to the sanctions list.

Another of the four domestic terrorists included in the first round of sanctions was David Chai Chasdai, who was previously arrested by Israeli authorities and put in administrative detention for leading a pogrom last year in Huwarra, which left one Palestinian man dead and torched 36 homes.

Belazel Smotrich got into hot water when - only hours before settler/terrorists set out Chasdai’s pogrom, he liked a tweet that said, “Erase Huwarra.” The tweet’s author was David Ben Zion, deputy head of the Samaria Regional Council, a governing body of 35 Israeli settlements in the northern West Bank, notably including those that surround the village of Huwara. Ben Zion, is also a board member of the Jewish National Fund, which has played an active role in taking over Palestinian land for the benefit of settlers.

Sanctioning Ben Zion could easily open the door to sanctions against the entire Samaria Regional Council, jeopardizing funding for 35 settlements, and perhaps even the Jewish National Fund.

The executive order also allows sanctions on any person or entity that provides support or services to a sanctioned individual. The crowdfunding campaign to replace Yinon Levi’s frozen funds launched by the Israeli NGO Har Hevron Fund, is expressly prohibited. Even facilitating the transfer of funds - like Israeli Bank Hapoalim, credit card processor PeleCard, and crowdfunding site GiveChak are doing - is grounds for being sanctioned.

Far more consequential is the simple fact that Israeli banks give mortgages to Israeli settlers, including some of the most violent and extremist ones. Israeli communications companies install cellular antennas on Palestinian land to provide service to settlers, and in some cases even pay rent to Israeli settlers for the use of that land. What will happen if Israeli banks conclude it is too risky to continue servicing those loans? What about utility companies like the Israel Electric Company, which services remote Israeli settlements as well as major Israeli cities? Can it continue to bill sanctioned individuals? Can it even continue to provide them electricity without being accused of providing material support?

The Treasury Department’s financial crimes unit sent an alert to 16,000 financial institutions designed to ensnare the flow of funds to the entire settler ecosystem. The alert orders banks to actively look for and report transactions with organizations linked to violent extremist groups in the West Bank.

That might include Shurat HaDin, the Israel Law Center, a major operation in Israeli lawfare. According to a 2007 State Department cable, co-founder Nitsana Darshan-Leitner told US diplomats “that in many of her cases she receives evidence from Israeli government officials, and added that in its early years Israel Law Center took direction from the Israeli government on which cases to pursue.”

The same cable noted that Darshan-Leitner co-founded the organization with her husband, Aviel Leitner, who as Craig Leitner, was convicted in Israel of participating in a shooting attack against a Palestinian bus in the occupied West Bank.

There is also Regavim, the settler organization co-founded by Bezalel Smotrich to assist and encourage Israeli authorities to forcibly displace Palestinian communities in the West Bank.

In 2023, the first year Smotrich was given control over the Israeli military government of the West Bank, the number of Israeli demolitions rose to the highest in at least 13 years.

Sanctions are brutal and extraordinary because they have nothing to do with due process. The government can seize assets without anyone ever being charged with a crime. For that reason, sanctions are not accountability measures; they are a diplomatic tool for creating leverage in the pursuit of foreign policy goals.

One of the foreign policy objectives listed in Biden’s executive order includes “ensuring the viability of a two-state solution and ensuring Israelis and Palestinians can attain equal measures of security, prosperity, and freedom.” Israeli settlements and the systems of apartheid and occupation they create are responsible for blocking that process, and are thus liable to be sanctioned.

The Biden Administration has floated the idea of recognizing Palestinians statehood as part of a process that eventually leads to a two-state solution. Netanyahu’s government has consistently opposed that. The rest of the world is coming to see the IDF’s killing of 27,000 Palestinians and wounding several hundred thousand more in their pursuit of a goal they cannot achieve as being the problem that must be solved now.

If the president is serious, defunding all of the support system for the illegal settlements the Israeli government has allowed for the past 50 years in violation of international law would be a great first step. That might get the Israeli government to reconsider their position. Netanyahu has tested the world’s patience long enough.

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