Biden Executive Order on West Bank violence: more likely use against Palestinians than Israeli settlers
President Joe Biden speaks to the media at the White House in Washington, 9 May 2023
Maryam Jamshidi writes in Mondoweiss:
There have been mixed reactions to the Biden Administration’s decision to place economic and travel-based sanctions on four Israeli settlers on Thursday, February 1. Some have been cautiously optimistic that the sanctions—which came in the form of an Executive Order—would bring long-absent accountability for Israeli settler violence in the West Bank. Others have criticized the sanctions as a cynical move to whitewash the Biden Administration’s own crimes and win over disillusioned Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian voters, whose support for Biden has substantially plummeted as a result of his unwavering support for Israel’s onslaught on the Gaza Strip.
There is no doubt that meaningful accountability for Israeli settlers is urgent and necessary. The Biden Administration first floated the idea of sanctioning Israeli settlers in mid-November, as the Israeli military and settlers meted out the worst violence in the West Bank since the Second Intifada. Under the cover of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza since October 7, 2023—a campaign the International Court of Justice recently described as constituting a “plausible” case of genocide—Israeli settlers and the Israeli military, which often work closely together, have killed nearly 400 Palestinians, including over 90 children, in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. Mass displacement of Palestinians—including at the hands of settlers—has also spiked since October 7, with the goal of consolidating permanent Israeli control over even more Palestinian land. In the last four months, Israeli settler and military violence has displaced approximately 198 Palestinian households, encompassing over 1200 people.
The surge in Israeli settler violence did not begin on October 7. In the first eight months of 2023, the UN documented approximately three incidents of settler violence in the West Bank every day—the then-highest level of settler violence recorded by the UN since it began gathering such statistics in 2006. Throughout 2023, settlers rampaged across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, killing and terrorizing Palestinians, displacing them from their homes, and destroying their property. Israeli settler violence against Palestinians has been a long-standing feature of Israel’s settler-colonial policies. As Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem has described it, “[s]ettler violence against Palestinians serves as a major informal tool at the hands of the state to take over more and more [Palestinian] land. . . .settler violence is a form of government policy, aided and abetted by official state authorities with their active participation.”