My Word: Sanctioning settlers and the two-state obsession

I hate hate crimes.

I hate them wherever they are perpetrated and whoever is the target. I condemn them as a moral perversion. I am clearly not alone. Every decent person anywhere surely feels sickened by them – especially if an attack is carried out ostensibly in their name.

Nonetheless, I was surprised that Joe Biden was so concerned by reports of alleged “settler violence” that the president of the United States personally issued an executive order against four Israelis last week.

Without checking into the response to every foul attack around the globe – against Jews, Muslims, or members of other communities – it is fair to assume that most don’t make it to the desk of the Oval Office in the White House. Most don’t even make international headlines.

How many people, for example, heard about the anti-immigrant violence that rocked Dublin in December after an Algerian-born man stabbed three young children and a care assistant outside a school in the Irish capital? (International media is cautious about calling the incident a terror attack, but nothing justifies the violent response from the far-Right.)

Biden’s decision is not about combating violence. It’s an attempt at moral equivalence – and it carries its own dangers. The leader of the Democratic party, running for presidential reelection, fell into a trap set up by his party’s Progressive wing and Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions supporters. The presidential order establishes a mechanism of financial sanctions against people (well, Jews) accused of “directing or participating in specific actions in the West Bank, which include threats of violence against civilians, intimidating civilians to cause them to leave their homes, destroying or seizing property, and engaging in terrorist activity.”

These are abhorrent acts indeed, but fortunately figures show that “settler violence” has decreased in recent months and is limited in scope and intensity. It is also condemned by Israeli public figures from the president, prime minister, and chief rabbi down.

According to a KAN public broadcaster report, one of the four – whose Israeli bank accounts have now been frozen as a result of the US sanctions – has never been indicted for violence. The other three have all faced proceedings in the Israeli justice system – a sign that the country takes the matter seriously even without US presidential pushing. The US could have – should have – informed the relevant Israeli authorities if it had specific information and concerns.

Incidentally, while Biden’s sanctions were leading the news, a story on the ground in Israel proves the complexities. According to the right-leaning Kol Hayehudi news site, a Jewish farmer in the Jordan Valley found himself surrounded by Bedouin as he shepherded his flock on Saturday morning and some of the sheep were stolen. He called the police and army, which also came under attack. The security forces arrested one Bedouin man and returned the stolen animals – only to later star in a left-wing social media campaign accusing the police, soldiers, and “settlers” of stealing the flocks of Bedouin, rather than the other way around.

I’m pointing this out, in case the White House or State Department have time to spare and would like to check it out and, perhaps, in the name of justice and fairness, sanction the perpetrators. However, it is unlikely that the NGOs and individuals providing the White House and international bodies with details of alleged Israeli crimes would be willing to provide similar details about Palestinian attacks.

If we weren’t already so used to such double standards, it would be astonishing that the president of the US – or his advisers – thought that tackling “settler violence” should be the highest priority at a time when Israel is still under rocket fire from Iranian proxies Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, and still reeling from the Hamas invasion and mega-atrocity of October 7. Given the ongoing Iranian attacks on US forces and international shipping, it should be clear that it is not the Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria who are undermining regional stability.

The message that Hamas and its ugly terrorist partners are receiving is that terrorism pays. No matter what atrocity they carry out, the Western world will ensure that the Jewish state gets equal blame. Using settler violence to provide an aura of even-handedness when compared to the utter depravity of the Hamas onslaught is warped and dangerous.

Another prize for terrorism

THE SETTLER sanctions affair is closely related to another issue – another prize for terrorism. The “Two-State Solution” mantra has reemerged with added fervor from Washington, London, Paris, and elsewhere following the Hamas onslaught and Israel’s military response.

“We should be starting to set out what a Palestinian state would look like, what it would comprise, how it would work, and crucially, looking at the issue, that as that happens, we with allies will look at the issue of recognizing a Palestinian state, including at the United Nations. That could be one of the things that helps to make this process irreversible,” declared UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron last week.

US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller similarly announced: “We have made quite clear publicly that we support the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.”

There are general platitudes that such a state can only be formed after the end of the hostilities in Gaza, but these are more disturbing than reassuring. Nobody wants the hostilities to end more than Israel, whose population is traumatized by the murder of 1,200 people and abduction of some 240; a population still under rocket fire and displaced from its northern and southern border communities. Hamas could instantly end the war by agreeing to return the hostages it brutally abducted, and laying down its weapons.

The suggestion that the Palestinians gain an independent state following the war – as a result of their mega-attack – is not so much shocking as numbing in its naivite. What message does this give to terrorist organizations? The longer you fight, the harder you hit, the larger the prize for a promise of a ceasefire. As if those promises haven’t been violated again and again.

The process that would be “irreversible,” as far as the Palestinians are concerned, is the original aim of getting rid of the Jews “Between the river and the sea” – an end to the Jewish state.

The US, UK, UN, and others can promise support and security guarantees for Israel. We’ve heard it before. Right now, the international community can’t even guarantee that medication reaches the Israeli hostages, as promised as part of a humanitarian aid deal; the International Red Cross Committee can’t even visit the captives; and no one, certainly not UNRWA, can guarantee that fuel and food are reaching Palestinian civilians rather than being stolen by the Hamas regime to keep its war going.

Hezbollah’s attacks from Lebanon were “guaranteed” not to happen after the UN resolutions following the First and Second Lebanon Wars. The Oslo Accords with arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat were meant to be a guarantee of peace in the Middle East. Hamas’s control of Gaza should never have happened – theoretically. The Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 should have resulted in the coastal strip becoming another Dubai, in principle. Instead, it became another failed quasi-state, under the control of a jihadist terrorist regime.

The Hamas mega-attack was not about “settlements,” or poverty, or the population density in Gaza. It wasn’t about the lack of hope. It was an all-out assault on the fact that the State of Israel, the Jewish state, exists.

And yet, as usual, it is Israel that found itself in the dock of the UN’s International Court of Justice. Where are the guarantees that the same groups that provided the “evidence” to put Israel on trial will not continue to push the case that Israel as a state should be sanctioned?

Pushing for a two-state solution now is not just letting Hamas literally get away with mass murder, it is rewarding it for its efforts. And don’t think the Palestinian Authority, with its pay-for-slay policy, would be any better.

The US and UK have both provided military support for Israel and backed the Jewish state in the IJC farce – so far. But settler sanctions and the two-state solution obsession show how fragile that support could be. Gifts come with strings attached and those strings can easily be tightened into a noose. All it takes is the pressure of double standards and false moral equivalence.