Among Israeli and Palestinian leaders, reactions to the Biden administration’s sanctions against West Bank settlers predictably fell along ethnic and ideological lines, from far-right Jewish nationalists who denounced the sanctions as unfair to Arabs who said they did not go far enough.
The sanctions announced on Thursday came in response to violence by extremist Jewish settlers, which has risen sharply in recent months.
“4 settlers?! Sad,” Ahmad Tibi, an Arab member of the Israeli Parliament, wrote to X. “What about the government that adopts them?”
At the other end of the spectrum, settler leaders as well as ultra-nationalist lawmakers, including Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, both cabinet members in the governing coalition, insisted that the victims were the settlers and not the Palestinians living near them. .
“The ‘settler violence’ campaign is an anti-Semitic lie spread by Israel’s enemies,” Mr Smotrich wrote to Xalthough such violence has been amply documented.
Yossi Dagan, who heads a regional council of settlers in the northern West Bank, said in a statement that he expected the Biden administration to take similar action against Arab residents who threw stones at the settlers and who, he claimed, “are systematically trying to kill Jews”. He focused on the small number of Israelis sanctioned compared to the hundreds of thousands of settlers, although many more have been involved in the violence.
Mouin Dmeidi, the mayor of the Palestinian city of Huwara – which was destroyed by a massive settler attack last February – praised Washington’s action and said he hoped other countries would follow suit. “This is the first time in a long time that we have seen an American decision that helps us Palestinians,” Mr. Dmeidi said in a telephone interview.
Much of the world views settlements on land captured by Israel in the 1967 war as illegal, and settlers – who refer to the land by the biblical names Judea and Samaria – generally support Israel’s annexation of part or all of the West Bank and oppose in the creation of a Palestinian state.
For Palestinians, the settlements are nothing less than land grabs that are tearing apart the West Bank in a way that makes both current life for many Arabs and a hopeful future state untenable.
They say the extremist settlers have been emboldened by the current government, the most right-wing and religiously conservative in Israel’s history, which has installed people like Mr. Ben-Gvir and Mr. Smotrich, once considered part of the far-right fringe , in powerful positions.
At the highest official levels on both sides, the response to sanctions has been relatively muted.
A statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said: “The vast majority of residents in Judea and Samaria are law-abiding citizens, many of whom are fighting these days as conscripts and in the reserves to defend Israel. Israel is acting against violators everywhere, so there is no need to take extraordinary steps in this matter.”
The Palestinian Authority’s foreign ministry welcomed the decision, saying it furthered “the interests of peace in the region”.
The mainly centrist Israeli opposition has been largely silent on the sanctions, avoiding a politically sensitive issue. Settlers and their supporters are a powerful force in Israeli politics, gaining strength as successive governments have expanded and encouraged settlements.
Opposition leaders wanted to keep the focus on the war in the Gaza Strip against Hamas and the government failures that preceded it.
