Biden’s New Doomsday Option Against Israeli Settlers

On February 1, Joe Biden took the biggest step any U.S. president has ever taken against Israel’s settler movement. He issued an executive order “imposing certain sanctions on persons undermining peace, security, and stability in the West Bank” and used this new authority to punish four Israeli settlers for violence against Palestinians and Israeli peace activists. But because the president’s directive dealt with the West Bank and not the war in Gaza, and was initially applied to only a handful of people, it was largely overlooked—or cast by critics as a symbolic sop to disaffected Arab and Muslim voters in places like Michigan.

A careful reading of the order and conversations with officials both inside and outside the U.S. government, however, reveal that the move was no PR exercise. It was a warning shot—part of a deliberate strategy to splinter Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition and to advance the cause of the two-state solution. In time, it could even upend the U.S.-Israeli relationship.

For more than a decade, Israel has struggled to contain a campaign of nationalist terror waged by radical Jewish settlers against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. In 2021 alone, Israel’s internal security service recorded some 400 violent incidents—an increase of nearly 50 percent from 2020. Those were just the assaults reported to the authorities, something many Palestinians don’t bother to do, and most went unpunished. A number of attacks have been caught on camera, some of them taking place on the Sabbath and Jewish holidays, in violation of the religious law that the perpetrators purport to follow. Since October 7, extremists have used the cover of the war in Gaza to advance their shadow war in the West Bank, threatening to further inflame the region.

Critics of the Biden administration’s focus on settler violence contend that the broad majority of Israelis in the West Bank are peaceful and law-abiding, which is true but irrelevant to the problem of dealing with those who are not. Others argue that significantly more Israelis have been killed in the West Bank by terrorist violence than Palestinians have been killed by Israeli settlers. This is also true but irrelevant: The U.S. already sanctions Palestinian terrorist groups—which are covered by the executive order too—and the majority of settler violence is meant not to murder Palestinians but to intimidate and ultimately displace them from their land, as my colleague Graeme Wood documented in October. Fundamentally, though, the fact that violent settlers are part of the current Israeli government proves that settler violence is no fringe phenomenon.

On February 26, 2023, two Palestinian terrorists from the West Bank village of Huwara shot and killed a pair of Israeli brothers in their car. In response, a horde of settlers descended on Huwara in an indiscriminate revenge riot that Yehuda Fuchs, the Israeli general who oversees the West Bank, dubbed a “pogrom.” But Bezalel Smotrich, the government’s finance minister, who also holds a position in the defense ministry, had a different reaction. “Huwara needs to be wiped out,” he said, but “the state of Israel,” rather than individual citizens, should do it.

This de facto endorsement of violence was not an isolated incident. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right national-security minister and a Smotrich ally, later met with the families of settlers who had been arrested after the riot, vowing to “fix the injustice” they’d endured by being detained without trial over suspicion of violence—a practice Ben-Gvir has happily embraced when applied to Palestinians. “A closed, burnt Huwara—that’s what I want to see,” Zvika Fogel, a member of parliament for Ben-Gvir’s party, told Israeli radio. “That’s the only way to achieve deterrence.”

[Read: The Israeli government goes extreme right]

Both Smotrich and Ben-Gvir live in settlements themselves, and their support for violence extends well beyond rhetoric. According to media accounts and a former deputy head of Israel’s internal security service, Smotrich was part of a 2005 plot to prevent Israel’s pullout of its settlers from Gaza by blowing up cars on a highway using 700 liters of gasoline. He was arrested and held for three weeks. Before being elected, Ben-Gvir regularly boasted about being indicted 53 times for various extremist offenses—including incitement to racism and supporting a terrorist organization (of which he was convicted). At the age of 19, he was interviewed on television while holding an ornament stolen from the car of then–Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was pursuing peace with the Palestinians. “Just like we got to this symbol, we’ll get to Rabin, too,” the young Ben-Gvir promised. Rabin was subsequently assassinated by a far-right gunman.

The dark spirit that claimed the former prime minister’s life endures today: When Fuchs, the Israel Defense Forces general, sought to crack down on settler extremism, he reportedly needed his own security detail to protect him, not from Palestinian terrorists, but from Jewish ones.

Smotrich and Ben-Gvir were once extremists on the outside of the Israeli establishment, looking in. But today, they are an essential component of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Because the current coalition received just 48.4 percent of the vote in Israel’s latest election and only assumed power thanks to a quirk of Israel’s electoral system, Netanyahu depends on several far-right parties to remain in office. The arrangement gives men like Ben-Gvir and Smotrich outsize influence over policy, despite their unpopularity with the broader Israeli public.

The October 7 massacre has made Netanyahu even more beholden to his extremist allies for his political survival. Polls consistently show that he would lose in a landslide if an election were held today. In practice, this means that while Israel’s army and security services have at times attempted to quell settler violence, they have received scant support from the political leadership. Given this reality, the Biden administration opted to act on its own—and its fundamental distrust of Netanyahu’s government is written explicitly into the text of last month’s executive order.

Far from being restricted to Israeli settlers who engage in explicitly violent conduct, the order enables sanctions on any actors who “threaten the peace, security, or stability of the West Bank.” This language could reasonably be interpreted to apply not just to direct perpetrators of violence, but to politicians whose policies enable them, including ministers such as Smotrich and Ben-Gvir and even the prime minister himself. In fact, the Biden administration has already leaked that the two far-right politicians are potentially in line for sanctions. The order itself says that it can apply to “a leader or official of … an entity, including any government entity.”

The most telling language in this regard is also the most technical. At the outset, Biden’s directive gives the administration the authority to sanction anyone found “to be responsible for or complicit in” actions that imperil West Bank stability, “including directing, enacting, implementing, enforcing, or failing to enforce policies.” The key words here are “failing to enforce policies.” In deceptively bland legalese, this clause implies that the American administration already believes that Israel’s current authorities are not following their own laws. Violent settlers are not the only ones at fault—so, too, is the Netanyahu government that has not policed them.

I saw this dereliction of duty for myself in late 2022, when I visited the Palestinian village of Beita, which is overlooked by a small, makeshift settlement called Evyatar. Evyatar is illegal under Israeli law, and most Israelis I’ve met have no idea it exists. But the far right is deeply invested in the area and has repeatedly attempted to establish a foothold there. Like other wildcat settlements deep in the West Bank, Evyatar has provoked Palestinian protest, ultimately resulting in violence and Palestinian casualties. None of this would have happened had Israeli authorities cleared the site in a timely fashion, in keeping with Israel’s own laws. But Netanyahu repeatedly delayed its evacuation to avoid offending part of his base, and today, members of his hard-right government are personally connected to those attempting to resettle Evyatar. Biden’s executive order puts everyone implicated in these decisions—settlers, politicians, and military officials—on notice.

The president’s directive is a far cry from the sanctions regimes imposed on rogue states such as Iran. Still, nothing like it has ever been enacted with respect to Israel or any similarly allied country, as one former Office of Foreign Assets Control official pointed out to me. Eugene Kontorovich, a professor at George Mason University and one of the sharpest legal minds on the Israeli right, immediately grasped the implications. “The new sanctions tools against Israelis announced by the Biden Administration is not about settler violence,” he wrote on X. “It does not require acts of violence - anyone vaguely involved in doing or not doing anything the [White House] thinks undermines ‘peace’ and ‘security’ in [the West Bank] qualifies.”

Such fears aside, Biden is unlikely to immediately use his new authority in such a sweeping manner. The order, like other U.S. sanctions, is meant as a tool to apply pressure on a foreign government judiciously, allowing the administration to gradually tighten the vise in order to get results. And the new directive serves two overarching goals.

First, it destabilizes Netanyahu’s governing coalition. With regard to the Gaza conflict, Biden has limited leverage over the Israeli prime minister. As long as the Israeli public remains behind the war, which it perceives as an existential struggle with Hamas, Netanyahu is able to shrug off external pressure. But the Israeli public is not behind the far-right settlers, making them the perfect target for undermining Netanyahu’s support at home. Israelis do not want their relationship with the United States held hostage to the whims of violent radicals and their illegal wildcat settlements in the remote reaches of the West Bank. In this way, as he has done in other cases, Biden is throwing a wedge into Netanyahu’s coalition, forcing him to choose between the public’s preferences and his unpopular far-right partners.

[Read: Biden’s smart strategy for outmaneuvering Bibi]

Second, the executive order advances the cause of the two-state solution. The Biden administration recognizes that just as Hamas must be defanged for any negotiated Israeli-Palestinian solution to succeed, so too must the Israeli settler movement. In other words, the executive order isn’t a counterbalance to Biden’s Gaza strategy but a counterpart. Both aim to disempower actors who would otherwise exercise a violent veto over diplomatic progress.

The Biden administration has indicated its intent to roll out further settler sanctions in the coming weeks. This development has incensed the Israeli far right but also exposed its weakness. When Biden’s initial sanctions on four violent settlers compelled the Israeli banking system to cut them off, an outraged Smotrich threatened to propose legislation that would force the banks to do business with the settlers regardless of U.S. penalties. Essentially, the finance minister suggested that the stability of the entire Israeli financial system was a reasonable sacrifice in order to shield a few fanatics on the political fringe. As yet, Smotrich has not followed through with this move, which would be toxic with the broader public. But the reaction itself is revealing. If this is how he and his allies respond to American sanctions on even the country’s most extreme elements, the far-right parties will no longer be viable partners for any Israeli government that seeks to maintain a healthy relationship with the United States.

If the implementation of Biden’s executive order is followed to its logical conclusion, whether under his administration or a future one, Israel may find itself facing a fateful choice: It will be able to have radical settlers in its government or a functional U.S.-Israel alliance, but not both.