Sanctions against individual settlers are hopelessly inadequate. The real settler organisation is Israel
expansion of the Abraham Accords
, Israel would be delighted to once again draw attention away from the carnage it continues to inflict on Gaza's civilian population.
Such a regional expansion would serve to advance another key goal of the accords: to spell out to Palestinians how Israel can look past them, not towards Ramallah or Rafah, but towards Abu Dhabi and – ideally – Riyadh. Israel's strategic gaze remains the same: skip over those erased Palestinians in order to look towards deal-making in the Gulf and beyond.
Of course, the violent, state-sanctioned erasure is not limited to Gaza. Almost daily pogroms against a defenceless Palestinian population in the West Bank have resulted – for now – in the ethnic cleansing of an area 'larger than the entire Gaza Strip'. And the violence continues.
Yet even amid all the bloodshed and destruction, Palestinians are not erased. They are right here – and still they comprise half of the people living between the river and the sea. The future of Israelis and Palestinians – just like our present and past – is here. That is the reality that must be addressed.
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All this is well known. And all this, staggeringly, is not only tolerated but in fact underwritten by Europe through various partnerships with Israel, chief among them the EU-Israel association agreement. The agreement – supposedly 'based on respect for human rights and democratic principles' – has just now gone through an ever-so-belated 'review'. Its conclusion?
That '[t]here are indications that Israel would be in breach of its human rights obligations.'
The resulting action on behalf of the EU? None.
Every new day of European inaction is a day in which Europe articulates a clear message to Israelis. What is that message? That the EU is fine (bar the occasional lip service) with what Israel is doing to Palestinians; that the killings and oppression are in fact greenlighted to continue by Brussels, Paris, Berlin and Dublin. For sure, the EU may not have the leverage to make it all stop. But it at least has the basic obligation not to be part of it, not to underwrite it, not to be continuously complicit in it. And it has a considerable measure of genuine leverage.
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What gives Ursula von der Leyen the right to egg Binyamin Netanyahu on with his killing crusades?
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That kind of leverage – which is perhaps what French President Emmanuel Macron meant when recently speaking of 'concrete measures' – has rarely been used to counteract Israeli state violence. In recent years a modest wave of personal sanctions against 'violent settlers' has emerged – and is clearly a step in the right direction. The most recent announcement, earlier in June, by the UK and others of personal sanctions against two Israeli ministers – Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir – is yet another such step forward. Further steps could now follow – if not at EU level then from individual states or ad-hoc, like-minded, alignments.
But personal sanctions, to date, have demonstrably failed to stop either the violence itself or the impunity enjoyed by its perpetrators. The logic at the core of sanctioning individual settlers – or some of their political leaders – has been flawed from the get-go. Settlements, and all the violence, dispossession and loss of Palestinian land and livelihood that comes with them, are not a project of a few individual settlers, nor of Israel's extreme political right. They are an Israeli state project – a violent one – backed for decades by all Israeli governments through decisions, policy, funding, planning and military might.
As such, the review – and suspension – of the trade agreement with the EU could have served as the appropriate level at which Israeli policies are to be addressed. Acting effectively against these Israeli policies would certainly be met by a predictable Israeli response: accusations of 'anti-Semitism' and 'BDS' per the usual script. Yet a suspension of the agreement – or similar action at the appropriate government level – would amount to neither. Instead it would simply be the outcome of Israel's own undermining of its international obligations, flowing directly from Israel's criminal and cruel policies.
To impact Israeli policies, you must impact Israel. Not a specific settler nor even a specific settler organisation: for the real 'settler organisation' is the state of Israel itself.
Hagai El-Ad is a writer based in Jerusalem
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RTÉ News
13 hours ago
- RTÉ News
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Irish Independent
15 hours ago
- Irish Independent
Now even Israel's most blind defenders are admitting the truth of what the state they support so fiercely is doing in Gaza
Britain announced it is ready to follow suit, unless Israel agrees to a ceasefire and commits to a two-state solution. President Donald Trump appears to have had a visceral reaction to the photographs of suffering children, dismissing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's claim that 'there's no starvation in Gaza,' and saying, 'Those children look very hungry. … That's real starvation stuff. I see it, and you can't fake that.' Influential MAGA voices have sounded the alarm, too, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, who became the first Republican in Congress to call what's happening in Gaza a 'genocide". Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon sees a deeper political shift: 'It seems that for the under-30-year-old MAGA base, Israel has almost no support," told Politico. Though this might be overstating the shift, Bannon is right that Israel is haemorrhaging support among conservatives. Even before the starvation crisis broke through in international media, 50pc of Republican and Republican-leaning adults younger than 50 said they had an unfavourable view of Israel, up from 35pc in 2022. Trump said the US would work with Europeans to set up food distribution centres in Gaza. Netanyahu ordered a pause in fighting in three areas of Gaza to allow 'minimal' aid to enter. For thousands of Palestinians, this will have been both too little and too late. Israel's temporary resumption of aid comes after it cut off supplies in March. Once acute malnutrition sets in, the damage can be long-lasting, particularly in children. Bodies ravaged by hunger struggle to process even basic nutrition. At least 111 people, including 81 children, have died of starvation, according to Gaza's Health Ministry. The priority now must be to prevent more suffering. The only way that can happen is with a durable ceasefire and an end to a war that has taken the lives of more than 60,000 and perhaps tens of thousands more, according to a recent study published in the Lancet. The problem is that Netanyahu has had strong incentives to prolong the war. By July of last year, top generals determined that Israel's key objectives had been met. The war's continuation served no discernible military purpose. Netanyahu pressed on anyway because ending it would have meant political suicide within his own far-right coalition. In other words, 12 months of war – and all the resulting destruction – did not need to happen. The world is waking up to this perverse reality. Even some of Israel's fiercest defenders, such as journalist Haviv Rettig, have acknowledged the reality of 'desperate hunger' after denying the evidence for months. Amit Segal, chief political correspondent for Israel's Channel 12, wrote recently that 'Gaza may well be approaching a real hunger crisis.' These are reluctant admissions, filled with caveats. I, myself, am reluctant to commend them for the barest minimum of moral awareness and human decency. But it matters. I have Palestinian friends who respond, understandably, that the newly outspoken critics of Israel's conduct are acting in bad faith and that they should have been speaking out when it could have made a difference for the thousands of Palestinians who have already died or who are already starving. They have a point. But at the same time, The pro-Palestinian movement must be a big tent and welcome anyone willing to question their past positions and update them in the face of incontrovertible evidence of Israel's crimes against humanity. My hope is that more of Israel's most ardent supporters will come to see how this war – this genocide – is putting a permanent moral stain on a state that they believe in and have dedicated themselves to defending. Until now, whenever I provided pro-Israel hard-liners with evidence of Israel doing bad things, they would insist that there must be an explanation. Their belief – akin to a faith, really – is that Israel is good, therefore it is not capable of committing something like genocide. It is hard to reason with people whose belief is based on projection, rather than facts. An anecdote from Shaul Magid, a professor of Jewish studies at Harvard, is instructive here. He recalled: 'I once asked someone I casually know, an ardent Zionist, 'what could Israel do that would cause you not to support it?'. He was silent for a moment before looking at me and said, 'Nothing.'' But when does nothing become something? Presumably, there is a red line for Israel's supporters. And, for many, it is being breached. Only Washington commands the kind of influence that could meaningfully change Israel's behaviour. But administration after administration has been unwilling to use that leverage. Those of us who pray for a better future for Palestinians are in the uncomfortable position of placing our faith in Trump's unpredictability, which is never a good place to be. But it's where we are. It's too little, too late. But it's also not too late. The dead cannot be brought back, but the living can still be saved. For their sake, we must be willing to take yes for an answer, even when it comes from unexpected quarters. And there's one unexpected quarter that matters most, now: the Trump administration. The moral arc of the universe might bend toward justice, but it doesn't bend on its own – and it doesn't bend fast enough. If Trump, of all people, can be the instrument of ending this catastrophe, then we must swallow our pride and our doubts and pray that his visceral reaction to hungry children becomes something more than words.
