US said to nix plan to sanction Smotrich, Ben Gvir, but will keep blacklisting settlers
Source says Sullivan told Netanyahu sanctions on West Bank extremists will persist despite PM’s lobbying against them; Israeli official says far-right ministers won’t be targeted
WASHINGTON — The US is not considering sanctioning far-right ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, a senior Israeli official said on Thursday, days after White House aides told The Times of Israel that the administration was weighing the step.
Sanctions against settler extremists will continue, however, despite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushing the administration to halt them in meetings with US President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and other officials on Thursday, according to a US official.
Vigilante violence by Israeli settlers has spiked in the West Bank since the Hamas terror group’s October 7 onslaught, when thousands of terrorists entered Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages, starting the ongoing war in Gaza.
US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has told Netanyahu that the sanctions levied since February against the Israeli extremists will persist, a US official said.
The idea of including Finance Minister Smotrich or National Security Minister Ben Gvir in the sanctions has been raised several times, two US officials said earlier this week.
Biden initially rejected the idea, arguing that the US should not be sanctioning elected officials. But the proposal resurfaced as Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians continued, and as Israeli authorities continued taking steps to expand their footprint in the West Bank, the officials said.
As national security minister, Ben Gvir has directed police he oversees to take a lax approach to cracking down on settler violence, a US official said earlier this week.
And as finance minister and minister in charge of settlement affairs in the Defense Ministry, Smotrich advanced a quid pro quo arrangement last month that saw Israel advance plans for roughly 5,000 settlement homes, legalize five wildcat outposts and expropriate large amounts of land in the West Bank. In exchange, Smotrich agreed to release hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenues that he had been withholding from the Palestinian Authority, which had brought it to the brink of financial collapse.
In the days and weeks before the finance minister agreed to release the funds, sanctioning him was again seriously considered by the Biden administration, a US official told The Times of Israel at the time.
Smotrich also intended last month to strip VIP permits from PA officials, which would limit their movement in the West Bank and prevent them from entering Israel. The proposed move was meant as retaliation for the PA’s support of countries recognizing a Palestinian state, and for its support for trying Israel in international tribunals.
Those measures weren’t taken at the time, but the senior Israeli official who briefed reporters on Thursday said the sanctions against the PA would still be implemented, adding: “It takes time.”
The official also said that Netanyahu, in conversations Thursday with both Sullivan and Harris, raised his opposition to the American sanctions levied since February.
The prime minister asserted that there were far more attacks against Israeli civilians in the West Bank than against Palestinian ones, and that the rate of Palestinian terrorists to civilians killed in the territory has been 50 to 1, the Israeli official said.
Sullivan told Netanyahu in response that the administration’s sanctions against Israeli extremists will continue, a US official told The Times of Israel.
Harris, in her conversation with Netanyahu, “expressed her concern about actions that undermine stability and security in the West Bank, such as extremist settler violence and settlement expansion,” her office said in a readout of the conversation.
Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee for the presidency in November, has been under scrutiny for her positions surrounding Israel and its ongoing war with the Hamas terror group.
Her remark that she “will not stay silent” on the suffering of Gazan civilians after meeting Netanyahu drew immediate furious responses from top Israeli officials on Friday morning.
