Sanctions against individual settlers are hopelessly inadequate. The real settler organisation is Israel

Irish Times

29-06-2025

Global attention has shifted away from Gaza during the two weeks of the Israel-Iran war – a collateral benefit from Israel's point of view, no doubt. But with or without the world watching, Israel's daily killing of starving Palestinians in Gaza never stopped. And now, with hints of the possible
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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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