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 …
