There are growing calls for Joe Biden to use his new executive order sanctioning violent Israeli settlers to also target political leaders, including government ministers, responsible for driving attacks against Palestinians.
Josh Paul, a former state department official who resigned over the US supplying weapons for Israel’s present war in Gaza, said that the order is framed broadly enough for the administration to pursue those enabling and facilitating a surge in killings, beatings and forced removals.
Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man, research director for Israel-Palestine at the group founded by the assassinated Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi, Democracy for the Arab World Now, said that if the sanctions were expansively applied they could have a significant impact.
Jacobs said money raised in the US also goes to Honenu, a group associated with Ben-Gvir, that gives cash payments to Israelis convicted of terrorism, including Yigal Amir, who assassinated the prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.
But Paul added that the sanctions order was also a domestic political move, arriving in the face of strong criticism from Arab American voters and many more liberal Democrats over Biden’s support for Israel attack on Gaza even as the Palestinian death toll rose into the tens of thousands.
“I had a conversation a couple of days ago with an Arab American activist who told me that the settler sanctions were announced they got 50 texts from the administration saying, ‘Look at what we’re doing, isn’t this great?’ So it goes to show that there is inherently a political aspect to this,” said Paul.
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