Burned houses and mosques, kidnappings, pogroms, masked thugs attacking unarmed olive harvesters: in the last few years such Israeli settler violence has exploded in the West Bank, reaching record levels.
Many policymakers, including some European governments and prominent organizations in the United States, have responded to the surge in ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by redoubling their call for sanctions on “extremist settler violence.” In September 2025, the European Commission proposed suspending Israel’s preferential trade access, citing settlement expansion in the West Bank’s E1 area. Canada has imposed four rounds of sanctions on individual settlers since May 2024. The UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Norway jointly sanctioned Israeli ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich in June 2025 for inciting violence against Palestinians. In the United States, liberal advocacy groups like J Street have championed this approach to hold Israel accountable—calling for the reinstatement of Biden-era sanctions and even pushing for legislation to codify them.
But sanctions, as currently conceived, haven’t worked—and probably aren’t going to. That’s because sanctions that see settler violence as a matter of individual accountability betray a fundamental misdiagnosis, treating settlements as an aberration rather than what they are: a project of state policy.
The problem is not just that Netanyahu’s far-right government—occasional denunciation of “extremists” notwithstanding—actually has an official policy of settlement expansion as part of a ploy to deny Palestinians a state. More broadly, the Israeli settlement project has been a core feature of Israeli policy throughout many decades of governments on both ends of the political spectrum. Israeli settlements are not the work of extremists operating at the margins of Israeli society. They are the deliberate product of systematic state policy, built and sustained through the coordinated efforts of core Israeli institutions: the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) provide security, the judiciary provides legal cover, and the Ministry of Finance provides funding.
The failure of President Joe Biden’s settler sanctions—reversed by Donald Trump on his first day in office in January 2025—demonstrates what happens when policy targets symptoms rather than causes. Without addressing the institutional machinery that enables settlements, sanctions will remain ineffective political theater that allows policymakers to claim they’re taking action while the settlement enterprise continues to expand.
The State Settlement Project
Any effective effort to curtail Israeli settlements must start with an understanding of the settlements as a state policy, and not a function of a rogue constituency at odds with the Israeli state. Effective sanctions would hold the state accountable rather than target individual settlers. In the late 1970s, when settlers from Gush Emunim (a right-wing Israeli organization) were establishing unauthorized outposts across the West Bank, the government was simultaneously implementing the Drobles Plan, an official strategy created by the World Zionist Organization, an authorized agency of the Israeli government, to “establish settlements not only around the settlements of the minorities [Palestinians], but also in between them.” Nearly fifty years later, the Israeli government and international supporters of the settlement enterprise maintain the pretense that some settlements are legal while others are unauthorized, and that certain fundamentalist settlements are the work of rogue actors rather than deliberate state policy.
Since Israel’s conquest of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israeli governments of all stripes have promoted settlement, with some differences in scope, degree, speed, and legal status. This includes periodic “settlement freezes,” which have been implemented over the last thirty years by successive Israeli governments after U.S. pressure to enter into political negotiations with the Palestinians. In the early 1990s, Israel paused some new settlement construction when George H. W. Bush withdrew loan guarantees. In 2005, Ariel Sharon dismantled all Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip and evacuated four in the West Bank. Regardless of occasional settlement freezes, however, Israeli governments from the left to right have supported settlements as a matter of state policy, and at no point have abided by international law (and U.S. policy), which deems all settlements in occupied territory illegal.
The settlement enterprise is not separate from the Israeli state—it is the Israeli state.
As Delaney Simon wrote in her recent Century International report, the short-lived Biden administration settler sanctions “were no match for the powerful elements of the Israeli government driving both settlement expansion and providing top cover—legal, military, and financial—for violent actors.” By targeting individual “extremist” settlers while ignoring the state apparatus sustaining them, the policy obscured how deeply settlement expansion is embedded within Israeli government institutions.
Three cases expose the futility of sanctioning individual settlers. The first is Amana, which operates as the settlement movement’s state-funded development arm, and was briefly sanctioned by the Biden administration. The second is Israeli finance minister Smotrich’s assumption of direct civilian ministerial authority over settlement expansion. The third is the Israeli government policy to deliberately move hundreds of thousands of Israelis into the West Bank. The settlement enterprise is not separate from the Israeli state—it is the Israeli state.
The Bureaucratic Apparatus: Amana
Amana, the development arm of Gush Emunim, has spent five decades embedding itself within Israel’s settlement bureaucracy. Established in 1978, Amana’s success came from building the administrative infrastructure required to access state funding. After the Likud’s 1977 election win, the government concentrated resources on building settlements and infrastructure in the West Bank and Amana became the primary financial conduit for settlement development. Amana manages budgets for settlements and government projects within them, functioning as an intermediary between settlement communities and major state institutions, including the Ministry of Defense, the Settlement Division, and the Israel Electric Company. Under Ze’ev “Zambish” Hever, who has served as CEO since 1989, Amana has become one of the most powerful institutions in the settlement enterprise, with Hever himself widely regarded as the movement’s most influential figure.
The Jewish Agency for Israel (an organization that promotes immigration to Israel) and the World Zionist Organization’s Settlement Division channeled settlement funds through Amana. Over time, this shift proved fundamental. The settlement enterprise evolved from an ideological movement requiring state accommodation into a bureaucratized, state-funded apparatus acceptable to mainstream Israeli society. Amana was not merely establishing fringe outposts on remote hilltops. It was responsible for building major settlements treated as legitimate within Israel, and internationally tolerated.
Six government ministries provided funding to Amana, creating multiple channels through which the settlement movement accessed state resources. This financial relationship was reinforced by personnel overlap: Pinchas Wallerstein, a Gush Emunim veteran, worked for Amana while holding a position in the Ministry of Defense, while Uri Ariel’s trajectory—he was CEO of Amana in the 1980s and minister of agriculture from 2015 to 2019—exemplified how settlement leaders could later direct the very government offices that had once funded their activities.
The Biden administration sanctioned Amana in November 2024, but granted it a sixty-day wind-down period—sixty-one days before the presidential transition. The timing rendered the sanction meaningless; the organization faced no real disruption. The administration turned down requests by advocacy groups that recommended targeting the Jewish National Fund and the World Zionist Organization’s Settlement Division, institutions that have channeled resources to settlements since the 1970s. These organizations remain untouched, their operations funded and legitimized by the Israeli government.
Amana has spent half a century managing state-channeled funding, establishing major settlements, and maintaining ties throughout the Israeli government. Sanctioning this organization as extremist reveals that extremism has been institutionalized at the core of Israel’s settlement project—supported by official state funding and legitimized by successive governments. The sanctions program implicitly acknowledges this reality while explicitly denying it.
Civilian Control of West Bank Occupation
The Biden administration’s focus on sanctioning individual extremist settlers in 2024 was inadequate from the start, because Israel had already begun making settlement expansion part of official ministerial authority. This shift, which accelerated in the wake of the 2020 Abraham Accords between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, collapsed any remaining distinction between “extremist” settlers and the state.
The Abraham Accords were marketed as a success for the peace process under the pretext that they prevented Israel from annexing parts of the West Bank. While the idea of preventing annexation is laudable, Israel moved ahead with de facto annexation policies that made formal de jure annexation unnecessary. The most striking and overlooked was Netanyahu’s 2023 appointment of his fair-weather coalition partner Bezalel Smotrich as minister of defense, responsible for overseeing civilian affairs in Area C of the West Bank.
Smotrich’s appointment replaces military governance with civilian control. Instead of army commanders making decisions under the law of belligerent occupation, Smotrich now exercises the same powers that Israeli ministers exercise within Israel’s recognized borders—effectively treating the West Bank as Israeli territory. While Smotrich’s electoral future is uncertain, this shift will be extremely hard to undo. Politicians will not be comfortable taking these powers away, as doing so would anger religious Zionists who are a crucial constituency and overrepresented in the military.
When the Biden administration first announced sanctions against settlers in February 2024, Smotrich used his ministerial position to neutralize them. He threatened to cut Palestinian banks off from Israel’s financial system unless Washington provided blanket exemptions for Israeli banks dealing with sanctioned individuals. The United States provided the exemptions. A government minister had successfully protected sanctioned settlers.
Smotrich is not enabling settlements from the margins. He is overseeing them as official state policy through a position in the Ministry of Defense. The settlement enterprise is not separate from the state; it is the state, administered through ministerial portfolios like any other government function.
The Mainstream Settlement Project
Settlement expansion was never merely an extremist project. Since Israel’s founding, and throughout the country’s political elite, a consensus held that Jewish sovereignty over “Greater Israel” was historically essential to Zionism’s fulfillment and that settlements provided strategic assets ensuring defensible borders. By the mid-1980s, facing budget constraints and international pressure, the Israeli government shifted its strategy. Rather than primarily funding ideological “community settlements” in the West Bank’s interior, the government poured resources into large settlement blocs near the Green Line—Ma’ale Adumim, Ariel, and the Etzion Bloc—marketing them as suburban extensions of Israeli cities where families could find affordable housing and commute to jobs within Israel.
Today’s distinction between “extremist” hilltop settlers and “moderate” suburban commuters obscures how the latter enabled the former.
This policy made the settlement enterprise successful. Thousands of nonideological families moved to Ma’ale Adumim and Ariel for affordable housing, providing demographic weight that entrenched Israeli control. Government infrastructure sustained the entire settlement project—suburban and ideological alike. Today’s distinction between “extremist” hilltop settlers and “moderate” suburban commuters obscures how the latter enabled the former. Suburban settlements made West Bank colonization appear mundane and middle-class rather than political and controversial.
Despite no concrete movement toward advancing Palestinian sovereignty in the West Bank for almost twenty years, the international community continues to behave as if change is possible and conditions for a two-state solution must be preserved at all costs. Policy debates fixate on dramatic “doomsday scenarios”—proposed settlements that would represent the proverbial “last nail” in the coffin of Palestinian statehood. Yet it is the continued influx of settlers through mundane means, including government subsidies and cheaper housing, that represents the true death knell. The growing number of settlers undermines the possibility of a Palestinian polity.
The two-state solution is not threatened by future dramatic expansions; it is impossible because of realities that those expansions merely make more visible. A few dozen violent settlers cannot prevent Palestinian statehood. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis living in government-subsidized suburbs can. U.S. sanctions targeted the former while ignoring the latter—and the state policies that created both.
What Comes Next
All West Bank settlements violate international law—a position the EU explicitly maintains and that U.S. policy has historically recognized. For decades, Western governments criticized settlements but avoided holding individual Israelis accountable. The Biden administration broke this pattern by sanctioning Israeli citizens, and Canada and the EU followed. These actions demonstrated that Western policy could move beyond rhetoric. But the Biden sanctions failed to produce any tangible changes on the ground. The sanctions treated individual settlements as the principal obstacle to peace, while ignoring that the settlement enterprise is embedded within the central organs of the Israeli state.
Governments that oppose settlements have pursued sanctions against some aspects of the settlement enterprise—but that approach has already demonstrated its limitations. Canada and some EU states have imposed sanctions similar to the Biden administration’s, which are likely to fail for the same reasons. These limited sanctions do nothing to curb official state sponsorship of settlements, as shown by the examples of Amana, civilian control of settlements, and the mainstreaming of the settler population. Governments have tried to follow mutually contradictory policies, arming Israel but deploring violence against Palestinians, sanctioning individual settlers but supporting state settlement policies, and endorsing a two-state solution on terms that are no longer feasible.
Any effective opposition to settlements must start by targeting Israeli state support. Governments that consider Israel a strategic partner might not be willing to consider sanctions against the state policies that drive settlement, in which case they will have to pursue other policy tools, such as aid conditionality or financial inducements to roll back Israeli state support for settlements. For now, Western policies avoid uncomfortable truths: that settlements represent systematic state policy, not rogue extremism; that territorial partition has become impossible; and that Palestinians who already have been conclusively dispossessed of their land must not also continue to be deprived of their rights.
Trump’s bear hug of Israel has been as tight as Biden’s. But in the future, another administration, or the U.S. Congress, is likely to build on the Biden experiment with sanctions. In fact, targeted settler sanctions are exactly what some groups, including J Street, propose as the cornerstone of a revived strategy to curtail settlements and end the occupation. The lessons of the Biden experiment make clear, however, that limited sanctions against settlers won’t reverse Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Settlements aren’t a sideshow—they’re the centerpiece of Israel’s policy to control Palestinians and make a Palestinian state impossible.
This commentary is part of “Networks of Change: Reviving Governance and Citizenship in the Middle East,” a Century International project supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Open Society Foundations.
Header Image: The Israeli army prevents Palestinians from reaching their lands to harvest olives after declaring the area a closed military zone on October 23, 2025, in Si’ir, Hebron, West Bank. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), around three dozen attacks on Palestinians across twenty-seven villages in the second week of October were related to the ongoing harvest. Source: Faiz Abu Rmeleh/Getty Images
Tags: sanctions, west bank, israel palestine
Sanctions Can’t Solve the Israeli Settlement Problem
Burned houses and mosques, kidnappings, pogroms, masked thugs attacking unarmed olive harvesters: in the last few years such Israeli settler violence has exploded in the West Bank, reaching record levels.
Many policymakers, including some European governments and prominent organizations in the United States, have responded to the surge in ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by redoubling their call for sanctions on “extremist settler violence.” In September 2025, the European Commission proposed suspending Israel’s preferential trade access, citing settlement expansion in the West Bank’s E1 area. Canada has imposed four rounds of sanctions on individual settlers since May 2024. The UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Norway jointly sanctioned Israeli ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich in June 2025 for inciting violence against Palestinians. In the United States, liberal advocacy groups like J Street have championed this approach to hold Israel accountable—calling for the reinstatement of Biden-era sanctions and even pushing for legislation to codify them.
But sanctions, as currently conceived, haven’t worked—and probably aren’t going to. That’s because sanctions that see settler violence as a matter of individual accountability betray a fundamental misdiagnosis, treating settlements as an aberration rather than what they are: a project of state policy.
The problem is not just that Netanyahu’s far-right government—occasional denunciation of “extremists” notwithstanding—actually has an official policy of settlement expansion as part of a ploy to deny Palestinians a state. More broadly, the Israeli settlement project has been a core feature of Israeli policy throughout many decades of governments on both ends of the political spectrum. Israeli settlements are not the work of extremists operating at the margins of Israeli society. They are the deliberate product of systematic state policy, built and sustained through the coordinated efforts of core Israeli institutions: the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) provide security, the judiciary provides legal cover, and the Ministry of Finance provides funding.
The failure of President Joe Biden’s settler sanctions—reversed by Donald Trump on his first day in office in January 2025—demonstrates what happens when policy targets symptoms rather than causes. Without addressing the institutional machinery that enables settlements, sanctions will remain ineffective political theater that allows policymakers to claim they’re taking action while the settlement enterprise continues to expand.
The State Settlement Project
Any effective effort to curtail Israeli settlements must start with an understanding of the settlements as a state policy, and not a function of a rogue constituency at odds with the Israeli state. Effective sanctions would hold the state accountable rather than target individual settlers. In the late 1970s, when settlers from Gush Emunim (a right-wing Israeli organization) were establishing unauthorized outposts across the West Bank, the government was simultaneously implementing the Drobles Plan, an official strategy created by the World Zionist Organization, an authorized agency of the Israeli government, to “establish settlements not only around the settlements of the minorities [Palestinians], but also in between them.” Nearly fifty years later, the Israeli government and international supporters of the settlement enterprise maintain the pretense that some settlements are legal while others are unauthorized, and that certain fundamentalist settlements are the work of rogue actors rather than deliberate state policy.
Since Israel’s conquest of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israeli governments of all stripes have promoted settlement, with some differences in scope, degree, speed, and legal status. This includes periodic “settlement freezes,” which have been implemented over the last thirty years by successive Israeli governments after U.S. pressure to enter into political negotiations with the Palestinians. In the early 1990s, Israel paused some new settlement construction when George H. W. Bush withdrew loan guarantees. In 2005, Ariel Sharon dismantled all Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip and evacuated four in the West Bank. Regardless of occasional settlement freezes, however, Israeli governments from the left to right have supported settlements as a matter of state policy, and at no point have abided by international law (and U.S. policy), which deems all settlements in occupied territory illegal.
As Delaney Simon wrote in her recent Century International report, the short-lived Biden administration settler sanctions “were no match for the powerful elements of the Israeli government driving both settlement expansion and providing top cover—legal, military, and financial—for violent actors.” By targeting individual “extremist” settlers while ignoring the state apparatus sustaining them, the policy obscured how deeply settlement expansion is embedded within Israeli government institutions.
Three cases expose the futility of sanctioning individual settlers. The first is Amana, which operates as the settlement movement’s state-funded development arm, and was briefly sanctioned by the Biden administration. The second is Israeli finance minister Smotrich’s assumption of direct civilian ministerial authority over settlement expansion. The third is the Israeli government policy to deliberately move hundreds of thousands of Israelis into the West Bank. The settlement enterprise is not separate from the Israeli state—it is the Israeli state.
The Bureaucratic Apparatus: Amana
Amana, the development arm of Gush Emunim, has spent five decades embedding itself within Israel’s settlement bureaucracy. Established in 1978, Amana’s success came from building the administrative infrastructure required to access state funding. After the Likud’s 1977 election win, the government concentrated resources on building settlements and infrastructure in the West Bank and Amana became the primary financial conduit for settlement development. Amana manages budgets for settlements and government projects within them, functioning as an intermediary between settlement communities and major state institutions, including the Ministry of Defense, the Settlement Division, and the Israel Electric Company. Under Ze’ev “Zambish” Hever, who has served as CEO since 1989, Amana has become one of the most powerful institutions in the settlement enterprise, with Hever himself widely regarded as the movement’s most influential figure.
The Jewish Agency for Israel (an organization that promotes immigration to Israel) and the World Zionist Organization’s Settlement Division channeled settlement funds through Amana. Over time, this shift proved fundamental. The settlement enterprise evolved from an ideological movement requiring state accommodation into a bureaucratized, state-funded apparatus acceptable to mainstream Israeli society. Amana was not merely establishing fringe outposts on remote hilltops. It was responsible for building major settlements treated as legitimate within Israel, and internationally tolerated.
Six government ministries provided funding to Amana, creating multiple channels through which the settlement movement accessed state resources. This financial relationship was reinforced by personnel overlap: Pinchas Wallerstein, a Gush Emunim veteran, worked for Amana while holding a position in the Ministry of Defense, while Uri Ariel’s trajectory—he was CEO of Amana in the 1980s and minister of agriculture from 2015 to 2019—exemplified how settlement leaders could later direct the very government offices that had once funded their activities.
The Biden administration sanctioned Amana in November 2024, but granted it a sixty-day wind-down period—sixty-one days before the presidential transition. The timing rendered the sanction meaningless; the organization faced no real disruption. The administration turned down requests by advocacy groups that recommended targeting the Jewish National Fund and the World Zionist Organization’s Settlement Division, institutions that have channeled resources to settlements since the 1970s. These organizations remain untouched, their operations funded and legitimized by the Israeli government.
Amana has spent half a century managing state-channeled funding, establishing major settlements, and maintaining ties throughout the Israeli government. Sanctioning this organization as extremist reveals that extremism has been institutionalized at the core of Israel’s settlement project—supported by official state funding and legitimized by successive governments. The sanctions program implicitly acknowledges this reality while explicitly denying it.
Civilian Control of West Bank Occupation
The Biden administration’s focus on sanctioning individual extremist settlers in 2024 was inadequate from the start, because Israel had already begun making settlement expansion part of official ministerial authority. This shift, which accelerated in the wake of the 2020 Abraham Accords between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, collapsed any remaining distinction between “extremist” settlers and the state.
The Abraham Accords were marketed as a success for the peace process under the pretext that they prevented Israel from annexing parts of the West Bank. While the idea of preventing annexation is laudable, Israel moved ahead with de facto annexation policies that made formal de jure annexation unnecessary. The most striking and overlooked was Netanyahu’s 2023 appointment of his fair-weather coalition partner Bezalel Smotrich as minister of defense, responsible for overseeing civilian affairs in Area C of the West Bank.
Smotrich’s appointment replaces military governance with civilian control. Instead of army commanders making decisions under the law of belligerent occupation, Smotrich now exercises the same powers that Israeli ministers exercise within Israel’s recognized borders—effectively treating the West Bank as Israeli territory. While Smotrich’s electoral future is uncertain, this shift will be extremely hard to undo. Politicians will not be comfortable taking these powers away, as doing so would anger religious Zionists who are a crucial constituency and overrepresented in the military.
When the Biden administration first announced sanctions against settlers in February 2024, Smotrich used his ministerial position to neutralize them. He threatened to cut Palestinian banks off from Israel’s financial system unless Washington provided blanket exemptions for Israeli banks dealing with sanctioned individuals. The United States provided the exemptions. A government minister had successfully protected sanctioned settlers.
Smotrich is not enabling settlements from the margins. He is overseeing them as official state policy through a position in the Ministry of Defense. The settlement enterprise is not separate from the state; it is the state, administered through ministerial portfolios like any other government function.
The Mainstream Settlement Project
Settlement expansion was never merely an extremist project. Since Israel’s founding, and throughout the country’s political elite, a consensus held that Jewish sovereignty over “Greater Israel” was historically essential to Zionism’s fulfillment and that settlements provided strategic assets ensuring defensible borders. By the mid-1980s, facing budget constraints and international pressure, the Israeli government shifted its strategy. Rather than primarily funding ideological “community settlements” in the West Bank’s interior, the government poured resources into large settlement blocs near the Green Line—Ma’ale Adumim, Ariel, and the Etzion Bloc—marketing them as suburban extensions of Israeli cities where families could find affordable housing and commute to jobs within Israel.
This policy made the settlement enterprise successful. Thousands of nonideological families moved to Ma’ale Adumim and Ariel for affordable housing, providing demographic weight that entrenched Israeli control. Government infrastructure sustained the entire settlement project—suburban and ideological alike. Today’s distinction between “extremist” hilltop settlers and “moderate” suburban commuters obscures how the latter enabled the former. Suburban settlements made West Bank colonization appear mundane and middle-class rather than political and controversial.
Despite no concrete movement toward advancing Palestinian sovereignty in the West Bank for almost twenty years, the international community continues to behave as if change is possible and conditions for a two-state solution must be preserved at all costs. Policy debates fixate on dramatic “doomsday scenarios”—proposed settlements that would represent the proverbial “last nail” in the coffin of Palestinian statehood. Yet it is the continued influx of settlers through mundane means, including government subsidies and cheaper housing, that represents the true death knell. The growing number of settlers undermines the possibility of a Palestinian polity.
The two-state solution is not threatened by future dramatic expansions; it is impossible because of realities that those expansions merely make more visible. A few dozen violent settlers cannot prevent Palestinian statehood. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis living in government-subsidized suburbs can. U.S. sanctions targeted the former while ignoring the latter—and the state policies that created both.
What Comes Next
All West Bank settlements violate international law—a position the EU explicitly maintains and that U.S. policy has historically recognized. For decades, Western governments criticized settlements but avoided holding individual Israelis accountable. The Biden administration broke this pattern by sanctioning Israeli citizens, and Canada and the EU followed. These actions demonstrated that Western policy could move beyond rhetoric. But the Biden sanctions failed to produce any tangible changes on the ground. The sanctions treated individual settlements as the principal obstacle to peace, while ignoring that the settlement enterprise is embedded within the central organs of the Israeli state.
Governments that oppose settlements have pursued sanctions against some aspects of the settlement enterprise—but that approach has already demonstrated its limitations. Canada and some EU states have imposed sanctions similar to the Biden administration’s, which are likely to fail for the same reasons. These limited sanctions do nothing to curb official state sponsorship of settlements, as shown by the examples of Amana, civilian control of settlements, and the mainstreaming of the settler population. Governments have tried to follow mutually contradictory policies, arming Israel but deploring violence against Palestinians, sanctioning individual settlers but supporting state settlement policies, and endorsing a two-state solution on terms that are no longer feasible.
Any effective opposition to settlements must start by targeting Israeli state support. Governments that consider Israel a strategic partner might not be willing to consider sanctions against the state policies that drive settlement, in which case they will have to pursue other policy tools, such as aid conditionality or financial inducements to roll back Israeli state support for settlements. For now, Western policies avoid uncomfortable truths: that settlements represent systematic state policy, not rogue extremism; that territorial partition has become impossible; and that Palestinians who already have been conclusively dispossessed of their land must not also continue to be deprived of their rights.
Trump’s bear hug of Israel has been as tight as Biden’s. But in the future, another administration, or the U.S. Congress, is likely to build on the Biden experiment with sanctions. In fact, targeted settler sanctions are exactly what some groups, including J Street, propose as the cornerstone of a revived strategy to curtail settlements and end the occupation. The lessons of the Biden experiment make clear, however, that limited sanctions against settlers won’t reverse Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Settlements aren’t a sideshow—they’re the centerpiece of Israel’s policy to control Palestinians and make a Palestinian state impossible.
This commentary is part of “Networks of Change: Reviving Governance and Citizenship in the Middle East,” a Century International project supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Open Society Foundations.
Header Image: The Israeli army prevents Palestinians from reaching their lands to harvest olives after declaring the area a closed military zone on October 23, 2025, in Si’ir, Hebron, West Bank. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), around three dozen attacks on Palestinians across twenty-seven villages in the second week of October were related to the ongoing harvest. Source: Faiz Abu Rmeleh/Getty Images
Tags: sanctions, west bank, israel palestine