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THE PLACE WHERE WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST WILL BE WON OR LOST  
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Nahal Toosi
October 12, 2024
Politico
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_ The Biden administration is taking action in the West Bank, but it
may be too late. _

Israeli soldiers take position in the West Bank. The Biden
administration imposed economic sanctions on a group of Israeli
settlers who routinely attack Palestinians in the West Bank, but why
wasn't it done earlier, writes Nahal Toosi. , Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP via
Getty Images

 

The U.S. recently took a step in the Middle East that was easy to miss
amid the roar of Iranian missiles and thud of Israeli combat boots: It
imposed economic sanctions on Hilltop Youth
[[link removed]], a group of
Israeli settlers who routinely attack Palestinians in the West Bank.

It was the latest in a series of penalties President Joe Biden has
levied on extremist Israeli settlers over the past year as Israel has
battled Hamas militants in Gaza and as the West Bank has sunk deeper
into violence and occupation. And to listen to Biden’s senior aides
talk of the effort is to hear people who are very proud of themselves.

Such sanctions, which can include freezing alleged culprits’
finances, are unprecedented, the aides stress. They prove America is
even-handed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They show the U.S. is
serious about the need for a Palestinian state, despite current
Israeli resistance to the idea.

But after months of listening to this self-congratulation, I still
have one question for Biden and his team: Why didn’t you do this
years ago? All of the trends you’re pointing to in the West Bank
existed then. And if you’d acted sooner, the Middle East today might
be less of a mess.

I have asked this question of some very high-ranking members of the
president’s team. None has given me a satisfactory answer (read on
for the ones I did get). But it’s important to keep asking, because
the fate of the Middle East could lie in the West Bank and what steps
Israel, the United States and the Palestinians themselves take there
now.

“The West Bank is the last remaining vestige of a Palestinian state
that hasn’t been destroyed or otherwise taken off the table
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scholar with the Middle East Institute who has been highly critical of
the Biden team. “If it falls, if the settlements overtake
everything, then there’s not even the pretense of a Palestinian
state.”

If Palestinians lose that hope of achieving statehood, it’s likely
to prolong the conflict at the root of the fight in Gaza — the one
that has for decades has pitted Palestinians and Israelis over the
same land.

It also means the odds are lower that the Middle East will ever know a
durable peace, because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fuels so many
grievances in the region. That includes anger toward a U.S. seen as
biased in favor of Israel, even though American officials — Biden
included — say the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel
is the only real way to solve the long-running feud.

Today, many of those same U.S. officials are watching the West Bank
collapse in slow motion, along with the dream of a future Palestine.

“The indicators are all running really negative,” a senior Biden
administration official acknowledged to me. I granted the official,
and others, anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic candidly.

Since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack from Gaza that launched the
current war, Israeli security forces have largely locked down the West
Bank, adding numerous checkpoints, gates and other obstacles
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limit Palestinians’ ability to get around and access basic services.
Israel has suspended the work permits of tens of thousands of West
Bank Palestinians who used to work in Israel. The Israelis also have
launched hundreds of raids across the territory to counter what they
say is stepped up Palestinian militancy
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often severely damaging its infrastructure
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More than 700 Palestinians have been killed
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the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Extremist Israeli settlers, who want Israel to annex the West Bank,
have escalated their attacks on Palestinians
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the months right after Oct. 7. Such attacks have emptied Palestinian
villages, killed many Palestinians and robbed others of their
livestock, harvests and other livelihoods. The Israeli security forces
often merely watch the attacks or join in, rights groups report
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The Israeli government, meanwhile, has unveiled plans for more land
seizures
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settlements
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the West Bank.

Some of Israel’s far-right government ministers are trying to
economically punish the Palestinian Authority, which governs parts of
the West Bank. They’ve at times held back tens of millions in funds
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to the PA. The far-right ministers also have threatened to bar
Israeli banks
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engaging with Palestinian banks, a move that could crush the West
Bank’s economy. Such figures have been open about their desire to
incorporate the West Bank into a “Greater Israel” that even
includes Jordan
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For Israelis traumatized by the Hamas attacks, the West Bank is full
of potential threats they cannot ignore. They remember abandoning
their settlements in Gaza two decades ago, only to see it turn into a
haven for Hamas militants.

An Israeli official familiar with the situation in the West Bank spoke
of growing Iran-related weapons smuggling
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the territory.

“We were able to block a few serious car bombs, where we found
explosives. We’d never seen those kinds of explosives in Judea and
Samaria before,” said the official, using the historical names many
Israelis prefer to use for the West Bank.
 
Israeli officials also lay much of the blame for dysfunction in the
West Bank on the Palestinian Authority, a deeply unpopular institution
known for its corruption.

The PA’s defenders point out that it is undergoing reforms, although
it has yet to change its notorious “pay for slay” program
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They also say Israel should help strengthen the PA into a reliable
partner, not weaken it further.

For Palestinians, the West Bank and Gaza are inseparable parts of a
future state. But Gaza is now a pile of rubble, and some form of
Israeli occupation there is almost certain. The deepening Israeli
occupation in the West Bank means more anguish — and defiance.

“We feel frustrated, but not defeated,” said Xavier Abu Eid, a
former adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organization, who lives in
the West Bank. “We are indigenous people in the land. The Israelis
may succeed in boycotting the two-state solution, but they will not
erase us.”

What’s especially striking about some of the trends in the West Bank
is that they existed long before Oct. 7, 2023.

Israeli settler violence has been rising for years. Israeli
settlements have been growing for decades. The Israeli military has
been ever-present and active. Far-right Israeli ministers
were threatening the Palestinian Authority’s funding
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the war began. Some critics argued that Israel’s occupation of the
West Bank had become a de facto annexation; others went further and
called it apartheid.

Israel felt it had a freer hand in the West Bank in part because of
Donald Trump’s presidency.

Among other pro-Israel steps, Trump largely cut off U.S. funds to and
relations with the Palestinians. His secretary of State reversed a
long-standing U.S. position by declaring that America no longer viewed
Israeli settlements in the West Bank as being inconsistent with
international law.

When Biden took office, he and his team could have brought more of an
equilibrium to the situation, truly distinguishing themselves from
Trump.

They barely tried
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They didn’t even switch back the position on settlements in those
early years.

Some Biden officials urged a more active approach. They sought to
impose sanctions on violent Israeli settlers as early as 2021; such
sanctions freeze the U.S.-held financial assets of the targeted
settlers and hamper their ability to engage in business globally,
especially with Americans.

But those American officials’ voices were drowned out by colleagues
who warned that moving against the settlers could destabilize
Israel’s coalition government or rally Israelis around their
extremists, two current U.S. officials and one former U.S. official
familiar with the discussions told me.

“Paralysis by analysis” seemed to set in, as did general
bureaucratic malaise. What also didn’t help was that solving the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict just wasn’t a Biden priority.

“We just couldn’t get anyone to fucking care at a senior level,”
one of the U.S. officials said.

In some conversations, I’ve resorted to asking U.S. officials
whether they ever considered penalizing violent settlers simply
because it was the right thing to do. They look at me as if I am silly
and explain that that is not how policymaking works.

But let’s say the administration had targeted such settlers sooner.
Maybe it would have put Israeli leaders on notice that the United
States, under Biden, is serious about the need for a Palestinian
state. Perhaps it could have given some hope to the Palestinians. It
may not have prevented Hamas’ attacks last October, but a stronger
U.S. stance against Israeli extremism could have undermined Israel’s
far right to the point where maybe they wouldn’t be in its current
government.

But by the time Biden acted, starting with visa bans on extremist
settlers late last year
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in February
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most Israelis were so angry over the Hamas attack that they cared
little about U.S. opinion and could not fathom allowing a Palestinian
state. It’s also not lost on Palestinians that Biden, then running
for reelection, imposed the sanctions when it was clear he could lose
a slew of pro-Palestinian votes in swing states.

At the Aspen Security Forum this summer, I asked White House national
security adviser Jake Sullivan why the Biden administration didn’t
impose the West Bank sanctions years earlier. Sullivan said he took
the question as a “compliment” and a sign his team was doing the
right thing.

“The fact is we did it, and no one else had done it before,” he
said.

Senior Biden administration officials assure me that more settler
sanctions are coming, and that Israel’s far-right government
ministers may not be immune from them.

But I also hear criticism from Palestinians and rights activists that
the administration is moving so slowly, so incrementally, that
potential targets are likely already shifting their financial assets
in ways that could protect them from sanctions.

So the administration may not only be late, it may still be doing too
little.

_NAHAL TOOSI is POLITICO’s senior foreign affairs correspondent. She
has reported on war, genocide and political chaos in a career that has
taken her around the world. Her reported column, Compass
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decision-making of the global national security and foreign policy
establishment — and the fallout that comes from it._

_In 2019, Toosi was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in
reporting for her story on the plight of Rohingya Muslims in
Bangladesh and Myanmar. Toosi joined POLITICO from The Associated
Press, where she reported from and/or served as an editor in New York,
Islamabad, Kabul and London. She was one of the first foreign
correspondents to reach Abbottabad, Pakistan, after the killing of
Osama bin Laden. Prior to joining the AP, Toosi worked for the
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where she mostly covered higher education
but also managed to report from Iraq during the U.S. invasion in 2003,
as well as several other countries. Toosi is a proud graduate of the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she spent most of
her time at the college paper, The Daily Tar Heel._

* Middle East
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* Iran
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* Joe Biden
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* Israel
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* Palestinian Authority
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* West Bank
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