Trump Halts Sanctions on Israeli Settlers, Threatens to Seize Assets of War Crimes Investigators

Trump lifted sanctions against Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Within hours, Netanyahu launched a new invasion.

Jonah Valdez

January 22, 2025

https://theintercept.com/2025/01/22/trump-israel-settlers-west-bank-sanctions/

In his inauguration speech on Monday, President Donald Trump said he wanted to be known as “a peacemaker and a unifier” in his second term, before applauding his own efforts of securing a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, as well as the return of three Israeli hostages from Gaza. 

But later that day, amid a rush of executive orders, Trump seemed to betray his own vision of peace. He lifted Biden-era sanctions aimed at curbing Israeli settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. He also rescinded a policy that had blocked sanctions against the International Criminal Court, putting those who try to hold the U.S. and its allies accountable for war crimes at risk of a new round of financial penalties. 

Within hours of lifting the sanctions, Israeli settlers attacked Jinasfut, a Palestinian village in the West Bank, injuring at least 21 Palestinians and setting fire to homes, cars, a nursery, and workshop, according to village officials. Despite the ceasefire, the Israeli military had been raiding homes and mosques, detaining dozens of Palestinians across the occupied territory, including children and journalists.

And on Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched a new military operation into the northern West Bank city of Jenin and an adjoined refugee camp where several Palestinian militant groups are based. The Israeli offensive, backed by drones and helicopters, killed at least 10 Palestinians — including a 16-year-old boy — and wounded 35 others, health officials said. The campaign is known as “Operation Iron Wall,” an apparent reference to the Zionist writings of Ze’ev Jabotinsky that argued for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to secure an Israeli state.

Experts were quick to note that the rise in Israeli military attacks in the West Bank shouldn’t be viewed in isolation from the ceasefire in Gaza. It’s a continuation, they say, of a broader campaign; some view it as Netanyahu’s attempt to appease extremists in his Cabinet and in Israel who were upset over the cessation of fighting in Gaza, which failed to eradicate Hamas.

“It was all political theater,” said Muhannad Ayyash, a policy analyst at Al-Shabaka and professor in Palestine studies at Mount Royal University, referring to the ceasefire, which went into effect days before Trump re-entered the White House. 

“It was never that Trump wanted to actually put pressure on Israel to stop its settler colonization of Palestine — whether that be decreasing settlement activity in the West Bank, or realizing the two-state solution on 1967 borders, or ending the military onslaught against the Gaza Strip,” Ayyash said. “What he wanted was just the appearance of peace and order to boost his political capital and then allow the Israelis to continue with their project of annexing large swaths of the West Bank and in their project of basically eliminating the Palestinians’ ability to live in Gaza and to resist Israeli settler colonialism.”

The sanctions that Trump erased, which were issued by former President Joe Biden last February, had done little to prevent settler violence in the West Bank. From 2023 to 2024, the area recorded a record-high of more than 1,400 settler attacks on Palestinians. Aided by Netanyahu’s far-right Cabinet and in the cover of Israel’s war on Gaza, settlers annexed large swaths of Palestinian land in the West Bank, including a July land grab that was the largest since the Oslo peace agreement in 1993. 

Though the sanctions had no effect on the ground, the policy of freezing U.S.-held assets of individual Israeli settlers and settler groups had a strong symbolic impact in the region, said Khaled Elgindy, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. “That was an important precedent to have that could be built upon,” Elgindy said. He had advocated for the State Department to add these settler groups to the U.S. Foreign Terror Organization list, which could have further hampered annexation efforts. 

But the latitude Biden gave to Israel will likely even be looser under Trump, Elgindy added. 

Even compared to Biden’s constant support for Israel, Trump’s far-right Cabinet — which includes evangelical Christians — appears to be even more ideologically aligned with Netanyahu’s pro-settler contingent. Trump’s incoming ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, famously said, “There is no such thing as a West Bank,” and disputed the very existence of “a settlement” or “an occupation.” Instead, he referred to the region by Israel’s preferred name of “Judea and Samaria.” During her confirmation hearing on Tuesday, Elise Stefanik, Trump’s pick for United Nations ambassador, agreed with Israeli far-right ministers that Israel has a “biblical right to the entire West Bank.” She also refused to answer a question on whether Palestinians have the right to establish their own state. 

“It’s alarming that they would invoke religious scripture as a basis for formulating U.S. foreign policy,” Elgindy said. “But it’s also alarming what that statement means: total erasure of Palestinians. The term ‘Judea and Samaria’ is based on erasing the existence of Palestinians, it’s what it was designed to do.”

With his executive order reopening the possibility of sanctions against the ICC, Trump appears poised to continue U.S. defense of Israel. Officials at the ICC, which has criminal arrest warrants against Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes, are already bracing for what a new round of sanctions would look like. Even if Trump doesn’t issue penalties against investigators, lawmakers in the House of Representatives, including 45 Democrats, passed a bill that would deliver such sanctions on ICC leadership. Experts at the U.N. have opposed the bill, calling it “a blatant violation of human rights.” Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., said he is preparing to bring the legislation, which was introduced in direct response to the arrest warrants on Israel’s leaders, to a Senate vote this week or next.   

Trump himself has seemed to signal interest in settlement expansion in Israel. When asked whether the U.S. intended to help rebuild Gaza, he seemingly drew on his real-estate background. “Gaza is interesting,” he said to reporters on Monday while signing executive orders. “It’s a phenomenal location on the sea. Best weather, everything is good. Some beautiful things can be done with it.” Just before last week’s ceasefire announcement, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner doubled his investments in an Israeli firm that funds settlement expansion. 

For both Elgindy and Ayyash, Trump’s day-one policies come with little surprise considering his first term, in which he sought to allow Israel to expand settlements, weaken Iran’s power, and normalize relationships between Israel and Arab nations. 

Now, Trump has said he plans to use the momentum from the ceasefire agreement to help normalize ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Such a move would further boost U.S. economic and security interests in the region and would improve Israel’s standing in the international community, which has been shattered by its genocidal war in Gaza. 

Among the largest political obstacles for such a deal is Saudi Arabia’s pledge to resist ties with Israel until it recognizes a Palestinian state within the borders drawn after the 1967 Arab–Israeli War. But Saudi Arabia has much to gain with a partnership with Israel — potentially new security deals from the U.S. that would allow the nation to boost its standing in the region as it faces off with other countries such as Iran, said Ayyash.

A deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel could set in motion a chain of other nations that had opposed Israel also normalizing relations, such as Indonesia or countries in the African Union. It could also weaken the standing of international human rights bodies, such as the International Court of Justice, which has an ongoing genocide case against Israel.

“It would signal the end of the Palestinian cause in the diplomatic international arena,” Ayyash said. “It would signal that states around the world have accepted that it’s OK for Israel to destroy the prospects of a two-state solution, that there will never be a Palestinian state, and that’s just the new reality we are living with.”