The Biden administration announced Tuesday it will implement visa bans on Israelis viewed as “extremist settlers” in the West Bank. The policy move follows President Biden’s warning last mont…
Fat lot of good that will do.
It’s like Biden thought, "what can we do that will makes us look like we are doing something, but will have absolutely no impact at all. "
As a general supporter of Israel’s fight against Hamas: this is fine. Fuck those asshole settlers with a rusty crowbar.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Biden administration announced Tuesday it will implement visa bans on Israelis viewed as “extremist settlers” in the West Bank.
The policy move follows President Biden’s warning last month that sanctions could be imposed on individuals the U.S. views as involved in violence against Palestinians, particularly in the larger territory.
Under the policy, any Israeli citizen deemed to be committing acts of violence or undermining peace and security in the West Bank, particularly against Palestinians, will be banned from entering the U.S.
The United Nations and other humanitarian organizations have warned of an alarming spike in violent attacks by Israeli settlers in the West Bank against Palestinians, to include reprisal violence for Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre and hostage taking — which sparked the ongoing war in the region.
But settler-violence is part of a larger problem of extremist Israelis who critics say are emboldened by Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government to settle, by force, the territory of the West Bank that was partitioned between Israel and the Palestinian Authority under the 1993 Oslo Accords, but is supposed to be the decided in final-status negotiations for a future Palestinian State.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in a statement announcing the visa-ban policy, also raised the issue of Palestinian violence against Israelis.
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Why not sanctions? The US has been happy to impose individual sanctions in many other cases. Visa bans don’t have significant impacts on people who don’t want or need to travel to the US.
Yeah, it’s a nothingburger to wait out the conflict. There will be a ceasefire soon, settlers will continue to do what they do, but the war will be out of sight of most of the world by then.
Because sanctions would actually have an impact.
This does nothing, which is the point.
But illegal settlement on the other hand… We don’t care
Well of course not. Our country was founded on it, after all!
It’s a start.
That’s how I see it. Israel really hasn’t seen any public consequences from the US, its closest allies, for how it treats the Palestinians. This is kind of a shot across the bow that there is more to come. The Biden administration has indicated that they are not pleased with the scale of civilian casualties in Gaza.