The Biden Administration continues to apply new sanctions to Israeli individuals and firms as it faces pressure from left-wing activists to take a tougher stance against Israel, lest he lose support in key swing states in the 2024 election.
Last month, the White House announced sanctions against four Israeli citizens, none of whom had been charged with any crime, for so-called “extremist settler violence.”
The language of President Joe Biden’s executive order is so broad that it allows the administration to adopt sweeping sanctions on any Israeli who lives across the 1949 armistice lines, or who supports the rights of Israelis to live and settle there, as the Trump administration recognized they could legally do.
As Caroline Glick has noted, claims of “extremist settler violence” are highly exaggerated. But the Biden administration is using the sanctions — and the threat of more sanctions — in an attempt to appease anti-Israel voters in Michigan and other swing states, amid growing dissatisfaction among the Democratic base with Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza.
Biden also reversed Trump’s policy that had once acknowledged that Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) is legal, and declared it “inconsistent” with international law instead. He is also reportedly preparing more sanctions on “extremist” settlers — a development that the Israeli government itself has called an “extreme” policy.
Later in February, it was revealed that the U.S. had opened an investigation into an Israeli company that makes parts for the Iron Dome missile defense system, necessary for protecting civilians — a decision that puzzled Israeli leaders.
And on Tuesday, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned a Greek firm headed by Israeli executives that produces spyware. It was, according to the Times of Israel, the first time that the U.S. sanctioned any companies for alleged misuse of spyware.
The company’s products were allegedly used to spy on U.S. government officials. Ironically, Biden was part of a previous administration that spied on Israeli government leaders and their communications with members of Congress.
These sanctions conform to the demands of the anti-Israel “boycott, divestment, sanctions” (BDS) movement, which attempts to isolate and destroy Israel, and is often regarded as antisemitic since it only singles out the Jewish state.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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