Both Israelis and Palestinians see problems with the sanctions, just very different ones.
Among Israeli and Palestinian leaders, reactions to the Biden administration's sanctions on West Bank settlers have been predictably along ethnic and ideological lines, from far-right Jewish nationalists who decried the punishments as unjust to Arabs who said they did not go far enough.
The sanctions announced on Thursday are a response to this violence by Jewish settler extremistswhich has increased sharply in recent months.
“Four settlers?! Pathetic,” said Ahmad Tibi, an Arab member of the Israeli parliament. wrote on X. “What about the government adopting them?”
At the other end of the spectrum, settler leaders and ultranationalist lawmakers, including Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, both cabinet members in the governing coalition, insisted that it was the settlers, not the Palestinians they lived near, who were the victims goods. .
“The 'settler violence' campaign is an anti-Semitic lie spread by Israel's enemies,” Mr. Smotrich said. wrote on Xeven though there has been such violence amply documented.
Yossi Dagan, leader of a regional settler council in the northern West Bank, said in a statement that he expected the Biden administration to take similar action against Arab residents who threw rocks at settlers and who, he claimed, routinely ” trying to kill'. Jews.” He focused on the small number of Israelis under sanctions, compared to the hundreds of thousands of settlers, although many more are involved in the violence.
Mouin Dmeidi, the mayor of the Palestinian city of Huwara, which was destroyed by a massive attack of settlers last February – praised Washington's action and said he hoped other countries would follow suit. “This is the first time in a long time that we see an American decision that helps us Palestinians,” Mr. Dmeidi said in a telephone interview.
Much of the world views settlements on land Israel captured in the 1967 war as illegal, and settlers – who refer to the land by the Biblical names Judea and Samaria – generally support Israel's annexation of part or entire West Bank and oppose the creation of a Palestinian state.
For the Palestinians, the settlements are nothing less than a land grab that carves up the West Bank in a way that makes both current life for many Arabs and a hoped-for future state untenable.
They say extremist settlers have been emboldened by the current government, the most right-wing and religiously conservative in Israel's history, which has installed people like Mr. Ben-Gvir and Mr. Smotrich, who were once considered part of the far-right fringe , in powerful positions.
At the highest official levels on both sides, the response to the sanctions was relatively muted.
A statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said: “The vast majority of the residents of Judea and Samaria are law-abiding citizens, many of whom today fight as conscripts and in the reserves in Israel's defense. Israel is cracking down on lawbreakers everywhere, so no exceptional steps are needed in this matter.”
The Palestinian Authority's Foreign Ministry welcomed the decision, saying it furthered “the interests of peace in the region.”
The predominantly centrist Israeli opposition remained largely silent on the sanctions and avoided a politically sensitive topic. Settlers and their supporters are a powerful force in Israeli politics, gaining strength as successive governments expanded and encouraged settlements.
Opposition leaders wanted to keep the focus on the war in the Gaza Strip against Hamas, and on the government's failure that preceded it.