Lame-duck Biden-Harris Admin Sanctions Israelis, Sends $230M to Palestinians
The lame-duck Biden-Harris administration is slapping new sanctions on Israelis, while sending nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in additional funding to the Palestinians, adding insult to injury in the closing weeks of its failed policy.
The Washington Free Beacon noted Monday:
The Biden-Harris administration on Monday unveiled sweeping new sanctions on Israeli Jews, just days after it awarded another $230 million in taxpayer funds to the Palestinians. The back-to-back announcements signal that diplomatic relations between Israel and the outgoing White House will continue to sour until President-elect Donald Trump retakes office next year.
The new sanctions are the broadest to date, imposing unprecedented punitive measures on three Israeli organizations the administration accuses of fomenting violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. They were leveled just days after a coalition of nearly 90 congressional Democrats petitioned the Biden administration to ramp up sanctions on Israel before leaving the White House.
The sanctions were announced just three days after the Biden-Harris administration awarded another $230 million in funding for humanitarian projects in the West Bank and the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. The American government has now sent more than $2 billion in taxpayer funds to the Palestinians since Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror spree on Israel—even as critics warn this cash is keeping Hamas on life support.
The State Department website describes the sanctions on Israelis as targeting “violent Israeli individuals and entities,” though the “violence” that two of the targets are accused of committing amounts to nothing more than providing construction vehicles to settlements that the State Department says are illegal.
The Biden-Harris administration has sanctioned a broad array of Israeli individuals and institutions, largely at the instigation of anti-Israel groups and Democrats in Congress. Many of the sanctions target people who have not broken laws; a legal challenge against the sanctions notes that some target what would be constitutionally protected protest in the U.S.
Israeli legal scholar Eugene Kontorovich added in the New York Post:
Usually, sanctions target those responsible for severe wrongdoing, such as terrorist financing, nuclear proliferation and large-scale human rights abuses.
The new sanctions break this mold by targeting Israeli Jews in the West Bank accused of property crimes and vandalism, or of simply associating with the wrong people.
Despite an ongoing campaign of terror by Palestinians in the West Bank, Biden has used his order to target Jews almost exclusively.
Kontorovich adds that the Biden-Harris administration has also made exceptions for Palestinian organizations that normally would fall afoul of existing anti-terror sanctions.The Biden-Harris administration restored funding for Palestinian organizations, and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which caters to Palestinians, as soon as it took office, brushing aside concerns about terror. The administration also eased sanctions enforcement against Iran, which funds Palestinian terrorists.Palestinian violence against Israel, which had been quiet for four years under President Donald Trump, resumed within months.
