US to impose visa bans on violent Israeli settlers in West Bank: 5 things you need to know

1. Why the ban?

This development comes after Israel, despite insistence by the United States, has refused to meaningfully clamp down on settler-violence in the West Bank.

“I have been emphatic with Israel’s leaders that extremist violence against Palestinians in the West Bank must stop,” Joe Biden wrote in The Washington Post on November 18. “The United States is prepared to take our own steps, including issuing visa bans against extremists attacking civilians in the West Bank,” he added.

More recently, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his war cabinet, and let them know that the US “will take its own action” against an undisclosed number of individuals, Reuters reported.

2. What are ‘settlements’ in the context of Israel and Palestine?

The state of Israel came into existence in 1948, based on a United Nations’ resolution which partitioned the former British mandate of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arabic state. Over the years, through various wars and military action, Israel has significantly altered the political map decided in 1947, and occupied significant territory which legally belongs to the state of Palestine.

It started building settlements just after capturing the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip in the 1967 Six-Day War. Since then, it has whole-heartedly encouraged settlers to move into Palestinian lands.

“The argument is that settlements act as a buffer for Israel’s national security as they restrict the movement of Palestinians and undermine the viability of a Palestinian state,” an Al Jazeera explainer said.

3. What is the situation with settlements today?

Today, more than 700,000 Jewsish settlers — roughly 10 percent of Israel’s population — live in about 279 settlements dotting the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. While some move for religious reasons, others are drawn by a relatively lower cost of living [when compared to the West, where most settlers come from] and financial incentives offered by the Israeli government.

Notably, settlement has been fundamentally violent, with Palestinians made homeless in their own land down the barrel of a gun. After the October 7 Hamas attack, there has been a surge in this violence, with UN figures indicating that daily settler attacks (attacks by settlers on Palestinian natives) have doubled since then.

“Settlers have been committing crimes in the occupied West Bank well before October 7. It is as though, however, they got a green light after October 7 to carry out more crimes,” Ghassan Daghlas, a Palestinian Authority official monitoring settler activity, told Al Jazeera.

4. What has Israel’s response been?

Eylon Levy, an Israeli government spokesman, told Reuters that he had no comment on the matter [the United States visa ban] but said that Israel firmly condemned any vigilantism or hooliganism or attempts by individuals to take the law into their own hands.

This statement, however, ignores how Israel’s own policy and people in its own government actively encourage settler violence, and how the state of Israel benefits from it. For instance, in February, a mob of settlers went on a rampage in the West Bank town of Huwara, torching dozens of houses and cars. Following the violence, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for Huwara to be “wiped out”.

5. When is the ban likely to come into effect? How will it play out?

The bans could come into effect as early as the next few weeks, a State Department official told Reuters. The move would be the most significant punitive measure the Biden administration has taken toward Israel since he assumed power in January 2021 — in fact, the most significant rebuke of Israel by the United States in years.

Domestically, in the US, the ban is likely to face some opposition, especially given that many Israeli settlers have close connections to the States. It is, however, unlikely to impact those holding dual citizen citizenship of the US and Israel.

It is also as yet unclear how the US plans to enforce such a visa ban, and in absence of any support from Israeli authorities, necessarily identify perpetrators of settler violence.