If the president is serious about recognising Palestinian statehood, defunding the settlements would be a great first step<\/p>\n
Israel and its settlement enterprise are getting a crash course in coercive diplomacy. In the first few hours and days after the Biden Administration announced it was placing financial sanctions on four extremist Israeli settlers, there was a bit of confusion in Israel about what it all meant. Demonstrating the absurdity of the moment, Israeli Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich told<\/a> fellow parliamentarians that, \u201cit is not possible for an Israeli citizen with Israeli money in an Israeli bank to be deprived of rights and assets due to an American order.\u201d<\/p>\n Within a day, one of the sanctioned settlers, a violent extremist named Yinon Levi who the Biden Administration said was involved in forcing Palestinian communities off their land, had his personal and business accounts frozen by Israel\u2019s Bank Leumi. A state-owned bank followed suit and froze the account of a second sanctioned settler. The banks understood something the Israeli finance minister didn\u2019t seem to grasp \u2014 the United States is a very powerful country.<\/p>\n Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man is the director of research for Israel-Palestine at Democracy for the Arab World Now (Dawn). He worked as a journalist in Israel-Palestine for over a decade, including as editor-in-chief of +972 Magazine<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If the president is serious about recognising Palestinian statehood, defunding the settlements would be a great first step Israel and its settlement enterprise are getting a crash course in coercive diplomacy. In the first few hours and days after the Biden Administration announced it was placing financial sanctions on four extremist Israeli settlers, there was … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4233\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}