US announces visa bans for Israeli ‘extremist settlers’ in West Bank
(thehill.com)
from pingveno@kbin.social to world@lemmy.world on 07 Dec 2023 05:03
https://kbin.social/m/world@lemmy.world/t/685503
from pingveno@kbin.social to world@lemmy.world on 07 Dec 2023 05:03
https://kbin.social/m/world@lemmy.world/t/685503
The Biden administration announced Tuesday it will implement visa bans on Israelis viewed as “extremist settlers” in the West Bank. The policy move follows President Biden’s warning last mont…
#israel #palestine #west #world
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Biden administration announced Tuesday it will implement visa bans on Israelis viewed as “extremist settlers” in the West Bank.
The policy move follows President Biden’s warning last month that sanctions could be imposed on individuals the U.S. views as involved in violence against Palestinians, particularly in the larger territory.
Under the policy, any Israeli citizen deemed to be committing acts of violence or undermining peace and security in the West Bank, particularly against Palestinians, will be banned from entering the U.S.
The United Nations and other humanitarian organizations have warned of an alarming spike in violent attacks by Israeli settlers in the West Bank against Palestinians, to include reprisal violence for Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre and hostage taking — which sparked the ongoing war in the region.
But settler-violence is part of a larger problem of extremist Israelis who critics say are emboldened by Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government to settle, by force, the territory of the West Bank that was partitioned between Israel and the Palestinian Authority under the 1993 Oslo Accords, but is supposed to be the decided in final-status negotiations for a future Palestinian State.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in a statement announcing the visa-ban policy, also raised the issue of Palestinian violence against Israelis.
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I wonder what impact this has. From my perspective, the people who think like this are usually the ones not interested in traveling anywhere past the end of their street.
You would be wrong. Many of the most extreme settlers are Americans or Europeans and they do what they do with total disregard for Israeli peace, safe in the knowledge they can always escape to the US or Europe.
Admittedly, those people are not affected.
So you are right, for a different reason.
But this move does have a huge impact. It is the first time the US has sanctioned Israel for Apartheid crimes and ethnic cleansing. The immediate impact is small, but it opens the door towards BDS.
And BDS is how we ended Apartheid in South Africa and Rhodesia. It will work even better against Israel, since they are totally dependent on aid from the West.
For anyone else wondering, like me: “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions is a Palestinian-led movement promoting boycotts, divestments, and economic sanctions against Israel.”
I think you’re wrong about this. Israel is a net-exporter economically and grows its own food. Although admittedly, the majority was being grown in the region around Gaza and there are reports that many crops went unharvested.
Do yourself a favour and look to whom they export.
They can’t afford a boycott.
And their agricultural sector is fully dependent on cheap Labor, mostly coming from Palestinians and Thai people. They stopped issuing work visas of Palestinians, so their building and agricultural sector is probably contracting and struggling at the moment.
I wouldn’t say fully dependent - there’s local labor who are willing to step up especially in the face of the economic downturn of a war. More importantly, foreign labor is legally entitled to the same minimum wage as Israelis - this was historically exploited through various loopholes such that many Thai workers are receiving around 80% of minimum wage. Even in the face of a pricing shock, local food markets should reach equilibrium quickly, and Israel has avoided food subsidies outside of a handful of regulated products (basic white bread, milk, eggs, hard cheese). I don’t foresee food security being an issue in Israel to the point they need to import food outside of stabilizing local prices or ensuring seasonal availability.
Palestinians won’t be going to work inside Israel for a very long time. The US is trying to push that one through, but I think that’s one they’ll push back hard on - if you were Israeli, would you want to work with someone who supported what happened on October 7th?
They cannot make all the military equipment they require to continue the occupation. It’s a country of ~8 million people. With the fourth or fifth largest military in the world.
Ranked 30th in the world by active military personnel. Ranked 13th in the world by reservists. Wikipedia
Most of the military aid goes towards purchasing Iron Dome interceptors at the moment - it’s a uniquely bad idea to stop those from being delivered. The rest is containers full of random plastic crap like lunch trays - US foreign aid to Israel is actually a jobs program for states like Ohio in a way that minimizes the macroeconomic impact on the US.
True, why should they go elsewhere if God gave them the land.
Fat lot of good that will do.
It’s like Biden thought, "what can we do that will makes us look like we are doing something, but will have absolutely no impact at all. "
Oh you mean like “nothing will fundamentally change”? Classic!
Yeah, that’s been the democratic platform ever since the Clinton administration.
While still sending that military “help” to Israel, who desperately need more rockets so that they can bomb even more AI- picked targets. Like Israel bombed more than 20K targets. I have a really hard time believing that there are so many legitimate military targets in Gaza.
It’s a start.
That's how I see it. Israel really hasn't seen any public consequences from the US, its closest allies, for how it treats the Palestinians. This is kind of a shot across the bow that there is more to come. The Biden administration has indicated that they are not pleased with the scale of civilian casualties in Gaza.
As a general supporter of Israel’s fight against Hamas: this is fine. Fuck those asshole settlers with a rusty crowbar.
Why not sanctions? The US has been happy to impose individual sanctions in many other cases. Visa bans don’t have significant impacts on people who don’t want or need to travel to the US.
Yeah, it’s a nothingburger to wait out the conflict. There will be a ceasefire soon, settlers will continue to do what they do, but the war will be out of sight of most of the world by then.
Because sanctions would actually have an impact.
This does nothing, which is the point.
But illegal settlement on the other hand… We don’t care
Well of course not. Our country was founded on it, after all!
What about American with dual citizenship?
They wouldn’t need a visa because they’re already citizens