Senate Democrats sought to restore sanctions on Israelis living in Judea and Samaria in a pair of bills on Monday that decry “extremist settler violence.”
Sens. Chris Coons (D-Del.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), Jack Reed (D-R.I.) and Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) introduced the West Bank Violence Prevention Act.
Sens. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) brought forward the Sanctions and Accountability for Non-Compliance and Transparent Investigative Oversight for National Security (SANCTIONS) in the West Bank Act.
Van Hollen blamed Bezalel Smotrich, the Israeli finance minister, and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, for the July killing of Saifullah Musallet, a Palestinian American living north of Ramallah.
“The Netanyahu government, driven by racist extremists like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, continues to fuel settler violence and support the expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank,” Van Hollen stated.
“The United States must not turn a blind eye to these acts, especially as another American citizen was recently killed following a settler attack in the West Bank, the eighth American killed there since 2022,” the senator said.
The senators who introduced SANCTIONS attribute the violence in Judea and Samaria exclusively to “Israeli forces and settlers in the West Bank,” while Coons also noted the responsibility of “Palestinian terrorists.”
The Welch bill would directly reimpose the sanctions on Israelis that former President Joe Biden put in place in an executive order, and which U.S. President Donald Trump lifted on his first day in office. The Coons bill instructs the president to impose sanctions on anyone who might “threaten the peace, security or stability of the West Bank.”
“Violent attacks by extremist settlers on innocent civilians and property in the West Bank are unacceptable and threaten further destabilization in the region,” stated Bennet, the Colorado senator. “This legislation takes the necessary steps to ensure that the United States holds violent attackers in the West Bank accountable.”
The legislative action follows a pair of Senate votes led by Sanders on Wednesday that saw more than half of the Democratic caucus vote to disapprove of the sale of rifles to the Israeli National Police and a similar number to vote against the sale of bombs to the Israel Defense Forces.
About half of the senators who introduced the pair of bills to sanction Israelis voted in favor of those measures. Bennet, Booker, Coons and Warner voted against both measures.
