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U.S. Sanctions on West-Bank Israelis

16:00 UTC−6:  DW News leads with a report that Biden has signed an executive order imposing economic sanctions on four named Israelis who were involved in anti-Palestinian violence in the West Bank.  I see this as a baby step in the right direction.  We’ll see whether U.S. policy toward Israel develops any morality.  Stay tuned…

16:30−6:  BBC World News America leads with the same story.

17:10:  my local TV news has a couple of sentences about the sanctions.  They say it’s in response to the killing of a Palestinian-American teenager.

17:30:  no mention of the sanctions on NBC Nightly News.

18:00:  nothing about the sanctions during the headlines on PBS Newshour either.

Now I’m saddened again.  NBC did have a short report about a growing movement within the Arab-American community for sitting out the next election.  They won’t vote for Trump, but they don’t think they can vote for Biden either.  Let’s hope that that doesn’t give the election to Trump.  Maybe there’s some good news in John Morales’ comment below.

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Comments

  1. John Morales says

    Yes, I saw that on the news, in the Guardian. Political and legal pressure is ramping up.

    Also, this related story: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/01/genocide-gaza-israel-california-court

    A federal court in California has ruled that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza “plausibly” amounts to genocide, but dismissed a case aimed at stopping US military support for Israel as being outside the court’s jurisdiction.

    “There are rare cases in which the preferred outcome is inaccessible to the court. This is one of those cases,” the US district court in the northern district of California ruled. “The court is bound by precedent and the division of our coordinate branches of government to abstain from exercising jurisdiction in this matter.

    “Yet, as the ICJ [the international court of justice] has found, it is plausible that Israel’s conduct amounts to genocide,” the judge in the case, Jeffrey White, said in his ruling, in a case brought by Palestinian human rights groups and individual Palestinians against President Joe Biden, Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, and Lloyd Austin, the defence secretary.

    “This court implores defendants to examine the results of their unflagging support of the military siege against the Palestinians in Gaza,” the ruling said.

  2. Katydid says

    My local news dedicated about a sentence to the sanctions and didn’t mention the violence in the West Bank. Thanks for filling in the details. Even some online middle-of-the-road and left-leaning news sites are egregiously pro-Isreal in every instance; Israel can do no wrong ever and anyone who brings up inconvenient facts is perma-banned.

    I’ve become so disgusted with the tv news; coming up on the Superbowl, it’s all football, all the time. A 30-minute newscast is only about 18 minutes with 12 minutes of commercials. In those 18 minutes, we get about 2 minutes of weather, a minute of misc., and 15 minutes of football.

    A horrifying news story that I read first in the Daily Mail (UK) was about a conspiracy theorist in a conservative suburb who beheaded his father and made a Youtube video displaying the severed head and urging people to kill all civil servants. Not a peep on local and national news: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13026501/Man-beheads-federal-employee-father-posts-video-decapitated-head-YouTube.html

  3. says

    Maybe there’s some good news in John Morales’ comment below.

    Yeah…seems about as good as we could hope for, I suppose. The court’s remarks that this is outside their jurisdiction is probably correct. If we’re talking about international law, then that is for international courts. But the problem with such courts, as we know, is enforcement. At least it is another sign, as John says, the “pressure is ramping up.”

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