It Is Time to Sanction Israel
Israel has done everything to Palestinians that Russians are doing to Ukrainians. Thus, the failure to sanction Israel weakens those imposed on Russia by making Nato states look hypocritical.
There has probably never been a better time than the present to press for sanctioning Israel.
Israel has spent generations subjecting Palestinians to the same abuses Russia is now being sanctioned for inflicting on Ukrainians. It has occupied their land, attempted to erase their national identity, and lied to the world about it. It has targeted civilians, displaced them from their homes, and stolen their natural resources. It has consistently broken international law, repeatedly engaged in war crimes, and generally made itself a source of global instability—just as Putin has done with his assault on Ukraine.
It is not lost on the rest of the world that if Russia deserves to be sanctioned, Israel should be sanctioned with it. Hence, many will not take the sanctions against Russia seriously unless they are applied equally to Israel. In this way, sanctioning Israel strengthens the case for sanctions against Russia by leading more people to take them seriously. The greatest impact of this consistency would probably be felt on the left and in the Middle East. Yet, the reverberations would be felt everywhere because the human rights ideals animating the sanctions can make life better for everyone—if only the force of international law were felt equally.
Israel should also be sanctioned because it is in American and European interests.
In the global fight against authoritarianism, Israel is siding with the autocrats. Its closest relations in Europe are not with its democratic defenders in France and Germany, for instance. Rather, it has forged its closest ties with the continent’s two most racist and authoritarian states, Poland and Hungary. Meanwhile, Israelis favored the fascism of Trump to the democracy of Biden by wide margins in the 2020 elections. Israel has repeatedly armed genocidal groups, from the Contras in Guatemala to the Hutus in Rwanda, the Serbians in Bosnia to the ruling junta in Burma. And when it developed the world’s most advanced spyware, capable of recording audio and video from the phones of its infected users, Israel gave it to several authoritarian states to use against dissidents, but not for the dissidents to use against their states—nor to states like Ukraine that sought to use it against an invading army.
Israel sided with the authoritarians because it is authoritarian for at least half the population it controls, and it has become increasingly threatened by democratic ideals.
Israel has also shown it to be no friend of the coalition supporting Ukraine. It supported the popular vote in the UN General Assembly condemning the Russian invasion but it failed to support the far more consequential sanctions. It has also failed to speak out against the invasion of Ukraine, thereby weakening the coalition of states opposing it. Hence, the world’s first Jewish president of a non-Jewish state in almost a century had to chastise the parliament of the world’s only Jewish state because it is siding with their fascist colonizer. Yet, if Israel chooses to remain neutral when its strongest defenders need it most, it should expect to be treated like every other state, and that means leveling crushing sanctions against it for its abuses of international law.
It might also mean sanctioning it for continuing to do business with Russia.
Israel has been seeking in much the same way as Putin to overturn the international order for ages, and much like Putin in his support for Trump it has sought to do so by corrupting America. For instance, America was responsible for a majority of Security Council vetoes during the eighties and nineties, with almost every single one in support of Israel. And protecting Israel with the UNSC veto has helped justify Putin’s use of it today. Meanwhile, the principal backers of the Iraq War, which arguably destroyed America’s international legitimacy, while justifying Putin’s own aggressions, were almost all closely associated with Israel’s domestic lobby—and so have the vast majority of supporters of war with Iran.
America’s association with Israel has been a boon to its own most imperial forces on the authoritarian right.
Israel and its domestic lobby have routinely undermined American leaders who criticized it, and almost every single one in recent years has been a Democrat. Benjamin Netanyahu went so far as to campaign against Obama in 2012 and Clinton in 2016. He even attacked Obama before congress in 2015. Meanwhile, the Israel lobby labelled former president Jimmy Carter an antisemite after he suggested, along with several former Israeli prime ministers, that it was in danger of becoming an apartheid state. Indeed, his prediction was accurate, according to every major human rights group in the world today—but you won’t hear that from more than a tiny handful of nationally elected American politicians. And that’s largely because they are afraid of being unseated by the Israel lobby, a fear that corrupts America’s most just and decent politicians by transforming them into hypocrites.
It is no surprise that developed democracies tend to be hypocritical in their support for human rights, for they are almost all divided between supporters of realpolitik, who believe in the narrow pursuit of national interest, and liberal internationalists, who believe in cooperating with other democracies in pursuit of shared interests. There are also an increasing number of humanitarians, who believe in sacrificing the national interest in pursuit of humanitarian goals. In this way, getting things done internationally usually means cobbling together a coalition of supporters from all these camps. Coupled with the continual change of administrations, and with it an endless stream of changing foreign policies, each involving its own set of limitations, we should not expect democratic states to maintain consistent foreign policies.
However, we should expect a reasonable degree of consistency from any given administration, and that means every Nato state should now support sanctions against Israel.
In the meantime, the western left should oppose Russian imperialism in Ukraine for all the same reasons it opposes Israeli imperialism in Palestine. In short, it involves a powerful state attempting to erase the identity of a smaller nation and a brutal invasion of its territories involving an endless string of crimes against humanity. Opposition to Russian imperialism can also be used to stop American imperialism because it sets a precedent for isolating invading armies. Moreover, the failure to oppose Russian imperialism among those who oppose Israeli and American imperialism is hypocritical—and it is far better to be hypocritical when you are right than when you are wrong.
States rarely maintain consistent strictures on their foreign policies. Rather, the best states occasionally do some good while the worst do whatever they please. And international law doesn’t develop all in one go. Rather, it is a piecemeal affair in which overlapping treaties and precedents are increasingly applied to new cases as they accumulate. In this way, treaties like the Helsinki Accords governing human rights may be hard to apply when they are first signed, but as more treaties and proclamations affirm their contents, and as more states take them seriously, they are increasingly integrated into international law. It is a gradual development taking place over generations, but over time we have seen the international community come to shun wartime rape, looting, torture, ethnic cleansing, and the targeting of civilians.
In this way, sanctioning Russia may not seem to have much to do with sanctioning Israel; sanctioning Israel may not seem to have much to do with ending the land grabs of powerful states; and making powerful states pay for their abuses may not seem to have much to do with the development of international law; but they are all of a piece, and we should embrace victories for justice where we can, because a victory for justice in one place sets precedents and inspires action for justice everywhere.
And for those who think that sanctioning Israel is radical and unprecedented, consider the fact that Biden has already sanctioned the company producing Israeli spyware.
~ Theo Horesh, author of The Fascism This Time: And the Global Future of Fascism