US President Donald Trump speaks to journalists in the Oval Office on January 20, 2025. (Jim WATSON / POOL / AFP)
(JTA) — In one of his first actions as president, Donald Trump canceled sanctions targeting dozens of far-right Israeli individuals and settler organizations accused by the Biden administration of violent extremism against Palestinians.
The rescinding of the sanctions appeared on a long list of executive orders signed by Trump immediately after his inauguration on Monday, many of which focused on undoing policies enacted by his predecessor in the White House.
The move delivers a victory to the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which regarded the sanctions enacted by Biden last year as an inappropriate intervention into the internal affairs of an allied country. Israeli officials had repeatedly asked the incoming president to lift them when he entered office.
Netanyahu’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who is associated with the settler movement, thanked Trump in a post on social media.
“These sanctions were a severe and blatant foreign intervention in Israel’s internal affairs and an unjustified violation of democratic principles and the mutual respect that should guide relations between friendly nations,” Smotrich wrote.
Other prominent figures on the Israeli right also praised Trump for the move, including Itamar Ben-Gvir, who recently resigned from Netanyahu’s coalition to protest the deal Netanyahu signed with Hamas to release Israeli hostages held in Gaza, and Naftali Bennett, a former Israeli prime minister and erstwhile Netanyahu ally.
Enacted by a Biden administration that was supportive of Israel’s war on Hamas but frustrated with Israeli policy in the West Bank, the sanctions were meant to pressure the Israeli government to take action against surging settler violence targeting Palestinian civilians.
Trump’s lifting of the sanctions comes amid raids by multiple days of settler raids on a West Bank Palestinian village of al-Funduq and as Israel declares an “extensive” military operation against Palestinian militants in the city of Jenin. The raids themselves follow the decision by Israeli’s defense minister, Israel Katz, to release all settlers who had been detained over their activity in the West Bank, a decision that he tied to the ceasefire deal and said was meant to support settlement activity.
“It is better for the families of Jewish settlers to be happy than the families of freed terrorists,” Katz said.
Trump’s day-one executive orders include another move signaling a shift in U.S. policy on Israel. He canceled a Biden order blocking sanctions on the International Criminal Court, which has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, over alleged war crimes during the fighting in Gaza. Trump also reportedly plans to revoke the pause imposed by the Biden administration on the supply of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel.
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