Last week, the United Kingdom, France, and Canada all announced new sanctions on Israeli settlements in the West Bank. From the standpoint of the likely goals of the political leaders of those countries — to express moral disapproval of something bad that is happening without doing anything too costly or provocative — this seems like a good idea.
That said, one of the luxuries you have as the foreign minister of, say, Canada is that you get to weigh in on various international controversies without anyone necessarily expecting you to solve them.
A genuine difficulty facing American policymakers is that as leaders of what is still the preeminent global power with unparalleled global reach, people expect our policy initiatives to be efficacious.
Back in October of 2025, for example, the government of Italy put out a strongly worded statement expressing “grave concern at reports emerging from El Fasher of widespread atrocities, summary executions, and deliberate acts of violence against civilians committed by the R.S.F.” This of course did not stop the Rapid Support Forces, a Sudanese paramilitary group — and in fact by the summer of 2026, there’s whole new rounds of atrocity in a different part of the country. But nobody really expects the prime minister of Italy to be able to halt a civil war in Sudan.
The United States faces higher expectations.
So thinking about these West Bank settlement sanctions and the possibility that a future Democratic administration will do something similar, it’s worth pointing out that this kind of measure is almost certainly inadequate to the scale of the problem.
The people actually doing the land theft and terrorizing Palestinian villagers are the most hardcore ideologues in Israeli society. There are some Israelis living just east of the border basically because they got a good deal on housing. But the people living in the further-flung settlements and certainly the people building new outposts aren’t there by happenstance, and they’re not going to turn around over a minor economic inconvenience.
The issue is that while mainstream Israelis are not doing this stuff, they also aren’t stopping it.
They have no real sympathy for or interest in the Palestinians as human beings, they’ve given up on a peace process or a two-state solution, they’re furious about hostile coverage of Israel in the global media and what they see as a double standard, and they just don’t care. The current Netanyahu coalition is dependent on small parties that are overtly supportive of irregular anti-Palestinian violence. The opposition coalition has pivoted toward criticism of the worst excesses of the violence, but settlement expansion continued apace under prior non-Netanyahu governments, and the legal landscape in the West Bank is inherently tilted against Palestinian civilians in a way that most Israeli politicians show no interest in dismantling.
Which is just to say that if Americans want to actually change the situation, as opposed to expressing disapproval over it, we almost certainly need to go further than targeted sanctions aimed at settlements. We need to do something that inflicts pain on nicer, more sympathetic Israelis in Tel Aviv and Haifa, something that makes them want to actually change course and meaningfully alter the situation.
Getting to yes
In American discourse about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I often notice an elision between taking a position on an issue — there should be a two-state solution, there should be a unitary democratic state, etc. — and making policy choices that will cause that to come about.