Foreign Secretary David Lammy announced the new sanctions against Israeli settlers on Tuesday. The violence witnessed at al-M’u’arrajat on 16 September is but a tiny fraction of the chaos engulfing the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank which has seen successive UK Governments roll out sanctions over the past year targeting Israeli settlers. “They send a signal that the governments imposing sanctions don’t care about seriously tackling the problem of illegal settlements.”Crucially, the sanctions ignore the settlers’ main sponsor; the Israeli state. Recent sanctions are still wholly insufficient and amount to no more than fiddling around the edges of the issue. Treating settler violence as an issue of terrorism rather than an issue of criminality would change everything.
