Last updated on March 4th, 2025 at 05:26 pm
Within its first two days, President Donald Trump’s administration has signaled renewed support for Israeli settlers who have expanded into the disputed West Bank territory over the years.
In a slew of executive actions on his first night in office, Trump ordered the recission of dozens of orders and actions his predecessor, President Joe Biden, had taken. Among the rescinded Biden-era actions was an order authorizing sanctions against Israeli settlers accused of engaging in violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.
The Biden administration had repeatedly used the order to impose sanctions on settler groups.
The West Bank Dispute
Israeli settlers and Palestinians have both engaged in violent attacks on the other in the West Bank over the years. The territory is a central part of their decades-long dispute.
In their earliest effort to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the United Nations advanced a partition plan, whereby there would be a separate Jewish and Arab state within the land that comprises the modern Israeli state, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. Zionist Jewish settlers accepted the U.N. partition, which called for them to control about 55 percent of the land, but the Palestinians opposed the split.
The Zionist project proceeded nonetheless, and Zionist settlers declared Israel’s sovereignty on May 14, 1948, citing the U.N. partition in their declaration of statehood. The Palestinians were relegated to Gaza and the West Bank, and these two territories serve as the key land claims on which their hopes for an eventual Palestinian state rest.
Israel seized both Gaza and the West Bank during a June 1967 war with its surrounding Arab neighbors. By November 1967, the U.N. Security Council passed Resolution 242 calling for Israel to withdraw from the territories. Despite this resolution, Israel has maintained varying degrees of control over the West Bank ever since.
In the decades since the 1967 war, Israelis have gradually established settlements within the West Bank, seeking to expand Israel’s sovereign territory and thwart Palestinian statehood. The international community has broadly supported a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict and rejected these Israeli settlements.
In 2016, the U.N. Security Council passed Resolution 2334, declaring Israeli settlements to be in violation of international law. For decades, U.S. policy had officially opposed the Israeli settlements. Still, the United States—one of five Security Council members with absolute veto power—declined to vote either way on Resolution 2334.
By 2019, the first Trump administration reversed the longstanding U.S. opposition to the Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and declared these settlements are not necessarily illegal under international law.
Trump Reversal Follows Mounting West Bank Violence
The current Israeli government, elected in 2022, pushed to expand West Bank settlements, and international humanitarian organizations have assessed settler violence has been on the rise since.
In a September 2023 report, the United Nation’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs concluded there was an average of three violence incidents per day in the first eight months of 2023, compared to an average of two a day in 2022.
Violent clashes between Israeli settlers and Palestinians have only increased since the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on southern Israel, which Hamas launched from the Gaza Strip. While the Israeli military has primarily focused on fighting Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Israeli police and military forces have conducted numerous raids and combat operations throughout the West Bank over the past year.
In February of last year, Biden authorized new financial sanctions targeting Israeli settler activists who had been accused of leading violent attacks and acts of vandalism targeting Palestinians and Palestinian settlements. Later that same month, the Biden administration reasserted the old U.S. policy of opposition to West Bank settlements, with then-White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby stating efforts to expand settlements during the ongoing Gaza War run “counterproductive to the cause of peace.”
On Jan. 20, just hours before Trump rescinded the Biden-era sanctions order, reports emerged of new settler attacks on two Palestinian towns in the West Bank, in which suspects fired gunshots, threw stones, and torched homes, shops, and motor vehicles. Israeli military officials said early investigative efforts indicate Israeli individuals, some of whom were masked, instigated riots, and vandalism in the Palestinian community of Al Funduq. Other attacks reportedly targeted Jinsafut.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a staunch proponent of expanding West Bank settlements, thanked Trump for rescinding the Biden-era sanctions order.
“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 said in a Jan. 21 press statement.
UN Pick Backs Israeli Biblical Claim to West Bank
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), Trump’s U.N. ambassador nominee, provided another strong signal of support for Israeli West Bank settlements on Jan. 21.
At her confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Stefanik avoided a “yes” or “no” answer when Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) repeatedly asked if she believes the Palestinians should have a right to self-determination. With time running out on his chance to question Stefanik, Van Hollen asked whether she believes Israel has a “Biblical right” to the entire West Bank.
Stefanik answered that she does support an Israeli Biblical right to the entirety of the West Bank.
Van Hollen said a peaceful resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict will be “very difficult to achieve that if you continue to hold the view that you just expressed.” He further argued hers was a view not held by the founders of Israel, whom he identified as secular Zionists.
Despite voicing his concerns over her views on Israel and the West Bank, Van Hollen said he looks forward to Stefanik’s tenure at the United Nations.
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