Sanctioned? Jessica Whyte, ‘Sanctioning Settlers and Settlers’ Sanctions: Financial Warfare and Economic Peace in Occupied Palestine’, Middle East Critique, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Sanctioned? Jessica Whyte, ‘Sanctioning Settlers and Settlers’ Sanctions: Financial Warfare and Economic Peace in Occupied Palestine’, Middle East Critique, 2025

30Nov25

Abstract: This article examines the Biden Administration’s 2024 sanctions on Israeli settlers in the West Bank, which were justified on the grounds that ‘extremist settler violence’ threatened peace and stability. While praised by some as a historic step toward accountability, these measures are best understood as part of a long US practice of using targeted financial sanctions to enforce the ‘peace process’ while legitimizing Israel’s colonization of Palestinian land. The article shows that, rather than being novel, the settler sanctions repeat the model of the Oslo Accords, when Washington used targeted financial sanctions against Palestinians, Arabs, and two Israeli organizations that it framed as threats to ‘peace’. The earlier Oslo sanctions were tools of a distinctly ‘economic peace’, in which Palestinians are expected to abandon the struggle for national liberation in favor of individual economic advancement. The more recent sanctions, introduced in the context of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, functioned not as accountability but as deflection – reframing state violence as individual misconduct, stigmatizing Palestinian resistance, and reinforcing the coercive economic order underpinning Israeli colonization. These coercive underpinnings came to the fore in the form of settlers’ sanctions, as the Israeli state engaged in economic warfare to further Palestinian dispossession and expropriate more Palestinian land.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed