Five Western countries announced on Tuesday that they would impose sanctions on two far-right Israeli cabinet ministers, a remarkable rebuke of Israel’s leadership and a significant escalation of Western pressure on Israel over settler violence in the West Bank and the conduct of the war in Gaza.
Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Norway jointly imposed the sanctions, which will restrict the right to travel and freeze the financial assets of the Israeli security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich.
Mr. Smotrich, 45, and Mr. Ben-Gvir, 49, are the most hard-line members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet. Both have called for the wholesale expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, in statements that the British foreign secretary, David Lammy, has previously condemned as “monstrous.”
“Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich have incited extremist violence and serious abuses of Palestinian human rights,” Mr. Lammy and the foreign ministers of the four other countries said in a joint statement on Tuesday. “That is why we have taken action now — to hold those responsible to account.”
While the measures were mainly in response to the violence in the West Bank, British officials said they were also calculated to tighten the pressure on Mr. Netanyahu’s government to negotiate a cease-fire with Hamas in Gaza, at a time when the humanitarian situation in the enclave had become dire.
Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Saar, reacted defiantly, condemning the move as “unacceptable” and saying the government would meet next week to discuss a response. “It is outrageous that elected representatives and members of the government are subjected to these kind of measures,” Mr. Saar said.
The United States also denounced the sanctions, saying that they did not help its own efforts to achieve a cease-fire.
“We remind our partners not to forget who the real enemy is,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement Tuesday afternoon, stressing that it was Hamas that should be in the cross-hairs of Western allies, not Israeli politicians. “The United States urges the reversal of the sanctions and stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel,” he added.
Despite the highly personal nature of the latest sanctions, some critics said blacklisting Mr. Smotrich and Mr. Ben-Gvir still fell short of the kind of measures that would force a change in Israeli policy.
“It is performative,” said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator who now runs the U.S./Middle East Project, a research group in London and New York. “It doesn’t harm them and it doesn’t cause the Israeli public in general to question the wisdom of the path Israel is on because it doesn’t affect the broader public at all.”
“It has no impact on the war crimes and the overall violations of international law being committed in Gaza and also in the West Bank,” Mr. Levy said.
The push to blacklist Mr. Ben-Gvir and Mr. Smotrich had been weeks in the making and underscored Israel’s growing diplomatic isolation. It came after Britain, Canada and France issued a stark statement last month about the treatment of civilians in Gaza.
France did not join in imposing sanctions on the ministers, illustrating differences in how allies are approaching Israel. British diplomats had also been concerned about timing in the aftermath of the fatal shooting of two staff members of the Israeli Embassy in Washington last month.
Still, the size and the makeup of the group were notable. It included four of the five members of the Five Eyes, the intelligence-sharing alliance that also includes the United States. Despite, Mr. Rubio’s comments on Tuesday, British officials said they had sounded out officials in the Trump administration about the proposed move in recent weeks and had not encountered strong resistance.
Mr. Trump has expressed impatience with Mr. Netanyahu over Gaza in recent weeks, warning that he wanted to “stop that whole situation as quickly as possible.” He has also pursued a deal with Iran on its nuclear program over Mr. Netanyahu’s objections.
France and other countries are weighing whether to recognize an independent Palestinian state, a step already taken by Norway, Ireland and Spain. Kare R. Aas, a former Norwegian ambassador to the United States and Israel, said he was encouraged that Norway was part of a bigger coalition in imposing sanctions, in contrast with when it recognized a Palestinian state.
“That decision isolated us and made it easier for Bibi to bully us,” said Mr. Aas, referring to Mr. Netanyahu by his nickname. He said the sanctions were an “important step,” but expressed doubt that they would change the political landscape in Jerusalem, where both ministers seemed to wear their blacklisted status as a badge of honor.
“Britain has already tried once to prevent us from settling the cradle of our homeland, and we will not allow it to do it again,” Mr. Smotrich posted on social media in Hebrew, referring to Jewish settlements in the West Bank. “We are determined to continue building.”
In a social media post in English, Mr. Ben-Gvir said: “While the European colonial countries fantasize that we Jews are still their subjects, the streets of their famous cities are being taken over by radical Islam. But their campaign of appeasement for the Hamas terrorists will not save them.”
In their statement, the five countries said that, as of April, extremist Israeli settlers had carried out 1,900 attacks on Palestinian civilians since last year. This violence, and the inexorable expansion of settlements, the statement said, undermined the prospects for lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
The countries also drew a direct line from the settler violence to the conflict in Gaza. “Measures today cannot be seen in isolation from events in Gaza, where Israel must uphold international humanitarian law,” the statement said.
For Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain, the move is partly a response to rising discontent among members of his Labour Party that their country has not taken stronger measures against Israel. The government announced a partial suspension of arms shipments to Israel last September, and paused talks on a trade deal last month.
Mr. Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, has said that he will be guided by the principles of international law in dealing with Israel. His government dropped objections to an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court for Mr. Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant. But Mr. Starmer has so far resisted calls to label Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide.
Last month, in an open letter, more than 800 lawyers, academics and retired judges called on the British prime minister to impose further sanctions, saying that Israel was guilty of war crimes and had met the threshold for genocide. They said that the limited aid Israel allowed into Gaza, after an 11-week blockade of food and medical supplies, was not sufficient to avert an “unfolding humanitarian catastrophe.”
Israel has vehemently rejected accusations of genocide in Gaza.
Speaking in Parliament in late May, Mr. Lammy condemned Mr. Smotrich for comments about “cleansing” the enclave and moving its two million people to other countries. “We must call this what it is,” Mr. Lammy said. “It is extremism. It is dangerous. It is repellent. It is monstrous.”
Mark Landler is the London bureau chief of The Times, covering the United Kingdom, as well as American foreign policy in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He has been a journalist for more than three decades.
Matina Stevis-Gridneff is the Canada bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the country.
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