How to cure Israel’s settlement addiction 

“Who’s the f—ing superpower here?” then-President Clinton exclaimed to his aides, after meeting Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the first time in 1996. “Who the f— does he think he is?”

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Only a few months after promising the United States, as well as the Palestinian Authority, Jordan and Egypt, that it would refrain from settlement expansion, Netanyahu’s government has announced 4,000 new units and new fast-track procedures for more. The United States’s reaction — that it is “deeply troubled” and “concerned” — has been nothing short of pathetic.

A more robust response would be that if Israel has so much money to spend on settlements, then it obviously does not need American security assistance. For every dollar that the government spends on new settlements, the U.S. should suspend $2 in military aid. 

The message should be clear: An alliance is a two-way street.  

Such a policy would pose no military or physical danger to Israel, because of the massive size of the Israel aid package. Until the Russia-Ukraine War, Israel was receiving more U.S. military aid than all other nations combined. 

But it will hurt financially, and that is the whole point. Israel receives uniquely favorable terms that no other nation enjoys. For example, it receives its funds in lump sums and can place them in U.S. interest-bearing accounts, giving it an even greater total. The U.S. should receive something for this aid. Instead, it is being laughed at by Netanyahu’s government. 

Settlement activity represents a unique opportunity to condition aid to Israel. Some proposals have concentrated on Israel Defense Forces (IDF) activity and alleged human rights violations, but those are the fruit of the poisoned tree — namely, the settlement enterprise itself. Besides, it is one thing to criticize decisions made in the heat of IDF operations. Settlements, on the other hand, constitute a deliberate and considered strategy. Better to focus on those making the decisions, not the IDF conscript trying to deal with the situation his political masters created. 

This is a pro-Israeli and pro-Zionist position. Settlements, as the Labor Party’s Gilad Kariv’s rightly observed, undermine the foundations of a Jewish and democratic state, and thus the Israeli government’s actions represent a rush toward a binational state. It is little wonder that Yitzhak Rabin in 1976 called settlements a “cancer” that threaten to create Israeli “apartheid.” 

But it goes further than that. Virtually all settlements undermine Israeli security. Protecting settlers creates a huge drain on the IDF and the Shin Bet (Israel’s internal security service). As we have seen this week, if security forces turn a blind eye to settler pogroms, that creates even greater problems (as well as violating international human rights principles). Shin Bet head Ronen Bar, who referred to settler attacks on Palestinians as pogroms, put it succinctly, “There is a direct risk to the settlers in the face of Palestinian revenge attacks that force us to divert forces from thwarting attacks in the first place.” 

No one should be fooled by propaganda about the settlements’ contribution to “strategic depth.” The sort of conventional set-piece military conflict is the least of Israel’s security problems. Settlements will not protect Israel from Iranian nukes or Hezbollah missiles — or for that matter, from Israel’s greatest security threat, the government’s undermining of the nation’s democratic institutions, its refusal to integrate the Arab minority as equal citizens, and its attempts at transforming professional security services into henchmen for Cabinet members.  

In any event, the settler lobby for years has purposely confused Israel’s supporters by conflating settlements, which undermine security, with the occupation, a byproduct of the Six-Day War that still requires a political solution. Tying military aid to settlement expansion can dispel this confusion, by making it clear that the more Israel advances settlements, the less secure it will be. 

Israel will have absolutely no right to protest American “cuts” in aid: No cuts will occur as long as Israel holds up its end of the bargain. Any cuts will derive from West Jerusalem’s choice, not Washington’s.  

The Biden administration will no doubt be wary of such an approach, particularly before an election year. But support for Israel among Americans, and particularly among American Jews, has collapsed. According to Gallup, Democrats now sympathize more with the Palestinians than with Israel, and independent support for Israel is the lowest it has ever been — in no small part due to Israel’s settlement addiction. 

But in a closely divided polity, there are few votes to waste. It is even more important, then, to begin this conversation now, to move the Overton Window. If Biden is reelected, public opinion must be prepared. 

At that point, the message to Israel’s government and its defense forces should be clearer: If you are missing spare parts for aircraft, go get them from settlers. Because they are the reason you don’t have them.  

Jonathan Zasloff is a professor at the UCLA School of Law.