The place where war in the Middle East will be won or lost

The U.S. recently took a step in the Middle East that was easy to miss amid the roar of Iranian missiles and thud of Israeli combat boots: It imposed economic sanctions on Hilltop Youth, a group of Israeli settlers who routinely attack Palestinians in the West Bank.

It was the latest in a series of penalties President Joe Biden has levied on extremist Israeli settlers over the past year as Israel has battled Hamas militants in Gaza and as the West Bank has sunk deeper into violence and occupation. And to listen to Biden’s senior aides talk of the effort is to hear people who are very proud of themselves.

Such sanctions, which can include freezing alleged culprits’ finances, are unprecedented, the aides stress. They prove America is even-handed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They show the U.S. is serious about the need for a Palestinian state, despite current Israeli resistance to the idea.

But after months of listening to this self-congratulation, I still have one question for Biden and his team: Why didn’t you do this years ago? All of the trends you’re pointing to in the West Bank existed then. And if you’d acted sooner, the Middle East today might be less of a mess.

I have asked this question of some very high-ranking members of the president’s team. None has given me a satisfactory answer (read on for the ones I did get). But it’s important to keep asking, because the fate of the Middle East could lie in the West Bank and what steps Israel, the United States and the Palestinians themselves take there now.

“The West Bank is the last remaining vestige of a Palestinian state that hasn’t been destroyed or otherwise taken off the table,” said Khaled Elgindy, a scholar with the Middle East Institute who has been highly critical of the Biden team. “If it falls, if the settlements overtake everything, then there’s not even the pretense of a Palestinian state.”

If Palestinians lose that hope of achieving statehood, it’s likely to prolong the conflict at the root of the fight in Gaza — the one that has for decades has pitted Palestinians and Israelis over the same land.

It also means the odds are lower that the Middle East will ever know a durable peace, because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fuels so many grievances in the region. That includes anger toward a U.S. seen as biased in favor of Israel, even though American officials — Biden included — say the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel is the only real way to solve the long-running feud.

Today, many of those same U.S. officials are watching the West Bank collapse in slow motion, along with the dream of a future Palestine.

“The indicators are all running really negative,” a senior Biden administration official acknowledged to me. I granted the official, and others, anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic candidly.

Since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack from Gaza that launched the current war, Israeli security forces have largely locked down the West Bank, adding numerous checkpoints, gates and other obstacles that limit Palestinians’ ability to get around and access basic services. Israel has suspended the work permits of tens of thousands of West Bank Palestinians who used to work in Israel. The Israelis also have launched hundreds of raids across the territory to counter what they say is stepped up Palestinian militancy, often severely damaging its infrastructure. More than 700 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Extremist Israeli settlers, who want Israel to annex the West Bank, have escalated their attacks on Palestinians, especially in the months right after Oct. 7. Such attacks have emptied Palestinian villages, killed many Palestinians and robbed others of their livestock, harvests and other livelihoods. The Israeli security forces often merely watch the attacks or join in, rights groups report. The Israeli government, meanwhile, has unveiled plans for more land seizures and expanded settlements in the West Bank.

Some of Israel’s far-right government ministers are trying to economically punish the Palestinian Authority, which governs parts of the West Bank. They’ve at times held back tens of millions in funds owed to the PA. The far-right ministers also have threatened to bar Israeli banks from engaging with Palestinian banks, a move that could crush the West Bank’s economy. Such figures have been open about their desire to incorporate the West Bank into a “Greater Israel” that even includes Jordan.

For Israelis traumatized by the Hamas attacks, the West Bank is full of potential threats they cannot ignore. They remember abandoning their settlements in Gaza two decades ago, only to see it turn into a haven for Hamas militants.

An Israeli official familiar with the situation in the West Bank spoke of growing Iran-related weapons smuggling into the territory.

“We were able to block a few serious car bombs, where we found explosives. We’d never seen those kinds of explosives in Judea and Samaria before,” said the official, using the historical names many Israelis prefer to use for the West Bank.

Israeli officials also lay much of the blame for dysfunction in the West Bank on the Palestinian Authority, a deeply unpopular institution known for its corruption.

The PA’s defenders point out that it is undergoing reforms, although it has yet to change its notorious “pay for slay” program. They also say Israel should help strengthen the PA into a reliable partner, not weaken it further.

For Palestinians, the West Bank and Gaza are inseparable parts of a future state. But Gaza is now a pile of rubble, and some form of Israeli occupation there is almost certain. The deepening Israeli occupation in the West Bank means more anguish — and defiance.

“We feel frustrated, but not defeated,” said Xavier Abu Eid, a former adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organization, who lives in the West Bank. “We are indigenous people in the land. The Israelis may succeed in boycotting the two-state solution, but they will not erase us.”

What’s especially striking about some of the trends in the West Bank is that they existed long before Oct. 7, 2023.

Israeli settler violence has been rising for years. Israeli settlements have been growing for decades. The Israeli military has been ever-present and active. Far-right Israeli ministers were threatening the Palestinian Authority’s funding before the war began. Some critics argued that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank had become a de facto annexation; others went further and called it apartheid.

Israel felt it had a freer hand in the West Bank in part because of Donald Trump’s presidency.

Among other pro-Israel steps, Trump largely cut off U.S. funds to and relations with the Palestinians. His secretary of State reversed a long-standing U.S. position by declaring that America no longer viewed Israeli settlements in the West Bank as being inconsistent with international law.

When Biden took office, he and his team could have brought more of an equilibrium to the situation, truly distinguishing themselves from Trump.

They barely tried. They didn’t even switch back the position on settlements in those early years.

Some Biden officials urged a more active approach. They sought to impose sanctions on violent Israeli settlers as early as 2021; such sanctions freeze the U.S.-held financial assets of the targeted settlers and hamper their ability to engage in business globally, especially with Americans.

But those American officials’ voices were drowned out by colleagues who warned that moving against the settlers could destabilize Israel’s coalition government or rally Israelis around their extremists, two current U.S. officials and one former U.S. official familiar with the discussions told me.

“Paralysis by analysis” seemed to set in, as did general bureaucratic malaise. What also didn’t help was that solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict just wasn’t a Biden priority.

“We just couldn’t get anyone to fucking care at a senior level,” one of the U.S. officials said.

In some conversations, I’ve resorted to asking U.S. officials whether they ever considered penalizing violent settlers simply because it was the right thing to do. They look at me as if I am silly and explain that that is not how policymaking works.

But let’s say the administration had targeted such settlers sooner. Maybe it would have put Israeli leaders on notice that the United States, under Biden, is serious about the need for a Palestinian state. Perhaps it could have given some hope to the Palestinians. It may not have prevented Hamas’ attacks last October, but a stronger U.S. stance against Israeli extremism could have undermined Israel’s far right to the point where maybe they wouldn’t be in its current government.

But by the time Biden acted, starting with visa bans on extremist settlers late last year and sanctions in February, most Israelis were so angry over the Hamas attack that they cared little about U.S. opinion and could not fathom allowing a Palestinian state. It’s also not lost on Palestinians that Biden, then running for reelection, imposed the sanctions when it was clear he could lose a slew of pro-Palestinian votes in swing states.

At the Aspen Security Forum this summer, I asked White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan why the Biden administration didn’t impose the West Bank sanctions years earlier. Sullivan said he took the question as a “compliment” and a sign his team was doing the right thing.

“The fact is we did it, and no one else had done it before,” he said.

Senior Biden administration officials assure me that more settler sanctions are coming, and that Israel’s far-right government ministers may not be immune from them.

But I also hear criticism from Palestinians and rights activists that the administration is moving so slowly, so incrementally, that potential targets are likely already shifting their financial assets in ways that could protect them from sanctions.

So the administration may not only be late, it may still be doing too little.