U.S. officials using pro-Palestinian NGO sources to back controversial effort aimed at sidelining Jewish state
BY LIEL LEIBOVITZ, TABLET February 5, 2024
The parents of Israeli settlers, brothers Yagel Yaniv, 19, and Hallel Yaniv, 21, mourn during their funeral at the military cemetery in Jerusalem on February 27, 2023, a day after they were shot dead while driving through Huwara town in the occupied West Bank
In early November of last year, barely a month after Hamas terrorists breached an internationally recognized border, murdered more than 1,200 Israelis, and kidnapped hundreds more, Michael Herzog attended a meeting on Capitol Hill. Israel’s ambassador to the United States, accompanied by his military attaché, likely hoped that the briefing would focus on the Jewish state’s efforts to defend itself from the heaviest blow it had ever sustained.
But the conversation took a very different tack. Instead of focusing on Hamas or Hezbollah, the lawmakers in attendance, sources told Tablet, including senior ranking senators from both parties, wanted to focus on the risks posed by Israel—specifically, by roving bands of allegedly violent settlers in the West Bank. Lawmakers pressed the Israeli officials, going so far as to assert that uniformed IDF soldiers were escorting Israeli settlers to attack Palestinians.
Much of the information that these lawmakers were citing came from a single, ostensibly impartial source whose words carry weight in Washington in part because of his rank: Lieutenant General Michael R. Fenzel, a three-star general who currently serves as the U.S. Security Coordinator to Israel and the Palestinian Authority, colloquially known as the USSC. Fenzel’s USSC is well-known for its regular, sometimes daily briefings and reports about “extremist settlers,” which it provides to members of Congress, policy hands, Israel-related advocacy groups, as well as to foreign countries’ forces in Israel.
According to sources in and out of the U.S. government familiar with Fenzel’s reports and advocacy, nearly every claim presented by the USSC as fact seems to have been lifted directly, sometimes verbatim, from the websites of highly partisan pro-Palestinian organizations, including the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OCHA) and the far-left Israeli NGO B’Tselem, which accuses Israel of apartheid and receives vast support from European governments and from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
In the past 12 months, 13 Israelis were murdered by Palestinians in Jerusalem and 17 in the West Bank—not counting those slaughtered on October 7, 2023—while doing nothing more provocative than driving home or stopping for gas. The number of Palestinian civilians who have been killed by Israelis under such conditions over the same time period is zero.
But the story the administration has been telling anyone who will listen is very different. By scrubbing any mention of the daily violence directed by Palestinian terror operatives against Jewish civilians living in the West Bank from his reports, Fenzel has eliminated the clear retaliatory motive for the vast majority of attacks by Israelis against West Bank Palestinians. Thinly laundered reports from expressly anti-Israel organizations, designed to support an illusion of innocent Palestinians being violently attacked by bloodthirsty Israelis, paint a picture of an Israeli equivalent to the Palestinian atrocities of Oct. 7, lending itself an easy “both-sides” posture meant to ease the way to creating a new Palestinian state in both the West Bank and Gaza. With an executive order now in place, the Biden administration has all the tools it needs to crack down on any form of Jewish life in Judea and Samaria, and on anyone, in Israel or stateside, who supports it.
According to sources, the meeting with Herzog was designed as an escalation in a campaign to curb the so-called “extremist settlers,” which the Biden administration wants to isolate as a major threat to regional stability. Last week, President Biden, invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, signed an executive order imposing severe sanctions on “persons undermining peace, security, and stability in the West Bank.”
“I, Joseph R. Biden Jr., President of the United States of America,” reads the statement, “find that the situation in the West Bank—in particular high levels of extremist settler violence, forced displacement of people and villages, and property destruction—has reached intolerable levels and constitutes a serious threat to the peace, security, and stability of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel, and the broader Middle East region.” These violent settlers, the order continued, go as far as undermining Israel’s security and “threatening United States personnel and interests.” Palestinian terrorism in the West Bank—including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other groups regularly attacking Israelis in Judea and Samaria, Jerusalem, and elsewhere—went unmentioned.
The executive order uses unusually broad language, and applies not only to those suspected of “actions—including directing, enacting, implementing, enforcing, or failing to enforce policies—that threaten the peace, security, or stability of the West Bank,” but also anyone, anywhere who provides any form of support to these individuals.
The implications of the order were evident last week, when the State Department announced a first round of sanctions, focused on four alleged violent settlers: David Chai Chasdai, Einan Tanjil, Shalom Zicherman, and Yinon Levi. The four, accused of various violent attempts to disrupt Palestinian lives across Judea and Samaria, are now barred from entering the United States or accessing the American financial system. In addition, any assets they may have stateside will be seized. And not only stateside: A few days after the four were named, Israel Bank Leumi aligned itself with Foggy Bottom, informing Yinon Levi that it had now frozen both of his bank accounts in Israel as well.
In light of such sweeping powers, it is worth asking how the administration determines which of the Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria may be guilty of subjective transgressions like “efforts to place civilians in reasonable fear of violence.” That’s where the office of Michael Fenzel, who has become the go-to authority for Israel’s fiercest critics in Washington, comes in.
During the recent confirmation hearings of U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack J. Lew, Senator Chris Van Hollen—who made headlines for insisting the Biden administration exert more pressure on Israel to curb what he called the “unacceptably high” number of Palestinian casualties—urged Lew to make Fenzel his confidant. “I ask that one of the first meetings you undertake if you are nominated,” Van Hollen told Lew, “is to meet with our three-star general Fenzel who is the commander that works with both the Israelis and the Palestinian Authority.” This, Van Hollen continued, was a necessary step, because “a lot of U.S. government reporting right now has indicated that while the world is focused on what is happening in Gaza there are extreme settlers on the West Bank that as we speak are seizing more and more Palestinian lands.”
In an open letter to Secretary of State Blinken in November, three members of Congress—Eric Swalwell (D-Ca.), Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), and Susan Wild (D-Pa.)—similarly singled out Fenzel for praise and stressed the need to continue and exert American efforts to “deter extremist elements in the West Bank.” The letter was circulated by partisan NGOs including Americans for Peace Now.
One source told Tablet that the USSC has developed a reputation for repeating the same numbers provided by Palestinian and radical leftist Israeli organizations, without independent verification, attribution, or contextualization. One major source for this data appears to be the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OCHA), which regularly posts updates with precise numbers of Palestinians they claim have been killed by Israel. “It was an open secret,” the source said. “On any given day last December, their numbers lined up exactly with whatever OCHA was posting.” OCHA’s record-keeping was recently called into question by Israeli officials, who argued that the organization counts every violent event in Judea and Samaria as an act of violence against Palestinians, even if Palestinian militants are the perpetrators and even when Jewish civilians are the targets.
A careful reading of OCHA’s own numbers confirms this claim. Since Oct. 7, the organization alleged that eight Palestinians had been murdered by “extremist settlers.” According to the OCHA’s tally, there were seven such Palestinian deaths in the West Bank throughout 2023 up until Oct.7.
B’Tselem echoed OCHA’s numbers, delivering an account of how each of the eight Palestinians killed by Israeli civilians in the West Bank before Oct.7 had died. The details, buried inside an online database, paint a stark picture: Abd al-Karim Badi’a, a 21-year-old, was shot by an Israeli settler after entering the settlement armed with knives and explosive devices. 42-year-old Tareq Odeh Yusef M’aali was shot by an Israeli settler after trying to stab the same settler in a field. Muhannad Falah Abdallah Shihadah, a Hamas terorrist, was killed after murdering four Israelis, including two minors, by shooting them to death outside the Jewish community of Eli.
@pdale5 Actually, Biden has been consistent in his opposition to Jews living beyond the 1949 armistice lines since his days as a freshman senator when he threatened Begin with cutting off aid and pounded the table like Kruschev prompting Begin’s historic speech beginning, “I am not a Jew on trembling knees…”
By contrast, Trump made generous donations for infrastructure, parks, and playgrounds in Judea and Samaria, also as far back as the 1980’s when he was still a liberal democrat and not even close to considering a career in politics. And he did it without publicizing it.
And yes, it is shocking that an Israeli bank would do that. Bibi worked in high finance in the states before making Israel an economic powerhouse on the world stage. Maybe he can figure something out though I’m curious about the bankers who made that decision. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn they are part of the anti-Bibi leftist, American-led, anti-judicial reform TSS cabal. Either Ben-Gvir or Smotrich, I forget, said he would take it to the Knesset. Bless them both. They are truly treasures.
I have to say, I wonder how much of Biden’s dysfunctionality is due to his dementia and how much due to his being a typical Democrat. Look at all the messes Democrat presidents after Truman and especially post LBJ, caused. And not just Presidents. Look at Hillary Clinton, Victoria Nuland, Leon Panetta, so many others. One disaster after another. And Hillary Clinton’s aide came from a prominent Saudi Jihadist family but Biden takes the cake with radical leftists, Jihadists and even Iranian agents!!! in key positions. And of course, he is probably totally compromised by China making him truly a Manchurian Candidate. The Big Guy.
Somebody asked me who I thought the worst president was and caught off guard, I just remembered the conventional answer from my school days, James Buchanan, the Democrat who immediately preceded the civil war but you know, there’s so many Dems to choose from, God Dem it. 😀
(though I have to say that in spite of everything else, when Israel is not on the table, for state wide elections, and Republican candidates want to slash the economic safety net, I have no choice but to vote Dem since I’m not suicidal.)
But, thankfully, Trump is no extremist on these issues.
What is especially shocking is that Israeli Banks are bowing to the dictates of a demented fool in Washington. The Israeli government should take action to compel the banks who freeze accounts of Israeli citizens to obey Israeli law and not that of a foreign power.
If he were willing to check other sources, he might change his executive order, but since that order follows the desired narrative, we should not hold our breath.
for instance, checking the numbers we read in this article would insinuate that the Palestinians should be the object of the executive order rather than Israelis, who, it seems, have connections if not roots in the USA.
I guess these people should get a lawyer to force their case.
The administration cannot deny entry to the USA to US citizens. Quite apart from that, these settlers were neither charged nor found guilty, so this action against them is purely political.
Excellent article! Should be shared widely. “The devil’s in the details,” as the saying goes.