Written by Shane Bauer on X.
Author of “American Prison,” one of the NYT’s 10 best books. Writing a book on Americans in the Syrian war. Email me at smbauer1@gmail.com

The U.S. just announced sanctions against Neria Ben-Pazi and Moshe Sharvit, two Israeli settlers I recently wrote about for the New Yorker. These are two very dangerous men, but the sanctions conspicuously avoid targeting their Israeli state sponsors. Some thoughts and details:

As I reported, Ben-Pazi was targeted by Israeli authorities in 2015 when he ran an outpost that sheltered Jewish terrorists. Then in 2019, after Netanyahu announced a plan to annex part of the West Bank, the state suddenly started backing him.

Israel allocated land to Ben-Pazi for an illegal outpost within the area targeted for annexation and paid for guards who violently expelled Palestinians from the surrounding land. Senior IDF officers, including Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, regularly visited his outpost.

Then Ben-Pazi started more outposts. His lawyer said he had “extensive ties with the security forces.” “When an officer wants to know what’s going on, they ask him,” he told me. The head of a settlement told me Ben-Pazi was “keeping the Arabs away. It’s really convenient for me.”

Ben-Pazi coordinated the expulsion of Wadi al-Seeq, starting early in 2023 and finishing the job after October 7. Together, settlers and soldiers threatened, beat, and tortured Palestinians and Israeli activists. They all left and the army has not allowed them to return.

Wadi al-Seeq is now a ghost town, and I ran into Ben-Pazi there, living comfortably. He got a new road. Minister of Heritage Amichai Eliyahu spent the night there and tweeted that Ben-Pazi was “the first line of defense against the enemy.”

I also visited Moshe Sharvit’s outpost. His wife Moriah spoke openly about wanting to expel Palestinians. They weren’t “regular people,” she said. “I think we need to give an alternative to the Arabs who live here. There’s Jordan, there’s Egypt, there’s Syria.”

I met Palestinians who Moshe had driven out after October 7. Here his wife shows me their now-empty houses.

The Sharvits had “a gazillion meetings” with government bodies to set up the illegal outpost, Moriah said. The farm acted as “eyes” for the army, she said. The army gave them M16s and set up surveillance cameras on the surrounding land, which it controlled from a command center.

Through Sharvit and Ben-Pazi, Israel seizes land while avoiding the legal hurdles of starting official settlements. Avi Naim of the Settlement Ministry said “You take people who believe in that goal as a pioneering mission, and let them spearhead the work to keep control of land”

By targeting just a few individuals, the Biden administration is casting the problem as one of fringe extremists, glossing over the well-documented fact that the state of Israel has been relying on violent settlers to expand its territory in the West Bank.