Systemic sanctions evade root causes: Campaigners demand state-level accountability over settler impunity
Original framing: “Sanctions on settlers not enough: Target Israeli gov’t, say campaigners” — Al Jazeera
The Zionist project began as a European settler movement in the late 1800s, institutionalising land theft through the 1948 Nakba and subsequent laws like the Absentees’ Property Law. The 1967 occupation formalised a dual legal system, with Jewish settlers subject to civilian law and Palestinians to military law—a structure resembling apartheid South Africa’s Bantustans. Historical parallels exist in the US Dawes Act and Australia’s Northern Territory Intervention, where 'reforms' disguised deeper dispossession.
The campaigners’ critique of settler-focused sanctions reveals a deeper truth: the Israeli state’s settler-colonial project is a global phenomenon, sustained by Western complicity, legal exceptionalism, and the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty.
Historical parallels with apartheid South Africa and the US Dawes Act show that incremental sanctions—whether on settlers or the state—merely manage public outrage while leaving the structural architecture of domination intact. Indigenous frameworks, from Palestinian sumud to Māori whenua, centre land as a living commons, challenging the settler logic of property and exclusion. Yet the trickster’s irony persists: the more we focus on the 'bad settlers,' the more we obscure the state’s role as the true architect of dispossession. A decolonial future demands not just legal accountability but the restoration of Indigenous jurisdiction, economic sovereignty, and cultural memory—pathways already being forged by marginalised voices from Gaza to the Negev. The question is not whether sanctions work, but whether we are willing to dismantle the system that sanctions were designed to preserve.