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Hating Israel Isn’t New; How the CIA and State Department Undermined the Jewish State
“Teddy Roosevelt’s great-great-great grandson is an anti-Israel protester at Princeton,” blared a New York Post headline on May 4, 2024.
The Post reported that Quentin Colon Roosevelt, an 18-year-old freshman, and descendant of the 25th President, is an anti-Israel activist at the Ivy League university. But far from being hip and new, Quentin’s brand of anti-Zionism is old hat — he is merely continuing a long family tradition of anti-Israel activism.
There is an abundance of literature on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s views on Jews and Zionism, the belief in Jewish self-determination. Both FDR and his wife Eleanor had made antisemitic remarks. In a private conversation in 1938, then-President Roosevelt suggested that by dominating the economy in Poland, Jews were themselves fueling antisemitism. And in a 1941 Cabinet meeting, FDR remarked that there were too many Jewish Federal employees in Oregon. In his final days, FDR promised Saudi leader Abdul Aziz Ibn al Saud that he would oppose the creation of Jewish state in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland.
FDR is the president who led the United States to victory against Adolf Hitler. He also employed Jews in high-ranking positions in his government. But he is also the president whose administration failed to save more Jews fleeing Nazism, and who refused to bomb the railway tracks leading to Auschwitz and other death camps where millions of Jews met a ghastly end. Accordingly, it makes sense that his beliefs regarding Jews have been the subject of books and belated study.
Less examined, however, is the Oyster Bay branch of the Roosevelt clan, and their beliefs regarding Zionism. In part, this is easily explained by the unique place that FDR holds in American history. He is the only president to serve four terms, and presided over both the Great Depression, World War II, and arguably the beginning of the Cold War. His branch of the family, the Hyde Park Roosevelts, were Democrats and remained active in public life for decades after his 1945 death.
At first glance, the Oyster Bay Roosevelts were more of a turn of the 19th century affair. They were Republicans, and their scion was Teddy Roosevelt, a war hero turned governor of New York state who, thanks to an assassin’s bullet, found himself as the nation’s leader in 1901.
The famously ebullient Roosevelt helped redefine the country’s idea of a president, and served as an inspiration for his cousin Franklin. But Teddy largely presided over an era of peace and tranquility, not war and upheaval.
Teddy was a philosemite. He was the first occupant of the Oval Office to appoint a Jewish American to the Cabinet. He championed the rights of Jews, both at home and abroad, and was harshly critical of the numerous pogroms that unfolded in czarist Russia.
As Seth Rogovoy has noted, Roosevelt’s “special relationship with Jews was forged during his time serving as police commissioner in New York City, a post he assumed in 1904.” When an antisemitic German preacher named Hermann Ahlwardt gave speeches in the city, Roosevelt assigned a contingent of Jewish police officers to guard the man.
Roosevelt was also a Zionist. In 1918, shortly after the Balfour Declaration, he wrote: “It seems to me that it is entirely proper to start a Zionist state around Jerusalem.” He told Lioubomir Michailovitch, the Serbian Minister to the United States, that “there can be no peace worth having … unless the Jews [are] given control of Palestine.” Six months later Roosevelt died in his sleep.
Not all his descendants would share his belief in Jewish self-determination, however.
Two of Teddy Roosevelt’s grandchildren, Kermit and Archie, served their country in the CIA during the early years of the Cold War. Both were keenly interested in Middle East affairs, and were fluent in Arabic. Both were well read and highly educated, authoring books and filing dispatches for newspapers like the Saturday Evening Post, among others.
They were also prominent anti-Zionists.
Kermit Roosevelt, known as “Kim,” played a key role in anti-Zionist efforts in the United States and abroad. He was not, by the standards of his time, an antisemite. But he was ardently opposed to the creation of Israel.
As Hugh Wilford observed in his 2013 book America’s Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East: “the anti-Zionism of the overt Cold War foreign policy establishment is well known” but “less widely appreciated is the opposition to Jewish statehood of the individuals responsible for setting up the United States’ covert apparatus in the Middle East.”
This began with the OSS, the CIA’s precursor. And it included men like Stephen Penrose, a former American University of Beirut instructor, and Kim Roosevelt’s boss during his wartime service in the OSS.
“Documents among Penrose’s personal papers reveal him engaged in a variety of anti-Zionist activities at the same time that he was commencing his official duties with the OSS,” Wilford notes.
Like many of his fellow Arabists, Penrose was the son of American missionaries who, failing to convert the native population to Christianity, sought to foster Arab nationalism instead. Penrose described himself as a “chief cook” who was “brewing” opposition to Zionism. He became one of Kim Roosevelt’s mentors.
In a January 1948 Middle East Journal article entitled, “Partition of Palestine: A Lesson in Pressure Politics,” Kim called the 1947 UN vote in favor of a Jewish state an “instructive and disturbing story.”
Roosevelt believed that the US media was unduly supportive of the creation of Israel, and claimed that almost all Americans “with diplomatic, educational, missionary, or business experience in the Middle East” opposed Zionism.
Kim’s pamphlet was reprinted by the Institute for Arab American Affairs, a New York-based group whose board he sat on. He also began working with the Arab League’s Washington, D.C., office and “turned elsewhere for allies in the anti-Zionist struggle, starting with the Protestant missionaries, educators, and aid workers.”
This nascent group soon received financial support from the American oil industry, which maintained close links to Kim’s OSS/CIA colleague, William Eddy.
As Wilford noted, the Arabian consortium ARAMCO “launched a public relations campaign intended to bring American opinion around to the Arab point of view.”
In addition to missionaries and big oil, Kim gained another important ally in the form of Elmer Berger, a rabbi from Flint, Michigan. Berger served as executive director of the American Council for Judaism, an anti-Zionist group that, among other things, opposed the creation of a Jewish army during World War II at the height of the Holocaust. Berger and Roosevelt became drinking buddies and close collaborators on their joint effort against the Jewish State.
Kim eventually became “organizing secretary” for a group called The Committee for Justice and Peace. The committee’s original chair, Virginia Gildersleeve, was both a longtime friend of the Roosevelts of Oyster Bay and the dean of New York City’s Barnard College, which today is part of Columbia.
Gildersleeve was “also a high-profile anti-Zionist” who “became involved with the Arab cause through her association with the Arabist philanthropist Charles Crane and the historian of Arab nationalism George Antonius.”
Crane, a wealthy and notorious antisemite, had lobbied against the creation of a Jewish state since the beginning of the 20th century, even advising then-President Woodrow Wilson against supporting the Balfour Declaration.
By 1950, the Committee had managed to recruit famed journalist Dorothy Thompson to their cause. Thompson was reportedly the basis for actress Katharine Hepburn’s character in the 1942 movie Woman of the Year. A convert to anti-Zionism, Thompson’s extensive network of reporters and celebrities proved crucial to Kim and Berger’s efforts to rally opposition to the Jewish State. In a 1951 letter to Barnard College’s Gildersleeve, Thompson wrote: “I am seriously concerned about the position of the Jews in the United States.” People, she claimed, “are beginning to ask themselves the question: who is really running America?”
Another ally emerged that year: the Central Intelligence Agency.
The CIA began funding the Committee, as well as its successor, the American Friends of the Middle East (AFME). Beginning in June 1950, Kim’s correspondence with Berger began making veiled references to the ACJ head taking on “official work” in Washington. This, Wilford believes, is a reference to working with the CIA. Indeed, the well-connected Kim and Archie Roosevelt had known top CIA officials like Allan Dulles since childhood.
With support from figures like Eddy, AFME also began encouraging Muslim-Christian alliances — ostensibly to counter Soviet influence, but also to attack the Jewish state. This led to some awkward alliances, including with Amin al-Husseini, the founding father of Palestinian nationalism and an infamous Nazi collaborator.
Husseini had ordered the murders of rival Palestinians, incited violence against Jews since the 1920s, and had led forces, equipped with Nazi-supplied arms, to destroy Israel at its rebirth in 1948. Now, along with the Secretary General of the Arab League, and Saudi King Ibn Saud, he was meeting with Eddy to discuss a “moral alliance” between Christians and Muslims to defeat communism. Kim himself knew Husseini, having interviewed him for the Saturday Evening Post after World War II.
AFME lobbied for the appointment of anti-Zionist diplomats and in favor of Eisenhower administration efforts to withhold aid from Israel. And both Berger and Thompson pushed for favorable coverage of the new Egyptian dictator, Gamal Nassar, who would wage war on the Jewish state for nearly two decades. Initially, they were successful, with TIME magazine writing that Nasser had the “lithe grace of a big, handsome, all-American quarterback.” Of course, there was nothing “all-American” about Nasser, who would become a Soviet stooge.
AFME officials like Garland Evans Hopkins would draw rebukes after claiming that Jews were bringing violence against themselves — a staple of antisemitism. Hopkins claimed that Zionists “could produce a wave of antisemitism in this country” if they continued acting against “America’s best interests in the Middle East.”
AFME itself would eventually lose influence, particularly after its boosting of figures like Nasser was revealed as foolhardy. Berger would go on to advise Senator J. William Fulbright (D-AR) in his efforts to get pro-Israel Americans to register as foreign agents.
In 1967, as Arab forces gathered to annihilate Israel, Berger blamed the Jewish State, accusing it of “aggression” and its supporters of “hysteria.” Top ACJ officials resigned in protest. That same year, Ramparts magazine exposed CIA support, financial and otherwise, of AFME.
Kim and Archie Roosevelt, however, would continue their careers as high-ranking CIA officers before eventually starting a consulting business and making use of their extensive Middle East contacts.
For some college protesters, attacking Israel — and American support for Israel — might seem new and trendy. Yet, both the CIA and big oil were precisely doing that, decades ago, forming alliances with anti-American dictators, antisemitic war criminals, the press, Protestant groups, academics, university administrators, and fringe Jewish groups claiming to represent “what’s best” for American Jewry.
As William Faulkner once wrote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
The writer is a Senior Research Analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis
The post Hating Israel Isn’t New; How the CIA and State Department Undermined the Jewish State first appeared on Algemeiner.comhttps://www.algemeiner.com/.
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Do European Nationalists Really Love Israel?
A police officer stands at the scene, after a man was arrested following a stabbing incident in the Golders Green area, which is home to a large Jewish population, in London, Britain, April 29, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Hannah McKay
For decades, major pollsters around the world have conducted surveys on attitudes toward Jews. For decades, these surveys have produced more heat than light.
“Thinking of Jews, is your attitude generally positive or negative?” — that is the typical formulation. Time after time, pollsters found that in the West in general, and in the Anglosphere in particular, negativity toward Jews was low. Perhaps 10–15% of the Western public would openly state that they see Jews negatively.
That number may still sound high to some. But what does it actually mean in terms of the potential for rapid political mobilization? Nobody really knows. Yet much of the academic research on antisemitism — conducted in major universities and sponsored by well-meaning donors — never seriously bothered to ask the crucial questions: what does this figure mean, and is it a lot or a little?
But there is another puzzle hiding in plain sight, equally gracefully ignored. The trend in negativity toward Jews is flat. If surveys are to be believed, not much has changed in the minds of Westerners over the past decade, and possibly longer. And yet, with reports constantly highlighting a global surge in antisemitic incidents reported by Jews to the police, one is tempted to ask: who is lying? Jews who report incidents to the police and Jewish communal bodies? The police? Or the surveys?
I have an answer: the surveys are. Or rather, the surveys are asking the wrong question.
What they should be asking, and some do, only less enthusiastically than they should, is whether the Western public is negative toward Israel.
And this is emphatically not because what people feel about Israel is an objectively true measure of Jews’ status, or even Israel’s status, in the Western imagination. It is because attitudes toward Israel function as a mirror: they reveal the respondent’s own identity, the way they see themselves, and their hopes for their society. In a way, Jews and Israel can almost be forgotten. They are only needed as instruments to tease out people’s real political selves.
Have you noticed a finding that some consider “strange,” others applaud, but nobody explains convincingly? When surveys ask about attitudes to Israel and also ask about political affiliation — and when the responses are cross-classified — it turns out that nationalist circles in the West are often quite pro-Israel.
In a recent YouGov survey in Britain, for example, 39% of Reform UK supporters (the most nationalistic large British party) identified as pro-Israel, and only 13% said they were anti-Israel.
Contrast this with the currently surging far-left force, the Green Party: only 4% of Green supporters were pro-Israel, while 60% were anti-Israel. The British political old-timers — the Conservatives and Labour — show similar dynamics in essentials. While the traditionally nationalistic Conservatives lean more pro-Israel than anti-Israel, Labour leans in the opposite direction.
These findings are not new. Nor are they limited to a single pollster.
It is true that the British political map has been redrawn in recent years. The old two-party dynamic — similar to what exists in the US — no longer holds, at least for now. The Conservatives and Labour are no longer the uncontested icons of Right and Left. Instead, both look like spent forces. British politics now has clearer, more sharply defined right-wing and left-wing agendas, represented by Reform UK and the Greens. But the basic pattern — the positivity of nationalists toward Israel and the hostility of socialist circles toward it — has existed for years. It is traceable back at least a decade.
The lack of serious commentary on this is astonishing, especially given that both radical left and right-wing forces are rising across Europe. So what is happening to the nationalists? Do they really care about Israel? And should this be celebrated by those who care about Israel?
My answer, from the crossroads of demographic and historical research, is simple: British nationalists care first and foremost about themselves. They are pro-Israel because Israel is useful to their self-understanding.
The way European nationalists see Israel is simply the way they want to see themselves. Israel, in their eyes, is a Western country — close in manners and sensibilities to their own. It is a muscular Western democracy, defending its citizenry and saying a decisive “yes” to prosperity and innovation, and a decisive “no” to attempts to valorize terrorism or relativize good and evil.
While such games could be played for a while in the West, Israel did not have the luxury of indulging in them for long. And so, not by design but by historical slippage, Israel became the version of the West that Western nationalists crave but can no longer see around them. At the same time, Israel’s neighbors and insurgents are associated with anti-Western sentiments and terrorism — and, more broadly, with what is not the West. The very West of which Britain is a formative part, and which nationalists believe deserves celebration.
In a recently published feature refreshingly titled “Zionism for Everyone,” Alana Newhouse proposes a simple test of national wellbeing. Can a country maintain its demographics? Can it defend itself? Are its people happy?
In Israel’s case, the answer to all three questions is a resounding yes. Israel’s population grows naturally. Israel fights wars — not without successes, to put it mildly. And Israelis report some of the highest levels of happiness in the Western world. Zionism, Newhouse argues, is a recipe for everyone.
Is this merely wish-casting — an expression of the author’s political preferences? Not so fast. It looks like large swathes of European nationalists feel similarly. Listening to their critiques of their own societies, it is procreative confidence, pride, muscularity, and optimism that they identify as both lacking and desirable.
And what of British Jews?
Their politics is also being redesigned. Like the rest of the UK, they are increasingly interested in the newly popular right-wing and left-wing forces — Reform UK and the Green Party. Like the rest of the UK, they are less interested in the old political brands, Conservatives and Labour. Recent surveys of British Jews make this clear.
Yet British Jews are not overwhelmingly aligned with Reform UK. The extent to which nationalist pro-Israel sentiment affects Jewish voting behavior remains unclear. At the risk of sounding dramatic, this resembles unreturned love.
Put more analytically: British Jews, and Diaspora Jews more broadly, do not share a single unified vision of their host societies — or of themselves. People often speak of “Jewish interests.” Perhaps the only idea that unites both antisemites and philosemites is the belief that Jews have some collective “interest” that they coordinate politically. The difference is that antisemites describe this alleged interest in sinister terms, while philosemites relate to it with sympathy. Both miss the point.
Jewish political instincts do not boil down to guarding some uniquely defined and unambiguous “Jewish interest.” Jews are as divided over what is good for them as their host societies are. And that is perhaps the best-kept secret about Jewish politics.
So what are these competing visions of society now being contested in Britain?
One vision, promoted by British nationalists, holds that nations are natural units of human existence. Their elites, however flawed, should take care of them. Borders should be guarded. National identity should be celebrated. In that broad family of nations, Britain, Israel, and the West more generally are benevolent forces — associated with lifestyles conducive to freedom and prosperity.
An opposing vision, promoted by the far left and expressed eloquently by the leader of the British Green Party, Zac Polanski, is one in which no country has a right to exist. Similar sentiments have been voiced before. In this worldview, individuals — not nations — are the natural units of humanity. Nations are retrograde, perhaps ridiculous. End of story. Full stop.
From this menu of national versus post-national dishes, the whole of the West — majorities and minorities alike, including Jews — is now choosing. These choices dictate voting behavior and political rhetoric.
If we adopt this framework, the nationalists’ love of Israel at this particular historical moment, as well as Jewish ambivalence toward nationalist parties, becomes simultaneously explainable. Until now, both the nationalist affection for Israel and Jewish lack of enthusiasm for nationalists have seemed puzzling. But a single explanation that solves several puzzles at once is usually the strongest explanation — assuming Occam’s razor still holds.
In today’s West, broadly speaking, whoever loves the West loves Israel. The two loves are connected because Israel is perceived as the West — condensed, sharpened, and made morally legible. By extension, whoever cannot tolerate the West cannot bear Israel.
And so, as long as the West remains capable of self-love at all, Israel will remain acceptable in its books.
Dr. Daniel Staetsky is an expert in Jewish demography and statistics. He is based in Cambridge, UK.
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Exposing The New York Times’ Tucker Carlson Interview
Tucker Carlson speaks on first day of AmericaFest 2025 at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona, Dec. 18, 2025. Photo: Charles-McClintock Wilson/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Like everyone who has sat down in recent months to interview Tucker Carlson, The New York Times’ Lulu Garcia‑Navarro too often allowed him to do what he does best: answer anything and everything with a mixture of sophistry, dishonesty, and vagueness.
Overall, she did a better job than most. Economist editor‑in‑chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, for example, all but avoided Carlson’s most insidious claims about Israel and Jews in her own interview, preferring to spar with him on safer, domestic territory.
Garcia‑Navarro, by contrast, doesn’t duck the subject at all.
Naming the Trope Without Truly Challenging It
She pointedly asked him about “rhetoric where everything is blamed on Israel, where Israel is seen as the core of all of these problems,” and notes how his rhetoric “has echoes of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” rhetoric that “opens the door to this idea that there is a very powerful sect of Jewish people who want global war and global conflict.”
She challenged his platforming of Nick Fuentes and tied it to Holocaust denial and to the way dehumanizing language paves the way for mass violence.
“The Holocaust didn’t start with the gassing of Jews. It started with the dehumanization of Jews, with the way that they were spoken about, with the language that was used,” she told him. It is a powerful line.
But she followed it with a curiously soft question: “Why do you think you get tagged so often with antisemitism?”
“Tagged” as antisemitic? Why ask Carlson how he feels about the label rather than confront him with his own words?
Why press him him on his claim that Dick Cheney’s office was “completely controlled … by people who were putting Israel’s interests above America’s interests,” or his description of Donald Trump as a “slave” to Benjamin Netanyahu and his “advocates in the United States,” and ask him directly how that is not trafficking in classic antisemitic narratives about Jews driving wars?
Why not force him to account for his line that “Israel pushed the United States president” into war with Iran and sought to keep the conflict going until Iran was “destroyed and chaotic, which is the Israeli goal”?
The Question Garcia-Navarro Never Really Asked
What Garcia‑Navarro too often failed to do is what so many interviewers before her have also failed to do: ask Carlson for evidence and stay on the claim until he either substantiates it or admits he cannot. When he portrayed Trump as a “hostage” and “slave” to Netanyahu and suggested Israeli leaders drove both the Iraq and Iran wars, she largely let those claims stand without demanding proof in the moment.
At his most evasive, Carlson falls back on one of his most familiar tactics: either feigning ignorance or retreating into an undefined “they.”
To her credit, Garcia‑Navarro did at one point press him on that famous “they” — asking him explicitly who “they” are when he talks about shadowy forces pushing Trump toward war. That, precisely, is what a good interviewer should do.
Carlson’s “They” and the Return of Old Conspiracies
But then, at other moments, she let him wriggle away. She raised the Protocols of the Elders of Zion herself, clearly aware of how central that forged text is to the idea of a Jewish cabal manipulating global events. Carlson responds by saying he has merely “heard references to it” and that it is “like a Tsarist forgery or something.”
This is one of the most prominent right‑wing media figures in America, a man who opines constantly about antisemitism, Jews, and Israel. How is it conceivable that he has not properly “heard of” one of the foundational antisemitic texts of the last century? Why not simply ask that? Why not point out that he is disavowing knowledge of the book while reproducing its very structure in his claims about shadowy pro‑Israel forces controlling presidents and forcing wars?
Letting Conspiracy Theories Stand Unchallenged
Carlson deserves to be challenged at the level of evidence, not just rhetoric.
On Iraq, he made the claim that former Vice President Cheney’s office was being controlled before concluding, “I would say the Iraq war was to a great extent a product of that.” On Iran, he similarly claimed that “Israel pushed the United States president” and that Israeli strikes on civilians in Lebanon were designed to sabotage diplomacy and “keep this going until Iran was destroyed and chaotic, which is the Israeli goal.”
On the latter point, Garcia‑Navarro mostly restated his claims and tacitly accepted the framing by asking why Trump has been uniquely susceptible compared with previous presidents. On both wars, she never put to Carlson the obvious counter‑facts: post‑9/11 doctrine, US intelligence assessments, the role of Gulf states, or Iran’s own conduct. She never tests whether “Israel did it” is anything more than a monocausal conspiracy theory.
Israel’s Legitimacy Treated as an Open Question
The same pattern holds for Israel’s basic legitimacy. Carlson was allowed, repeatedly, to pivot to his preferred talking points. He questioned whether Israel has any “unique right to exist” based on scripture and whether “people whose ancestors didn’t live here now occupy the land.”
Garcia‑Navarro did note that this rhetoric veers into delegitimizing Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people, but she did not test his reasoning. Israel is not a case of “Bible or bust.” There are non‑theological bases for its legitimacy — UN partition, international recognition, state practice — that never entered the conversation.
By keeping the debate locked inside Carlson’s chosen frame — is Israel’s biblical claim valid? — the interview ended up treating the very question of Israel’s right to exist as an open, almost abstract dilemma.
Would Garcia‑Navarro ever entertain, in the same way, the question of whether Algeria or Pakistan “really” have a right to exist, on the grounds that their borders are disputed and their populations include people “whose ancestors didn’t live there” a hundred years ago?
The New York Times Problem
In that sense, Garcia‑Navarro becomes a proxy for broader New York Times tendencies. She is very good at naming labels: antisemitism, “cabal” tropes, the Holocaust, genocide, “delegitimizing Israel.”
But when Carlson made concrete empirical claims — that Israel decides US wars, that it deliberately targets civilians in Lebanon to blow up peace talks, that “hundreds” of people in Britain have been arrested simply for “criticizing Israel,” that Israel practices “collective punishment” — she rarely forced him to supply proof or confront counter‑evidence.
The Times is comfortable talking about antisemitism as a feeling or fear. It is much less comfortable adjudicating factual narratives about Israel, even when those narratives echo some of the oldest antisemitic myths in circulation.
Antisemitism as Rhetoric, Not Fact-Checking
That asymmetry runs through the interview. Throughout, Garcia‑Navarro seems more at ease challenging Carlson on certain narratives than others. She pushed repeatedly on his theological musings about Trump as a possible “Antichrist” and on Christian morality in the age of Trump. Yet she took a comparatively light touch toward Carlson’s sweeping claims about Israel’s agency and Israel as the prime driver of Middle Eastern conflict.
That choice is particularly striking because Garcia‑Navarro is not a novice on these issues. She has previously hosted ADL chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt to discuss antisemitism, anti‑Zionism, and “double standards” toward Israel, and she has reported extensively on Israel and the Palestinians. She knows that “Israel controls US policy” narratives are a staple of modern antisemitism. Precisely because she knows this, the decision to let so many of those claims pass without forensic challenge is important.
When Caveats Replace Journalism
When a platform as powerful as The New York Times invites Tucker Carlson to explain why Israel supposedly drives American wars, the minimum journalistic standard cannot be to name the antisemitic tropes and then leave his assertions hanging in the air.
It has to be to interrogate them, to demand evidence, and to put his story about Israel alongside the facts about how US policy is actually made. Otherwise, even a well‑meaning interview risks laundering a familiar narrative — that a small, uniquely suspect Jewish state and “its advocates” pull the strings — into the mainstream with only the thinnest of caveats.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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EU sanctions Israeli settlers after Hungary, under new leadership, clears path
(JTA) — The European Union decided to sanction Israeli settlers over violence against Palestinians in the West Bank on Monday, moving forward a measure that had been blocked for months.
The EU’s 27 foreign ministers agreed on the sanctions at a meeting in Brussels after Hungary’s new government gave its approval.
The measure had been blocked by a close ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Viktor Orban, who was Hungary’s president for 16 years before being unseated in April.
The backing from Peter Magyar, who was sworn in as Orban’s replacement on Saturday, is seen as portending a new era in which the consensus-oriented European Union adopts a more united tone against Israeli policies.
Magyar has pledged to restore ties with the EU after Orban’s far-right politics isolated Hungary. He also said he would pursue a “pragmatic relationship” with Israel and vowed to recommit Hungary to the International Criminal Court, which Orban withdrew from after the court issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu over alleged war crimes.
“It was high time we move from deadlock to delivery. Extremisms and violence carry consequences,” Kaja Kallas, the EU’s top diplomat, said on X.
Kallas said ministers also agreed to impose “new sanctions on leading Hamas figures,” who were not specified.
Kallas did not name the Israelis that will now be sanctioned or specify whether they will be organizations, individuals, or both. Several groups play crucial roles in promoting, developing, financing and defending Israeli settlements, while multiple individuals have previously faced sanctions by individual governments over their alleged involvement in violence against Palestinians.
Settler violence in the West Bank surged after the Gaza war began in October 2023 and further intensified since the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran broke out in February. In March, thousands of Diaspora Jewish leaders called on Israeli President Isaac Herzog to take action to stop the violence.
Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Saar said Israel “firmly rejects” the EU’s decision and accused the bloc of imposing sanctions on Israeli citizens and groups “because of their political views and without any basis.”
“Equally outrageous is the unacceptable comparison the European Union has chosen to make between Israeli citizens and Hamas terrorists. This is a completely distorted moral equivalence,” Saar said on X. He added that Jewish people have a “moral and historical right” to “settle in the heart of our homeland.”
Peace Now, which advocates for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said the EU had sent “a grave warning sign” and “a call to the Israeli public to wake up to the reality we have created through decades of occupation.”
“The rampant violence of settlers in the West Bank, encouraged and supported by the government, is leading Israel into a moral abyss and casting an indelible stain on the state of Israel,” the group said in a statement.
Broader measures against Israel remain stalled by a lack of support. Spain, Ireland and Slovenia have pushed for the EU to suspend its trade agreement with Israel and sanction its far-right cabinet ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. France and Sweden have called for tariffs on imported products from settlements in the West Bank. Other member states, such as Germany and Italy, have refused to support those measures.
Under the Biden administration, the United States sanctioned multiple settler leaders, settler groups and West Bank outposts in 2024. Trump canceled the sanctions a day after reentering office in January 2025.
In March, Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said the administration had expressed concerns about settler violence to the Israeli government and anticipated that the government would take action.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post EU sanctions Israeli settlers after Hungary, under new leadership, clears path appeared first on The Forward.