Vendetta Violence: Israeli Settlers Sanctioned by the E.U.

What a difference even just a month can make. On 11 May, 2026, the E.U. enacted sanctions against “Israeli settlers over their violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, a move enabled by backing from Hungary’s incoming government.”[1] A month earlier, Viktor Orbán was the sitting prime minister of the E.U. state of Hungary. As a supporter of U.S. President Trump, who in turn supported Israel even in its decimation of Gaza razing entire cities into leveled ground for real estate “properties,” Orbán would have wielded Hungary’s veto in the European Council.

Kaja Kallas, the E.U.’s foreign minister, marveled at the time, “We move from political deadlock that was there for a long time. Violence and extremism carry consequences.”[2] The long time is likely a reference to Orbán’s 16 years in power in the E.U. state of Hungary, and her point overall is that with that governor out of the European Council, the E.U. can inflict consequences on foreign actors who engage in violence under the aegis of some extremist ideology. In the case of the Israeli settlers, the ideology is Zionism, which in coming from a religious text has overreached into the political domain, even circumventing international law.

That the violence occurred in the occupied West Bank renders Israel itself especially culpable, for under international law, “all settlements are considered illegal, with the International Court of Justice describing the State of Israel’s ‘continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory’ as ‘unlawful.’”[3] Both the unprovoked violence of the settlers and the Israeli government’s attempted holocaustic genocide of the population of Gaza are on top of the fact that Israel has no justified basis internationally to even be in Gaza and the West Bank. In other words, Israel is two degrees of separation from being a lawful state in terms of international law. That the Netanyahu government was able to ignore that law so easily suggests that there is no such thing as international law—that only guidelines were by then operating in the collapsed post-World War II global order. In a Hobbesian state of nature, no law exists because no international or global government exists. No world federation certainly, which Kant admitted in Perpetual Peace would only make world peace possible but not probable.

The recurrent violence and theft was being committed even in broad daylight by Israeli settlers against defenseless Palestinians—even walking into their houses and nonchalantly taking appliances and furniture!—because impunity must surely have been assured by means of the tacit approval of a government that, after all, had been determined by the UN to have committed a genocide in Gaza. The violations of human rights occurred on both the societal and interpersonal level. A counter-move international could therefore be expected beyond the E.U. sanctioning individual settlers and related organizations.

Given the harm that was being unleashed directly or indirectly by the Israeli government, Kallas’ claim that violence and extremism abroad would trigger negative consequences by the E.U. rings hollow because those consequences are so inadequate to meet the magnitude and depth of the suffering, both interpersonally and at the societal level (i.e., an entire people). So even though a month made a difference in the European Council, the global “community” was still holding back from enforcing international law. With no other enforcement mechanism, can such law even be called law?

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1. Maia de la Baume, “E.U. Approves Sanctions on Israeli Settlers after Hungarian Backing,” Euronews.com, 11 May, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.

The UN: Israel Guilty of Reproductive Genocide

On March 13, 2025, the Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory released a report based on evidence of incessant incidents and Israeli strategic bombings to the UN Human Rights Council. “Israel has increasingly employed sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence against Palestinians as part of a broader effort to undermine their right to self-determination,” Chris Sidoti of the Commission stated.[1] This statement is oriented to particular incidents, albeit recurrent; the report goes on to charge the Israeli government with genocidal methods targeting the ability of the Palestinian population to sexually reproduce itself. Ironically, such methods may bring to mind the methods used in Nazi Germany, including those used by Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death,” to wantonly kill and strategically sterilize undesirables. It need not be a truism, however, that the descendants of victims become victimizers, though I suspect that studies on intergenerational psychology attest to the phenomenon. Also ironically, culpability with an intergenerational cause is also a theme in the Hebrew Bible. Thirdly, it is ironic too that Yahweh may have the last word on the Israeli transgressions, as this too is a recurrent theme in the Hebrew Bible’s faith-rendering of the history of Israel. It would be odd indeed were Yahweh behind a sort of rendering of justice against the Nazis by having Israel inflict severe pain on Palestinians in the occupied territories. Put another way, that justice did not catch up to every Nazi aggressor does not mean that excessive, and thus unjust, harming of innocents can complete the cycle of justice. In fact, both the literal “overkill” by Israel and Russia’s war crimes in invading Ukraine—both with impunity—raise the question of whether omnipotent Yahweh gives a damn, or even whether it is actually sheer fiction.

In the Commission’s report released to the UN on June 14, 2024, whose coverage includes the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 and does not excuse Hamas for its atrocities against Israelis. Even so, the Israeli government ignored the Commission’s requests for information even on those crimes. That the UN had created the state of Israel must also be considered in assessing the refusal. The report also states that the attack by Hamas “and the subsequent Israeli military operation in Gaza must be seen in context. Those events were preceded by decades of violence, unlawful occupation and the denial by Israel of the right of Palestinians to self-determination”.[2] The “unlawful occupation” is especially relevant, as it attests that the political and military “playing field” was hardly level. The Israeli government had taken advantage of this macro advantage for decades, and the Commission’s report on the genocidal sexual and reproductive crimes against humanity following October 7, 2023 should be put in this context. In other words, those crimes were not part of an even “tit-for-tat” between two equal adversaries. Moreover, 45,000 to 55,000 killed or starved for 1250 Israelis killed on October 7, 2023 is so extremely one-sided that the slant in the underlying geo-political and military paradigm can be reckoned as being culpable, as well as the party enforcing it.

Therefore, it is vital to go beyond particular instances of the crimes. Even as the March, 2025 report includes incidents, the macro-level of genocidal sexual tactics is not ignored. Of the former, “two days of public hearings held in Geneva . . . featuring victims and witnesses of sexual and reproductive violence and medical personnel who assisted them, as well as civil society representatives, academics, lawyers and medical experts” went into the report.[3] The report asserts that “forced public stripping and nudity, sexual harassment including threats of rape, as well as sexual assault” were “standard operating procedure” of the Israeli Security Forces in Gaza.[4] Furthermore, the report maintained that “forms of sexual and gender-based violence, including rape and violence to the genitals, were committed either under explicit orders or with implicit encouragement by Israel’s top civilian and military leadership.”[5] From a human standpoint, it is only natural that the anger of Gaza residents towards Israelis and Israel going forward must be such that any proximity, such as is an aspect of military occupation, is itself problematic and essentially infeasible. That such anger can be expected to be intergenerational also rendered continued occupation unfeasible. This is not to say that the residents of Gaza should be moved; a coalition of the willing globally could step in to see that no Israeli enters the territory, which, fortunately, shares a border with Egypt.

The report on the sexual and reproductive tactics also covers crimes against the Palestinian people in Gaza, and this also renders continued occupation untenable. Specifically, the Commission reported “that Israeli forces had systematically destroyed sexual and reproductive healthcare facilities across Gaza, including Gaza’s largest fertility clinic, Al Basma centre, in December 2023.”[6] Additionally, it was no accident, according to the report, that “(t)ank shelling destroyed about 4,000 embryos at the clinic that reportedly assisted 2,000-3,000 patients a month.”[7] According to Sidoti, “certainly, their commanders knew and the commanders would have known that there were tanks operating within that vicinity and firing on buildings and fired on a healthcare facility that was clearly marked.”[8] To be sure, it is possible that the Israeli government had intel that Hamas was using the clinic as a shield. Even if this were so, the report includes other instances of tactics of reducing the number of Palestinians in Gaza, such as direct attacks on maternity wards, “combined with the use of starvation as a method of war,” that have negatively “impacted all aspects of reproduction.”[9] Imagine the reaction were such a design and intent applied by an occupying power on Israel; it would not take long at all for the Israeli government to charge such an occupier with committing Nazi atrocities on the Jews. The asymmetry itself points back to the tilted playing field.

From its collection of evidence, the Commission could detect a systemic pattern. The report “finds that the destruction amounts ‘to two categories of genocidal acts in the Rome Statute and the Genocide Convention, including deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians and imposing measures intended to prevent births.”[10] The very notion of collective justice (and injustice) is based on the fallacy that there are no innocents in a population. Immediately after the Hamas attack, the president of Israel commited this fallacy and connected it with his stated determination that every resident in Gaza should suffer as a result of the Hamas attack. The reaction of governments around the world was to step back and let this fallacious reasoning be implemented on the ground in Gaza by embittered Israeli leaders and soldiers. It is as in Hobbes’ Leviathan in that a sovereign power can do whatever it wants. Yet even in Hobbes’ political theory, even though a country’s sovereign power has the last word in interpreting scripture, everyone is subject to God’s judgment.

The doctrine in Jonathan Edwards’ sermon, “Sinners in Zion,” is that the “time will come when fearfulness will surprise the sinners in Zion, because they will know that they are going to be cast into a devouring fire, which they must suffer forever ad ever, and which none can endure.” Edwards’ most famous (or infamous) sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” is based on Deut. 32:35: “Their foot shall slide in due time.” This can be said of the Israelis who are culpable in ordering or committing genocidal acts well in excess of reciprocal harm in an eye for an eye. The Palestinians are largely if not all Muslims, so it cannot be believed that Yahweh would be in favor of the killing, starvation (e.g., blocking humanitarian aid from entering Gaza in 2025), deprivation of utilities (e.g., cutting off electricity), and reproductive abuse. It is not as though the deity were saying to Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu, Go and rid the Land of Israel of those people who worship other gods, as is the biblical story of Yahweh directing the Hebrews to circle Jericho seven times and kill even the women and children who worship Baal because they do not worship Yahweh. Rather, it seems that Yahweh would eventually punish Israel (i.e., collective divine justice) for having violated the Commandment against killing, especially if the magnitude is well beyond tit-for-tat.

For a God-fearing Israeli, and the rest of us, Yahweh once again punishing Israel for its transgressions is not something that any person can or should take on as if delegated by that deity to enforce divine justice. Indeed, such a horrendous assumption renders theocracies dangerous. We are all, human, all too human, and thus we don’t have the omniscience to be God’s enforcers. This is not to say that governments cannot or should not act to enforce international law, especially given the impotence of the United Nations, but absent this, there is faith that Yahweh will have the last word in holding Israel accountable here rather than only in the hereafter. Instead of willful arrogance, humility, self-restraint, and contrition are the appropriate attitudes of people of faith who have so violated divine (and international) law. It can even be said that serving rather than attacking one’s enemies unlocks the door to the kingdom of God, but even this is subject to willful intransigence out of jealousy and spite.

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1. “Rights Probe Alleges Sexual Violence Against Palestinians by Israeli Forces Used as ‘Method of War,” UN News, United Nations, March 13, 2025.
2. “Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including
East Jerusalem, and Israel,” Annual Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and Reports of the Office of the High Commissioner and the Secretary-General, The United Nations. June 14, 2024.
3. Rights Probe Alleges Sexual Violence Against Palestinians by Israeli Forces Used as ‘Method of War,” UN News, United Nations, March 13, 2025.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.

On the Impotency of International Law in a System of Sovereign States: The Case of Gaza

The sheer brazenness with which countries ironically recognized as being sovereign states by international law ignore international law even in regard to human rights that seeks to place boundaries on said sovereignty reflects the impotency of international law, and thus even that which recognizes national sovereignty itself. For the rest of us, continuing to believe that upcoming cases before the International Court of Justice, the UN’s court, are of consequence and thus even worth paying attention to, demonstrates abject stupidity, as if we were herd animals without learning curves. Admittedly, the stubborn, self-aggrandizing governments are ethically worse than the world’s population that lets such governments blatantly and even explicitly ignore judicial rulings of the International Court of Justice (and the European Court of Human Rights), but culpability can also be gleamed from the public’s truly pathetic irrational belief that another case against a country that has just ignored a verdict of that very court might just work in curtailing human-rights abuses and outright, even genocide-scale, aggression that outstrips even the sin of retaliation. Either I am blind or the proverbial emperor is not wearing any clothes.

As a case in point, in January, 2024, the International Court of Justice announced its preliminary ruling on Israel’s military incursion into Gaza. “The state of Israel shall . . . take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of the Genocide Convention,” the court announced.[1] The court had not reached a verdict on whether Israel was committing a genocide, and but was saying that one could be in progress and thus Israel is obliged to see that it does not, and this includes allowing more humanitarian aid to reach the Palestinians. The health ministry in Gaza had reported that thousands of women and children were among the more than 25,000 people killed in Gaza by the Israeli army, which did not “differentiate between civilians and Hamas fighters.”[2] In addition, more than a million Palestinians there had become homeless. Because only 1,200 Israelis had died in the Hamas attack in October, 2023, the scale of the harm in Gaza is beyond the scope of “an eye for an eye” and retribution or retaliation.

Because we humans have flawed judgment concerning punishment for those who harm us, John Locke of the 17^th century in Europe claimed that a major legitimating function of a government is in providing impartial judges so that vigilantes don’t have to dispense justice in their own cases. He wrote, “it will be objected, that it is unreasonable for men to be judges in their own cases, that self-love will make men partial to themselves and their friends . . . therefore God hath certainly appointed government to restrain the partiality and violence of men.”[3] We are too violent a species to be able to be fair judges against people who have rendered us as victims. I submit that this holds for sovereign states, which are in a state of nature, Locke insisted, with each other because there is no higher human power that can restrain their lust for violence that goes beyond justice and even retaliation. This is precisely why an international court with no enforcement power, such as in the UN having its own military force with which to “remind” wayward states that they had agreed to be bound by international law. The lack of any such army is, I submit, the proverbial elephant in the room that no one wants to recognize and discuss. By the way, this is precisely why I view my non-academic short essays as a form of charity to my species in spite of itself. I don’t ask whether it deserves it—only whether my ideas can possibly help it. I suppose I am benevolent in spite of myself, for I am human, all too human.

Before the court’s preliminary decision, Israeli Prime Minister Ben Netanyahu had said that Israel’s “commitment to international law is unwavering,” and yet he added that the “charge of genocide levelled against Israel is not only false, it’s outrageous, and decent people should reject it.”[4] He would doubtless not be a fair judge in his own case, as he would doubtless throw that case out without letting it be heard. This is precisely why an international court is crucial, and, furthermore, that it must have a direct enforcement mechanism such that its verdicts will stick rather than be dismissed by a guilty defendant.

In its preliminary decision (not yet ruling on whether Israel was committing a genocide), “the court said Israel must restrain from the destruction of infrastructure, should support more humanitarian aid into the besieged Gaza strip and prevent calls to commit genocide against the Palestinian people.”[5] In reaction to the decision, Netanyahu said, “Israel has an inherent right to defend itself.”[6] Exactly two weeks later, he announced that he had “ordered the military to prepare a plan to evacuate civilians from Rafah ahead of an expected Israeli invasion” of the city.[7] Rafah had been home to 280,000 people, but the addition of other Palestinians made homeless in other parts of Gaza increased the city’s population to 1.5 million.[8] Forcing that many people to move in a short time span could itself be considered a violation of human rights if not part of a genocide. Also, the planned invasion itself would likely violate the court’s decision, which specified that Israel must not destroy the infrastructure in Gaza any further.

As for the court’s insistence that Israel let in more humanitarian aid, Israel actually “imposed financial restrictions on the main U.N. agency providing aid in the Gaza Strip, a measure which prevented a shipment of food for 1.1 million Palestinians” in Gaza.[9] Not even on a humanitarian basis was the Israeli government willing to heed the decision of the court whose jurisdiction Israel had agreed to, and whose law Netanyahu himself had said he respects so much.

There should thus be scarcely any doubt as to whether Israel would adhere to the court’s decision on a case set to begin on February 19, 2024 “into the legality of Israel’ 57-year occupation of land sought for a Palestinian state.”[10] Rather than focusing on Israel’s war with Hamas, that case concerns “Israel’s open-ended occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem.”[11] Palestinian representatives planned to “argue that the Israeli occupation is illegal because it has violated three key tenets” of international law: “the prohibition on territorial conquest by annexing large swaths of occupied land,” the “Palestinians’ right to self-determination,” and the prohibition of “a system of racial discrimination and apartheid.”[12] In reading about the upcoming case, I felt an instantaneous rush of hope that the issue that had led to the Hamas attack in 2023 might finally be definitively decided by a neutral court rather than by the warring parties themselves by sheer might and strife in lieu of weak negotiations and weak allies on both sides. I had momentarily neglected to consider Israel’s response to the court’s preliminary decision—namely in dismissing or ignoring it outright and perhaps even going even further by adding a forced exodus from Rafah before another ground invasion. If you tell another person not to sneeze in your face and yet it not only happens again, but at an even closer range, you would naturally conclude that it will happen again unless some obstacle is brought to bear on that person. My point is that an international system in which there are no viable and enforced constraints on state-actors is incompatible with there being real obstacles on the wayward states. Relying on pressure from allies or even an impromptu coalition “of the willing” is not reliable enough to count on as a counterweight to such a severe flaw in the very fabric of an international system of unfettered sovereign nation-states.

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1. Thomson Reuters, “Israel Must Take Steps to Prevent Genocide in Gaza UN Court Says in Ruling on Temporary Measures,” the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC), January 26, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. John Locke, “The Second Treatise of Government: An Essay Concerning the True, Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government,” in The Selected Political Writings of John Locke, Paul Sigmund, ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 2005): 17-125, sec. 13, p. 22.
4. Thomson Reuters, “Israel Must Take Steps to Prevent Genocide in Gaza UN Court Says in Ruling on Temporary Measures,” the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC), January 26, 2024.
5. Brad Dress, “Netanyahu Casts Off Genocide Case, Vows to Push Ahead Against Hamas,” The Hill, January 26, 2024.
6. Ibid.
7. Najib Jobain and Josef Federman, “Israel Seeks to Evacuate Palestinians Jammed into a Southern Gaza City Ahead of an Expected Invasion,” The Associated Press, February 9, 2024.
8. John Gambrell and Phil Holm, “From 200K to 1.5M People: Startling Images Show the Ongoing War’s Impact to This Small Area in Gaza,” The Associated Press, February 8, 2024.
9. Julia Frankel, “Israel Is Holding Up Food for 1.1 Million Palestinians in Gaza, the Main UN Aid Agency There Says,” The Associated Press, February 9, 2024.
10. Mike Corder and Julia Frankel, “Top U.N. Court to Hold Hearings on Legality of Israeli Occupation,” The Associated Press, February 18, 2024.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.