The Push for an Embargo on Israel Is Vague and Confused

Two prominent Democrats visited the Holy Land over the past few days. Rahm Emanuel, chief of staff to former President Barack Obama and the son of an Israeli independence fighter, gave a speech to Tel Aviv University about how the U.S. can “stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel on the long journey toward peace.” Meanwhile, Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.) was visiting a Palestinian village in the West Bank when his car was held up by an Israeli settler militia. The Israeli army says it dispersed the militia to let Khanna through; Khanna says that the army is “lying” and that the soldiers took the settlers’ side.

Both Emanuel and Khanna embraced the idea of U.S. sanctions on Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories. Khanna told socialist talk show host Hasan Piker that a categorical “arms embargo” on Israel would be “probably too far,” and presented sanctions on companies and officials dealing with settlements as a more moderate option. But Emanuel made it clear to The Jerusalem Post that sanctions on settlements were intended to be an all-out attack on the Israeli economy. “You want to pursue a greater Israel?” he said, referring to a term for the Israeli maximalist vision. “You pay full price for it. Everything. That’s a choice you make.”

Sanctions are one of the most powerful but misunderstood tools of U.S. power. And in their rush to realign the U.S.-Israeli relationship, Democrats (and some Republicans) risk getting ahead of their skis. The ambiguity over the word embargo is one example. An arms embargo means that the U.S. government would decline to provide the Israeli government with any weapons. A trade embargo, on the other hand, would involve the U.S. government using its enforcement powers to target private, civilian business in Israel as a form of indirect pressure on the government. These sanctions have a spotty track record in other countries, and even in theory, they only work by causing huge collateral damage.

The main Israeli-Palestinian lightning rod in U.S. politics used to be aid; Israel was the largest foreign recipient of American taxpayer money since World War II. That debate is more or less over, as the Israeli government itself is asking to end direct U.S. subsidies. The pro-Palestinian movement has moved toward demanding a full arms embargo—stopping the U.S. government from sending weapons, whether they are paid for by American or Israeli taxpayers. Indeed, polling shows that most Americans oppose sending weapons in general to Israel.

A New Policy, a pro-Palestinian lobby group founded by two officials who resigned from the Biden administration, argues that the U.S. should use arms sales as “leverage” to change Israeli policy. The Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project, another pro-Palestinian lobby group, claims that any weapon sale to Israel would violate U.S. arms control law, which forbids arming militaries involved in large-scale torture or wars of aggression.

These critics are right that the U.S. government has a lot of leverage in this regard. The international arms trade is not really a free market. U.S. weapons sales are either done by the Pentagon itself or are carried out under the direct control of the State Department. They often come with long-term U.S. commitments. Saudi Arabia, the largest customer for American weapons, gets U.S. training and support (including American maintenance technicians on the ground) with its purchases. To replace direct U.S. aid, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is pushing to fully integrate U.S. and Israeli supply chains, and a bill to that effect is about to pass Congress, despite attempts by Khanna and Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) to stop it.

Some Democratic proponents of continued U.S. arms sales to Israel, such as Slow Boring editor Matt Yglesias, argue that cutting those sales would hurt American manufacturing jobs. That’s not an entirely honest argument. There is, in fact, an excess of demand for American weapons around the world. In many ways, Israel has been allowed to push ahead of the line. The U.S. government guarantees that the Israeli military can receive preferential access to American ammunition (the War Reserves Stockpile Allies-Israel) and better weapons than its neighbors (the qualitative military edge mandate) while other countries are stuck in a backlog. If Israel doesn’t buy those weapons, someone else will.

There is more to the argument that U.S. leverage is overrated. Comparing Saudi Arabia to other cases, former Pentagon officials Elizabeth Dent and Grant Rumley wrote in 2024 that cutting off arms sales has proven to be “a fickle tool” of coercion. Although Israel could not wage its foreign wars without various types of U.S. support, the Israeli-Palestinian issue is a much older and lower-tech form of ethnic conflict. The people who stopped Khanna’s car, after all, were a ragtag militia. Still, perhaps that’s an argument for getting the U.S. out of the mix, if only to wash Americans’ hands of an intractable problem.

Economic sanctions are a different creature altogether. Some sanctions involve seizing the assets of specific foreign officials. Other sanctions are comprehensive bureaucratic attacks on a country’s economy. Over the past few decades, the U.S. Treasury has developed increasingly sophisticated ways to impede other nations’ ability to trade. There is an active, extensive effort to stop oil from flowing into Russia, natural gas from flowing into North Korea, dollars from passing through Iran, or tourists from visiting Cuba.

For all the efficiency of sanctions enforcement, the theory behind comprehensive sanctions is quite crude: Throw a country into economic chaos and its government will be forced to give in to your demands, or better yet, it will be overthrown. In other words, the plan is to use ordinary people’s suffering as leverage. It’s dubious whether that suffering even “works.” Instead of achieving U.S. goals without war, sanctions campaigns have often been the prelude to war. The Trump administration escalated from sanctions on Venezuela to a blockade and then a direct regime change operation. Then it did the same in Iran, much less successfully.

Emanuel and Khanna’s proposal for settlement sanctions is supposed to be a smarter, more precise form of economic pressure. The two Democrats have named a specific target set (officials, construction companies, and banks) and a specific behavior (dealing with settlers in the West Bank) that the targets can cease in order to escape punishment. In theory, the plan is well-tailored to its goals, especially since the settlement movement relies so much on American money, and the issue with settlements is a property dispute at heart.

But the campaign could easily escalate into sanctions on the entire Israeli financial sector because of how many banks deal with settlement real estate. Emanuel at least admitted that this risk existed, perhaps as a way to rattle his right-wing interviewer. Khanna, on the other hand, portrayed economic sanctions as a less extreme measure than an arms embargo. He either did not fully understand the implications of his proposal, or wasn’t completely honest about them, neither of which is a good sign for how it would be implemented.

Democratic critics are right that U.S. involvement, especially military aid and arms dealing, has enabled violence and tyranny across the Middle East. Even if ending that meddling isn’t sufficient to solve all the region’s problems, it is a necessary step toward lowering the temperature. They’re also right to notice that the exceptional U.S. support for Israel has unleashed an exceptional domestic backlash among Americans. But that backlash has grown so quickly that it seems politicians don’t quite know how to translate it into policy changes.

The U.S. government can passively withhold support from its Israeli counterpart before moving on to active coercive measures. Weapon sales are one major example. Another is the direct defensive support from U.S. troops stationed in Israel, or the U.S. intelligence sharing that enables Israeli operations. U.S. diplomats have also put in a lot of effort into rewarding Israel’s friends and punishing its opponents. And there are scores of smaller pro-Israeli exemptions in U.S. law and policy. Ending these measures would make the environment less favorable to the kinds of Israeli actions that progressives oppose, while also reducing the overall U.S. involvement in the Middle East.

In summer 2023, before the current series of wars, I wrote that financial aid “should not be the beginning and end of the conversation” about Israel, because “America is tied and obligated to Jerusalem in ways that go far beyond just $3.8 billion a year.” (That number nearly tripled over the next couple of years.) Indeed, the current U.S.-Israeli entanglement was created through a lot of thoughtlessly passed or seemingly inconsequential laws. That’s why politicians trying to disentangle the relationship have to think carefully and understand exactly what they’re doing.