Following reports that President Biden considered including ministers Itamar Ben Gvir and Betzalel Smotrich in the sanctions set to be imposed by his executive order to be signed today, Finance Minister Smotrich responded that “I will work fearlessly.”
“The ‘settler violence’ campaign is an antisemitic lie spread by Israel’s enemies in order to smear the pioneering settlers and the settlement project and harm them, and through them to smear the whole State of Israel,” Smotrich wrote. “This is an immoral BDS campaign which turns the victim into the aggressor and forfeits the blood of the settlers. It is a shame that the Biden administration is cooperating with it in times when the settlers are paying a dear price in blood with the best of their sons in the war in Gaza.”
He ended on a defiant note, “I will continue with God’s help to act without fear to strengthen and develop Jewish settlement throughout the Land of Israel and strive for a lasting peace, which will be achieved only when the hope of the Arabs to establish an Arab state on the ruins of the Jewish state is cut out. If the price will be the imposition of American sanctions on me – then so be it.”
