The Government of France announced this Tuesday the imposition of an entry ban into the country on Israel’s Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, for “actively promoting the annexation of the West Bank” and promoting the construction of settlements in Palestinian territory, among other actions.
The French Foreign Minister, Jean-Noel Barrot, made the announcement following a series of sanctions along with the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Norway against “those responsible for the intensification of colonization and acts of violence in the West Bank.”
“On a national basis, we have banned Minister Bezalel Smotrich, four leaders of settler organizations and 21 violent settlers from entering our territory,” said the head of French diplomacy through a message published on social networks.
Thus, he stressed that “Smotrich actively promotes the annexation of the West Bank, which he openly demands, the creation of new settlements in the West Bank, the colonization of Gaza, the economic collapse of the Palestinian Authority and its detrimental consequences for the Palestinian population.”
“This is a policy that the vast majority of the international community, firmly committed to the two-state solution, cannot accept,” Barrot concluded, without Smotrich or the Israeli authorities having commented on the decision for now.
The step comes just over two weeks after France announced that it was banning “with immediate effect” the entry into the country of the Israeli Security Minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, for the mistreatment of members of the last humanitarian flotilla for Gaza intercepted by Israel in international waters in the Mediterranean Sea.
Both Ben Gvir and Smotrich are two of the best-known faces of the hard wing of the Government of Israel, led by Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud and made up of far-right and ultranationalist parties, amid growing international criticism of Israeli actions in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the increase in settler violence.
International Law considers all settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories illegal, although the Government of Israel differentiates between those to which it has given permission and those to which it has not, which are the only ones it considers contrary to the law, despite international criticism and the pronouncements of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in this regard.