Vice President Kamala Harris and first gentleman Doug Emhoff had a problem during their 2022 Passover seder. The problem centered on the source of their spirits. The wine bottles at the table had come from the Jewish settlement of Psagot in the occupied West Bank. The Biden-Harris administration had been publicly supportive of the two-state solution as the means to resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. And as part of the support for a solution that encompasses an independent Palestinian state alongside a safe state of Israel, the Biden administration had been publicly opposed to expanded Jewish settlements. In the last days of the Obama-Biden administration, the United States allowed the passage of U.N. Security Council resolution 2334, which declared Jewish settlements illegal (the U.S. abstained on that vote, but importantly, it did not exercise its veto, as it often did on votes about Israel).

So what was the second family doing drinking settlement wine? They swore they were sending no political signal. But it seemed to some symbolic of the administration’s broader posture of occasionally talking tough toward Israel but never really making it pay any price for its policies.

Settlements had been for years the biggest obstacle facing Palestinians’ efforts to determine their future in their own state. In their attempt to convince the world that they wanted peace but that the Israelis didn’t, Palestinians regularly pointed to the constant expansion of Jewish settlements. The Israeli settlement enterprise was often given as the best proof that, as someone once sarcastically said, Israel wanted a “piece” of Palestinian land and not “peace” with Palestinians.

International law, and specifically Article 4 of the Geneva Conventions, made it a war crime for an occupying power to move its people to occupied areas. Israel refused to recognize the Geneva Conventions. Nor did it accept that it was an occupying power, insisting that it wanted peace and that Jews have a right to live in any part of Eretz Israel (the land of Israel). At the same time, Israel and many........

© New Republic