Mike Johnson says he called White House with threat to ‘intervene’ over Israel sanctions
House Speaker Mike Johnson said Wednesday he called White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan and threatened to “intervene” if President Biden slapped sanctions on an Israeli military battalion over its alleged conduct in the West Bank.
“We heard a rumor of this before our [aid] bill was actually brought for a vote in the House [Saturday], I mean, hours before,” Johnson (R-La.) told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt.
“And I’ll tell you what I did, Hugh, and I don’t, I guess I’m breaking news here,” Johnson went on. “No one knows this. But I called the White House immediately and talked with Jake Sullivan, and [Secretary of State] Tony Blinken was overseas at the moment.
“But I made him send me an email where he committed to me in writing that it would not affect any of the funding that we were working on to assist Israel in this critical time, and that they would be very judicious in that.”
Johnson added that the issue “seems to be have been resolved, and I am very hopeful that they won’t try to proceed on that. If they do, we’ll intervene.”
Axios reported Saturday that the Biden administration is expected to announce sanctions on the Israel Defense Forces’ Netzah Yehuda battalion sometime this week.
The unprecedented US rebuke would prevent the battalion, whose membership is largely comprised of ultra-Orthdox nationalist Jews, from receiving US military assistance or training.
US sanctions against a regular Israeli military unit would also be a major public relations black eye to the Jewish state as its war against Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip nears the seven-month mark.
The investigation of the Netzah Yehuda battalion stems from a series of incidents prior to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack against Israel.
The most notable of these took place in January 2022, when 78-year-old Palestinian American Omar Assad died of a heart attack after being arrested at an Israeli military checkpoint.
An IDF investigation found that Assad’s death was “a grave and unfortunate event, resulting from a moral failure and poor decision-making on the part of the soldiers” who failed to check Assad’s condition after he lost consciousness.
Blinken said last week that he made “determinations” on sanctions against the battalion and teased an announcement “very soon.”
According to Axios, the Israeli wartime government has pressed the State Department to reconsider the sanctions decision, while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stood by the unit.
“If somebody thinks they can impose sanctions on a unit in the IDF,” Netanyahu said in a statement Sunday, “I will fight this with all my powers.”
