Last month American provocateur Tucker Carlson visited a Russian grocery store. Because it was filled to the brim with food, Carlson claims that western sanctions placed on Russia aren't having an effect. "We've been told sanctions on Russia have had a devastating effect on its
economy," writes Carlson. "We visited a grocery store in Moscow and found a very
different situation."

Tucker Carlson We've been told sanctions on Russia have had a devastating effect on its economy. We visited a grocery store in Moscow and found a very different situation. pic.twitter.com/oPF1WUE6Ec

— 1776 (@TheWakeninq) February 15, 2024

Carlson's video is just one of many in a strange genre of "sanctions aren't working" videos produced by Westerners visiting or living in Russia. (Here is a good rebuttal to Carlson's video by Russian YouTuber NFKRZ.) In another video, Dutch-Canadian farmer Arend Feenstra, who has recently moved to Russia with his wife and nine children, walks through a hardware store full of tools. "Sanctions???" he quips.

Don't let the videos fool you. Sanctions have had a big effect on Russia. And by sanctions I'm referring not only to the official sanctions levied by coalition governments, but also self-sanctions imposed by Western companies. Self-sanctioning occurs when companies like Lego, Coke, or McDonald's choose to leave Russia, not because their government says they must, but because their customers and employees have pressured them to leave, or out of a general sense of solidarity with Ukraine. (Here is a list of companies that have left.)

While Carlson and Feenstra's videos of store shelves suggest prosperity, what they don't show is how many resources Russian businesses have been forced to sacrifice in order to re-order their affairs so as to provide Russians with full shelves. These businesses have had to go out and build new relationships with manufacturers in places like China or Turkey. The alternative products that have been introduced often aren't as good, or as familiar, or as useful to customers. 

Many of the "sanctions don't work" videos spotlight the contraband Western goods that are often found on Russian store shelves. This video, for instance, shows Coke being sold at Spar, a grocery store. Coke is banned in Russia, so the message here is presumably that the sanctions are a waste of time. But what they don't show is that the prices for these contraband goods will be higher than before. The Coke products in the video are no longer made in Russia but must be
smuggled in via third-parties such as Poland, Afghanistan, and
Kazakhstan, the extra shipping and handling costs being incorporated into their final price. Think of this as a sanctions-induced smuggling tax.

Put differently, coping with sanctions and self-sanctions is costly for Russia; in Carlson's videos we only see the final product, full shelves, but not all the hassle and resources that have gone into producing that state of affairs. Nor is the set of full shelves on display in his video necessarily as desirable as the set of full shelves that existed prior to sanctions.

A much more realistic illustration of the effect of sanction is provided in a recent video by Arend Feenstra, the Dutch-Canadian farmer, of a visit he makes to a Russian tractor dealership.

I watched it so you don't have to. What follows is a quick summary of the relevant bits. It starts out with an excited Feenstra driving out to is what he believes to be a Case/New Holland dealership. Since the Case and New Holland tractor brands are popular in Canada, Feenstra's previous home, he will get to see some brands that he is familiar with. Ah, nostalgia.

(A side note: As a Dutch-Canadian myself, I find it jarring that someone of my ilk has decided to emigrate to Vladimir Putin's Russia. But digging deeper, we learn that Feenstra is a bigot: he doesn't like the LGTBQ community. Given that Russia's regime considers the "international LGBT movement" to be a terrorist organization, I suppose there's a natural fit for folks like him in Russia.)

Unfortunately for Feenstra, when he arrives at the dealership he discovers that it no longer sells Case or New Holland tractors. Both brands of farm equipment are built by CNH, a UK-headquartered equipment manufacturer, and along with most other Western farm companies CNH pulled out of Russia in 2022, effectively ending all its Russian dealership relationships. 

The only new tractors that the dealership has available are Chinese-built YTOs, which the dealership was forced to turn to in 2022 to fill the sudden gap in its show room.We learn in the video that YTOs are a regression in terms of technology. Feenstra points out throughout that the Chinese tractors have less electronics than their western equivalents and more mechanical parts. Instead of electronic shifting, for instance, the YTOs use mechanical shifting. The fuel pumps are mechanical too. It's like stepping back in time.

A regression to mechanical components is a nuissance, but it's not awful. However, things get worse. Enter the triple mower problem.

A tractor with a triple mower

Prior to the sanctions, we learn that the dealership's most popular tractors were larger horsepower products like the New Holland 210. These larger tractors are particularly desired by farmers in the region for their ability to accept an attachment known as a triple mower, says the employee. A triple mower is designed to cut a wider swath of grass or crops compared to a single mower. This allows farmers to cover more ground in less time, improving overall efficiency during harvesting or haymaking operations.

Alas, the Chinese-made YTOs can't use a triple mower, the employee tells us. The dealer is in talks with the manufacturer to make changes to the frame to accommodate them, but there's no indication when this will occur. Feenstra is not impressed by any of this.

Feenstra checking out a YTO tractor

In the meantime, the dealer tells Feenstra that if he needs a new tractor with triple mower compatibility, he will have to import a Western one via the parallel market. This will involve buying a tractor in Europe and sending it through a third-party transit country, like Turkey, then moving it to Russia. But the whole process will be expensive, warns the employee, including paying VAT three times.

Russian farmers who bought New Holland or Case tractors prior to the sanctions are no better off, we learn, because they now face hurdles getting spare parts for their tractors. Prior to the self-sanctions they could rely on the Case/New Holland dealership for a steady supply of Case and New Holland parts, but with the dealer having lost its relationship with CNH, the only way to get parts is by smuggling them in. Alas, smuggling adds uncertainty and a higher price tag.

Another conversation between Feenstra and the employee centres around a piece of machinery known as a baler, which can be attached to the back of a tractor in order to convert a row of hay into a convenient bale. According to the employee there are a number of Russian companies that make balers, but they are "not very good". The video reveals that one Western-made baler brand is available for purchase, a German-made Kuhn. (Is Kuhn one of those rare European farm companies that has chosen not to self sanction?) But the Kuhn baler it is quite expensive, more than the cost of an entire tractor.

Stepping back, Feenstra's video is great illustration of the costs imposed on Russia by sanctions and self-sanctions. The dealership is struggling to fill the void left by departing Western brands. Its customers, Russian farmers, are stuck with the option of an inferior replacement for Western-made tractors, like the YTO, or a more expensive smuggled products. The dealership and its customers seem to be getting by, but they are clearly worse off than before.

Feenstra isn't the only western farmer in Russia to be producing "sanctions don't work" videos. An Australian family that has moved to Russia in order to start a farm also makes YouTube videos on the topic. "So, the sanctions really haven't been bad for Russia," says the family patriarch, John, standing in a Russian mall. "If they have done anything, they have been great for Russia."

But another video (see below) suggests the opposite. In it the Australians are paying a visit to a nearby John Deere tractor dealership. We learn from an employee that this particular dealership is part of a Russian dealership network that, prior to the sanctions, was the largest John Deere distributor in all of Europe. John Deere is a U.S. equipment manufacturer.

Near the start, John optimistically films a large sign boasting the dealership's many relationships with western manufacturers, including JCB, Pottinger, Väderstad and Haybuster. But as he learns later on, the sign is no longer meaningful. Along with most other farm product companies, John Deere and JCB exited Russia in 2022. The dealership has lost its dealer status and can no longer sell either John Deere or JCB products, nor most of the other brands that are advertised on its sign.

To fill the void, the dealership now offers Turkish-made Basak tractors and Chinese-made Noma tractors. An employee who shows the family around the dealership grouses to John about the quality of the Chinese tractors that he stocks, saying: "I don't know what we will do with it, because if I sit inside of the cabin and look down I can see the ground because there in a gap in the floor." The tractor is the technological equivalent of a first generation John Deere, he complains.

Interestingly, the owner of this particular network of Russian dealers, known as EkoNiva-Technika, is based in Germany and produces public financial statements. I dug through the numbers to get a better feel for how the dealership is doing. 

In 2021, prior to self-sanctions, the EkoNiva-Technika dealership network sold 403 tractors. Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and the dealership's sales fell to 263 tractors in 2022. In 2023 it sold just 131 tractors. That's a big fall.

The German parent blames the decline in tractor sales on a "significant drop in demand" for new agricultural machinery by Russian farmers, as well as the loss of its main suppliers, which were replaced by alternatives from China and Turkey whose "products fell far short of the previous sales figures." Meanwhile, the dealer's spare parts business saw a big jump in revenue thanks to an intensification in demand for Western parts and higher parts prices, no doubt due to having to resort to costly transshipment routes. Spare parts have gone from 24% of the dealership network's revenues prior to sanctions to 49% of revenues in 2023.

Back to John, the Australian farmer. When he does eventually buy a tractor, we find out that it's a used Japanese-made Yanmar tractor. All the controls are written in Japanese and he can't read the manual. Compounding matters, Yanmar has officially left Russia, so John will likely find that getting parts is a pain. Again, that's the nuissance of sanctions. Rather than getting the first-best, the only option is often second- or third-best.

John and his new Japanese tractor

Given all the anecdotes I've assembled, what is the bigger picture?

Prior to being sanctioned, Russia's farming sector had evolved towards a particular pattern of specialization and trade comprised of middlemen dealerships, their relationships with Western manufacturers, and the farmers they served. The sanctions (and self-sanctions) immediately upended that pattern, forcing dealers and farmers to undergo a massive and costly recalculation event.

The new pattern of specialization and trade that the Russian farm sector has arrived at doesn't appear to be as good as the initial pattern. 

To begin with, the alternative brands that have filled the void seem to be a downgrade. The Chinese YTOs that the first dealer is selling won't accept a triple mower while the tractors the second dealer stocks have holes in the floors. Spare parts that were once widely available thanks to dealerships' stable relationships with their western suppliers are harder to come by. Dealership resources are now being diverted to smuggling in contraband parts, which means higher prices for farmers. Finally, as suggested by the dealership's financials, farmers are refurbishing old tractors rather than investing in new tractors. This slowdown in capital investment will presumably hurt crop yields in the long term.

In sum, contrary to Tucker's video and many other "sanctions aren't working" videos on YouTube, the videos made by expatriate Canadian and Australian farmers suggest that the opposite: sanction are having an effect. And it isn't a good one.

There's a new financial loophole in town: stablecoins. Stablecoins are dollar, yen, or pound-based payments platforms that are built using crypto database technology.

Financial institutions are always looking for loopholes to game the system. Typically this has meant avoiding capital requirements or liquidity ratios in one jurisdiction in favor of a looser standards elsewhere. The new stablecoin loophole allows for a different set of financial standards to be avoided, society's anti-money laundering regulations.

I'll explain this new loophole using PayPal as my example.

PayPal now offers its customers two sorts of regulated platforms for making U.S. dollar payments. The first type will be familiar to most of us. It is a traditional PayPal account with a U.S. dollar balance, and includes PayPal's flagship platform as well as PayPal-owned platforms Xoom and Venmo. These all have strict anti-money laundering controls.

The second type is PayPal's newer stablecoin platform, PayPal USD, which has loose anti-money laundering controls. PayPal USD is built on one of the world's most popular crypto databases, Ethereum. Dollars held on crypto databases are typically known as stablecoins, the most well-known of which are Tether and USDC.

What do I mean by fewer anti-money laundering controls?

If I want to transfer you $5,000 on PayPal's traditional platform, PayPal will first have to grant both of us permission to do so. It does so by obliging us go through an account-opening process. PayPal will carry out due diligence on both of us by collecting our IDs and verifying them, then running our information against various regulatory blacklists, like sanctions lists. Only after we have passed a gamut of checks will PayPal allow us to use its platform to make our $5,000 transfer.

Contrast this to how a payment is made via PayPal's new stablecoin platform.

First, we both have to set up an Ethereum wallet. No ID check is required for this. That now allows us to access PayPal's stablecoin platform. Next, I have to fund my wallet with $5,000. I can get these these funds from a third-party who already holds money on PayPal's stablecoin platform, say from a friend, or from someone who buys goods from me, or from a decentralized exchange. Again, no ID is required for this transaction to occur. Once I have the funds, PayPal will process my $5,000 transfer to you.

Can you spot the difference? In the transaction made via PayPal's legacy platform, PayPal has diligently got to know everyone involved. In the second transaction, PayPal makes no effort to gather information on us. And lacking our names, physical addresses, email addresses, or phone numbers, it can't do a full cross-check against various regulatory black lists.  

More concretely, PayPal's legacy platform does its best to stop someone like Vladimir Putin, who is sanctioned, from ever being able to sign up and make payments. But if Putin wanted to use PayPal's new stablecoin platform, PayPal makes almost no effort to stop him from jumping on.

One of the biggest expenses of running a legacy financial platform is anti-money laundering compliance. Programmers must be deployed to set up onboarding and screening processes. Compliance officers must be hired. If a transaction is suspicious, that may trigger a halt, and the transaction will have to be painstakingly investigated by one of these officers. The platform is hurt by lost customer goodwill – no one likes a delay.

That's where the stablecoin loophole begins.

PayPal can reduce its costs of getting to know its customer by nudging customers off its traditional platform and onto its PayPal USD stablecoin platform. Now it can onboard them without asking for ID. Since it no longer collects personal information about its user base, fewer transactions trigger flags for being suspicious, and only rarely do they register hits on sanctions blacklists. That means fewer halts, delays, and costly investigations. PayPal can now fire a large chunk of its compliance staff. The reduction in costs leads to a big rise in earnings. Its share price goes to the moon.

For now, PayPal's stablecoin platform remains quite small. Only $150 million worth of value is held on the platform, as the chart at the top of this post shows. The company's legacy platforms are much larger, with around $40 billion worth of balances held. Given the compliance cost difference, though, I suspect PayPal would love it if its stablecoin platform were to grow at the expense of its legacy platform.

I've used PayPal as my example, but the same calculus works for the financial industry in general. If every single bank in the financial system were to convert over to a stablecoin platform for the delivery of financial services, and no longer use their legacy platforms, the industry's total anti-money laundering compliance costs would plummet.

So far I've just explained this all from the perspective of financial institutions, but what about from the viewpoint of the rest of us? Society has set itself the noble goal of preventing bad actors from using the financial system. A large part of this effort is delegated to financial institutions by requiring them to incur the expense of performing due diligence on their platform users. This requires a big outlay of resources. Many of these costs are ultimately passed on to us, the users.

If institutions like PayPal switch onto infrastructure that doesn't vet users, then resources are no longer being deployed for the purposes we have intended, and the broader goals we have set out are being subverted. Is that what we want? I'd suggest not.

Some followup thoughts:

1. PayPal's stablecoin platform employs fewer anti-money laundering controls than its regular platform. On the other hand, its stablecoin platform has stricter standards in other areas, including the safety of its customer funds. I wrote about this here: "It's the PayPal dollars hosted on crypto databases that are the safer of
the two, if not along every dimension, at least in terms of the degree
to which customers are protected by: 1) the quality of underlying
assets; 2) their seniority (or ranking relative to other creditors); and
3) transparency."

2. The pseudonymity of stablecoins is something I've been writing about for a while. In a 2019 post, I worried that at some point this loophole would lead to "hyper-stablecoinization," a process by which every bank account gets converted into a stablecoin. I'm surprised that almost five years later, this loophole still hasn't been closed.

3. The typical riposte to this post will be: "But JP, stablecoins are implemented on blockchains, and blockchains are transparent. This prevents bad actors from using them, and so stablecoins should be exempt from standard anti-money laundering rules." I don't buy this. Bad actors are using stablecoin platforms, despite their pseudo-traceability. "Its convenient, it's quick," say a pair of sanctions breakers about payments made via Tether, the largest stablecoin platform. Society has deputized financial institutions to perform the crucial task of vetting all their users. By not doing so, stablecoin platforms are shirkers. Trying to outsource the policing task to the public or to the government by using a semi-transparent database technology doesn't cut it.

Turkish banks halted transactions with Russian banks last month and are only slowly reintroducing payments for a narrow range of products that are on a so-called "green list," reports Ragip Soylu. This broad debanking of Russia by Turkey is part of the fallout from President Biden's first round of secondary sanctions, announced on December 22. 

Ukraine/sanctions watchers around the world are breathing a sigh of relief. At last the cavalry has arrived! While the Russian sanctions program has often been described by the press as the "world's strictest", in actuality it has been (till now) alarmingly light-touched due to its lack of the toughest tool of financial warfare: secondary sanctions.

Primary sanctions vs secondary sanctions

Secondary sanctions, especially when applied to foreign banks, are far more damaging than primary sanctions, which to date have been the dominant type of sanction levied against Russia. 

With primary sanctions, it is the "primary" layer – U.S. citizens and companies – that are cut off from dealing with the designated Russian target(s). However, primary sanction don't prevent non-U.S. individuals or non-U.S. companies, say a Turkish bank, from filling the void left by departing American counterparts, often acting as a re-router of the very U.S. goods that can no longer be moved directly to Russia by U.S. firms. So rather than reducing the amount of Russian trade, primary sanction often lead to little more than a displacement of trade from one route to another. That's a nuissance for the targeted country, but hardly a game changer.

Secondary sanctions are an effort to combat this displacement effect. They do so by extending the trade prohibitions placed on the primary layer, U.S. actors, to the second layer, that is, to non-U.S. actors. In the case of Biden's December order, foreign banks can no longer facilitate certain Russian transactions that have already been off bounds to Americans for several years.

So far, Biden's secondary sanctions appear to be working. In addition to halting all transactions with Russia for a month, Turkish banks have completely stopped opening accounts for Russian customers. According to Reuters, Turkish exports to Russia fell 39% year-on-year in January. In China, reports say that banks have "heightened scrutiny" of Russian transactions, in some cases going so far as to cut off Russian banks. UAE banks have also begun to restrict linkages to Russia.

Why comply with the U.S.?

Why do non-U.S. actors bother complying with U.S. secondary sanctions? After all, if you're a Turkish banker in Istanbul, Biden has no jurisdiction over you. America can't put you in jail, or fine you.

The way that the U.S. is able to sink a hook into non-U.S. actors is by threatening to take away access to the U.S. economy. Foreign banks, for instance, are told they will be exiled from the all-important U.S. banking system if they don't severe or constrict their Russian relationships. Since access to the Ne York correspondent banking system is so important relative to the small amounts of sanctioned Russian business they must give up, foreign banks are quick to fall into line.

Biden's secondary sanctions on foreign banks only apply to a narrow range of transaction types, specifically those that support Russia's military-industrial base. In short, any foreign bank that is found to be conducting transactions involving military goods destined for Russia can be penalized. Those foreign banks that deal in, say, Russian food imports needn't worry.

In addition to obviously prohibited military items, like missiles and fighter jets, the U.S. Treasury has provided a list of not-so obvious items, such as oscilloscopes and silicons wafers, that it deems fall under the category of military-industrial goods. I've appended this list below. The Treasury suggests that these additional items might be used for, among other things, the production of advanced precision-guided weapons.

Source: OFAC

That's quite an extensive list.

Turkish banks appear to have overcomplied by dropping any transaction that even has a whiff of Russia. This de-risking effect is a common by-product of various banking controls, both sanctions and anti-money laundering, whereby banks cease dealing not only with prohibited customers but certain legitimate customers that are superficially similar to prohibited customers that they are deemed too risky and expensive to touch.

According to reports, Turkish banks have reintroduced transactions for green-listed products such as agricultural products, which aren't actually targeted by the U.S. secondary sanctions.

Turkish financial institutions may be particularly sensitive to U.S. sanctions given the fact that an executive of Halkbank, a Turkish government-owned bank, was sentenced to 32-months in U.S. jail in 2018 for helping Iran evade U.S. sanctions and money laundering. One of his evasion routes was the notorious gold-for-gas trade, which I wrote about here. Halkbank itself was indicted in 2019 for sanctions evasion; the case against it is ongoing.

An unforgiving legal standard

An important element of any alleged crime is the mental state of the alleged criminal, or their "intent." This gets us to another reason for the rapidity and breadth of the debanking of Russian trade. Biden's secondary sanctions have a novel legal feature. The legal standard on which they rely, strict liability, does not require that the prosecution prove intent.

Up till now, U.S. secondary sanctions have not deployed this sort of a strict liability standard. To demonstrate that a foreign bank has engaged in evading secondary sanctions on Iran, for instance, U.S. prosecutors have been required to show that the foreign bank did so knowingly. If the banker conducted prohibited Iranian transactions unknowingly (i.e. inadvertently or unintentionally), then they couldn't be found guilty of sanctions evasion.

Under the strict liability standard set out in Biden's December 22 order, there is no onus on U.S. sanctions authority to show that a foreign bank has knowingly conducted transactions linked to Russia's military-industrial complex. Even an unintentional transaction can be punished. Because this strict liability standard makes it so much more likely that foreign banks run afoul of sanctions and get cut off from the U.S. banking system, bankers are rushing to comply.

What's next?

When the U.S government asked domestic entities to stop dealing with Russia a few years ago, many of these transactions were quickly displaced to third-parties like Turkey. By deputizing foreign banks to be equally vigilant, secondary sanctions will likely crimp the original displacement effect, resulting in a big and permanent decline in Russian trade.

To get an idea for what might happen to Russia's military-industrial goods trade, take a look at how Iran's oil exports were halved after Obama imposed secondary sanctions on Iran in 2012, leapt when they were lifted in 2016, and crumbled again when Trump reimposed them in 2018.

The lesson is that secondary sanctions on foreign financial institutions can be very effective.

Evasion efforts will begin very quickly. When secondary sanctions were first placed on Iran in 2012, Turkish bank Halkbank introduced a forged document scheme in an effort to disguise trade in sanctioned crude oil shipments as legitimate food transactions. The U.S. will have to step up its enforcement efforts to plug these holes. Without proper enforcement, the effect of the secondary sanctions will remain muted.

Using the secondary sanctions on Russia's military-industrial complex as a model, there are many more sectors of the Russian economy on which secondary sanctions might be placed. The next round could extend to Russian automobile imports, its central bank, or the diamond industry.

Secondary sanctions to strengthen the oil price cap 

Even more useful would be to use secondary sanctions to strengthen the most important piece of financial artillery heretofore deployed against Russia: the $60 oil price cap. 

The price cap endeavors to force Russia to accept a below-market price for the oil that it ships, thus hurting its ability to finance its invasion of Ukraine. The cap is currently underpinned at the primary level by threatening banks, insurers, shippers and other businesses located in the EU, U.S., and other G7 countries ("the Coalition") with penalties if they trade in Russian oil above $60. Because Russia has historically been dependent on Coalition service provides for shipping oil, it has been getting less revenue for its oil then it would otherwise receive. 

However, over time a growing chunk of Russia's oil exports has been diverted away from Coalition service providers to third-parties in jurisdictions like Turkey and UAE that are not subject to the cap. This has allowed Russia to sell at prices in excess of $60 and thus recover much of its forgone revenues. If the cap were to be applied not only at the primary Coalition layer, but also at the secondary layer by requiring foreign financial institutions to join in via the threat of secondary sanctions, then much more Russia oil would brought back under the $60 ceiling, and Russia's ability to finance its war against Ukraine would be significantly crimped.

Israel’s latest refusal to accept the Palestinian offer for a cease-fire and prisoner exchange demonstrates again that it only wants to continue the killing. Furthermore, the latest cold-blooded assault on Palestinians in Rafah – most of whom are displaced, having had to escape their homes in other parts of the Gaza Strip, presents an urgent need for the international community to intervene. The purpose of the intervention is to force Israel to comply with terms that will make it impossible for it to continue the killing. An absolute guarantee for the safety and security of Palestinians must be put in place and monitored by the international community.

All the negotiations so far began with the assumption that the Palestinians had to disarm and release hostages. However, it is time to change the equation. Since Israel is the aggressor, the source of the violence and has shown an insatiable appetite for killing Palestinians, the demand must be for Israel to disarm and release the thousands of Palestinians held in its prisons. Furthermore, Israel must immediately lift the siege on Gaza and allocate billions of dollars necessary to rebuild and rehabilitate the Gaza Strip and its people.

While the main focus since October 7, 2023, has been on Gaza, Israel’s crimes against humanity continue throughout all of Palestine. In the Naqab, in Hebron, and throughout the West Bank, in Jerusalem, in Lyd, Yafa and Ramle, and all the way to Northern Galilee, Palestinians are living in a state of terror. Afraid for their lives, not daring to leave their homes, fearful for their children’s lives and unable to communicate their fears because the Israel intelligence services are listening.

Therefore, any agreement must include demands that will improve conditions for Palestinians throughout all of Palestine. Israel must remove barriers and checkpoints that inhibit free movement for Palestinians. Settlers must be disarmed, and the authority of the Israeli military, police, and intelligence service to arrest, torture, and kill Palestinians must be curtailed.

Israel must be forced to accept these conditions; it cannot be left to the Israeli government’s will.

Until such time that Israel demonstrates that these conditions are met, there should be sanctions against the Zionist State. An arms embargo must be placed, and any party, state or otherwise, breaking the embargo must be penalized. There must be a no-fly zone declared over the Gaza Strip so that Israel can no longer endanger the lives of the Palestinians living within it. Israeli diplomatic missions must be closed down, and representatives of Israel in other countries must all be sent back home.

If the world is serious about ending the killing of Palestinians and allowing those who survive to rehabilitate and live free, then severe measures must be taken. Israel must be forced to comply with these conditions or be punished. Israel must pay for its crimes, and the heavier the cost, the more chances there are of compliance.

Miko Peled is a MintPress News contributing writer, published author and human rights activist born in Jerusalem. His latest books are”The General’s Son. Journey of an Israeli in Palestine,” and “Injustice, the Story of the Holy Land Foundation Five.”

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