Sanctions policy lab

As the Israeli regime escalates its apartheid and settler colonial practices in Palestine, calls for sanctions against it have likewise increased. Still, sanctions remain controversial – both in terms of their ethics and efficacy. Indeed, many have argued that sanctions have rarely achieved their intended goals.

What might sanctions look like in the context of efforts to hold the Israeli regime accountable for its human rights violations? Would sanctions be effective, or are they too little too late? And what lessons may be drawn from the South African experience and others? To answer these questions and more, join host Tariq Kenney-Shawa in conversation with Nada Elia and Khaled Elgindy for our latest policy lab!

Tariq Kenney-Shawa is Al-Shabaka’s US Policy Fellow and co-host of Al-Shabaka’s Policy Lab series. He holds a Masters degree in International Affairs from Columbia University. Tariq’s research and writing have covered a range of topics, from the role of open-source intelligence in exposing Israel’s war crimes to analysis of Palestinian liberation tactics. His writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Foreign Policy, and The Nation, among others. Follow Tariq on Twitter @tksshawa and visit his website at https://www.tkshawa.com/ for more of his writing and photography.

Nada Elia teaches ethnic and cultural Studies at Western Washington University. She is the author of Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine (Pluto, 2023), and has contributed chapters to numerous anthologies, including The Case for Sanctions Against Israel (Haymarket, 2020).

Khaled Elgindy is a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, where he also directs MEI’s Program on Palestine and Israeli-Palestinian Affairs. He is the author of the newly-released book, Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians, from Balfour to Trump, published by Brookings Institution Press in April 2019. 

Latest Analysis

 Civil Society
In February 2021, Defense for Children International–Palestine (DCIP) reported that Israeli interrogators had raped a 15-year-old Palestinian boy in detention. Rather than investigate the allegation, Israeli forces raided DCIP’s offices and later designated it—along with five other Palestinian human rights groups—as a “terrorist organization.” While such abuses and crackdowns are not new, this moment marked a decisive escalation: the shift from harassment of Palestinian civil society to its outright criminalization with the full support and participation of the US. In 2025, the Trump administration designated six Palestinian organizations under counterterrorism frameworks before advancing even further, sanctioning leading human rights groups for engaging with the International Criminal Court. These measures move beyond targeting individual actors to undermining the very infrastructure of international accountability. This policy brief argues that the campaign by the US and the Israeli regime against Palestinian civil society and international law carries global consequences, threatening mechanisms designed to hold state violence in check. It concludes with recommendations for how Palestinian organizations and their allies can adapt, defend themselves, and pursue justice in an increasingly hostile environment.
Al-Shabaka Tariq Kenney-Shawa
Tariq Kenney-Shawa· Mar 31, 2026
 Politics
As the US and Israel escalate their assault on Iran, the Israeli regime has been constructing a war economy to sustain prolonged military campaigns while evading accountability. In September 2025, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged Israelis to transform the country into a “Super Sparta” of the Middle East—more militarized, economically self-reliant, and capable of sustaining protracted conflict despite mounting external pressure. This policy brief argues that this rhetoric reflects an emerging doctrine: a political-economic project structured around permanent national mobilization, preventative warfare, and accelerated defense-industrial expansion. Yet the Israeli regime’s shift toward self-reliance is not producing full autarky. Instead, the war economy is consolidating into a hybrid model that combines domestic substitution in critical defense sectors with deeper integration into transnational supply networks, thereby dispersing sanctions risk. This configuration blunts the impact of conventional accountability tools, such as fragmented or weakly enforced arms embargoes. As a result, effective international responses must move beyond traditional sanctions frameworks and instead target the material infrastructure and dependency nodes that sustain Israel’s war economy.
Ahmed Alqarout· Mar 11, 2026
 Politics
Noura Erakat and Jake Romm joined us for a policy lab episode on how Gaza helped shatter the old status quo and what that break reveals about the world being built in its wake.