PARIS — Three weeks ago, France barred National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir from its territory. On Tuesday, it did the same to Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. Taken together, the two bans close France’s borders to the men who, more than anyone else in the Israeli government, have driven the push to annex the occupied West Bank, re-establish settlements in Gaza, and dismantle the conditions under which a Palestinian state could ever emerge. Benjamin Netanyahu still travels freely. But the ideological engine of his coalition does not.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot announced the ban on Tuesday in a post on X, describing Smotrich as someone who “actively promotes the annexation of the West Bank, the creation of new settlements in the West Bank, the re-colonisation of Gaza, and the economic collapse of the Palestinian Authority.” The decision was coordinated with Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Norway — six governments acting together — and extends beyond Smotrich to four leaders of settler organisations and 21 settlers identified as perpetrators of violence against Palestinian civilians. In total, France announced travel bans on 26 individuals. None have been named publicly.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry rejected what it called “disgraceful measures adopted by foreign governments against Israeli citizens, entities, and a government minister.” That response, standard in its construction, did nothing to explain how a sitting finance minister of a country that considers itself a Western democracy now finds himself persona non grata in Paris, Ottawa, London, Canberra, Wellington, and Oslo — all simultaneously.
The sequencing matters. Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Norway had already sanctioned Smotrich in June last year, alongside Ben-Gvir. France moved on Ben-Gvir last month after a video emerged of him mocking bound activists seized by Israeli soldiers from a Gaza-bound aid flotilla. It took France another three weeks to formalise the Smotrich ban, and that delay was deliberate: Paris had been building a broader sanctions package, one coordinated across five capitals, targeting the infrastructure of settler violence rather than just its most visible advocates. The announcement Tuesday was the product of that patience.
Smotrich’s record provided ample material. He is both finance minister and a minister in Israel’s defence ministry, a dual role that gives him direct authority over civilian administration in the West Bank. He has used it methodically. In August 2025, he stood at a press conference near the settlement of Maale Adumim — holding a map — and announced plans for the E1 project, a construction corridor that Israeli and Palestinian planners alike say would physically sever the northern West Bank from its south, eliminating the territorial contiguity any viable Palestinian state would require. “The Palestinian state is being erased from the table,” he said then, not as a warning but as a declaration of intent. Reuters reported last week that a planning committee under his authority approved 2,162 new settlement homes across three West Bank sites.
That is the context Barrot placed front and centre. The ban, he wrote, reflects “a policy that the overwhelming majority of the international community, firmly committed to the two-state solution, cannot accept.”
The joint statement released Tuesday by the foreign ministers of Australia, Canada, France, Norway, and Britain described what is happening in the West Bank in unusually direct terms. Radical settlers, it said, were using violence — arson, property destruction, physical attacks — “to displace Palestinians, destroy their property, and perpetuate illegal settlement,” and doing so in some cases “under the protection of Israeli security forces.” The five governments said they remained ready to take further measures if the Israeli government did not “act urgently” to hold perpetrators accountable. That conditional threat marks a departure from the language of diplomatic concern that has characterised Western statements on West Bank violence for years.
Ireland has also recently barred both Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. Spain and Slovenia imposed comparable restrictions on Ben-Gvir after Britain’s original June 2025 move. The pattern is visible: a small cluster of Western governments began building this sanctions architecture more than a year ago, and France, whose relationship with Israel carries particular historical weight, has now joined it fully. All six countries in Tuesday’s coordinated announcement have, since the beginning of the conflict in Gaza in October 2023, formally recognised Palestinian statehood. Eastern Herald reported on Europe’s move to coordinate settler sanctions at the national level ahead of this announcement.
What the bans cannot do is alter Israel’s domestic political arithmetic. Smotrich’s Religious Zionist party and Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit together hold the seats that keep Netanyahu’s coalition in office. The prime minister has given no public indication he intends to constrain either minister in response to Western pressure — and the structure of his governing arrangement makes doing so politically suicidal. That tension is what the French ban, for all its symbolic force, leaves unresolved. Six governments have now told one of the world’s most prominent finance ministers he is not welcome. The settlement construction continues.
France’s statement said it would also seek sanctions at the European Union level. That step, if it comes, would represent a qualitative escalation: EU-wide travel bans and asset freezes require unanimity among member states and have historically been blocked by governments sympathetic to Israel, including Hungary. Whether Paris can marshal that consensus remains an open question — one that the six-nation announcement Tuesday conspicuously does not answer. Arab News reported that hundreds of British MPs separately demanded a ban on trade with Israeli settlements on the same day, adding parliamentary pressure to the diplomatic moves.
Barrot put it simply on X: “This is a policy that the overwhelming majority of the international community cannot accept.” What the international community intends to do when the policy continues regardless is the question no statement, however coordinated, has yet addressed. France has closed its door to Smotrich. Whether that door leads anywhere is what comes next.
