Democrats vow to confront Israel once they win an election Israel's attorney general already outran.

…(cont) On September 24th, nineteen US Senate Democrats introduced a bill to sanction anyone who facilitates construction of the E1 settlement — the project that would connect Jerusalem to Ma'ale Adumim and, in Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich's own words, "buries the idea of a Palestinian state." Nineteen senators is not a majority of the Senate Democratic caucus, let alone the House majority Democrats do not yet hold. The bill was introduced. It was not passed.

Then, this week, Israel's attorney general pushed the E1 project's final approval deadline to a date after next month's Israeli election — the same election House Democrats are now waiting on their own election to answer. Two governments, two elections, and the deadline that was supposed to force a reckoning moved on its own schedule instead. Smotrich and the settlers living in the E1 area said they were furious the deadline moved at all; they were not furious that the project might be stopped. The 3,401 housing units approved last year remain approved. The sanctions bill from September 24th remains a bill. Confrontation remains something Democrats say they are ready for, on a date set by an election that has not happened, about a project whose own deadline just moved past it.