The Biden administration is illegally sanctioning American citizens in Israel and the West Bank, a federal lawsuit filed Thursday alleges.
National Center for Jewish Advocacy, Inc. (NJAC), together with Zell Aron & Co. and Marcus & Marcus LLC, filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Thursday challenging the Biden administration’s Executive Order (EO) 14115.
The lawsuit is the second of its kind against what lawyers say are unprecedented unconstitutional sanctions against Jews living in Israel and the West Bank, including American citizens like plaintiffs Levi Yitzchak Pilant and Issachar Manne.
After the terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, President Biden signed executive order (EO) in February 2024, imposing sanctions on “persons who undermine peace, security and stability in the West Bank”.
Manne on his farm. (The Manna family)
Biden said, in the EO announcement, that “the situation in the West Bank – particularly the high level of violence by extremist settlers, the forced displacement of people and villages and the destruction of property – has reached intolerable levels and poses a serious threat to the peace, security and stability of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel and the wider Middle East region.”
As a result, sanctioned individuals have had their bank accounts frozen, credit cards cancelled, and faced with the inability to perform basic life activities. Critics say the move allows the administration to sanction Jews in Israel who disagree with the administration’s policies, which they believe violate the constitutional rights of American citizens in Israel and their supporters in America.
EO 14115 authorizes financial sanctions against a “foreign person.”[s]” who are taking actions that run counter to the Biden administration’s policy in Judea and Samaria, also known as the West Bank, but the lawsuit claims that the only people to whom those provisions have been applied are Jews.
“When you apply a double standard to sanction only Jews, and when you punish Jews for the simple act of Jews being in a place you don’t want them to be, there’s a word for that, and it’s not a pretty one,” NJAC Executive Director Mark Goldfeder said.
Additionally, the lawsuit criticizes the State Department for its lack of investigation into the alleged claims, arguing that they instead relied almost entirely on biased reports from radical anti-Israel groups full of demonstrably false claims.
Pilant was sentenced on August 28, 2024 for “malicious activities beyond the scope of his authority” including leading “a group of armed settlers to set up roadblocks and conduct patrols to persecute and attack Palestinians in their lands and forcibly expel them from their lands.”
The lawsuit alleges that he has never engaged in violence against Palestinians at any time.
“The State Department’s allegations are completely false and appear to be based on a ‘comprehensive dossier’ that came just days before sanctioning Democracy for Arab World Now (“DAWN”), an organization whose board members are affiliated with the extremist Muslim Brotherhood and praised Hamas , and who did not even manage to name the prosecutor Pilant correctly,” the lawsuit states.
In fact, the lawsuit states that the State Department acknowledged that Pilant was a bona fide Israeli government security official authorized to counter threats to the security of Israeli citizens and that he was on active military duty when he organized patrols and roadblocks as part of the government. mission.
A picture taken in the village of Turmus Ayya near the city of Ramallah shows the nearby Israeli settlement of Shilo in the background, in the West Bank on February 18, 2024. (Getty Images)
Manne and the “Manne Farm Outpost” were also sanctioned by the State Department on July 11, 2024 for establishing a farm “on pasture belonging to the Palestinian community,” claiming that “settlers from this outpost regularly attack local shepherds and prevent them from accessing pastures through violence.” ”
His lawyers, however, claim that he has “never appropriated, nor attempted to appropriate, land that is privately owned by Palestinians or otherwise designated as private or restricted by the Israeli government.” In fact, he has a general policy of grazing his flock of approximately 130 sheep in areas that are not owned by private individuals, either Israelis or Palestinians.
Both Pilant and Manne claim that as a result of the sanctions, their bank accounts and credit cards have been frozen, they are unable to pay their mortgages and they have suffered damage to their finances and reputation.
Fox News Digital previously covered a similar lawsuit filed by a group of Israelis against the administration, challenging the constitutionality of the first sanctions regime of its kind, but this is the first challenge to a sanctions order brought by sanctioned individuals. The plaintiffs are US citizens who claim that the sanctions violate their rights to due process and equal protection.
George Mason University Law School professor Eugene Kontorovich, who was NJAC’s legal counsel and a member of the legal team in the first legal case challenging the sanctions, said the government’s actions are based on the shocking idea that a certain country is inherently “Palestinian.”
“American Jews are having their bank accounts frozen and their lives turned upside down for no better reason than to be pointed at by people who think they have no right to live in the West Bank,” he said.
Kontorovich has previously argued that “violence” is defined by anti-Israel groups and can be applied to Jews defending themselves against a Palestinian attacker in an “arbitrary” manner, citing data from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) website, categorizing acts of self-defense Jews and counter-terrorist operations of the Israel Defense Forces as settlers of violence, the lawsuit states.
Israeli officials work at the site of an attack by Palestinian gunmen near the Maale Adumim settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on February 22, 2024. (Photos by Reuters)
For example, the lawsuit says, after a Palestinian was killed after breaking into a Jewish farm in the northern West Bank armed with a knife and explosives, the UN labeled him a victim of “settler violence.”
“This is all the more striking because there are thousands of Palestinians who have engaged in terrorist attacks against Jewish civilians that unquestionably threaten the ‘peace, security or stability of the West Bank,'” the lawsuit added.
In 2024, there were 1,040 major Palestinian assassination attempts against Jews: 689 gun attacks, 326 explosives, 13 stabbings, 9 vehicle attacks, 2 suicide attacks and 1 kidnapping, the lawsuit said. 231 successful attacks were carried out with 46 dead and 337 wounded.
Matthew Mainen, litigation counsel at NJAC, added that the Biden administration’s “lazy and clearly politically motivated EO is undermining Israel’s security by sanctioning individuals like Levi Yitzhak Pilant, an IDF officer who is the first line of defense in his community, and Issachar Manne, A Jew who dares to defend himself and his country against terrorist attacks.”
“That the administration did not even bother to verify that these individuals were U.S. citizens before sanctioning them as ‘foreign persons’ reveals a sad vendetta that we now seek to remedy,” he said.
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Fox News Digital reached out to the State Department for comment, but did not immediately hear back.
