Biden administration to maintain sanctions on Israelis over ‘settler violence’ amid lawsuit | The Jewish Press – JewishPress.com | Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) | 7 Av 5784 – Saturday, August 10, 2024

The Biden administration will continue to enforce sanctions against Israelis after a federal lawsuit was filed alleging that the policy discriminates against Jews and American supporters of Israel, according to U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller.

“We have made it clear that we expect Israel to take action to stop settler violence, and if it does not, we will,” Miller said at a department news conference Thursday. “We have taken those steps and will continue to do so as appropriate.”

Texans for Israel, an Amarillo-based pro-Israel Christian group, and other plaintiffs filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas on Wednesday. They argue that the sanctions against Israelis constitute religious discrimination and violate their First Amendment rights of freedom of expression and association.

Eugene Kontorovich, a professor at Scalia School of Law at George Mason University and counsel for the plaintiffs and their legal team, told JNS that U.S. President Joe Biden’s February executive order on “those undermining the peace, security, and stability in the West Bank” was applied much more broadly than the “extremist settler violence” that prompted Biden to declare a state of emergency.

“The administration talks about these as sanctions against ‘brutal settlers,’ and people have some kind of image in their minds,” Kontorovich said. “But when the administration applied them, they applied them to people who are clearly not accused of any specific acts of violence, like Reut Ben Chaim, and who are not even settlers, like Reut Ben Chaim.”

“This is not a sanction that is limited to aggressive settlers,” Kontorovich told JNS. “This is a sanction against Israelis and like-minded American citizens who disagree with the Biden administration.”

In July, the Biden administration imposed sanctions on Ben Chaim, a resident of Netivot in southern Israel, for his leadership of the Israeli protest movement Tzav 9, which opposes the sending of humanitarian aid to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip because much of it is stolen by Hamas.

The Biden administration imposed sanctions on the group as a whole and on Ben Chaim individually, saying it is a “violent extremist organization that opposes the sending of aid to Gaza and has previously blocked humanitarian aid convoys going to the Gaza Strip.”

Ben Chaim’s husband, Yosef, a U.S.-Israeli citizen, is one of the plaintiffs in Wednesday’s lawsuit. The suit challenges the Biden administration’s characterization of Tzav 9 and claims that Yosef is unable to receive a salary from his wife’s company or provide for the family’s basic needs after her bank accounts were frozen.

The lawsuit describes Tzav 9 as engaging in “peaceful acts of protest and civil disobedience in an effort to prevent the delivery of ‘humanitarian aid’ into the hands of Hamas and its affiliates,” and claims that the brutal May 13 attack on a truck carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza that was cited in the sanctions announcement was carried out by another group.

The group has previously staged protests in an attempt to block the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza, but a spokesman for the group told JNS in June that those activities had been halted.

Kontorovich told JNS that the president’s decision to impose economic sanctions on a foreign group conducting business that might be protected by the First Amendment if it were conducted in the United States opens a dangerous door for American civil liberties.

“If the president can prevent American citizens from engaging in protected free speech simply by deeming that freedom a threat to national security, that would be a fundamental undermining of the First Amendment,” he said.

“Nobody thinks that if President Trump decides that progressive groups like Peace Now or B’Tselem are a threat to national security, he can shut them down,” he added. “That would certainly be a scandal, but that’s basically what we’re seeing now with the Biden administration.”

The executive order has sanctioned 22 individuals and entities so far. All of the individuals designated are Israeli Jews, most of whom live in Judea and Samaria.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who met with leaders of the Judea and Samaria councils on Thursday, takes the sanctions “with the utmost seriousness,” according to a statement from his office.

“We are working to block this,” Netanyahu said. “This is a problem for the entire state of Israel, not just Judea and Samaria.”

Under U.S. law, the president has broad authority to impose economic sanctions against terrorists, drug traffickers, foreign dictators and other individuals and entities deemed a threat to national security. (JNS reached out to the U.S. Justice Department for comment, which declined to respond.)

Kontorovich told JNS that Texans for Israel’s lawsuit does not seek to challenge those powers, but argues that in this case they were used illegally — to discriminate against Jews.

“No one has ever suggested that the president might discriminate against people on religious or ethnic grounds because of his foreign policy,” he said.