The Biden administration will continue to enforce sanctions on 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 been quite clear that we expect Israel to take actions to crack down on settler violence, and if they don’t, we will,” Miller said at the department’s press briefing on Thursday. “We have taken those steps, and we will continue to do so as appropriate.”
Texans for Israel, an Amarillo-based, pro-Israel Christian group and other plaintiffs filed the suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas on Wednesday. They allege that the sanctions on Israelis are religious discrimination and violate their First Amendment rights of expression and association.
Eugene Kontorovich, a professor at George Mason University Scalia Law School and an adviser to the plaintiffs and their legal team, told JNS that U.S. President Joe Biden’s February executive order on “persons undermining peace, security and stability in the West Bank” has been applied far beyond the “extremist settler violence” that prompted Biden to declare the national emergency.
“The administration talks about this as sanctions on ‘violent settlers,’ and people get some kind of picture in their mind,” Kontorovich said. “But as the administration has applied them, they have been applied to people who are clearly not accused of any particular 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 violent settlers,” Kontorovich told JNS. “It’s a sanction on Israelis and like-minded American citizens who disagree with the Biden administration.”
The Biden administration sanctioned Ben Chaim, who lives in Netivot in southern Israel, in July for being a leader of the Israeli Tzav 9 protest movement, which opposes sending humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza since much of it is stolen by Hamas.
The Biden administration has sanctioned the group as a whole and Ben Chaim individually, alleging that it is a “violent extremist organization that opposes aid being sent to Gaza and has previously blocked humanitarian aid convoys traveling towards the Gaza strip.”
Ben Chaim’s husband Yosef, a U.S.-Israeli dual citizen, is one of the plaintiffs in Wednesday’s lawsuit. The lawsuit disputes the Biden administration’s characterization of Tzav 9 and alleges that Yosef is unable to receive his salary from his wife’s business or to provide the family with basic essentials after her bank accounts were frozen.
The lawsuit describes Tzav 9 as engaging in “peaceful acts of protest and civil disobedience to prevent the delivery of ‘humanitarian’ aid into the hands of Hamas and its affiliates” and claims that the violent May 13 attack on a Gaza-bound aid truck cited in the sanctions announcement was carried out by a different group.
The group previously organized protests attempting to blockade entry of aid into Gaza, but a spokesperson for the group told JNS in June that it paused those efforts.
Kontorovich told JNS that the president’s decision to impose economic sanctions on a foreign group engaged in activity that might be protected by the First Amendment if it was done in the United States opens a dangerous door for U.S. civil liberties.
“If a president can prevent American citizens from engaging in protected speech simply by designating that speech a threat to national security, it would be a fundamental undermining of the First Amendment,” he said.
“Nobody thinks that if President Trump determines that progressive groups like Peace Now or B’Tselem are a threat to national security that he could then shut down their operations,” he added. “That would certainly cause a scandal, but it’s essentially the same thing that we see the Biden administration doing now.”
The executive order has sanctioned 22 people and entities so far. All of the designated people are Israeli Jews, most living in Judea and Samaria.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who met on Thursday with Judea and Samaria council heads, views the sanctions “with utmost gravity,” according to his office.
“We are working to block this,” Netanyahu said. “It is an issue for the entire State of Israel, not just Judea and Samaria.”
Under U.S. law, the president has broad powers to impose economic sanctions on terrorists, drug dealers, foreign dictators and other individuals and entities deemed a threat to national security. (JNS sought comment from the U.S. Justice Department, which declined to respond to questions.)
Kontorovich told JNS that the Texans for Israel lawsuit is not trying to challenge those powers but argues that they have been used in this instance illegally—to discriminate against Jews.
“No one has ever suggested that the president can engage in religious or ethnic discrimination on foreign policy grounds,” he said.
