Right-wing NGOs, dual citizens sue Biden administration for sanctioning settlers
Plaintiffs allege executive order to target settler violence impinges on first-amendment rights of speech, religion; case will be heard by Trump-appointed judge in Texas
Right-wing, pro-Israel advocacy groups and dual US-Israeli citizens have filed a lawsuit challenging the Biden administration’s sanction regime against Israeli extremists in the West Bank.
The complaint filed in Amarillo, Texas, federal court on Tuesday says the executive order that US President Joe Biden issued in February to begin applying financial and immigration sanctions violates the plaintiffs’ free-speech rights under the US Constitution and illegally interferes with the exercise of their religious beliefs.
The plaintiffs include Texans for Israel, a Christian nonprofit, Israeli nonprofit Regavim, the groups’ leaders, and two dual US-Israeli citizens who live in the West Bank and say they oppose the two-state solution favored by the Biden administration.
Biden’s executive order allows federal agencies to impose financial sanctions and visa restrictions against individuals who attack or intimidate Palestinians or seize their property. The White House in issuing the order said it would “promote peace and security for Israelis and Palestinians alike.”
But the new lawsuit tries to argue that the order more broadly penalizes anyone who opposes the creation of an independent Palestinian state.
“This is the first and only sanctions regime where an administration has deemed ordinary, peaceful activities and reasonable political positions supported by many Americans as inimical to ‘peace’ and therefore sanctionable,” the plaintiffs said in a statement.
The ten individuals and ten entities designated in five batches of sanctions levied through the executive order are all accused of involvement in acts of violence in the West Bank, not merely objecting to a two-state solution.
The White House and several federal agencies named as defendants in the lawsuit did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The executive order, issued in February, permits the government to sanction people or entities involved in actions that “threaten the peace, security, or stability of the West Bank,” including acts of violence toward civilians, property destruction, or terrorism.
The order’s preamble says those actions “undermine the foreign policy objectives of the United States, including the viability of a two-state solution,” but there is no further mention of the topic in the directive’s operative paragraphs.
The case was assigned to US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, an appointee of Republican former President Donald Trump and one-time Christian legal activist whose court has become a favored destination for challenges to Biden administration policies.
In February, Kacsmaryk rejected the administration’s bid to dismiss a lawsuit by a Republican congressman and three others seeking to block US aid to the West Bank and Gaza that they said was unlawfully funding the Palestinian Authority.
The Biden administration has sanctioned several individuals, groups, and unauthorized settlements since issuing the executive order, including the wife of one of the plaintiffs in Tuesday’s lawsuit.
