American Jews sue Biden administration, claiming ‘unconstitutional’ sanctions

The Biden administration is illegally sanctioning American citizens in Israel and the West Bank, a federal lawsuit filed Thursday claims.

The National Jewish Advocacy Center, Inc. (NJAC), along 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 argue are unconstitutional, unprecedented sanctions against Jewish people living in Israel and the West Bank, including American citizens like plaintiffs Levi Yitzchak Pilant and Issachar Manne. 

Following the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel, President Biden signed an executive order (EO) in February 2024, imposing sanctions on “persons undermining peace, security, and stability in the West Bank.” 

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Biden said, in announcing the EO, that “the situation in the West Bank-in particular high levels of extremist settler violence, forced displacement of people and villages, and property destruction-has reached intolerable levels and constitutes a serious threat to the peace, security, and stability of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel, and the broader Middle East region.”

As a result, the sanctioned individuals have had their bank accounts frozen, credit cards canceled and faced an inability to conduct 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 to be a violation of the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens in Israel and their supporters in America. 

EO 14115 authorizes financial sanctions on “foreign person[s]” who take actions that conflict with the Biden administration’s policy in Judea and Samaria, also known as the West Bank, but the lawsuit argues that the only individuals these provisions have been applied to are Jews. 

“When you apply a double standard to sanction only Jewish people, and when you punish Jews for the simple act of being Jewish in a place where you do not want them to be, there is a word for that, and it is not pretty,” NJAC CEO 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 made by radical anti-Israel groups full of demonstrably false allegations. 

Pilant was sanctioned on Aug. 28, 2024, for “malign activities outside the scope of his authority” including leading “a group of armed settlers to set up roadblocks and conduct patrols to pursue and attack Palestinians in their lands and forcefully expel them from their lands.” 

The lawsuit maintains that he has never engaged in violence against Palestinians at any time. 

“The State Department’s accusations are entirely false and appear to be based on a ‘comprehensive dossier’ submitted just a few days prior to the sanctioning by Democracy for Arab World Now (“DAWN”), an organization whose board members have ties to the extremist Muslim Brotherhood and have praised Hamas, and which failed to even get Plaintiff Pilant’s last name right,” the lawsuit states. 

In fact, the lawsuit noted that the State Department has acknowledged that Pilant is a bona fide security official of the Israel government authorized to counter threats to the safety of Israeli citizens and was in active army service when organizing patrols and roadblocks as part of a government mission. 

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Manne and the “Manne Farm Outpost” was also sanctioned by the State Department on July 11, 2024, for establishing the farm “on pastureland belonging to the Palestinian community,” arguing “settlers from this outpost regularly attack community shepherds and prevent their access to pastureland through acts of violence.” 

His lawyers, however, argue he has “never appropriated, nor has he sought to appropriate, land under private Palestinian ownership or otherwise designated by the Israeli government as private or restricted.” In fact, he has a general policy to graze his herd of approximately 130 sheep in areas that are not owned by private individuals, be it Israelis or Palestinians. 

Both Pilant and Manne argue that, as a result of the sanctions, they’ve had their bank accounts and credit cards frozen, are unable to make mortgage payments and have suffered from harm to their finances and reputations. 

Fox News Digital previously covered a similar lawsuit filed by a group of Israelis against the administration, challenging the constitutionality of the first-of-its-kind sanction regime, but this is the first challenge to the sanctions order brought by sanctioned individuals. The plaintiffs are U.S. citizens who allege that the sanctions violate their Due Process and Equal Protection rights. 

George Mason University Law School Professor Eugene Kontorovich, who served as NJAC legal consultant and member of the legal team in the first legal case challenging the sanctions, said the government’s actions are based on a shocking idea that certain land is inherently “Palestinian.” 

“American Jews are having their bank accounts frozen and their lives turned upside down for no better reason than that people who think they have no right to live in the West Bank have pointed fingers at them,” he said. 

Kontorovich previously argued that “violence” is defined by anti-Israel groups and can be applied to Jews who defend themselves in the face of a Palestinian attacker in an “arbitrary” way by relying on data from the website of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), categorizing acts of self-defense by Jews and anti-terror operations by the Israel Defense Forces as settler violence, according to the lawsuit. 

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For example, the suit states, after a Palestinian was shot dead after breaking onto 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 on Jewish civilians that unquestionably threaten the ‘peace, security, or stability of the West Bank,’” the lawsuit adds. 

In 2024, there were 1,040 major Palestinian attempts on Jewish life: 689 firing attacks, 326 explosives, 13 stabbings, 9 driving attacks, 2 suicide attacks, and 1 kidnapping, according to the lawsuit. There were 231 successful attacks resulting in 46 killed and 337 wounded.

Matthew Mainen, litigation counsel at NJAC, added that the Biden administration’s “lazy and clearly politically motivated EO undermines 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 land from terroristic incursions.” 

“That the administration did not even bother to check if these individuals were U.S. citizens before sanctioning them as ‘foreign persons’ exposes a sad vendetta that we are now seeking to rectify,” he said. 

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Fox News Digital reached out to the State Department for comment but did not immediately receive a response.