The Biden administration is imposing illegal sanctions on American citizens in Israel and the West Bank, a federal lawsuit filed Thursday alleged.
The National Jewish Advocacy Center (NJAC), along with Zell Aron & Co., filed the lawsuit. 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 unconstitutional and unprecedented sanctions against Jews living in Israel and the West Bank, including American citizens like plaintiffs Levi Yitzhak Bilant and Issachar Mann.
Following the October 7 terrorist attack on Israel, President Biden signed a document Executive order (EO) in February 2024, imposing sanctions on “persons who undermine peace, security and stability in the West Bank.”
I'm on his farm. (Man family)
Biden said, In the announcement of EO, “The situation in the West Bank – particularly the high levels of extremist settler violence, the forced displacement of people and villages, and the destruction of property – has reached intolerable levels and constitutes a serious threat to the peace, security and stability of the West Bank.” Gaza, Israel and the wider Middle East region.
As a result, sanctioned individuals have had their bank accounts frozen, credit cards canceled, and faced the inability to perform basic life activities. Critics say the move allows the administration to punish Jews in Israel who disagree with the administration's policies, which they believe is a violation of the constitutional rights of American citizens in Israel and their supporters in America.
Executive Order 14115 allows for financial sanctions to be imposed on “foreign persons” who take actions inconsistent with Biden administration policy in Judea and Samaria, also known as the West Bank, but the lawsuit says the only individuals to whom those provisions apply are Jews.
“When you apply a double standard to only punish Jewish people, when you punish Jews for simply being Jewish in a place you don't want them to be, there's a word for it, and it's not pretty,” said NJAC CEO Mark Goldfeder.
Additionally, the lawsuit criticizes the State Department for not investigating the alleged allegations, arguing that it instead relied almost entirely on biased reporting by anti-Israel extremist groups filled with patently false claims.
Pelant was sanctioned on August 28, 2024, for “malicious activities outside his authority,” including leading “a group of armed settlers to set up roadblocks and conduct patrols to pursue and attack Palestinians on their lands and forcibly expel them from their lands.” “lands.”
The lawsuit asserts that he never participated in acts of violence against Palestinians at any time.
“The State Department’s accusations are completely false and appear to be based on a ‘comprehensive dossier’ submitted just days before sanctions were imposed by Democracy for the Arab World Now (“DAWN”), an organization whose board members have ties to extremists,” the lawsuit states. The judiciary stated that “the Muslim Brotherhood praised Hamas, which even failed to get Plaintiff Pelant’s last name correctly.”
In fact, the lawsuit noted, the State Department recognized that Pelant was a bona fide Israeli government security official authorized to address threats to the safety of Israeli citizens and who was on active military duty when conducting patrols and roadblocks as part of the government. a task.
A photo taken in the village of Turmus Aya near the city of Ramallah with the nearby Israeli settlement of Shilo in the West Bank on February 18, 2024. (Getty Images)
The US State Department also imposed sanctions on Mann and the “Mann Settlement Farm” on July 11, 2024, due to the establishment of the farm “on pastures belonging to the Palestinian community,” arguing that “settlers from this outpost regularly attack community shepherds and prevent their access to pastures through… Acts of violence.”
However, his lawyers say he “never allocated, nor sought to seize, land that was privately owned by Palestinians or classified as private or restricted by the Israeli government.” In fact, he has a general policy of grazing his flock of about 130 sheep in areas that are not Owned by private individuals, whether Israeli or Palestinian.
Both Pelant and Mann say that as a result of the sanctions, their bank accounts and credit cards have been frozen, they have been unable to make their mortgage payments and have suffered damage to their finances and reputations.
Fox News Digital previously covered A similar lawsuit was filed by a group of Israelis against the administration, challenging the constitutionality of the first-of-its-kind sanctions regime, but this is the first challenge to the 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.
The government's actions are based on the horrific idea that some lands are inherently “Palestinian,” said Eugene Kontorovich, a professor at George Mason University Law School, who served as legal counsel to the National Center for Justice and a member of the legal team in the first legal case challenging the sanctions.
He said: “American Jews' bank accounts are frozen, and their lives are turned upside down. There is no better reason than to point the finger at them by people who believe they have no right to live in the West Bank.”
Kontorovich has previously argued that “violence” is defined by anti-Israel groups and can be applied to Jews defending themselves from a Palestinian attacker in an “arbitrary” manner by relying on data from the website of the United Nations Office for Refugees. The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) classified acts of self-defense by Jews and counter-terrorism operations by the Israeli army as settler violence, according to the lawsuit.
Israeli officials work at the site of a shooting attack carried out by Palestinian gunmen near the Maale Adumim settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on February 22, 2024. (Reuters photos)
For example, the lawsuit states that after a Palestinian was shot and killed after storming a Jewish farm in the northern West Bank armed with a knife and explosives, the United Nations designated him a victim of “settler violence.”
“This is all the more surprising because there are thousands of Palestinians who have participated in terrorist attacks on Jewish civilians that undoubtedly threaten the peace, security, or stability of the West Bank,” the lawsuit adds.
In 2024, there were 1,040 major Palestinian attempts to take Jewish life: 689 shooting attacks, 326 IEDs, 13 stabbings, nine driving attacks, two suicide attacks, and one kidnapping, according to the lawsuit. There were 231 successful attacks, killing 46 people and wounding 337 others.
“The Biden administration’s clearly politically motivated, lazy Executive Office is undermining Israel’s security by imposing sanctions on individuals like Levi Yitzhak Bilant, an IDF officer who is his community’s first line of defense, and Yissacker Mann, an officer,” NJAC litigation attorney Matthew Mynin added. In the IDF, he is the first line of defense for his community.” “The Jew who dares to defend himself and his land from terrorist incursions.”
“The fact that the administration did not bother to verify whether these individuals were US citizens before imposing sanctions on them as ‘foreign persons’ reveals an unfortunate vendetta that we now seek to correct,” he said.
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Fox News Digital It contacted the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
