Biden admin faces lawsuit over sanctions against Israeli settlers regarding West Bank violence

The plaintiffs, who filed the lawsuit in Amarillo, Texas, are composed of two NGOs, Texans for Israel and the Israeli nonprofit, Regavim, as well as two dual US-Israeli citizens who live in the West Bank.

The defendants named in the lawsuit include the US Department of Treasury; US Department of State; Department of Homeland Security; Office of Foreign Assets Control; Financial Crimes Enforcement Network; and their department chiefs, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen.

In February this year, Biden filed an executive order allowing federal agencies to impose financial sanctions and visa restrictions against individuals who attack or intimidate Palestinians and destroy or dispossess Palestinians of their property.

In the order’s preamble, Biden says the “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”.

“These actions undermine the foreign policy objectives of the United States, including the viability of a two-state solution and ensuring Israelis and Palestinians can attain equal measures of security, prosperity, and freedom”, he continued.

In the order, he further calls for a “national emergency” to deal with the threat.

In the lawsuit, the group argues that Biden’s executive order violates the plaintiffs’ free-speech rights under the US Constitution and illegally interferes with the exercise of their religious beliefs, providing a blanket sanctioning of Israelis who disagree with Biden’s policies.

“Texans for Israel’s support for Judea and Samaria settlements – by hosting speaking events or donating to Israeli advocacy groups – is an exercise of its First Amendment rights,” Israeli lawyer Eugene Kontorovich, who has been supporting the plaintiffs, wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinions article.

Texans for Israel, Kontorovich details, “provides charitable support to Jewish farmers and communities” in the occupied West Bank and organises speaking tours to Texas to “educate Americans about the importance of Jewish presence in the Holy Land”.

The extensive appropriation of land and the appropriation and destruction of property required to build and expand settlements in the occupied West Bank is illegal under international law as defined by Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Kontorovich further argues that the executive order sweeps perfectly legal conduct and “unconstitutionally chills its free speech”.

The group also argues in its lawsuit that under Biden’s order, Jews living in the West Bank might wrongfully be subject to sanctions even though the individual or organisation may never have engaged in any violent or destructive activity related to those policies.

Biden’s executive order comes amid a dramatic upsurge in settler violence, violent raids by the Israeli military, and mass arrests in the occupied West Bank that have run parallel to Israel’s ten-month-long war on the Gaza Strip.

According to recent data by the United Nations office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs, settler attacks on Palestinians have increased in 2023 to their highest levels since the UN began recording this data in 2006.

More than 600 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli raids in the occupied West Bank since the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on 7 October and the war on the besieged enclave. Meanwhile, thousands of Palestinians have been arrested, according to Palestinian prisoner groups.

Settlement construction itself has hit new records since October, with some 490,000 Israeli settlers living in the West Bank alongside some three million Palestinians.

A recent report by Human Rights Watch says that “Israeli settlers have assaulted, tortured, and committed sexual violence against Palestinians, stolen their belongings and livestock, threatened to kill them if they did not leave permanently, and destroyed their homes and schools”.

Growing settlement expansion and increasing financial support for settlements by the Israeli government have also greatly undermined any viability of a two-state solution.

The Biden administration has imposed sanctions on different individuals and entities involved in violence in the West Bank over the last months.

On 1 February, sanctions were imposed on Israeli settler Yinon Levi, who led a group of Israeli settlers that assaulted Palestinian civilians and burned their properties and agricultural lands.

Last month, the US blacklisted Lehava, an umbrella group for Israeli settlers, which it described as the “largest violent extremist organisation in Israel” with more than 10,000 members.