An Executive Order that Targets Jews

Should U.S. Presidents be able to freeze your bank account if they disagree with your views on foreign policy, or if anti-Israel groups ask them to? The Biden administration apparently thinks so, at least if you’re Jewish and have opinions on what’s going on in Israel that they don’t like.

In February of 2024, the Biden administration issued Executive Order 14115, which authorized the State and Treasury Departments to impose financial sanctions, including the freezing of bank accounts, on people or entities that do a wide variety of things in, or relating to, the territories Israel captured from Jordan during the Six-Day War in 1967. The language of the Order suggests that sanctions are allowed against anyone—although the administration has applied it mostly to Jews—who is violent. But it also explicitly allows sanctioning anyone who commits any “actions—including directing, enacting, implementing, enforcing, or failing to enforce policies—that threaten the peace, security, or stability of the West Bank.” 

The current administration, like the Obama administration, believes that any Jewish presence in any area over the Green Line is a threat to the peace, security and stability of the West Bank. So what this Executive Order does is empower the administration to sanction anyone who commits any action that it determines to be a bad idea.

The kind of sanctions the administration imposes prevent anyone from dealing with the sanctioned person: their internet and email are canceled,  they have no access to their credit cards and thus can’t pay for basics like insurance and daily life activities. Their life is essentially unraveled. And once they’re sanctioned, they can’t hire a lawyer to defend them and to seek removal of the sanctions without going through a special administrative process—because after all, rendering services to a sanctioned person is illegal, and that includes legal services.

Typically, such sanctions are used against terror states and rogue regimes, drug traffickers and international arms dealers. Such entities and people probably have the means to live with such sanctions. But no other sanctions program applies to a democratic U.S. ally. And this Order is being used to sanction individual Israelis who run small businesses or farms—suddenly turning their lives into a Kafkaesque nightmare. But it doesn’t apply only to Israelis. This Executive Order applies also to U.S. citizens doing nothing other than speaking or financing speech.  

As a result, some Americans deeply committed to helping Jews live freely in the land of Israel are in danger of having their financial lives frozen without notice. Among these people are Christian Zionists, who believe that Judea and Samaria are parts of Israel given by God to the Jews, and that it is important for Jews to be able to live there as Jews.  

Many American Jews are suspicious of Christian Zionists, imagining that they work with Jews only out of a secret desire to convert them to Christianity. But this is false. By and large, these people just want to help the Jewish State. During the current Gaza war some even came to Israel to step in for soldiers who’d been called up.  

In the U.S., Christian Zionists donate to help Jewish towns buy security equipment like fences and cameras, and they bring Jewish residents from Judea and Samaria to the U.S. to speak and to meet with U.S. government officials.  

On behalf of Texans for Israel—a Christian Zionist organization that deeply believes in the right of the Jewish people to live in Judea and Samaria—as well as other plaintiffs, a group of lawyers including this writer has filed a constitutional challenge to the Executive Order in federal court in Texas. The case is based on the fact that the Order chills activity that is fully protected by the First Amendment. As U.S. citizens, our Christian Zionist clients have full protection for all of their Constitutional rights. The Executive Order tramples on these rights, because any one of the Israelis with whom these Americans are working could, at any moment, be sanctioned. And then, because the Americans were supporting them, the Americans would be sanctioned next.  

Because there’s no notice provided under this Executive Order, you find you’ve done something impermissible only when the sanctions have already been imposed. Then, while your bank account is frozen, you can initiate an administrative proceeding, which could take months to resolve, to ask for removal and try to prove you’ve done nothing wrong. In the meantime, even if you’re an American, you’ll have to borrow cash to buy groceries.

Because there’s no notice provided under this Executive Order, you find you’ve done something impermissible only when the sanctions have already been imposed.

The sanctions are being imposed on people who are neither settlers nor violent. The list of sanctioned entities includes Tsav 9, an organization that engages in nonviolent protest to prevent humanitarian aid from being captured by Hamas. You’d think that this administration, or any U.S. government, would have exactly the same goal: It can’t be a good idea to let Hamas capture humanitarian aid, because we know—as reported by Israeli TV again recently—that Hamas sells the aid, at exorbitant prices, to the Gazans to whom it’s directed, and then uses that money to fund Hamas terror operations.  

The Israelis who are trying to right this obvious wrong are engaging in exactly the kind of protests we see all the time. When such tactics were used to protest judicial reforms, President Biden praised the riots as an “enduring protest movement that is demonstrating the vibrancy of Israel’s democracy.”    

But the same tactics deployed by Israeli Jews against Hamas get a different response, and this administration is committed to stopping them even if they take place entirely in Israel, entirely among Israelis and are entirely nonviolent. What does this mean in practice? It means that the organization Tsav 9 and one of its organizers, a mother of eight living in a development town in Southern Israel, have been debanked. 

As shocking as it is, this Executive Order didn’t come out of nowhere: Within weeks of President Obama’s first inauguration, IRS and State Department officials began considering whether they could deny or revoke tax-exempt status for organizations that provide material support to Jews living across the Green Line—the nonborder that delineates pre-1967 Israel from the territories Israel acquired in the Six-Day War. The theory was that a Jewish presence in those areas is inconsistent with U.S. policy. The IRS drew up lists of such organizations based on information from anti-Israel websites such as Electronic Intifada and Mondoweiss. A case successfully challenged that policy, with a federal appellate court opinion holding that the IRS couldn’t discriminate on the basis of viewpoint when processing applications for charitable status.

One of the most troubling things about this Executive Order is how it’s targeting Jews. There are plenty of Islamist terrorists operating in Judea and Samaria, and in fact the Palestinian Authority itself officially pays monthly stipends to the families of terrorists who have been convicted of killing Jews. (Those payments are an explicit violation of the U.S. law known as the Taylor Force Act, but the Biden administration doesn’t care and allows such payments.) Not one Arab individual has been sanctioned under this Executive Order. 

The only sanctions “imposed” on any non-Jewish person or entity was the Lion’s Den terrorist cell in Nablus. But the terrorist cell is just that—a cell. It has no bank accounts or credit cards in its own name, and nobody else was sanctioned along with it—no individual people or leaders, no banks that service those people. And aside from this “sanction,” the Biden administration has done nothing under this Executive Order to sanction any non-Jew for any action, including the actual or attempted murder of Jews, which you can read about every few days in the newspaper.  

As a matter of Constitutional law, the president has the authority to treat allies and enemies largely as he wishes, and it’s not illegal for the President to discriminate among different groups of people when none of them is a U.S. citizen.  But it’s disappointing that Israel, which for the Biden administration is formally categorized as an ally, has its citizens subject to financial sanction while the people who are trying to kill them not only get virtual immunity, but also get paid with money provided as U.S. aid.

Jerome Marcus is a lawyer in private practice, and the president of The Deborah Project, a public interest law firm that represents people affected by antisemitism and anti-Zionism on American university campuses. He is also a Fellow at the Jerusalem-based Kohelet Policy Forum.