“Settler violence” has been the subject of a growing international campaign that seeks to equate acts of vandalism, or, really, any action by Jews in the West Bank and Jerusalem—or even their presence there—with murderous terrorism by Palestinians, in an effort to create a moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas.
Democratic Congress members, led by Rep. Jerry Nadler, recently proposed legislation that would codify the Biden administration’s unprecedented sanctions on Israelis allegedly involved in such conduct, and which had set the stage for the Europeans to follow. The agenda behind the Democratic play became clear in late May, when the European Union announced sanctions against six “extremist settler” groups and individuals. Though the announcement repeatedly mentioned “violence,” none of those sanctioned is accused of anything resembling it. Instead, some of them were targeted for “institut[ing] legal proceedings and lobbies” against illegal Palestinian construction and destruction of antiquities in the West Bank. Others were sanctioned for building homes for Jews in Judea and Samaria. The EU designations, parroting the Biden administration, make explicit that the real crime is political: allegedly “undermining the viability of the two-state solution.”
The Biden administration’s and the European Union’s policy deliberately mixes together criminal acts (real or manufactured) by a small number of Israelis against Palestinians—acts that are both inseparable from and numerically overwhelmed by acts of terrorism by Palestinians—with political opposition to the Democrats’ and the Europeans’ preferred political vision of a “two-state solution.” In doing so, the policy attempts to use the actions of some Israelis to criminalize perfectly legitimate and legal political opposition by entirely different Israelis to the “two-state solution,” which, incidentally, has little traction among either Israelis or Palestinians. It’s an old political debating tactic that the Europeans are trying to legitimize under the cover of “opposing violence.” By the same measure, as the European Union is full of Palestinians and their supporters who oppose the existence of Israel—an existing state—that would make their views criminal too. Unless the only criminals are those who oppose the existence of a state that doesn’t exist.
Some of those who have been targeted by the Biden sanctions took legal action, and recently the Justice Department settled two lawsuits: one brought by two people sanctioned by the Biden administration, Pilant et al. v. U.S. Department of the Treasury et al., and another, Texans for Israel et al v. U.S. Department of the Treasury et al., by people claiming they would likely be targeted because of their opposition to the “two-state solution.” Sure enough, some of the plaintiffs in that case have since been sanctioned by the European Union, Canada, and other countries on precisely these grounds. We helped represent these individuals, and their stories both highlight the problems with the whole “settler violence” narrative and expose its weaponization through sanctions as nothing but the targeting of Jews—including Americans.
One Department of Justice settlement acknowledges that two plaintiffs, Levi Yitzhak Pilant and Issachar Manne, are U.S. citizens. That alone underscores the outrageous broadness of the Biden administration’s sanctions; by its own terms, the executive order creating the sanctions ostensibly applied only to “foreign persons.” Even more scandalously, the government based its designations on reports from far-left and pro-Palestinian nongovernmental organizations. Prominent among those is Dawn MENA, which was founded by the late Saudi Islamist operative Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 and is funded by the same foundations that back pro-Palestinian and leftist revolutionary activism in the United States and left-wing NGOs in Israel that are central to feeding the “settler violence” campaign.
During the Biden administration, Dawn MENA would publicly accuse individuals of “settler violence,” submit uncorroborated “evidence” to the State and Treasury Departments, and demand they impose sanctions; days later these individuals would magically find themselves sanctioned. A remarkable example of this pipeline can be seen in the Biden administration’s sanctions order, which even misspelled Pilant’s name the same way Dawn did.
Our clients’ experiences illustrate how the “settler violence” narrative makes lawful actions sound like ethnic cleansing. The Biden administration accused Pilant of 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.” In reality, Pilant, a captain in active reserve duty in the Israel Defense Forces, was mobilized after the Oct. 7 massacre to defend Jewish communities. The roadblocks and vehicle inspections were standard procedure by the army to prevent much-feared follow-up attacks.
Issachar Manne was sanctioned for seizing “pastureland belonging to the Palestinian community.” Yet the government never established that the land was privately owned by Palestinians. In fact, Manne’s farm sat on land leased from the World Zionist Organization, within his settlement’s municipal borders.
Reut Ben Haim, a young mother of eight, is not even a settler. She was sanctioned for organizing demonstrations against sending supplies into Gaza during the war, because they would be diverted by Hamas. Her husband, an American citizen, also had his finances frozen and is a plaintiff in the Texas case. Before sanctioning her, the Biden administration described this as “protest activity.” The settlement in her case makes clear that she was not sanctioned for her involvement in any violent activity.
The Biden administration’s play was designed to open the floodgates of European and other Western sanctions. In turn, the European sanctions, which are even worse, are themselves a dress rehearsal for what we can expect under a future Democratic administration in the United States.
One of the sanctioned organizations, Regavim—also a plaintiff in the Texas case—has been exposing the European Union’s role in promoting violations of the Oslo Accords by sponsoring the ongoing Palestinian land grab in Area C, the area left under full Israeli control by those agreements. Regavim’s research and whistleblowing activity, it turns out, is also considered settler violence.
Regavim’s work forensically documents how the “settler violence” sausage is made, thereby clarifying the function not only of leftist NGOs in Israel, but also of groups like Dawn MENA in the United States. The production cycle goes like this: A deceptive NGO report becomes a settled account, trumpeted by human-rights organizations that are themselves funded by the European Union. Reporters and international bodies cite the NGOs without independent corroboration. Policymakers cite the resulting consensus. The European states that funded the NGOs making the claims then impose sanctions accordingly. What passes for evidence is often nothing more than a chain of ideological citations. And when a handful of these stories were finally forced to address facts, the narrative fell apart.
Take the case of Amana, a company that has built tens of thousands of homes throughout Judea and Samaria for decades. The Biden administration made sure to sanction Amana on its way out, two weeks after it lost the election in November 2024. As justification, it cited Amana providing a loan to Manne, whom it had sanctioned in August of that year. Another justification was that “the settlers and farms that Amana supports play a key role in developing settlements in the West Bank, from which in turn settlers commit violence.”
Following the Biden administration’s lead, last month the European Union sanctioned Amana for “initiating, financing, and facilitating at least 30 violent outposts and settlements.” The word violent in that sentence is doing Herculean work. What makes an outpost “violent”? Amana pours concrete and lays roads. But under the definitions used by the United Nations, anything from exercising self-defense to an individual committing petty theft is classified as violence. This then allows the European Union to state with a straight face that Amana “facilitated violent outposts” without identifying a single act of violence that Amana directed, funded, or encouraged. This is not a legal standard. It is a word game.
Based on spurious accusations and bogus legal reasoning, the Biden administration, and now the European Union, turned the very idea of Jews living in the West Bank into a sanctionable offense and an inherent violation of Palestinian human rights.
Criminal and political violence—typically vandalism and property crime—directed at Palestinians by Israeli Jews (not necessarily settlers) in the West Bank does exist. It is both wrong and rare. Israel’s leaders and rabbis condemn it categorically, in contrast with the Palestinian Authority, which pays pensions to its terrorists. The clearance rate on such incidents is low, but that is also true of property crime in U.S. and European cities.
Our lawsuit alleged that while the sanctions were facially neutral—aimed at any perpetrators of violence in the West Bank—they were applied discriminatorily, exclusively targeting Jews. The settlement agreement states that the government will not “target private organizations and Israeli citizens living in the West Bank,” a hint that this is exactly what Democrats have done and want to do again.
Framing settler violence as a crisis worthy of global concern reinforces a narrative of predatory fundamentalist Jews dispossessing Palestinians. The low level of criminal activity by Jews in Judea and Samaria is a domestic Israeli law enforcement matter and should be treated as such. Thankfully, the Trump administration recognizes this. In the Justice Department’s settlement agreement, the government declares that it “categorically rejects any policy that would infringe upon Israel’s sovereignty.” Using such language to discuss measures relating to the West Bank is, in fact, a quiet but potentially significant policy change that should be celebrated.
Written in collaboration with Mark Goldfeder, CEO of the National Jewish Advocacy Center and a law professor at Touro Law School.
(First appeared in Tablet Magazine “How ‘Settler Violence’ Became a Tool for Sanctioning Jews”, June 16, 2026)
