Palestinian Refugee Sues Far-Right Group Betar Over Year-Long Campaign of Racial Terror
Lawsuit invokes Reconstruction-era anti-KKK law as Trump administration deports activists from Betar Zionist Organization’s own list.
WASHINGTON — A Palestinian-American activist and naturalized U.S. citizen who came to this country as a one-year-old refugee filed a federal civil rights lawsuit Wednesday against Betar Zionist Organization Inc. and its leadership, charging them with orchestrating a coordinated, months-long campaign of stalking, threats, and racial intimidation — including offering cash bounties to anyone who would hand her a beeper, a direct reference to Israel’s 2024 assassination operation that killed dozens in Lebanon using exploding pagers.
The plaintiff, Nerdeen Kiswani — founder of Within Our Lifetime, a New York City-based pro-Palestinian political organization — filed the complaint in the Southern District of New York on February 25th. Her legal team, led by Lee & Godshall-Bennett LLP and the civil rights powerhouse Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel LLP, is invoking the Ku Klux Klan Enforcement Act of 1871, a Reconstruction-era statute written to protect freed Black Americans and Republican activists from organized racial terror.
The choice of statute is not rhetorical flourish. It is precise. And the facts alleged make it stick.
Beeper Bounties and a Pregnant Woman Cornered
The complaint reads like a police blotter written by people who knew the police weren’t coming.
According to the lawsuit, Betar USA used its official social media accounts to offer cash rewards — at various points $1,000, then $1,800 — to anyone who would hand Kiswani a pager, invoking the memory of the exploding communications devices that Israel deployed against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon in September 2024, killing dozens and wounding thousands.
The bounties weren’t just online noise. On January 6, 2025, an individual affiliated with Betar USA physically approached Kiswani and attempted to hand her a pager while draped in an Israeli flag. Video posted online by Betar shows the organization’s then-Executive Director, defendant Ross Glick, screaming at Kiswani: “You can’t hide! We’ve got our eyes on you, Nerdeen!”
Twelve days later, at a pro-Palestinian demonstration near Rockefeller Center, Glick and an unidentified associate cornered Kiswani against a building column — a semi-enclosed space from which she could not easily flee — shouting threats while her friends physically shielded her.
She was visibly pregnant.
From Social Media to ICE Arrests
The lawsuit is not operating in a vacuum. It lands inside a documented and escalating pattern of Betar USA functioning as an extrajudicial enforcement arm of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
In March 2025, Betar spokesperson Daniel Levy told CNN that the organization had submitted hundreds of names of pro-Palestinian activists to the Department of Homeland Security, urging ICE to deport them. Executive Director Glick told CNN the organization created dossiers — “our research, our information, the massive amount of video and photos that we have gathered” — and handed them directly to federal officials.
In July 2025, that arrangement stopped being an allegation. Under oath, ICE’s Assistant Director for the Office of Intelligence, Peter Hatch, testified in federal court in Massachusetts that his office relied on Betar USA’s “deportation list” to select individuals for arrest, detention, and removal.
The complaint also documents the case of Efe Ercelik, a Turkish visa-holder whom Betar USA publicly called for deporting on April 8, 2025. Six days later, the State Department revoked his visa and he was detained. A federal judge ordered him released the following month, noting that the Trump administration’s “pursuit of detention seems to have been almost exclusively triggered by Betar Worldwide.”
Kiswani’s name, the complaint alleges, has been at the top of Betar USA’s denaturalization list — a category of enforcement the Trump administration has been actively exploring for naturalized citizens.
The New York AG Already Found What the Complaint Alleges
The lawsuit benefits from a significant evidentiary runway. On January 13, 2026, just six weeks before this complaint was filed, the New York State Attorney General published the results of its own investigation into Betar USA — and the findings track the complaint almost point for point.
The AG concluded that Betar violated New York Civil Rights Law by physically assaulting individuals at protests based on their perceived Muslim, Arab, or Palestinian identities. The investigation found members harassed students wearing hijabs and keffiyehs at The New School, threatening to force beepers on them. It found that a member of Betar’s national leadership team struck a woman wearing a keffiyeh at a protest — and that Betar celebrated it by posting the video. It found members privately bragging on WhatsApp that they “kicked terrorist ass in boro par” after a February 2025 Brooklyn demonstration where, the complaint alleges, at least one activist was stabbed.
The AG settled with Betar rather than pursuing litigation. This federal civil suit goes further — naming the organization’s CEO, PR chairman, social media director, and executive director individually, and arguing they each had both knowledge of and power to stop the conspiracy against Kiswani.
The Law Being Invoked Has Teeth — and History
The KKK Enforcement Act of 1871 was passed during Reconstruction specifically because private organizations — not the government — were terrorizing Black citizens and their white Republican allies out of exercising their constitutional rights. Congress recognized that when private mobs do what the government is prohibited from doing, civil rights protections become meaningless.
The complaint argues that Betar USA’s campaign against Kiswani checks every statutory box: two or more persons, a conspiracy, aimed at depriving someone of equal protection of the laws, motivated by race, ethnicity, and religion.
The lawyers also invoke the Thirteenth Amendment, arguing that racially motivated violence, threats, and intimidation constitute “badges and incidents of slavery” — a legal theory that has been applied to organized private campaigns of racial terror since Reconstruction.
Kiswani is seeking compensatory and punitive damages, a declaration that Betar violated the Act, and attorney’s fees.
“Drawing a Line”
Kiswani, who founded Within Our Lifetime in 2015 to organize boycotts and demonstrations against Israel’s occupation of Palestine, has become one of the most visible Palestinian activist voices in the country — and, by the evidence in this complaint, one of the most systematically targeted.
“This case is not just about me,” she said in a statement accompanying the lawsuit. “It is about drawing a line. Groups that believe they can weaponize harassment and threats to silence us should understand that there are legal consequences.”
Attorney Christopher Godshall-Bennett, who identifies as Jewish, addressed directly the accusations of betrayal he said he has faced for taking the case. “The othering at the core of anti-Palestinian animus is no different than that at the core of other forms of racism. It is our duty to oppose it, regardless of identity, but especially when it is done in your name.”
The case is Kiswani v. Betar Zionist Organization Inc., No. 1:26-cv-01585, filed in the Southern District of New York.
Racist trump, deserves to be sued, by all Palestinians civilians in Gaza, with Murderer Netanyahu, both sent to the Hage!
Thank you so much for this - excellent! So informative........