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 Re…