The Betar Settlement
It's judicious and well scaled
The settlement reached between Betar and New York Attorney General Letitia James, which you can read here, is appropriately scaled. There are pluses and minuses to it, but when it comes to ending the harm using the least powerful stick necessary, it seems about right.
The AG’s office found Betar did violate New York civil rights laws, though that will not now be tested. Fines are suspended, and Betar has told James’ office they’re winding down operations, so they don’t need to be forced to.
That civil remedies of this kind, which are most often used against far-right groups comprised of gentiles, could also be used where Jewish extremist groups are concerned, serves the principle of equal justice. It’s smaller than the sort of dramatic civil suits seeking large damages that we are accustomed to seeing from groups like the SPLC, but that’s appropriate because the civil suit is being pursued by a state official.
James is letting them off easy, in other words. Whether it would make sense to pursue a big case over, basically, hooliganism and online intimidation, against a group in the process of winding down is open to question.
On the other hand, what New York may have found may be more appropriate for the feds to handle, if it touches on transnational repression for instance. Betar hired Jake Novak, who worked for the Israeli consulate in New York, for instance, so there’s a tight nexus between the group and a foreign diplomatic facility.
Moreover, there’s an ideological convergence between Betar and both the Israeli government and Zionists in the U.S. that is more substantial than, for instance, the ADL designation of them suggests. It’s the main revisionist Zionist organization, though its current form is more of a reconstruction than one in continuation with what came before. Whether an organization of long-standing should be held to a different standard is an interesting question, but it doesn’t look like Betar is going to put up a fight over that.