From Prof. Juan Cole today:
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey S. White of the Northern District of California ruled Tuesday in a lawsuit brought by Palestinian-Americans and the Palestinian human rights group al-Haq against President Joe Biden, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken for their involvement in an Israeli genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza. White found that the suit had merit on the facts but that a district court could not overrule the president of the United States on foreign policy. That is, the conclusion of the case was more about the separation of powers than about whether the Biden administration is guilty of participating in a genocide.
The judge felt he had to dismiss the case, given a whole plethora of previous Supreme Court decisions. He clearly did so, however, with enormous regret.
White seems to be calling for mass political action by Americans on the issue. He asserted that “It is every individual’s obligation to confront the current siege in Gaza.” He went on to lament, however, “but it also this Court’s obligation to remain within the metes and bounds of its jurisdictional scope.” [emphasis added]
The suit was brought to this court, which heard the case in late January in Oakland, California, by Defense for Children International — Palestine, and the case is titled Defense for Children International — Palestine vs. Biden. They are represented in this by the Center for Constitutional Rights, and it was argued before the bench by highly experienced human rights attorney, Katherine Gallagher.
CCR has been asserting since at least November that Israel’s conduct of the Gaza campaign constitutes genocide. They were at that time perhaps the most credible US-based constitutional rights NGO to make such a strong assertion about Israeli wartime conduct.
The case they presented in Federal Court in Oakland last week:
based its assessment on the “uncontroverted” live testimony of seven Palestinian witnesses, including one from Gaza and one from Ramallah, who testified firsthand to Israel’s killing of their nieces, cousins, aunts, uncles, elders, and members of their community, to the mass displacement of their families reminiscent of the 1948 Nakba, and to the devastating conditions of life in their homeland as the siege leads to mass starvation. The court also relied on the expert opinion of genocide and Holocaust scholars who confirmed that Israel’s military assault and totalizing humanitarian destruction bears the hallmarks of a genocide based on legal and historical precedent. Nevertheless, the court reluctantly dismissed the case on jurisdictional grounds. While the court recognized that the prohibitions on genocide are fundamental and binding international law, this was a “rare” instance where “the preferred outcome is inaccessible to the Court” and it found it lacked power to resolve the case because it implicated executive decision-making in the area of foreign policy.
Delivering a historic rebuke of Israel and the United States for its flouting of the Genocide Convention, the court wrote:
Both the uncontroverted testimony of the Plaintiffs and the expert opinion proffered at the hearing on these motions as well as statements made by various officers of the Israeli government indicate that the ongoing military siege in Gaza is intended to eradicate a whole people and therefore plausibly falls within the international prohibition against genocide. [emphasis added]
The court recognized the substantial role of the United States in furthering the genocide and noted that “as the ICJ has found, it is plausible that Israel’s conduct amounts to genocide” and, therefore, the “Court implores Defendants to examine the results of their unflagging support of the military siege against the Palestinians in Gaza.”
The court stated, “It is every individual’s obligation to confront the current siege in Gaza.”
I think we will see more lawsuits such as this brought before various Federal courts in the US, in the wake of the International Court of Justice finding last month that there is credible evidence Israel is committing an ongoing genocidal campaign in Gaza.
Meanwhile, in Dearborn, Michigan, the rejection of some members of that community to meet with the Biden-Harris campaign reinforces the increasing pressures the ICJ ruling puts on our government and the Biden administration, as it juggles priorities in a struggle to not lose young and Muslim American voters.
The efforts of President Biden’s campaign to restore the dialogue with Arab and Muslim American voters in the Detroit area failed following the cancellation of a meeting last Friday scheduled to bring together Biden-Harris National Campaign Manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez, local elected Arab American officials and community leaders.
Of course the Biden administration and, more so, the Biden 2024 campaign, desire to tamp the very justifiable anger many Americans are expressing, as we’re forced once more to pull the inept Israelis’ asses out of a fire they pretty much have lit and lit and relit over the decades. And Biden all too well knows that any interchange with Prime Minister Netanyahu is as likely to get him kicked in the nuts one more time. Just like it’s been since this episode:
Joe Biden, the US vice-president, condemned a plan by Israel to build 1,600 homes on occupied Palestinian land in an East Jerusalem settlement.
The Israeli interior ministry's approval of the plan cast a cloud over a visit to the country by Biden just hours after he pledged strong support for the Israeli government.
In an unusually strong statement issued after he arrived 90 minutes late for a dinner with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden said: "I condemn the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units."
He said the blueprint for Ramat Shlomo, an ultra-Orthodox settlement in an area of the West Bank annexed to Jerusalem, "undermines the trust we need right now and runs counter to the constructive discussions I've had in Israel".
I predicted back when this Gaza fiasco began, that there might be:
at least 45,000 Palestinian deaths in the ongoing attempt to liquidate Hamas from Gaza. Probably almost 1,000 of those will be in the collateral escalation of squatter attacks upon the indigenous population in the West Bank, which an Israeli Government spokeswoman referred to Monday morning on MSNBC as Judea and Samaria. She was unchallenged by the MSNBC folks, who may not have understood some of the implications of her having identified the West Bank thusly. I believe the superstitious new Speaker of the US House uses the same terms for that physical space.
Of the 44,000 deaths in Gaza, I predict over a third of them will be kids who weren’t even born yet when Hamas took over there from the PLO in 2006. There are probably already close to 4,000 dead kids from the bombings.
We are now most of the way toward that being an actuality. Then, as the debris is removed, the toll will surely surpass my prediction, which was dissed mostly, in the diary I wrote here then.