Former President of the United States Joe Biden addressing to the nation in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington DC, United States on November 7, 2024 [Celal Güneş – Anadolu Agency]
The International Criminal Court (ICC) should investigate former US officials President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin for their accessorial roles in aiding and abetting, as well as intentionally contributing to, Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, US civil society organisation Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) has said.
The NGO submitted a 172-page communication to the ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan on 19 January, 2025. Prepared with the support of ICC-registered lawyers and other war crimes experts, the submission details a pattern of deliberate and purposeful decisions by these officials to provide military, political, and public support to facilitate Israeli crimes in Gaza; this support included at least $17.9 billion of weapons transfers, intelligence sharing, targeting assistance, diplomatic protection and official endorsement of Israeli crimes, despite knowledge of how such support had and would substantially enable grave abuses.
“There are solid grounds to investigate Joe Biden, Antony Blinken and Lloyd Austin for complicity in Israel’s crimes,” said Reed Brody, DAWN board member and veteran war crimes lawyer. “The bombs dropped on Palestinian hospitals, schools and homes are American bombs, the campaign of murder and persecution has been carried out with American support. US officials have been aware of exactly what Israel is doing, and yet their support never stopped.”
DAWN’s communication lays out the legal and factual basis for investigating Biden, Blinken, and Austin for violating Articles 25(3)(c) and (d) of the Rome Statute, both aiding and abetting and intentionally contributing to crimes committed by Israeli officials in Gaza. These crimes include those identified in the arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, including the war crimes of starvation and intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population, and crimes against humanity, including murder, inhumane acts, and persecution, under the Rome Statute. It also includes their role in the war crime of intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects under Article 8(2)(b)(ii) and the crime of genocide under Article 6.
“Not only did Biden, Blinken and Austin ignore and justify the overwhelming evidence of Israel’s grotesque and deliberate crimes, overruling their own staff recommendations to halt weapons transfers to Israel, they doubled down by providing Israel with unconditional military and political support to ensure it could carry out its atrocities,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Executive Director of DAWN. “They provided Israel with not only essential military support but equally essential political support by vetoing multiple ceasefire resolutions at the UN Security Council to ensure Israel could continue its crimes.”
Climate scientists are probably among those most aggrieved by Donald Trump’s return as US president.
Trump has scoffed at the increasingly dire warnings of these scientists and declared his enthusiasm for digging up and burning the coal, oil and gas that is overheating Earth. His empowerment of the far right dims prospects for collective solutions to collective problems, but what is he likely to change about US climate policy?
Trump has not published a climate agenda. To discern his impact on domestic and international policy, we have to sift through statements, appointments to political positions and the record of his first term.
Here, our academics glean grim portents for the years ahead – and some continuities with supposedly pro-climate presidents of the past.
1. It’s still ‘drill, baby, drill’
Trump’s three-word campaign slogan, “drill, baby, drill”, is intended to sum up his plans for the US oil and gas industry. It’s also an apt summary of existing US energy policy.
Since 2008, when Democrat Barack Obama was elected, oil production has soared from a 50-year low of 6.8 billion barrels a day to 19.4 billion in 2023.
“The United States is already producing more crude oil than any country ever,” says Gautam Jain, an energy and finance expert at Columbia University.
“Oil and gas companies are buying back stocks and paying dividends to shareholders at a record pace, which they wouldn’t do if they saw better investment opportunities.”
2. We won’t always have Paris (or even Rio)
Trump withdrew the US from the 2015 Paris agreement on the first day of his second term (it took him six months to do it last time).
Jain frets that he may go further and exit international negotiations entirely, by rescinding his country’s membership of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which was adopted in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.
Rejoining would be “nearly impossible”, Jain says, as a future president would need the consent of two-thirds of the Senate.
The US risks dropping the mantle of climate leadership on China, he adds. A recent analysis by Oxford economists Matthew Carl Ives and Natalie Sum Yue Chung suggests that that ship may have sailed years ago.
“China already processes most of the clean energy supply materials and has an advanced manufacturing base that is more capable of scaling up production to meet the rising demand,” they say.
3. The bucks stop here?
A US retreat from international climate diplomacy would afflict people who are particularly vulnerable to the mounting crisis in Earth’s atmosphere. Jain highlights how Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden donated several billions of dollars more towards renewable energy and adaptation in the developing world, compared with Trump in his first term.
However, a 2023 study that estimated each country’s “fair share” of this climate finance pot according to income, population size and historical emissions, issued this withering assessment while Biden was president:
“Based on these metrics, we found that the US is overwhelmingly responsible for the climate finance shortfall,” says environmental economist Sarah Colenbrander (University of Oxford).
“The world’s largest economy should be providing US$43.5 billion of climate finance a year. In 2021, it gave just US$9.3 billion – a meagre 21% of its fair share.”
4. Biden’s green tax credits may endure…
Trump could keep some Biden-era investments in clean energy (tax breaks for investors in renewables, for example) as the benefits are accruing in Republican states, Jain says.
He may still cut tax credits for people buying electric vehicles, though. This would slow the transition from combustion-engine transport by making it harder for people to afford an EV. (Biden’s 100% tariff on Chinese-made EVs hasn’t help either).
5. … but his methane tax probably won’t
Jain predicts that the greatest damage inflicted by Trump will be to the regulation of fossil fuels and emissions. In his crosshairs is a federal charge for the release of methane from oil and gas wells and pipelines.
Biden identified cutting methane emissions as a potential brake on the accelerating pace of global heating. That’s because methane is a greenhouse gas that lingers in our atmosphere for decades instead of centuries like CO₂ and is far more potent in trapping heat during that time.
Reducing methane emissions could reduce climate change quickly – a climate action lifeline we will be sorry to see thrown away.
6. The nuclear option
Trump seems to have a soft spot for one low-carbon energy source: nuclear power. Perhaps because civil nuclear maintains the skills and supply chains needed for its military applications?
7. Up is down, left is right
Democrats may regret making “trust the science” their dividing line against Trump.
Eric Nast, an environmental governance expert at the University of Guelph, tracked how the first Trump administration altered language on US government websites.
He expects Trump to disguise his regulation bonfire as “strengthening transparency” (blocking air pollution standards that rely on private health data) and championing “citizen science” (dismissing academics from advisory boards for private citizens rich in time and money, who might benefit from scrapping rules and limiting scrutiny).
8. Fighting fire with money
Tesla’s Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg attended Trump’s second inauguration. Their presence – plus a pointed farewell speech by Biden – has provoked murmurs of “oligarchy”: rule by people whose immense wealth and influence has utterly captured ostensibly democratic societies.
“As public firefighters struggle to cope, affluent residents and businesses have turned to private firefighting services to protect their properties,” says Doug Specht, a University of Westminster geographer.
9. Arctic relations
What explains Trump’s sudden interest in the Arctic? Oil, gas and critical minerals newly liberated by thawing ice in a region warming four times faster than the global average says engineer Tricia Stadnyk at the University of Calgary.
“The second Trump administration is aware of both the new opportunities and risks as global temperatures shatter new records and thresholds, and an ice-free Arctic becomes a possibility,” she says.
Jack Smith, the special counsel who investigated and charged Donald Trump, spoke to the media on August 1, 2023. (Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
“But for Mr. Trump’s election and imminent return to the presidency, the office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial,” the report states.
The special counsel who investigated and chargedDonald Trump over his attempts to subvert the 2020 election said in a final report released by the U.S. Justice Department early Tuesday that the former president would have been convicted for “a series of criminal efforts to retain power” had he not won another White House term in November.
“But for Mr. Trump’s election and imminent return to the presidency, the office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial,” wrote Jack Smith, who resigned from the Justice Department late last week ahead of Inauguration Day.
Smith pointed to the Justice Department’s view that “the Constitution prohibits the continued indictment and prosecution of a president,” a position he said is “categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the government’s proof, or the merits of the prosecution, which the office stands fully behind.”
The report, which Trump’s legal team sought to bury, is the first of two volumes that Smith’s team produced following the completion of its investigations into the former president’s unlawful election interference and hoarding of classified documents. Smith dropped the two cases shortly after Trump’s victory in the 2024 election.
According to the Justice Department, Smith has urged that the volume on the classified documents probe not be released to the public while the case against Trump’s former co-defendants is still pending.
“Trump worked with other people to achieve a common plan: to overturn the election results and perpetuate himself in office.”
In the newly released report, Smith detailed how Trump and his allies tried to “induce state officials to ignore true vote counts,” manufactured “fraudulent slates of presidential electors in seven states that he had lost,” directed “an angry mob to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification of the presidential election,” and leveraged “rioters’ violence to further delay it.”
“In service of these efforts, Mr. Trump worked with other people to achieve a common plan: to overturn the election results and perpetuate himself in office,” the report added.
Trump responded furiously to the report’s release, ranting on social media that “Deranged Jack Smith was unable to successfully prosecute the Political Opponent of his ‘boss,’ Crooked Joe Biden, so he ends up writing yet another ‘Report’ based on information that the Unselect Committee of Political Hacks and Thugs ILLEGALLY DESTROYED AND DELETED, because it showed how totally innocent I was, and how completely guilty Nancy Pelosi, and others, were.”
In his introduction to the report, Smith rejected as “laughable” Trump’s claim that the investigations were politically motivated or influenced in any way by the Biden administration.
“While we were not able to bring the cases we charged to trial, I believe the fact that our team stood up for the rule of law matters. I believe the example our team set for others to fight for justice without regard for the personal costs matters,” Smith wrote. “The facts, as we uncovered them in our investigation and as set forth in my report, matter. Experienced prosecutors know that you cannot control outcomes, you can only do your job the right way for the right reasons. I conclude our work confident that we have done so, and that we have met fully our obligations to the department and to our country.”
A pro-Palestinian protester holds a placard accusing U.S. President Joe Biden, former U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of war crimes at a demonstration against Israeli attacks on Gaza in central London, U.K. (Photo: Andy Soloman/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
In less than a year, more than a dozen U.S. officials publicly resigned in protest of Biden’s policy on Israel-Palestine. I was one of them.
Every so often, countless young hopefuls arrive in Washington, D.C., eager to help implement policies that improve the lives of Americans. But some quickly come to find out that U.S. imperialism bleeds into all areas of policy, it impacts all facets of government directly or indirectly, and sometimes at the expense of Americans in need. That was my rude awakening, at least.
I was one of those young hopefuls, and two years later, I publicly resigned from my post as a political appointee in the Biden-Harris administration because the cost of U.S. imperialism occupied every one of my thoughts. I felt I strayed away from my goal of pursuing justice through policy every time I thought about the cost of funding destruction and death in Palestine at the expense of us Americans, roughly half of whom are struggling to afford food, clothing, and housing.
And I am not the only one who resigned under President Joe Biden. In less than a year, more than a dozen U.S. officials publicly resigned in protest of Biden’s policy on Israel-Palestine, and many others left quietly. This level of dissent within the realm of government is unheard of and it can be characterized as a fight against imperialistic policy.
If, in his final days, Biden strayed away from the norm far enough to pardon his own son, exemplifying the instinct we have to protect our family and keep them safe, he should have known of the hypocrisy in enabling the orphaning and killing of children in Palestine.
The imperialistic features of our government disillusion passionate people, it turns them away from a life of public service. It is difficult to stay motivated while seeing the military spending in our country grow astronomically by the year while education and transportation face steep budget cuts. Americans do not get to see the benefits of high military spending materialized, but they would directly benefit from sufficiently funded schools and public transportation. And imperialism only succeeds abroad in ruining the United States’ reputation, casting it as a force wreaking havoc in the Global South. So, when I think about the United States’ role in supporting Israel’s aggression in Palestine, I wonder what it is all for in the grand scheme of bettering the lives of Americans.
If the administration’s insistence on supporting Israel no matter the cost was about maintaining the status quo, something the Biden-Harris administration had no trouble straying away from in other cases, then it was both a failed and hypocritical policy. Biden did not mind the status quo when he chose a woman as a vice president in a historic first or when he nominated the first Black female Supreme Court Justice. One can argue those steps were superficial, but regardless, they signaled progress to some. It is unfortunate, to say the least, that the same administration that took those steps tarnished their legacy when they, time and time again, failed Palestine on a catastrophic level.
My generation and community will remember this administration for one thing: genocide. It will go down in history as the administration that could not stray away from the status quo on Israel-Palestine policy at the expense of Americans in need, the lives of American activists like Ayşenur Eygi, and the safety of Arab and Muslim Americans. Not to mention, the Biden-Harris administration and Democratic Party leadership at large sacrificed the 2024 presidential election and Democratic voters in the process when they refused to campaign differently on Palestine.
As the Biden-Harris administration departs, their legacy is being immortalized. The hundreds of thousands of Americans who have advocated for a change in policy since October 2023 can argue that the legacy of the administration becoming stained permanently was avoidable.
If, in his final days, Biden strayed away from the norm far enough to pardon his own son, exemplifying the instinct we have to protect our family and keep them safe, he should have known of the hypocrisy in enabling the orphaning and killing of children in Palestine. If he was able to use his authority for good to commute the sentences of 37 prisoners on federal death row, he should have known to uphold the law and ensure Israel is not receiving an endless supply of weapons illegally. What may be worse than ignorant leaders are ones who are aware and indifferent, willingly complicit, and that may very well be the Biden administration’s legacy.
Some updates have been made throughout this piece at the author’s request.
As Los Angeles battles historic wildfires, residents are demanding accountability for why the city’s fire department faced budget cuts while greater disaster preparedness measures were overlooked. These frustrations have fueled questions about the prioritization of aid to Israel and Ukraine.
Just months before the wildfires ravaged the city, LA Mayor Karen Bass approved the budget for the next fiscal year, which included a $17.5 million reduction to the fire department’s funding. The department’s budget slashed to $819.64 million, prompted warnings from Fire Chief Kristin Crowley, who cautioned that the cuts were already impeding emergency response capabilities.
All of this comes amid a revelation that the State of California has sent approximately $610 million in taxpayer funds to Israel, making it the most significant state contributor to Israeli aid in the U.S. This disparity gained attention online after Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson suggested imposing conditions on federal disaster relief for Los Angeles.
U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson has been a staunch advocate of unconditional aid for Israel, notably championing a $74 billion aid package in April 2024 that included $60 billion for Ukraine and $14 billion for Israel, despite mounting public and congressional pressure to curtail such transfers. Specifically, the Leahy Law, named after its author, former Senator Patrick Leahy, prohibits the transfer of military aid to nations credibly accused of committing human rights abuses. In a recent Washington Post op-ed, Leahy urged that the law be applied to Israel, arguing that ongoing rights violations demand accountability and adherence to U.S. legal standards.
In October 2024, U.S. President Joe Biden drafted a $100 billion aid package for Ukraine and Israel—a striking coincidence, as this is the same amount now proposed to confront the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles. The announcement of a one-time payment of $770 to each wildfire victim by the administration has drawn mixed reactions, with some calling it a necessary gesture while others see it as woefully inadequate. This announcement came mere days after the White House informed Congress of its intention to send an additional $8 billion in military aid to Israel.
Although the aid package isn’t a cash handout to Israelis, the cost of the military aid package would be the equivalent of handing each Israeli over $820. Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. aid in history, amounting to a total of over $250 billion in American taxpayers’ dollars, at least $25 billion of which has been publicly disclosed to have been sent since the beginning of the war in Gaza. At a time when U.S. domestic crises demand urgent attention, the government’s unwavering commitment to foreign aid for Israel continues unabated.
The concern extends beyond monetary figures. Cities across the U.S. struggle to provide safe drinking water, veterans face mounting suicides due to inadequate access to healthcare, and Los Angeles grapples with a homelessness crisis. Experts estimate that $22 billion—roughly equivalent to the aid Israel received in a year—could eliminate homelessness in LA over the course of a decade. Meanwhile, Israelis enjoy clean drinking water year-round and are even expanding their control to include six key water sources in southern Syria, in contravention of international law.
Feature photo | Locals help a firefighter stretch a hose as an apartment building burns, Jan. 8, 2025, in the Altadena section of Pasadena, Calif. Chris Pizzello | AP
Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the occupied Palestinian territories and hosts the show ‘Palestine Files’. Director of ‘Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe’. Follow him on Twitter @falasteen47
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.
