Democracy for the Arab World Now

Lawsuit Claims State Department Illegally Arming Israel via Leahy Law ‘Loophole’

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Original article by Brett Wilkins republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv on October 12, 2023. (Photo: Eyepress Media Limited/Reuters via Getty Images)

“This lawsuit demands one thing and one thing only: for the State Department to obey the law requiring a ban on assistance to abusive Israeli security forces,” said one advocate.

Palestinians and Palestinian Americans on Tuesday filed a lawsuit accusing the U.S. State Department of creating a “loophole” allowing Israel to skirt federal legislation barring American military aid to foreign militaries that violate human rights law.

The lawsuit, which was filed by five individuals and supported by the group Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), accuses the State Department and Secretary of State Antony Blinken of violating the Leahy Law, legislation passed in two parts in the late 1990s that built on the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961‘s proscription of U.S. military aid to foreign security forces that commit gross human rights violations.

According to DAWN, the suit “documents how the State Department has created unique, insurmountable processes to evade the Leahy Law requirement to sanction abusive Israeli units, despite overwhelming evidence of their human rights violations” including “torture, prolonged detention without charge, forced disappearance, and flagrant denials of the right to life, liberty, and security, such as genocide, indiscriminate and deliberate killings, and deprivation of items essential to survival, including food, water, fuel, and medicine.”

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Case plaintiff Ahmed Moor, a Palestinian American from the southern Gazan city of Rafah who has lost numerous relatives in Israeli attacks, toldZeteo‘s Prem Thakker, “I’m hoping, through this action, through this lawsuit, that we can just call out the federal government to begin to enforce American laws.”

The State Department has sparked international outrage by repeatedly finding that Israel is using U.S.-supplied arms in compliance with domestic human rights law, citing the key ally’s right to defend itself and the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack. However, Israel’s 438-day retaliation has left more than 162,000 Palestinians dead, wounded, or missing in Gaza and millions more forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened. Thousands more have been killed or maimed in the West Bank.

South Africa is leading a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Last month, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, his former defense minister, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Both men have been warmly welcomed in Washington, D.C.. Congress and the Biden administration have approved tens of billions of dollars in arms transfers to Israel. U.S.-supplied bombs have been used in some of Israel’s most notorious airstrikes. The U.S. has also vetoed numerous United Nations Security Council resolutions demanding a Gaza cease-fire.

Today, the White House welcomed Yoav Gallant, charged by the ICC with the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population, as well as the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts. What a disgrace.

— Adil Haque (@adhaque.bsky.social) 2024-12-10T20:21:30.596Z

“This lawsuit demands one thing and one thing only: for the State Department to obey the law requiring a ban on assistance to abusive Israeli security forces,” DAWN executive director Sarah Leah Whitson said in a statement on Tuesday. “For too long, the State Department has acted as if there’s an ‘Israel exemption’ from the Leahy Law, despite the fact that Congress required it to apply the law to every country in the world. As a result, millions of Palestinians have suffered unimaginable, horrific abuses by Israeli forces using U.S. weapons.”

Stephen Rickard, a former U.S. official who helped pass the landmark legislation, said that “long-standing concerns that the State Department was not cutting off aid to specific Israel units as required by the Leahy Law… have been given dramatic urgency by the tragic ongoing crisis in Gaza.”

“If the State Department will not comply with the law, then it is time for the courts to vindicate the rule of law and order it to do so,” Rickard added.

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The new lawsuit came a day after relatives of Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi—the Turkish American woman who, according to witnesses, was deliberately shot in the head while peacefully protesting the expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank in September—met with Blinken in search of justice and accountability for the activist’s killing.

Referring to another American activist killed by Israeli forces while defending Palestinian homes, Hamid Ali, Eygi’s widower, said that Blinken “was attentive in listening to us, but unfortunately repeated a lot of the same things that we’ve been hearing for the past 20 years, particularly since Rachel Corrie’s killing.”

Ali called Blinken “very deferential to the Israelis,” adding that “it felt like he was saying his hands were tied and they weren’t able to really do much.”

A journalist asked State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller during a Tuesday press conference why the U.S. has not suspended arms transfers to Israel by invoking the Leahy Law and citing the cases of victims like Eygi or Shireen Abu Akleh—the Palestinian American Al Jazeera correspondent who, according to witnesses and several independent probes, was deliberately shot dead by an Israeli sniper in the West Bank in May 2022.

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“We have taken those cases extremely seriously,” Miller claimed. Referring to Eygi, he added that he made it clear to Israel that “her death was unacceptable, that it should have been avoided, it should have never happened in the first place, that we want to see the results of their investigation, and we want to see them change their rules of engagement.”

Original article by Brett Wilkins republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue ReadingLawsuit Claims State Department Illegally Arming Israel via Leahy Law ‘Loophole’

US Peace Advocates ‘Utterly Condemn’ Biden Decision to Send Israel 1,700 500lb Bombs

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Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Palestinian rescue workers search the rubble of a house destroyed by an Israeli airstrike on the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza on July 6, 2024. 
(Photo: Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

“The Biden administration is fully culpable for the slaughter of civilians in Gaza, and should be held accountable for its role in aiding and abetting Israel’s shocking war crimes.”

The Biden administration’s decision this week to lift a pause on the transfer of 500-pound bombs to the Israeli military drew outrage from U.S. peace advocates who warned the weapons would be used to commit additional war crimes in the Gaza Strip, which has been pulverized by nine months of relentless Israeli attacks.

Sara Haghdoosti, executive director of Win Without War, said in a statement Thursday that “we utterly condemn” the administration’s decision to release a shipment of 1,700 500-pound bombs to Israel’s military, which has killed more than 38,000 people in Gaza since the Hamas-led October 7 attack. The shipment was paused in May as Israel prepared to launch its deadly assault on Rafah.

“We are dismayed because these bombs will almost certainly be used to kill more innocents in Gaza, where indiscriminate bombing continues and where a starvation crisis only worsens,” said Haghdoosti. “And if they are not used there, they risk being used to terrible effect in Lebanon, where civilians would again bear the brunt of a disastrous possible war between Hezbollah and the Israeli government.”

“We are perplexed because the White House is, yet again, using arms transfers to directly undermine its stated policy aims—both to secure a cease-fire and protect civilians in Gaza, and to avoid a full-scale war between Israel and Hezbollah that would devastate the region,” Haghdoosti continued. “Releasing this transfer signals to the Israeli government that, if cease-fire talks again stall, the war in Gaza can continue and that a massive conflict with Hezbollah can begin, with no real U.S. pushback.”

President Joe Biden “must reverse this decision, which makes no sense as politics or policy,” she added.

Biden, who is facing mounting calls to drop his reelection campaign, was not asked about the reversal during his closely watched press conference at the conclusion of NATO’s 2024 summit in Washington, D.C. late Thursday.

The administration’s decision to lift the pause came following what The Washington Post described as “a pressure campaign by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and pro-Israel lobbyists in the United States, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, demanding the resumption of all weapons shipments regardless of their lethality.”

Last month, Netanyahu—who is facing a possible arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC)—released a video complaining that the administration was “withholding weapons and ammunitions to Israel.”

The U.S. is Israel’s top arms supplier and has sent Israel billions of dollars worth of weapons and other military equipment since October 7—weaponry that Israel has repeatedly used to commit atrocities in Gaza.

An unnamed administration official told the Post that the U.S. was mostly concerned about the 2,000-pound bombs that were part of the initially planned shipment, rather than the 500-pound bombs. The 2,000-pound bombs will remain on hold, the official said.

Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) joined Win Without War in demanding that the Biden administration walk back its decision to lift the pause on the 500-pound bombs, warning that “providing such massive, explosive weapons with wide-area effects despite Israel’s systematic and deliberate deployment of such bombs in built-up civilian areas throughout Gaza further exposes U.S. officials to liability for war crimes prosecution.”

“This week alone, Israel used U.S. weapons to strike a school during a soccer game killing scores of children, and ordered the forced evacuation of hundreds of thousands of desperate civilians from Gaza City,” said DAWN senior adviser Josh Paul, who resigned from the U.S. State Department last year over the Biden administration’s continued arming of Israel.

“Lifting a suspension on the delivery of 500lb bombs meant to prevent the invasion of Rafah, only to then send Israel those bombs to enable the further destruction of Gaza City, is not only an act of perversity but a lawless one as well,” Paul said.

Raed Jarrar, DAWN’s advocacy director, called on the ICC to “investigate U.S. officials for their complicity in the genocidal atrocities in Gaza, insisting on providing Israel with some of the most lethal weapons in the world despite full knowledge that Israel is using them unlawfully against Palestinian civilians.”

“The Biden administration is fully culpable for the slaughter of civilians in Gaza, and should be held accountable for its role in aiding and abetting Israel’s shocking war crimes and crimes against humanity,” Jarrar added.

Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

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Continue ReadingUS Peace Advocates ‘Utterly Condemn’ Biden Decision to Send Israel 1,700 500lb Bombs

Nations Urged to Back ICJ Case Against Israel After Experts Confirm Genocide Underway

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Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

An injured Palestinian girl is brought to the al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital after an Israeli airstrike hit al-Maghazi Refugee Camp in Deir al-Balah, Gaza on January 09, 2024.  (Photo: Ashraf Amra/Anadolu via Getty Images)

“How many more alarm bells have to ring and how many more civilians must unlawfully suffer or be killed before governments take action?” asked one human rights expert.

Human rights advocates are ramping up pressure on nations to formally back South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice after a panel of experts determined that the Israeli military’s actions in the Gaza Strip—paired with officials’ overt statements of intent to wipe out the Palestinian population—constitute sufficient evidence that a genocide is underway.

Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) convened the expert roundtable last month, before South Africa submitted its 84-page ICJ application accusing Israel of violating its obligations under the Genocide Convention, which also requires signatories to prevent genocide.

“We have to be clear that this is a very unique case, indeed textbook, in the way that intent is articulated openly and explicitly in an
unashamed way,” Raz Segal, associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University, said during his December presentation, pointing to remarks by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other high-ranking officials signaling genocidal war aims.

South Africa’s ICJ filing, submitted to the 15-judge United Nations court on December 29, features page after page of quotations from Israeli officials and lawmakers voicing what the document calls “genocidal intent against the Palestinian people.” The first public hearing on the case is scheduled to take place on Thursday.

“Expert analysis of Israeli government statements revealing their intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza, combined with military actions on the ground, including mass killings, forced displacement, and the deprivation of items essential to life in Gaza, suggest that the crime of genocide is being committed against the Palestinian population,” Sarah Leah Whitson, DAWN’s executive director, said Tuesday. “South Africa’s charging Israel with genocide before the International Court of Justice underscores the need for decisive international action to compel a cease-fire and hold the perpetrators of these atrocities accountable.”

Francis Boyle, the first human rights lawyer to ever win an order from the ICJ under the Genocide Convention, toldDemocracy Now! last week that based on his “careful review of all the documents so far submitted” by South Africa, he believes the country “will win an order against Israel to cease and desist from committing all acts of genocide against the Palestinians.”

Thus far, at least seven national governments and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation—which includes 57 member states—have issued statements supporting South Africa’s case against Israel. But only Jordan has signaled that it plans to officially back South Africa’s case with a Declaration of Intervention.

Such declarations allow countries to “formally express their support for the case and contribute to the legal proceedings, enhancing the case’s legitimacy and impact,” DAWN explained, noting that more than 30 nations—including the U.S., Israel’s top ally and arms supplier—submitted Declarations of Intervention in Ukraine’s genocide case against Russia at the ICJ.

“South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice, invoking the Genocide Convention against Israel, represents a pivotal moment in the pursuit of global justice and accountability,” said Raed Jarrar, DAWN’s advocacy director. “It is time for the international community to support this process and speak with one voice to stop the genocide against the Palestinian people.”

With national and grassroots support for South Africa’s case growing, Israel has been pressuring governments around the world to speak out against the filing as it continues to wage war on Gaza’s desperate and starving population. On Tuesday, as Common Dreamsreported, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken dismissed South Africa’s case as “meritless” even as the Biden administration refuses to formally assess whether Israel has adhered to international law.

Since South Africa submitted its application to the ICJ late last month, Israel has killed more than 2,100 people in the Palestinian enclave and injured thousands more, according to the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor.

“How many more alarm bells have to ring and how many more civilians must unlawfully suffer or be killed before governments take action?” Balkees Jarrah, associate international justice director at Human Rights Watch, asked Wednesday. “South Africa’s genocide case unlocks a legal process at the world’s highest court to credibly examine Israel’s conduct in Gaza in the hopes of curtailing further suffering.”

Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Continue ReadingNations Urged to Back ICJ Case Against Israel After Experts Confirm Genocide Underway