“It’s really a modest set of goals here,” said plaintiff Ahmed Moor, whose cousins, uncles, and aunts have all been adversely affected by the Israel-Gaza conflict. “We’d like the federal government to adhere to U.S. law.”
A coalition of Palestinians and Palestinian-Americans have filed a lawsuit alleging that the U.S. Department of State has violated federal law by continuing to provide Israel with military aid.
According to The Associated Press, attorneys for the plaintiffs claim that the “Leahy laws” prohibit the United States from providing military assistance to foreign nations and security forces known to violate human rights.
Proponents of the lawsuit include former State Department officials and several of the legislators involved in the 1997 passage of the Leahy laws.
“It’s really a modest set of goals here,” said plaintiff Ahmed Moor, whose cousins, uncles, and aunts have all been adversely affected by the Israel-Gaza conflict. “We’d like the federal government to adhere to U.S. law.”
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has since denied that his agency has carved out any exceptions for Israel, saying that there is no “double standard” when it comes to America’s closest ally in the Middle-East.
For the past year, Israel has deflected allegations of widespread and unnecessary killings by saying that it makes every possible effort to limit harm to Palestinian civilians.
In May, the State Department released a report indicating that there is or was “reasonable” evidence suggesting that Israel has used American weapons to violate international law.
Nevertheless, the Department of State refused to recommend limitations on future arms sales to Israel. It also did not intervene to block arms transfers, despite threatening to do so in the past.
Charles Blaha, a former State Department official who helped review compliance with the Leahy law, said that proper enforcement could have prevented thousands of civilian deaths in Gaza.
“The Secretary of State has made all the decisions so far on Israel and the Leahy law, and every single decision has resulted in [Israeli security forces continuing to be] eligible” for U.S. military aid,” Blaha said.
Plaintiff Said Assali, a Palestinian-American who claims to have lost six family members to Israeli airstrikes, told The Guardian that he’s participating in the lawsuit to curb what he believes are blatant violations of federal law.
“I’ve had […] immediate relatives, cousins and other family that have been murdered in Israeli airstrikes,” Assali said. “As an American, this is a clear violation of our laws, and it is violations the state department is carrying out actively and aggressively – and it’s using our tax dollars.”
The plaintiffs are being represented by Dawn, the human rights advocacy organization founded by Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post journalist murdered by Saudi Arabian operatives at the kingdom’s Istanbul consulate in 2018.
“This is a historic effort to right the wrong of the state department’s decades of refusal to obey the law requiring it to restrict military aid to abusive military units in Israel,” said Dawn executive director Sarah Leah Whitson.
“What the state department is asking the world to believe is that no Israeli unit has ever committed a gross violation of human rights,” she said. “This flies in the face of mountains of human rights reports and journalistic investigations. It flies in the face of the state department’s own human rights reports.”
Sources
Lawsuit accuses State Department of creating loopholes for Israel on military aid and human rights
Palestinians sue State Department over U.S. military assistance to Israel
US violating law to fund Israel despite alleged human rights abuses, lawsuit says
Join the conversation!