My Take | America is neck deep in Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza

In the United States where some states have unusually harsh prosecution practices, the line between murder and accessory to murder is frequently blurred. So, it’s perhaps just deserts that the Joe Biden administration and some of its top officials have been named in a lawsuit that is effectively raising this fundamental question of complicity.

The lawsuit was first co-filed by the New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in November but hearings at a US federal court opened on Friday, the same day the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel had a genocide case to answer and that injunctions were imposed on the Jewish state to protect civilian lives in Gaza.

The US case charges that Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin have not only failed in their legal responsibility to prevent genocide, but are fully complicit in it. It’s asking for an emergency court order to halt “US support for Israel’s assault, including by enjoining the transfer of more weapons and unconditional support to the Israeli government”.

More than 26,400 Palestinians have been killed and at least 65,000 injured in Gaza. Israel’s carnage could not have been carried out without US weapons, whose rapid and massive transfers were made possible by the White House by bypassing normal procedures on such transfers.

In early December alone, the Biden administration sent “at least 15,000 bombs, and more than 50,000 155mm artillery shells, which are inherently indiscriminate”, the CCR noted in a press statement. This followed congressional approval in November of US$14.3 billion in military aid to Israel, but which deliberately cut out humanitarian aid originally budgeted for Palestinians. Besides those weapons, there have been reports that secret Pentagon weapon warehouses in Israel have been opened for the country’s military to use in Gaza.

According to a Guardian report, the warehouses have an extensive storage of 155mm artillery shells, which are unguided munitions that “are particularly hazardous … as each shell releases 2,000 lethal fragments, and their accuracy degrades over distance, increasing the likelihood of civilians and civilian infrastructure getting hit by errant shells”. The report further stated that “Israel now appears to be receiving munitions from the stockpile in significant quantities for use in its war on Gaza, yet there has been little transparency about transfers from the arsenal”.

In a Bloomberg op-ed in January last year, James Stavridis, a former supreme allied commander of Nato, provided useful background information about the US arsenal in Israel. He was arguing that “the dumb munitions” should be transferred to Ukraine for its war with Russia.