Palestinians Will End Israel’s Genocide and Reshape the World

The U.S. government is providing unconditional and absolute diplomatic, financial, and military support for the Israeli government’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. Decades of U.S. and Israeli impunity for war crimes and crimes against humanity have made this genocide not only possible, but inevitable. Domestic courts have ceded their responsibility to check the actions of the executive and defend the rights of those most vulnerable to abusive state power. See here for updates on our lawsuit against President Biden, Secretary of State Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Austin.

In the absence of accountability or even the most elemental commitment to international norms that might have prevented genocide, the crime of crimes, the Israeli and U.S. war machine rages on and not only threatens the lives of people from Palestine to Lebanon, Iran, Yemen and Syria, but degrades our collective humanity. 

Meanwhile, the people of the global majority, who are in full support of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, make clear our collective demands for justice and our commitment to a world beyond ideologies of supremacy and domination and realities of colonial wars of aggression and conquest. In their steadfast resistance and refusal to accept a subjugated position, Palestinians, fighting for life and liberation, are reshaping our world.  Below is an overview of the conditions, elements, and human impact of the crime of genocide that Israel is currently committing in Palestine, followed by a review of the legal efforts taken to hold the U.S. accountable for its complicity. Embedded throughout are ways to join, grow in, and contribute to the movement for Palestinian liberation. 

The Israeli government’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza in the context of colonial occupation

In the context of over seven decades of Israel’s colonization of historic Palestine, the Israeli government has, since October 7, 2023, directly killed over 41,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including over 16,500 children, and injured more than 96,000. The exact civilian death toll as of October 2024 is unknown and likely much higher due to Palestinians buried under rubble and indirect deaths resulting from disease and the widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure in Gaza. In July 2024 a study by the medical journal, The Lancet, concluded that “it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable” to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Government authorities in Gaza report that Israel has killed at least 902 Palestinian families.

Within a besieged coastal enclave that has been under total land, air, and sea closure by Israel since 2007, there has been documented widespread use by the Israeli military of explosive weapons in densely populated residential areas, direct targeting of civilians, including children, journalists, and health care workers. The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reported that by April 2024, "Israel has dropped more than 70,000 tons of bombs on the Gaza Strip since last October, far surpassing the bombing of Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined during World War II." Based on Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor's earlier estimates of the scale of Israel's bombing of Gaza, this April figure is equivalent to approximately six of the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima. Israel’s constant bombardments and continued closure of Gaza has resulted in the collapse of Gaza’s entire healthcare system. The World Health Organization has verified 800 attacks on hospitals, ambulances, healthcare workers, and patients in Gaza and the West Bank. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) estimates that more than 90 percent of the people have been internally displaced across Gaza.

Numerous Israeli government leaders have expressed clear genocidal intentions and deployed dehumanizing characterizations of Palestinians, including calling them “human animals.” These statements of intent – when combined with mass killing, causing serious bodily and mental harm, and the total siege and closure creating conditions of life to bring about the physical destruction of the group – reveal evidence of the crime of genocide. Genocide is the gravest of crimes under international law. As defined by the international Genocide Convention (1948), genocide refers to specific actions – such as killing or deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of a group in whole or in part – taken with the intention of destroying, in whole or in part, the group targeted, including on ethnic or national grounds.

Under international law, there can never be a justification for genocide. And international law is clear that Israel’s position as an occupying power brings with it unique responsibilities to the civilian Palestinian population – a global consensus affirmed in July 2024 by the International Court of Justice – the Israeli regime, with full U.S. support, is stripping international law of its meaning and revealing its inability to protect the rights of colonized, marginalized, and racialized communities. The insistence by Palestinians on lives of self-determination and human dignity offer the foundation of an entirely new global reality.

Get Involved with the Movement for Palestinian Liberation

• Click to tell your Senators to Block Bombs to Israel 
• Click to tell Congress to call for an Arms Embargo Now 
• Join the daily 3 p.m. Jewish Voice for Peace ‘Power Half-Hour for Gaza’

Follow the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights’ protest tracker to stay up to date on all the street actions being planned across the U.S. and get involved with your local chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace.

Recent efforts by the Center for Constitutional Rights to hold the U.S. government accountable

The U.S. is a signatory to the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Congress passed the Genocide Convention Implementation Act (18 U.S.C. § 1091) in 1988, making it federal law. International law imposes on Biden and other high-level officials a legal duty to prevent genocide. The United States has significant capacity to influence Israel's actions as its primary provider of military and political support. Therefore, the U.S. has been obligated, since learning of the serious risk of genocide in Gaza, to exercise its considerable influence on the Israeli government to prevent the crime.

Not only have high-level officials in the Biden-Harris Administration failed to exercise their influence to prevent genocide, but they have publicly and repeatedly offered statements of unconditional support of the Israeli government’s actions, while providing additional military financial assistance and equipment to Israel. In 2023 and 2024, like every year, the U.S. government provided Israel with $3.8 billion USD in unrestricted military financing. On top of this support, and since the Israeli government’s indiscriminate bombardment of Palestinians in Gaza began on October 7th, the U.S. has provided Israel with an additional $8.7 billion USD in military hardware, deployed aircraft carrier battle groups, and, as Israel expands its war of aggression against Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran, the U.S. increased its forces in the region to “assist in the defense of Israel.”

The Center for Constitutional Rights has long challenged U.S. and Israeli impunity for violations of international law related to Israel’s colonial project in Palestine. In response to the Israeli govenrment's actions after October 7th, we joined other experts and legal organizations in issuing urgent warnings to the U.S. of the unfolding genocide. Central to these efforts is the legal and factual documentation that highlights the United States’ failure to uphold its legal obligation to prevent the Israeli government's genocide of the Palestinian people, and its role in advancing the genocide.

Lawsuit

On November 13, 2023, the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a federal lawsuit, Defense for Children International – Palestine, et al. v. Biden, et al., on behalf of Palestinian human rights organizations and Palestinians in Gaza and the U.S. Plaintiffs brought suit against President Biden, Secretary of State Blinken, and Defense Secretary Austin for their failure to prevent and complicity in the Israeli government’s genocide against them, their families, and the 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza. The case against the three high-level U.S. officials argues that they are violating international law, including the laws codified in the 1948 Genocide Convention and the corresponding Genocide Convention Implementation Act (18 U.S.C. § 1091) passed by the U.S. Congress in 1988. 

The lawsuit situates the genocide within a history of Israeli actions against the Palestinian people – starting with the Nakba in 1948. It sets out how Defendants Biden, Blinken, and Austin have not only failed to prevent the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza but have helped advance the gravest of crimes by continuing to provide the Israeli government with unconditional military and diplomatic support, coordinating closely on military strategy, and undermining efforts by the international community to stop Israel’s unrelenting and unprecedented bombing campaign and total siege of Gaza. Plaintiffs demanded that the court declare that these U.S. officials have failed to prevent genocide and are aiding and abetting genocide, and to order an end to U.S. military and diplomatic support to Israel. 

On January 26, 2024 the Palestinian plaintiffs, including one from Gaza and one from Ramallah were called as witnesses before Judge White of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to testify 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. Judge White found that Israel is plausibly engaging in genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza and that the United States is providing “unflagging support” for the massive attacks on Palestinian civilians in contravention of international law. Nevertheless, the court reluctantly dismissed the case on jurisdictional grounds, ruling that it lacked power to resolve the case because it implicated executive decision-making in the area of foreign policy.   

The plaintiffs appealed the district court's dismissal, but, on July 15, 2024, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal by the district court. On August 29, 2024, we urged the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to review the lawsuit, arguing that the courts have a constitutional duty to assess the legality of the Biden administration's actions. On October 2, 2024, nearly a year into Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people, the 9th Circuit denied the petition and refused to intervene as a check on abusive executive power. The abdication of judicial responsibility has far reaching consequences: from Gaza to Lebanon, Iran, Syria, Yemen, and beyond, the U.S. has emboldened Israel to further defy international law and raises the risk for more abusive state power and aggression. 

Advocacy Interventions

In the early weeks of the genocide, the Center for Constitutional Rights issued an Emergency Legal Briefing Paper on Israel’s Unfolding Crime of Genocide of the Palestinian People & U.S. Failure to Prevent and Complicity in Genocide. We shared this analysis with national and international stakeholders and urged them to take all measures to stop the crimes, to call for an immediate ceasefire, and to end U.S. military, economic, and diplomatic support of the Israeli government's violations. Stakeholders who received the correspondance and who have a duty to prevent genocide include: Chairs of the House and Senate Foreign Affairs/Relations Committees; the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield; Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court Karim Khan; UN Special Rapporteurs and Working Groups; and Special Advisers Alice Wairimu Nderitu and George Okoth-Obbo of the United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect. See select letters here.

At the October 2023 Human Rights Committee review of the U.S.’s compliance with its obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Center for Constitutional Rights delegation, made up of lawyers and advocates, pivoted its interventions to demand urgent action by the international community to halt the U.S. complicity in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people, insisting that unconditional support for Israel and the dehumanization of Palestinians was a violation of the right to life under Article 1 of the covenant. See Senior Staff Attorney, Diala Shamas, outline to the UN Human Rights Committee the U.S. government’s complicity in the Israeli government’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, and draw connections between this conduct and the oppression faced by Palestinian rights activists in the U.S.

A week later, the Center for Constitutional Rights was invited to join a delegation of Palestinian human rights advocates who had rapidly arranged an urgent meeting with UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk. The advocates demanded that the High Commissioner speak out  against the U.S. and Israeli government’s violations of their international human rights and humanitarian law obligations, and called on him to have the courage to name the Israeli government’s violence against the people of Gaza for what it is –  genocide.  At the UN negotiations on a forthcoming international treaty to regulate corporations the Center for Constitutional Rights delegate was repeatedly interrupted by the chair of the negotiations when he was calling on the U.S. to uphold its international legal obligations to do not aid and abet the Israeli government’s genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza. 

Over the course of the year, we also partnered with the Global Network of Movement Lawyers to call on UN member states in New York to adopt meaningful resolutions for ceasefire during an Emergency Session of the General Assembly, and in September 2024 urged member states to refuse to be present when Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the UN General Assembly in September 2024. Many states did leave the room when he gave his address. 

In Congress we have advanced draft legislation that would prohibit the sale, transfer, and delivery of U.S.-sourced weapons to Israel and advocated for a permanent ceasefire. We have regularly shared reports and documentation detailing how U.S.-sourced weapons are implicated in atrocity crimes by Israeli forces in Gaza, and highlighted how the Biden administration is failing to implement existing U.S. laws by continuing to sell and transfer weapons to Israel amidst an ongoing genocide.

While institutions failed to protect our people, and despite increasing acts of suppression, the movement swelled in support of Palestinian life and freedom. We were proud to host conversations with Palestinian partners, both longtime colleagues and the new comrades who co-created our historic lawsuit against the Biden administration. The power hours we held with Adalah Justice Project and others served to deepen our collective understanding of the current moment and invite audiences into action, whether toward local decision-makers or U.S. embassies around the world. And when our clients took Biden, Blinken, and Austin to court in January and June 2024, a powerful coalition of national and Bay Area artists and organizations, led by Bay Resistance and AROC, leveraged the litigation and continued to build the power of the movement. 

On the Global Day of Action, as we approached one year of genocide, twelve months on from marking 75 years of Israeli occupation, we reaffirmed our commitment to the Palestinian movement for liberation, and to accountability and repair declaring, “There is no statute of limitations for genocide, and we will pursue you until justice comes.”

Resources

• Case page: Defense for Children—Palestine v. Joseph Biden, et al.
• Resource: Profiles of Plaintiffs
• Press Release: U.S. Court Concludes Israel's Assault on Gaza Is Plausible Case of Genocide (Jan 31) 
• Emergency Legal Briefing Paper (PDF): Israel’s Unfolding Crime of Genocide of the Palestinian People & U.S. Failure to Prevent and Complicity in Genocide (October 2023)