A federal judge dismisses a suit to block U.S. support of Israel — but urges Biden to re-examine his approach.
A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit by Palestinian Americans who sought to force the White House to withdraw support for Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, as was widely expected based on constitutional precedent that only the political branches of U.S. government could determine foreign policy.
The determination came five days after a hearing in Oakland, Calif., in which Judge White allowed the head of a humanitarian group, a medical intern and three Palestinian Americans with relatives in Gaza to tell the court that their loved ones were being slaughtered. They alleged that the U.S. government has underwritten a genocide by backing Israel’s military response to the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas.
“President Biden could, with one phone call, put an end to this,” Laila el-Haddad, a Palestinian activist and author living in Maryland, told the judge. She said that Israeli attacks had killed at least 88 members of her extended family in Gaza. “My family is being killed on my dime.”
Judge White, who last week had called the testimony “gut-wrenching,” wrote that the evidence and testimony “indicate that the ongoing military siege in Gaza is intended to eradicate a whole people.”
But, he added, “there are rare cases in which the preferred outcome is inaccessible to the court.”
This, he wrote, was such a case: “It is every individual’s obligation to confront the current siege in Gaza, but it is also this Court’s obligation to remain within the metes and bounds of its jurisdictional scope.”
Legal precedent limits judicial power over U.S. presidents on foreign policy decisions, and lawyers for the government had argued that, regardless of the testimony about Gaza, the White House and Congress have the constitutional prerogative to set policy on Israel.
However, in a remarkable aside, Judge White, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, urged President Biden to rethink U.S. policy on the military siege, writing that “it is plausible that Israel’s conduct amounts to genocide.”
Lawyers for the plaintiffs said they would contest the decision, but were heartened by the judge’s comments.
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