By Charlotte Silver: A group of US citizens and Palestinian nationals is suing Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and key members of US President Donald Trump’s
administration for perpetrating and enabling war crimes.
Their lawsuit, filed in federal court in
Washington, DC, on Wednesday, alleges a money laundering scheme that involves
the US defendants raising charitable donations to send to Israeli government
leaders.
Based on the Anti-Terrorism
Act and the Alien Torts
Statute, the complaint alleges that the Israeli officials use the
money to fund settlements and violent extremism in the occupied West Bank,
which the complaint identifies as “international terrorism.”
It comes as Netanyahu vowed
that Israel would soon build an entirely new settlement in the occupied West
Bank. Since Trump took office last month, Israel has announced plans for 6,000
additional settler housing units.
Israel’s current and former defense
ministers Avigdor
Lieberman and Ehud Barak are named as
defendants, as is former foreign minister Tzipi Livni, who recently evaded a war
crimes summons from Belgian prosecutors.
The lawsuit also names the family
foundation of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and now his adviser
on the Middle East and Israel.
Other defendants are David
Friedman and his charity, American Friends of Beit El Yeshiva
Center. Friedman, Trump’s ambassador-designate to Israel, is a major fundraiser
for Israeli settlements.
Pandering to Christian Zionist leaders
The lawsuit aims to use anti-terrorism
statutes and laws governing tax-deductible charities to hold accountable those
sending huge sums to fund Israeli colonization.
It was filed just one day before Trump told a group
of religious leaders that he would “totally destroy” the amendment
to the US tax code that prohibits tax-exempt organizations, including churches,
from engaging in direct political activity to influence elections.
Trump made the
repeal of the Johnson Amendment a tenet of the Republican Party
platform during his presidential campaign, drawing the
support of right-wing Christian Zionist leaders, including John Hagee, head of Christians
United for Israel.
Hagee is a defendant in another pending
lawsuit filed last year over the funding of settlements and
occupation.
Real-estate fraud
The several dozen plaintiffs include
residents of the US, the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. They say they have
been directly injured by the alleged war crimes enabled by the defendants.
For example, Palestinian Americans Linda
Kateeb and Ali Ali claim to have lost from $2 to $3 million worth of real
estate in the occupied West Bank due settlement activity the complaint
describes as real-estate fraud.
According to the lawsuit, tax-exempt
organizations currently raise $2 billion dollars to fund Israeli colonization
of the occupied West Bank.
“Courtesy of the $2 billion in laundered
funds that they receive every year, Israeli-based beneficiaries are able to
inflict wholesale violence on their Palestinian neighbors and steal more of
their real property,” the complaint alleges.
While Jared Kushner was a director of the
Kushner Family Foundation, the group sent
nearly $60,000 to West Bank settlements between 2011 and 2013 and more than
$315,000 to Friends of the IDF, a group the Israeli newspaper Haaretz describes
as “the army’s US fundraising arm.”
The foundation sent a small amount to the Yitzhar settlement, home
to some of the most violent settlers in the West Bank.
Yitzhar’s rabbi, Yosef Elitzur,
has advocated for settlers to commit so-called “price tag” attacks on
Palestinians and co-authored
a book justifying the killing of non-Jewish babies.
Until recently, Kushner also sat on the board of the
New York-based Friends of
the IDF, which holds gala fundraisers to support Israeli soldiers.
On 25 January, The Forward
reported that Kushner’s name was removed from the website.
David Friedman’s Americans Friends of Beit
El Yeshiva Center raises about
$2 million a year that mostly goes to the Beit El settlement, near
Ramallah.
The seventh defendant is the accounting
firm Billet, Feit, & Prince, P.C., which the complaint claims knowingly
concealed the nature of the charities on documents filed with the US Internal
Revenue Service, therefore committing tax fraud.
Follow the money
The complaint was prepared by attorney Martin
McMahon, who has filed three other lawsuits that are currently
before the courts, targeting the stream of funding from the US to Israeli
colonialism.
“They’re designed to cut off the money
that’s going to the settlements,” McMahon told The Electronic Intifada. “If you
cut off the money going to the settlements, they’re dead.”
One of his lawsuits already accuses
American Friends of Beit El Yeshiva Center along with other individuals and
companies of profiting from Israel’s settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Another charges
the US Treasury
Department with failing to enforce the laws on charitable
contributions.
“Our tax code is being abused, and the
Treasury is not doing its job,” McMahon said.
The latest lawsuit argues that for the last
20 years, settlements in the occupied West Bank have been fueled by the
“personal agenda” of the defendants, in contravention to Israel’s sovereign
interests.
“When financing, encouraging, or engaging
in acts of international terrorism the Israeli defendants were not implementing
Israeli official government policies but pursuing their own personal agenda,”
the complaint states.
Like previous
attempts to invoke US laws in favor of Palestinians, this lawsuit
must argue that the settlement activity and violence is distinct from state
violence.
“I don’t want Netanyahu or the Ministry of
Defense to claim immunity,” McMahon explained, citing past cases in which
lawsuits against Israeli military commanders have been thrown out on the
grounds that they were acting as agents of the state.
“All defendants have been violating US and
Israeli criminal statutes for at least twenty years,” the complaint claims, “by
engaging in money laundering … and funding settlement expansion, arms
trafficking, ethnic cleansing and genocide.”
Controversial law
The complaint invokes, but is not based on,
the recently passed Justice
Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), which allows victims to
sue state actors for knowingly contributing material support to people or
organizations “that pose a significant risk of committing acts of terror.”
Until now another law, the Foreign
Sovereign Immunities Act has protected states and their agents from
civil claims in US courts. This law has repeatedly shielded Israeli leaders.
The Senate unanimously passed the
controversial JASTA statute last May, with the specific intention of allowing
families of victims of the 9/11 attacks to seek damages from the state they
believe bore responsibility: Saudi Arabia.
The Saudis reportedly lobbied heavily
against the bill. President Barack Obama vetoed the bill, only to see Congress override
his veto for the first and only time during his eight-year presidency.
The bill was strongly supported
by Senator Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump’s nominee for attorney-general.
While arguing against the bill, Obama warned
it “threatens to create complications in our relationships with even our
closest partners.”
McMahon intends to use it to do just that.
The lawsuit argues that by funding
belligerent settlements and the Israeli army through Netanyahu and Israel’s
defense ministers, Kushner, Friedman and other donors are violating JASTA.
Past attempts to claim Israeli leaders and
military officials violate the Anti-Terrorism Act have failed
to overcome the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, while US courts have accepted
numerous lawsuits against Palestinian groups.
This lawsuit stops short of accusing
President Trump, but suggests he could be found to be violating federal
criminal statutes if his tax returns are released.
No comments:
Post a Comment