US Bears Direct Responsibility for Israel’s Hideous Brutality and Oppression

Rasa - Since it began in 1962, American military aid to Israel has amounted to nearly $100 billion. For the past decades the United States has been transferring aid of about $3 billion annually.

News ID: 423522

Date: 13 September 2016 - 23:47

RNA - Under a new arrangement, however, Israel will be receiving some $38 billion in US military aid over the next decade. It's the biggest US military aid in history. And it comes as Israel continues to aggressively expand illegal settlements of the West Bank and slaughter civilians in Gaza. All of this means that the United States government bears direct responsibility for the hideous brutality and oppression imposed by Israel on Palestinians through decades of terror and occupation.

What’s perhaps most shocking of all is how little attention or debate any of this receives at the United Nations. Here, the world body endlessly pays lip service to how Palestinians are suffering under Israeli occupation while the US government prepares to transfer more and more billions of military aid to Israel. The US does so even as Israel pursues with more aggression than ever the very policies Washington claims to find so objectionable and destructive: Israel systematically undermining the prospects for a two-state solution by continuing to expand illegal settlements.

As is, the United States government is in many ways deeply complicit in Israeli war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. This complicity comes mainly through military and financial aid, which is the bread and butter of their unholy alliance; corporations, as the military aid is also a boon to the Military-Industrial Complex; and diplomatic support, which enables Israeli attacks across occupied Palestine by shielding it in diplomatic forums, including at the UN Security Council.

Still, there is irrefutable evidence that Israeli leaders and commanders have committed the following war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity as defined in the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court. What's more, US military aid has aided, abetted and assisted the commission of these crimes by providing Israel with the military means to commit them:

-Wilful killing of Palestinians using American-made weaponry.

-Wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health: more than 2,100 Palestinians were killed and nearly 10,000 wounded in the last Gaza war.

-Unlawful and wanton, extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity: tens of thousands of Palestinians have lost their homes in the West Bank.

-Wilfully depriving Palestinian prisoners the rights of fair and regular trial.

-Intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population, civilian objects, or humanitarian vehicles, installations and personnel – even UN aid agencies in Gaza.

-Intentionally launching attacks with knowledge they will cause incidental loss of life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or long-term severe damage to the natural environment.

-Attacking or bombarding undefended towns, villages, dwellings and buildings, or intentionally attacking religious, educational and medical buildings.

-The crime of apartheid: inhumane acts committed in the context of an institutional regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another racial group.

-Collective punishment, a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which constitutes a war crime.

Considering the above, war crimes and genocide charges could and must be brought under the Genocide Convention, to which both Israel and the United States are parties. That convention also punishes complicity in genocide; US leaders’ decision to provision more military aid constitutes complicity.

Although Israeli and US leaders continue to claim that Tel Aviv only acts in self defence, the weight of world opinion and legal cases points in the opposite direction. There is overwhelming opposition to Israeli aggression in occupied Palestine and calls for justice and accountability. Both Israeli and US leaders must be criminally prosecuted for committing, aiding and abetting these crimes. There is no other way to bring justice to Palestine.

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