...On Nov. 13, the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a lawsuit against President Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III for complicity with genocide. The lawsuit was filed in federal court in San Francisco on behalf of Palestinian individuals and organizations. It requests that the defendants stop “providing further arms, money, and diplomatic support to Israel on grounds that there is an unfolding genocide by the State of Israel against the civilian population of Gaza and the U.S. officials have a legal duty to prevent, and not further, this most serious of crimes,” according to the center.

The submission to the court includes an expert declaration by three leading Holocaust and genocide studies scholars: Victoria Sanford, Barry Trachtenberg and John Cox. Sanford has written extensively on genocide and state violence in Latin America, especially in the case of Guatemala. Trachtenberg and Cox have published widely on the Holocaust. They stress in their report that the “levels of destruction and killings in just over one month, together with the annihilatory language expressed by Israeli state leaders and senior army officers, point not to targeting of individual Hamas militants or Hamas military targets, but to the unleashing of deadly violence against Palestinians in Gaza ‘as such,’ in the language of the UN Genocide Convention.” ...

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