Landmark Lawsuits Filed in U.S. Courts Against Israeli Officials

[Tom Joad]

http://wrmea.com/archives/March_2006/0603021.html

By Noura Erakat

DECEMBER 2005 marked the filing of two claims on behalf of Palestinian human rights in U.S. federal courts. On Dec. 8 the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a civil and human rights litigation organization, along with the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) in Gaza, served Avi Dichter, the former head of Israel’s General Security Services, with papers to appear in court. The complaint filed against Dichter alleges that he provided the intelligence necessary, and the final approval, to drop a one-ton bomb on the residential area of Al-Daraj in Gaza just before midnight on July 22, 2002, killing 15 people, including 8 children, and injuring 150 others.

On Dec. 15 CCR, along with several other U.S.-based human rights attorneys, served Moshe Ya’alon, former head of Israel’s Intelligence Branch and former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces. The class action lawsuit charges Ya’alon with war crimes, extrajudicial killing, crimes against humanity, and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment for his role in the 1996 shelling of a United Nations compound in Qana, in the south of Lebanon.

The lawsuits against Dichter and Ya’alon are not the first attempts to sue Israeli officers in U.S. courts for the violation of Palestinian human rights. In July 2002, New York-based attorney Stanley Cohen filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of 23 Palestinian Americans against U.S weapons manufactures, Israeli officials and U.S. government officials. (See Sept./Oct. 2002 Washington Report, p. 20.) Unlike that case, which targeted Israeli and U.S. officials protected by diplomatic immunity, the recent lawsuits against Dichter and Ya’alon do not face the same challenge. Neither defendant any longer represents the Israeli government or military—both are retired from the latter and are now working as policy fellows in U.S.-based think tanks. Therefore, they no longer enjoy diplomatic immunity.

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http://wrmea.com/archives/March_2006/0603021.html
The author is
Noura Erakat is a Palestinian-American legal activist. She is the national grassroots organizer and legal advocate for the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, where she is developing a Palestinian Human Rights Litigation Project.