A Washington-based lawyer filed a lawsuit Tuesday on behalf of a group of Palestinians and United States nationals, against U.S. President Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. Ambassador David Friedman, White House advisor Jared Kushner, and others for their involvement in the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians.
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The plaintiffs launched the action against these defendants for "aiding and abetting the denationalization of the Palestinian people, the installation of an apartheid regime in the OPT [Occupied Palestinian Territories], and securing awards of declaratory relief that the Israeli citizen known as Mr. Netanyahu is a war criminal and the issue of the land transfer component of defendant Kushner's peace plan should be referred to the United Nations general assembly," the complaint read.
The defendants cited above used all the levers of power in the federal government, state government, as well as groups like AIPAC to suppress criticism of Israel's regime and the way it treats Palestinians. Due to this, attorney Martin F. McMahon said in the lawsuit, that there is a whole strategy to deprive the Palestinian people of all their fundamental rights.
"If AIPAC were active during the colonial days," McMahon wrote, "patriot Tom Payne would have been hanged for advocating independence for the colonies."
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McMahon also recalled that people in the U.S. would not find the actions of the Israeli regime too "alien" from those of the U.S. empire, which practiced analogous treatments towards the country's first populations and slaves brought from Africa.
"The indigenous American Indian population and the African slaves brought to America have been victimized by these identical war crimes [the concepts relied upon by the plaintiffs]," the attorney said.
"Each group has been subject to ethnic cleansing, genocide, expropriation of private property, confinement to reservations and ghettos, wholesale denial of their fundamental freedoms, subjected to a biased criminal justice system, and deemed to be irrelevant and disenfranchised members of American society."
McMahon has significant experience with similar cases as he previously sued other foreign governments and entities in federal court. In 2019, the lawyer brought a US$1 billion suit against Israeli settlers and their U.S. backers to the D.C. District Court. Earlier this month, he filed a lawsuit against Libyan military commander Khalifa Haftar on behalf of families killed by Haftar's militias.