President Donald Trump and top White House adviser Jared Kushner have been named as defendants in a lawsuit filed this week in a federal court, that accuses the two — along with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, and U.S. Ambassador David Friedman — for being involved in the “denationalization and dehumanization of the Palestinian population” in the Israeli occupied territories, according to Common Dreams:
“The 175-page suit (pdf), filed on behalf of a group of Palestinians and Americans, claims that the actions of the defendants, most of whom are U.S. and Israeli officials, ‘have aided and abetted the commission of numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity.’
“Attorney Martin F. McMahon in the lawsuit describes a long strategy to disenfranchise the Palestinian people by using the levers of power in the federal government, state governments like New York, and groups like AIPAC to deaden criticism of the Israeli regime’s treatment of the Palestinian people.
“‘If AIPAC was active during the colonial days,’ writes McMahon, ‘patriot Tom Payne would have been hanged for advocating independence for the colonies.”
The lawsuit also suggests that the actions of the U.S. government regarding Israel and Palestine are part of a larger American quest for empire at any price that stretches back to the earliest days American history:
“The indigenous American Indian population and the African slaves brought to America have been victimized by these identical war crimes. 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 filed other lawsuits against governments and government officials in the past. Just last year he filed a massive $1 billion suit against Israeli settlers and their backers in the United States.
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