Marta Toren (ca.1948

Ann Miller, ca. 1948. Photo by Nat Dallinger.

Two P-51 Mustangs overflying USS Texas (BB-35) ca 1948

Agnès Varda on the sailboat Quand Même, photographer unknown, September, 1948. Estate of Agnès Varda / Rosalie Varda Collection via The New Yorker

Agnes Varda ~ Valentine Schlegel and Mr. Mestres on the deck of a sailboat, ca. 1949.  Institut pour la Photographie des Hauts-de-France | src Rencontres Arles

Yasuhiro Ishimoto • Young girl with candy cigarettes, ca. 1948

Children playing war, Volgograd (Stalingrad), Russia, ca. 1948 - by Grigory Dubinsky (1917 - 1988), Russian

/ Cas Oorthuys, Antwerp Harbour, 1948

Perriere House (1948) in Malibu, CA, USA, by Griswold Raetze. Photo by Julius Shulman.

Walking

Saul Leiter, ca. 1948

Irving R. Wiles (American, 1861-1948)

Russian Tea, ca. 1896

January 31, 2024, Oakland, CA – After a federal court heard arguments and testimony in the case Defense for Children International – Palestine v. Biden on Friday, January 26, charging the Biden administration with failing in its duty to prevent, and otherwise aiding and abetting, the unfolding genocide in Gaza, a federal judge found that Israel is plausibly engaging in genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza and that the United States is providing “unflagging support” for the massive attacks on Palestinian civilians in contravention of international law. The court’s decision follows a historic ruling by the International Court of Justice last Friday, which also found the Israeli government was plausibly engaged in a genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza, and which issued a series of emergency measures Israel must take to end its genocidal campaign.

The U.S. court based its assessment on the “uncontroverted” live testimony of seven Palestinian witnesses, including one from Gaza and one from Ramallah, who testified firsthand to Israel’s killing of their nieces, cousins, aunts, uncles, elders, and members of their community, to the mass displacement of their families reminiscent of the 1948 Nakba, and to the devastating conditions of life in their homeland as the siege leads to mass starvation. The court also relied on the expert opinion of genocide and Holocaust scholars who confirmed that Israel’s military assault and totalizing humanitarian destruction bears the hallmarks of a genocide based on legal and historical precedent. Nevertheless, the court reluctantly dismissed the case on jurisdictional grounds. While the court recognized that the prohibitions on genocide are fundamental and binding international law, this was a “rare” instance where “the preferred outcome is inaccessible to the Court” and it found it lacked power to resolve the case because it implicated executive decision-making in the area of foreign policy.

Delivering a historic rebuke of Israel and the United States for its flouting of the Genocide Convention, the court wrote:

Both the uncontroverted testimony of the Plaintiffs and the expert opinion proffered at the hearing on these motions as well as statements made by various officers of the Israeli government indicate that the ongoing military siege in Gaza is intended to eradicate a whole people and therefore plausibly falls within the international prohibition against genocide.

The court recognized the substantial role of the United States in furthering the genocide and noted that “as the ICJ has found, it is plausible that Israel’s conduct amounts to genocide” and, therefore, the “Court implores Defendants to examine the results of their unflagging support of the military siege against the Palestinians in Gaza.”

The court stated, “It is every individual’s obligation to confront the current siege in Gaza.”

Marlon Brando, New York, ca 1948