Biden Urged to Re-examine Israel Support After Lawsuit Dismissed

A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit by Palestinian Americans who sought to force the White House to withdraw support for Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, as was widely expected based on constitutional precedent that only the political branches of U.S. government could determine foreign policy.

But, unexpectedly, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White indicated that he would have preferred to have issued the injunction were he not limited by the Constitution, and he implored the Biden administration to “examine the results of their unflagging support” of Israel.

The determination came five days after a hearing in Oakland, Calif., in which Judge White allowed the head of a humanitarian group, a medical intern and three Palestinian Americans with relatives in Gaza to tell the court that their loved ones were being slaughtered. They alleged that the U.S. government has underwritten a genocide by backing Israel’s military response to the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas.

“President Biden could, with one phone call, put an end to this,” Laila el-Haddad, a Palestinian activist and author living in Maryland, told the judge. She said that Israeli attacks had killed at least 88 members of her extended family in Gaza. “My family is being killed on my dime.”

Judge White, who last week had called the testimony “gut-wrenching,” wrote that the evidence and testimony “indicate that the ongoing military siege in Gaza is intended to eradicate a whole people.”

But, he added, “there are rare cases in which the preferred outcome is inaccessible to the court.”

This, he wrote, was such a case: “It is every individual’s obligation to confront the current siege in Gaza, but it is also this Court’s obligation to remain within the metes and bounds of its jurisdictional scope.”