Joe Biden is being taken to court for ‘complicity’ in Palestinian genocide

While Israel faces allegations of genocide and war crimes in The Hague for its devastation of Gaza, attorneys for President Joe Biden’s administration are defending him in a federal courtroom in Oakland, California.

A group of Palestinians and civil rights groups are suing the president for his alleged failure to prevent genocide in Gaza, citing violation of international and federal law, and are asking a judge to halt any additional military aid or diplomatic support to Israel.

After several weeks of court filings between parties, the plaintiffs will have their day in court on 26 January, when attorneys with the US Department of Justice will argue in front of a federal judge for a hearing that marks the first time that a president has faced allegations of genocide in an American courthouse. The Biden administration is asking the court to dismiss the case.

The lawsuit, which also names Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, invokes US obligations to the Genocide Convention and the Genocide Convention Implementation Act, which was signed into law by then-President Ronald Reagan in 1988. It was ushered through Congress by a US senator from Delaware named Joe Biden.

“I am certainly not aware of another sitting US president who has had charges of complicity in genocide brought against him in federal court, or against his senior cabinet members – a testament in and of itself to the gravity of the US’s significant role in this genocide, the crime of crimes,” Sadaf Doost, a Berth Justice fellow with the Center for Constitutional Rights, told The Independent.

The Center for Constitutional Rights filed the lawsuit in November on behalf of Dr Omar Al-Najjar, a physician at Nasser Medical Complex in