For nearly 30 years, a U.S. law, affectionately named the Leahy Law after its author, Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, has required the State Department to block U.S. assistance to foreign security forces responsible for gross violations of human rights. For nearly 30 years, the State Department has arbitrarily and capriciously avoided enforcing the law with respect to one country: it has never found even a single Israeli unit ineligible for aid, despite mountains of evidence documenting horrific abuses by Israeli forces against Palestinians, many of them recorded in the State Department’s own human rights reports. Last month, DAWN, where I serve as executive director, helped file a lawsuit challenging the State Department for failing to do its job, illegally creating an “Israel exception” from the law, to the detriment of millions of Palestinians – indeed also Israelis, Americans, and the entire Middle East — harmed by decades of U.S.-funded Israeli oppression.
The plaintiffs in this lawsuit, Amal Gaza, et al v. Secretary Antony Blinken, et al have a single demand of the State Department: obey the law. These five Palestinian families have suffered terribly at the hands of Israeli units that receive U.S. support. Were the State Department to faithfully and fully enforce the law, it’s likely that not a single Israeli security force would receive a single dollar in U.S. aid. There is strong evidence not only that Israeli abuses, including extrajudicial executions, torture, forced displacement, and deprivations of life, liberty and security, which the law defines as the relevant human rights violations, are widespread and systematic, but that they are taking place under the direct command of the officials in charge of all Israeli security forces – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and (former) Defense Minister Yoav Gallant – effectively tainting all Israeli units. The State and Defense Departments have previously withheld aid from entire units in other countries where they found commanders were responsible for the abuses.
Given their extensive dependence on American military support, the ability of Israeli forces to continue their abuses would be severely constrained without U.S. aid. Withholding aid would also incentivize them to stop carrying out abuses. The power to lift these restrictions would be in Israel’s hands. Units would become eligible to receive assistance if the Israeli government took effective steps to bring to justice those responsible for the abuses. This is exactly what Congress intended when it passed the Leahy Law: to ensure Americans are not funding abuses by foreign forces and to incentivize the countries they aid to uphold standards of human rights and justice.
The State Department abides by the law when it comes to other foreign countries, denying support to thousands of abusive foreign security forces every year. For Israel, however, the State Department created a parallel, Kafakaesque bureaucratic process to review abuses by Israeli forces, making it nearly impossible to sanction an Israeli unit, no matter how damning the evidence.
We know this not just because of the State Department’s deliberate failure to designate a single unit, but because two of the most senior (now former) State Department officials who oversaw vetting of Israeli forces: Charles Blaha and Josh Paul know about it firsthand, and are leading our lawsuit efforts. Even Tim Rieser, who served for decades as Senator Patrick Leahy’s foreign policy adviser and led the drafting of the Leahy Law, agrees, denouncing the “Israel exception” the State Department has effectively created.
If the State Department had followed the normal procedures, to give just one example, by all accounts it should have halted assistance to an extremist IDF unit, the Netzah Yehuda Battalion. Among its various documented crimes, the unit was responsible for the reckless death of Omar Assad, a 78-year-old U.S. citizen, whom its soldiers beat and left outside, bound and gagged, on a cold January night in 2022, where he died of a stress-induced heart attack. Instead, Secretary Antony Blinken personally intervened earlier this year to ensure the unit faced no sanction. To do so, he created a new, “Israel-only” rule clearing Israeli units to continue receiving U.S. aid with a self-declared “roadmap to remediation.” The result: a foreign security force unit that even the State Department recognizes was responsible for the death of a U.S. citizen and never held accountable for it continues to receive U.S. taxpayer-funded assistance.
Israeli security force abuses have reached particularly horrific levels over the past year, as documented by international judicial bodies, such as the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, and the world’s leading human rights institutions, international humanitarian organizations, and credible independent media organizations. In Gaza, over the past year alone, investigations by groups including civil society organizations and U.N. organs have provided evidence of Israeli forces committing some of the worst human rights crimes known to mankind, including genocide; deprivation of items essential to human survival, such as food, water, fuel, and medicine; the forced displacement of nearly 2 million; arbitrary imprisonment of tens of thousands; torture and rape of detainees; and hundreds of deliberate murders of journalists, aid workers, and doctors.
For any other country in the world, any one of these abuses could have resulted in immediate disqualification from U.S. assistance of the security force units involved. For Israel, however, the State Department is ignoring this evidence, claiming that no Israeli security forces, not even during the shocking crimes in Gaza over the past year, have ever committed any unremediated gross human rights violations requiring it to withhold aid. It has instead doubled down to shield Israel with impunity, while dramatically increasing its military assistance over the past year to $17.9 billion.
Courts are typically reluctant to intervene in foreign policy matters, rejecting lawsuits that question U.S. policies abroad as a “political question” outside the purview of the judiciary. The Leahy Law, however, dictates the strict, non-waivable requirements for disbursing U.S. taxpayer funds, beyond the scope of a discretionary, political determination. The failure of successive administrations to abide by the law – only with respect to Israel – has harmed far more than the millions of Palestinians subjected to decades of U.S.-funded Israeli crimes. It has undermined the rule of law and disrupted the balance of powers in our own government, eroding the authority of Congress to decide how and where the executive branch allocates U.S. taxpayer funds.
No one can dispute the merits of the Leahy Law, designed to avoid entangling our country in aiding and abetting foreign regimes committing heinous abuses. No one, especially not a foreign country committing horrendous abuses, should be above the laws of the United States. The State Department’s selective enforcement of the Leahy Law is an abuse of power, and we call on the judiciary to remedy it.