2/23/2015
snip* MICHAEL RATNER, PRESIDENT EMERITUS, CENTER FOR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS: It's good to be with you, Sharmini, and good to be with The Real News.
PERIES: So, Michael, explain to us this case against the PLO and the PA in the United States.
RATNER: It's a really important case, unfortunately. And, of course, it's broadened what I consider to be the power behind the colonial power of Israel. And so its courts are quite favorable to Israel. Imagine bringing a case for damages against the African National Congress in South Africa during apartheid. Imagine bringing a case against the liberation movement of Algeria in Paris during the war for liberation of Algeria. Well, that's the equivalent of what you have in bringing a case against the Palestinian Authority, which is what this case is against, in the courts of the United States.
And what the case is about is a series of killings that took place 2002 to 2007. Approximately seven of them, seven incidents, in which 33 people were killed and scores were injured, and the Palestinians, Palestinian Authority, is being sued by the victims and survivors of those killings.
The case has been pending for a dozen years. It's been going up and down on various legal issues, some of which I'll mention. But it finally is coming to trial. And we should do this with the understanding that this is one of many cases in which Palestinians find themselves either sued, or in which people go after them, or in which their efforts to get justice--or, for example, the thousands killed in Gaza or the hundreds of thousands illegally moved into the occupied territories--their efforts to get justice against those causes come to complete failure in the courts. What you have is a worldwide justice system, so far, at least particularly in the United States and in Israel, that basically gives a blank check to whatever Israel wants to do against the Palestinians and whatever Israel wants to do in the courts, or its allies against the Palestinians.
Back to this case. It's pending a couple of miles from my house in what's called the Southern District of New York. It's the federal court in New York. It was initiated by an NGO in Israel called Shurat HaDin, which is essentially, in my view, opinion, a propaganda arm for Zionism, and particularly for Israel, and brings these cases all over the place, without necessarily expectations of winning, although in this case we'll see what happens.
The case claims that the Palestinian Authority, which is the Palestinian state, was behind the series of attacks in 2000 to 2007. They sued for--they are being sued, the Palestinian Authority, for $1 billion, and they're being sued under a special law, the 1991 Antiterrorism Act, that allows people who are citizens of the United States to sue for acts of international terrorism against U.S. citizens outside the United States. You can say that one of the primary reasons that law was passed was so that people, Israelis and U.S. citizens living in Israel who were killed in the ongoing wars in Israel, could somehow sue the Palestinians or the Palestinian state. And that's exactly what happened here.
Prior to the trial starting, which has been going on now for more than a month, the Palestinian Authority claimed that there was no jurisdiction in the U.S. court to try it. They said, how can you do this? It all happened overseas. The Palestinian Authority is in Ramallah. We don't have offices of any sort in the United States. To the extent we have a UN office, that doesn't count for jurisdiction. But, of course, as you would expect in a U.S. court, the Palestinian Authority lost on that issue.
The second and more important issue--again showing the bias and prejudice of our courts--that the Palestinian Authority raised was immunity. Let me give you an example. If I go sue Haiti, if I go sue France in the United States, they immediately say, we're a state, and we're immune from lawsuits in the United States, because states are immune under a law in the United States called the immunities act, the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.
On the other hand, look at what happened here. The Palestinian Authority is sued, and, of course, 134 countries out of 193 consider Palestine to be a state. It's been recognized by the UN to be a state. It signs international agreements as a state, including the International Criminal Court agreement as a state. And yet the United States courts refuse to apply the immunity law, saying Palestine Authority, the Palestinian state, cannot be sued.
And so they went to court, the Palestinian Authority, saying, you can't sue us. Of course what happened: the court said, you aren't really a state under our--in the United States's eyes, and therefore you're allowed to be sued in a U.S. court. Of course, the president could come in, the State Department, and say, we would like Palestinian Authority, the Palestinian state, given immunity, but the president hasn't done that.
So the case is now at the trial stage. The plaintiffs in the case, who were the victims and survivors, are claiming that the Palestinian state, the Palestinian Authority, is responsible for these killings, responsible because it was the policy of the Palestinian Authority to carry these out or it was the standard operating procedure to carry them out. The defense is saying, with these acts, we don't think these acts are great. We don't like them. We condemn the acts of killing civilians. But it wasn't the Palestinian Authority or Palestinian state that did them. We're not defending them, but you can't hold the Palestinian Authority responsible.
And how is the other plate is going to sue their--going to improve their case? Well, when there was an invasion, one of the Israeli invasions into the West Bank, they went into Ramallah, the capital of the West Bank, capital of Palestine, and they took hundreds of thousands of documents. And the plaintiffs claim those documents prove that the Palestinian Authority is behind these killings. In fact, when Human Rights Watch examined those documents, they said there was not proof in those documents that could say that the Palestinian Authority was responsible for what happened to the victims and their survivors. So I think the proof is going to be very, very thin. It's going to be a real stretch for the plaintiffs to connect this case to the higher-ups in the Palestinian Authority.
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