Why the Supreme Court Should Hear the Victims’ Case against the PLO

Today the Supreme Court decides which cases it will hear in the upcoming session; among the petitioners are a group of American citizens whose family members were murdered in Israel during the second intifada. A federal court had ordered the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Palestinian Authority (PA) to pay the plaintiffs $655.5 million, but a court of appeals then threw out the verdict on the grounds that foreign organizations could not be tried in American courts for crimes committed abroad. Yishai Schwartz argues that this latter decision is wrong, and that the Supreme Court should restore the ruling against the PLO and PA. (Free registration may be required.)

The decision [to reject the original verdict] rests on an old and venerable constitutional doctrine: “personal jurisdiction.” For hundreds of years, this doctrine has limited American state courts, confining their authority only to those present in a particular state or who have consented to be sued there. It is this sensible principle that prevents one state’s courts from encroaching onto its neighbor’s turf. In Sokolow v. PLO, [as this case is generally known], the appeals court applied the same principle to a foreign defendant in federal court. Personal jurisdiction, the court ruled, limits transnational cases in precisely the same way it limits interstate disputes. . . .

The ruling flies in the face of congressional will. After all, the law that permitted this lawsuit, the [1992] Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA), is unusual. Whereas most of America’s laws govern conduct within America, the ATA is different. . . . Its text specifically authorizes Americans to sue foreigners for acts of “international terrorism” occurring outside the United States and instructs courts not to dismiss suits simply because their location inconveniences defendants [as was done in Sokolow by] the appeals court, which held that the Constitution, through the doctrine of personal jurisdiction, protects the PLO’s fundamental right not to be sued from afar.

That decision gets the Constitution wrong. . . . [The doctrine of] personal jurisdiction has no place restricting the federal government’s interactions with foreign powers. The U.S. Constitution is about ensuring domestic tranquility, not guaranteeing fair treatment to foreign peoples. It protects, [for instance], New York’s sovereignty from Virginia. It was never intended to protect Palestinian sovereignty from the United States. . . . [Therefore], the Supreme Court should decide to hear the case, and restore the hard-fought judgment won by the victims of terror.

Read more at Haaretz

More about: American law, Palestinian terror, Politics & Current Affairs, Second Intifada, Supreme Court

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF