Portside

Over the past three years, a collective of volunteer researchers, lawyers, and commentators created The Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal, dedicated to holding accountable four weapon manufacturing corporations based in the U.S. Their tribunal amassed copious evidence to prove that Boeing, Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon) and General Atomics (a company which manufactures weaponized drones) are guilty of committing war crimes. On January 15, 2025, as the world marks the birth of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, a press conference will announce the Tribunal’s verdicts and release the report of ten international jurors who have weighed the evidence submitted to them. 

Of necessity, the evidence was culled from examining a limited range of devastatingly criminal U.S. “forever wars,” of brutal and needless wars of choice. The Tribunal focused on   specific U.S. war crimes and crimes against humanity in the invasions, occupations and aerial assaults which followed the “9/11” attacks in 2001.

What if we could enlarge the Tribunal, bringing before it war crimes occurring right now, the U.S.-assisted massacres we watch in real time on our phone and computer screens?

Certainly, one witness we would beg to appear for testimony would be Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who was the director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital when such a place existed. The Tribunal would wish to amplify his testimony on the harrowing weeks of siege during which Israel subjected his hospital to artillery and aerial bombardment. They would help to record his story of witnessing assassinations targeting medical staff, field executions of people clutching white flags in an attempt to surrender, the hospital’s forced evacuation with at-gunpoint humiliation stripping of women and girls. The initial attacks disabled the hospital’s operational capacities by targeting power generators and oxygen production equipment, but now an iconic photo shows Dr. Abu Safiya walking towards an Israeli tank through collapsed buildings and rubble. The Tribunal would like to interview him, but he is being held without charge by Israel’s military. 

Our tribunal would surely turn to three of the world’s most crucial international human rights groups for testimony. 

On December 5, 2024, Amnesty International concluded that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Its research documents how, during its military offensive launched in the wake of the deadly Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on 7 October 2023, “Israel has unleashed hell and destruction on Palestinians in Gaza brazenly, continuously and with total impunity.” 

On December 19, 2024  Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, Doctors Without Borders) stated that “repeated Israeli military attacks on Palestinian civilians over the last 14 months, the dismantling of the healthcare system and other essential infrastructure, the suffocating siege, and the systematic denial of humanitarian assistance are destroying the conditions of life in Gaza.” The report says there are “clear signs of ethnic cleansing” by Israel as it wages war in Gaza.

Also issued on December 19, 2024 was a report from Human Rights Watch, entitled “Extermination and Acts of Genocide,” stating that Israel has killed thousands of Palestinians in Gaza by denying them clean water which it says legally amounts to acts of genocide and extermination. 

Corroborating the testimony of health care workers and human rights advocates in Gaza would be Pope Francis’s January 9, 2025, message to international diplomats. Pope Francis denounced Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza, calling the humanitarian situation in the Palestinian enclave “very serious and shameful.” Pope Francis referenced the deaths of children who froze to death because of Israel’s destruction of infrastructure: “We cannot in any way accept the bombing of civilians. We cannot accept that children are freezing to death because hospitals have been destroyed or a country’s energy network has been hit.”

Screengrab from Al Jazeera

Recommendations made by jurors in the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal call for major weapon makers to pay reparations for suffering caused. They echo the words of Pope Francis, whose message to the assemblage of diplomats made this appeal:  “With the money spent on weapons and other military expenditures, let us establish a global fund that can finally put an end to hunger and favor development in the most impoverished countries, so that their citizens will not resort to violent or illusory solutions, or have to leave their countries in order to seek a more dignified life”.  

Considering such testimony from so many diverse sources, one might expect that U.S. lawmakers would re-evaluate their murderous, unwavering support of Israel. Instead, on January 9th, 2025, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to sanction the International Criminal Court in protest of its arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister.  

Who are the criminals? U.S. news coverage of five former or current presidents gathered for the funeral of President Jimmy Carter never hinted that hideous wars of choice along with massive increases in weapon sales had marked the administration of each of the five. There was no mention of President Biden’s order to send eight billion dollars of weapons to Gaza. This gathering of U.S. presidents is referred to as “The World’s Most Exclusive Club.”  Exclusive indeed. What other club of so few has caused so much suffering to so many?

On April 7, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famously insightful, prophetic speech about another illegal U.S. war of choice – “Beyond Viet Nam: A Time to Break the Silence” – in which Dr. King said:  “Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken: the role of those who make peaceful resolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.” 

Dr. King’s verdict, in this speech, on the momentous first anniversary of which he was taken from us, was that “This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

The four defendants before our Tribunal certainly did their part to pressure these five other criminals toward their varied crimes, but we all have a choice to hold ourselves accountable in the face of Dr. King’s warning that we are approaching spiritual death. One step toward reconciling with wisdom, justice and love would be to demand the release of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya from an Israeli prison so that we could humbly learn from him about war crimes and reparations. 

Kathy Kelly (Kathy.vcnv@gmail.com) is World BEYOND War’s board president and one of three rapporteurs who helped coordinate formation of the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal.

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