Sue Gun Manufacturers Who Enable Palestinian Leadership To Keep Shooting Selves In Foot

by Michael Sfard, attorney

Credit: 102fm via Wikimedia Commons

Tel Aviv, June 24 – American and Israeli citizens have for years pursued cases in the courts against various Arab or Palestinian entities, charging that the latter played a role in the financing or otherwise played a supportive part in terrorist attacks that killed relatives of the plaintiffs. This phenomenon relates to a broader one in which citizens attempt to hold firearms makers liable through the courts for producing or making available the weapons that killed their loved ones. It also offers Palestinians an example of a way forward after decades of their leaders handing the people failure after failure, missed opportunity after missed opportunity. No, I do not refer to holding Palestinian leaders accountable; that ridiculous notion will never get us anywhere. Rather, hold liable the manufacturers of the guns those leaders use to keep shooting themselves and their people in the foot.

The principle already comes into play in numerous lawsuits currently lending in US courts; what remains to be determined is whether the reasoning behind those cases, should the courts allow them to proceed, applies as well to Palestinians shooting themselves in the foot. To the untrained observer, applying only common sense, this appears to be an open-and-shut case: of course the manufacturers have liability. But to those of us versed in the intricacies of jurisprudence and litigation, common sense only seldom has bearing on judicial decisions. Close readings of tort law, of liability statutes, and of constitutional issues often distort what the casual observer believes should result; arguments from counsel further extend this phenomenon, and those outside the legal profession perceive the outcome as a perversion of justice. Specific to our issue, will the courts see manufacturers as contributing to the circumstances in such a manner that, without their activities, Palestinian leaders would remain unable to shoot themselves and their people in the foot?

I, representing various Palestinian and pro-Palestinian groups, intend to argue the affirmative case. Not to accept firearms manufacture culpability in the century-old Palestinian refusal to accept Jewish sovereignty in the ancestral Jewish homeland implies culpability of Palestinians themselves as beings capable of moral decision-making, of human volition, a notion so foreign to the Palestinian and pro-Palestinian ethos that mere consideration of it borders on the inconceivable. An underlying axiom of the Palestinian cause has always held Palestinian guiltlessness as unassailable. All arguments must proceed from that assumption.

Get ready to pay up, gun-makers, whoever you are.

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