What should happen to US citizens accused of committing war crimes while fighting for Israel?

 With the storming of the prison where Israeli troops who were said to have tortured and sexually abused Palestinian detainees and their release, it is clear that Israel cannot and will not hold any standard and hold anyone accountable. However, would the US government hold US citizens accused of war crimes accountable? The answer is provided in the report by the British paper, The Guardian.

Americans in the IDF

An estimated 23,380 US citizens serve in Israel’s armed forces, according to the Washington Post – a figure the IDF did not confirm but probably includes both Americans traveling to Israel for the purpose of service and Israeli-raised soldiers holding dual citizenship.

A spokesperson for the US state department did not answer questions about Settenbrino and referred questions about US obligations regarding its citizens’ actions in Gaza to the justice department. “We do continue to emphasize that the IDF must abide by international humanitarian law,” the spokesperson wrote. The justice department did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

A spokesperson for the IDF declined to comment on Settenbrino specifically, citing privacy concerns, but said in a statement that “the IDF examines events of this kind as well as reports of videos uploaded to social networks and handles them with command and disciplinary measures”. The spokesperson declined to say whether the IDF regulates soldiers’ use of social media but said that it refers cases of suspected criminality to the military police for investigation.

The state department spokesperson was not able to confirm the number of Americans serving in the IDF, as citizens are not required to register their service with the US government.

Settenbrino has been deployed in Gaza since the beginning of the war with the Handasah Kravit, the IDF’s engineering corps. An Eagle scout raised in New Jersey, he moved to Israel as a teenager, becoming one of an estimated 600,000 US citizens who live there. He first joined the Israel dog unit, a civilian group that trains and deploys search-and-rescue dogs, and later enlisted in the IDF.

Last year, he received an “Outstanding Soldier of the Year” award from his division, according to his father, Randy Settenbrino, who has written about his son in op-eds for Israeli and Jewish publications.

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Whether the US would ever prosecute American citizens fighting for Israel is as much a political question as a legal one.

“The US government could prosecute these US citizens if they participate in war crimes,” Oona Hathaway, director of the Center for Global Legal Challenges at Yale Law School, told the Guardian. “Politically, however, that’s unlikely, for all the obvious reasons.”