The October 7th attack on Israel may have been Israel’s 9/11 but it was also a defining moment in American politics. As Israel unleashed its genocidal response, which has now destroyed almost all of Gaza, left 2.3 million homeless and snuffed out at least 40,000 lives, Americans had a choice to make. Instead of locating their moral center and preventing a barbarous human rights abuse, America sided with an ongoing, historical injustice and — as usual — against the rule of law.
But the culture of impunity that shields Israel is the same that shields our own politicians from accountability and justifies almost every injustice in this country. Our culture of impunity exists because we have always worshipped at the altar of raw power instead of true democracy.
The particular intensity of the cruelty and the barbarity of hounding 2.3 million people from one place to another, then bombing them, using crude AI models to target 100 civilians for every suspected Hamas commander, and the use of massive American munitions — all made a lie of Israel’s claims of “surgical” strikes against terrorists.
Israel’s genocidal violence, accompanied by numerous Israeli public and political expressions of genocidal intent, finally got to some Americans. Many for the first time — including a large proportion of young American Jews — began to examine the sickness and inconsistency of our foreign policy and to connect these with the sickness of our domestic institutions that rhyme so well with it.
The disproportionate Israeli Blitzkrieg on Gaza was a waterboarder’s bucket of ice-water to the face that reminded us of empire’s cruelty — not just Israel’s but our own. A handful of “terrorists” had managed to kill and kidnap hundreds of Israelis — and that led to Israel’s slaughter of dozens or possibly hundreds more of their own citizens, as the Israeli media itself has reported. The documented number of Palestinian dead is now over 40,000 as I write this, but the British medical journal Lancet estimates the number could be as high as 186,000 — 8% of the entire Gaza population.
For decades Israel’s theft of Palestinian land and pogroms against Palestinians have proceeded with the collusion of settlers, politicians, the Israeli public, the Israeli military, and the US foreign policy establishment. The barbarity of Israel’s war on Gaza is nothing new.
With revelations that prisoners of war and even civilians face summary execution (which also occurred during the 1948 Nakba) as well as torture, murder and rape in detention, Israel’s claims ring hollow that it has the “most moral army in the world.” Thousands of social media posts by IDF soldiers have documented Israel’s many war crimes, from looting to heinous crimes against humanity. I sincerely hope these are being collected as evidence in a future war crimes trial.
We are told that Israel “has a right to defend itself” and that any response to “terrorism” is justified. But what of the terror of 1948 that created Israel? And if we are discussing terrorism we should not forget that no one does terrorism as well as a state with an air force, nuclear weapons, and unlimited munitions from a friendly imperialist benefactor. If Hamas is a terrorist organization after killing 1,000 people and destroying a few kibbutzim and military posts, then what is a nation that slaughtered forty times that number, terrorized and destroyed an entire enclave?
There’s no other word for it. Israel is a terrorist state.
After international institutions like the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and the International Court of Justice condemned Israel’s war crimes, and the ICJ ruled that charges of genocide leveled by South Africa at Israel were credible, the United States and its Western imperial partners showed their contempt for the so-called “rules-based order” — the thin veneer of “civilization” they hide behind when not providing arms and diplomatic for friendly repressive regimes. It is nauseating to see a Biden, a Macron, or a von der Leyen supporting Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or the Philippines as if they did not deserve the status of international pariahs. It turns out that the “rules-based order” involves absolutely no respect for international law but simply follows the law of the jungle.
Joining Republicans in mocking the rule of law as something only for suckers, rubes and peons, Democrats screamed a loud Fuck You! to international conventions on cluster munitions and domestic laws, including the Leahy Law and the Magnitsky Act, which forbid military aid to human rights abusers. Democrats, who frequently accede to demands to dismantle or defund social programs, went on a veritable bomb-buying spree, shelling out billions for [internationally prohibited] cluster munitions for Ukraine, jets and munitions for Taiwan, and 2000-pound neighborhood-leveling bombs with which Israel has inflicted so much carnage and damage to civilian infrastructure in Gaza.
Both American political parties went on to reject the ICJ’s determination of genocide by Israel, defund the United Nations refugee program, reiterate their objections to the International Criminal Court’s mandate to indict war criminals, and to promise that, if Netanyahu and Gallant were ever indicted, the U.S. would continue to thumb its nose at international law.
For Democrats, there ought to be no whining about the lawless Supreme Court and its disregard for our domestic “rule based order.” In that institution, operating with complete impunity, habitual corruption among Justices goes unpunished — not including the Court’s own unaccountable departures from established jurisprudence and legal precedence. How can Democrats object to any of this while thumbing their nose at the ICJ?
Democrats who object to the MAGA president’s attempts to overturn inconvenient election results should not announce plans to impose unelected puppet regimes on post-war Gaza or Venezuela. Democrats who bristle at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and land theft are curiously mute on Israel’s identical crimes. The same Democrats who call for Russia’s complete withdrawal from the Donbass should not speak of a “Two State Solution” that fails at a minimum to require a complete withdrawal from the West Bank by settlers coddled by Israel and the US and funded by American Zionist institutions.
The American lame-duck president, a self-described Christian “Zionist” who cannot enunciate his own foreign policy to the American public and instead leaves that to his military-security establishment, has given Israel everything it wants, which includes the deployment of U.S. naval fleets as well as beefed-up military bases in Iraq, Jordan, and Syria. There is no question that — regardless of the nature of Israel’s belligerency — the U.S. will never hesitate to put American troops in harm’s way to defend the Zionist state.
The Israeli Prime Minister, all but indicted in both Jerusalem and at the Hague, was invited to address Congress by leaders of both political parties and he used that opportunity to gaslight Congress and the American public, insulting both the American people and the institutions of the host nation that underwrites his genocidal war.
Americans listen to our elected officials using words like “ironclad,” “unbreakable,” and “no daylight” to describe the US-Israeli relationship. We hear again and again that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, that its military is the most moral, its enemies nothing but virulent jihadist antisemites bent on its total destruction. Like the fabled “beheaded babies,” such talking points begin life in the Israeli Foreign Ministry, bounce about among an armada of Israel lobbyists and Zionist organizations who serve only Israel, and end up glued to the lips of American politicians. Billions in junkets and PAC money ensure American politicians’ subservience to a foreign state.
Despite the relentless propaganda thrown at us by Israeli and domestic propagandists, Americans can see with their own eyes the carnage that Israel is inflicting with our complicity. The cognitive dissonance between the propaganda and what we see and read with our own eyes is so great that some weak minds simply deny the reality. Israeli propagandists do their part by conjuring up “crisis actors,” a term they pilfered from their MAGA bedfellows to discredit what is seen and real as “just an act.” If not slammed as “fake news” then accurate descriptions of Zionism’s dark reality are termed “antisemitic.” The White House, the State Department, and the national security establishment invariably follow Israel’s lead, disputing Palestinian casualty figures, denying documented atrocities, sanitizing Israel’s crimes, recycling Israeli Foreign Ministry talking points.
Despite all this, Americans have begun to tally the costs of our reflexive, uncritical support for a murderous rogue state. American taxpayers — denied national healthcare like Israel or even Mexico — nevertheless have to foot the bill for 15% of Israel’s military budget, more if you factor in the many buy-at-cost military programs, or the numerous joint technology, security, and energy ventures.
Uncritical American support for Israel’s murderous regime also threatens our own democracy. Israel’s defenders have thrown tens of millions of dollars at the Democratic primaries and recently unseated the second of two members of Congress they had targeted for opposing genocide.
Thousands of people have lost their jobs in purges of critics of Israel. Laws in 36 states — New Hampshire just joined them — create a legal definition of “antisemitism” that has nothing to do with “the baseless hatred of Jews” (the traditional definition) and everything to do with punishing any or all criticism of Israel. American universities, once safe places for debate and critical studies, are now in ideological lockdown, experiencing a new form of McCarthyism — as Zionist attack groups working with MAGA Republicans take down their real targets: DEI programs and the faculty members who challenge settler colonialism — including Israel’s.
The near-assassination of Donald Trump brought forth a torrent of repudiations of political violence — of the “this is not who we are” sort of argument. But this is exactly who we are.
Less than a week before a white supremacist managed to clip Donald Trump’s ear, North Carolina governor and Christian nationalist Mark Robinson told a church assembly that secular America were all Nazis and that “some folks need killing… it’s a matter of necessity.” Church pastor Cameron McGill agreed with Robinson, who suggested that the “guys in green” or the “boys in blue” were up to the job.
Not surprisingly, Americans were quick to applaud Israel’s targeted assassination of Ismael Haniya. Besides the hundreds if not thousands of our own political assassinations carried out by American presidents (remember Obama’s “Terror” Tuesday?), many more have been carried out by agents of foreign governments in our employ — just as Israel paid off two disaffected Iranian IGRC agents to plant a bomb in Haniya’s residence. The Guantanamo detention center remains open; the US tortured prisoners to death there and at Abu Ghraib and at other “black sites” — all artificially and yet unimaginably outside the reach of the Constitution. And all this occurred despite numerous U.S. laws and directives prohibiting assassination. In America the rule of law means nothing.
But Governor Robinson was simply speaking of reality when he suggested having the police carry out assassinations. This is exactly what they do in thousands of documented cases each year. We already give the police — who act like and are often armed precisely like military occupation forces in non-white and working-class neighborhoods — carte blanche to kill people. In practice “qualified” immunity amounts to complete blanket immunity, as Justice Sotomayor observed.
Likewise, the American judicial system — which convicts 95% of those it processes by inflating charges in order to coerce plea deals — carries out assassinations every time it applies the death penalty. Even knowing that we are murdering a not insignificant number of demonstrably innocent people, those who had an inadequate defense, or those who lack the mental capacity to understand their crime, makes no difference to the terror state. We go so far as to use untested drugs and mystery cocktails to stop a human heart, keeping their provenance secret, preventing the public and the press from observing or documenting these gruesome rituals — which now include the reintroduction of the firing squad and the gas chamber.
Rounding out the injustice and impunity at work in both our foreign policy and domestic government is the Presidency. The rogue Supreme Court recently ruled that whatever the President does — whether a blatant crime for personal benefit or an official act of state — is protected. The President is a goddamned emperor.
It is not the anarchists or the communists that scare me. It’s the fascist thugs and the neoliberal machinators making up the law as they go along. In this climate of official corruption, hypocrisy, lawlessness, and impunity, how is the average citizen supposed to respect the rule of law — when virtually every branch of government revels in its unchecked corruption?
If the nation’s moneyed and “connected” murderers, bribe-takers, scofflaws, insurrectionists, and war criminals can get away with anything — then open the doors to all the prisons and let them all out.
No one’s a more murderous criminal than the politician who signs a bomb bound for Gaza or the one who votes for it.
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