The Only Moral Option to End U.S. Support for Israel

There is only one way to stop the relentless genocide in Gaza, and that is not through sterile bilateral negotiations. Israel has demonstrated beyond doubt—including by assassinating Hamas’s chief negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh—that it does not care about achieving a permanent ceasefire. The only way to stop Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians is for the United States to stop supplying it with weapons. And the way to do that is through a strong public will. Americans must make it clear that they will not support any presidential candidate or political party that contributes to this crime.

The arguments against a bipartisan boycott are well-known: it would help Donald Trump win, Kamala Harris has apparently shown more sympathy than Joe Biden, we, though few, will have a tangible impact, we can work within the Democratic Party, the Israel lobby—particularly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)—dominates a majority of Congress, and negotiations will ultimately stop the slaughter.

In short, we are powerless, and we must abandon our hope of stopping this monstrous project. We must accept as a fait accompli the sending of hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to an apartheid state, use our veto in the UN Security Council to protect Israel, and block any international efforts to end mass murder. We have no choice.

Genocide, which is the crime of crimes under international law, is not merely a political issue, like trade agreements, infrastructure projects, charter schools, or immigration. It is a moral issue that touches the very core of humanity, the elimination of an entire people. Any submission to this atrocity condemns us as a nation and as a species. It brings the world community one step closer to barbarism, tears down the rule of law, and mocks every value we profess to respect.

Genocide is in a category of its own, and not resisting it with all we have is participating in “radical evil,” the evil that makes the human being superfluous, as Hannah Arendt put it.

The fundamental lesson of the Holocaust offered by writers like Primo Levi is that we can all become willing executioners. It takes little to become complicit, even through indifference or hesitation, in evil.

“Monsters exist,” wrote Levi, the Auschwitz survivor, “but they are too few to be truly dangerous. The most dangerous are ordinary men, who are willing to believe and act without asking questions.”

Confronting evil, even when there is no chance of success, preserves our humanity and our dignity. It allows us, as Vaclav Havel wrote in The Power of the Powerless, to live in that truth that the powerful do not want to be told and seek to suppress. It provides a light for those who come after us. It tells the victims that they are not alone. It is “humanity’s revolt against imposed injustice” and “an attempt to regain a sense of responsibility.”

What does Havel say about us if we accept a world in which we arm and finance a nation that kills and injures hundreds of innocent people every day?

What does he say about us if we support a planned famine and the poisoning of water sources, where polio has been discovered, meaning that tens of thousands will fall ill and many will die?

What does he say about us if, for ten months, we allow refugee camps, hospitals, villages and cities to be bombed, with the aim of wiping out families and forcing survivors into the open or into makeshift tents?

What does he say about us when we accept the deaths of 16,456 children, knowing that this number is certainly an underestimate?

What does it say about us when we watch Israel escalate its attacks on UN facilities, schools—including one of its own in Gaza City, where more than 100 Palestinians were killed during dawn prayers—and other emergency shelters?

What does it say about us when we allow Israel to use Palestinians as human shields by forcing documented civilians, including children and the elderly, into tunnels and buildings that may be booby-trapped, ahead of Israeli forces, sometimes wearing IDF uniforms?

What does it say about us when we support politicians and soldiers who justify the rape and torture of prisoners?

Are these the allies we want to empower? Is this the behavior we want to adopt? What message are we sending to the rest of the world?

If we do not uphold moral imperatives, we are doomed to failure. Evil will prevail. It means that there is no right or wrong. It means that anything, including mass murder, is permissible. Protesters outside the Democratic National Convention at the United Center in Chicago are demanding an end to genocide and U.S. aid to Israel, but inside the convention halls we encounter a disturbing conformity. Hope lies in the streets.

A moral position always comes at a cost. If there is no cost, it is not a moral position. It is just a popular opinion.

“But what about the price of peace?” asks the radical Catholic priest Daniel Prejean, who was imprisoned for burning draft records during the Vietnam War, in his book No Barriers to Manhood. He goes on to say:

“I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder how many of them suffer from the disease of stereotyping to the point that even as they proclaim peace, their hands instinctively reach out for their possessions, their homes, their security, their income, their future, their plans; that five-year plan for studies, that ten-year plan for professional status, that twenty-year plan for the growth and unity of the family, that fifty-year plan for a dignified life and an honorable natural death!”

“Of course, we cry out: ‘Let us have peace,’ but at the same time let us not lose anything, let us keep our lives intact, let us not know either prison, or bad reputation, or the severance of ties.” Because we must embrace this and protect that, because at all costs our hopes must go according to their appointed schedule, because it is unusual for the sword to fall in the name of peace, unraveling the fine and delicate web that our lives have woven, because it is unusual for good men to suffer injustice, or for families to be torn apart, or for good reputations to be lost, because of all this we cry for peace, and then we cry for peace, and there is no peace!

“There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no peacemakers because making peace is at least as costly as making war. It is at least urgent, at least disruptive, at least liable to bring shame, imprisonment, and death in its wake.”

The question is not whether resistance is a viable option. The question is whether resistance is right.

We are commanded to love our neighbor, not our tribe. We must believe that good attracts good, even if the tangible evidence around us is bleak. Good is always embodied in action. It must be seen. It does not matter if the wider society is cruel. We are called to challenge it through acts of civil disobedience, noncompliance with the laws of the state, when those laws conflict, as they often do, with the moral law.

We must stand, at all costs, with the oppressed and the downtrodden on this earth. If we fail to take that stand, whether against the abuse of the military police, the inhumanity of our vast prison system, or the genocide in Gaza, then we become complicit in a great moral crime, we become accomplices to this evil that threatens to dehumanize our world.