Whether you object to genocide or internalize every scrap of Israeli propaganda, there isn’t any way in ordinary English to dispute that each shipment of weapons from the United States to Israel, whether given or sold, violates numerous U.S. laws, including the Foreign Assistance Act, the Arms Export Control Act, the Conventional Arms Transfer Policy, and the Leahy Law, and at the very least assists Israel in committing the acts criminalized by the Genocide Convention Implementation Act and the U.S. War Crimes Act.
There’s also no way to dispute that Secretary of State Blinken was told in writing by his own staff and the staff of USAID that some of these laws were being violated, and proceeded to lie to Congress about it.
It would be even harder to dispute that Congress Members know that laws that Congress created are being blatantly violated, and that Congress is being blatantly — and illegally — lied to.
Senator Bernie Sanders last month forced votes in the Senate on creating yet more laws, and did so with the argument that — as everyone knew — shipping weapons to Israel was violating numerous already existing laws. Just prior to the vote, Sanders published an op-ed in the Washington Post arguing for new laws. He began: “The United States government must stop blatantly violating the law with regard to arms sales to Israel.” Media outlets such as The Hill, Associated Press, NBC, and New York Times, presented Sanders’ citation of laws, and presented opposing arguments that did not in any case that I am aware of ever mention laws at all. The argument that shipping weapons to Israel is legal is well hidden if it exists anywhere.
I recently asked a Congress Member in an off-the-record conversation what could be done, and their only solution was to put a different person in the White House in 2029.
If this were a normal country, or if the populations of its major cities all lived within an hour’s reliable train ride of Washington, D.C., or if media outlets were open to peace voices, some novel solutions would seem obvious to everyone, such as surrounding the State Department’s offices until the State Department complies with U.S. laws.
But there are supposed to be solutions already in place to allow the system to correct itself while everybody goes shopping and watches football. A criminal Secretary of State or President is supposed to be impeached and removed, regardless of their political party, and regardless of whether sex or Russia is involved. Congressional committees are supposed to hold hearings at which they challenge criminal behavior — and to literally hold (behind bars) in contempt recalcitrant witnesses. Congress is supposed to be able to pass laws, even stupidly redundant laws, as needed, regardless of who paid for their campaign or who will label them an “anti-Semite.” None of that exists anymore.
Decades ago, the imperial presidency made pretenses of legal behavior. Presidents who were going to violate new laws signed them into law with “signing statements” explaining the “legality” of violating them. If forced to notice such actions, Congress would re-criminalize an abhorrent behavior repeatedly. Does anyone even know how many times torture has been banned in U.S. law? But then came Obamian “looking forward” and Trumpian flamboyance in law violation. By the time it became acceptable to put a leading supporter of the war on Iraq on the throne in Washington, he or she was pretty likely to be Genocide Joe or Genocide Jane. That wasn’t a freak happenstance.
Precedence matters. Letting Nixon and Reagan and Bush off the hook mattered. Destroying the impeachment process mattered, Nancy. Legislating already existing presidential immunity mattered. Putting Oliver North on television mattered. Turning Bush Jr. into an artist, and Dick Cheney into a respectable old coot mattered. Pretending Hunter Biden got off only for the lesser charges that covered up his and his father’s blatant crimes in Ukraine matters. Letting the weapons flow to Israel matters not just for Gaza and Lebanon but for the UAE’s arming of slaughter in Sudan, for Ukraine’s ongoing murderous quagmire, and for countless other coming steps toward the apocalypse.
We’re now well beyond “Stop protesting the wars for a year-and-a-half and elect Obama.” We’ve arrived at “Shut up for four years and elect someone worse than Obama but better than some other thuggish suit who will oversee the crimes now running so smoothly under the oversight of an emperor nobody trusts even to tie his own shoes or remember his own name.”
And yet the United States Congress performs (key word: performs) its functions as if it were real. Like all court jesters, it puts on a show. It’s just very seldom an entertaining one.
I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I do have a question. If the $16 billion just spent on a U.S. election were spent next time on educating, training, mobilizing, and sustaining a nonviolent surrounding of the State Department until it complied with U.S. laws, would that do more good?