We have long passed the point of mobilizing world opinion against Israel’s shameless and wanton slaughter of countless defenseless civilian Palestinian men, women, children and even the unborn. They are countless because no one has the means to count those whose bodies have never been recovered, who have starved or frozen to death far from the tabulators, those who have died from diseases that do not exist among populations that have access to the most basic necessities of life, those whose weakened bodies must contend with rain mixing with raw sewage flooding a field of humanity herded into ever-smaller unprotected spaces in midwinter so as to intensify their misery, and so that they may die cheaply and economically without bombs or bullets or even Zyklon-B, and so that the victims can be killed by creating the conditions where death is assured, while the murderers can claim that they shot or strangled only a minority of the dead.
World opinion against Israel and its unspeakable crimes has already reached its apex. Those who continue to deny the genocide are a minority who know perfectly well that it exists, but will lose their cushy jobs in government, media and the Military Industrial Complex if they say that the Emperor is naked. That leaves an even smaller minority who love genocide and support it, but refrain from saying so because they might lose the few remaining friends who refuse by force of will to believe that there is a genocide, and who enjoy the company of paranoid schizophrenics and other delusional mentally impaired. There is no point trying to convince such hangers-on to absurdity. Better to move on with the vast majority who are still functional, not including most of government and the media.
The fact is that no accumulation of demonstrations, petitions, ICJ decisions, boycotts, threats, or least of all facts or reason, will cause the murdering criminals and their supporters to cease and desist. No “successes” at the United Nations, World Court, human rights organizations or other national or international bodies that have been accomplished up to now has had the slightest effect on the people of Gaza. Israel is indifferent to all of them as long as it can depend upon the US to provide unlimited arms and economic aid to sustain its people and its filthy project. Even the mountains of money sent to Gaza both directly and through relief agencies have only increased the prices of the few items still available in Gaza, and made them more available to those with the money, while condemning those without to starvation, death and disease in their stead. They are rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking Titanic.
What recourse do we have? What can actually stop the genocide? The Palestinian resistance and its supporters in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, and until recently Syria have had a direct effect upon Israel and its allies. Israel is a poorer place now, with fewer jobs, fewer investments, next to zero tourists, more than 50,000 closed businesses, and also fewer Jews, as an increasing number decide to make their future elsewhere. It’s dramatic, compared to the effects of international law, United Nations resolutions, and mass demonstrations, but even these resistance actions and their consequences have not ended the genocide or provided relief for the suffering and dying people of Gaza
Of course, the answer has always been there. Without bombs, missiles, drones and other military supplies, there would be no genocide. If we can end the supply, we end the genocide, and even make the resistance actions more effective. All of our efforts have been directed toward persuading our policy and decision makers toward imposing an embargo. Nevertheless, some things have yet to be tried, such as compelling our members of government to obey the law. This is the implicit intention of a new initiative that holds lawmakers legally liable for voting to engage in illegal activity – in this case in favor of providing Israel with arms to engage in genocide. Well-known activist and campaigner for social justice Norman Solomon has recruited a substantial number of constituents in two California congressional districts to sue their members of Congress, and he encourages similar initiatives throughout the rest of California and the U.S.
It’s an interesting idea, worth trying. As a civil suit, it cannot send anyone to prison for complicity in genocide – only a criminal case can do that, and finding a prosecutor that will accept to open such a case is next to impossible. However, a judgment for the plaintiffs can bring injunctive relief which, if not obeyed, could potentially result in incarceration. Furthermore, enough successful suits of this kind across the country could precipitate prosecutorial or other action that could inhibit further support of Israel’s crimes. It’s a potential use of force to block provision of the means to commit genocide. It uses the legal principle of complicity in the crime, as prescribed in the Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, to which the U.S. and Israel have both been signatories for almost 75 years, but which both have decided not to obey (on the grounds of impunity, most likely).
Suing our government representatives is in the same category as refusing to load or unload ships carrying arms to Israel, but potentially with much broader popular participation, and with greater potential impact. Much depends on the willingness of the U.S. public to make the effort and stay the course. It means replicating the lawsuit throughout most of the congressional districts in the country and not just in northern California. It’s a matter of holding our elected government representatives to account, which is already a major issue in the current debate about the extent to which the US is currently a democracy of the people and not of the corporations and lobbyists. Thompson and Huffman, the Congressional Representatives named in the lawsuit, are mindful of the immense power of AIPAC and the rest of the Israel Lobby, as well as the arms manufacturers who back them, to make or break their political career, regardless of how many of their constituents oppose their support of genocide. A win for the people who actually cast the votes could provide a rare empowerment of citizens whose sense of democracy has heretofore been mainly limited to occasionally choosing between candidates whose names they had no part in placing on the ballot. The genocide lawsuits could be the nonviolent version of torches and pitchforks, and the U.S. Capitol chambers their Bastille.