Lately, the Democrats, and some on the right—it’s too soon to say Republicans—have begun to openly question the provision of warfare payments to Israel. Since 1948, this country has funneled more than $310 billion, inflation-adjusted dollars, to that place. The Israelis, for their part, have used the money to kill approximately 200,000 people in eighty years. In other words, American taxpayers have paid $1.6 million for each corpse the Israelis have produced.
The arguments Zionists in America—people like Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, and Mike Huckabee—have made in support of cash for Israel have varied over time. In the past, Israel was the American bulwark opposing the Soviet Union in the Middle East (false). It was also a villa in the jungle, or an oasis of shared values, a variant on that cloying metaphor. Later, we encounter the logically-challenged arguments that the money provides an economic benefit to Americans, or that it produces “peace” through deterrence.
Now that Americans are paying attention—the genocide in Palestine and mass murder in Lebanon and Iran have had that effect—each of those arguments has failed. That’s caused the Israel lobby to splinter along well-delineated fault lines. The grizzled vanguard, groups like AIPAC, the ADL, and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, have tried to force their representatives in Congress to continue to cover the expense of maintaining Jewish supremacy in Palestine.
Other groups like JStreet, which is less red-in-tooth than AIPAC, but continues to find alignment when it counts, have argued instead that the subsidy to Israel should be phased out. They believe that doing so will “strengthen” the US-Israel relationship, although it’s unclear how. Whatever the argument, the important predicate here is that the US and Israel are allies, and that Israel is worthy of American friendship and moral support. Other forms of coordination, they argue, should continue.
That argument, constituted in that way, relies on an intellectual sleight of hand to extract a moral concession. It invites a reasonable person who is horrified at Israel’s institutionalization of rape, for example, to reaffirm American support for Israel by accepting the premise of the argument: that Israel and America are natural friends. In fact, the average American and Israeli diverge not only on policy, but on values as well. Israel is an apartheid state whose regime is organized around the racial principle of Jewish rights and privileges and Palestinian inferiority. No reasonable person should seek to “strengthen” racism as a governing principle. Instead, we should seek to undermine and abolish racism, racist laws, and racist regimes.
Here it is worth defining terms.
The political scientist Ian Lustick recently argued in Foreign Policy that the question of whether Israel has a right to exist is an elision and a “category error.” Instead, the question is whether the Israeli regime, which is Zionist, should exist. He explains:
“A state is a territorially defined community recognized as such by its membership in the United Nations. A regime is a legal order within a state that specifies what is permitted and what is not permitted by its institutions and how people are chosen to fill the positions and carry out the functions it authorizes. A government is the specific group of individuals who, at any one time, fill those positions and make policy decisions.”
He goes on to explain that the Nazi regime was purged from Europe, with no effect on the continued existence of the German state. With reference to Israel, “[t]he real question, and one that deserves the attention and debate of both Jews and non-Jews, is whether the regime in Israel that has ruled the state since its inception [Zionist] has lost its right to exist.”
For me, the answer is clear, and it modifies the frame slightly. The Zionist regime in Israel has never had a right to exist. Racism is racism. Bad is bad, immutably.
That bears on the current day. The price we seek to extract for the joyful extermination of Palestinian life in Gaza, of Lebanese lives, and the lives of innocents in many other places should correspond to the magnitude of the crime. Demanding that America wash its hands of the Israeli genocide, to say no more money for killing children, is inadequate to our times.
Rather, Americans should demand targeted sanctions and an arms embargo, including on sales from other countries to Israel. The targeted sanctions may be directed at individual criminals within the Israeli regime (Netanyahu, Gallant, Katz, Herzog), but also at the soldiers who perpetrated (and continue to perpetrate) the mass murder. The ultimate goal should be regime change within Palestine/Israel, from the river to the sea.
In pursuing targeted sanctions and an embargo, which should include prosecutions and the provision of reparations, we may achieve a small measure of justice for all of Zionism’s victims. We may also reassert the primacy of liberal values—that everyone is equal before the law—in this country, which has also lost much in ceding moral prerogatives to Israel. And through our actions and calls for accountability, we may resuscitate the wan and sad body of international law, which is our only real hope for negotiating our way through the jungle, after all.
Ahmed Moor
Ahmed Moor is a writer and fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace. Substack: https://ahmedmoor.substack.com/
