fluid

In terms of news sites, I'm really only trusting Al Jazeera's coverage of the situation. I'm also following pages like Times of Gaza and Eye On Palestine. But mainly, I'm following Palestinian citizens/journalists who are sharing live updates: Muhammad Smiry, Hind Khoudary, Motaz Azaiza, Wael Al Dahdouh, Plestia Alaqad, Yara Eid, Ali Jadallah, Abdallah Al Attar, and Mohammed Al Masri and probably a few more I can't remember right now.

“Yet I have been pondering not the English, prosecutorial witness, but the Arabic. In this, our, language, the verb to witness comes from the root شهد . This is also the source of the much-maligned word شهيد, shaheed, which means, literally, witnesser, but is often translated as martyr. It is a word with many folds of meaning and history. It carries connotations not only of seeing, but of presence and proximity. To be a witness is to make contact, to be touched, and to bear the marks of this touch.

International humanitarian law has not prevented the carpet bombing of residential neighborhoods, the use of white phosphorus, the death of more children than it is sensible to describe, and the endless trauma, which will last generations. There are no standing adjudicative bodies with both the authority and the power to regulate state action, and even if there were, it is not clear what IHL could offer in the case of Palestine. IHL was crafted by state powers to regulate wars between them; it is, in many respects, fundamentally antagonistic to a stateless national movement fighting for liberation.

…

While the formal rules of IHL have been elaborated through centuries of state practice, case law, and scholarship, they became codified in their modern form after World War II, when they attained ideological hegemony. Despite its codification, the law—and to a greater extent, the philosophical principles underlying it—has also been the subject of significant debate. In Just and Unjust Wars, published in 1977, American political theorist Michael Walzer wrote a famous defense of these philosophical principles and the abstract expressions of the basic rules upon which the law, in its greater complexity and specificity, is based. Together these foundations make up what he calls the “war convention.” Walzer’s methodology is historical, not legal, and he is less interested in the rules as codified than in inferring a general set of conventions from examining state practice, professed ideals, and historical precedent. The moral justification of this framework—the aim of Walzer’s book—is referred to as Just War Theory.

The war convention is defined by three key principles. The first principle, which operates as a sort of umbrella concept for the other two, is the separation of jus ad bellum, the causes for which a state may go to war, from jus in bello, permissible conduct in war. Since the adoption of the UN Charter in 1945, jus ad bellum has become co-extensive with the right to self-defense. Articles 2 and 51 of the Charter make it clear: States shall settle disputes diplomatically and shall refrain from the use and threat of force, though they retain the right of self-defense. It is because only defensive wars are legal that all wars are framed as defensive: Compare the justification of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq on the grounds of “pre-emptive self-defense” with the Iraqi military effort to resist that invasion.

…

Walzer’s theory, and the law of war it supports, is most suited to war between hypothetical states. Our world, however, is composed of actual states in geopolitical relation to one another—and to subnational and extranational political formations. Broadly, these form a world-system that has the United States at its core. This has granted the United States a unique ability to extol the virtues of a “rules-based international order” while simultaneously exempting itself from the various obligations that comprise such an order: the US refuses to sign onto the major human-rights treaties, launches wars of aggression without permission from the Security Council, and tortures prisoners of war.

As the major geopolitical ally and regional proxy force of the US, Israel has benefited tremendously from the broad umbrella of US exemptionalism. Like its benefactor, Israel has also refused to ratify the Rome Convention of the International Criminal Court, routinely engages in torture and arbitrary detention, and violates the sovereignty of neighboring countries at will. But whereas the US, as the self-appointed enforcer of the global order, must at least pay lip service to institutions it claims to lead, Israel, as a bit player (albeit an important one) is under no such obligation. Instead, Israel routinely castigates and denigrates the entire patchwork of international bodies—from the United Nations and the ICC to the global network of NGOs that have, for better or worse, sprung up around them. In so doing, Israel is not just seeking to exempt itself from these institutions’ oversight. Nor is it merely challenging these institutions’ legitimacy. Rather, it is challenging the very idea of international oversight and comity altogether. When its supposed enemies in the UN correctly accuse Israel of committing war crimes or the crime of apartheid, Israel sees only games of realpolitik. To condemn Israel on the terrain of international law is to wage a battle that has already been lost. At once Israel retorts: we follow the law, and also there is no such thing.

…

The Palestinian national movement is likewise exempted from the framework of international law, not by recusal but by exclusion. Decades of Israeli state policy has had as its principal objective the prevention of a sovereign Palestinian state and Palestinian entrance into the community of nations. With the help of the United States, Israel has largely succeeded—Palestine is not a member state of the United Nations and does not have standing to petition many international bodies. Where the state is recognized, Palestinian national formations are marginalized: the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court Karim Khan recently referred to Hamas as a “terror organization” in a formal communique.

But “terror organization” is an empty signifier—it tells us nothing about the designated group, but quite a bit about the speaker. It tells us, for instance, that the speaker is mired in a framework that separates distinction and proportionality to such a degree that the former becomes folded into the latter. It tells us that the speaker views state action as presumptively legitimate and action by the oppressed as presumptively illegitimate. …

…

Walzer argues that the only permissible cause for war is the defense of rights. But what does this mean for those who have none to begin with? In spite of Hannah Arendt’s antipathy to revolutionary movements, her account of the “right to have rights” in the Origins of Totalitarianism is instructive. Writing in the wake of the Shoah, Arendt prefigures the current predicament of the Palestinians: “The calamity of the rightless,” Arendt writes, “is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law . . . formulas which were designed to solve problems within given communities—but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever. Their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them.”

The Palestinians, particularly of Gaza, have in the place of law only a condemnation to rightlessness in perpetuity—an inescapable hell. Rhetorical invocations of human rights ring hollow for precisely this reason. Israel’s genocidal campaign seeks to accomplish the same feat as all genocidal campaigns before it—the reduction of a people to their bare humanity, to their biological existence. It is a testament to the Palestinian people, however, that, despite decades of subjugation and ghettoization in intolerable conditions this aspiration has not been realized.

Within the paradigm of IHL, waging a revolutionary war will always be illegal. It is, by its very nature, an offensive action against an existing political order with the aim of overthrowing that order. It will not be conceived as self-defense, because it breaks with an intolerable and naturalized status quo—which is precisely what the right of self-defense is here invoked to defend.

As Walzer acknowledges, “the first principle of the war convention is that, once war has begun, soldiers are subject to attack at any time (unless they are wounded or captured), regardless of whether they are actively engaged in fighting or whether they are bathing or playing soccer.” Many imagine that the war against the Palestinians was settled in 1948, occasional flare-ups notwithstanding. This elides the experience of Palestinians, for whom the war never ended. Indeed, what Israel experiences as extended periods of calm manifests as uninterrupted siege warfare for the Palestinians of Gaza. Both Israel and the West are only able to ignore this state of war because Palestinians have been so thoroughly dehumanized that their brutal subjugation has been naturalized. To break from this order is violence, to maintain it is peace.

In Palestine the ordinary workings of life have been replaced by the rule of violence—which takes the form of murder, of dispossession, and of the daily violations to dignity of living in subjugation. Revolution begins from a position of extremity. The alternative to revolution is surrender. But as Walzer writes, “Surrender is an explicit agreement and exchange . . . a government promises that its citizens will stop fighting in exchange for the restoration of ordinary public life.” If the intolerable condition to be overturned is precisely ordinary life itself, however, surrender presents the same prospects as loss in battle: death, dispossession, subjugation. To fight, then, is a choice forced upon the Palestinian people by the severity of their situation.

Some, primarily on the left, are willing to cede the justice of the Palestinian cause for war, but demand that such a war be waged according to the principles of jus in bello, and condemn the October 7 attack as a failure to do so. By neglecting to abide by the principle of distinction and by taking civilian hostages, this argument goes, the Palestinian militants abdicated their moral duty. The problem with this approach is that it condemns the Palestinian resistance—a cause it presumes just—to military failure, while simultaneously holding it to a higher standard than a conventional armed force. No doubt, the Israeli military force is far more technologically capable and well-armed than the resistance. But beyond that, Palestinians are fighting against a state with an entire hostage-taking apparatus and an entire land-theft apparatus that never enter the jus in bello calculus. This is what it means to have a state at all: to control a machine that congeals the contingencies of political violence into facts around which all actors must navigate. As such, when Palestinians take hostages used to exchange for a pause in the bombing, for the entrance of aid, and for the release of prisoners in Israel, they are committing war crimes; while when Israel rounds up Palestinians, holds them in administrative detention, and beats them they are merely abusing their policing authority. This is the qualitative asymmetry of war between a stateless population—for whom all political violence is a form of war—and an advanced military power, which can literally pick its battles. (Walzer’s attempts to theorize asymmetrical warfare in Just and Unjust Wars were plagued by a willful ignorance to the monstrous violence of the status quo, and his attempts to theorize it further have been even more blinkered by his continued hand-wringing and his teary-eyed commitment to Zionism and American Empire.)

The reason that the US and Israel are capable of violating the requirements of IHL without consequence has everything to do with their position at the top of the global balance of power. A national liberation struggle, like the one in Palestine, seeks to upset this balance such that the laws of war and the protections they provide can actually be realized. This is not to endorse a violent race to the bottom—there are always limits on conduct—but rather it is a call to recognize that the limits as they are currently invoked condemn entire peoples to the rule of violence, to a life beyond the very limits that the law purports to set.

The question of how to justly wage revolutionary violence touches on several lacunae in the Marxist tradition—ethics as such and military strategy are undertheorized on the left—and the two formulations we have on hand, namely “by any means necessary” and “according to the law of war,” are unsatisfying: the former because it sidesteps ethics, and the latter because it sidesteps the question of national liberation. If we are to move beyond merely understanding why political violence occurs toward the construction of a just world as a positive, post-imperial project, we will ultimately need to seize international law, or an aspirational version of it, for our own ends.

This requires reckoning with the inadequacy of the legal form, not just as a weak deterrent, but as a framework for liberation. “Only because there is no escape from hell,” Walzer writes, “have we labored to create a world of rules within it.” The presumption of symmetry in IHL means that the hell presupposed here is a cyclical event between sovereigns and not an enduring structure imposed on the oppressed. Any effort to abolish this structure, not in the utopian sense imagined by Walzer—a war to end all wars—but merely an escape from hell as a structure—in a word, decolonization—will necessarily stand outside the boundaries of the law entirely.

(...)

"Set the scene for us: what is the ICJ, and why is the hearing taking place there?

The 1945 UN Charter — signed by all UN members, including Israel — affirms that the ICJ is the UN’s supreme legal organ. The Constitution establishes two powers for the Court: issuing advisory opinions, and ruling in cases between states. The Court’s verdicts are binding on the states that have signed the UN Constitution. A state can agree in an ad hoc manner that a particular dispute will be litigated by the ICJ, or invoke signed treaties containing a clause that establishes ICJ jurisdiction over disputes relating to those treaties. 

Israel has always had reservations about the jurisdiction clause, and has refrained from agreeing to ICJ jurisdiction in all the hundreds of treaties it has signed, except one: the Genocide Convention. Article 9 of the Convention stipulated that if disagreements arise between the members over the Convention’s authority or interpretation, the ICJ is the place to hear them. 

ICJ decrees are enforced by the UN Security Council. Chapters 6 and 7 of the UN Charter allow for a range of sanctions against countries that violate the Court’s ruling, such as economic sanctions, arms embargoes, and military intervention. The latter is rare but it has happened, for example in the first Gulf War.

Why did Israel sign up to ICJ jurisdiction in the Genocide Convention?

I’m not a legal historian; I can only guess. Israel was one of the initiators of the treaty, and historically one can understand why Israel would have pushed for such a treaty in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Secondly, I think that back then, the popular Israeli notion that we do not let gentiles judge us had not yet developed. We are talking about an era in which the international system had recently decided to establish a Jewish state. Maybe there was a little more trust in that system back then.

What constitutes a violation of the Convention?

(...)

It is defined as an act of extermination, or creating conditions that will annihilate a particular group with the intention of eradicating that group or even a distinct part of it.

The Convention, which was integrated into Israeli law in 1950, states that a soldier or civilian who kills a person, even one, while aware that he is part of a system aimed at annihilation, is guilty of the crime of genocide. In Israeli law, the punishment for this is the death penalty. This also applies to those who conspire to commit genocide, those who incite genocide, and those who attempt to participate in genocide.

What is South Africa basing its lawsuit on?

South Africa bases its accusation on two elements. One is Israel’s conduct. It cites a great deal of statistics about the indiscriminate, disproportionate attacks on civilian infrastructure, as well as about starvation, the huge number of casualties, and the humanitarian catastrophe in the Strip — horrifying statistics that the Israeli public is barely exposed to, because the mainstream media here does not bring them to us.

The second and more difficult element to prove is intent. South Africa is trying to prove the intent through nine dense pages of references to quotes by senior Israeli officials, from the president to the prime minister, government ministers, Knesset members, generals, and military personnel. I counted more than 60 quotes there — quotes about eradicating Gaza, flattening it, dropping an atomic bomb on it, and all the things we’ve gotten used to hearing in recent months.

South Africa’s case does not rely only on the fact that some Israel leaders have made genocidal statements. It further charges that Israel has done nothing in response to these statements: it hasn’t condemned the statements, it hasn’t dismissed from office the people who expressed them, it hasn’t opened disciplinary proceedings against them, and it certainly hasn’t opened criminal investigations. This, as far as South Africa is concerned, is a very strong argument.

Even if we haven’t heard the IDF Chief of Staff or the General of the Southern Command say these things, and we don’t have an operational order that says, “Go and destroy Gaza,” the very fact that these statements have been made by senior Israeli officials without sanction or condemnation sufficiently expresses Israel’s intention.

South Africa also pulled a little legal stunt to get here, correct?

Yes. The jurisdiction of the Court is determined when a dispute arises between the parties over the interpretation or application of the Convention. South Africa sent several letters to the Israeli government saying, “You are committing genocide.” Israel responded, “No we aren’t.” So South Africa said, “Okay, we have a dispute over the interpretation of the Convention.” That’s how it got the authority.

What can we learn from similar ICJ cases in the past, such as those regarding genocides in Bosnia and Myanmar?

First of all, we know from these cases that the burden of proof on South Africa is significantly lower for obtaining an interim order than for ultimately proving that Israel is committing genocide. We also know that this case will continue for years: the Bosnia case took 14 years; Gambia v. Myanmar is still ongoing. But the procedure for an interim order is fast.

Gambia filed its case against Myanmar on behalf of the Organization of Islamic States. It asked for an interim order stating that Myanmar must cease its military operations [against the Rohingya people]. The Court ruled that at this stage of the hearings, it did not need to determine whether the crime of genocide had been committed. What it needs to decide is whether, without an interim order, there is a real danger that the prohibitions set out in the Genocide Convention will be violated.

An interesting interim order was issued in that case, which I think has a good chance of being issued to Israel as well — not in the context of military activity, but of incitement. The Court’s order also required Myanmar to take enforcement actions and submit reports to the ICJ and Gambia on what it was doing to prevent genocide. As for the cessation of Myanmar’s military activity, this matter went to the Security Council, where both Russia and China threatened vetoes, but Western countries imposed sanctions and a military embargo anyway.

So even if South Africa fails to make the Court issue an interim order to stop Israel’s military activity, it could be that in the context of incitement — which enjoys full immunity in Israel — the Court will say that Israel needs to do something.

(...)

I know lawyers don’t like to wager on the results of court hearings, but if the ICJ does produce an interim order, what will that mean for Israel?

If the Court issues an order, the question is of course whether Israel will obey it or not. Knowing Israel, I expect that it will not obey the order, unless it can present the ending of hostilities as the result of its own independent decision, unrelated to the Court order. 

There are good reasons for Israel to do this, because disobeying an ICJ order brings things to the UN Security Council. It’s true that the United States has a veto there, and therefore a resolution to impose sanctions on Israel would most likely be blocked. But vetoing an ICJ order regarding concerns that genocide is taking place would come at an enormous political price for the U.S. government, both domestically and internationally. 

The Biden administration wants to portray itself as a government that sees human rights as one of its pillars. So it is likely that the United States would only veto such a resolution while imposing a significant cost on Israel in order to justify doing so, such as allowing the residents of northern Gaza to return to their homes, or entering into negotiations over two states — I don’t know.

But even if the United States doesn’t use its veto in that scenario, an interim order from the ICJ is likely to cause Israel serious problems. 

There is such a thing as an international legal “deep state.” Jurists and judges listen to what important courts say. And when the ICJ, also known as the World Court, makes its rulings, national courts in most of the Western world take note. Therefore, if the ICJ rules that there is a danger of genocide being committed, I can imagine a British citizen turning to a British court and demanding that the UK cease trading arms with Israel. Another implication is that such an ICJ ruling would likely force the ICC’s chief prosecutor [Karim Khan] to open an investigation of his own.

(...)

Within what time period is the Court’s decision expected?

There are no set rules, but in the Gambia v. Myanmar case, there was a decision within a month. It should be remembered that this [Gaza] case will continue after the hearing on the interim order. Israel will have to present evidence that will exonerate it from the claim that it is committing genocide, but in doing so could get into difficulties with the ICC. For example, it may explain that it bombed a certain place because it was pursuing a military objective, but it may thereby make admissions that create a basis for the claim that it used disproportionate force."

This was an interesting read, and I particularly want to highlight this comment by Marta:

There is nowhere else for you to go but Tegucigalpa, where you can work trying to wash car windows or selling snacks to passing cars for a handful of lempira a day. Or perhaps you could work for a few dollars a day in one of the maquila factories making textiles for the American and European market, which are set up in special economic zones called Charter Cities where the constitution and labour laws do not apply, which can close down and spirit away whenever they like to another country when they are more willing to sell their people for even less. And then you have to factor in the hurricanes that sweep through the country, destroying everything, that the rains no longer come when they used to but when they do they come in flooding torrents. Much of the north of Honduras is currently underwater; most of the banana and coffee plantations have been destroyed.

And then you factor in when you tried to change this via electing a better government in 2006, he was overthrown in 2009; when you tried to get organised and resist the coup, your friends, your loved ones, your trade union leaders and peasant resisters all turned up mysteriously dead while the military and police worked with drug gangs disguised as agribusiness like the Dinant coproration to burn down villages that opposed them. For trying to change things in the way that you were supposed to, through non violently protesting, organising, and voting for something better, you were subjected to a decade of counterrevolutionary terror and violence that the “international community” not only ignored but gave its active approval to. All of the factors listed above have not only been ongoing for the last 10 years, they’ve been intensified, hothoused by the global counterrevolutionary terror that was the response to the 2011 wave of post-financial crisis uprisings and revolutions and accelerating climate apocalypse.

And at the same time, all of this is being done so more of the country can be turned into a massive cash cow for the benefit of foreign corporations and domestic oligarchs. The wealth of your country is siphoned off and flows around the American and European financial system, benefiting them and building a consumer disneyland that looks like paradise compared to your situation. That could, even if you are worked for nothing, give you a few dollars to send home that could build your abuela in the countryside a nice home for her to live out her days. What other option is left for you and your family other than joining the exodus of people heading north, to the countries where the wealth and profits and rewards of your homeland’s suffering are being kept. And after you cross mountains and rivers which freeze you to death and sweep you away, you are faced with a massive border wall of ahte and soldiers on horses which hit you with sticks. You are faced with an immigration detention centre that will chain you to your bed while you give birth and separate you from your baby who will be given away for adoption to a white couple. When you make a charge against the border fence in Melilla, fed up with being kept in shacks with nothing while the Northerners debate what to do about the problem people their greed has forced to move, the Moroccan police will beat 35 of you to death.

And then when you get there to that golden paradise, you end up doing work not dissimilar to the work you were doing back home, working for pennies (though pennies that are valuable enough back home to buy the family that remain the tiniest slice of comfort) for an agroindustrial giant that supplies supermarkets with cheap produce picked by cheaper people. While you work in the fields, a crop duster plane will spray you with paraquat; when support organisations try to raise this with OSHA they will ask for the plane’s number, and when this can’t be provided they will say nothing can be done. In fact, inspectors are ordered to stay away from the plantations on the Texas border. A member of the Border Agricultural Workers Project says she hasn’t seen a normal child born on the border in 20 years, such is the effect of agrichemicals. If you fuck up in the slightest, have any interaction with the state, you will be deported and sent back to square one. There are a 14 million migrants in the US in the same precarious state, effectively without any way of enforcing their rights. My aunt is a Mexican migrant in California. Her son was deported because he got a speeding ticket. It was 15 years before she saw him again, other than through the bars of the border fence, when she finally got her green card.

In The Little Prince [1943], by [Antoine de] Saint-Exupéry, the little prince asks the fox to always visit at the exact same time, so that the visit becomes a ritual. The little prince explains to the fox what a ritual is. Rituals are to time as rooms are to an apartment. They make time accessible like a house. They organise time, arrange it. In this way you make time appear meaningful.

Time today lacks a solid structure. It is not a house, but a capricious river. The disappearance of rituals does not simply mean that we have more freedom. The total flexibilisation of life brings loss, too. Rituals may restrict freedom, but they structure and stabilise life. They anchor values and symbolic systems in the body, reinforcing community. In rituals we experience community, communal closeness, physically.

Digitalisation strips away the physicality of the world. Then comes the pandemic. It aggravates the loss of the physical experience of community. You’re asking: can’t we do this by ourselves? Today we reject all rituals as something external, formal and therefore inauthentic. Neoliberalism produces a culture of authenticity, which places the ego at its centre. The culture of authenticity develops a suspicion of ritualised forms of interaction. Only spontaneous emotions, subjective states, are authentic. Modelled behaviour, for example courtesy, is written off as inauthentic or superficial. The narcissistic cult of authenticity is partly responsible for the increasing brutality of society.

In my book I argue the case against the cult of authenticity, for an ethic of beautiful forms. Gestures of courtesy are not just superficial. The French philosopher Alain says that gestures of courtesy hold a great power on our thoughts. That if you mime kindness, goodwill and joy, and go through motions such as bowing, they help against foul moods as well as stomach ache. Often the external has a stronger hold than the internal.

Blaise Pascal once said that instead of despairing over a loss of faith, one should simply go to mass and join in rituals such as prayer and song, in other words mime, since it is precisely this that will bring back faith. The external transforms the internal, brings about new conditions. Therein lies the power of rituals. And our consciousness today is no longer rooted in objects. These external things can be very effective in stabilising consciousness. It is very difficult with information, since it is really volatile and holds a very narrow range of relevance."

I used to work for a recruitment firm.

A large part of my job involved doing the first- and second-stage job interviews that a Big Corporation had chosen to outsource, so basically only candidates who made it through to a third round of interviews would ever actually speak to a person from the company they were actually applying to work at.

We were supposed to introduce ourselves as ‘from the Big Company recruitment team’, so many of the candidates didn’t realise this, but a lot of them did.

This job, more than anything else, truly showed me the power imbalance between the employer and the employee in this day and age.

In addition to being eminently qualified and providing good references, the modern candidate for employment is expected to undertake an exaggerated pantomime in which she pretends that she loves Big Company, and has dreamed of working at Big Company all her life. Her only goal and driving passion in life is to do supply-chain management for an international beverage company. The CEO of Big Company is her personal hero and she has a poster of him over her bed so it is the first thing she sees when she wakes up, and the last thing before she falls asleep.

Both she and her interviewer are expected to ignore the fact that they both know she is spinning the same line to five different companies. This isn’t about truth, after all, or suitability for the role.

It’s about the willingness to roll over and beg.

I suppose, as a trained actor, I shouldn’t complain that what has happened is that a compulsory acting component has essentially been tacked on to most every interview. It’s not as if I can’t do it, as part of the 99% who can’t afford dignity.

The Israeli government is deeply reliant on the US government in a way that gives the US a massive amount of leverage. Most people fail to understand just how far US foreign policy goes to support the Israeli government. Because the Israeli government's current activities would not be possible without US support, the US is the only world power with the ability to stop the Israeli siege on Gaza.

Here are various forms of US government support for the Israeli government which could be used to pressure them into a ceasefire:

Military aid. The US provides Israel with roughly $3.3 billion a year in military aid, equivalent to about 16% of the entire Israeli defense budget. While US military aid is normally required to be spent on US-made weapons, Israel has historically been allowed to use part of its aid on its own weapons industry (a subsidy for the Israeli military-industrial complex which the US is currently phasing out). This aid comes despite the fact that it violates the inconsistently-enforced Leahy Laws against providing US aid to known human rights abusers.

Arms exports. From 2018-2022, 79% of Israeli weapons imports came from the US, much of it funded by our military aid. This includes thousands of bombs and missiles, dozens of aircraft, and nearly 400 armored personnel carriers. The Israeli government also buys large amounts of US weapons directly from weapons companies through the Direct Commercial Sales process— $5.7 billion worth from 2018-2022.

Military ties. The US government has 12 active defense agreements with Israel and a memorandum of understanding on military aid lasting until 2028, has designated Israel as a Major Non-NATO Ally, meets with the Israeli government once every two years for planning and strategy discussions, and conducts regular training exercises with the Israeli military (Juniper Oak and Juniper Falcon).

Direct military support. The US uses its military power to support Israeli objectives, as the last couple of months have shown. The US Navy stationed an aircraft carrier in the eastern Mediterranean Sea for several months to deter Hezbollah from getting involved in last year's violence, and is now involved in active hostilities against the Houthis in Yemen in response to their trade blockade.

Diplomatic support. The US votes in agreement with Israel at the United Nations more than any other country in the modern era. Israel's next three largest supporters at the UN are small island nations which are satellite states of the US. Many supporters of Israel do so only to curry favor with the US; without this, Israel would be even more isolated than it is now. The United States has used its veto power in the UN Security Council to defend Israel 34 times, most recently in October 2023. The US also has a policy of automatically defunding any UN agency which recognizes Palestine.

Trade Relations. The US has a free trade agreement with Israel and is one of its largest trading partners. In 2021, 27% of Israeli exports went to the US, and 9% of Israeli imports came from the US. Israel has a trade surplus with the US that helps to offset its overall trade deficit; if all trade with the US were to cease, the Israeli trade deficit would increase by 27%, with major repercussions for its entire economy.

US domestic politics. The US has adopted a handful of policies which tilt its internal political field in favor of the Israeli government: laws repressing the BDS movement, the refusal to punish Israeli government operatives for surveillance campaigns in the US, etc., etc.

If the US government wanted to, it could deprive Israel of a large portion of its defense budget, cut off the flow of weapons and munitions which enable their attacks on Gaza, isolate it from its closest military ally, leave it defenseless against overwhelming diplomatic opposition around the world, severely upset its export-import economy, and expose the nation to increased scrutiny within the world's most powerful nation. If even a fraction of these moves were attempted, it would be enough to force the Israeli government to change course, and it would also likely be enough to topple Netanyahu's already-tenuous grasp on power.

Biden can't do most of this unilaterally— most of it would require congressional approval. But that doesn't mean he's powerless: foreign policy is the one area where the President has the most power to act without congress.