Time is up. It’s been a year since Gaza turned the world upside down. As days turned into months, the pretense of American mediation of “Israeli” thirst for revenge has given way to the plain reality of American taste for Arab blood. Any idea that the U.S. state is “working around the clock” for a ceasefire is belied by perennially renewed military assistance to “Israel’s” war. Most recently the U.S. sent an additional $8.7 billion in arms purchases — on the eve of “Israel’s” invasion of Lebanon. It is now clear that what purport to be negotiations are in fact a bid for more time — or even a tactic to get sightlines on a resistance leader’s head. If somehow we had believed in State Department-led diplomacy, we now know the truth.
The Biden-Harris-Netanyahu strategy is explicit: holocaust until victory. In this new phase of unrestrained expansionist slaughter, even the most conciliatory parts of our movement face total marginalization. The majority of Americans want to stop sending the bombs. But the polling does not matter. “Israel’s” patrons in the West aid and arm and encourage the carnage and instability detonated by “Israel’s” rampage because they see it as an opportunity, the best chance they’ve had for a generation, to reshape the region in their interest. We know that this interest is ratified by a sickening dance of force and consent that marbles every layer of organized power in the West. The broad surge of activity that characterized the movement in the months from October to the Spring has ebbed—under the combined weight of active repression and passive demoralization. We know that the movement will move again. What will be its role?
We know some other things. We know we are writing this from within the armory, where we have watched genocidaires use our national domestic product to bury infants under rubble, wearing a crown of impunity given to them, we must admit, by our own incapacity to stop them. Our complicity has moved us to action. We know the role of arms procurement in this genocide is the point around which the clock revolves. And we know that we must stop it.
After a year of mobilization, which has so far only yielded death, there is only one task: impose an arms embargo now. Something that we don’t know yet: how?
In the first weeks after Al-Aqsa Flood, debate within the pro-Palestine (or anti-genocide) movement unfolded over the question of demands. Who were we targeting? What were we demanding? Some of the fighting took the form of questions around the “liberal” character of the demand for a ceasefire — in the wake of the historic operation by Al-Qassam Brigades and the unfolding catastrophe, shouldn’t more be asked for? The debate settled. The unifying necessity of the demand won out: from Gaza, to European and American capitals, to press podiums and Congress, from every participant in the widening movement, the same demand could be made. A ceasefire states the obvious: the bombs must stop; war only ends with a political agreement on both sides.
From the point of view of the Western onlooker, whose will and imaginary participation is needed for the demand to become reality, ceasefire represented a simple, moral call to stop the bombs. This meant the demand — fitted to the immediate and spectacular crimes of the Zionist project — could be a vehicle for the broadest-ever wave of institutional recognition of the Palestinian question in favor of Palestine. From the point of view of the resistance, a ceasefire would represent military victory. This made the demand coherent as a project of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. From the point of view of “Israel,” a ceasefire represented military defeat. This made the demand a threat — hence its subsequent co-optation and weaponization, in the decades-long tradition of “peace process” obstructionism. As in the previous negotiations, the demand for a ceasefire became a way to prolong the carnage. Gruesomely, Kamala Harris inaugurated the co-optation pivot by calling for an “immediate ceasefire” in Selma, Alabama — on the 59th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. In the seven bloody months since, Biden-Harris-Netanyahu could claim they were all after the same thing.
Historically, it is rare for divestment campaigns to have direct and immediate material consequences. The famed movement to divest from apartheid South Africa, which still stands as a model for organizing in the core against a client nation’s policy, barely grazed the pocket-lining of pro-apartheid companies. But in making claims against pecuniary complicity in apartheid, these campaigns signaled a widening radius of refusal — they showed how intimately the struggle of the rebels reverberated through the institutions of empire.
But ideological and political cover is part of the material of empire. A given institution’s investments may be replaced swiftly by another, but the edifice of unyielding material support is built with unyielding political consent. The threat of divestment is the threat of crumbling that consent, pillar by pillar, throughout elite institutions. Following the fracturing of consent comes the fracturing of material support.
This spring, the demand for an arms embargo — to stop supplying the bombs — overtook the demand for a ceasefire. It did so in the wake of the latter’s co-optation — in the recognition that the diplomatic charade was a screen for the U.S.’s support to continue unabated. It did so, too, in the wake of the explosive call for divestment that spread through student encampments across the country. Like divestment, the demand for an arms embargo represents an understanding of leverage: where the connections to the chain of command are and how to strike at them.
The chain is complex. Whether through direct commercial sales approved by the government, or through foreign military financing — the latter comprises the majority of U.S. aid to “Israel”: the U.S. supplies “Israel” with money that it uses to purchase U.S.-made weapons — some combination of the State Department, the Department of Defense, Congress, and the immense prerogative of the White House are party to the bloody decision tree. An embargo would mean putting a block somewhere in the chain.
Know-nothings will claim that “Israel” — with its advanced technology and manufacturing base — could pursue its military aims without the flow of U.S. arms. They can be ignored among the chorus of idiots claiming Biden is “hamstrung” by the wiles of Netanyahu. Over 65 percent of “Israel’s” weapons come from the United States — a figure that may be outdated for this year given the reportedly large quantity of off-book transfers (of precision-guided munitions, small-diameter bombs, bunker busters, and guns and other small arms) made since the genocide began. Another 30 percent come from Berlin. All of the Occupation Forces’ planes are Made In America. An interruption — indeed, the threat of an interruption — to the flow of these arms would be existential for the occupation, especially now as it flees from Gaza to expand its fronts.
Congressional legal instruments exist to force the U.S. to comply with its own laws regarding arms transfers to criminal states. Rhetorically, the arms embargo can be argued in pursuit of a ceasefire: if you want one, the only way is to force “Israel” to the table by choking off American supply lines to the Zionist slaughter. Politically targeting the supply chain — in sabotage and pressure campaigns against firms like Maersk and Elbit, or by denying port of call to “Israel”-bound weapons shipments — builds the pressure to stop the flow of the bombs. And the comrades of Pal Action — “we’re just normal people, we’ve never done anything like this” — have shown that direct action can disable nodes in the chain. No one is an onlooker: there are those who consent, and those who resist.
Munitions aren’t the only pivotal domestic industry propping up the Zionist regime. Consent, too, is a precious asset in their hands, jealously guarded at the cost of arrests, firings, blacklistings, harassment, and even vigilante shootings. The reason we address The New York Times in our work is because it represents a massive bulwark for the Zionist project within the American domestic sphere. But calling for arms embargoes, even from allied nations, is within its capacity. We know because they have done it before: on apartheid South Africa, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. In these moments the Times’ editorial board saw that their role could unlock some diplomatic deadlock, tipping the scale against State Department and presidential preference. “South Africa might not budge in the face of sanctions; what's now indisputable is that it will not budge without them,” they wrote in 1986, against Reagan’s “apologias” for Pretoria. If this was indisputable in 1986, why not today?
Failing to crush the resistance in Gaza, “Israel” is expanding its target bank across the region. Only when the IOF turns to their stockpiles and finds them depleted will there be an end to their brutality. Not because they have decided not to kill, but because they will no longer have the means — provided to them by the United States and its ruling Democratic Party.
In the weeks before he was assassinated by “Israel,” Refaat Alareer wrote: “The Democratic Party and Biden are responsible for the Gaza genocide perpetrated by Israel.” We recognize this situation very clearly. Our demands — and our actions — must flow from this recognition. Arms Embargo Now! Death to the Zionist Entity! Free Palestine!