By Norman Solomon / The Hill

Former President Joe Biden “has told some Democratic leaders he’ll raise funds, campaign and do anything else necessary for Democrats to recover lost ground,” NBC News reported last week. Some prominent party supporters reacted with skepticism while insisting on anonymity, but Jane Kleeb, a new vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, voiced open enthusiasm.

“If you were to call any state party chair and ask them if they wanted Joe Biden to be a keynote speaker for their annual dinner, the answer would be yes,” Kleeb said. “He is beloved by the party and beloved by the voters.”

Kleeb is a rising star on the national stage, after many years as the innovative head of the Nebraska Democratic Party. In February, state party chairs elected her to a four-year term as president of the Association of State Democratic Committees, replacing Ken Martin when he became the new DNC chair. The two are close allies.

Does Kleeb truly believe that all state Democratic chairs would want Biden to keynote their annual dinner? The claim seems dubious. Her description of Biden as “beloved by the voters” is quite a stretch; Gallup polls show that Biden’s approval remained in the vicinity of 40 percent during the last three years of his presidency.

As the Democratic Party struggles to regroup after its disastrous 2024 election, what is needed from leadership is candor, not more politician-speak that touts Biden as some kind of guiding light for the future. Kleeb’s depiction of him is disconnected from the outlooks of grassroots Democrats.

Today, few Democrats agree that Biden is a fitting exemplar for their party. This month, when a CNN poll asked Democratic voters “which one person best reflects the core values of the Democratic Party,” only 1 percent chose Biden.

Pretending otherwise is politically foolish. Biden might appeal to the more hidebound party leaders, but it’s a whole different story for the voters that the party needs to mobilize. The reflex to do implausible public relations has been chronic among Democratic leaders, often undermining their credibility and damaging the party’s electoral prospects.

[Click here to real full article on The Hill website.]

By Norman Solomon

Israel’s renewed assault on Gaza comes several months after both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch issued reports concluding without equivocation that Israel was engaged in genocide. But very few members of Congress dare to acknowledge that reality, while their silence and denials scream out complicity.

In a New York Times interview last weekend, the Senate’s Democratic leader Chuck Schumer put deep moral evasion on display. Among the “slogans” that are used when criticizing Israel, he said, “The one that bothers me the most is genocide. Genocide is described as a country or some group tries to wipe out a whole race of people, a whole nationality of people. So, if Israel was not provoked and just invaded Gaza and shot at random Palestinians, Gazans, that would be genocide. That’s not what happened.”

Schumer is wrong. The international Genocide Convention defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” — with such actions as killing, “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” and “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

Such actions by Israel have been accompanied by clear evidence of genocidal intent — underscored by hundreds of statements by Israeli leaders and policy shapers. Scarcely three months into the Israeli war on Gaza, scholars Raz Segal and Penny Green pointed out, a database compiled by the Law for Palestine human rights organization “meticulously documents and collates 500 statements that embody the Israeli state’s intention to commit genocide and incitement to genocide since October 7, 2023.”

Those statements “by people with command authority — state leaders, war cabinet ministers and senior army officers — and by other politicians, army officers, journalists and public figures reveal the widespread commitment in Israel to the genocidal destruction of Gaza.”

Since March 2, the United Nations reports, “Israeli authorities have halted the entry of all lifesaving supplies, including food, medicine, fuel and cooking gas, for 2.1 million people.” Now, Israel’s horrendous crusade to destroy Palestinian people in Gaza — using starvation as a weapon of war and inflicting massive bombardment on civilians — has resumed after a two-month ceasefire.

On Tuesday, children were among the more than 400 people killed by Israeli airstrikes, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proclaimed that “this is only the beginning.”

It’s almost impossible to find a Republican in Congress willing to criticize the pivotal U.S. backing for Israel’s methodical killing of civilians. It’s much easier to find GOP lawmakers who sound bloodthirsty.

A growing number of congressional Democrats — still way too few — have expressed opposition. In mid-November, 17 Senate Democrats and two independents voted against offensive arms sales to Israel. But in reality, precious few Democratic legislators really pushed to impede such weapons shipments until after last November’s election. Deference to President Biden was the norm as he actively enabled the genocide to continue.

This week, renewal of Israel’s systematic massacres of Palestinian civilians has hardly sparked a congressional outcry. Silence or platitudes have been the usual.

For “pro-Israel, pro-peace” J Street, the largest and most influential liberal Zionist organization in the United States, evasions have remained along with expressions of anguish. On Tuesday the group’s founder and president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, issued a statement decrying “the decision by Netanyahu to reignite this horrific war” and calling for use of “all possible leverage to pressure each side to restore the ceasefire.” But, as always, J Street did not call for the U.S. government to stop providing the weapons that make the horrific war possible.

That’s where genocide denial comes in. For J Street, as for members of Congress who’ve kept voting to enable the carnage with the massive U.S.-to-Israel weapons pipeline, support for that pipeline requires pretending that genocide isn’t really happening.

While writing an article for The Nation (“Has J Street Gone Along With Genocide?”), I combed through 132 news releases from J Street between early October 2023 and the start of the now-broken ceasefire in late January of this year. I found that on the subject of whether Israel was committing genocide, J Street “aligned itself completely with the position of the U.S. and Israeli governments.”

J Street still maintains the position that it took last May, when the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to halt its military offensive in Rafah. “J Street continues to reject the allegation of genocide in this case,” a news release said.

It would be untenable to publicly acknowledge the reality of Israeli genocide while continuing to support shipping more weaponry for the genocide. That’s why those who claim to be “pro-peace” while supporting more weapons for war must deny the reality of genocide in Gaza.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," includes an afterword about the Gaza war.

By Norman Solomon / The Nation

Since its founding in 2008, the advocacy group J Street has had a consistent motto: “pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy.” In practice, this has meant resolute backing for a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine, and consistent criticism of the extremist policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Along the way, J Street has remained closely allied with the Democratic Party, raising almost $15 million for Democratic candidates during the last election cycle and taking credit as the “largest Jewish organizational fundraiser for Kamala Harris.”

But J Street’s importance goes far beyond the group’s fundraising prowess. Its status as an unabashedly liberal Zionist group—in contrast with the ever-more-hawkish AIPAC—has allowed it to play a unique political role on Capitol Hill. Whether accused of being insufficiently or excessively loyal to Israel, Democratic lawmakers can use their alignment with J Street as a handy shield. Notably, during President Obama’s second term, J Street helped push the Iran nuclear deal through Congress despite intense opposition from AIPAC and other hawks. The White House official in charge of gaining approval for the agreement, Ben Rhodes, later recalled that “J Street was one of the most effective organizations that supported the Iran deal because they had a large grassroots network and growing clout on the Hill.”

But, as with liberal Zionism itself, the flaws in J Street’s approach have become more and more apparent over the years. The group rarely used its aforementioned clout to raise critical questions about recurring Israeli assaults on Gaza. And the relentless brutality of the Israeli assault on Gaza that began in response to the October 7 Hamas attack left J Street floundering for a coherent message.

Routinely, while calling for the release of the Israeli hostages, the organization also expressed concern about the deaths and suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. But none of J Street’s 132 news releases between October 7 and the start of the ceasefire in late January 2025 called for an end to shipments of the US bombs and weapons that were killing those civilians while enforcing Israel’s policy of using starvation as a weapon of war—a glaring omission for a group that declares itself to be “pro-peace.” It was as if J Street thought that vague humanistic pleas could paper over these gaping cracks in its stance.

However, J Street felt comfortable taking a firm line on the question of whether Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. Here, it aligned itself completely with the position of the US and Israeli governments.  In mid-January 2024, when oral arguments ended at the International Court of Justice in the case brought by South Africa that charged the Israeli government with violating the Genocide Convention in Gaza, a news release declared that “J Street rejects the allegation of genocide against the State of Israel.” Four months later, on May 24, J Street responded quickly when the ICJ ordered Israel to “immediately halt its military offensive” in Rafah. “J Street continues to reject the allegation of genocide in this case,” a news release said.

That statement from J Street came ten days after the publication of an article by Aryeh Neier, a founder of Human Rights Watch, who wrote: “I am now persuaded that Israel is engaged in genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.” Many other experts, including Omer Bartov, the Israeli-American professor seen as the world’s leading scholar of genocide, agreed. But this was a bridge too far for J Street. 

In a statement last December, J Street’s founder and president Jeremy Ben-Ami harked back to what he described as Israel’s “promise as a proud, just, peaceful democratic homeland not just for the Jewish people, but for all who live there.” He called for following “the path that allows Israel to remain true to its founding values of pluralism, equality, freedom and justice, and a commitment to liberal democracy.” Such messages are not only conveniently unmoored from history (Palestinians would, to say the least, likely take issue with the idea that Israel was ever conceived as a homeland for them). They are also, crucially, in sync with denial about the present-day realities of Israel, a state that grows more committed to apartheid, occupation, and ethnic cleansing with each passing year.

[Click here to read full article on The Nation website.]

By Norman Solomon / TomDispatch

Donald Trump’s power has thrived on the economics, politics, and culture of war. The runaway militarism of the last quarter-century was a crucial factor in making President Trump possible, even if it goes virtually unmentioned in mainstream media and political discourse. That silence is particularly notable among Democratic leaders, who have routinely joined in bipartisan messaging to boost the warfare state that fueled the rise of Trumpism.

Trump first ran for president nearly a decade and a half after the “Global War on Terror” began in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The crusade’s allure had worn off. The national mood was markedly different than in the era when President George W. Bush insisted that “our responsibility” was to “rid the world of evil.”

Working-class Americans had more modest goals for their government. Distress festered as income inequality widened and economic hardships worsened, while federal spending on war, the Pentagon budget, and the “national security” state continued to zoom upward. Even though the domestic effects of protracted warfare were proving to be enormous, multilayered, and deeply alienating, elites in Washington scarcely seemed to notice.

Donald Trump, however, did notice.

Pundits were shocked in 2015 when Trump mocked the war record of Republican Senator John McCain. The usual partisan paradigms were further upended during the 2016 presidential campaign when Trump denounced his opponent, Hillary Clinton, as “trigger happy.” He had a point. McCain, Clinton, and their cohort weren’t tired of U.S. warfare — in fact, they kept glorifying it — but many in non-affluent communities had grown sick of its stateside consequences.

Repeated deployments of Americans to war zones had taken their toll. The physical and emotional wounds of returning troops were widespread. And while politicians were fond of waxing eloquent about “the fallen,” the continual massive spending for war and preparations for more of it depleted badly needed resources at home.

Status-Quo Militarism

President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton represented the status quo that Trump ran against and defeated. Like them, he was completely insulated from the harsh boomerang effects of the warfare state. Unlike them, he sensed how to effectively exploit the discontent and anger it was causing.

Obama was not clueless. He acknowledged some downsides to endless war in a much-praised speech during his second term in office. “Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue,” he affirmed at the National Defense University. “But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.”

New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer hailed that instance of presidential oratory in a piece touting Obama’s “anguish over the difficult trade-offs that perpetual war poses to a free society.” But such concerns were fleeting at the White House, while sparking little interest from mainstream journalists. Perpetual war had become wallpaper in the media echo chamber.

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By Norman Solomon

The Capitol’s phone lines have been overwhelmed this month, and some Democrats are complaining about the deluge of calls from voters who implore them to fight the Trump administration. Too often the responses to the calls have amounted to passing the buck rightward.

“It's been a constant theme of us saying, ‘Please call the Republicans,’" Virginia Democratic Rep. Don Beyer explained. Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) is offended by what he’s hearing from constituents. “I reject and resent the implication that congressional Democrats are simply standing by passively,” he said.

Such reactions are political copouts. Those two congressmembers represent deep-blue districts, and both of their states are represented by Democratic senators. Responding to outraged constituents by telling them to “call the Republicans” is a way of dodging responsibility and accountability.

It's easy enough for Torres, Beyer and others in the Democratic caucus to gripe about the volume of irate calls to their offices. And at first glance, telling constituents to contact Republicans instead might seem logical. But that’s actually a way of telling an angry Democratic base not to be a nuisance to Democratic lawmakers.

What’s more, as a practical matter, their constituents often have no way to message GOP members of Congress. The congressional email system doesn’t allow non-constituents to send a message to a representative or senator. And the first thing that a staffer wants to confirm on the phone is whether the caller is in fact a constituent.

Fully half of the nation’s citizens — and a large majority of Democrats — live in states with two Democratic senators. And so, routinely, when Democratic officeholders say that their agitated constituents should leave them alone and “call the Republicans,” it amounts to a brushoff that can be translated from politician-talk as “Stop bugging us already.”

But in primaries next year, some are liable to be held accountable. Few serving Democrats with blue electorates will face tight races in the 2026 general election — but if they’re perceived as wimps who failed to really put up a fight against President Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk, incumbents risk facing primary challenges propelled by grassroots anger.

The anger might seem overheated inside Capitol Hill bubbles. But it’s real for millions of engaged activists — the ones who volunteer in droves and can get behind insurgency campaigns with plenty of fundraising, canvassing power and social-media impacts.

Mere shrugs from Democrats that they’re in the minority won’t wash. “The rules of the Senate are designed to protect the rights of the minority, and Democrats have tools to grind Senate business to a halt to delay and defy the Trump-Musk coup,” the activist group Indivisible points out. “The three biggest weapons? Blanket opposition, quorum calls, and blocking unanimous consent — parliamentary guerrilla tactics that can slow, stall, and obstruct at every turn.”

The needed opposition goes way beyond procedural maneuvers. The tenor and vehemence of public statements every day, from the hundreds of Democrats in the House and Senate, set a tone and convey messages beyond mere words on paper and screens.

The week after Trump’s return to the Oval Office, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) traveled to California and met with donor powerhouses in Silicon Valley, where he reportedly “said Democrats were reaching toward the center, while Trump will swing harder right.” Here we have the prospective next House speaker pledging to move in the direction of a president whom Gen. Mark Milley has described as “fascist to the core.”

Jeffries’ goal of hugging “the center” may play well with rich tech executives, but it shows notable indifference to the large bulk of Democratic voters. Early this month, CBS News reported that its polling shows “the nation's rank-and-file Democrats are increasingly looking for more opposition to President Trump from their congressional delegation.” The trend has been emphatic. Only 35 percent want Democrats in Congress to “try to find common ground with Trump,” while 65 percent want them to “oppose Trump as much as possible.”

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By Norman Solomon / The Hill

The Democratic National Committee has just elected a new chair, but the old guard that has long dominated the party will not go quietly. Although there are some reasons for cautious optimism, the road ahead will be steeply uphill for the Democratic Party.

Ken Martin, longtime chair of the party in Minnesota, is replacing DNC Chair Jaime Harrison, whose four-year term was marked by steady subservience to his patron, former President Joe Biden. Martin has the opportunity to be a leader instead of merely following self-focused directives from the president. It shouldn’t be difficult to improve on Harrison’s job performance.

The DNC headquarters has functioned as a fortress, notorious among grassroots party activists as an unwelcoming place. Martin might be inclined to change that.

Many top executives at the DNC do not like Martin. Given their hidebound behavior, it’s an indication that badly needed change might be in the offing. What’s more, it is encouraging that the new chair overcame the opposition of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who all publicly endorsed Ben Wikler, Martin’s main rival for the post.

The national party has remained in the grip of leaders who have never acknowledged their abject failure. That failure can be summed up in a notorious statement Schumer made a few months before Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump in 2016: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia. And you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

Rather than dissipate after Clinton’s shocking loss, this elitism lingered on and guided the strategy of former Vice President Kamala Harris eight years later. “The path to victory in a state like Michigan, Harris campaign officials are betting, is through suburban counties that are home to many college-educated and white voters,” the New York Times fatefully reported less than three weeks before the election.

Although countless party officials and pundits have scratched their heads over the drastic fall-off in working-class support for the 2024 Democratic ticket, the main reasons should not be mysterious. The faux populism of Trump’s Republican Party cannot be effectively countered by warmed-over liberal bromides and calls for incremental reform.

To shed its well-earned reputation for elitism, the DNC should stop running away from populism and instead embrace it — not by making peace with Trumpism, but by moving toward genuine progressive populism. That means showing that the party actually means business about siding with the interests of low- and middle-income Americans against the rapacious effects of unfettered corporate power — from systematic price gouging to regressive tax rates to runaway military spending — at the expense of programs that meet human needs.

[Click here to real full article on The Hill website.]

By Norman Solomon / The Hill

More than 800 Americans in Northern California have now joined in a class-action lawsuit against their Democratic congressional representatives, charging them with illegally helping to provide weapons to Israel for use in committing genocide in Gaza. News of the suit has caused a stir in the Bay Area, with media coverage putting the pair, Rep. Jared Huffman and Rep. Mike Thompson, on the defensive.

Legal experts may be correct that the suit is destined to be thrown out of court. The judicial branch has rarely been willing to interfere with the foreign policy decisions of the legislative or executive branch, and issues like legal standing and the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause have routinely shielded legislators. But harping on the steep uphill climb for the lawsuit — and others like it now being prepared by plaintiffs elsewhere in the country — misses the political point.

I decided to join the lawsuit as a plaintiff and to help publicize it because I think that even if the action loses in court, it will win in public discourse. And that will, justifiably, make the congressional defendants the losers.

Like other plaintiffs in the Northern California case, I believe that our lawsuit is on solid ground of justice. The arms shipments to Israel’s military have violated the Constitution, the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide and U.S. federal laws — including the Leahy law, which prohibits the government from “using funds for assistance to units of foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights.” The namesake of the law, former Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), says it is being violated.

In effect, by enabling approval of $26.38 billion in military aid to Israel last spring, 366 members of the House voted to force constituents into being complicit in genocide. No amount of rhetoric can change that overarching reality. And no amount of legalistic arguments will deflect the profound effects that moral revulsion can have on politics.

Before the winter ends, dozens of members of Congress, mostly Democrats, are likely to be facing class-action lawsuits from constituents accusing them of illegal and immoral complicity in genocide. Such lawsuits promise to spotlight what many of those lawmakers would much prefer to keep in the shadows.

Legalistic issues of standing and the like avoid far deeper questions. Anyone who contends that the federal court system is immune from an era’s politics might want to ponder the difference between the Supreme Court’s 1896 “separate but equal” ruling in Plessy vs. Ferguson and its 1954 ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education.

Drawing media attention to congressional votes for massive arms shipments to Israel will expose lawmakers who staked out positions opposed by the majority of voters. While the defendants may triumph legally, victory will tend to be Pyrrhic — winning in federal court, but losing in the court of public opinion.

What’s more, as with the lawsuit against Huffman and Thompson, the plaintiffs will be largely organized by congressional district while pursuing community outreach strategies — a potentially ominous prospect for politicians seeking reelection. Liberal members of the House who have voted to arm Israel’s military would be wise to recall that entrenched liberal Democrats like former Reps. Eliot Engel, Michael Capuano and Joseph Crowley have fallen to primary challengers who were in part propelled by antiwar sentiment.

[Click here to real full article on The Hill website.]

By Norman Solomon / Media North

A few days before the end of 2024, the independent magazine +972 reported that “Israeli army forces stormed the Kamal Adwan Hospital compound in Beit Lahiya, culminating a nearly week-long siege of the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza.” While fire spread through the hospital, its staff issued a statement saying that “surgical departments, laboratory, maintenance, and emergency units have been completely burned,” and patients were “at risk of dying at any moment.”

The magazine explained that “the assault on medical facilities in Beit Lahiya is the latest escalation in Israel’s brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza, which over the last three months forcibly displaced the vast majority of Palestinians living in the area.” The journalism from +972 – in sharp contrast to the dominant coverage of the Gaza war from U.S. media — has provided clarity about real-time events, putting them in overall context rather than episodic snippets.

+972 Magazine is the work of Palestinian and Israeli journalists who describe their core values as “a commitment to equity, justice, and freedom of information” — which necessarily means “accurate and fair journalism that spotlights the people and communities working to oppose occupation and apartheid.” But the operative values of mainstream U.S. news outlets have been very different.

Key aspects of how the U.S. establishment has narrated the “war on terror” for more than two decades were standard in American media and politics from the beginning of the Gaza war in October 2023. For instance:

• Routine discourse avoided voices condemning the U.S. government for its role in the slaughter of civilians.
• The U.S. ally usually eluded accountability for its high-tech atrocities committed from the air.
• Civilian deaths in Gaza were habitually portrayed as unintended.
• Claims that Israel was aiming to minimize civilian casualties were normally taken at face value.
• Media coverage and political rhetoric stayed away from acknowledging that Israel’s actions might fit into such categories as “mass murder” or “terrorism.”
• Overall, news media and U.S. government officials emitted a mindset that Israeli lives really mattered a lot more than Palestinian lives.

The Gaza war has received a vast amount of U.S. media attention, but how much it actually communicated about the human realities was a whole other matter. The belief or unconscious notion that news media were conveying war’s realities ended up obscuring those realities all the more. And journalism’s inherent limitations were compounded by media biases.

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By Norman Solomon

When news broke over the weekend that President Biden just approved an $8 billion deal for shipping weapons to Israel, a nameless official vowed that “we will continue to provide the capabilities necessary for Israel's defense.” Following the reports last month from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch concluding that Israeli actions in Gaza are genocide, Biden’s decision was a new low for his presidency.

It’s logical to focus on Biden as an individual. His choices to keep sending huge quantities of weaponry to Israel have been pivotal and calamitous. But the presidential genocide and the active acquiescence of the vast majority of Congress are matched by the dominant media and overall politics of the United States.

Forty days after the Gaza war began, Anne Boyer announced her resignation as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine. More than a year later, her statement illuminates why the moral credibility of so many liberal institutions has collapsed in the wake of Gaza’s destruction.

While Boyer denounced “the Israeli state’s U.S.-backed war against the people of Gaza,” she emphatically chose to disassociate herself from the nation’s leading liberal news organization: “I can’t write about poetry amidst the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.”

The acclimatizing process soon became routine. It was most crucially abetted by President Biden and his loyalists, who were especially motivated to pretend that he wasn’t really doing what he was really doing.

For mainline journalists, the process required the willing suspension of belief in a consistent standard of language and humanity. When Boyer acutely grasped the dire significance of its Gaza coverage, she withdrew from “the newspaper of record.”

Content analysis of the war’s first six weeks found that coverage by the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times had a steeply dehumanizing slant toward Palestinians. The three papers “disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict” and “used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians,” a study by The Intercept showed. “The term ‘slaughter’ was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and ‘massacre’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2. ‘Horrific’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4.”

After a year of the Gaza war, Arab-American historian Rashid Khalidi said: “My objection to organs of opinion like the New York Times is that they see absolutely everything from an Israeli perspective. ‘How does it affect Israel, how do the Israelis see it?’ Israel is at the center of their worldview, and that’s true of our elites generally, all over the West. The Israelis have very shrewdly, by preventing direct reportage from Gaza, further enabled that Israelocentric perspective.”

Khalidi summed up: “The mainstream media is as blind as it ever was, as willing to shill for any monstrous Israeli lie, to act as stenographers for power, repeating what is said in Washington.”

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By Norman Solomon                                                     

On the last day of 2024, the deputy general counsel for the House of Representatives formally accepted delivery of a civil summons for two congressmembers from Northern California. More than 600 constituents of Jared Huffman and Mike Thompson have signed on as plaintiffs in a class action accusing them of helping to arm the Israeli military in violation of “international and federal law that prohibits complicity in genocide.”

Whatever the outcome of the lawsuit, it conveys widespread anger and anguish about the ongoing civilian carnage in Gaza that taxpayers have continued to bankroll.

By a wide margin, most Americans favor an arms embargo on Israel while the Gaza war persists. But Huffman and Thompson voted to approve $26.38 billion in military aid for Israel last April, long after the nonstop horrors for civilians in Gaza were evident.

Back in February — two months before passage of the enormous military aid package — both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International found that, in the words of the lawsuit, “the Israeli government was systematically starving the people of Gaza through cutting off aid, water, and electricity, by bombing and military occupation, all underwritten by the provision of U.S. military aid and weapons.”

When the known death toll passed 40,000 last summer, the UN’s high commissioner for human rights said: “Most of the dead are women and children. This unimaginable situation is overwhelmingly due to recurring failures by the Israeli Defense Forces to comply with the rules of war.” He described as “deeply shocking” the “scale of the Israeli military’s destruction of homes, hospitals, schools and places of worship.”

On Dec. 4, Amnesty International released a 296-page report concluding that Israel has been committing genocide “brazenly, continuously and with total impunity” — with the “specific intent to destroy Palestinians,” engaging in “prohibited acts under the Genocide Convention.”

Two weeks later, on the same day the lawsuit was filed in federal district court in San Francisco, Human Rights Watch released new findings that “Israeli authorities are responsible for the crime against humanity of extermination and for acts of genocide.”

Responding to the lawsuit, a spokesperson for Thompson said that “achieving peace and securing the safety of civilians won’t be accomplished by filing a lawsuit.” But for well over a year, to no avail, the plaintiffs and many other constituents have been urging him and Huffman to help protect civilians by ending their support for the U.S. pipeline of weapons and ammunition to Israel.

Enabled by that pipeline, the slaughter has continued in Gaza while the appropriators on Capitol Hill work in a kind of bubble. Letters, emails, phone calls, office visits, protests and more have not pierced that bubble. The lawsuit is an effort to break through the routine of indifference.

Like many other congressional Democrats, Huffman and Thompson have prided themselves on standing up against the contempt for facts that Donald Trump and his cohorts flaunt. Yet refusal to acknowledge the facts of civilian decimation in Gaza, with a direct U.S. role, is an extreme form of denial.

“Over the last 14 months I have watched elected officials remain completely unresponsive despite the public’s demands to end the genocide,” said Laurel Krause, a Mendocino County resident who is one of the lawsuit plaintiffs.

Another plaintiff, Leslie Angeline, a Marin County resident who ended a 31-day hunger strike when the lawsuit was filed, said: “I wake each morning worrying about the genocide that is happening in Gaza, knowing that if it wasn’t for my government’s partnership with the Israeli government, this couldn’t continue.”

Such passionate outlooks are a far cry from the words offered by members of Congress who routinely appear to take pride in seeming calm as they discuss government policies. But if their own children’s lives were at stake rather than the lives of Palestinian children in Gaza, they would hardly be so calm. A huge empathy gap is glaring.

In the words of plaintiff Judy Talaugon, a Native American activist in Sonoma County, “Palestinian children are all our children, deserving of our advocacy and support. And their liberation is the catalyst for systemic change for the betterment of us all.”

As a plaintiff, I certainly don’t expect the courts to halt the U.S. policies that have been enabling the horrors in Gaza to go on. But our lawsuit makes a clear case for the moral revulsion that so many Americans feel about the culpability of the U.S. government.

To hardboiled political pros, the heartfelt goal of putting a stop to the arming of the Israeli military for genocide is apt to seem quixotic and dreamy. But it’s easy for politicians to underestimate feelings of moral outrage. As James Baldwin wrote, “Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.”

Organizing together under the name Taxpayers Against Genocide, constituents served notice that no amount of rhetoric could make funding of genocide anything other than repugnant. Jared Huffman and Mike Thompson are the first members of Congress to face such a lawsuit. They won’t be the last.

In recent days, people from many parts of the United States have contacted Taxpayers Against Genocide (via classactionagainstgenocide@proton.me) to see the full lawsuit and learn about how they can file one against their own member of Congress.

No one should put any trust in the court system to stop the U.S. government from using tax dollars for war. But suing congressmembers who are complicit in genocide is a good step for exposing — and organizing against — the power of the warfare state.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," includes an afterword about the Gaza war.