An Offensive Shield -- for Impunity, and Genocide: The Iron Dome and U.S. Complicity in Slaughter of Gazans

The Iron Dome … is the preeminent strategic enabler of Israel’s asymmetric genocidal war against Palestinians.

Guernica by Picasso

The House of Representatives has approved giving Israel an additional $1.3 billion in “emergency defense assistance” for its Iron Dome missile defense program, another installment of countless billions sent from the United States to intensify a one-sided war against the Palestinian people.

The Iron Dome system intercepts short range rockets (launched from 2.5 to 43 miles) through the joint work of the IDF, Israeli contractors, and U.S. weapons manufacturers like Raytheon. Radar batteries detect incoming missiles, calculate direction and threat level, and, if necessary, target the menacing projectile and speed interceptors to destroy it.

The Iron Dome destroys incoming rockets at high altitude, but, since its emplacement in 2011, the system has also functioned to enable Israel to conduct ethnic cleansing and perpetuate genocide with impunity in Gaza and the West Bank.

It has underwritten an astonishingly deadly campaign of collective punishment, with lengthy, targeted air, drone, and guided missile strikes in densely populated areas. These deadly attacks are carried out against a people who have no army, no shield, and no means of response.

When we fund one-sided protection without justice, we destroy the possibility of peace for them, and for ourselves.

The Iron Dome, then, is not just a “defense” system. It is the preeminent strategic enabler of Israel’s asymmetric genocidal war against Palestinians. First the shield, then the sword.

It must be said clearly: Opposing genocide and illegal occupation is not antisemitic. It is the defense of humanity. The Israeli government's ongoing colonization of Palestinian land, its collective punishment of a captive population, and its refusal to recognize a sovereign Palestinian people all constitute violations of international law.

To oppose this violence is not to oppose Jewish people. It is to stand against the machinery of oppression, just as we should for any people subjected to such inhumanity.

By eliminating the possibility of reprisal, the Iron Dome has insulated Israel from accountability, enabling it to continue inhumane policies of dispossession and aggression without consequence. This strategic impunity dulls domestic dissent and emboldens a government that continues to seize land and to erase Palestinian life.

War crime inquiries, censures, sanctions, none of it matters while the Netanyahu government pursues with single-minded intensity a “Greater Israel,” using the most advanced military technologies against people who cannot fight back.

That the whole of the United States is not consumed with outrage at the mass murder, the diabolical, Torquemadan cruelties of the IDF, the self-appointed agents of death who gleefully kill children, laugh while shooting starving people desperately scrapping for a morsel of food to survive, and bomb hospitals, mosques, churches, markets, cafes, even tents, -- is a wrenching testimony to the psychic numbing that occurs with distance from the grim reality of war and the power of the dehumanizing narrative to which many Americans have succumbed. The capacity to emotionally respond to the agonizing suffering of Palestinians has been muted by distance and by relentless propaganda in the West.

I remember years ago, during the Vietnam War, daily news accounts of the carnage in Southeast Asia eventually dissolved into an undifferentiated mass of information, causing readers to turn the page or switch the channel. Information overload can normalize atrocity as it dulls cognition. Then, when battle scenes of U.S. soldiers being killed or injured were carried by US television networks, the powerful emotional impact drove home the true cost, propelled public opposition to the war and forced President Lyndon Johnson from office.

Spectators of events in Israel can become morally anesthetized as high technology is employed in mass murder, when journalists are targeted and killed, when civilian casualties roll up like an odometer at high speed. Except for random videos posted online, the only testimony is that of the IDF, which denies, denies, denies, cries “anti-Semitism” at exposure, and then, after a pause for a drink of limonana, efficiently continues the killing.

The Iron Dome provides Israel with the illusion of security, that having created enemies everywhere, it can declare the peoples of any nation in the region “Amalek” and proceed to destroy Gaza and the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria. Israel, like its benefactor the United States, has been willingly catapulted into what sage Gore Vidal called “perpetual war for perpetual peace.” Iraq, Libya and Iran figure into the banality of such savagery.

The Likud government’s hyper militant pose is inherently self-destructive. A population that feels secure tolerates riskier policies, emboldening its military. This escalating aggression will not end well for Israel. It has isolated itself from much of the world community. What a stunning journey, from being the hoped-for spiritual “light unto nations” to becoming a pariah nation, with morally depraved leaders using Biblical authority to rampage and kill.

Licensing relentless, deadly violence against Palestinians will not end well for the U.S. government or the American people. Without the United States’ money and munitions, Israel would not be able to level Gaza and pulverize its people. The U.S. has entwined itself with Netanyahu and fine-tuned the IDF’s killing machine, transforming Gaza from a functioning society into an abattoir.

U.S. policies increase offensive military spending while cutting domestic priorities. We deprive our own people of a secure economic life while guaranteeing that Israeli society stays intact with bountiful health and education benefits. This contradiction cannot be maintained without political consequences.

The U.S. has provided Israel in Gaza with a sense of financial, political, diplomatic, and military immunity from its every sordid excess. As such, it has achieved a sterling level of complicity, which may very well find Israeli officials alongside their U.S. benefactors in the dock at The Hague.

Once the American people become fully aware of the monstrous killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, the genocide, the ethnic cleansing which steals lives and land, the destruction of the Palestinian home and hearth, all done in the name of the American people, with their votes, with their tax dollars used to destroy people who look like them, killing children who look like their children, all in the name of “Greater Israel,” I believe the backlash will be severe.

Then, those politicians who slavishly approved money to conduct genocide, who funded Israel’s Iron Dome, who were basically indentured servants of the Israeli war machine, will find that they were on the wrong side of history and of the electorate.

It will not be enough to cut off funding to Israel. There must be a dramatic restructuring of U.S. foreign policy, not only in the Middle East, but globally.

The constant preparation for war, spending more than one trillion dollars a year, more than 50 percent of discretionary spending, makes us less safe. It transfers the wealth of the nation from the mass of people into the hands of a few, keeps us on permanent war footing, leads to the misuse of power, puts us in search of wars to incite, and will lead to our own destruction.

If the United States must uphold the principles it claims to stand for: Liberty, justice, and the equal worth of all people, that means protecting both Palestinians and Israelis from violence. It means ending the occupation of Palestinian land, the collective punishment of civilians, and the targeting of noncombatants. These are moral failures and violations of international law.

The path to peace is through diplomacy based upon the Geneva Conventions, the U.N. Charter, the U.S. Constitution and the spiritual teachings common to all great faiths, including Christ’s command to love our neighbor -- which do not countenance military superiority or theological exceptionalism. American leadership should reflect values which protect the lives of all people.

Witness Gaza. Look at the faces of a people ‘stripped bare with the curse of nothingness,’ for it is our own future, unless we change America’s direction in the world.

Let the science of human relations become our shield. We must require our leaders to reject notions of world dominance, to stop bullying, and to become healers, peacemakers, diplomats.

It is time to use the wealth of our nation for our own people, to improve housing, health care, education, retirement security; otherwise, what is a nation for?

Let us dedicate ourselves to lifting the murderous siege inflicted upon Palestinians. We must demand that the IDF withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank, and that the U.S. stop funding Israel.

Let us mark the horrible suffering and the martyrdom of the Palestinian people, and of people in all war-torn regions of the world, including Israel, as the beginning of the end of war.

There has not been, in our lifetimes, a more urgent necessity to heed the lesson of the Book of Isaiah and “turn swords into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” (Isaiah 2:4)