Palestine, Gaza, and the Price of US Impunity

On July 19, 2024, the International Court of Justice — the UN's principal judicial organ — issued an advisory opinion: Israel's occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem is illegal under international law. The court found that Israel's prolonged presence in occupied territory, combined with its annexation policies and settlement program, violated the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people and constituted an unlawful act of acquisition of territory by force.

The court's 15 judges — drawn from every major legal tradition in the world — voted 11-4 on the core finding. The opinion called on Israel to end its occupation "as rapidly as possible" and on all states to refrain from aiding or assisting in maintaining the illegal situation.

The United States government rejected the opinion. A State Department spokesperson said the US "disagrees with the court's approach." The US has not changed its policy, its military aid, or its diplomatic posture in response to the ruling.

The UN Security Council is the only international body empowered to take binding action on international peace and security. The United States has used its permanent veto power to block Security Council action on Israel-Palestine more than 45 times since 1972 — more than on any other single issue. Every proposed ceasefire resolution, every condemnation of settlement construction, every attempt to impose international humanitarian law as binding obligation has been blocked.

During Israel's military campaign in Gaza that began in October 2023, the US vetoed Security Council ceasefire resolutions multiple times — including in October 2023, December 2023, and February 2024. The US finally abstained (rather than vetoing) on a March 2024 resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire, but did not support it, and the resolution had no enforcement mechanism.

Without US protection, international sanctions or enforcement mechanisms would long since have been applied. The US veto is the structural enabler of Israeli impunity in international law.

The United States is Israel's primary arms supplier, its largest diplomatic protector, and its largest single donor. According to Congressional Research Service data, cumulative US military assistance to Israel from 1948 to 2023 exceeded $158 billion — making Israel the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign assistance in American history.

During the 2023–2024 Gaza campaign, the Biden administration approved multiple emergency arms transfers, including 2,000-pound bombs. Multiple US officials reported internally that they could not confirm US weapons were not being used against civilians — a legal requirement under US law. The transfers continued anyway.

In February 2024, the Biden administration issued a "national security memorandum" determining that Israel had not blocked US humanitarian aid — a determination its own State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs staff dissented from in an internal dissent cable. Weapons transfers continued.

Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories, issued a March 2024 report titled Anatomy of a Genocide. The report concluded that there are "reasonable grounds to believe" that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, citing the mass killing of civilians, the deliberate destruction of infrastructure required for survival (hospitals, water systems, food supplies), and public statements by Israeli officials that, if made anywhere else in the world, would be treated as incitement.

The International Court of Justice, ruling on South Africa's genocide case against Israel in January 2024, found it "plausible" that some rights protected by the Genocide Convention were being violated, and ordered provisional measures requiring Israel to take all measures to prevent genocide — though without ordering a ceasefire.

More than 45,000 Palestinians were killed in Gaza in the first 15 months of the campaign, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health — a figure the WHO and UN have treated as a minimum floor, not a ceiling. The majority were civilians. More than 1.7 million people were internally displaced.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee and affiliated organizations — most prominently the United Democracy Project (UDP), AIPAC's super PAC arm — spent over $100 million in the 2024 election cycle, including aggressive primary campaigns targeting Members of Congress who criticized US military aid to Israel. AIPAC's primary targets included progressive Democratic incumbents who had voted against or publicly criticized arms transfers.

This is not advocacy. It is the systematic purchase of silence and compliance in the US legislature on a foreign policy issue where the actual public opinion is far more mixed than Congressional votes suggest. Polls consistently show that a majority of Americans, including a large majority of Democrats, support conditioning military aid to Israel on human rights compliance. Congressional votes tell a different story.

The gap between public opinion and Congressional action on Israel-Palestine is one of the clearest examples in American politics of money successfully overriding democratic will.