The political scientist William Adler recently argued that the main risk of our current lame duck period is inaction, rather than action. So far as the United States is concerned, it’s hard to argue otherwise.

Sure, President Trump will pardon his buddies, maintain the relentless grift of frivolous lawsuits, and do his best to undermine public confidence in the integrity of this and future elections. Ultimately, however, his shenanigans are most damaging in obstructing the urgent task of containing the second wave of COVID-19. Americans will continue to die in shocking numbers not because of bombs or bullets, but abject government failure.

Abroad, things are different.

Since the election, outgoing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has done the following: refused to peacefully transfer power with a brazenness that usually earns American enemies an invasion or a coup; conducted a tour of the Middle East followed suspiciously promptly by an assassination of Iran’s pre-eminent nuclear scientist; worked diligently to secure a last-ditch $23 billion arms deal with the United Arab Emirates; and apparently brokered a historic meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and one of freedom’s greatest friends, Crown Prince Mohammed bin-Salman of Saudi Arabia.

A Geopolitical Shock Doctrine

Although such overt plotting and scheming is nearly unprecedented for a lame duck Secretary of State, the idea of a geopolitical shock doctrine during the American transition of executive power has a storied tradition with our Middle East allies — particularly Israel.

Because the Israeli government has launched so many vicious attacks on Gaza since it theatrically removed its colonizers from the territory in August 2005, it is hard to keep track of all the mission names and casualty counts.

In 2014, during seven weeks of “Operation Protective Edge,” the UN’s Independent Commission of Inquiry concluded that “2,251 Palestinians were killed, including 1,462 Palestinian civilians, of whom 299 women and 551 children; and 11,231 Palestinians, including 3,540 women and 3,436 children, were injured of whom 10 per cent suffered permanent disability as a result.” Meanwhile, “The death of six civilians in Israel and 67 soldiers and the injury of up to 1,600 others were also the tragic result of the hostilities.” At the height of this assault, 28 percent of the Palestinian population was internally displaced.

You may also remember “The Great March of Return” in 2018, which was defined less by wholesale death and destruction than it was by calculated Israeli military violence against masses of nonviolent protesters. Of course, this has all occurred in the context of a decade-and-a-half land, air, and sea blockade, which has inflicted both humanitarian catastrophe and permanent economic subjugation on the people of Gaza.

Yet, in late 2008 and early 2009, the Israeli government perfected the art of the lame duck gambit.

Incoming U.S. president Barack Obama certainly wasn’t a dove, and had long maintained the standard Democratic Party line on Israel: polite criticism, lip service to international law, and steady streams of financial, military, and diplomatic support.

Still, he had dinner with the legendary Palestinian scholar Edward Said, and showed somewhat more sympathy for the Palestinians than the outgoing president, George W. Bush. And, as it turned out, Obama did end up tangling with Prime Minister Netanyahu when in office, though primarily over Iran, rather than Palestine. Even then, the cause was clearly not Obama fulfilling the spirit of his Cairo speech or his Nobel Peace Prize, but Netanyahu’s extraordinary willingness to publicly undermine Obama in front of the U.S. Congress.

In any event, the parallels between 2008-2009 and today are clear. To be sure, Trump is miles to the right of Bush on Israel, dispensing with any pretense of international law or even-handedness. Bush, moreover, actually agreed to leave office after losing the election, making that lame duck period much less terrifying and unpredictable than the current one.

Punishment, Humiliation, and Terror

Nevertheless, the perspective of Israeli leaders was similar: a thoroughly reliable Republican giving way to a potentially wishy-washy Democrat. So, on the morning of December 27, 2008, the moment was swiftly seized. Gaza was then pummeled for 22 days, its people visited with F-16s, drones, Hellfire missiles, artillery, and viciously incendiary white phosphorus shells.

“The scale and intensity of the attacks were unprecedented, even in the context of the increasingly lethal Israeli military campaigns in Gaza in previous years,” Amnesty International reported. “More Palestinians were killed [1,400] and more properties were destroyed in the 22-day military campaign than in any previous Israeli offensive.”

Israeli authorities produced their standard “targeting terrorists” defense, coupled with the allegation that Hamas fighters used civilians as human shields. Despite the partial truth of the latter claim, the evidence suggests that “Operation Cast Lead” was overwhelmingly designed (in the words of a UN report that was later shamefully watered down) to “punish, humiliate, and terrorize” the entire Palestinian population. Indeed, it is difficult to square Israeli claims of a defensive war with precision-guided munitions hitting civilian targets, the leveling of entire neighborhoods, or searing-hot showers of white phosphorus.

The massacre ended two days before Barack Obama’s inauguration, after which the new president provided the classic liberal response to Palestinian misery: a Special Envoy. This particular envoy, George Mitchell, had impeccable credentials from his work with the Clinton Administration in Northern Ireland, but his much-anticipated travels went the same way as all before him: lofty talk of peace, followed by a resumption of unquestioned Israeli supremacy.

Today, Prime Minister Netanyahu is shrewd and desperate in equal measure. Shrewd enough, certainly, to know that Operation Cast Lead achieved its fundamental goals without any consequences — and desperate enough, perhaps, to cash in on Trump before either or both men wind up behind bars.

For now, these two menaces to global peace and security seem primarily focused on Iran. Yet there are already some indications from Mr. Pompeo’s recent trip that the lame duck period could see more expansive West Bank annexation and criminalization of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.

This, at least, would not be another Cast Lead. But it would add another layer to the ongoing Palestinian nightmare. As ever — under Democrats or Republicans, lame ducks or new administrations — this nightmare is Made in the U.S.A.

And Americans, ultimately, must stop it.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Israel frees Palestinian who waged 103-day hunger strike | AFP

The American war machine has always been integral to American racism. It’s time to tear it down along with those Confederate statues.

( Foreign Policy in Focus) – It was entirely fitting that Senator Tom Cotton would be the one to say the quiet part out loud — very loud — in the New York Times.

Usually, Cotton specializes in inciting war against black and brown people in other parts of the world. He does so with such impressive regularity and predictability that it has ceased to constitute news.

And Cotton is not alone. Before his dubiously earned reputation as a “Never Trumper,” John McCain was another reliable advocate of unrestrained violence against foreigners. Elected Democrats tend to choose their words somewhat more carefully, though they, too, occasionally say what they really think — like when Chuck Schumer explained that Gaza remains a prison because the Palestinians “don’t believe the Torah.”

While Cotton’s op-ed — if we can call it that — ignited a mutiny among Times writers, the standard diet of militarism aimed at distant lands is generally digested without serious protest.

The differences, of course, are real. It is jarring and appalling to hear the nation’s most powerful political leaders candidly contemplate war against their own citizens. If this doesn’t “cross the line” for the president’s most devout followers, I shudder to consider where the line is.

Nevertheless, there is also something unsettling about the implicit notion that state-sanctioned terror is acceptable as long as we don’t have to see it. The truth is: black America has always seen it, and war has always made it worse.

The “Red Summer” Model

“There are no more law-abiding people in the country than our negro citizens,” Congressman Byrnes of South Carolina reassured the House Judiciary Committee in December 1919. However, “the earnest effort of these radicals now is to induce them to join this movement, playing upon the real and imaginary grievances of the negro.”

Byrnes’s comments followed that year’s “Red Summer” of vicious mob violence against black communities, especially in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Elaine, Arkansas. After the mobs faced unexpected resistance, especially among black World War I veterans in Chicago and Washington, government officials soon spread rumors of outside agitation.

“Reds Try to Stir Negroes to Revolt,” a New York Times headline proclaimed on July 28, 1919. “Evidence is accumulating in the files of the Government to show that the negroes of this country are the object of a vicious and apparently well financed propaganda which is directed against the white people, and which seeks, by newspapers, pamphlets, and in other ways, to stir up discontent among the negroes, particularly the uneducated class in the Southern States.”

Here was a familiar dynamic. America went to war, black America did much of the fighting, and then had the gall to fight for some dignity at home.

The cause was not as compelling as war-to-the-death against chattel slavery. “For bleeding France and what she means and has meant and will mean to us and humanity and against the threat of German race arrogance, we fought gladly and to the last drop of blood,” W.E.B. du Bois wrote in Returning Soldiers. “For America and her highest ideals, we fought in far-off hope; for the dominant southern oligarchy entrenched in Washington, we fought in bitter resignation. For the America that represents and gloats in lynching, disfranchisement, caste, brutality, and devilish insult — for this, in the hateful upturning and mixing of things, we were forced by vindictive fate to fight also.”

“Under similar circumstances, we would fight again,” du Bois added. “But by the God of Heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if now that that war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land.”

This was the kind of talk that no self-respecting white supremacist could possibly tolerate.

The immediate perpetrators of the “Red Summer” were the lynchers, the arsons, and the vandals. They were aided, in various ways, by local police forces.

But away from the blood-stained streets — supremely comfortable in the D.C. office spaces where he would spend his whole life — was the Justice Department’s 26-year-old star pupil, John Edgar Hoover. Amid the apparent chaos and confusion of the Red Summer, Hoover began to forge a durable model of repression.

The Perennial Menace

He didn’t touch a rope or torch a church. He didn’t beat a black body or smash up a black business. He was a data guy, dedicated — diligently and consistently — to the destruction of black political power through surveillance, infiltration, and blackmail.

In 1919, the primary targets were Marcus Garvey, as well as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The methods were primitive, including a less-than-subtle campaign to have Garvey convicted of mail fraud. Over time, they matured to encompass the wiretap, the agent provocateur, bugging, forgery, targeted harassment — all of which were infamously deployed against the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, and later against the Black Panther Party.

In his half-century career, Hoover repeatedly learned that war was the perfect justification for more money, more men, and fewer constraints on his power. Conflict abroad, he argued, must mean subversion at home — the Germans one day, the Communists the next. The latent Fifth Column, uniquely susceptible to intruding schemers, would always be black Americans.

After the Second World War, Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) would no longer have a monopoly on the spying bureaucracy. A Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and National Security Agency (NSA) were created — in the official narrative — to provide global intelligence to a now-dominant global power.

Inevitably, even though these agencies were expressly excluded from domestic operations, they joined the party. As John Prados writes in his history of the Vietnam War, “every element of the U.S. intelligence apparatus, not to mention local police, operated against Americans” — from the CIA’s “Project Chaos” surveillance to the Defense Intelligence Agency’s infiltration of the antiwar movement.

The Perfection of the Police State

Vietnam might well be the first time white Americans tasted the official brutality normally reserved for black people. Events like the Kent State massacre gave middle class suburbia a small sample of standard ghetto policing.

Still, during the Vietnam era, black uprisings across the United States — especially in 1965 and 1967 — received the undiluted, pitiless force of “law and order.” They were also met with what would become a nationwide innovation: the SWAT team.

The LAPD’s Daryl Gates diplomatically changed the acronym from “Special Weapons Attack Team” to “Special Weapons And Tactics,” but the original name was ultimately more accurate. As Radley Balko has painstakingly documented, the SWAT team, which is now a ubiquitous feature of American policing, is all about offense — relentless pursuit of the enemy wherever he lives and hides.

The enemy, however, is not just a foreign or exotic foe. It is Drugs, Crime, or Terror — vague and endless threats that are invariably assigned black and brown faces.

This domestic war has been waged with machine guns, armored vehicles, no-knock warrants, and almost every conceivable shiny tool of repression. All while the non-police state – schools, hospitals, subways, roads – has crumbled.

As white Americans begin to question the broken and predatory society that our wars have created, black Americans wonder if we mean it this time. Martin Luther King was surely stating the obvious when he described racism, militarism, and poverty as this country’s three constantly connected evils. Yet each evil still thrives.

White America is likely more comfortable with Instagram blackouts than it is with an assault on the American war machine. But that machine is and always has been integral to American racism. Along with Robert E. Lee, King Leopold, and Edward Colston, it must be torn down.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

Featured Photo: Heavily armed police at a Black Lives Matter protest, Washington, D.C. (Shutterstock)

When history finally conducts an autopsy into this horrendous pandemic, the national security state that failed to protect us cannot emerge unscathed.

(Foreign Policy in Focus ) – Between 1978 and 2018, American presidents declared 58 national emergencies.

Their targets ranged from “Transactions with Terrorists Who Threaten to Disrupt the Middle East Peace Process” and “Transactions with Significant Narcotics Traffickers” to “the Anchorage and Movement of Vessels with Respect to Cuba” and “Persons Undermining Democratic Processes or Institutions in Zimbabwe.”

By the time President Trump declared a national emergency to divert federal money toward border wall construction in February 2019, 31 of these earlier emergencies were still active. Supporters of the president were eager to highlight this fact, and — even though the border wall emergency remained constitutionally dubious — they weren’t wrong in highlighting how Trump was only making use of a tool that the executive branch of government had normalized over time.

Still, a crude tally of executive decrees fails to truly capture the U.S. government’s long-term shift toward a permanent, war-like posture.

We have a generously funded and legally unencumbered national security bureaucracy, embodied in the ever-expanding Department of Homeland Security (DHS). We have a sprawling global intelligence apparatus, spread across seventeen federal agencies and armed with far-reaching powers of surveillance and policing. We retain what is grandly labelled a “National Security Council” — an assortment of the best and brightest minds serving at the sole behest of the president since the Second World War. We have had a Congress willing, in some shape or form, to create and sustain all these institutions for most of the past six decades.

Critics have asked: Does the most powerful nation on earth — which has only substantially been attacked three times in its entire history — need to be governed like this? What about all that stuff from the “founding fathers,” who trembled under their powdered wigs at the prospect of Old World militarism? Might an enormous bureaucratic juggernaut dedicated to the vague idea of security create some problems for civil liberties?

The response to these queries has been simple: We must prepare for the worst. Since September 11, 2001, this argument has resonated with large portions of the American public, not to mention politicians.

But our immovable commitment to “Homeland Security” encompasses much more than terrorism. An incomplete list of threats identified by the American national security state in recent years would also have to include climate change, drug trafficking, Russian trolls, piracy, cybercrime, mass-marketing fraud, “criminal aliens,” and — of course — pandemics.

How, after devoting so much of our resources and energy toward constant crisis management, did we mismanage the mother-of-all-crises so badly?

Perhaps the most obvious answer centers on the current occupant of the White House.

It turns out that relentless, tacky showmanship, spectacular inattention to detail, and wild inconsistency aren’t ideal leadership qualities when the plague looms. From President Trump’s abject failure to create a national testing program to his dissolving of the National Security Council’s pandemic unit in 2018, the commander-in-chief has rightly earned from many Americans a score rather lower than the 10 out of 10 he has given himself for COVID-19 management.

It is difficult to refute the argument that this catastrophe is, at bottom, the president’s fault. The evidence is strong, and the logic is straightforward.

Nevertheless, there are features of this nation-wide fiasco that cannot be blamed entirely on Donald Trump: the tragi-comically inadequate congressional relief efforts, the deadly shortages produced by a parasitic, profiteering health care market, the hero-worship of moderately competent governors who provide no more than token support to the masses of poor, working people most threatened by the virus.

Of course, a better president could have alleviated these problems by acting early, trusting scientists, and fully utilizing key powers like those granted by the Defense Production Act.

But even the most detailed and well-executed plan — produced by the National Security Council specialists who we now wish could rescue us — wouldn’t fix the health care racket, wouldn’t relieve the economic pain, and wouldn’t guarantee anything for essential workers. When operating at maximum efficiency, America’s permanent emergency government is overwhelmingly geared towards other things — things that make better television.

We’re ready to fight two big damn wars at once and to station men, women, and robots all over the world just in case some pipsqueak chooses to mess with us. We’re ready for Iranian sneak attacks and Cuban microwave weapons; one-eyed terrorists and underpants bombers.

Personal protective equipment? Hospital beds? Emergency rent moratoriums? Emergency income support? Not part of the plan — or, at least, the plan backed by all the money and all the important people.

No doubt, political scientists — once they exhaust themselves from a greater than usual outpouring of anger against Donald Trump — will highlight numerous other causes of the American government’s COVID-19 disaster. Federalism could work better. Congress could have a half-decent plan for working remotely. Expertise could be better integrated into policymaking.

Yes, yes, and yes. But for years we have poured incalculable cash and personnel into preparation for the worst. Something close to the worst came, and we botched it badly. When the nation finally conducts an autopsy into this horrendous mess, the system that was supposed to guard against it — the national security state, or whatever we choose to call it — cannot emerge unscathed.

Harry Blain is a PhD student in political science at the Graduate Center, CUNY (City University of New York).

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

CNN: “President Trump’s 10 most outrageous lines on coronavirus”

From El Paso to Pittsburgh, the fears and fantasies of an immigrant invasion, a liberal Jewish betrayal, and a righteous race war have motivated surgically targeted slaughter. With law enforcement — especially the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) — seemingly more concerned with “black identity” and “animal rights/environment extremists,” our so-called “War on Terrorism” looks more distorted than ever.

Klansmen rally on the National Mall, 1926. (Shutterstock)

Should we be trying to even the score?

Although it is tempting to embrace Senator Elizabeth Warren’s call for white supremacy to be treated as domestic terrorism, any widening of the current, more narrow “war” should be approached with caution. History suggests that repression of these movements may well succeed, but also bring a troubling mix of unintended consequences.

The Old Wars on White Terrorism

The obvious analogue to today is the 1960s. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover long held that national security was under attack not from the architects of near-daily atrocities in “Bombingham,” Alabama, or from a resurgent Ku Klux Klan, but instead the Black Panther Party and the unruly, allegedly Communist-sponsored “agitators” of the Civil Rights movement.

Hoover had to be cajoled, belatedly, by President Johnson before the FBI promised, in September 1964, to “expose, disrupt, and otherwise neutralize the activities of the various Klans and hate organizations” across the country.

By 1970, 17 field offices were participating in this “counter-intelligence program” (COINTELPRO), which included tried-and-tested methods like the “manipulation of informants, anonymous letters, and friendly press services” to foment conflicts among the leaders of white supremacist organizations. The Bureau even exposed the Jewish descent of the Nazi Party’s Midwest Coordinator.

By most accounts, these typically dirty tricks — honed by their deployment against civil rights leaders — were effective in undermining groups like the Klan.

The story was different when the federal government was confronted with its first bout of “White Terror” after the Civil War. Initially disorganized violence against newly emancipated African Americans solidified quickly into a politically inspired assault on Reconstruction: The Civil War-era Republican Party’s attempt to build something like a biracial democracy in the South.

Although our received image of Southern racism is the grinning, poor, illiterate white man ogling at a burning black body, the original Ku Klux Klan was more country club than trailer park — formed and sustained by prominent politicians, decorated Confederate veterans, and former slaveholders.

This embedding of the Klan in respectable society ensured its expansion throughout the late 1860s. Only in 1870, with Ulysses Grant in the White House, and after the harrowing Ku Klux Klan Congressional hearings, did a counter-terrorism plan develop.

By our standards, the Enforcement Acts — passed by Congress in 1870 and 1871 — were relatively tame, focusing, for the most part, on beefing up the newly created federal Department of Justice.

But the third of these acts provided for a true emergency power: The president could suspend the writ of habeas corpus in pursuit of white terror organizations.

Grant, it seems, was genuinely appalled by Klan violence, and did not hesitate to act on his new authority in response to rampant terrorism in South Carolina. Yet resistance to “Bayonet Rule” — including from within his own party — combined with a devastating economic crisis and deepening Republican divisions to leave most of the former Confederacy to the mercy of well-armed “Redeemers” intent on restoring the Old South.

In this, the first American war on white terrorism, the terrorists unquestionably won.

What Can We Learn?

These historical episodes could be interpreted simply: If Ulysses Grant had a J. Edgar Hoover and a COINTELPRO instead of an overstretched army and a reticent Congress, Reconstruction might have had a fighting chance of success. The civil libertarians may not like it, but the only remedy for white supremacy is our strongest possible repressive medicine.

Today, however, this argument raises two difficult questions.

First, would repression actually work? It is not hard to identify people who march around with bedsheets on their heads or swastikas on their sleeves. Navigating the largely online network of the “alt-right” movement is less straightforward: leaderless, dispersed, and rarely traceable to a specific organization.

Second — and much more difficult — could repression backfire?

A combination of old-school and modern methods — infiltration, surveillance, hacking, propaganda — is surely at least capable of disrupting the activities of white terrorist groups. But here the civil libertarians do have a point: Extreme powers used for one purpose can easily be recycled for something else.

Britain passed a Public Order Act to restrict fascist demonstrations, and the government deployed it against communists; the US Congress established a House Un-American Activities Committee with the goal of exposing Nazis, only to turn it overwhelmingly against the left; and France’s Lellouche Law — aimed at hate speech — has more recently targeted pro-Palestinian activists.

Even in supposedly strong democracies, checks and balances have struggled to reverse these repressive cycles. We could boot President Trump out of office and craft a new counter-terrorism law carefully directed at white supremacists, but it will still be interpreted and enforced by Trump-packed courts, an unaccountable national security bureaucracy, and more than a few rogue local law enforcement agencies. The end result is unlikely to be pretty.

The Real Risk of Overreaction

After the El Paso shooting on August 3, the FBI called for a law much like this.

Apparently rooted in common sense, these proposals should be viewed skeptically. The alternative is not necessarily to do nothing, or, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested, to offer an olive branch to young men “in the grips of hatred.”

There is a strong argument for reallocating the resources of law enforcement away from mosques, Muslim Student Associations, and games of cricket, and toward the real threats posed by white supremacists. But the last thing we should encourage is an expanded “War on Terror.”

Via FPIF

Harry Blain is a PhD student in political science at the Graduate Center, CUNY (City University of New York).

New York (FPIF ) – “They just seem — well — less developed, less innovative, less productive than the Israelis.”

This was one of the many objections I faced during a recent attempt to secure support for a petition condemning the 12-year siege of Gaza. While it seemed honest, it was also probably influenced by a time-honored propaganda tactic: the celebration of Israel’s economic and technological achievements in everything from renewable energy to its “startup ecosystem,” as opposed to the stagnation, corruption, and cronyism of the Arab and Muslim world.

Making the Desert Bloom

Few proponents of this narrative put it quite as bluntly as “the cool kid’s philosopher,” Ben Shapiro, did in 2010. “Israelis like to build,” he wrote on Twitter. “Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage. This is not a difficult issue. #settlementsrock.”

All the same, there seems to be something inherently appealing about supporting a country that has “made the desert bloom.” Who can argue with the basic facts? Rationing of oil and food existed in Israel as late as the 1960s; now it boasts “the highest density of startups of any country in the world.” From 1986 to 2016 its GDP grew by 180 percent. Its unemployment and debt-to-GDP figures make some developed nations look like banana republics.

Compare this with the miserable spectacle of an Egyptian economy 40 percent controlled by its armed forces, a Saudi “rentier state” sustained by a slave-like, mostly South Asian underclass, or a growing casualty list of failed Iranian development plans and vision documents. Not to mention the Palestinians, whose leaders have often done an impressive job of squandering and misusing large sums of foreign aid money, or paying civil servants not to work as long as they belong to the right political faction.

“Redeeming the Soil”

In a broad sense, these were the points raised by the man who didn’t like my petition. And, like any good political operative, I dodged them: the only question on this piece of paper, I said, is whether we should defend — with our tax dollars and national diplomatic representatives — the self-proclaimed right of the Israeli military to shoot and kill non-violent protesters.

But, notwithstanding my attempt to stay “on message,” the economic questions do have to be answered. For one thing, they have significant political implications, lying at the heart of Israel’s national mythology since at least the late 19^th century, when early “Labor Zionists” committed themselves to “redeeming the soil” through agricultural settlements in Palestine.

In a more concrete way, “the economy” is not — and never should be — a purely academic curiosity. As our material foundation, it is capable of broadening, constraining, stimulating or destroying the possibilities of human life. It is at the core of our daily struggles and advances. Understanding its dimensions in Israel/Palestine, therefore, is essential to understanding what we vaguely call “the Arab-Israeli conflict.”

Strangulation Hurts

Thankfully, despite what some officially-anointed “experts” tell us, the general picture is not particularly complicated.

Israel’s economic development has been remarkable, and much of it has been driven by the ingenuity of its citizens — but it helps when American aid reaches above 10 percent of your GDP in times when you really need it.

It helps too when you have full control over your borders, airspace, roads, water, schools, and electricity. When you don’t have to worry about well-armed, hostile colonists routinely setting fire to your olive trees. When you can go fishing without being shot, threatened, or humiliated by a professional national navy. When you can drink clean water, or plant in clean soil. When your imports and exports are not subject to the arbitrary restrictions of a government whose ministers openly support your mass expulsion.

Many of these inhuman and degrading conditions apply to everyone living in the occupied Palestinian territories. But they are uniquely crushing to the people of Gaza.

Although Palestinian leaders — both in Hamas and Fatah — are far from guiltless, it takes a heavy dose of intellectual casuistry to deflect blame from the de jure and de facto occupying power. Gaza’s economic catastrophe is not caused by a lack of entrepreneurial spirit or some politicians who can’t keep their hands out of the till. It is caused by an occupation regime that has embraced New York Senator (and, incredibly, now Senate Minority Leader) Chuck Schumer’s call to “strangle them economically.”

This strangulation has ranged from sinister calculations of near-but-not-quite starvation levels of daily caloric intake for Gaza, to more mundane but equally humiliating micromanagement of Gaza’s eggplant and tomato exports. Its primary consequence is what Harvard’s Sara Roy calls a “demeaning dependence on humanitarian aid” for at least 1.3 million Gazans (70 percent of the strip’s population).

And this is really the central point about the relationship between the economy and the conflict: it’s not a question of GDP per capita, aggregate growth, or even the unemployment rate. As any political scientist will not hesitate to tell you, there are too many poor people and not enough wars in the world to sustain the idea that poverty causes war.

In this sense, Gandhi’s often-quoted claim that “poverty is the worst form of violence” might not be an empirically sound one. But what we see in Gaza is not just poverty: it is, above all, humiliation. This, of course, can grind people down until they give up. However, it only takes a single outrage — a murder, a beating, an insult — to turn these slowly accumulating grievances into a political explosion. Israel learned this the hard way in 1987 and 2000, as did many Arab dictatorships in 2011.

It is good when we speak out against horrors like those that the Israeli military inflicted on Great March of Return protesters. But calling out the more insidious economic violence that dominates daily life in Palestine comes closer to the essence of the struggle. We cannot wait for the next massacre before we take up this task.