“On tax resistance.”
Breaking the law to observe the law.
Over the past year, the United States and Israel have been committing genocide in Gaza. By these actions, both have proven themselves to be illegitimate states.
This imposes a rare responsibility on Americans. In accordance with internationally recognized legal principles, they are now obliged to disobey their own government—that is, to observe the law by breaking the law. One effective way to do this, one with a lengthy history, is to withhold payment of taxes according to one or another formula others have used during previous tax revolts.
On 12 April of this year The Nation published an article by Lucy Dean Stockton in which she documents a growing movement opposing military aid to Israel comprised of thousands of people who are protesting by refusing to pay their taxes.
Implicit in Stockton’s article, written six months into Israel’s assault on Gaza, is both the historical and politically practical question of how effective a revival of the long American tradition of tax resistance potentially could be in relation to the present crisis of joint American and Israeli commission of genocide.
Stockton reports a resurgence of interest in tax resistance, especially among young people, expressed by an “exponential” increase in visits to the website and Instagram account of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee. As that institution’s outreach coordinator estimates, “There are 10,000 active war tax resisters in the U.S. today, and newcomers could raise that number much higher.” The NWTRCC, indeed, announces a conference, “Resisting Together,” to be held online 8 November to 10 November.
Implicit in Stockton’s article is a strategic surfacing—and preliminary survey—of an uncertain and unknown landscape of financialized protest and refusal of the present politically and morally unbearable status quo on the part of a newly activist democratic electorate. What new or radically revitalized democratic activist political forms, the article encourages us to ask, might now be created or come to the fore in an unbearable neoliberal age in which corporate and militarized power creates, with evident impunity, an exterminatory world order characterized by globalized financialization and the monetization of all value?
As The Nation’s article makes clear, there exist organizations already in place able to assist would-be tax resisters. These include the NWTRCC and the War Resisters League.
But these organizations were formed in another century. The WRL marked the centennial of its founding last year.
Many of us are consumed with an inchoate sense that intrinsic to the conduct of the American empire’s “forever wars” since U.S. military defeat in Vietnam in 1975 has been a mutually determining, deep-seated, systemic corruption of both the language of politics (including law) and the politics of language.
Words of legal protest (including these) against the failure of democratic institutions are now failing us. This is not too drastic a conclusion to draw from the way the lawsuit for crimes of genocide filed in November 2023 in U.S. federal court against Joseph Biden, Antony Blinken, and Lloyd Austin has played out. I will shortly consider the court ruling in this case. For now, this: It is in direct contravention of the rulings of the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, and the findings of all U.N. investigative agencies and confirms the U.S. and Israel’s status as rogue states.
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This is an historically clarifying moment. Not since August of 1860 and the lead-up to the Confederates’ bombardment of Fort Sumter in April of 1861 have U.S. citizens had to decide whether to fight and risk, if not their lives as during the Civil War, their status, reputations, jobs, and freedom from incarceration, to say nothing of personal relationships, to uphold the Declaration of Independence’s foundational commitment to democratically created law. Law being the necessary basis of universal human rights and equality.
To return to the court case mentioned above, on 31 January a federal judge for the District of Northern California, Jeffrey S. White, granted the defendants’ petition for dismissal of a case brought by Defense for Children International–Palestine and other plaintiffs against Biden, Blinken, and Austin for their failure to “take all measures within their power to prevent Israel’s commission of genocidal acts against the Palestinian people of Gaza.” In his ruling, Judge White “implored” the defendants “to examine the results of their unflagging support of the military siege against the Palestinians in Gaza” given the substantive finding by the I.C.J. of the plausibility “that Israel’s conduct amounts to genocide.”
Six months later, on 15 July, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed Judge White’s dismissal. One of the original judges chosen for the appeal panel recused himself and was replaced following the public disclosure of a visit he made to Israel—this along with thirteen other federal judges, including two other judges of the Ninth Circuit—to convene with Israeli legal and military officials. The trip was organized and sponsored by the World Jewish Congress. The WJC explicitly stated that the intention of the visit was to influence U.S. judicial opinion regarding the legality of ongoing military action against Palestinians.
The clear conclusion is that the U.S.–Israeli partnership in the commission of genocide reflects the longstanding corruption of democratic governance and law. It leaves American citizens with no effective institutional recourse to justice—that is, with no ability to utilize the law to stop our government’s participation in a genocide, “the crime of crimes.”
At this defining moment of world-historical crisis it is essential for our self-respect as Americans, surely, to recognize the enormity of the betrayal of democracy in the two Federal court rulings in Defense for Children–Palestine v. Biden et al. They directly and shamelessly contradict the commitment made by all signatories to the Genocide Convention—the first human rights treaty, unanimously adopted by the U.N. General Assembly on 9 December 1948—to ensure that never again would a state’s power to annihilate with impunity become the de facto legitimating source of its authority. The G.A. adopted the Universal Declaraton of Human rights the following day.
The Genocide Convention, which is legally binding, requires all signatories to warn against and intervene to prevent the commission of genocide. It further requires them to prosecute and punish those who commit genocide whether they are private individuals, public officials, or political leaders with otherwise sovereign immunity. The convention was meant to ensure that the law against genocide would be considered by all legitimate powers as falling in perpetuity under the legal category of jus cogens, a “peremptory norm,” from which no “derogation”—that is, no legal exception or exemption—would ever be permitted or considered possible.
Over the past year, the U.S. has openly partnered with Israel in the commission of genocide. It has thus proven itself to be an illegitimate and profoundly undemocratic state. It is illegitimate because of the criminality of its participation in the commission of genocide in Gaza and undemocratic because of its defiance of the will of Americans as expressed in public opinion polls.
Fifty-six percent of Democrats believe Israel is committing genocide; sixty-four percent of likely voters favor an immediate ceasefire and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza; eighty-six percent of Democrats desire an immediate ceasefire and a withdrawal from Gaza of all Israeli occupying forces. Two-thirds of American voters favor a permanent ceasefire and a de-escalation of violence in Gaza.
A derisory subversion of any principled democratic politics is already well under way in the U.S. and Israel’s exterminatory conduct toward Palestinians. But my concern here has nothing directly to do with recovering democracy from the “threat of authoritarianism.” It is how to respond legally and democratically to two states’ joint ongoing commission of genocide. Refusing to recognize that this is what genocide means for the true state of politics in the U.S. and Israel is to live in denial. Such a recognition is surely a prerequisite for any future narrative understanding we eventually achieve about our present moment.
The genocidal slaughter of Palestinians continues. A horrified and disgusted world looks on with amazement and contempt at the unspeakable cruelty and brutality of the U.S. and Israel’s unrelenting, unapologetic, pathologically criminal, systematically conducted policy of extermination.
It is time for American citizens to act on the Nürnberg principle that when it comes to genocide, it is incumbent on each individual to disobey illegal orders. The United States government is out of compliance with its own domestic laws forbidding aid to governments which flagrantly violate human rights and international laws against genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Washington’s blatant failure to comply with domestic and international law is now incontrovertible.
This systemic violation of the most fundamental of all first principles of just governance requires ethical civil disobedience as the only meaningful and available nonviolent response. Intentionally putting oneself in active opposition to an unjust state’s exercise of illegitimate force and overwhelming violence can be seen as simultaneously the last and first act of democratic citizenship. Henry David Thoreau’s much praised and often cited (but very rarely acted upon) essay is not (as it is usually known and discussed) “On Civil Disobedience” but “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.”
When words fail, acts that clear the ground for the assertion (or reassertion) of first principles are valuable. In peace we engage the state most directly as we pay taxes. Our democratic citizen’s duty to disobey illegal orders and to uphold the peremptory legal norm against genocide requires us to refuse to pay taxes in proportion to what the United States government spends in support of the slaughter of civilians in Gaza.
As The Nation article quoted from above documents, there are an increasing number of American citizens who think this way.
Collective withholding of taxes in the name of publicly acting to make the U.S. government accountable—in the moment of its severest testing since the Civil War—need not automatically be considered futile. Let us at least try to imagine the possibility of creating citizen-donated funds made up of withheld Defense Department tax dollars whose proceeds are designated, collectively by the funds’ contributors, as partial downpayment for the reparations Palestinians are so obviously and urgently owed. Trying to make that imagined possibility a reality in the face of the state’s harsh repression of any such effort would signal—in a language of act—a democratic refusal of, and an alternative to, U.S. politics as usual.
Starting with the Declaration of Independence, conscience-driven personal commitments to the first principles of democratic political life exercised directly by challenging an illegitimate state’s right to collect taxes has a long and honored history. Democracy’s present betrayal by the American government’s depraved descent into sponsorship of genocide is on course to continue indefinitely no matter which political party wins the White House on 5 November. Words alone—of protest, unmasking, or even of formal indictment before the I.C.J. and censure by every agency of the United Nations—have proven inadequate to address the enormity of American and Israeli criminality.
Clear, ethical acts by American citizens in opposition to their government’s commission of genocide are needed to assert in practice the first principles of democracy. Even heavy punishment for withholding taxes will be judged by history much too small a price to have paid.
Peter Dimock is a longtime student of American history and the author of three novels. A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family was published by Dalkey Archive Press and subsequently reprinted by Methuen. Dalkey Archive also published George Anderson: Notes for a Love Song in Imperial Time. Dimock’s most recent novel, Daybook from Sheep Meadow: The Notebooks of Tallis Martinson, is out now from Deep Vellum.
