Trump and Netanyahu are murdering civilians in Lebanon and Gaza to win their elections. The bombs dropped this week, the hospitals struck, the villages demolished—they are not tactical necessities. They are campaign ads written in blood.
The electoral math is brutal and simple. Netanyahu’s coalition is fracturing; his corruption trial looms; the far-right partners who keep him in power demand annexation of southern Lebanon and the West Bank. So he feeds them war. A state of emergency drowns out scandal, rallies the base, and silences dissent. The bodies are just the price of staying in office. Those living through the bombardment are told to keep a bag packed and wait for the next convoy, which is the only certainty a military occupation offers. The terror that forces families to flee by bus, car, or foot on a moment’s notice, the economic paralysis, the generational trauma of watching hospitals burn—this is not collateral damage; it is the mechanism. Perpetual fear erodes hope and makes any alternative to Netanyahu’s rule seem impossible.
This operating tempo creates the illusion of strategic necessity where only domestic electoral survival actually remains. As Andrew Bacevich documented in Washington Rules, the institutional apparatus treats military engagement as a permanent administrative function rather than an extraordinary corrective—a pattern Bacevich traced from the Cold War through Iraq. The war does not end because the architecture feeding it requires the continuous expenditure of munitions and political capital to justify its own existence. A deterrence posture becomes the only language policymakers understand, even when it accelerates the very regional collapse it claims to prevent. Since the October 2025 ceasefire, over nine hundred people have been killed in Gaza despite brokered halts, and the deepest incursion into Lebanon in twenty-six years has displaced hundreds of thousands more from the south. Agreements collapse because their architects never intended them to hold. They are negotiating the tempo of the bombardment, not the cessation of it.
The United States is not a bystander to this slaughter; it is the quartermaster. Dwight Eisenhower warned in his 1961 farewell address of the military-industrial complex and its potential for the “disastrous rise of misplaced power.” Today, American-made bombs and fighter jets are the instruments of that misplaced power, unleashed even as ceasefires are announced and forgotten. The Strait of Hormuz closure has sent oil prices spiking—a direct consequence of a war the White House enabled—and yet the weapons keep flowing. Trump, battered by inflation and midterm anxiety, would rather talk peace than keep shipping arms, but the machinery of resupply outruns his political calculations. That is the divergence that sustains the killing: a beleaguered American president who needs a deal, and an Israeli prime minister who needs war to survive.
What those weapons do is not abstract. Michael Walzer, in Just and Unjust Wars, establishes that the deliberate targeting of civilians is never permissible, even in pursuit of a just cause. Israel’s strikes on hospitals, its demolition of entire villages in southern Lebanon, its starvation blockade of Gaza—these are not the tragic collateral of a necessary campaign; they are the campaign. War crimes, plain and simple, committed with precision-guided munitions paid for by American taxpayers. Phil Klay, in Redeployment, documented the profound moral cost of treating foreign battlefields as abstractions, and the actual consequence of this kind of permanent forward deployment is the annihilation of ordinary life. In Tehran, Beirut, and Gaza, people are staring down state collapse and the total absence of air raid shelters.
Congress has the constitutional authority to halt this. The Foreign Assistance Act’s Section 502B and the Leahy Laws condition military aid on human rights compliance, and the Arms Export Control Act gives Congress further levers. Those laws have been ignored through multiple administrations, and this one is no different. A constitutional republic requires its wars to be declared by law, funded by taxation, and bounded by time. When the executive branch and a foreign coalition bypass these constraints to turn civilian populations into political leverage, the system abandons its founding contract and operates as an armed corporate entity. The blood in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran is not only Netanyahu’s work; every member of Congress who votes to send more bombs without conditions is an accomplice.
Netanyahu is murdering civilians. Washington is paying for the ordnance. For the families who never unpack, the only certainty is a countdown to the next strike.