After Damascus fell, “a historic day in the history of the Middle East” per Netanyahu, Tel Aviv immediately began stealing more Syrian land with Washington’s support. The IDF is indefinitely taking control of territory outside the illegally occupied Golan Heights in the UN sanctioned demilitarized buffer zone established in 1974, with Israeli forces reportedly holding positions beyond those areas within fifteen kilometers of Damascus. Illegal settlement expansion in the Golan Heights is surging.

Most unfortunately, as hundreds of thousands have already been slaughtered and maimed not just in Gaza, but from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea, the Palestinians are likely going to be hit that much harder now. Only the American people can stop this U.S.-backed carnage by exerting relentless pressure on their own government to cease funding Israel’s wars.

A legal route may be the only sufficient way to force an end to American complicity in the Israeli rampage. Washington is currently breaking myriad laws on our own books, including the Arms Export Control Act, the Foreign Assistance Act, and the Leahy Laws by supporting Israel’s mass slaughter campaign against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and elsewhere.

Israel’s refusal to allow humanitarian aid into the Strip despite the White House’s public demands, particularly as Tel Aviv escalates its ethnic cleansing plan in the north, its countless gross violations of human rights across Palestine and Lebanon, as well as its unlawful possession of nuclear weapons, all render Washington’s transfer of billions in military aid to the Israelis totally illegal.

The efforts of Palestinians, including at least one US citizen, to sue the State Department and Democratic party lawmakers’ campaigns against the White House’s unlawful support for Israel’s war machine deserve the American people’s support. But, across the political spectrum, there must be more grassroots action as the hawks in Trump’s transition team and Tel Aviv seek to drag the United States into a war with Iran while Tehran appears temporarily weakened. As Trump recently told Time magazine when asked about the chances of war with Iran, “anything can happen.”