In light of the United States’ continued financial support for Israel amid its ongoing genocide in Gaza, antiwar organizations say they’ve received a surge of interest from U.S. taxpayers considering tax resistance as a form of protest.

“The office has received more calls and emails and orders for war tax resistance materials than in years,” Ruth Benn, an organizer with the War Resisters League, tells Truthout.

Founded in the aftermath of forced enlistment during World War I, the War Resisters League is under an umbrella of organizations that belong to the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee (NWTRCC), which educates taxpayers across the United States about the reality of military funding and various methods of resistance.

As the April 15 deadline for filing annual income tax returns approaches, the War Resisters League and NWTRCC say they’re seeing a spike in traffic to their online resources, calls and correspondence for more information, orders for educational material and requests for guided workshops on tax resistance.

One of the many activists engaging in tax resistance because of U.S. support for the genocide in Gaza is Paul Stretch, a social worker in Portland, Oregon.

Stretch first engaged in tax resistance decades ago, after the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was gunned down outside of a chapel in El Salvador in 1980, likely due to his opposition to the U.S.-backed military junta which had taken control of the country the previous year. The assassination shocked people around the world, including Stretch, who decided to protest the United States’ support for the junta by refusing to pay the federal taxes due on his home telephone line.

“War tax resistance means refusing to pay some or all of the federal taxes that pay for war.”

As U.S. support for the junta persisted through the administrations of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George Bush, Stretch and his wife refused greater portions of their federal taxes, redirecting the amounts due to local nonprofits caring for their neighbors. After their tax debt ballooned to thousands of dollars, the IRS began garnishing his wife’s wages, forcing them to give up their tax resistance — until last year.

“I felt morally compelled to begin engaging in war tax resistance once again when Israel invaded Gaza and systematically began killing the Palestinian populace,” he tells Truthout.

Stretch isn’t alone. As the United States continues to finance the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza — which has claimed the lives of at least 33,175 Palestinians, including more than 13,000 children and 8,400 women, according to Al........

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