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Friend,
Today, October 7th 2024, marks one
year since the Hamas attack on Israel that many consider to have
sparked Israel’s US-backed genocidal campaign against Gaza that is now
exploding into a regional war. But history did not begin on October
7th, 2023.
To understand the current
situation, we must look back at least as far as 1948 to the Nakba, the
brutal mass expulsion of indigenous Palestinians from their homes by
Zionist paramilitaries and the newly formed state of Israel. While the
world has been watching in horror for the past year as this genocidal
rampage has cut short hundreds of thousands of innocent lives, that
one year was preceded by generations of violence, occupation,
displacement, dispossession, apartheid, and ethnic
cleansing.
While we abhor violence, we must
understand that settler colonialism, occupation, genocide, and all
forms of oppression have always provoked resistance. If we merely
condemned violence “on all sides” without first acknowledging the
underlying conditions of oppression and doing everything we can to
rectify those conditions, we would not only fail to address the root
causes of the problem, but would risk becoming complicit in injustice
by drawing a false equivalency between oppressor and oppressed. As
Desmond Tutu observed, “if you are neutral in situations of injustice,
you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
One of history’s greatest
nonviolent changemakers, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., identified the
“great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom” as “the white
moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice” and “who
prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive
peace which is the presence of justice”. For too long, the US
government has supported Israel’s version of “order” and “peace” that
demands the systematic subjugation of Palestinians to violent
injustice. But whenever people are denied their human rights,
resistance is inevitable. Even President Kennedy recognized this with
his statement that “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will
make violent revolution inevitable.”
Dr. King also recognized the
hypocrisy and uselessness of condemning the violence of the oppressed
without first addressing the violence of oppression: “I knew that I
could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed
in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest
purveyor of violence in the world today - my own government.” The US
government is fully complicit in the violence that Israel has
inflicted on the Palestinians and others, after supplying Israel with
over one hundred fifty billion dollars in military aid and shielding
Israel from accountability to the international community for its long
history of defying international law. For Americans to condemn
Palestinian resistance while our own government actively oppresses the
Palestinian people would be neither just nor conducive to
peace.
The events of October 7th, 2023
have been weaponized to justify the genocide of Palestinians. Yet it
has become clear that official accounts of October 7th have not only
been divorced from the historical context, but factually distorted to
serve the agenda of the Zionist Israeli government. As one example,
Australia’s ABC News reported in September that Israeli forces apparently
applied the “Hannibal Directive” on October 7th, killing an untold
number of their own citizens in attempts to prevent them from being
taken hostage. The official discourse on hostages has also been
extremely one-sided, rarely if ever mentioning that thousands of
Palestinians are held prisoner by Israel without charge. From the
“Hannibal Directive” killings to Netanyahu’s disregard for the
families of Israeli hostages to Israel’s expansion of the war far
beyond Gaza, it’s clear that the Israeli government has not acted out
of concern for hostages, but has only used those concerns as
justification to launch a preconceived agenda of conquest and
genocide.
In just the last few weeks, the
situation has gotten even worse. In a massive escalation of its
genocidal war on Gaza, Israel has invaded Lebanon. Shortly thereafter,
Iran launched a barrage of missiles at Tel Aviv in response to
Israel’s attacks on Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Palestine, and Iran itself,
raising fears of an ever-expanding war in the Middle East that could
even spark World War III, nuclear war, or both.
If he wanted to, President Biden
could stop this war with one phone call to the Israeli prime minister
as Ronald Reagan did in 1982. Israel’s war machine is completely
dependent on US taxpayer-supplied weapons, money, military and
diplomatic support. But instead the Biden-Harris administration is
complicit in Netanyahu’s plans to expand this horrific war. A recent
Politico article titled “US officials quietly backed Israel’s push
against Hezbollah” revealed that top Biden advisors actually
encouraged Israel to invade Lebanon - despite the Democrats’ claims
that Kamala Harris is “working tirelessly for a ceasefire”.
We do not consent to be dragged
into World War III by Netanyahu to support his genocidal land grab in
Palestine, Lebanon, and beyond. By allowing Netanyahu to essentially
dictate US foreign policy, Biden and Harris have abdicated the
responsibility of their office.
As President, the first thing I
will do is make the phone call to stop this madness at once and fix
the crisis at its source - by ceasing all support to Israel until it
ends its genocide in Gaza and agrees to negotiate a settlement for
Palestine and the region consistent with international law and the
rulings of the International Court of Justice. The US, as the primary
backer of Netanyahu’s military campaigns, holds the power to end his
assault on Gaza and bring him to account. This is not a matter of
diplomacy but of the US electorate exercising its responsibility by
voting for leaders with the political will to act. As voters in the
most powerful nation on Earth, we bear a unique obligation to hold our
government and its allies accountable.
By holding Israel accountable, the
US can rejoin the international community, from which we have become
increasingly isolated due to our government’s unconditional support
for Israel’s defiance of international law. When the United Nations
considered membership for Palestine this year, 143 nations voted in
favor and only 9 against, including the US and Israel. But the US has
consistently used its veto power to shield Israel from accountability,
undermining any credibility our nation has to speak on issues of
international law and human rights.
As a Jew who grew up just after the
Holocaust, with relatives who fled pogroms and a grandfather named
Israel, I take “never again” seriously. And that means never again for
anyone. In just the last year, I have met thousands of people from all
walks of life, including Muslims, Jews, Christians, Palestinians,
Israelis, Arabs, and many others from many ethnic, religious and
spiritual backgrounds. And I can say with certainty from my personal
experience that peace and friendship are possible. We can put an end
to war, genocide, and generations of oppression, and start a new path
to a world of peace, justice, and human rights for all.
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