New Post: Letter to my congressional representative
I am supposed to be doing money-earning work this morning, but I got sidetracked. Yesterday, I wrote to my congressional representative Mike Thompson expressing my opposition to U.S. policy regarding Israel’s war on Palestine. His response caused an outpouring of words and emotion whose flow I could not stop. At last, I’m going to post something on my blog about this issue, come what may.
Rep. Thompson,
Thanks for your canned response to my letter. Nothing new here.
How can there be a “two state solution” when Netanyahu specifically says he doesn’t support it? How can you support aid to the Palestinians on the one hand (if you do, then why not then return U.S. funding to UNRWA?) and support bombing them relentlessly with the other? Israel is trying to draw the U.S. into a wider war. Do you support Israel now going into the West Bank and destroying infrastructure and killing children? How do you feel about the International Court of Justice declaring genocide in Gaza? What about the other international court declaring the occupation of Palestinian territories illegal ? What about US violating its own laws by supplying arms to Israel which it then uses to kill civilians indiscriminately? What about using starvation, obliteration of sanitation and health infrastructure as weapons of war? And torture of prisoners? (See Human Rights watch new report on documented torture of Palestinians in Israeli detention)
How can you even call this a war? War is between two nation states. There is no Palestinian state, no official Palestinian army or military infrastructure. No camouflage uniforms, no quadcopters over Israeli cities, no blockage of Israeli Internet. No fighter jets over Israeli cities, no tanks, no armored bulldozers on their settler-only roads, no Palestinian snipers over the apartheid wall. How many Israeli civilians have been killed in the last 10 months? How many of their houses, churches, and universities have been destroyed? How many of their journalists killed? (Oh yes, Israel has forbidden foreign journalist entry, thus no documentation of their activities except by Palestinian journalists whom they have targeted unceasingly.) Aside from the one over border incursion by Hamas fighters on October 7, what damage had the tens of thousands of obliterated Palestinian families done to Israel?
I also didn’t hear you say you disapprove of Israeli settlers destroying Palestinian homes and orchards in the West Bank. Do you think my tax money should be used to rip up roads, water pipes, and sewers in a refugee camp? Do you say you disapprove of Israeli mobs stopping aid from entering Gaza? NO YOU DON’T.
Rep. Thompson, you do not answer my questions and you do not justify U.S. tax money supporting aggressive activity by nuclear-powered Israel against its neighbors all around. Israel has threatened to do to Beirut what it has done to Gaza. Is that OK with you? Should Israel be allowed to control Gaza’s border with Egypt? (Should Canada be allowed to control the U.S. border with Mexico?)
Bottom line: Israel wants to drive all Palestinians out into Jordan and surrounding countries so that the settlers can have it all. Where is the land for a two state solution? Everyone in the world but the U.S. Government seems to know that a two state solution is no longer possible.
YOU TELL ME AND SHOW ME why you support Palestinian genocide. I can quote you the 4 measures of genocide from the convention on genocide and how Israel has met all of the conditions (which was argued by South Africa in their case at the ICJ. ) No matter what Hamas fighters did on one day (remember, Israel had bombed Gaza like this — “mowing the lawn” –all through the last decade, but now is the first time the world really took notice), the way to get peace in the middle east is not through war. Biden has the ability to stop powering Israel’s crimes and he is not using it. And by the way, if Israel has the right to defend itself, do Palestinians have the right to defend themselves?
Over the years, I have heard U.S. officials say that “these people don’t respect life the same way we do.” This racist attitude from on high allows such acts as the stabbing to death of a 7-year-old Palestinian child by his landlord in Chicago and three college students speaking Arabic and wearing keffiyehs to be shot as they walked down a Burlington, Vermont, street. (One of these young man is now paralyzed from the waist down.)
Here is the latest back-to school news: those who protest the war on Palestine at the universities in America are being prosecuted and prosecuted. Where do you stand on this Mike Thompson?
See this report on Democracy Now today from Columbia University:
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/9/5/katherine_franke
and from Northwestern University:
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/9/5/steven_thrasher
Thanks for your consideration of my questions in this message.
Your constituent,
Jennie Orvino
BRAVA, Jennie and THANK YOU. THIS IS A POWERFUL LETTER. One can hope he actually reads it and not just one of his aides.
Thanks, Jennie. Sadly, I think changing the US relationship with Israel would take a decade or longer, so structurally embedded is that relationship. There is probably no legal basis for declaring AIPAC An agent of a foreign power, yet that is what it is. It will be incredibly difficult to reduce US military aid because those billions of dollars are mostly cycled right back in to the gigantic and untouchable American defense industries. It’s likely that the burden of creating major policy change will rest on the shoulders of the younger generation of Jewish Americans, about half of whom are horrified by the attack on Gaza and who have developed deeply different views of Israel and Zionism in general. It’s probably worth noticing that the single largest donor to the Republican party or its PACs is a billionaire Zionist, And that the single largest donor to the Democratic Party or its PACs Is a billionaire Zionist. The continued defunding of UNRWA, the US denunciations of the international courts, and the US supplying massive amounts of weaponry whose utility to Israel is primarily the attack on Gaza shames us all. It’s also worth noticing that the 8000 to one ratio of Palestinian to Israeli casualties in Gaza is remarkably similar to the casualty ratios of every American war since Korea.
Thanks for contributing so much to this conversation, Bill. I agree with what you say, sadly. Particularly for reminding of how much of the money for Israel just comes back to our defense industry! I have really been tongue tied on this issue with only one little poem in all these horrible 10 months.
Very powerful. Please let us know what his response is.
Thank you, Jennie, for writing and sending this powerful and passionate letter to our elected representative. I would hope (against experience, I know) that the letter will move Mike Thompson off his complacency and coziness with genocidal regimes and policies.
Jennie, thank you for sending your passionate and articulate letter. Even if it’s true that the younger generation of Jewish people that are horrified will be the ones to see movement on this, your letter serves as an important marker. It helps those of us reading it to understand the particulars of the situation, and orient ourselves. This has been a horrifying ordeal that many of us have no other reference for except our human knowing that this is wrong. Thank you.