Your support of Israeli mass murder of Palestinians is insufferable. 15,000 dead and counting. More than a million displaced. Gaza’s hospitals are “morgues.”
According to B’Tselem—an Israeli human rights organization—Israel is a “Jewish supremacist” state. B’Tselem has concluded along with Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch that Israel is practicing apartheid. You have no clue as to the realities on the ground in the Middle East in general and Israel/Palestine in particular.
As UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, the Hamas attack of 7 October “did not happen in a vacuum.” Gaza has been under siege and blockade since 2007. As has been said by Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, Norman Finkelstein and many others, “Gaza is the world’s largest open-air prison.”
Meanwhile, large parts of the West Bank—supposedly the future home of a Palestinian state—have been de facto annexed by Israel. Recently more than 200 Palestinians there have been killed by settlers, they should be called colonizers, and the Israeli military. Several thousand Palestinians have been arrested and are being held in administrative detention, i.e., imprisonment without trial or charge. Their homes have been demolished, cars destroyed, olive trees uprooted, crops burned.
Collective punishment is illegal under international law. In violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, 700,000 Israelis are colonizing the West Bank, E. Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Israel is a classic example of a settler colonial state. Its retrograde policies are backed by you. You enable massive death and destruction. Your position and that of the Democratic Party turns my stomach. Shame on you.
PS—Also Mr. President, Bravo for standing by and doing nothing while 125,000 Armenians were ethnically cleansed from their ancestral homeland in Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh). And thanks too for supporting autocratic regimes in Baku and Ankara. Armenians, Palestinians, Kurds and Kashmiris are disposable people. But Blinken probably already told you that.
David Barsamian is an investigative journalist who has altered the independent media landscape, both with his weekly radio program, Alternative Radio—37 years and running— and his books with Noam Chomsky, Eqbal Ahmad, Howard Zinn, Tariq Ali, Richard Wolff, Arundhati Roy and Edward Said. His latest books are Edward Said: Culture and Resistance, Retargeting Iran and Chronicles of Dissent with Noam Chomsky. His forthcoming book with Chomsky is Notes on Resistance. He lectures on world affairs, imperialism, capitalism, propaganda, the media and global rebellions. David Barsamian is the winner of the Media Education Award, the ACLU’s Upton Sinclair Award for independent journalism, and the Cultural Freedom Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation.
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