We US citizens in Kansas City must call for a cease-fire in the Israel-Palestinian war | Opinion
Twenty years ago, a small group of us met at the Waldo Branch of the public library to discuss our concerns about U.S. policy in the Middle East, particularly with regards to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We formed Citizens for Justice in the Middle East, calling ourselves “citizens” not because we wanted to exclude people who weren’t, but because we wanted to emphasize who we were: ordinary American citizens concerned about the need for a responsible U.S. policy that respected the rights and aspirations of both Israelis and Palestinians.
Since then, CJME has sponsored lectures and films, held panel discussions, organized conferences and lobbied our legislators in Missouri and Kansas to support Palestinian human rights and uphold international law. We have tried to bring better understanding to a topic frequently marked by denial, distortion and disinformation.
Since our group formed, the situation of Palestinians has grown worse. There have been more illegal Israeli settlements constructed on the West Bank, more confiscations of Palestinian land, more demolitions of Palestinian homes, more violence by Jewish settlers, and in Gaza a crippling blockade Israel imposed in 2007 after Hamas won democratic elections for the Palestinian Parliament. Before the outbreak of war in October, more than 80% of the population lived in poverty. Electricity was available only two to four hours a day; 97% of the groundwater was undrinkable. In 2012 United Nations officials warned Gaza would be unlivable by 2020. That year has come and gone, with the world largely indifferent to the suffering caused by the 16-year siege.
The massacre of civilians in Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7 was horrific, the loss of innocent life tragic. Depicted as an intelligence failure, the attack speaks more fundamentally to the decadeslong failure of Israel’s political leaders to negotiate an end to the 75-year old Israeli-Palestinian conflict that arose during the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 when 750, 000 Palestinians were displaced from their homeland, and that continued after Israel’s 1967 conquest and occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.
The Oct. 7 terror attack highlights the failure of U.S. policy as well. For decades now, the United States has immunized Israel from the consequences of its actions, protecting Israel in the UN Security Council with its veto and providing Israel a constant flow of money and armaments. We have disincentivized Israel from making peace. President Joe Biden’s strong support for Israel’s war in Gaza doubles down on a feckless policy that pays lip service to peace and the two-state solution, but has done nothing to advance them or to stop Israel from depriving Palestinians of their land, herding them into ghettos and periodically bombing the caged population in Gaza.
Israel has long used disproportionate violence in response to attack. Now it is escalating the collective punishment of the population in Gaza to new, previously unseen levels of brutality. During the first week of the war, Israel dropped 6,000 bombs on the Gaza Strip, an area half the size of Kansas City with four times the population. Since then, bombing has intensified, according to news reports. More than 1.5 million Palestinians have fled their homes seeking escape from relentless air strikes. People in Gaza are being deprived of food, water and fuel. More than 11,000 have died, almost half of them children.
In the eyes of the world, including many of its own diplomats, the United States is complicit in war crimes. Under international law, war crimes committed by one side — Hamas— do not justify war crimes committed by the other side. Sending more arms to Israel to continue its slaughter is unconscionable and arguably illegal.
Around the world, hundreds of thousands of people have been protesting the bloodshed in Gaza and calling for a cease-fire. Citizens in this country have an even greater responsibility to do the same. It’s our weapons that are being used to kill Palestinians. It’s our policies that have encouraged extremism on both sides and prevented measures that could lead to a fair and just resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.