Words of Warning from the West Bank & Gaza
Our Taxpayer Dollars Fund It; Will Our Voices Stop It?
For 60 days, the Israeli government has blocked the flow of aid and goods into Gaza.
60 days. For 60 days, the Israeli government—led by a man who has made pretty clear his intentions behind continuing this war—has violated humanitarian law and basic norms of international law in the most unmistakable way possible.
60 days. Let’s put that in perspective. Trump has been in office for a little over 100 days. For more than half of that time, Gazans have endured Israeli bombardment without food, water, shelter, or medication. If the time seems to be passing much too slow here in America, it is hard to imagine how the time passes in Gaza.
All the while, Netanyahu’s government has engaged in a slow-motion encirclement of the Palestinian people as a whole. It continues to bulldoze West Bank villages. It continues to launch new military campaigns in the West Bank. And from Tulkarm to Bethlehem, they have left little behind besides an expansive path of needless destruction.
The far-right Israeli cabinet has just officially signed onto a plan to “conquer Gaza.” The second most far-right member of that cabinet, Smotrich, openly brags that, within a year, Gaza’s entire population will “be confined to a narrow swath of the land.” The rest, of course, will be “utterly destroyed.” Similarly, Smotrich has boasted that new Israeli building & construction in the West Bank’s “E1 area” will “kill the de-facto Palestinian state.”
For these radical right-wing Israelis, this is indeed a “historic opportunity.” Why? Well partly, because we in America are paying for all of it. These are the “ambitious” programs that your taxpayer dollars are funding. Not an expansion of the child tax credit. Not a plan to fix America’s broken healthcare system.
No. A plan to annihilate an entire population of people. A plan to slowly cut off their food supplies in a slow and excruciating fate worse than death. All sponsored by the same American president who promised “no foreign wars” and an end to conflicts “on Day 1” of his presidency.
That, much like all else in this Administration, has turned out to be an empty promise. The ceasefire deal fell apart for all the reasons we could have predicted: Trump did not care about much more than the flashy headlines when Hamas and Israel signed “the deal,” and Netanyahu only did the deal so that he could indulge Trump by giving him “the win.” And Hamas is, well, Hamas. But again, I digress.
If these past 100 days have seemed to crawl at the pace of a snail, it is hard to imagine how the time passes in Gaza or in the West Bank. With the help and encouragement of Donald Trump and his Administration, our country is responsible for aiding & encouraging 60 days of a full-on blockade and the deaths via slow starvation of untold numbers of Gazan children. Plus 100 days of a full-on assault/slow annexation of the West Bank.
Why? Because Netanyahu was one of the men who helped to elect Donald Trump. And so our taxpayer money is Donald’s way of returning the favor without sharing his own personal slush funds.
Not so long ago, the notion of the Israeli government holding up aid to Gazans until further notice almost threatened to derail President Biden’s visit to Israel in the days after October 7th.
Now? There’s nothing more than a shrug, and maybe a passing comment made about 45-50 days after giving Netanyahu free reign to commit the most obvious of sustained human rights violations. If that were not bad enough, Trump topped it all off with a proposed real estate development built on the graves of tens of thousands of dead Gazans.
What a sacrilege. And we are on the hook for all of it. Our dollars prop up the Netanyahu regime, which is an enemy to the freedoms of its own people, never mind to the freedoms of the innocent Palestinians that it attempts to force out of their homeland.
Where does that leave us, then? Well, we still have a choice. I am almost certain that the vast majority of everyday Americans—even many Trump supporters—would rather see our tax dollars put to better use.
Yet, to rework an old saying, good intentions alone will not save Palestinians from traveling down the road to Hell. If we want to make a difference, we have to take a stand for the people’s right to decide where the people’s money actually goes.