Dear friends,
I alternate between violent rage, a welling up of unwept tears, frustration, utter speechlessness, and rage again.
I don’t have words, but sometimes all we have is words, and if we don’t speak up, if we don’t act, then who will. We, people of privilege, we in the US and in the West, with blood on our hands.
Some thoughts:
ONE. Yesterday, Saturday, July 26, Israeli forces intercepted the Gaza Humanitarian Aid flotilla ship, the Handala, and took captive the 20 brave souls from ten countries, different faiths, attempting to deliver baby formula, medicine, food, diapers and other necessary aid to the besieged people of Gaza undergoing a human-made genocide at the hands of Israel and the United States. The humanitarians and journalists that make up the Handala’s crew include our dear friend, Palestinian-American human rights attorney, Huwaida Arraf.
Just before the Handala was boarded and thee crew kidnapped, Huwaida delivered the following message directly to the Israeli Zionist military:
“Israeli navy, this is the civilian vessel Handala. Let me give you a lesson in international law. Any blockade that deliberately starves a civilian population is a violation of international law. It is not only that, it is a war crime. You have no legal authority to enforce an unlawful blockade and as such you have no authority to use force to enforce an unlawful blockade. Therefore we demand that you stand down. You are responsible for the well-being of every civilian on board this vessel. As an occupying power in Gaza, you are responsible for the health and well-being of the civilian population there. Not only have you disregarded that obligation but you are actively exterminating the people. You have engineered a famine, you are deliberately starving civilians and children before the eyes of the world. Our vessel does not constitute any threat to you. We carry only humanitarian aid and therefore you have no authority to intercept or otherwise attack our vessel. We demand again that you stand down.” (https://x.com/yipengGe/status/1949207105203761471)
Huwaida continued:
“We are sailing lawfully in international waters where you have no jurisdiction. You have no lawful jurisdiction. You are starving civilians. Any blockade that starves civilians or has a disproportionate harmful effect on a civilian population is illegal and therefore, you have no authority to enforce an illegal blockade. And as such, you are not permitted to use any kind of force to enforce an illegal blockade. We demand that you stand down, that you not attack the civilian vessel that is carrying only humanitarian aid. Why are you afraid of baby formula and teddy bears that are destined for the children of Gaza? You spew your propaganda about Hamas. This vessel carries food and baby formula for children that your government is deliberately starving. Your blockade is deliberately starving children to death. You have no authority to enforce an illegal blockade. This is a war crime. You are responsible for the health, well-being, and safety of all civilians on this vessel, and any attack on us is a violation of international law for which you will be held accountable by the international community. Again, we are a civilian vessel. We constitute no threat to you. Do not attack this vessel. Do not board our vessel. Do not obstruct our path to Gaza. Handala out.”
Handala is the third such humanitarian aid ship that has been attacked in the last year by Israeli forces supported by the United States and prevented from bringing food, medicine and other aid to the 2 million people of Gaza.
TWO. This is an Israeli-imposed starvation ethnic cleansing and genocide fully supported, funded, militarily armed, and given cover by a criminally complicit United States government. Let’s be crystal clear: the US is even more than complicit – through bipartisan administrations and Congresses, the US is actively engaged in ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and genocide ourselves, our every single tax-paying US citizen is supporting the genocide.
Last week, Alex de Waal, Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, in an interview with Al Jazeera: “I’ve been working on this topic for more than four decades, and there is no case since World War II of starvation that is being so minutely designed and controlled. This is preventable starvation. It is entirely man-made, and every stage of this has been predicted, and at every stage action could have been taken—by Israel, by the international authorities, [the] international community, those who back Israel—to prevent what is happening now… Those steps have simply not been taken.”
THREE. The so-called “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” (GHF), supported by Israel and the US, is a sham, a front, a smokescreen to give the appearance of humanitarian assistance all the while Israel and the US are, at best, rationing and restricting food, medicine, and other aid, and at worst, luring the starving and destitute men, women, and children of Gaza to their deaths, used as target practice, Israeli soldiers ordered to shoot people simply trying to gather survival supplies for their families.
Therapist and trauma expert, Gabor Mate, a Holocaust survivor as a child, whose grandparents were killed in Auschwitz:
“In the Warsaw Ghetto when the Jews were concentrated in this crowded area of Warsaw, and the Germans were deporting people, you know what the Germans did? They offered the Jews who were starving bread and jam to get on these trains and to ship them to their deaths. In Gaza we’ve seen now for weeks upon weeks upon weeks, every day people desperately lining up for food and then being killed. And Israeli soldiers have described how they’ve been ordered to shoot on people lining up for food – people who were no threat to them whatsoever, people that weren’t even close to them to pose any kind of a threat, people that were unarmed.”
(https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1495297078304401&rdid=9VuUYkvM07uikmh5)
From #BBCNews, July 25, 2025:
A former US veteran who was employed at a food distribution site in Gaza has accused members of the Israel Defence Forces and American colleagues of deliberately targeting and killing unarmed Palestinian civilians. Lieutenant-Colonel Anthony Aguilar, a former special forces veteran, was recruited to work for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a joint Israeli-US scheme replacing the United Nations food distribution operation in Gaza. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72aZhsNMOWk)
“I witnessed the Israeli Defense Forces shooting at the crowds of Palestinians. I witnessed the Israeli Defense Forces firing a main gun tank round into a crowd of people destroying a car of civilians who were simply driving away from the site. I witnessed mortar rounds being fired at the crowds of people to keep the controlled. My professional opinion, in my most frank assessment, [how the sites were established] they were criminal. In my entire career have I never witnessed the level of brutality and use of indiscriminately unnecessary force against a civilian population, an unarmed, starving population. I’ve never witnessed that in all of the places I’ve been deployed until I was in Gaza at the hands of the IDF and US contractors. Without question, I witnessed war crimes, I witnessed war crimes by the Israeli Defense Forces, without a doubt using artillery rounds, mortar rounds, firing tank rounds into unarmed civilians. These are war crimes.”
FOUR. Israel’s National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir tweets in Hebrew that a “complete halt of ‘humanitarian aid’ will encourage migration and settlement of the Gaza Strip.” Israel’s Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu tells Israeli media that “the government is racing ahead for Gaza to be wiped out,” that “all Gaza will be Jewish.” Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced earlier this month that the official plan is to build a giant concentration camp for Gaza’s population on the ruins of Rafah while working to deport the population to other countries. And Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump continue with their plans, as Trump put it in February, “for all Palestinians to be removed from Gaza on a permanent basis.”
FIVE. And while our eyes are rightly fixed on Gaza, the Israeli Knesset is passing a number of laws, sweeping new legislation that changes the status of Palestinians in the West Bank. Just one example, this past Wednesday, the Knesset passed a resolution, 71-13, a non-binding resolution but in Israeli parlance, a “declaration of intent,” to annex the entirety of the West Bank. This is merely the next stage of the Israeli and Zionist master final solution for the Palestinians – “from the river to the sea, Israel will belong to me.” That was the plan all along, 76 years an counting, and in our lifetimes, under our watch, it’s happening in real time, on the news, right before our very eyes, Israeli ethnic cleansing and genocide against Palestinians and the very idea, the very memory of Palestine, and the US supports, enables, and funds it, while the rest of the world watches.
SIX. Hundreds of human rights groups, including Oxfam, Save the Children, Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), international aid organizations, religious organizations, and others are condemning Israeli and US assault on Palestinian lives and freedoms. After the recent Israeli attack on the Catholic Holy Family Church in Gaza, Pope Leo has called for “an immediate halt to the barbarity” in Gaza. What about you? What about us? Our church. Our family. Our singular voice. What are we doing?
So, enough already. It’s not enough for non-Jews to ask, like our friends in Jewish Voice for Peace, like Ha’aretz columnist (who we met with this past May) Gideon Levy, and others: “How can a people who experienced genocide can commit genocide?” Our friends, Jewish voices of conscience, are courageously confronting their own Jewish community every day with these questions. We non-Jews need to look ourselves in the eye, we need to take a hard look at ourselves in the mirror and ask, “What are we doing – daily, practically, in real time – to raise our voices, to stand against a genocide that our government, which means, we through our taxes, support?”
No forgiveness for those who’ve remained silent, not while babies by the tens and tens and tens of thousands have been maimed and starved and murdered, while lives of men, women, and children have been destroyed, entire families wiped out, and even for those who survive, their lives traumatized, shattered. No, as I’ve said often, if killing babies isn’t your red line, then you don’t have a red line. I will not spend one more precious moment I have trying to convince you otherwise.
I alternate between violent rage, a welling up of unwept tears, frustration, utter speechlessness, and rage again. I don’t have words, but sometimes all we have is words, and if we don’t speak up, if we don’t act, then who will. We, people of privilege, we in the US and in the West, with blood on our hands.
Raise your voice … with a friend, in a small group, in your community. Support Palestinian freedom.
Michael