Dear President Biden,
The troubling thing this week is this: While working to end Trump's reign, you are following in his steps. History will not record your unquestioned loyalty to Israel at this moment as support for the Jewish people, but as devotion to a government hell-bent on destroying not only Palestine, but its own teetering democracy. Your unwavering support for Bibi Netanyahu's war machine simply extends our government's decades-long war on Palestinian human rights. Simply put, Israel's aggressive project of Gaza blockades, Gaza bombardments, West Bank settlements and oppressive policing has not only perpetuated a Palestinian nakba (or catastrophe)--it has corroded Israel's democracy itself. What Hamas did two weeks ago--and continues to do in keeping hostages--is horrific and deplorable; but this devastation emerges in the context of an equally horrific and equally violent occupation. Human rights groups across the globe have catalogued this and insisted on it.
Hamas and apartheid are two sides of a single coin.
Just as Donald Trump and his acolytes thumb their noses at American democracy, just as those zealots attacking the US Capitol in 2021 showed contempt for democratic practice and values--so too does Israel suffocate dissent, colonize the lands and culture of an indigenous people, and violently prevent Palestinian sovereignty (and human rights). You call it a great democracy. But many would argue that assessment. And their argument is persuasive indeed.
In essence, then, it seems that you and your team are trying to beat Donald Trump by lining up with a government that seems determined to undermine democratic ideals every bit as persistently and aggressively as he has. And this is a very, very troubling thing indeed.
As we celebrate Jimmy Carter's long and storied service to this country, I'd hope that you, President Biden, might take a page out of his brave book. If Israel has created an apartheid state, we must leverage American power to demand a full revisioning of its ways and a constitution that enshrines human and voting rights for all. Why can't American foreign policy adhere in a principled way to the human rights that all peoples deserve, the civil and human rights that are not granted by nations, but by God? What your government (and Netanyahu's) have done over these last weeks serves only to communicate that one people's human rights rise above another's. What you are doing by sending massive military assistance (again, and again, and again) to an occupying power serves only to communicate that one people's human rights are indefensible and unimportant.
Recognizing that real politik is in play, and that little we can say will change American policy on this matter, I grieve your indifference to the decades-long suffering of an occupied, displaced and now scattered (perhaps forever) people.
The Rev. David Grishaw-Jones
Thursday, October 19, 2023
