La Conner Weekly News - Your independent hometown award-winning newspaper

No. No more military aid to Israel, not $14 billion, not 14 cents. Write President Joe Biden, Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell and Rep. Rick Larsen and tell them more weapons will neither stop the killing nor end the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

Biden is wrong in his easy rhetoric. Sure Hamas is a terrorist organization. Yes their actions are absolutely despicable. Rightfully call the kidnapping and murder of innocent evil. But wars on terrorism are efforts to kill ideas, pain, anger and memories brought about by decades of war, killing and deprivation by the Israeli military. Biden, the American foreign policy establishment and too much of the U.S. press corps are not critical or honest assessors of 75 years of Israeli government repression and brutality against over seven million Palestinians trapped and displaced not only in Gaza but also the West Bank and inside Israel, Jordan and the Golan Heights.

This talk of destroying Hamas. That is like killing all members of the Proud Boys here. Neither is possible. Neither is a long term solution. Murdering terrorist gangs only seeds future generations of terrorist gangs.

Everyone, whatever side of whatever border they are on, in safe rooms or digging out of rubble, is traumatized. The Jews have been persecuted for millennia. Their leadership’s response as Holocaust survivors has been to devolve into prison wardens running an apartheid state.

Survivors punish survivors. The haters despise those they rule over. The beaten down are certain they will average their murdered brethren.

Yes, Israel has a right to exist. Hamas can no more destroy Israel than can the Proud Boys overthrow the U.S. government. Calling for the destruction of Israel is sticking a finger in their eye rhetoric, spouted by desperate fanatics without hope. All they have is hate, a deep-to-the-bone-pain born from generations of repression and death. Their hate does fuel suicidal attacks but their fanaticism is not armed with tanks, ships or fighter jets.

The decades of barbed wire, bayonets, bullets and bombs, of bulldozing homes and olive groves have not built a path toward peace with the Palestinians. The U.S. replenishing Israeli armaments and sending aircraft carriers to the Mediterranean perpetuates war and strengthen the iron fist of repression. Inside the glove is a bloody hand.

Our government knows about massive bombardments, having dropped more bombs in Vietnam than in World War II. U.S. history has too many chapters where overwhelming force has been applied to wipe out small bands of opposition, having done that to native tribes from the Atlantic seaboard to Afghanistan, from before we were a country almost to the present moment.

President Biden, with his 20tnh century worldview, throws gasoline on the flame. Project U.S. power. Bolster their military defenses. And, sprinkle crumbs to those not yet starved or dehydrated. U.S. tax dollars buy the most sophisticated weapons in the world for the obliteration of the Gazan population. Then Biden has the blindness to spend a pittance of our money for inadequate humanitarian aid. Our government’s defense of Israel provides Israel cover and permission to destroy another people.

U.S. tax dollars pays for and creates that blood. Blood is on the hands of U.S. taxpayers. It is long past time to say no to paying for arms to Israel. It is time to demand working for peace, to stop the continuation of wars which Israel will always dominate but never conclude, or in the end achieve a final victory.

We need policies that stop the killing and reduces the violence. Instead, the rush to send arms escalates the death and destruction.