Vox Populi
A curated webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature with over 20,000 daily subscribers and over 8,000 archived posts.
Jewish Voice for Peace: Divest from death. Invest in life.
You can tell what a society’s priorities are by how it spends its resources.
Two weeks ago, Hurricane Helene “carved a 500-mile path of destruction across six states,” reported CNN, “causing catastrophic flooding and killing more than 230 people.” But before a full count of the wreckage and death could even be made, FEMA announced a $9 billion funding shortfall. With another hurricane hitting land within days, the federal agency responsible for coordinating disaster recovery efforts was out of money.
The same day that FEMA announced its budget shortfall, Israel announced it would receive another $8.7 billion in military aid from the U.S. Of course, Israel isn’t promising to do anything for flooded homes in Appalachia. It is entering its second year of a genocidal campaign against Palestinians, second month of leveling of cities in Lebanon, and continuing preparations for military strikes against Iran.
The Biden administration is making it clearer by the day that it would rather pay for the murder of Palestinian children than the rescue and rebuilding of communities in the U.S.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Right now, what we need is a new antiwar movement — with Palestine at its center…
Palestine is the center of our struggle.
For a year, people have marched across the world demanding an end to the Israeli government’s genocidal war on Palestinians — and an end to the U.S. weapons shipments that are fueling this genocide.
On university campuses and in cities across the country, people made the connection between our tax and tuition dollars and the decimation of Gaza. When the U.S. government gives the Israeli government billions of dollars in military aid, the Israeli government turns around and spends that money to buy bombs, planes, and weapons from U.S. weapons manufacturers. And it’s our tax dollars that fund these purchases.
This is the connection that drove thousands of students to erect encampments demanding divestment from weapons manufacturers: they recognized that solidarity with Palestinians means an end to the endless funding of war.
And this is what solidarity means: that our futures are intertwined, and that it’s incumbent on us to build a movement strong enough to divest from war and invest in life.
An antiwar movement with Palestine as its locus.
Over the past year, the Palestine solidarity movement has grown historically large. Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been resisting Israeli genocide and ethnic cleansing every single day, forced to livestream unspeakable atrocities while the world watches. And still, the U.S. government and weapons companies line up to keep arming this generational nightmare.
In the face of this, we must reckon with the fact that all we have done has not been enough to stop a year of genocide against the people of Gaza, not enough to stop the bombs from raining on Beirut.
Following a year of protest, the seeds have been sown for a mass antiwar movement with Palestine at its center. The question is before us: Will we continue to allow our government and our communities to fund the murder of Palestinians and disregard the lives of our neighbors? The connections are clear. All of our futures depend on the future of Palestine.
First published in The Wire, a publication of Jewish Voice for Peace. Included in Vox Populi under an open license.
Jewish Voice for Peace is a national, grassroots organization working towards Palestinian freedom and Judaism beyond Zionism. It’s the largest such organization in the world. As the right wing gathers momentum in the U.S., Israel, and globally, it can be hard to know how to respond as an individual. Tens of thousands have joined JVP because they want to make meaningful contributions to the crises of our time and know that making change takes collective power. Being a member of a grassroots, national membership organization means joining a community of thousands of people working together towards freedom and justice for all from the U.S. to Palestine. Members are the base of JVP, and when our membership grows, the movement grows. Becoming a member commits to your stake in the movement. It allows you to be counted. And it amplifies your power. And together, we can take action — online, in the streets, and in our communities.
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Thanks for this illuminating post. It begs the question: who are we as a people? And what do we do with a government that is funding genocide in our name?
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https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/israel-749-battalion-demolition-gaza?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=2510348&post_id=150533123&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=68g8n&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
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This article by Ryan Grim is a description of one Israeli tank battalion after a year of destroying Gaza. The young soldiers seem very proud of their work.
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You said it for me. I had no words. Just today I read that Israel bombed a group of Palestinians who were helping to get a wounded boy to safety.
–Rosmarie Epaminondas (Rose Mary Boehm)
http://rosemaryboehm.weebly.com/https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/ https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/* https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR9fygcz_kL4LGuYcvmC8lQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR9fygcz_kL4LGuYcvmC8lQ
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There are atrocities all over the world which go largely unmentioned in Vox Populi. The reasons I’ve taken a strong stand on atrocities committed by Israel are that the United States military and arms industry are supplying the weapons, the US State Department is providing diplomatic protection, and the US media is spreading propaganda that covers up the slaughter. According to the UN, there have been approximately 50,000 deaths directly caused by Israeli attacks and 160,000 deaths caused by malnutrition, dehydration and destruction of health care facilities. Many of these casualties have been children. This is not war. It is genocide. And our tax money is funding it.
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I’ve posted this on FB to see if they take it down.
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Let us know whether FB allows it, okay?
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FB took it down while I was walking the dogs. It wasn’t even up for an hour.
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FB abuses its power as a common carrier under the law. Can you imagine the telephone company deciding which messages it will carry based on political leanings?
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It’s really hideous and very police state. They’re calling it Spam, although it’s not. Nor does it break any of FB’s purported “rules” about spam posts.
“It looks like you tried to get likes, follows, shares or video views in a misleading way.”
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FB banned me two months ago. I don’t miss it.
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I don’t understand how you can publish this article. It’s not genocide. It’s war. War is horrible. It’s Hamas, Hamas that began it and that is keeping it going by not releasing the hostages and surrendering so the people under their rule can live. Just because they repeat the word over and over doesn’t make it true. Iran, and its proxies want the Israel gone, all its inhabitants dead, what would JVP say then, when there are no more Jews in the land? That is in the Hamas charter, and that, is the definition of genocide.
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Hamas didn’t start the war, which began in 1948. Hamas didn’t even exist before 1987. Here’s the genocidal record of Israel:
1. Haifa Massacre 1937
2. Jerusalem Massacre 1937
3. Haifa Massacre 1938
4. Balad al-Sheikh Massacre 1939
5. Haifa Massacre 1939
6. Haifa Massacre 1947
7. Abbasiya Massacre 1947
8. Al-Khisas Massacre 1947
9. Bab al-Amud Massacre 1947
10. Jerusalem Massacre 1947
11. Sheikh Bureik Massacre 1947
12. Jaffa Massacre 1948
13. Deir Yassin Massacre 1948
14. Khan Yunis Massacre 1956
15. Jerusalem Massacre 1967
16. Sabra and Shatila Massacre 1982
17. Al-Aqsa Massacre 1990
18. Ibrahimi Mosque Massacre 1994
19. Jenin Refugee Camp April 2002
20. Gaza Massacre 2008-09
21. Gaza Massacre 2012
22. Gaza Massacre 2014
23. Gaza Massacre 2018-19
24. Gaza Massacre 2021
25. Gaza Genocide 2023 is still ongoing…
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I can see your point of view is that Israel has no right to exist. That when the international community gave them the land in 1948 for a Jewish state, living next to an Arab state, that at that moment in time, when they accepted and the Arabs rejected the deal, they should have just given up. When the Arabs attacked, they should have accepted death. 700,000 Jews were expelled from Muslim countries at the time of the founding of the State of Israel. They were forced to leave countries they had lived in for generations. Many of them went to Israel. If your premise is they shouldn’t be in their ancestral homeland, I see your argument. I disagree. And never did they ever have a governing principle that all Arabs in the land should be driven into the sea.
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Thank you, Alfred. The lie that this began on 10/7/23 is the linchpin on which all Israel’s current justifications depend, at least in the minds and hearts of those whose otherwise compassionate souls have been propagandized into asserting that lie as fact. Even Bernie Sanders, who surely knows better, knows he must mouth the formulaic “this horrible war which began with the brutal attack by Hamas,” even as he makes the case for a ceasefire and an end to arms shipments.
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Julie, there is a big difference between Jews and Zionists. It is dangerous to conflate the two.
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Thanks, Mandy.
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