Palestine Tet – 46 – Notes for my remarks (Rob Prince) – Protest and Sit In At U.S. Congressman Joe Neguse’s Office in Boulder: Joe support a ceasefire!

Young woman from Front Range Jewish Voice for Peace being arrested at civil disobedience on Sunday, December 3, 2023 in Denver.
Ceasefire Now!

1. From IK .. an email from Gaza… the kind of news one doesn’t get in the mainstream media..

“The Israeli occupation stormed a short while ago a school housing thousands of displaced people in the northern Gaza Strip, dragged all the young men over the age of 15 out of the school, then put them in the school yard and executed them in cold blood immediately after forcing them to take off their clothes in front of the eyes of the displaced children and women.”
Medical teams have not been able to reach them yet.”

According to eyewitnesses, dozens of martyrs are now in the school yard and in the streets adjacent to it”

2. My wife Nancy Fey’s letter to John Hickenlooper. She writes zingers, short, sweet – or sour and to the point.

Sir:

You are repeating the same old drivel including “Israel has the right to defend herself” that Israel uses as a mantra to anything it want. This is not self-defense”.

Nor is military incursion into illegally occupied territory `self defense”. Stop and say something intelligent! Hamas may not be supported by all Palestinians. And Biden is supported by all Americans? Cut the crap.

What about a cease fire? A pause is a poor excuse for true humanitarian concern for Palestinians. As usual, your prejudice is showing. Only Israel, a terrorist state, is given full rights. Dis you learn nothing from those who paid you a vsit from the Palestinian and Peace Community?

Very disappointed in you!

Nancy Fey

3. Our forefathers fought a war against racism – Nazi, Italian, Japanese racism in WW2;

The generation of their sons and daughters fought against racism in South Africa, in Los Angeles in Alabama and Mississippi and against French Colonialism in Algeria.

And those earlier generations now pass the baton to those of standing here, Palestinians, Jews, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Whites.

The best – the very best of America’s humanistic traditions – nothing comes close – is its anti-racist heritage

– from the struggles of Native Americans fighting genocide – Native Americans know what genocide is

– to the anti-slavery struggles that went on for hundreds of years culminating in the victory of the North and the defeat of the racist South in the Civil War. Black Americans know what a holocaust is –

– to the struggles of Japanese Americans incarcerated in concentration camps during WW2. Asian Americans know what concentration camps and racism is …

– to Mexican Americans – whose land was stolen and many of whom were kicked out in a manner rather similar to what the Palestinians face.

You don’t have to tell Latinos – Mexicans in particular – what stealing indigenous land, expelling people from their homeland, forced assimilation is.

– to the horrors of World War II – the extermination of the Jews, the murder of 4,000,000 or more Poles – why do we never talk about that? Of 27 million citizens of the former Soviet Union? How many tens of million Chinese died at the hands of the Japanese?

All of us – together – were victims of the Holocaust … Yes, we Jews were primary victims – but we were never the only ones, never even only the primary victims … rather than isolating our tragedy we should be embracing all those victims – we all stand together in remembrance – in saying Never Again…

Never again for Native Americans
Never again for Afro-Americans
Never again for Latinos
Never again for Jews, Poles, Soviets, Chinese
And now Never Again for Palestine –

That is why we are here;

As friend Tom Mayer noted this morning in an email:

“We do this because we are horrified and outraged by the continuing slaughter of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, which has now killed over 15,000 civilians many of whom are children. We are also outraged by the continuing role of the Biden administration in enabling the Israeli perpetrated massacre of Palestinians”

We know that ultimately it is the U.S. government, along with its Israeli proxy that has the blood of tens of thousands of Palestinians on their hands, that is complicit in the genocide taking place before our very eyes, the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

And now building on those anti-racist struggles, traditions, we here – from Ferguson, to Aurora Colorado where Elijah McClain was slain by police, to the struggles against gentrification – racist to the core,

… we here dedicate ourselves to the struggle against Zionism – a peculiar yet powerful form of settler colonialism.

And whether it was in Algeria or now in Palestine, settler colonialism is racist to the core

– a system based on a spurious archeological claim to land, on the bigoted foundation of being “chosen” and on historical foundation of a mass expulsion – the Nakba – of Palestinian people – nearly a million of them in 1948 and their continued subjugation, oppression and ethnic cleansing to make way for Jews from Brooklyn with a heavier New York accent than my own.

What can be more racist today than Zionism? Nothing that I can think of

And what can be more noble, more in the anti-racist tradition, the only substantial contribution this nation might make to world civilization, than our common effort, an part of our effort for the global common good, than to struggle against the racism that is Zionism that for all its public relations is little more than a proxy for U.S. Imperialism in the Middle East.

Rip the mask off of all the “humanitarian make up”, the utter crap about “shared values” get down to the core of things and what is left: a political philosophy trying to embed itself in a 2500 year old religion that resembles in its form and content, the former racist apartheid government in S. Africa, the ugly face of French colonialism in Algeria – a proxy for a fast fading “great power”.

“Anti-Zionism is opposition to the oppression of the Palestinian people by the state of Israel. It is certainly not antagonism to the Jewish people. Equating Anti-Zionism and antisemitism is tantamount to authorizing the oppression of the Palestinian people.”

And we know that Joe Neguse knows all this as well as we do and that he has done nothing about it – not even sign on to a simple ceasefire resolution – that this is unacceptable and that if he can’t at least do that, why would we want him as Colorado’s governor.

End the genocide, the ethnic cleansing. For an immediate ceasefire