This is the second in a series of four posts on related subjects. Yes I’m a selectboard member; no I’m not speaking for the board or the town. (As if I could!)
Did you know that almost four months ago, the death toll in Gaza largely stopped being counted because most of the people who did the counting—medical and public health professionals—had been killed by American-made bombs? We hear that 40,000 people have died, but we no longer really know. Chances are it’s much higher. Israel just bombed 1.5 million people living in a massive tent city, forcing them to evacuate yet again.
Does it sound remotely like a proportional response to you—proportional response is technically international law—to destroy the homes and civic infrastructure of 1.7 million of Gaza’s 2 million people, kill many tens of thousands, and starve hundreds of thousands, after an attack that killed 1,200? (Especially given that Israel refuses to investigate how many of those deaths were from Israeli “friendly” fire.) The U.N. hasn’t thought it proportionate. As of two weeks ago, Israel had violated 62 U.N. resolutions and counting. When Iraq violated two, we launched a ground invasion of their country.
To all who think this irrelevant to Hartford, ask yourself how much of our economy comes from Dartmouth and Dartmouth hospital. (If we’re honest, it’s a huge percentage.) Dartmouth has six billion dollars in accounts which are, as we speak, political tools to prop up the business concerns these assets are invested in—including weapons manufacturers and countless others profiting from Gaza’s immolation. If you live off the local economy, like I do, then you live off the returns of these investments. That’s how directly we benefit from the murder of Palestinians.
I’ve mentioned that Hartford residents alone have sent $2.8 million in weapons to Israel since October. And yet, the value generated by Dartmouth’s investments is far greater than our direct contribution. That’s why protest is necessary: our livelihoods shouldn’t be derived from how profitable it is to starve brown people or slaughter doctors and journalists. The professors were right Monday evening when they voted, for the first time in the college’s history, to censure their president for her role in the arrest of ~75 students protesting for their institution’s divestment.
The listserv has its limitations, so if you’d like to hear what I have to say without this filter, email hey@brandonsmith.com to be included in future mailings.
This is the first in a series of four posts on related subjects. Yes I’m a selectboard member; no I’m not speaking for the board or the town. (As if I could!)
“Divide and conquer” is the greatest tool that history’s oppressors, and indeed today’s oppressors, have ever known. If they can convince you to not care about some fellow humans, they can ensure that, despite being vastly outnumbered, they can keep benefiting from others’ misery. It’s that simple. The only solution to this is global solidarity: a commitment to true justice, from and for all people. The only solution is caring what any government (or government of corporations, as the case may be) does in our name and with our money.
The Hartford-based, anti-Gaza-genocide group that’s currently working toward a Selectboard resolution is doing precisely this. I support the group’s efforts. It’s not taking much time from the selectboard at all, actually. They’ll bring it before the board, we’ll hear some minutes of testimony, and we’ll either vote it into the record or we won’t.
I do hear the argument that this doesn’t have much effect. Indeed it doesn’t have any *direct* effect. But remember that oppression can only be countered by global solidarity. Everyone who has a platform should use it to identify injustice when they see it, and call for it to end. Everyone has a role to play in making change, and people with political capital MUST use that capital to fight injustice in the course of their everyday business. (Read: while doing their everyday business. Which the Selectboard has never stopped, and will never stop. You have a town concern? Write us!) What else is political capital for?
To the argument “we pay the board to run the town, not to fight injustice.” If the people you pay to run the town only make $100 every two weeks, like we do, then your town will cease to run. What I’m saying is that you don’t pay us, on the selectboard, to run the town. You pay an office of seasoned professionals real salaries to do that. (They do a bang-up job, BTW.) Rather, you pay the board to watch the world and think about how it affects us and how we affect it; to listen to you; to make suggestions to the professionals who run our town based on all this watching/listening/thinking; and to speak when speaking is needed. What I’m doing here literally IS our job. And right now, with our bombs creating objectively more destruction than in Dresden in WWII, speaking is necessary.
Multiple Israeli military and political officials have said on camera that “all” their bombs and shells come from the U.S. For its part, Hartford residents send about $280,000 annually to Israel via an average aid package around $3.6B. Typically around half of that is in the form of weapons. But since October 7, our townspeople have sent about 10 times as much in weapons alone, or $2.8 million in just seven months. (Citations follow.) An aid bill is being debated now that, if it passes and at least 2/3 of the value is in weapons, Hartford residents will have sent $3.7 million in <8 months. At this rate annually, it’s an amount closing in on a quarter of Hartford’s General Fund budget.
The listserv has its limitations, so if you’d like to hear what I have to say without this filter, email hey@brandonsmith.com to be included in future mailings.
Citations for weapons aid to Israel since October 2023:
I do understand that my posts are outside the norm on the Hartford Listserv. I recently read a week’s worth of posts; the vast majority are announcements for events, or general classifieds. So to the extent readers want that and just that, I get it. I don’t want to be the troll, and I’m not trying to hinder the event announcement service that has served everyone well. So I will endeavor to keep longer things, unless they seem vitally important, to my website and the Valley News. (Even if Valley News didn’t correct the error I told them about in a previous writing, originally published here.) When I do post here, I’ll make a specific advertisement or ask of residents. Barring the occasional quote the length of a limerick.
One thing to maybe consider is that nearly all events advertised here are for get-togethers to discuss or educate about national/international issues that touch us in Hartford. Which has been my goal as well. So I’m curious where folks think the dividing line is. Perhaps it’s the content.
Here’s an event announcement: Wednesday May 1 at 5 p.m. on the Dartmouth green, students, professors and community members will gather in solidarity with Palestine, for a “Rally, concert, and dance party for liberation.” I hope you’ll join me there.
Did you know the first arrests of recent college protesters was at Dartmouth, a couple months back? Dartmouth set the precedent for what’s now happening around the country. But to students, perhaps Dartmouth was an inspiration. More than 100 campuses now feature permanent protest encampments. Reading the full list is eye-opening. (I’ve posted it at brandonsmith.com, along with a Part II to this column, and my five prior local writings.)
Dartmouth students and those at other colleges have a concrete demand: their institution’s divestment from companies that profit from occupation of Palestine and attacks on its people. That includes but is not limited to those who make weapons we’ve sent. There is precedent for this: in the ’80s, students forced their colleges to divest from apartheid South Africa. In recent years, many have been forced to divest from fossil fuels.
Folks have tried to say these protests don’t matter. And yet, the 30 largest U.S. university endowments, of which Dartmouth has one, control $493 billion of investment capital. It’s hard to comprehend big numbers, but someone making the U.S. median household income of $74,580 would need 6.6 million years to earn this much. Of the 30 schools in this heavy-hitters group, 26 currently have divestment encampments.
It also matters on a human scale. Displaced people in Gaza, forced to flee their homes and live in tents 10 or 20 miles south, have spray-painted on their tents “Thank you students,” “Thank you Columbia students,” and “Thank you students in solidarity with Gaza, your message has reached (us).”
To stay above-board, I do have an ask of Hartford residents today. It’s the same one asked of the attendees of the rally this past week: “The time is approaching when we will have to lay more on the line. When we’ll have to ask ourselves what we’re willing to put at risk to continue the work of liberation.” To get further involved, email uv4pal@gmail.com. To subscribe to the Upper Valley for Palestine newsletter, visit uv4pal.com/contact-us/
I imagine I’ll get some responses claiming “Hanover is not Hartford.” I encourage folks to see the reality which Hartford community leaders have expressed in recent public meetings: we can no longer think of Hartford, in certain key ways, as separate from other towns in the central Upper Valley. It’s been decades since these communities effectively integrated their economies. We may live in Hartford, but most of us work and spend in other towns nearby. Our friends are scattered. So to claim that persistent, justifiable protest at our local college isn’t relevant in Hartford feels like bad faith.
As we know, the economy Dartmouth generates for Hartford is huge. We benefit from that economy. Since Dartmouth invests in military contractors and companies that assist Israel’s occupation, *we benefit* from the profitability of Palestinians’ oppression and murder. The only way violent oppression and pointless warmaking stops happening, over and over, is if everyday people think about how they’re benefiting from the situation—and refuse to do so.
Don’t be swayed by talking heads: there have not been recorded incidents of violence from recent college protesters, unless you consider self-defense through the use of water cooler bottles. Video shows plenty of violent incidents from police. For us locally so far, the most serious attack against folks’ right to speak isn’t the prospect of an hour or a night in a jail. It’s the prospect of being expelled from your school; of being evicted; of being ostracized at work or losing your job. All of which have happened to scores of students, professors, and other professionals around the country. Capitalism uses threat of homelessness to compel people to do jobs they think are meaningless. (And there’s a good chance they are.) Turns out, our culture also uses threat of homelessness to curtail the content of messages that powerful folks don’t want spread.
Weren’t we all taught that, when this was done to professors in previous generations, it was the beginning of the end? A harbinger of horrific times to come?
As many of you know, I’m one-seventh of the elected selectboard in Hartford. To those who might think people who hold elected office wield a magic scepter: I stand on the same soapbox each of you do. (I don’t imagine it’s taller than about ten inches or so.) I don’t purport to represent the board or the town, nor will I ever. Unless I’m part of a quorum at a publicly-warned meeting, I’m just some dude. That was kind of the founding idea of our country, was it not? When Bernie Sanders speaks, unless he’s speaking as a part of an official meeting, he, also, is “just some dude.” He doesn’t speak for the government, nor could he.
Similarly, I don’t understand why some folks feel insulted when a neighbor writes something they may have already heard before. Our whole lives are a series of hearing things we’ve heard before. By telling you something, a fellow is not saying they think you don’t know it. Just that, on the off-chance you haven’t heard, now you have. For 99.9% of the things we hear and already know, we give grace; we assume it came from good faith. Is the difference this time the content? If so, why?
The office I hold is not a Political one, with a big “P,” in the sense of party-affiliated. But one key thing I’ve learned is that everything is political, with a little “p.” All choices we make have causes and all have effects. Those causes & effects can be from (or for) the most powerful among us, supporting the status quo; or they can be from/for the rest of us, working toward more equality, freedom, and human flourishing than we currently have. So if everything is political, then telling someone “don’t be political” is like telling them to not breathe air; it doesn’t make any sense. But it’s a good indication that the content of what they’re expressing disagrees with you.
Here’s my content: starting Thursday, snipers were stationed on the rooftops of American college buildings, with weapons pointed toward student protesters ostensibly protected by the first amendment. Snipers were spotted above protests at Ohio State University where, as a high school student, I took classes; attended an engineering summer camp; and interned in a lab. Snipers have been atop buildings around protests at Indiana University for three straight days. I said I wouldn’t post at length unless it was vitally important. Well, this message feels vitally important. The Upper Valley can not, and will not, recreate the scenes at Kent State and Jackson State.
Our consent for this is being manufactured by major media. On Friday, the New York Times featured four articles about college protests at the top of its homepage. All four hemmed and hawed about antisemitism. Tellingly, those who accuse the protests of being antisemitic will never define “antisemitism,” even when asked. (Pay attention to this if Dartmouth ever makes the accusation.) None of these four articles state the underlying purpose of the protests: to voice opposition to an ongoing genocide. Like so many other media these days, the New York Times has failed journalism 101. I know; I’ve taught it. I don’t wonder why the youngest generation has abandoned legacy news.
Did you know that the municipal police of most towns with colleges in them make a pact with their college to stay off the campus, in almost all situations, unless the administration requests them? This feels important to remember: municipal police involvement is the call of University administrators. And for campus police, administrators have full direction of what they suppress and the means they use. So it’s all on the administrators. Perhaps all on the college president.
Make no mistake: many students who live in Hartford will continue to protest on the Dartmouth green. Many faculty who live here will continue to support and protect them. Can they count on the rest of us? Can they count on us to show up, in effect saying “you young humans are too important to us to allow the shenanigans we’ve seen elsewhere”? If so, sign up for alerts and join me Wednesday for the most dorky dancing.
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Dartmouth and Palestine: Part II – the best of this week’s internet, and sneaker-net
I had mentioned why it’s clear the youngest generation has abandoned legacy media. (Read: they’re more wise than we were about how to spot propaganda.) I do wonder how Joe Biden expects to win an election after signing a bill that may ban the source for their news, TikTok. Did you know that TikTok isn’t majority-owned by China? According to documents filed with DC courts, reports to investors, and reports to the Chinese government, all verified by Poynter, 60% of TikTok is owned by institutional investors around the world, such as Blackrock and General Atlantic—shares of which you probably own if you have an IRA. 20% is owned by its founders, and the last 20% is owned by its own employees, 7,000 of which are American.
On Twitter recently I’ve enjoyed following the current chair of the journalism school at Northwestern University, a “J-school” where I’ve given lectures and workshops. His handle is @thrasherxy. He’s been taking shifts with other faculty to physically protect students camped on the lawn at Northwestern. On Friday he wrote this post: “No, I am not tenured. How will I account for yesterday and today and tomorrow? Will our board forgive me when I go up (for tenure) and let me stick around? Doesn’t matter. This is the job: to speak about important matters. And protecting our students is the only thing that matters right now.”
I think about this when I say things publicly that I suspect will prompt some folks to yell at me. “This is the job: to speak about important matters.” It doesn’t matter whether I get to stick around after my current term. Too many folks with power make the fallacy that they must “live to fight another day.” I would say that’s helpful, sure, but if as a public servant, it causes you to censor yourself… then in my humble opinion you’re doing “public servant” wrong.
If the role of someone in power is to be thoughtful, make good decisions, and have meaningful conversations, then I’ll try to do those. But I was once a journalist, and the role of a journalist is—in large part—to put what’s happening in context for others. Twitter user @_alialkhatib put things in context with a thread this week, which I’ll copy here as one paragraph:
“A philosophy chair getting arrested, an Econ prof getting her head smashed against concrete, a street medic being held down and tased, snipers setting up vantage points to shoot at Ohio state students—all because of nationwide protests against a genocide? You SHOULD be radicalized. I haven’t even mentioned the mass arrests, the administrat(ors’) incendiary lies, the totally belligerent behavior of university presidents and other political officials, or THE HUNDREDS OF BODIES FOUND IN MASS GRAVES WHERE DOZENS OF PEOPLE WERE CONFIRMED TO HAVE BEEN BURIED ALIVE. The appropriate reaction to what we’ve been witnessing over the past 6 months, let alone decades, is not measured objectivity; it’s trauma. You should be fucked up by what we see happening. That is the correct response. Look what they have done and have insisted we should be okay with it.”
All the stuff I’ve been ranting about with my last six columns has been connected. That’s when things start to make sense: when you realize it’s all connected. The connectedness comes across hard in this now-famous speech by Mike Prysner from the White House lawn in 2010. Every time I watch it, I get chills from my neck to the soles of my shoes. Prysner is a veteran of the invasion of Iraq. His message is as relevant today as it was when he gave it:
I’ll conclude by sharing another great thing I heard this week. It was written by a member of Upper Valley Democratic Socialists of America, and given in a speech to the crowd supporting Palestine on the Dartmouth green this week:
“Despite ongoing efforts by Dartmouth students, faculty, staff, and community members to demand divestment from Israeli military forces, the College continues to contribute millions of dollars to the genocide of the Palestinian people. For the past nine months, the same administration has sat across the bargaining table from graduate workers and insisted that they do not have the money to pay us a living wage for the research and teaching labor we perform. Dartmouth will gladly throw money at a settler colonial project, but they refuse to help graduate workers overcome barriers associated with the costs of childcare or immigration fees. This makes perfect sense when you consider the fact that the establishment of Dartmouth itself was a settler colonial project, and it’s shameful, but not surprising, that the administration chooses to remain on the wrong side of history to this day. Dartmouth has made it clear again and again that it prioritizes profit and power over human life and education, and this institution is not going to change no matter how many times we ask. But, and this becomes more and more true every day, Hanover is a union town, and we don’t have to ask anymore. Now it is up to us, the workers, to think of our unions as more than just organizations that win raises in a contract. It is through our unions that we can dismantle the systems of oppression on which Dartmouth was founded and in its place build an institution that we can feel proud to be a part of.
This movement is not isolated to our campus. In response to the recent atrocities committed by the Israeli state, workers in all sectors across the nation have been joining forces in solidarity with the Palestinian people. When these workers come together, they almost always come to the same conclusion: workers hold the power to disrupt the war machine, no other group is in a position to force this kind of radical change, but we are not yet organized enough to wield that power in a magnitude that matches the gravity of the ongoing Palestinian genocide. Developing a working class movement in the U.S. that is capable of truly challenging U.S. imperialism will require slow, steady commitment, and in some ways this project feels at odds with the urgency of the destruction that we have all been helplessly watching unfold. But what can we do from a position of powerlessness besides commit to building power? I encourage you to imagine a future where organized shipyard and railroad workers can block shipments of weapons to Israel. Imagine a future where wall-to-wall university unions can grind military research to a halt at a moment’s notice. Imagine a future where workers have the power to take matters into our own hands instead of hoping that our university presidents or state representatives will listen to our phone calls. Begging and pleading with politicians will never change the system they are beholden to, but workers keep this machine running, and only workers have the power to shut it down.
In order to achieve the future we dream of, we need committed organizers to lead workers in a militant, politicized labor movement. Talk to your fellow workers about the role we play in contributing to an insitution that aids Isreal in commiting genocide. Talk to them about the power our labor holds, and begin to build the groundwork towards a liberated working class and towards a liberated Palestine.”
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Here’s the list of colleges where, as of 4-27-24, students have started encampments demanding divestment from companies supporting/profiting from occupation of, or attacks against, Palestine: Arizona, ASU, Auraria, Barnard, Berkelee Music, Berkeley, Brown, Cal Poly Humboldt, Columbia, Columbia Chicago, Cornell, CU Denver, CUNY, Delaware, Drexel, Duke, Emerson, Emory, Evergreen, FIT, FIU, Fordham, FSU, Gallaudet, GW, Harvard, Howard, Iowa, IU, Kansas, Kennesaw St, Loyola, Mary Washington, Miami, Michigan, Middlebury, MIT, MSU, New School, North Texas, Northeastern, Northwestern, Notre Dame, NYU, Oregon State, OSU, Pace, Penn, Pitt, Pomona, Portland St, Princeton, Puget Sound, Rice, Rochester, Roosevelt, Rutgers, SAIC, Smith, South Carolina, Stanford, Swarthmore, TAMU, Temple, Tufts, Tulane, U Washington, UCF, UCLA, UCONN, UCSB, UF, UIUC, UMD, UMN, UMW, UNC, UNC Charlotte, UNM, UT Austin, UT Dallas, UTSA, UVM, Vanderbilt, VCU, Virginia Polytechnic, Virginia Tech, Wash U, Yale. And more by the day.
I love the Hartford listserv. The town I grew up in didn’t have anything like this, and I wished it did. We had the internet; we just didn’t use it like this, like a real community. In 1997, in the fourth grade, I started a chat room on the early chat protocol, “mIRC.” My room was called “#Kids97”. Mostly I had fun programming the “bot” that patrolled the room. I could have it boot out anyone who said this word or that. I had lots of fun with my little power trip, loading in a long list of swear words. Perhaps “Gaza” is such a swear word here. I regret my 11-year-old policing of the internet. Don’t be like me.
Monday evening I attended a conference call, err, conference Zoom, with several Hartford residents and at least one person involved in the pro-Gaza, anti-genocide resolution recently passed by the Lebanon town council. Much of their discussion centered why Gaza is germane to Hartford. It’s not just the tax dollars we all send over in the form of weapons. (I hear Sharon’s selectboard recently featured a calculation of the amount their town’s residents send to arm Israel.) The Hartford connection is about our local Congressional delegation, as I mentioned earlier. It’s the environmental impact, which we know affects us. Scientists have estimated the flattening of Gaza has released more CO2 than 20 small nations do in a year. It behooves Hartford residents to know about police training: how it’s well-documented that many police-training operations have been designed and tested in Israel, on Palestinians. And it’s about a slippery slope. If we don’t agitate about this being done in our name, then what’s to say the next one that follows—or the one after that—doesn’t touch Hartford physically? Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. (MLK again.)
All this and more is why Hartford residents are organizing to present a ceasefire resolution to the Hartford selectboard, akin to the ones passed in at least thirteen other Vermont towns. A list of those towns is here:
Lots of folks have weighed in about what they feel is an acceptable form, or topic, of discussion. On the listserv and among the Selectboard, which again, I don’t represent here. I think THIS is the most germane thing to Hartford: our discussing with one another, civilly, about what constitutes acceptable speech and protest, and why. This is *it*. This is what my home town was lacking. So I don’t post here all the time, but when I do, I want it to count. Noam Chomsky famously said that any truly meaningful statement, if compressed into what can be featured in a 30-second sound byte, would sound like the ranting from someone *unwell.* Because it’s not enough time to explain your evidence or your thought process. So here I am, writing long. I’m not doing it to spite you!
President Biden’s remarks over the weekend about a few hundred student protesters were more pointed and irate than he’s ever been about the killing of more than 30,000 Gazans. Let’s put that in context. Yesterday, more than 300 bodies were discovered in mass graves in a second hospital complex in three weeks. The bodies of many people in scrubs, and many minors, were discovered with their hands and feet bound, indicating they were killed in that state. We’re supposed to believe college students trying to force divestment from this is more of a problem than the thing itself? Do we really believe that my saying the wrong thing at the wrong time is the primary problem here?
I had always thought that us educated folk drew the line, of what can be protested, somewhere well before “genocide.” Now I’m not so sure.
This week, someone shouted me down to say they disagree with my posting here. Totally fair! I was eager to hear their argument. (They keep a really nice yard and I respect their opinion on guns.) Their argument was that “breaking the rules,” for instance the rules of a listserv—which again, I maintain I only bend—is similar to what Donald Trump does; why Trump is bad news. They said it feels dangerous when someone thinks rules don’t apply to them. My thought is this: the severity of rule-breaking is context-specific. Courts usually acknowledge this. Protesters break rules to call attention to something. To make others think “why would they risk getting thrown in jail? Is this so important to them?” In other words, to educate. It’s pretty clear Donald Trump breaks rules for his own personal gain. Perhaps Biden, too, as he continues to ignore the Foreign Assistance Act.
If we can’t tell the difference between these two contexts, we might be lost indeed.
Epilogue: As of Monday, college students, including some from Hartford, at the following institutions have started encampments demanding divestment from Israel: Columbia, Barnard, NYU, The New School, MIT, Emerson, Tufts, UNC Chapel Hill, University of Michigan, Vanderbilt, Washington University. At many of them, administrators have had students and/or professors arrested for their speech. (See a theme?) Dartmouth students, many of whom live in Hartford, held an emergency meeting Monday night to discuss whether they should start their own action. I don’t know the outcome of their meeting.
Hi, all. I’m writing for the folks who appreciate my writing. And the folks who are willing to think “What if he’s onto something? What would that mean?” rather than simply “He’s wrong,” at the outset.
Most of you, neighbors, have been the former, and for that I am so grateful.
Since I last posted, I got some solid guidance from Vermont League of Cities and Towns on what I, as a newly minted selectboard member, can say publicly, per the laws on these things. If I make clear that I’m just representing myself and don’t purport to be speaking with any authority granted me by the office, then I don’t forfeit first amendment rights. Happy to share the precise guidance with any who are curious.
Speaking of the board! I read 260 pages of briefing material for this week’s board meeting, and about 200 pages each for the three meetings before that. I’ve crafted policy that I’m excited to try to implement, should I get buy-in from stakeholders. And yet I still care about some “social issues.” So here I am, writing for you, for free. And I got paid to write for six years, full time!
(Did you know that the number of jobs in journalism in the U.S. decreased by more than 70% from 2000 to 2024?)
About social issues, a wise local friend told me recently that “folks who want their electeds to remain silent on many issues actually want support from those same officials on *other* issues. As it turns out, we *all* care about social issues.”
I have a hunch that that’s not a bad thing.
Here’s the meat of what I wanted to say today:
Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote this in his 1963 letter from a Birmingham jail:
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”
As you may judge by the fact that I am posting this, I agree wholeheartedly. I think the person who often disagrees with the method of achieving justice can be said to *effectively* disagree with that justice.
One pithy saying is that the centrist or moderate—I wonder if this also applies to the “good ol’ Vermont liberal”—always opposes the last war but never the current one. Always opposes the injustice that appears resolved but never the one clearly happening now. May I never be this person.
Gaza has now been more thoroughly obliterated than Dresden when the allies carpet-bombed it, according to those who’ve studied this. The Biden Administration has been *publicly* promoting a “two-state solution.” This would feature sovereign states of Israel and Palestine, both with separate territories not in dispute. But as of Wednesday this week, we know that in private diplomatic cables—where it counts—the administration has been advocating *against* a two-state solution. The revelation comes from a leak obtained by an old reporting buddy of mine, Ken Klippenstein. One must ask: what the heck are we doing?
I’ll share at this juncture something a radio host, Jesse Brenneman, wrote on social media last month:
“One trick for critical thinking I recommend is that if the behavior of a person or group defies all logic and seems like a series of baffling unforced errors that undermines their stated goal, try considering whether there’s a different goal that would align with that behavior.”
I’ve been saying something like this for years but Brenneman said it better. In other words: The purpose of a system is what it does. Do you think Israel needed to destroy the homes of 1.5 million people, as they’ve done—that’s like every residential unit in Chicago—just to incapacitate or get revenge on a few hundred, or a few thousand, Hamas fighters? If not, then perhaps the primary purpose is making this land a place its former residents don’t want to, or can’t, return to. At very least, we need to consider the possibility that this is the Israel’s goal and that of it’s biggest ally, our own government.
When I was a writer, my primary weapon was public shame. I’d like to return to that era for a minute with a fact-based story. When the Biden administration stopped contributing funding to UNRWA, the aid agency feeding Gazans, Biden cited the idea that UNRWA staff had been assisting Hamas. Canada followed suit in refusing funding. But when it was revealed that the “confessions” were likely untrue, and had been tortured out of those aid workers, Canada and other countries reinstated funding.
Shortly thereafter, on March 26, our own lawmakers had the opportunity to make a correction based on this new information. After all, two million trapped people are in danger of starving to death; one million of them children. A member of Congress quickly proposed a foreign aid bill that didn’t restore UNRWA funding. Almost all other members voted for it. Vermont’s Becca Balint and Bernie Sanders, with some principle, voted against. Norwich resident and U.S. Senator Peter Welch inexplicably voted for it, continuing to keep back funding from the aid agency that provided the most life-saving food.
At last count, the number of trucks of food that Israel allows to enter Gaza today is something like 1/36th of the number of trucks before this “conflict” started, when no one was starving. Roughly the same number of people live there today. Let’s be real: what term would most accurately describe this situation? People in Gaza continue to eat animal feed. Israel recently issued a decree prohibiting animal feed from entering Gaza.
We’re all “good guys” and we’re all “bad guys.” Each of us individually, and this country we live in. It behooves us, both individually and as a country, to ask ourselves in what way we are the bad guy. And to deal with it. Not at some undefined future time as MLK would admonish—but right now. Not while maintaining the utmost respect for norms (which helped get us to this place), but by throwing norms out the window, if that’s what’s required to not be the “bad guy.”
I would like to use this post to honor a veteran who lived in Quebec.
Jacob Flickinger was a US-Canadian citizen. He was killed Tuesday by Israeli military while delivering food aid in Gaza.
Flickinger was a retired master corporal who served 11 years in the Canadian Army, including a tour in Afghanistan. He was father and sole provider to a one-year-old son.
The founder of the food aid organization he was working for, which employs several of my former kitchen colleagues, has said the organization got permission from the Israeli military to be where they were, and kept the Israelis abreast of their exact location. Three vehicles in the aid convoy were destroyed in three separate air strikes within minutes.
The founder, Chef José Andrés, says they were targeted “systematically, car by car.” Flickinger was one of seven food aid workers killed in the strike.
Multiple Israeli military officials, since October 2023, have stated in interviews that “all” of Israel’s bombs and shells come from the U.S. One said, “We couldn’t do this if it wasn’t for the U.S.”
President Biden has sent at least one arms package per week to Israel since October, each of these packages just smaller than the size that U.S. law requires the White House to report to Congress, according to a Washington Post investigation. Legal experts have spoken out about how this “military aid” also runs afoul of a federal law that prohibits arms gifts or sales to countries that block humanitarian aid. (Foreign Assistance Act Section 620I)
Please join me in a moment of silence for Jacob Flickinger and his family.
Brandon Smith 