israel

How we know what we know: Gaza edition

/ paladin1787 / Leave a comment

Marcy Bartlett and I share a love of humanity. That much is clear. I spoke with her at length in the early spring, and I believe her to be a reasonable person. So I feel compelled to bring up that which I’ve been made aware about the topics she addressed to the listserv and the selectboard this week. My set of facts is pretty different than the ones Marcy based her letter on, but, I submit, no less true. I would like to see some of the sources for her assertions.

(FYI, while I’m a selectboard member, I’m not speaking for the board or the town.)

To preface: all this is really disorienting. Having learned at an early age that genocide is “the crime of crimes, the worst thing a government can do,” now it seems some talking heads and even the U.S. Congress want the word “genocide” redefined to not include the one happening now. We’re supposed to treat this like some boutique, far-left issue. Respectfully, I refuse. This is an issue for everyone.

(Before you think to list all the genocides in recent decades and question folks’ response to this one as opposed to those, the difference here is that the U.S. is providing the weapons, the money, the targeting intelligence, and the political cover on the world stage. Not to mention the U.N. vetoes. It’s that simple.)

Marcy’s letter’s subject references “antisemitism,” perhaps referring to the idea that to not support Israel in this moment is to possess ethnic hatred of Jewish people. Scores of famous rabbis and scholars of Judaism have spoken publicly, in the strongest possible terms, that conditioning support for Jewish people on support for the state of Israel is dangerous to Jewish people everywhere. For a helpful primer on why, see this short explainer by Jewish Voices for Peace.

Did you know that the technical definition of genocide includes a number of ways of treating a people group other than just murdering them? (Very specific things; this isn’t a designation one can lob willy-nilly.) That’s because quality of life is important, too, and some things a government can subject a people group to fully destroy a quality of life. In this sense, a genocide against Palestinians may have been going on for decades now. When people say Gaza is an open-air prison, they have evidence backing up their claim. That evidence is included at the bottom of this piece on my website.

Did you know Israel refuses to investigate how many of the deaths on Oct 7 were killings by Israeli personnel or weapons, despite calls from its own people to do so? A few admissions, or near admissions, in Israeli news sources allude to the “immense” amount of “friendly fire.” Israelis have called for these investigations, but the IDF has said it would “not be morally sound” to investigate them.

Let’s talk about hostages. Do you know about the Israeli practice of “administrative detention?” We prohibit holding people without charge, and/or indefinitely, in our country. (The biggest case of violating it being at Guantanamo Bay). But in Israel, they currently have about 3,424 Palestinians held in this way. That’s compared to the roughly 130 Israeli hostages held by Hamas.

Did you know that the first week of May, Hamas accepted a deal that would see reduced Israeli military presence in Gaza, and would include release of all Hamas-held hostages? The deal had been finalized with the support of the director of the CIA. Israel rejected the proposal, with independent observers saying Israel appears to seek one thing above all: fully destroying Gaza.

Did you know the diplomat who recently resigned from the state department, a Joe Biden appointee, says she kept trying to tell the government that our policy of continually arming Israel for attacks on Gaza is actually making life more dangerous for Israelis? After so many months of not getting through, she felt her only choice was to publicly resign in protest.

Addendum: Why Palestinians live in open-air prisons:

  • Before Oct 7, when Israel prohibited Gazans from entering the sea, fishing boats from Gaza were only allowed a certain distance away from the coast. (About 7 miles at the north and 14 miles at the south.) No boats were prohibited to leave the designated zone. So Gaza had faced a Naval blockade for many years, if not decades.
  • The southern border of Gaza, with Egypt, features a continuous steel wall for its ~8 mile length. The rest of Gaza is completely enclosed in walls and razor-wire fences, with armed watchtowers, not unlike the walls of American prisons. It’s a closed system. There were only two checkpoints through which Gazans could come or go. But most couldn’t even use those:
  • Palestinians have lived under a “tiered citizenship” system. Those Israel has forced into exile can’t relocate to Gaza. Those in Gaza can’t relocate to the West Bank. Those in the West Bank can’t relocate to East Jerusalem. And it’s nearly impossible for a Palestinian in East Jerusalem to obtain citizenship. If you’d like to move down the slide, however, you are permitted. You just have to sign papers saying you agree you won’t be allowed to move back upward to a “tier” in which you existed previously. You read that right: only downward mobility.
  • Even intra-tier movement has been restricted. In the West Bank, Israel has fragmented Palestinians into 227 enclaves, surrounded by Jewish-only settlements and military checkpoints which severely hinder Palestinian movement. Palestinians are allocated access to only 3% of the country’s land by the Israeli government.

Divesting our livelihoods from mass suffering

/ paladin1787 / Leave a comment

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.

What’s a local politician for?

/ paladin1787 / Leave a comment

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:

What about Gaza is germane to Hartford?

/ paladin1787 / Leave a comment

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:

Thirteen Town Meetings Call for Ceasefire in Gaza, No More Weapons to Israel

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.

On “decorum” and things like it

/ paladin1787 / Leave a comment

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.”

Honoring a veteran

/ paladin1787 / Leave a comment

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.