Opinion: Calling for an End to Killing Palestinians with Our Help

The following column appeared previously in the Amherst Bulletin.

.On July 24, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood in the Capitol, thanking the U.S. Congress for itscooperation in Israel’s war on Gaza, I was standing on Pennsylvania Avenue, with thousands of Jews, Palestinians and others, facing the Capitol, before a platform of speakers under a banner reading: FREE PALESTINE.

I’ve been standing in streets like that, around the country, for 57 years, ever since I drove to south Los Angeles for a march condemning the use of napalm in Vietnam, being manufactured at the Dow Chemical plant there. And I can’t help pondering either the meaning or the value of such protests.

Locally, I’m one of the people standing around the traffic circle by the Coolidge Bridge on Fridays and Sundays to remind our fellow citizens that there is a war going on, and that thousands of human beings are being killed and tens of thousands maimed for life, with bombs manufactured here, for the Israeli government, so it can maintain its control over the Palestinians it captured in previous wars, and has corralled in the Palestinian ghetto of Gaza.

The number has gone up from less than 10,000 when I started to hold up my sign, to over 39,000 as I write, and will go up to over 40,000 by the time that you read this. The vast majority of them are children, women and men without any ties to Hamas.

And I hold up my sign, which says “Stop the Israeli murder of Palestinians with American bombs.” 

Am I a fool? This is not a rhetorical question to me, any more than the idea that Palestinian deaths are less terrible than Israeli deaths.

As the U.S. government showed in Vietnam, and Laos and Cambodia, and Iraq and Afghanistan, it has had little interest in the lives or deaths of non-Europeans and non-Christians. They apparently are not as humanly valuable as the lives of our government’s political allies. And they don’t have a vote. Or few have had a vote, before this war.

Netanyahu spoke very clearly about his war being with Hamas. And he said the people protesting in the streets outside of the Capitol were the “useful idiots” of Iran, which, he said, was behind Hamas. And he talked of the “Democratic state of Israel and the terrorist thugs of Hamas.” “For all we know,” he said, “Iran is funding the anti-Israel protests going on right now outside this building.” 

I was outside that building, and didn’t miss more than a few of the two dozen three- and four-minute speeches. I don’t remember once hearing a glorification of Hamas. I do remember hearing Hamas condemned. 

But Hamas wasn’t the subject of the rally. The subject was the ongoing scream of Palestinian deaths and the bombing of every mosque and every school and every hospital in Gaza. Precision bombing that the Israel Defense Forces and Israeli government claim they have meticulous control over.

Israel is unquestionably a democracy for its Jewish population. But it is an apartheid democracy, with different laws and different benefits for its Palestinian citizens. And it is a persecuting, military tormentor of the Palestinians it has captured in its wars, and whom it has continued to terrorize, without letup since 1948.

I could never justify the evil of the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7. I’m pointing out that the evil of Hamas attack was not a result of what Netanyahu mislabeled the “world’s oldest hatred.” It was the result of a fraction of those conquered people refusing to be tormented without a response.

No one will ever be able to tally the pain and suffering enacted by Hamas on October 7. Much less will anyone be able to tally the pain of innocent Palestinians murdered by the Israeli government, or the proportion accounted for by American-made and funded munitions.

Limited as my holding up of handmade signs has been, they have been my tiny humanitarian vote, like the equally tiny electoral vote I’ll get to cast in November.

But where it took a decade of public protesting to slow the Vietnam War, and only rushed the timeline for our second Iraq War, the idea that the American public may reject the killing, even if it is of non-Christians and non-Europeans, is becoming more and more politically powerful. Antiwar protesters didn’t ruin Joe Biden’s electoral possibilities by themselves, but we were prominent in the chorus that did.

It’s not just that American-Palestinians vote, and American Jews who hold up signs saying NOT IN OUR NAME, vote. More and more Americans of every kind are becoming aware of the murderous miscarriage of our nation’s international war alliances. And more politicians are learning to fear the impact on their leadership of bombing foreign people, even when they are not Christian and not European.

And that is what I am holding up my little sign to say. Unlike President Lyndon Johnson, and President George W. Bush and President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris is thinking very carefully about her support of our latest foreign war involvement.

Gary Michael Tartakov is a resident of Amherst. He holds up his sign every Friday and Sunday at the traffic circle at the Coolidge Bridge.