We, the undersigned members of the Pelham Town Democratic Committee strongly believe that the current war in the Middle East must end. We say current because ever since the Arab Revolt during the late 1930s the region has witnessed recurrent wars between the people of Palestine and the state of Israel. The international community has disagreed passionately over who’s to blame for the chronic bloodletting. A number of things, however, are abundantly clear to us:

First, the current iteration of the war erupted because on October 7, 2023, Hamas, the terrorist force that claims to represent the will of Gaza, crossed the border, killed 1,200 Israelis and took some 250 hostages, most of whom remain in captivity under barbarous conditions.

Second, Israeli’s military response has been horrifyingly disproportional, savagely reckless, and heedless of the suffering of innocent civilians. It reeks of collective punishment pure and simple. The death toll in Gaza, already at 35,000 and rising, coupled with unrelenting ground artillery fire and aerial bombing raids that have rendered the area uninhabitable, testifies to a policy of deliberate ethnic cleansing that verges on genocide.

And third, the Likud Coalition, which came to power in 2022, has shown itself unworthy of U.S. support. It has mocked President Joe Biden’s appeals to scale back its invasion of Gaza and rebuffed his insistence on accepting a two-state solution, the long-term policy of virtually every democracy on the globe and the only viable path to peace.

Such rejectionism comes as no surprise given Israeli’s incremental expansion of its occupation of the West Bank in further defiance of settled policy here and the world over. No other putative U.S. ally could have gotten away with such brazen insolence. One need not be a formal student of Israel to realize that Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel isn’t the same nation the vast majority of Americans once admired and supported unconditionally.

We call on President Biden to get behind an immediate truce, not simply a cease-fire, and to make any additional aid for Israel dependent on its acceptance of a two-state solution.

Jane Porter and Bruce Laurie

On the behalf of the Pelham Town Democratic Committee