America shouldn’t be offering support to Israel
I have grown ashamed of the American people and their slide into fascism. How can we, unless we are fascists, support the fascist state of Israel in its genocidal attacks on the Palestinian people?
Clearly the pro-Israel lobby is well funded and buying our always-on-sale politicians left and right.
How can the Jews who suffered so much from the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s bring the same kind of misery down on their ethnic cousins, the Palestinians? Americans, if you pay taxes, some 50 percent of your tax money funds the military and the intelligence services that spy on you and the rest of the world. That makes you an accessory to the deaths of innocent people in our many and long wars of repression. Since we give Israel billions of dollars each year in weapons and other military support, you are an accessory there as well to the brutalization of Palestinian civilians.
Why can’t people distinguish between governments and people? Vladimir Putin is not Russia. George W. Bush, Barack Obama and the 1 percent are not America. Hamas is not Palestine.
Are we ignorant or stupid? Most Palestinians, as most Israelis, want only to live their lives in peace. The same goes for most Iraqis, Iranians and Afghans. That applies to a lot of Americans too, although it seems that an inordinate number of Americans still march to the tune of “My government, right or wrong.”
Joe Michaud, Iowa City