Opponents of Israel’s bombing of civilians in Gaza turned their attention to US Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) this week, calling upon him to support a ceasefire.
“We, former staffers of the Fetterman for Senate campaign, write this letter to you with deep grief and anguish over the Palestinian and Israeli lives lost over the past two weeks,” the letter to the Senator began. The former staffers penned the message anonymously, in fear of openly breaking the powerful political taboo against criticizing Israel in the US.
“We call on you to use the position we elected you to to [sic] champion peace, not war; and demand a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel.”
Additionally, activists protested at Fetterman’s office in Philadelphia on Thursday, also calling for a ceasefire. They claimed via a post on social media that they were expelled from the office. A spokesperson for Fetterman denied his staff had forced them to leave, but was unapologetic in rejecting the protesters’ demands.
“The thing about being a staffer is that no one elected you to represent them,” said Adam Jentleson in a post responding to the staffers’ letter on the X platform, speaking for Senator Fetterman.
The response from Fetterman comes amidst multiple failed efforts to convince allegedly progressive Democrats in the United States to support a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. A similar letter to Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has also failed to achieve support for the measure. On Monday, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) declared she would support continued US funding for Israel.
Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza has killed 3,785 people so far according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.
5 October 2023, 03:54 GMT
On October 7, after the failure of peaceful protest efforts in Gaza as recently as 2019, the Palestinian militant group Hamas launched a surprise attack that killed some 1,400 Israelis. The armed group has historically benefitted from funding from Netanyahu’s government, which preferred for Hamas to represent Palestinians in Gaza rather than a more mainstream force that might have successfully pursued Palestinian statehood.
Israel has been engaged in violence against the country’s indigenous Palestinian Arab population since large numbers of Zionist settlers arrived in the territory to establish the settler colonial regime in 1948.
That year, Zionists were given a green light by Western powers to establish Israel, wiping out more than 500 Palestinian villages and killing thousands of Palestinians as they sought to ethnically cleanse the territory. Albert Einstein called the groups responsible for the acts “terrorist organizations” and decried Israel’s major conservative party at the time as “closely akin… to the Nazi and Fascist parties.”
Zionism is the ideology that Jewish people have a right to a state in the region they consider their historical homeland in West Asia. The ideology has guided the establishment and continuation of the modern-day country of Israel as well as the displacement and killing of Palestinian people in the territory.