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(Issued Nov. 2, 2023) Radical Elders adds our voice to the worldwide outcry for an immediate ceasefire in the Israeli government’s genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza. The insanity of our imperialist, racial capitalist world continues to explode. We add our voice to the world’s outrage at this most recent eruption, in one of the last settler colonialist struggles. The world must not remain silent to what Jewish Israeli historian Ilan Pappe calls the “incremental genocide” Israel has been inflicting on Gaza for the last 16 years.
We call for an immediate end to U.S material military support for the government of Israel; an end to the gigantic material support we, as taxpayers, give the Israeli government, which before the current crisis amounted to $10.4 million every day; a bill has been introduced in Congress to send an additional $14.3 billion to Israel.
We call for an end to U.S. political support for Israel’s current escalation of its long war on Gaza, and its 75 year war on the Palestinians.
We demand that our government call on our declared ally IMMEDIATELY to end the criminal shutdown of all food, water, fuel, electricity and medical supplies to Gaza, and demand an IMMEDIATE and complete ceasefire.
Some of our members criticize the actions of Hamas and other Palestinian organizations in their October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. Other members believe that sometimes people fighting for their freedom have no other option. In all cases, we mourn all deaths, believe that violence is an insane solution to this situation and absolutely reject war as an answer to this crisis.
As a US-based national organization of Radical Elders, united by our mini-program, we take stands on issues directly connected to our mini-program:
Racism and white supremacy: Our mini-program recognizes the importance of supporting struggles against “colonialism and imperialism, and … their enabling forms of oppression such as racism and white supremacy” as well as “the dehumanization of systematically excluded or oppressed populations.”
We oppose the racism structured into the apartheid Israeli state. We believe those structures underlie the settler colonialism that the Palestinians have been resisting since the Nakba. Further, we believe that opposing an ideology of white Jewish supremacy in Israel’s apartheid regime, connects to our struggle against racism in our country, whether it is the many United States police departments who train in Israel and learn how to “mow the lawn” here, or the impunity with which the Israeli regime has functioned in the world. We cannot eradicate the oppression of racism in our country while it flourishes anywhere in our world.
Further, the US government is supporting the racism of the Israeli apartheid regime both ideologically, and materially.
Impact of Militarism on elders: When all resources are cut off and a people are carpet-bombed, as in Gaza, elders are among the highest casualties.
As Radical Elders we have seen time and time again that by funding the military this country’s resources that should be used to provide its citizens with a sustainable productive life and clean renewable energy, are directed toward a criminal militarist foreign policy. We see the impact of that destructive waste of resources throughout the society and, as elders, we feel it particularly.
As our mini-program makes clear, we consider military aid an immoral, destructive scam that channels the resources that should be used to address our own problems and society’s deficiencies, into the hands of the arms industry. We see too many of our compatriots without decent shelter, medical care, and we need our government to pivot from supporting the arms contractors to supporting our citizens and residents. Instead of improving our society, they facilitate the destruction of lives and societies world-wide.
Posted by Dave Lindorff, a member of the Radical Elders Coordinating Committee