The tragic conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians, more than 7,000 miles away, seem far removed from our lives here. Yet those conflicts have been disturbing to many in Marin County ever since the horrible attack by the Hamas terrorist group resulted in 1,200 Israeli deaths and the taking of nearly 250 hostages on Oct. 7, 2023.
No matter how much or little we’re paying attention to Israel’s war effort in Gaza, which has continued for more than 14 months, it is connected to us as taxpayers. During the war’s first year, the U.S. government spent at least $17.9 billion on military aid to Israel. Such spending continues with no apparent letup.
On Dec. 4, the human rights group Amnesty International released a 296-page report concluding that Israel has been committing genocide – “brazenly, continuously and with total impunity.”
The report said that – with the “specific intent to destroy Palestinians” – Israel has “committed prohibited acts under the Genocide Convention, namely killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction.”
The Amnesty International secretary general said at a news conference: “This is genocide and it must stop now.”
For more than a year, the United Nations has been documenting the horrors in Gaza. When the known death toll passed 40,000 last summer, Volker Türk, the UN’s high commissioner for human rights, said: “Most of the dead are women and children. This unimaginable situation is overwhelmingly due to recurring failures by the Israeli Defense Forces to comply with the rules of war.” He described as “deeply shocking” the “scale of the Israeli military’s destruction of homes, hospitals, schools and places of worship.”
Five months ago, the International Criminal Court charged Israel with using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza. Since then, the situation has gotten even more terrible.
Rep. Jared Huffman, Marin’s elected official in the House, has yet to provide an adequate response. He continues to support sending vast quantities of U.S. weapons and ammunition to Israel for the Gaza war. No amount of nice-sounding rhetoric can change that reality.
Like some others in Congress, Huffman is at pains to express criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – even while backing huge quantities of military assistance enabling Netanyahu’s government to continue to do what it’s doing.
Immediately after voting for a massive military-aid package dubbed the “Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act” last spring, Huffman declared that “Israel’s war against Hamas is justified, but it must be fought in a more just way.”
But it was clear then, and it is clear now, that the only way for the U.S. to halt the crimes against humanity being steadily committed by the Israeli military would be to stop sending the military aid making those crimes possible.
Yet Huffman still refuses to back an arms embargo against Israel while its horrific war in Gaza persists.
And so, this fall, in the northern part of his sprawling district, when several dozen protesters gathered in front of his Eureka office to call for closing the U.S. weapons pipeline to the war, Huffman had an aide pass out a printed statement with customary wording – as though methodical killing of children and women has anything to do with Israel’s right to defend itself.
“I support the right of Israel to exist and protect itself against the existential security threats the Israeli people have faced since the country was recognized by the United Nations in 1948,” Huffman’s statement said, while calling Israel’s war “too reckless, sometimes indiscriminate, and generally counterproductive to Israel’s own security interests.”
Mildly critiquing a war – while helping to sustain it with enormous shipments of weapons – might seem politically deft. But especially in the wake of the new report from Amnesty International, Huffman will be known as our representative in Congress who kept supporting weapons for a genocidal war. And so, a shameful blot on Huffman’s record just keeps getting bigger.
Norman Solomon, of West Marin, is national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book is titled, “War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine.”
