I’m angry. No, outraged. Why aren’t more people talking about Palestine? Demanding that our government stop sending arms to Israel? Incensed that a population of 2 million people in Gaza, constantly being displaced with nowhere to escape, is being starved and bombed to death? Mad as hell that some 1000 children have had limbs amputated without anesthesia? Enraged that doctors report a disturbing pattern of children being shot by Israeli snipers?

The Euro-Med Monitor says that Israel’s brutality in Gaza surpasses all recent forms of terrorism. In the last several weeks alone, 14 rescue workers and a UN employee were brutally slain by the Israeli military, their bodies found in a mass grave, along with a crushed ambulance, fire truck and UN vehicle. A journalist who wrote about his impending death was killed in an Israeli airstrike. A UN independent commission reported that Israel employs sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence against Palestinians, through the destruction of healthcare facilities and other means. And Israel’s Supreme Court denied a request to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, in violation of international law.

Hamas should just release the hostages, you say. Hamas started it, you say.

Did you know that, from the time Hamas won elections in January 2006, Israel imposed a 17-year blockade on Gaza that had serious social, economic, and humanitarian consequences? Unemployment rose to 47% by the end of 2022, poverty to 61.6%. Israel closed all but two border crossings and imposed complex, bureaucratic restrictions on the movement of Palestinians out of Gaza. Israel also launched four major military attacks on Gaza in 2008-2009, 2012, 2014, and 2021 killing some 4,000 Palestinians and wounding nearly 20,000.

Did you know that Israel had Hamas’s battle plan a year before the October 7 attack and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had propped up Hamas by allowing years of monthly cash payments from Qatar into Gaza?

In early 2025, there was a negotiated ceasefire deal that both Israel and Hamas agreed to. Between January 19 and March 18, when Israel resumed bombing Gaza, Israel had violated the ceasefire repeatedly, killing 155 people. Since then, Israel has killed over 1,600 Palestinians, the onslaught having sparked condemnation from the UN. Israel has withheld all aid from entering Gaza since March 2, in an effort to get Hamas to bend to its will. Amnesty International and the UN, among others, have found that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide.

Israel also used the occasion of the ceasefire in Gaza to escalate its military attacks on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, in what has become the longest Israeli military operation there “since the second intifada in the early 2000s and causing the largest population displacement since the 1967 war.”

Despite all this, despite the majority of Americans wanting an arms embargo, despite the Democrats losing a presidential election over U.S. policy toward Israel, despite arms transfers violating numerous U.S. laws when it’s likely they will be used to commit genocide, only 15 U.S. Senators voted on April 3 to block another $8.8 billion in weapons to Israel.

Eighteen months into a genocide, even Progressive Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who sponsored those resolutions, still prefaces his criticism of Israel’s war on Gaza by saying that “Israel has the right to defend itself.” At an April 14 “fighting oligarchy” rally in Nampa, Idaho – an event that drew a crowd of over 12,000 – Sanders said that “Israel, like any country on Earth, has the right to defend itself from terrorism but it does not have the right to wage all-out war against the Palestinian people.” These and subsequent remarks drew loud applause. Shortly afterwards, Sanders twice turned to acknowledge commotion in the audience behind him but said nothing as security removed attendees who had unfurled over the American flag a Palestinian flag with “Free Palestine” written across it. The crowd erupted in a “Free Palestine” chant.

Former UN official Craig Mokhiber argues that Israel has no right of self-defense in Occupied Palestine under international law. Moreover, Palestine has a lawful right to armed resistance against occupation, apartheid, and genocide, Mokhiber argues.

According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, Israel’s war on Gaza has claimed more than 50,000 Palestinian lives, 17,000 of them children, and wounded more than 113,000. Ralph Nader says these are vast undercounts. This has been the deadliest war for journalists ever recorded, with 282 dead. Over 1,000 medical personnel and more than 400 aid workers have been killed.

What will it take to get you to demand an end to this war?