VOICES: Your tax dollars are making the Palestinian crisis worse

The October 7, 2023 attack was preceded by over a century’s worth of targeted and systemic oppression of the Palestinian people, including the destruction of Gaza, and any claims to explain its origin must take that history into account. It is a history of the ongoing plight of the Palestinian people, generally, and the systematic destruction of Gaza, in particular. The scale of the violence since the attack has been staggering, with over 40,000 Palestinian killed, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, along with thousands still missing under the rubble. According to Human Rights Watch, Israel has engaged in the deliberate starvation and displacement of 2.2 million human beings. Article II, Section 3 of the UN Convention on Genocide includes starvation of civilians as an act of genocide and is the basis of South Africa’s current case against Israel.

Some may perceive charges of genocide as exaggerated or anti-Semitic. However, it is essential to recognize that criticizing a country’s actions, even one that self-identifies as Jewish, in no way equates to anti-Semitism. In fact, many Jewish people globally are among Israel’s most vocal critics. But when a government minister brands the Palestinian people confined to the world’s largest open-air concentration camp for over a decade as ‘animals’ and then cuts off their food, water, and fuel while indiscriminately bombing them with banned chemical weapons, it is clearly committing genocide as defined by the UN Convention on Genocide, which describes these criminal acts as the “deliberate destruction of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.”

Being Palestinian in occupied Palestine means living without freedom in any sense, even in the absence of the recent bombings, killings, displacement, and starvation. It means being subjected to the more than 175 Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank, which restrict travel. It entails being separated from their persecutors behind 30-foot concrete wall. It means continually losing portions of their internationally-recognized country (and their personal homes) through illegal settlement expansion. It can also include facing imprisonment as a terrorist for resisting that oppression, regardless of whether violence or non-violence is employed to achieve political objectives.

Palestinians face significant challenges in their fight for human rights due to US support for Israel. America provides Israel with billions of dollars in aid, weapons, and legal cover at the federal level, but it supports Israel through state and local channels, too. For instance, the State of Ohio mandates that businesses refrain from boycotting, divesting from, or sanctioning Israel in order to conduct business with the state and invests millions of tax dollars in Israeli bonds. Montgomery County and the City of Dayton also use tax dollars to support an ongoing special trade program with Israel.

Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech at the DNC demonstrated just how deaf the American political establishment is to the outcry of protestors regarding the ongoing violence against the Palestinian people. Their refusal to allow even a single Palestinian speaker from the list of speakers provided by uncommitted delegates to take the stage at the convention in Chicago last week is a signal that they will continue down the same warpath.

We must demand of all our politicians and at all levels of government a free Palestine, including full voting rights for every person in these long-disputed territories. This must include the right of return for Palestinian refugees and their descendants who were displaced during Israel’s founding. Only then can we claim to be on the right side of history when it comes to this issue.

Arch Grieve is a former high school social studies teacher and was a Mediation Specialist for the City of Dayton’s Mediation Center. He is also a former Vice President of both the Xenia School Board and the Dayton Council on World Affairs, and he is a former Chair of the Dayton Sister City Committee. He is now a college history and political science lecturer at two local Dayton colleges.