||| FROM SAN JUAN COUNTY COMMUNICATIONS |||
The San Juan County Council unanimously adopted a proclamation calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in the war between Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories during the first Council meeting of the year. This proclamation echoes the voices of residents who have sent hundreds of emails to the Council in the last few weeks, as well as those who gave public comment during the meeting, to share their concerns.
“The San Juan County Council, in the State of Washington, does hereby proclaim its full support for conflict resolution in the war between Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, and urgently calls on the Federal government to support all efforts to bring about an immediate and permanent cease fire and lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians,” the proclamation states.
The proclamation also affirms the County’s commitment to upholding the Declaration of Community Values which states “we value a vibrant, inclusive, just, and diverse community that fosters peace, mutual tolerance, and respect for each other’s dignity, privacy, freedoms, and responsibilities.”
The public is encouraged to read the proclamation on the County’s website and below:
San Juan County Council Proclamation in support of Conflict Resolution and Peace
between Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories
WHEREAS, the outbreak of war between Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories since October 7, 2023 has resulted in the loss of tens of thousands of innocent lives on both sides of the conflict, with the predominant number of them being Palestinian women and children, and rendered the region of Gaza uninhabitable according to the United Nations due to the humanitarian crisis facing the civilian population; and
WHEREAS, the calls for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in this conflict are growing louder every day in local jurisdictions across the United States, including in the State of Washington, and in countries across the globe, as evidenced by the vote of 153 member countries of the United Nations General Assembly on December 12, 2023 in support of a ceasefire (Res. A/ES-10/L.27), “Protection of civilians and upholding legal and humanitarian obligations”. These urgent calls for a ceasefire have been heard locally by the San Juan County Council in recent weeks in the form of hundreds of emails sent by constituents to the County Council; and
WHEREAS, the San Juan County Council recognizes that its jurisdiction does not extend to state, federal or international affairs; and yet, as a locally elected government, the statements it makes in response to and on behalf of local constituents can elevate their calls for actions to Washington State and Federal elected officials; and
WHEREAS, the San Juan County Council governs in accordance with its Home Rule Charter, which secures the rights granted by law and the responsibilities of self-governance, and upholds the Declaration of Community Values contained in the Charter’s Preamble which states that as a County “we value a vibrant, inclusive, just, and diverse community that fosters peace, mutual tolerance, and respect for each other’s dignity, privacy, freedoms, and responsibilities”; and the values contained in the San Juan County Resolution (31-2020) Affirming Commitment to a Safe and Inclusive Community;
NOW, THEREFORE, the San Juan County Council, in the State of Washington, does hereby proclaim its full support for conflict resolution in the war between Israel and occupied Palestinian territories, and urgently calls on the Federal government to support all efforts to bring about an immediate and permanent cease fire and lasting peace between Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.
The foregoing proclamation was adopted by the San Juan County Council at a regularly scheduled meeting held on January 9, 2024.
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Good Luck in getting this “cease fire” to happen.
Thank you to our county councilors for responding to the hundreds of requests for the council to declare publicly for a ceasefire. As the proclamation states, the council does not have any jurisdiction over the federal government’s actions, but since the federal government has been unwilling to support a ceasefire, an important way for the will of the American people to be expressed is by our representatives, like the council, making such a proclamation. The previous commenter wishes good luck in getting the ceasefire to happen, and he is right, this proclamation by itself is not enough. But along with proclamations from other entities around the country, including San Francisco yesterday, there is at least more of a chance. A famous line from history states, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Thanks to all the locals who have expressed themselves to the council, and thanks to our councilors for having the wisdom and courage to act.
I have to disagree David; feel-good virtue signaling “proclamations” by our county council regarding some (but not other) current international conflicts not only wastes the council’s time and our tax dollars, but far worse, these pointless proclamations give the illusion that something was actually accomplished. When, in fact, nothing has changed.
If the citizens of SJC actually do concur that we, as a community, should take a collective position on the affairs of foreign nation-states, then I suggest our only lever to effect real change is through divestment. The WA State Public Employee Retirement System manages over $125 BILLION dollars in assets and when that amount of investment money takes a political position in regard to fossil fuels, war profiteering, human rights abuses, etc. the guilty parties actually pay attention. I cannot say the same about proclamations. IF you want to make real changes, contact your state representatives and urge them to DIVEST the public employee’s retirement system of investments that fund unhealthy, unsustainable and frankly, evil, corporations, organizations and governments.
https://conorbronsdon.com/blog/divest-washington-state-pension-funds
Unilateral Ceasefire? Not Possible!
Did you graduate from Harvard? Please provide proper attribution to Mr. Edmund Burke and tell me how doing “something” such as vacuous virtue signaling can achieve the goal of peace.
When one side initiates hostilities and relentlessly continues to attack ”cease fire” is meaningless. Some additional thoughts to ponder: “Peace in our time” – Neville Chamberlain; “Peace through strength” – Ronald Reagan; “Si vis pacem, para bellum” – from the Roman Republic.
Israels very survival is at stake and whatever means necessary to SURVIVE is justified. Opposition to the “right of return” exposes a glaring inconsistency with domestic return of ancestral lands and reparations championed by those who now support Hamas.
Bigotry masquerading as high minded virtue, will it never end?
Why is it apparently not possible to express an opinion about the CONDUCT of a group of people without being instantly accused of bigotry?
I can and do condemn the deliberately vicious and cruel terrorist assault by Hamas on October 7th. That does not make me an Islamaphobe. I can and do condemn the Israeli government for walking directly into the Iranian trap set for them and for their apparent lack of regard for the Israeli hostages abducted by Hamas and for the civilians in the Gaza strip. That does not make me anti-semetic.
Enough with the name calling.
Israel, the fourth largest military power in the world, is a repressive, racist, colonialist, imperialist, supremacist, undemocratic, ultranationalist, apartheid state that is armed, funded, and shielded from accountability by the colonial Western establishment, including governments, corporations, and institutions that have created a new paradigm where might makes right prevails unmasked and uncontrolled by international law or moral principles under the guise of Zionism while committing crimes against humanity including a total long-term air, land, and sea blockade enforcing an embargo of such life sustaining necessities as water, food, medicine, and fuel, the subjugation, oppression, genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people by means of a prolonged brutal, illegal military occupation, long-term land and resource theft, imposing telecommunications blackouts, restricting access by U.N. aid workers, fact-finding bodies, and international media, the forced dislocation of civilians, razing agricultural lands, starvation, dehydration, and the spread of contagious disease, while also committing war crimes including the intentional destruction of property, the theft of personal belongings, the looting and burning of homes, mass arrests, arbitrary detentions, torture, enforced disappearances, the targeting of aid workers and aid convoys, non-combatant civil society personnel such as doctors, nurses, ambulances, academics, professors, poets, writers, photographers, members of the press, independent journalists and their families, arbitrary field executions of civilians in their homes, in hospitals, and in the streets, the mass murder of civilians in detention centers, refugee camps, and U.N. sanctuaries, the use of banned munitions such as white phosphorous and cluster bombs, and carrying out targeted and premeditated ground attacks and precision aerial bombing attacks on museums, and heritage and archeological sites (some dating back to the Phoenician era), as well as critical civilian infrastructure facilities such as water, sewage, transportation, docks, universities, schools, hospitals, places of worship, markets, bakeries, wheat mills, banks, government offices, high-rise apartment blocks, and the indiscriminate carpet bombing of a densely populated, vastly outnumbered, unarmed, utterly helpless civilian Muslim and Christian population comprised mostly of women, children and the elderly as part of a systematic strategy of collective punishment on the Palestinian people and the creation of a Jewish Zionist state in the illegally occupied state of Palestine.
What Israel is doing, in essence, in standing with the Israeli military’s long-held and widely known tradition of the Dahiya doctrine, is employing asymmetric warfare using disproportionate force resulting in the premeditated mass slaughter and methodical annihilation of an entrapped human population. This being no different than the holocaust… this is genocide.
Israel, murdering Palestinians for over 70 years
Palestine is a fictional construct of the Eurocentric League of Nations dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire following the first world war, nothing more.
L’Shana Haba’ah B’Yerushalayim has been sung for millennia by those hoping, seeking, praying to return peacefully to the homeland of their fathers and to be free of the scapegoating that followed them through that diaspora culminating in the Holocaust. “Never Again!
“Peace through strength” is the only way to reasonably achieve that simple goal.
Michael Johnson – The period key is the one just to the right of the comma.
Awe Ken… ya got me. Punctuation has never been one of my strong points. Anymore than sound judgement, unbiased reasoning, critical thinking, empathy for those on the wrong end of the stick, or the desire to be on the right side of history has ever been yours. Grow up.
Phillip– “L’Shana Haba’ah B’Yerushalayim has been sung for millennia by those hoping, seeking, praying to return peacefully to the homeland of their fathers and to be free of the scapegoating that followed them through that diaspora culminating in the Holocaust. “Never Again!”
How can you say “never again.” It’s happening “again” as we speak. What Israel has been doing to the Palestinian people since the blockade was enacted, and what they’re doing to the Palestinian people now is in every sense of the word similar to the holocaust. I don’t deny the holocaust… why do you deny the genocide?
Phillip– “Peace through strength” is the only way to reasonably achieve that simple goal.”
Are you somehow saying that apartheid and genocide are reasonable ways in which to achieve peace?
“Palestine is a fictional construct of the Eurocentric League of Nations dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire following the first world war, nothing more.”
From Palestinian Lara Elberno–
“We as Palestinians are categorically denied the right to narrate our own lived experiences, instead dismissed as biased or exaggerating as the bodies pile up. While instead the statements of the military of the apartheid regime are taken as fact, never challenged, and repeated even when proven false. Worse, the U.S. and Israel who have seemed to decide our fate for us without our input, casually shop around ethnic cleansing blueprint plans for Gaza, while Israel awards exploration licenses for billions of dollars of Gazan gas. And yet they know not the first thing about us.”
“Do they know about our origin? That the history of Gaza, and Palestine more generally, is a deep, rich history of more than 4,000 years? That our land was inhabited and invaded by epic civilizations of whom we are all descendants? From the ancient people of the Mediterranean Sea, to the Canaanites, to the ancient Egyptians, the Philistines, the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Persians. Then the different Muslim empires like the Arabs led by Omar, and the invading Crusaders, driven out of the land by the fierce resistant Salah. And then came the Mamluks followed by the Ottomans? Do they know that these are our ancestors?”
“My own family traces our lineage in Gaza back to at least the 13th century. My parents were born in Gaza. All four of my grandparents were too, and so on going back generations. My family is from the Zun and Raal neighborhood in the northern part of Gaza.”
“Do they know that despite the fact that Israel has prevented me from entering Gaza on multiple occasions, that despite the fact that Israel has flattened our entire neighborhood along with the majority of Northern Gaza in the last 6 weeks, that I, like all Palestinians in forced exile, have never, and will never abandon the right to return to our lands?”
“Do they understand the meaning of asserting these words during the Nakba of 2023 when the scope of killing and displacement has already exceeded that of the Nakba of 1948? We will never back down.”
“Do they know that while the elderly may have died, the young didn’t forget? How could we as the Nakba continues 75 years later?”
“Do they know that Gaza is known in the region as “Razza, the land of dignity, of pride?”
“Do they know that dignity cannot be bought, faked, or seized by force?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dIL30-LxMQ
Ad hominem attacks are the last resort of a weak argument. SOMEBODY does indeed need to “grow up”.
Sad. Incredibly sad, as Michael points out in detail. More so because neither the UN nor the current trial in the Hague can do anything to change the situation.
But, to return to the point of the original article, which is our County Council’s recent proclamation…I am not personally partisan to the efficacy of local streetcorner protests, however much I may agree with their intent; however, the letters we write to the president and our congressional representatives seem to be moving the needle slightly, at least in terms of the Biden administration’s public relations stance in an election year, if not its actual continuing support for Israel. Why, then, should our elected local representatives not do the same thing? And if local governments all over the country did the same (as they did, for example, to oppose apartheid in South Africa) couldn’t this effectively influence the direction of our national policy? So, to reiterate David Tournoy’s point, I say kudos to the Council.
My heart has been bleeding since October 7 for both Israelis and Palestinians — but especially the latter. Phil, have you watched the nightly news and seen the photos and videos of battered, bloody Palestinian babies on the floors of bombed-out homes and even hospitals? Hard to conclude that “Israel’s very survival is at stake.” Any reasonable student of history realizes that that has not been in question since the 1967 War.
Even the Israeli-leaning mainstream US press is beginning to call this Genocide. I do not at all condone the Hamas murders, rapings and other atrocities of October 7. But do they justify bombing densely populated residential areas with unguided two-thousand-pound weapons and killing thousands of women and children who had nothing to do with that horrific attack? This is just vengeful revenge, pure and simple. It’s more than an eye for an eye, for which the Mideast is famous. It’s more like ten or twenty eyes for an eye.
And it’s deeply disturbing to see how the extremists on both sides are calling the shots. Hamas speaking for Palestinians on the one hand, and the extreme Zionists speaking for Israelis on the other. But how do you respond when something like 700,000 illegal Israeli settlers have taken over your prime lands in the West Bank, chopped it up with concrete barriers criss-crossing these lands and stationed armed checkpoints all about, through which the original inhabitants have to pass daily? This is called Apartheid, pure and simple.
To conclude, I support Israel’s right to exist — but not to try to destroy any possibilities of a viable Palestinian nation living peacefully beside it.
I have absolutely no tolerance for those who casually blow this issue off because they feel “the Palestinians deserve what they’re getting” as a result of what they deem was an “unprovoked” attack by Hamas militants on Oct. 11.
“Unprovoked?” After the Nakba, after 70 years of a brutal illegal military occupation, after two decades of a total land, air, and sea blockade, the non-stop illegal annexation of Palestinian land, and daily violent incursions and arbitrary arrests by the Israeli military against unarmed civilians. Unprovoked?
And what about the escalating violence in the West Bank that’s happening while everybody’s eyes are on Gaza?
From a recent U.N. Human rights council report–
In its latest update UN humanitarian affairs coordination office OCHA stressed that 2023 is “the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank” since the UN began recording casualties in 2005. The report cited a sharp increase in airstrikes as well as in incursions by armored personnel carriers and bulldozers sent to refugee camps, an increase in settler attacks at an average of six incidents per day, including shootings, burning of homes and vehicles, uprooting of trees, the deaths of over 300 Palestinian civilians (including about 40 journalists) by both settlers and the Israeli military, and the arrest of more than 4,700 Palestinians, including about 40 journalists, by ISF, (in most cases not linked to the commission of a criminal offense). The Office noted that more than one in every three settler-related incidents since 7 October involved settlers using firearms to threaten Palestinians, including by opening fire. In many incidents, settlers were accompanied by ISF, or were themselves wearing ISF uniforms, and carrying army rifles,” the report said. The findings include armed settler attacks against Palestinians harvesting their olives, “forcing them to leave their land, stealing their harvest and poisoning or vandalizing their olive trees, depriving many Palestinians of a vital source of income.
The UN envoy also remained deeply concerned by the continued demolitions and seizures of Palestinian structures, noting Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Some 4,800 housing units were advanced this year in what is known as Area C, and the number of housing units advanced in occupied East Jerusalem this year more than tripled: from 900 in 2021 to 3,100.
Not unlike the violence that occurred on. Oct. 7, what will they say, not “if” but “when,” the Palestinians in the West Bank have had enough and lash out against those perpetuating such violence against them there?
That it’s another example of “unprovoked,” extremists attacking innocent Israeli civilians? Of course they will.
Just what business is it of our county council to pass judgement on this extremely complex geopolitical issue?
Bob Distler: I won’t bother to make an argument for moral imperitive in this moment of genocide. Rather, I’ll pose a dollars and cents opinion that the Council had every right to take a position when every year, U.S. taxpayers provide $3.8 billion dollars in various forms of aid, mostly military and always under preferential terms offered to no other nations. Of this, WA taxpayers hand over $118,472, 967 per year (not including the recent larger allocation made to Israel for their defense). This is my money, yours, and all of ours. It would better go to addressing problems in our own country. I am not at all against foreign aid when it will contribute to humanitarian needs, or lead to human rights and democratic security here and abroad. None of our recent “wars” have accomplished any of this. Instead, these dollars to Isreal used to perpetuate genocide are contributing to American political isolation and international instability to greater measure as each day passes, and as each innocent is killed. So yeah, the current travesty that is Israel/U.S. genocide against the Palestinians is our concern. Or should we not have passed judgement on the Nazis?
Christine, Cindy & Jane:
To use the word “occupied” was totally wrong as a Govt Agency in your “proclamation”
You incited wrong doing by Israel in your use of the word “occupied”.
You did not have to use the persecutory phrase “occupied”.
You used the term “politically, without regard for its general or legal meaning.
Your use of the “term occupation”, in political rhetoric like this, reduces complex situations of competing claims and rights to predefined categories of right and wrong.
By using that term in your “Proclamation”, Advances the argument that Israel bears ultimate responsibility for the welfare of the Palestinians, while the use of the phrase limits and denies Israel’s right to defend itself against Palestinian terror, and thus relieving the Palestinian side of responsibility for its own actions and their consequences.
The use of “Occupied” is also employed by you as part of a general assault upon Israel’s legitimacy, in the context of a geopolitical narrative.
And to further show which side you are taking points to the fact that you did not issue nor include in, a proclamation calling for the immediate release of “Hostages” and the immediate surrender of those responsible for the slaughter of innocent Israelis?
Asking that our government use its good offices and such peaceful pressures as it can exert toward a cease fire is not taking sides. Neither side is innocent. Hamas is a failed government that denies Israel’s right to exist. Israel assumes a moral superiority that permits large-scale killing of women and children for which our nation is furnishing weapons and money, echoing and magnifying the acts of Hamas. The underlying hostility between the the two governments, however ancient and complex, is being carried out at the expense of civilians in violation of the tenuous rules that apply to institutional violence.
As in medical practice, it is imperative to stop the bleeding before suturing and healing can even begin. This is the topic of our council’s declaration. While beyond our council’s prerogative, it is nevertheless a collective voice expressed in an election year, a time when politicians listen more closely to their constituents.
What the County Council did was a lukewarm response to one of the greatest myths of the 21st century. Like the Jewish holocaust that was hidden from view during the 1940’s, the Palestinian holocaust has been hidden from view for much of the past 75 years.
The council’s policy statement was in keeping with San Juan County’s own Declaration of Human Rights, and was in response to the concerns of nearly 1,500 of their constituents who signed a petition asking them to do so, (as well as hundreds of phone calls and letters).
For those that need an education relative to the Israeli long-term, illegitimate “occupation,” illegitimate “blockade,” illegitimate “theft of Palestinian resources,” illegitimate “annexation of Palestinian land,” illegitimate “settlements,” and immoral “genocide,” all of which are in violation of many U.N. Resolutions, and are also unaware of the Palestinian’s legal right to resist under international law… please take a moment and listen to this.
This is an interview with Miko Peled, a former Commando in the IDF Special Forces, the son of a famous Israeli general, and the grandson of one of the original signers of the Israeli Declaration of Independence talking about the racist indoctrination and militarization of Israeli society.
“Israel is the outgrowth of a militarized settler colonial movement that seeks its legitimacy in Biblical myth. It has always sought to solve nearly every conflict — the ethnic cleansing and massacres against Palestinians known as Nakba, or catastrophe, of 1947-49, the Suez War of 1956, the 1967 and 1973 wars with Arab neighbors, the two invasions of Lebanon, the Palestinian intifadas and the series of military strikes on Gaza, including the most recent.”
“The long campaign to occupy Palestinian land and ethnically cleanse Palestinians was rooted in the Zionist paramilitaries that formed the Israeli state and continues within the IDF. The overriding goal of settler-colonialism is the total conquest of Palestinian land. The few Israeli leaders who have sought to reign in the military, such as Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, have been pushed aside by the generals.”
https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-chris-hedges-report-with-miko?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=24t3av&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
In reading Sandy Strehlou framing the moment as the “moral imperative” that it is, I’m reminded of the following, “Today I am not going to answer you because between you and me there is no political divergence, there is simply a difference in humanity.” Belgium MEP Marc Botenga
Where’s the outrage? Where’s the response of our local church leaders in regards to the violation of human rights that’s being perpetuated upon Christian and Islamic places of worship, and in regards to the genocide of a people that have occupied their land for millennium? Where is your voice? The United Church of Canada just called on Canada to support South Africa’s submission to the International Court of Justice on Israeli genocide. Where’s the outrage at this senseless act of inhumanity?
Bethlehem Pastor Rev Munther Isaac criticizes Western hypocrisy and Church complicity in Gaza crisis–
Christ under the rubble
“We are angry. We are broken. This would have been a time of joy. Instead, we are mourning. We are fearful. More than 20,000 killed. Thousands are still under the rubble. Close to 9,000 children killed in the most brutal ways. Day after day, 1.9 million displaced, hundreds of thousands of homes destroyed. Gaza, as we know it, no longer exists. This is annihilation, this is a genocide.”
“The world is watching. Churches are watching. The people of Gaza are sending live images of their own execution. Maybe the world cares. But it goes on. We are asking here, could this be our fate in Bethlehem? In Rammalla? In Jenin? Is this our destiny too? We are tormented by the silence of the world. Leaders of the so called free, lined up one after the other to give the green light for this genocide against a captive population. They gave the cover. Not only did they make sure to pay the bill in advance, they veiled the truth and context, providing the political cover.”
“This war has confirmed to us that the world does not see us as equal. Maybe it’s the color of our skin. Maybe it’s because we are on the wrong side of a political equation. Even our kinship in Christ did not shield us. So they say, if it takes killing 100 Palestinians to get the single Hamas militant, so be it. We are not humans in their eyes. But in God’s eyes, no one can tell us that.”
“The hypocrisy and racism of the western world is transparent and appalling. They always take the word of Palestinians with suspicion and qualification. No, we’re not treated equally. Yet on the other side, despite the clear track record of misinformation, lies, their words are almost always deemed infallible. To our European friends. I never, ever want to hear you lecture us on human rights or international law again… and I mean this. We are not white I guess. It does not apply to us according to your own logic.”
“In this war, the many Christians and the Western world, made sure the empire has the theology needed. “It is thus self-defence,” we were told. And I continued to ask, “How is the killing of 9,000 children self-defence?” “How is the displacement of 1.9 million Palestinians self-defence?” In the shadow of the empire they turned the colonizer into the victim, and the colonized into the aggressor.”
“Have we forgotten? Have we forgotten, that the state they talk to, that that state was built on the ruins of the towns and villages of those very same Gazans? Have they forgot that?”
“We are outraged by the complicity of the church. Let me be clear friends, silence is complicity. And empty calls for peace without a ceasefire and end to occupation, and the shallow words of empathy without direct action all under the banner of complicity.”
“So here is my message. Gaza today has become the moral compass of the world. Gaza was hell before Oct. 7th, and the world was silent. Should we be surprised that they’re silent now? If you are not appalled at what is happening in Gaza. If you are not shaken to your core, there is something wrong with your humanity. And if we as Christians are not outraged by the genocide, by the weaponization of the Bible to justify it, there is something wrong with our Christian witness, and we are compromising the credibility of our gospel message.”
“If you fail to call this a genocide that is on you. It is a sin and a darkness you willingly embrace.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l75yhhAAPt0