Matt Dricker submitted this letter, which is co-signed by Casey Parles, Jane Katz Field, John Field, Leo Moskowitz, Liz Harris, Lucy Johnston, Maya Faerstein-Weiss, Naomi Ullian, Rebecca Speisman, Steve Wangh, and Abby Mnookin.
Tim Wessel asks readers to "think for a few moments about your Jewish friends. Ask them how they've been since Oct. 7."
As some of Tim's Jewish neighbors in Windham County, allow us to answer this question:
We are horrified, heartbroken, fiercely angry, and unwilling to stand aside while the state of Israel uses the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7 as a pretext for the murder of 32,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including 13,000 children, 125 journalists and 170 United Nations aid workers.
The Israeli bombing and ground invasion has injured an additional 75,000 Gazans. Over 55% of the buildings in Gaza have been destroyed, resulting in the internal displacement of 1.7 million people, or 75% of the population.
As a direct result, the U.N. estimates that 1.1 million Gazans are facing catastrophic levels of food insecurity. At Phase 5, this is the largest proportion of any population in food security crisis ever recorded by the Integrated Food Security and Nutrition Phase Classification.
These numbers are on such a scale as to numb our human need to personify tragedy. We recognize the risk in citing them, knowing that they may fatigue an all-too-stretched capacity to hold life equally sacred. Yet this capacity never stopped containing our grief for the 1,200 Israelis murdered and 130 Israelis taken hostage and held in Gaza by Hamas on Oct. 7.
The accounting of Israeli loss on that day allows each victim's name and portrait to be printed on individual flyers and held in the hand of a single person. We have seen their names and faces, mourn their deaths, and hope for their safe return home.
We have not yet seen the faces of all of the Palestinian victims in Gaza, because we cannot even account for the many thousands that remain buried under the rubble of Gaza's cities: the ruins of schools, mosques, libraries, hospitals, cafés, apartment buildings, sanitation plants, and homes.
Tim Wessel "question[s] the moral compass" of those who march in solidarity with Palestinians. The moral compass we question is when people witness the scale of destruction of life and culture in Gaza over the past five months, yet continue to describe Israel's actions as "self-defense." Instead, we recognize Israel's intentional and overwhelming desecration of Gaza as callous, indiscriminate, unprecedented, genocidal and an act of ethnic cleansing.
As Jews, we refuse to allow Israel or Zionists to claim to act in our name. We refuse to allow the manipulation of our generational Holocaust trauma to propel a militarized, violent displacement and oppression of Palestinians that began decades before Oct. 7 - decades before even the rise of Nazi Germany.
We refuse to be silent when Zionists describe Hamas as a "death cult" while Israeli soldiers murder Gazans as they gather for a delivery of food aid, Israel shuts off supply and access to clean water, and Israeli ministers call to "wipe Gaza off the face of the earth."
As Jews living in Vermont, we are scared - not by a reflexive, future-imagined fear of our neighbors repeating Jewish historical trauma, as Tim Wessel believes, but by the actual, current, and ongoing genocide of Palestinians upon whom Israel has perpetuated a new trauma mirroring our own, which will reverberate across future generations.
We understand that Jewish safety is inseparable from the safety of Palestinians, that Jewish liberation is inexorably bound with liberation of all people, and that peace and healing can exist only in opposition to oppression and violence. This is why we say to Israel: "Not in our name." This is why we vow: "Never again, for anyone."
If we do not stand with Palestinians, we do not stand with anyone, least of all ourselves.
We know on which side of history we stand.
Matt Dricker
Brattleboro
Matt Dricker submitted this letter, which is co-signed by Casey Parles, Jane Katz Field, John Field, Leo Moskowitz, Liz Harris, Lucy Johnston, Maya Faerstein-Weiss, Naomi Ullian, Rebecca Speisman, Steve Wangh, and Abby Mnookin.
This letter to the editor was submitted to The Commons.