Campaigns
160 Organizations Demand Congress Stop Funding Israel’s Massacres
160+ organizations representing Palestinian communities, Palestinian solidarity organizations, and the racial justice movement have signed on to the new joint statement “Stop Funding Israel’s Massacres,” calling out the U.S. government’s complicity and racist dehumanization of Palestinian life. Read the statement below:
Israel’s horrific murder of 10 Palestinians in Jenin, unprecedented for two decades in the West Bank, demands action
After Israeli forces massacred at least 10 Palestinian people in Jenin refugee camp on Thursday, Jan. 26, leaving dozens of injuries and destruction in their wake, Palestinian journalist Mariam Barghouti called the Palestinian reality under Israeli military occupation a “slaughterhouse.”
While most U.S. politicians and media focused attention on a shooting by a Palestinian individual in an illegal Israeli settlement in East Jerusalem that followed, they remained silent on Israeli forces killing Palestinians in the Jenin massacre. This silence continued following the Israeli government’s moves to institutionalize their collective punishment and retribution responses to the shooting, including expediting gun permits for Israelis and punishing family members of Palestinian attackers by demolishing their homes and revoking social security benefits. This dehumanizing disparity reinforces the racist devaluation of Palestinian life. Peace is not possible without justice, which begins with an end to Israel’s military occupation, theft of Palestinian land, and attacks on Palestinian lives.
When this context is explained, it is clear all this violence is rooted in Israel’s brutality against the Palestinian people. The Jenin massacre was the bloodiest in the West Bank in about two decades, in one of the deadliest months: Israeli forces killed 35 Palestinians in the West Bank in 2023 so far, killing on average at least one Palestinian person each day. This Israeli violence marks an acceleration since 2022, when Israel killed 146 Palestinians in the West Bank, including killing Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh while she was reporting in Jenin. And in Gaza, Palestinians living trapped under Israeli blockade endure structural violence each day, and have endured multiple Israeli bombing massacres over the last two decades, which have killed thousands of Palestinians including 49 people in August 2022.
This week, Secretary of State Blinken is meeting with the new increasingly fascist, far-right Israeli government. Blinken’s statements said nothing about the Israeli government’s plan to entrench illegal settlements, reaffirming the U.S. refusal to even recognize the context of Israel’s military occupation. We will not accept his politics-as-usual of words of concern without U.S. policy change, which gives Israel a free pass to keep massacring the Palestinian people. The images coming out of Jenin—an elderly woman killed by Israeli sniper bullets, hospital patients suffocating with Israeli tear gas, and ambulances denied access to the wounded by Israeli forces—are part of apartheid Israel’s greater systematic violence, which our government has chosen to fund with $3.8+ billion of U.S. taxpayer dollars a year.
The Palestinian people’s ongoing demands for freedom in their homeland and basic human rights must be met by people around the world rising up with them. We demand Members of Congress take immediate policy action towards accountability: Stop arming Israel’s massacres against the Palestinian people by ending U.S. military funding to Israel. Real justice will not begin until we do.
List of Signatories Demand Congress Stop Funding Israel’s Massacres
The Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club’s National Political Committee is engaged in supporting the Carolina Federation’s campaign to Help Turn North Carolina Blue. The Carolina Federation team tells you in their own words, what they want to achieve and how they will achieve that goal in this video.
“One thing that we learned in addition to organizing is that actually having really strong candidates and in particular strong candidates who come from the multi-racial working class of this state and who can speak to the base of folks who haven’t been given a reason to vote. That actually having really strong candidates can be a deciding factor and so we’ve been doing that hard work to recruit working-class folks, folks from our membership, folks from union membership around the state to run for office.” — Gabe Gold Hodgkin, Movement Politics Director
More information about the Federation is available here.
Help us help the Carolina Federation by joining our organizing campaign.
Report from the California Democratic Convention
Three members of the Wellstone Club were delegates to [...]
Stop Talking about Looting
Got your attention, eh? So am I pro-looting or anti? Is that a stupid question or what–no, I’m not pro- looting. Having run my own shop and have worked with store owners who actually “put their business in the street,” by putting their trust and life savings out there, no. Yeah, and most of them are not covered for broken windows, have deductibles, etc.
The pandemic proves we need single payer, Medicare for All
It is often said that events like the COVID19 pandemic open minds to bold ideas previously not accepted. We can see this every day — with both immediate and longer term solutions coming into clearer and clearer focus. We are also learning more about the crisis before the crisis — in the hospitals, nursing homes, working class communities, and especially among oppressed people.
Pandemic: A Nation and a World Tested
This from The New York Times: Many Americans have demonstrated heroic strength during the coronavirus pandemic, but the society itself has revealed profound weaknesses. Widening gaps in income, wealth and opportunity in the years before the virus hit left everyone more vulnerable to the disease. It undermined the nation’s defenses and weakened its response. Yet the devastation of the pandemic has also created an opportunity to begin to put things right, to ensure that the America that ultimately emerges is more just, more free and less fragile. Through this initiative, Times Opinion is exploring, and seeking to answer, basic questions about what the government owes its citizens, what corporations owe their employees and what we all owe each other. America was ailing long before the coronavirus reached its shores. Now we have the chance to make it better.
NY Times articles on diverse dimensions of the current crisis are listed here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/opinion/america-inequality-coronavirus.html
Looking for more ways to get involved?
Are you looking for ways to get more involved in local voter engagement groups? Look no further! We have three great options for you: Becca Freed, Indivisible Berkeley – They’re working on texting to flip Virginia and canvassing for CD-10. Andrea MacRae, East Bay Activist Alliance – They work to help elect Democrats all over the US, especially at the state level, particularly in areas that can flip red to blue. The East Bay Activist Alliance is an affiliate of the Sister District Project. Debbie Raucher: Swing Left – They organize activities for volunteers from the San Francisco East Bay area including Oakland, Berkeley, San Leandro and other nearby cities.
Contact Gov. Newsom: Sign SB1!
Governor Newsom has indicated that he may veto SB1, the legislation that can protect California against Trump’s undermining of environmental protection laws. SB1 passed the Assembly and the Seante. Today’s San Francisco Chronicle has an EDITORIAL urging him to sign. This is a BIG ONE. Please DO IT. You can contact Governor Newsom via https://govapps.gov.ca.gov/gov40mail/ and urge him to sign the bill. The link also gives the Governor’s phone number. You can both call and write.
