We thank this newspaper for reprinting the Florida Sun Sentinel editorial, “The Dark Side of the US-Israel Alliance.” It is rare that local readers have the chance to reflect on the relationship between the rise of antisemitism and Israel’s policies of endless war and occupation, the scourging of Gaza and Lebanon, and Israel’s illegal colonization and ethnic cleansing campaign in the West Bank.

This is also a response to Yoram Samets and Mike Kanarick, authors of a rebuttal, printed in the Valley News, to the Sun Sentinel editorial. Even as they assert that the Sun Sentinel’s position on the U.S.-Israel war against Iran is morally deficient and a disservice to responsible civic discourse, they are silent on the slaughter of 160 Iranian school girls on Day One of the war. They are likewise silent about the deaths of more than 3,000 other Iranians, the 125,000 Iranian homes and civilian buildings damaged and destroyed, the hundreds of health facilities and schools directly hit by Israeli and U.S. bombs, Israel’s destruction of a synagogue in Tehran during Passover, and the plunging of millions into unemployment and poverty. So much for morality.

Odious repressive measures and denial of civil liberties by Iran’s theocratic elite and governing institutions should be condemned, but they do not confer on Israel and the United States a right to bomb the country at will. Samets and Kanarick’s bullhorn declaration that Iran is a perennial aggressor — so, essentially, had it coming — is spurious, offensive and contemptuous of the laws of war. They offer no compelling historical evidence to support their position. It is intended to distract us from the inconvenient fact that Iran did not fire the first shot in March, or even threaten to.

Here are other omissions in the Samets/Kanarick charge sheet.

Iran does not have nuclear weapons; Israel does, and its nuclear warheads are outside international regulation.

Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; Israel is the only country in the Middle East not to sign this treaty.

Iran and 21 other countries in the Middle East, plus nuclear-armed China, France, the United Kingdom and Russia, attended a U.N. conference in 2019 to discuss establishing a weapons of mass destruction-free zone, including nuclear arms. (Iran and Egypt first jointly proposed a nuclear-free zone for the Middle East in 1974.) The United States and Israel stayed away from the 2019 conference. Another Middle East WMD-free conference came in 2023. Again, Israel did not attend.

For the last six decades, Israel has violently occupied, confiscated vast stretches of land, and facilitated the transfer of hundreds of thousands of its citizens to Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, while collecting billions annually in U.S. military aid and taking cover behind the shield of diplomatic immunity
the U.S. wields. The unrelenting, murderous, and racist attacks on Palestinians by Jewish settlers have intensified dramatically since Oct. 7, 2023, ignored mostly by the Western press as Gaza was burning, and now South Lebanon.

Officials in Tel Aviv trumpet their commitment to democracy while angrily rejecting the findings of human rights groups that their country is guilty of apartheid. In the words of B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights organization, “In the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, the Israeli regime implements laws, practices and state violence designed to cement the supremacy of one group—Jews—over another–Palestinians.” 

Neither antisemitism nor “domestic political hatred” of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netayahu, as Samets and Kanarick claim, explain why millions of Americans are appalled by the war on Iran and by the obliteration of Gaza and the rampages of Jewish settlers. True, it is easy for some to fall into the trap of blaming Israeli state violence on Jews worldwide given that Israel’s leaders routinely boast that they shed blood and steal land in the name of all Jews — a boast that is as far from truth as Israel’s actions are from international law. In fact, most Americans are responding to what is in the best interests of their nation and of humanity: ending the U.S.-Israel addiction to perpetual war and domination, imposing an arms embargo on Israel, and severing the costly, irrational and dangerous U.S.-Israel alliance that has pushed us again into the abyss of war, slaughter, and mass devastation.

Liz Blum is a member of Jewish Voice for Peace VT/NH; Nancy Welch is a member of Upper Valley for Palestine.