For Release: JVP calls for Biden administration to demand a regional ceasefire.

Jewish Voice for Peace calls on the Biden administration to use the United States’s leverage to enforce calls for a regional ceasefire, including an immediate end to U.S. military funding and weapons sales to the Israeli government, amid its unfolding genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

For months, American people across the political spectrum have made clear that we do not want our taxpayer money to arm a genocide against Palestinians. But the U.S. government has insisted on defying the will of the people, and has offered the Israeli regime complete and total impunity as it carries out countless war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza, facilitates pogroms to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, and repeatedly bombs Lebanon and Syria, including the Iranian embassy in Damascus. Such reckless aggression by Israel and the U.S. have not only led to unthinkable devastation, but have driven the entire region to the precipice of all-out-war. 

Our Jewish tradition is grounded in pikuach nefesh, the imperative to save every life. This imperative drives us to demand that the Biden administration end the unconditional funding and arming of the Israeli military, and instead truly invest in the sanctity of all life. For decades, the U.S. government’s incessant weapons sales and billions of dollars in military funding to Israel have abetted Israeli dispossession, oppression, occupation — and now the genocide — of the Palestinian people.  In the past six months, the Israeli government has killed over 33,000 Palestinians in Gaza — 70 percent of whom are women and children — and over one million more people are being starved by the Israeli blockade on humanitarian aid. Israeli soldiers and settlers in the occupied West Bank are rampaging through Palestinian villages.

This wanton disregard for life also extends to Jewish Israelis as, time and again, the Israeli government has spurned diplomatic deals that would end this bloodshed and return the Israeli hostages, instead choosing to further decimate Gaza and intentionally escalate regional instability. The U.S. has been a full partner in this ongoing catastrophe. This must end now.

A different future is only possible with a radically different approach to the present. The Biden administration must not only demand, but take action toward, achieving an immediate and permanent regional ceasefire. The U.S. government must halt weapons sales to Israel immediately and end all funding of the Israeli military. Diplomacy is the only route to stopping the Israeli military’s genocide of Palestinians, to releasing Israeli hostages and Palestinians arbitrarily imprisoned by Israel, to ending the Israeli-manufactured famine in Gaza, and to de-escalating regional war.  

A future where all people across the region live in safety and lasting peace must start with the U.S. government ending Israeli impunity and instead backing the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and equality.