No neutral position on the genocide machine.
Last week, American rapper Macklemore announced on social media that Ed Sheeran had removed him from the remaining dates of their tour together, over comments Macklemore made in support of Palestine. Robert Kraft, the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots and Gillette Stadium, reportedly pressured Sheeran to drop Macklemore, including organizing other stadium owners.
“Taking a side can cost you,” Macklemore wrote in a statement posted to Instagram. “But there is no neutral position between the oppressor and the oppressed.”
With these words, Macklemore expressed the sentiments of millions. Within two days, Sheeran’s other opening acts withdrew from the tour. Within a week, he had lost half a million followers on Instagram, and concert ticket prices had plummeted. Protesters gathered at his Philadelphia show over the weekend and there are plans for more protests at this Friday’s show at Kraft’s Gillette stadium.
Two years into Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestine organizing, the backlash against Sheeran shows how little patience Americans have for attacks on pro-Palestine speech. It also demonstrates the shift toward support for Palestinian rights among everyday Americans that our movements have helped propel.
More than ever before, there is an understanding that to profess “neutrality” in the face of ongoing atrocities is akin to siding with the state committing them.
“For the sin of genocide, we atone.”
More and more American Jews are changing their minds about Palestine.
The polls are clear: 63% of American Jews don’t identify as Zionists. Forty percent of American Jews think Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Increasingly, rabbis and community leaders are speaking out against the genocide.
Amidst this year’s High Holy Days, over 200 rabbis signed a letter to Congress calling on representatives to cosponsor the Block the Bombs Act, historic legislation that would suspend the shipment of the most lethal U.S. weapons to Israel.
“We… are guided by the Jewish values of Pikuach Nefesh, the obligation to save lives,” their statement read, “and B’tzelem Elohim, the belief that all humans are made in the image of the divine.”
Then, on September 21, over 1,000 Jews and allies gathered in NYC on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, to perform a public mourning ritual and demand a permanent end to the genocide in Gaza. A sign on the podium on stage read “For the sin of genocide, we atone.”
Participants wore white, many draped in prayer shawls and keffiyehs. They chanted, prayed, sang, and laid stones in honor of the Palestinians killed in Israel’s genocide.
Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian graduate student held by the Trump regime for over a year in retaliation for his organizing, showed the stone from Jerusalem that he brought with him as he addressed the crowd: “I try to keep it with me all the time just to connect with the land.
Ending the flow of U.S. dollars to genocide.
Our movements are propelling a sea change in public opinion towards support for Palestine, among both Jewish and non-Jewish Americans alike. Now, that narrative shift is beginning to sow the seeds toward material change: actually stopping the flow of U.S. dollars to Israeli apartheid, genocide, and ethnic cleansing.
Trump is currently trying to force through another $2.8b in 40,000, one-ton bombs to Israel. But there’s already been unprecedented opposition to the sale from some unexpected places: the Democratic Ranking Members of both the House and Senate Foreign Relations Committees announced they are objecting to the sale.
This comes after 104 members of the House voted in June to block $3.3 billion in annual military funding to Israel, and nearly half the Senate voted to block a shipment of military equipment in April. We’re not there yet, but we are closer to blocking the bombs than at any point in JVP’s 30-year history, and that means we have to keep pushing.
It’s not just Congress where we’re keeping up the pressure. In communities big and small, from Providence to New Orleans, JVP members and partners are fighting hard to divest their local and state governments from Israeli genocide.
In Providence, after months of organizing by JVP-Rhode Island and the rest of the Providence Palestine Coalition, residents are now gearing up to vote to divest their city from countries committing genocide: the first legally binding divestment vote in U.S. history. In Louisiana, North Carolina, Minnesota, Michigan, and Maryland, JVP and partner organizers have racked up wins totaling over $100 million divested or not reinvested in Israel bonds, unrestricted loans to Israeli genocide and apartheid.
The most pro-Palestine Congress in U.S. history.
The shift in American public opinion that our movements have helped propel has also opened up new opportunities to build political power: to elect candidates to local, state, and federal office that will fight to cut off the flow of U.S. dollars to Israeli genocide.
In the year since our movement propelled Zohran Mamdani to victory as mayor of the biggest city in the country, 9 insurgent JVP Action-endorsed candidates for Congress have won their primaries. From New Jersey to Texas to Michigan to Colorado to Florida and beyond, our candidates are winning because they have a winning message, one that merges the fight for Palestine with the fight for the working class.
Our work is not over. Midterm elections are less than two months away. In November, we’ll have the chance to elect the first-ever JVP Action-endorsed candidates for Senate — Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Angie Nixon in Florida — alongside 7 other pro-Palestine candidates for Congress. Because of the power of our movements, we are preparing to usher in the most pro-Palestine U.S. Congress in history, bringing us that much closer to blocking the bombs.
Take action: Block the Bombs.
The Block the Bombs Act, which was endorsed by over 200 rabbis last week, now has over 80 co-sponsors.
Email your member of Congress now and tell them to sign onto this historic legislation.
We’re reading: Democrats’ Gaza reckoning.
American voters rejected establishment choices this year in favor of candidates who spoke out clearly against U.S. support for genocide, Akbar Shahid Ahmed writes in the Guardian, which shows that “the base is eager for Democratic leaders to rethink unfettered US-Israel solidarity.”
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