I’d like to amplify Carrie Beveridge‘s May 13 message (“Even from the coast, Oregon must condemn Gaza genocide”). 

Beveridge rightly emphasizes the most direct connection between these atrocities and our community: that our tax money is used to directly support this genocidal campaign. But I’d like to suggest another crucial connection: the deep ideological alignment between the Israeli state and the neo-fascist movement that is rising worldwide, including in our federal government.

This neo-fascism upholds values of racial supremacy and conquest wherever it takes root. The connection should be obvious here at the western edge of American settlement, where members of the Chinook Indian Nation are still engaged in a struggle for recognition of their status as the inhabitants and stewards of this land since time immemorial. 

But in occupied Palestine today, like in America in the era of “manifest destiny,” the order of the day is seizure and settlement, with genocidal “solutions” (including “final” ones) naturally ensuing.

Protests against the current administration’s “authoritarianism” are abstract and hollow if they don’t recognize this fundamental fact. How can we combat contemporary neo-fascism if we continue to hypocritically give full support to one of its foremost standard bearers, the openly genocidal Israeli state?

The coming years are going to be difficult for our society. We have no hope of navigating them peacefully unless we view our own actions and history honestly. It is long past time to uproot the vicious spirit of conquest and settlement from our politics, from Gaza to the Lower Columbia.

DANIEL HUBNER

Astoria