On Sunday October 20th, MAPA activists engaged our next generation on the issue of U.S. complicity in violence during an information session organized by Representative Stephen Lynch in Braintree for local high school students interested in military service.
We greeted students and their parents as they entered the session with a flyer detailing the United States’ exorbitant financial backing and ceaseless arms supply facilitating the genocide – using $22.7 billion in US taxpayer money to gift over 50,000 tons of arms and equipment to the Israeli military – as well as recent news of the deployment of 100 US troops to Tel Aviv to operate US-supplied defense systems. With the prospect of a widening war as Israel extends deadly strikes into Lebanon and Iran, activists encouraged potential service members to contemplate whether they wanted to become embroiled in this conflict in the future.
Also included in the educational handout were the words of five conscientious objectors, including Aaron Bushnell, the 25-year-old member of the U.S. Air Force who proclaimed in February: “I will no longer be complicit in genocide” before self-immolating in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C. His final words of “Free Palestine”, which he screamed as flames engulfed his body, should haunt every politician who has stood idly by while Palestinians have been slaughtered using US weapons purchased with US tax money.
At the event, MAPA activist Dan McLaughlin, joined by Jeffrey Parente of Veterans for Peace, spoke with Rep. Lynch, urging him to introduce into the House a set of companion Joint Resolutions of Disapproval objecting to recent arms sales to Israel, matching Bernie Sanders’ actions in the Senate.
Israel’s War on Palestinian Children
With a median age of 18 and about 40% of its people aged 14 or younger, Gaza is one of the youngest populations in the world. The Gaza Strip is a crowded enclave, as dense as London, with 2.3 million people packed into an area the size of Detroit (which by comparison is home to 620,000).
Israel’s stated genocidal intent and its use of building-flattening weapons, when coupled with Gaza’s youth and density, has led to what UNICEF Deputy Chief Ted Chaiban has termed “a war on children”, making the Strip, as Chaiban put it, “the most dangerous place in the world to be a child”.
The targeting of Palestinian youth is not limited to airstrikes: American doctors volunteering in Palestine have testified to treating children, including toddlers, with sniper wounds to the head. For children who survive the violence, their life is left permanently harmed. For example, humanitarian experts have warned that “Gaza is home to the largest cohort of child amputees in modern history”.
The official child death toll in Gaza stands at 16,765 but as many experts have cautioned, the true death toll is almost certainly significantly higher. By comparison, in a considerably longer period of time, about 2,200 children were killed in the first 900 days of war in Ukraine.
Youth Killing Youth
Essentially, Israel’s siege on Gaza could be described as a war on the next generation of Palestinians by the next generation of Israelis. The average age of an IDF recruit is just 18.9 years old. Many of these young soldiers have shamelessly documented their violence with Instagram, Facebook and TikTok posts showing crimes including destroying buildings for sport, using Palestinians as human shields, and brutally mistreating detainees.
Educating Our Own Youth
To those who have followed Palestinian journalists over the course of the last year, the nature of Israel’s attack on Gaza’s civilians does not come as a surprise, as the people of Gaza have meticulously and tragically documented their own genocide in intensely gory detail. Yet for Americans obtaining their media from mainstream sources, or for those taking the word of its politicians at face value, much of this horrific reality has been obscured.
As members of our own youth consider their futures, and consider serving our country, it is more critical than ever to spread awareness to the current reality on the ground in Palestine, as well as the broader history of the Palestinian struggle for freedom.
Particularly with the prospect of expanding war in the Middle East and increasingly direct U.S. involvement, activists must directly engage young Americans, educate them where the media and our education system has failed to, and help end the destructive cycle of youth killing youth for Western imperial interests.
We at MAPA continue to encourage concerned citizens to call their Senators and Representative daily, demanding their support of these Joint Resolutions of Disapproval at a bare minimum.