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Sen. Jeff Merkley isn’t mincing words on the complicity of the United States in the ongoing decimation of Gaza.
“This is horrific, and we are complicit in it,” Merkley said in an interview last week with the Mercury. “We are complicit because we provide the bombs, we provide the rifles, we provide the shells, we provide economic support.”
Merkley’s remarks, some of his most pointed yet on the war waged by Israel in the Gaza Strip, come after the Democrat senator’s return from an eight-day trip to the region with Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D—MD) in late August. Both men serve on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
Merkley and Van Hollen visited both Israel and the West Bank during their excursion, meeting with a variety of groups including families of Israeli hostages, residents of a Palestinian village recently attacked by Israeli settlers, and a variety of political leaders. The senators also visited both Egypt and Jordan.
The trip was Merkley’s first to the region in more than a year-and-a-half and second since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023. Since then, more than 64,000 people in the Gaza Strip have been killed, more than 163,000 have been wounded, and nearly 2 million have been displaced. The US has facilitated Israel’s war effort with more than $22 billion in military aid since the war began.
On Thursday, Merkley and Van Hollen released a 19-page report on their trip—arguing that the world has a “moral and legal obligation to stop the ongoing ethnic cleansing” of Palestine and that it “must impose penalties and costs on those who are implementing this plan.”
Israel has framed its assault on Gaza as a targeted effort to defeat Hamas following the October 7 attack, though Israel’s own estimates suggest that more than eight in ten people killed in Gaza have been civilians. The United Nations overwhelmingly voted to endorse a proposal outlining a path to a two-state solution in the region last week, over the objections of Israel and the US.
Merkley, who is serving his third term in the Senate and running for re-election next year, was among the first senators and the first member of Oregon’s congressional delegation to call for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in November of 2023. He has since voted to withhold aid and block weapons exports to Israel.
Program warehouse in Israel.
screenshot/instagram
Merkley described standing on top of a building at the edge of the city of Rafah in southern Gaza and seeing it “completely turned to rubble” as among the most powerful moments of his recent visit.
“The entire place has been blown up to make it impossible for people to return,” Merkley said. “You can know that from satellite photos, but somehow it burns it into your mind to see it in person.”
Merkley called the total devastation of Rafah part of a broader Israeli strategy of ethnic cleansing in Gaza, which could extend to Gaza City, the Strip’s most populous urban center, in the coming weeks. Israel has ordered the evacuation of the city and is threatening a fullscale invasion.
“What’s going on in Gaza is an accelerated version of ethnic cleansing with two core strategies: one of those is to destroy homes, blow them up so there’s nothing to return to, just a pile of rubble, not even clear ground to pitch a tent,” Merkley said. “The second is a strategy of deprivation: deprivation of food, water, and medicine.”
The deprivation of food is of particular concern given that half a million Gazans are at risk of starvation in what an Integrated Food Security Phase Classification analysis has called a famine. Merkley said that he was able to view equipment designed to rapidly surveil aid trucks to ensure they are carrying only humanitarian goods, but that the equipment has been sidelined.
“That equipment is no longer being used because the Netanyahu government wanted to slow down inspections,” Merkley said.
Merkley and Van Hollen wanted to visit Gaza as part of their excursion, but were denied access. The senators said they were scheduled to fly over Gaza on a Jordanian aircraft dropping food into the Strip, but that Israel denied authorization for the flight they would have been on.
The senators were, however, able to visit the West Bank, where they toured the Christian village of Taybeh and met with American Palestinians living in the region whose family members have been killed by Israeli settlers or military personnel.
“It’s very systematized now: cut off access of the Palestinian villagers from their agricultural undertakings—their vineyards, their olive orchards, their fields—cut them off from water, an essential element for survival, harass them physically,” Merkley said.
“It is constant harassment and pressure, often including economic consequences, often including physical attacks—injuries and burns—and nothing gets investigated, nothing gets to a conclusion, no one’s held accountable,” Merkley said.
Merkley noted that many of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) officers theoretically responsible for protecting Palestinian villagers from vigilante settler violence are in fact settlers themselves, with the effect that “they basically provide protection for the settlers to attack the Palestinian villages.”
Though the violence in the West Bank is not being perpetrated by the IDF in the same way the violence in Gaza is, Merkley also identified Israel’s approach in the West Bank as part of a broader “strategy of ethnic cleansing” designed to allow Israelis unimpeded access to the eternity of historic Palestine in clear violation of international law.
Merkley has thus far refrained from describing Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide, which the United Nations Special Committee and a wide variety of academic experts in the field believe it is.
Nevertheless, Merkley’s words are among the strongest any member of Congress has used about Israel’s conduct in Palestine since October 7. The war has been a major political issue in Oregon, where Merkley recently said attendances at his town halls have jumped five-fold this year in large part due to opposition to Israel’s conduct in Gaza.
Merkley’s colleague Sen. Ron Wyden, who has steadfastly opposed efforts to block or condition aid to Israel, has also faced vociferous town hall crowds: Wyden’s town hall in Grants Pass was cut short in August by protesters demanding he do more to help end the carnage in Gaza and he has been the target of protests from the Portland chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace.
A coalition of elected officials and activists in Oregon rallied last week to demand the state’s Congressional delegation end military aid to Israel—a position that has attained majority support across the country over the last year.
For Merkley, the stakes of their campaign are clear.
“We are complicit in the war crimes that the Netanyahu government is conducting,” he said.
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Abe Asher
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