Open Letter from Brooklyn For Peace
to President Barack Obama
Uphold Your Promise of Change in Foreign Policy!

Dear President Obama: The voters of Brooklyn responded overwhelmingly to your call for change. The humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza highlights the urgency of changing the failed Bush policy of providing "blank-check" support for Israel in its pursuit of security through occupation and use of military force. In recent days, the Bush Administration has:

• Used its diplomatic influence to delay a cease-fire, to benefit the Israeli Defense Forces' attempt to annihilate Hamas; and encouraged Israel to ignore a UN Security Council resolution requiring an immediate cease-fire
• Given a green light to Israel's use of American weaponry to attack civilians
• Refused to criticize Israel's deliberate targeting of relief convoys, UN humanitarian workers and civilians, including the use of white phosphorus and other chemical weapons
• Accepted Israel's policy of barring Western journalists from entering Gaza

The Bush Administration's cooperation in the invasion of Gaza is just the latest instance of its imbalanced and one-sided support of the continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. This has included:

• Refusing to talk to democratically elected representatives of the Palestinians
• Criticizing Palestinian rocket attacks while remaining silent when, according to Human Rights Watch, Israel launched five times as many artillery shells into far more densely populated Gaza
• Refusing to recognize Hamas as the part of the legitimately elected government of Gaza, and then inciting a failed coup against it
• Supporting a blockade of Gaza which has caused such misery to the civilian population that the UN had declared that blockade to be a crime against humanity even before the latest military assault
• Supporting Israel's seizure of territory ("creeping annexation") on the West Bank through a separation wall that runs deep into Palestinian territory
• Resisting any acknowledgment that Israel is a nuclear power that has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty

Israel remains the largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the world — $1.8 to $3 billion annually. The United States has a moral responsibility to curb the cycle of violence which this weaponry has facilitated. The Bush Administration's policy of seeking security through expansive military force has, as you have so eloquently pointed out, failed in Iraq, and it has also failed in Israel and Palestine.

It is past time to change U.S. policy to an evenhanded support for "land for peace" and to ending the injustice of denying national rights to the Palestinians. Only through such a policy can the legitimate security needs of both Palestinians and Israelis be met.

The people of Brooklyn, together with people throughout the U.S., have clearly voted in the last two elections to change the Bush Administration's failed policy throughout the Middle East. We respectfully and urgently ask your Administration to move quickly to do so.