Letter to Ha’aretz Newspaper

Catherine Buntin is CAPA’s President.

From an American Nurse

We have done everything possible to protest our government sending weapons to Israel to no avail.

The only hope for stopping this genocidal war sits in your hands, the people of Israel.  You can organize to say “Not in our Name” to Netanyahu and your extremist right wing government. 

So far, the only protests in Israel have been organized around the remaining Israeli hostages.  While that may be understandable, it is not the whole story while over 2,000 innocent Palestinians languish in your tortuous prisons.  They too are hostages, and they are voiceless.

The Jewish faith does not condone ethnic cleansing.  Your care and your voice must bring down this government which would annihilate another people.  Hamas has said it fights to end the occupation, for their people to be free. They will not lay down their arms any more than Israel would lay down its arms.  This appears to be a war of racist intent, one of white superiority. A war of power over the powerless and for a major land grab.

Killing civilians is a war crime, be it 120 innocent or 50,000 innocents.  Hamas was wrong and what Israel has done is unconscionable.

Netanyahu does not intend to ever allow a two-state solution.  He has demonstrated his intention of stealing land from several of your neighbors, including Lebanon and Syria, and Gaza and the West Bank, to create the “Greater Israel”.  He is proud to show his new map of the future.  I must ask, do you condone this? 

He has also demonstrated that he will execute, at will, any leaders in other countries. Is this the world we want to live in– a lawless world where tyrants can take you out with drones from the sky, while you sleep?

The slaughter in Gaza is inhumane and the Israeli soldiers who have killed and maimed these people will live out their lives with deep emotional and spiritual scars. And how will the world see Israelis from now on?  Will they care about your history, your pain, your suffering?  Hardly. You have no moral ground to stand on now and neither do we, we who have supplied your bombs.

There are starving people next door to you.  I weep—even want to scream—for the beautiful children starving and dying a painful death.  And for their parents. Please care enough to bring down your government–  You can stop this war.

M. Catherine Buntin, RN, MS, MPH

Cultural Center Art Represents Harsh Reality

by CAPA Climate Change Working Group member Carter Cleland,
published February 8th in the Chicago Sun-Times.

I’ve got blood on my hands, just as the “protest puppet” at the Chicago Cultural Center. Why? Because my tax dollars, and yours, and those of Alderpersons Debra Silverstein, Byron Sigcho-Lopez and Bill Conway, go toward the purchase of U.S.-made bombs that, to date, have killed nearly 47,000 Palestinians, 70% of whom are women and children. Tens of thousands more have been maimed, and the dead buried under the rubble that was once Gaza may double or triple the known casualties. I’m sickened by my complicity in this conflict, and if that makes me an antisemite, so be it.

Carter Cleland, West Ridge

HOW SHALL BEAUTY CLAIM A PLACE

Here’s a Gaza poem from our friend Kos Kostmayer. It is sent “with love and desperate hope for better news and happier times.”
_________________________________________________________________

HOW SHALL BEAUTY CLAIM A PLACE

When sorrow bears witness
To unspeakable violence

Time withers
Weather stops
Laughter too
The wind departs

The sun retreats

Wells run dry
The sky disgorges black regret
Rivers reek of blood and bile
Children vanish in the dark
Olive trees begin to die
People wading through the bloody streets

In search of missing names

Weep to no avail

They weep because they know
There is no justice in this world
If mercy has no say
If mourning has no brief

To salvage tenderness
From mindless force
Or shelter happiness

From grief so deep
It wears the human heart away

Photo: Palestinians inspect the damage following an Israeli airstrike on the El-Remal aera in Gaza City on October 9, 2023. CC BY-SA 3.0 license held by Palestinian News & Information Agency (WAFA) in contract with APAimages. The image has not been modified.

THE LAST BREATH: A POEM FOR PALESTINE

By Kos Kostmayer, poet, novelist, screenplay writer
October 8, 2024


I don’t know where we are

We are not allowed to see

Lights are made to blind us

We are driven out of sleep – ridden down by beasts – banished out of sight

They say we have no right to live, but still I have to ask: whose prayers abide when we are vaporized?

Who cares for us when laws are cast aside by genocide?

Who walks inside the wind with us when all is stolen, all is lost, all is broken in the mind?

We were never born to disappear and yet we vanish

The West is deaf to our suffering, indifferent to our need, blind to our despair, but I have heard the cries of mothers bleeding orphans in the dark

When infanticide is no longer a sin, we have come to the edge where the end begins

We are pleading in the void

There is fear in every step

Death in every cell

I am running out of breath

I am not allowed to breathe

I don’t know what to do

I pray you hear me when I say that if you find my last remains scattered on the bloody ground

Treat them with respect

Take them home to Khan Yunis

Bury them beside my name.

###
In the last 12 months the U.S.A. has embraced, weaponized and fully funded Israel’s genocide  against the people of Palestine. It has been estimated by Lancet and other reputable organizations that a minimum of 118,000 and possibly more than 200,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, have been slaughtered to date, and the killing continues unabated. The living are hounded from place to place, then buried under bombs delivered to Israel by the U.S.A. The dead pile up. The war goes on and spreads. Israel continues bombing schools, churches, mosques, temples, refugee camps, apartment buildings, civilian dwellings, tent cities, U.N. shelters, designated safe zones, and all the while disease and famine spread and the hostages that Israel claims to care about continue to die or remain in captivity. In the past few days Israel has bombed four countries – Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen – killing mostly civilians, including countless numbers of children. Children are always civilians. Civilians are always innocent.

According to Oxfam, more women and children have been killed in Gaza than in any other conflict in the world over the past two decades. The response of the Biden administration to these ongoing massacres is a mix of unforgivable cruelty, blatant dishonesty and astonishing weakness.  A group of American medical professionals who traveled to Gaza to care for the wounded recently sent a letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris, pleading for mercy, and saying, “We cannot fathom why you continue arming the country that is deliberately killing these children en masse.” It is difficult to think of the current Israeli government as a legitimate state. It has become a state of mind, a feverish whirlwind of annihilation bent on destruction and bred for death, less a governing body than a lethal and well-funded war machine. In the midst of all this we have to retain some sense of our own humanity. We have to embrace compassion. We have to reject the agents of death and destruction on every side. We have to stand with the innocent, and with the living, not with the killers. We have to be grateful for the fact that the international community has overwhelmingly condemned the U.S. sponsored Israeli violence and  has articulated strong support for Palestinian self-determination. That call has been echoed by a multitude of Jewish organizations and people around the world who have condemned the genocide, demanded an immediate and permanent ceasefire, and overwhelmingly rejected the egregious and dangerous claim that Judaism and Zionism are synonymous. We have to acknowledge that the Palestinian people have a right – codified by international law – to resist subjugation. They also have a right to self-determination and self-defense, but Israel has never allowed the Palestinians to assert those rights in a reasonable, non-violent fashion. We have lost our way, we have betrayed our professed values, and we have abandoned the rules-based international order put into place after World War Two in response to genocide. It is a sad but true fact that there is no end to our shame; no redemption in our lust to kill; no sense in our cruelty; no mercy in our politics; no reason in the madness we have subsidized. We have spread death, destruction, disease and even famine without regard for human life or safety. We have forsaken the righteous cause and made ourselves the willing servitors of evil. We have sided with the mighty against the undefended. We have become the agents of an infinite sorrow.

An Appeal for Enlightened Journalism On Gaza – Catherine Buntin

This May 4, 2025 letter was sent by Catherine Buntin, CAPA president, to David Brooks, a New York Times columnist and PBS commentator. We encourage readers to send their own peace-oriented letters, not only to legislators but also to journalists and influential public figures.

Dear David Brooks,

We need your deep dive into the war in Gaza, from the Palestinian perspective, and your journalistic help to bring balance to our news coverage.

For three years the Houthis have repeatedly said that they are only bombing ships in the Red Sea to retaliate for the Israeli bombing in Gaza. And they stopped all bombings during the recent ceasefire. They kept their word. Yet this never gets reported.

Nor does the fact that thousands of innocent Palestinian prisoners — including men, women, and children — are tortured and held in depraved conditions in Israeli prisons. They are hostages, too. But only the 50 or so remaining Israeli hostages are ever discussed, only their families are interviewed.

Your reporting could elevate the profile of one Palestinian prisoner in particular. Marwan Barghouti (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marwan_Barghouti) is respected by Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank and might be a gifted negotiator for peace. The people need his voice and talent. I’m sure Hamas has negotiated for his release — perhaps they would have more luck if there were public pressure from the US. But this can’t happen if Americans don’t know of him, and most don’t.

Most importantly, the US needs to examine its years of bombing Yemen and its support for the terror Israel has inflicted in the Middle East for decades; the list of executions is long as is the theft of land. These atrocities must be called out and our participation must be critiqued with brutal honesty. But to do this, Americans need complete and accurate information from journalists.

We are faithful viewers of the News Hour, and daily readers of the NYT. We are grateful for most of the journalism produced in these spaces. But on Israel’s genocidal war, the US media presents a biased view, and that includes PBS and the NYT. There are excellent journalists, like Trita Parsi and Jeremy Scahill, who could be featured. Please encourage The News Hour and the NYT to include voices like these and of the Palestinians themselves so that your viewers are equipped to hold our government accountable and to demand the just peace that Palestine deserves. By the way we know that this war will never make Israel safe or safer. Until Israel can treat its neighbors as equals, hate and violence over peace and human dignity will surely prevail.

Lastly, please see the documentaries, Where Olive Trees Weep and No Other Land; and read “Hamas Contained” by Tareq Baconi. These resources have helped our community better understand what “occupation” means to people’s everyday lives and why the resistance will continue.

Your voice matters…. I believe we need your help… and I think Pope Leo would agree!

Respectfully,
M. Catherine Buntin, MS, MPH, Public Health Nurse

09.22.19

40th ANNUAL