Peoria for Palestine is going to pack the City Council Chamber at their next meeting on February 13th at 6pm! If you are a Peorian who does not condone our government’s unconditional support and enablement of war crimes and the indiscriminate killing of civilians en masse in Gaza, join us in Room 400 at 419 Fulton St, Peoria IL, as we demand that the Peoria City Council adopt a Ceasefire Resolution with regard to Israel’s collective punishment of Gaza and the West Bank.
Peoria City Council: 419 Fulton st, Peoria, IL
Room 400, 6 pm (arrive by 5:40 if possible)
If you are planning to attend, scan the QR code on the page or fill out a form here.
Why we are doing this
On October 7th, the al-Qassam Brigade and other Palestinian armed resistance groups launched an attack on Israel that killed 373 Israeli Operations Forces members, and left 695 Israeli civilians dead. It remains unclear how many Israeli civilians were killed by Palestinian fighters and how many were killed by the Israeli forces’ firing upon both Palestinian combatants and Israeli civilians under orders reflecting the Hannibal Directive . In addition to those killed, the Al-Qassam Brigade captured over 200 civilian and military hostages intended as bargaining leverage for the release of over 8,000 Palestinians held illegally, many for years, in Israeli prisons under “administrative detention.” Murdering civilians and taking civilian hostages is a war crime and a breach of international law.
Peoria for Palestine reiterates its belief in upholding international law consistently across all actors. Since October 9th, Israel has launched an unprecedented, indiscriminate, and illegal military assault on the civilians of Gaza. This assault is the most recent chapter in a history of brutal and dehumanizing occupation that precedes the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, with its roots in British colonial policy beginning in 1917.
Since October 9th, Israel has killed over 30,000 Palestinians, 70% of whom are women and children. They have consistently deployed illegal chemical weapons, annihilated Gaza’s hospital and public health systems, completely destroyed sanitation infrastructure, and for months completely severed Gaza’s connection to any food, water, fuel, or medical supplies.The trickle of aid that has since been allowed in is completely insufficient, and is itself weaponized against the very people Israel cynically claims it is helping. The state of Israel, by its actions, aims to make Gaza unlivable by destroying any life-sustaining systems necessary for sustaining a population.
Right now, in addition to withstanding a continued carpet bombing and murderous ground campaign, known to use such cruel deception as luring crowds of starving refugees with aid trucks only to be open-fired upon and disguising bombs as cans of food to trick children into triggering an explosion, Palestinians must navigate record levels of starvation, malnutrition, psychological trauma, and deadly disease. Their homes are bombed, 1.9 million people displaced along designated “safe” corridors that are themselves bombed, one has to ask, how can anybody possibly justify this scale of violence, this degree of cruelty? Some might say “Hamas” – if a Hamas member were allegedly in your basement, would you accept the murder of your entire family for their death? Would you accept the demolition of your entire neighborhood? The slaughter of your children?
We must not sit passively while Palestinians are brutalized, murdered, and made repeated victims of the most destructive and lethal military campaign in modern history.
Some may say, “Why not protest Hamas?” We do not provide material support to Hamas. We hold no sway over Hamas, and Hamas does not care what Peorians think about its tactics. We are not complicit in Hamas’ actions. Israel, however, receives substantial aid from the United States – we are all directly implicated in the actions the Israeli state chooses to undertake.
Peorian citizens provide $1,746,217 to Israel every year. We paid for the bullets, and the Hellfire missiles, and the tanks, and the 2,000-pound bombs, and the white phosphorus that leaves children’s faces covered in unhealable chemical burns. We paid for these tools of massacre while our own people often sit hungry, unhoused, and uncared for. Our plight is not separate from the plight of the Gazan expectant mother dying in agony of sepsis, of the Palestinian child undergoing a double-amputation with no anesthesia.
The International Criminal Court of the United Nations found that Israel’s actions since October 9th constitute a plausible genocide – the United States government is using our hard-earned resources to enable a plausible genocide. We demand that Peorians of Conscience rise up and say “No!” No to genocide, no to war crimes, and no to our government making us all accomplices to this horror.
If you take issue with the devastation and complete animosity towards human life demonstrated in the assault on Gaza, if you believe that all people have a responsibility to stop genocide, if you refuse to say “yes” to perpetuating cycles of violence, join us at the Peoria City Council meeting on February 13th. You are encouraged to make a public comment in support of a Ceasefire Resolution, or to show up in person in support of those public comments.
Peoria City Council: 419 Fulton st, Peoria, IL
Room 400, 6 pm (arrive by 5:40 if possible)
