February 23 marked a public turning point for Pat Ryan, the Democratic congressmember for a New York district presently comprised of Orange County and parts of Dutchess and Ulster counties. The district boundaries now seem likely to undergo considerable change.
That’s the day that the West Point-educated, Kingston-native and veteran of two tours in Afghanistan put out a press release calling for a conditional ceasefire of the ongoing military operations of Israeli forces in the Palestinian territory of the Gaza strip.
“I’m calling for a mutual temporary ceasefire to both secure the return of hostages and to send a massive surge of humanitarian aid to Gaza,” said Ryan. “The Rafah invasion cannot proceed.”
Rafah is a city at the southern border with Egypt into which a reported 1.4 million Palestinians have been pushed after fleeing from Israeli military operations in the north. The Gazans there are now hemmed in with nowhere else to go.
So many Palestinians have ended up there because the Israeli military (IDF) resorted to bombing the Gaza strip, first on October 27, following the Hamas-perpetrated slaughter of 1200 Israeli civilians and their kidnapping of 253 people, women, children and the elderly among them. The IDF’s communicated goal is to eradicate Hamas.
Reports are that that over 29,000 Palestinians have been killed.
According to Israel, that statistic is just a fact of war and in no way resembles the appearance of a genocide.
First enacted as a provision to the foreign assistance act in 1997, the so- called “Leahy law” provides moral guardrails for American projects by “prohibiting the U.S. government from using funds for assistance to units of foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights.”
Ryan wasn’t silent on the idea of a ceasefire before. In a seven-point plan outlining his requirements, he had called for the safe return of the hostages, the surrender of Hamas, the recognition from both the Israeli government and Palestinian government of a state in which both peoples had the right to coexist, that a new government would operate with the best interests of the Palestinian people, an end to settler violence in the West Bank, and that perpetrators of rape and sexual violence during the slaughter would be brought to justice.
Since November, Ryan’s speaking engagements in Ulster County have been enlivened by protestors agitating for an unconditional ceasefire.
The national and state Democratic parties have so far straddled a precarious fence with conservative elements of the party pulling on one leg and progressives pulling on the other. For those balanced in the middle, the political pain has become excruciating.
Protests calling for an unconditional ceasefire have been held every weekend in New Paltz outside Elting Memorial Library in New Paltz, with protestors on one side of Main Street and counter-protestors on the other.
“It is the bare minimum he should do,” said one young woman protestor.
“It makes me feel mildly contemptuous of him,” said an older man. “Because it’s taken him 20,000 or 30,000 dead to make a modest step forward towards rationality.”
A third protestor who identified himself as Eli Kassirer said: “It’s pathetic, but it’s progress.”
Across the street, counter-protester Mark Goichman said he wanted a ceasefire, too. “I haven’t met anyone who doesn’t want a ceasefire,” said Goichman. “It’s always been about the conditions.”
Goichman’s conditions for a ceasefire are simple: “Free the hostages. Dismantle Hamas. You can’t have a ceasefire with a hostile enemy next to you.”
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