Darializa Avila Chevalier
Benjamin Netanyahu belongs at The Hague; not in the streets of New York City, and certainly not before the United Nations general assembly. The international criminal court has a warrant out for his arrest for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The UN’s own commission of inquiry has found that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and named Netanyahu as its chief architect.
As the Democratic nominee for New York’s 13th congressional district, I refuse to allow a war criminal to roam the streets of our city unchallenged. I refuse to play host to a man who has overseen the slaughter or injury of more than 64,000 children in Gaza with American taxpayer dollars. I refuse to be complicit in genocide.
That is why I was arrested today outside of the United Nations alongside hundreds of my fellow New Yorkers.
Israel has killed more than 73,000 people in Gaza. It has bombed hospitals, schools, places of worship, fishing boats, and refugee tents. It has collectively starved an entire population as a tool in its genocide.
It has subjected men, women and children to systematic sexual torture and imprisonment. It has threatened to kill people for flying kites, killed more than 1,000 people since its so-called ceasefire, and fired 335 bullets into a car carrying five-year-old Hind Rajab.
And when it comes to consequences, world leaders offer carefully worded statements that don’t even amount to a slap on the wrist.
Here in the US, establishment Democrats and Republicans alike have shielded Netanyahu from prosecution for his crimes and sent over $21bn of our tax dollars in just two years to fund Israeli bombs.
The Biden and Trump administrations both obscured evidence, lied about what Israel was doing in Gaza, funded the carnage, and isolated and arrested people that spoke out against it. Just last week, the Trump administration proposed a $2.8bn weapons sale to Israel including 2,000lb bombs.
New Yorkers refuse to be silent. That’s why today’s civil disobedience, led by Jewish Voice for Peace, NYC-DSA, Sunrise Movement, CAAAV, Palestinian Youth Movement, Adalah Justice Project, the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights and more had 400 participants including more than 100 people arrested to demand an end to this injustice.
And NY-13, and New York City, is with us. This summer, Harlem, Washington Heights, Inwood and the West Bronx unseated a five-term, Aipac-backed incumbent. Their message was clear: invest in their babies here at home, not in bombs dropped abroad.
They made me their Democratic nominee with a mandate to pass legislation like the Block the Bombs Act and fight back against our country’s insatiable war machine. Across this city, New Yorkers elected candidates to Congress and the state assembly who’ll fight to stop the bombs, divest from death, and invest in a politics of life.
Families in Palestine, Lebanon and Iran are not our enemies.
Our enemy is a system where billionaires get rich from stoking hatred and war while our own communities go without. Tonight, shelters across uptown and the Bronx will be full. This past year, more than 100,000 children in New York City’s public schools have experienced homelessness. And right now, families are feeling the physical toll of cuts to Snap and Medicaid, and New York City Housing Authority residents are once again forced to sleep in inadequate housing.
I ran for Congress because I am done being told that there is never enough money for our communities while watching our government write blank checks to enact atrocities. Every dollar spent on slaughtering communities abroad is a dollar stolen from our communities here at home.
In 1967, Dr Martin Luther King Jr stood at the pulpit of Riverside church in my district and warned that a country that spends more on war than “on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death”.
Members of Congress have a responsibility to act with courage in the face of grave injustice, not to continue funding it. Unfortunately, nearly 60 years later, not much has changed.
Palestinians are facing unthinkable conditions every single day under an Israeli apartheid regime that that disappears men, women and children into military prisons known for their physical, sexual and psychological torture.
And here at home, families in my district have to endure their schools, clinics and food assistance being cut to pay for war, and ICE kidnapping our neighbors for speaking up for Palestinians, while nearly 40% of the babies in my district are growing up in poverty.
From NY-13 to Palestine, all children, and all people, deserve the safety and the resources to live dignified lives. That’s why I take to the streets, and that’s why I’m headed to Congress: to stop sending our tax dollars to arm genocide, to end senseless wars, and to build a government accountable to the working people of this country.
Our communities deserve leaders with an unwavering moral compass, who understand that our shared humanity is sacred, and who fight to build a politics of life even when it is politically costly. If that requires my arrest, so be it.
Darializa Avila Chevalier is the Democratic nominee for New York’s 13th congressional district
