Silence Is Also a Choice

I have written about Palestine for years. I have stood at podiums, sat across from lawmakers, and spoken to rooms full of people who wanted to understand what was happening and rooms full of people who did not want to hear it at all. I have done this because I believed, and still believe, that speaking plainly about what is happening to Palestinians is not a controversial act. It is simply telling the truth.

We are at a different moment now. The documentation is no longer in question. Gaza's health ministry has recorded well over 70,000 Palestinians killed by Israel (numbers exceed over 100,000) since October 2023, a majority of them women and children, with tens of thousands more wounded and an unknown number still buried beneath rubble that rescue crews cannot reach. Children have been deliberately shot by Israeli snipers in the head and chest. Gaza has the largest population of amputees. Surgeries have been performed including on children without anesthesia. Hospitals have been bombed. Food, medicine, clean water, and basic dental and medical care have been blocked or delayed as a matter of policy, not accident. People and children have been kidnapped by Israeli forces without charge, without trial, without the due process This is not a matter of interpretation. It is a matter of record.

And still, I hear the hedging. I hear public officials, in private, tell me they understand, or they care, but they cannot say so publicly. I hear the same tired formulations rolled out again and again: Israel right to self-defense, the right to exist, as if either phrase justifies the killing of thousands of Palestinian children or the deliberate obstruction of food and medicine to a besieged population. These phrases are not analysis. They are a way of not answering the question.

So let me be direct. If you are an elected official including in Maine, or you are seeking office in Maine, and you still cannot bring yourself to name what is happening to Palestinians, you should not expect my support, and you should not expect my silence about your silence. This is not a reminder. It is an accounting. History does not remember the people who calculated the political cost of telling the truth. It remembers whether they told it.

I have watched people including my friends pay a real price for speaking the truth. Musicians. Doctors. Students. Artists. Ordinary professionals who lost jobs, contracts, and reputations because they said what they saw. I count myself among them. I tell every one of them the same thing: wear it as an honor. Because one day, and it may be soon, people will look back on this period the way we now look back on other atrocities the world claimed not to see clearly until it was over. Children not yet born will ask how so many people watched this unfold in real time, with cameras in every pocket and satellites overhead, and said nothing. There will be an answer for that question, and it will not be a comfortable one for those who chose silence.

Speaking out does not require perfect language or a flawless grasp of a century of history. It requires the willingness to say that the killing of children is wrong, that the blockade of medicine is wrong, and that a population under siege deserves the same moral consideration as any other. That genocide is wrong. That is not a radical position. It is the minimum one.

I do not care if you are a politician, an activist, or simply a private citizen. I do not care if you have been swayed by certain groups, pressured by certain donors, or raised inside an American education system that shielded you from the fuller history of this region. None of that is an excuse anymore. At this point there are only two choices: you find the courage and the spine to speak, or you remain silent beneath the umbrella of cowardice. There is no third option and no dignified place to hide.

History will remember which one you chose, and one day you will look back and own it fully. And what a miserable way to spend the rest of your life, knowing you had the chance to stand on the right side of history, to speak against the worst atrocities of your own time, and you chose instead to say nothing.