A general view over the Gaza Strip as seen from the Israeli side of the border on Jan. 8, 2024, in southern Israel. Photo by Amir Levy/Getty Images.
With an agreement just hours old, it remains to be seen whether the announced Gaza ceasefire will stick. Whether it does or not, the misery of the Palestinian people is hardly over. Gaza has been made a hellscape, and it has been made a hellscape by design, even if Israel’s American apologists, such as U.S. Rep. Pete Stauber, deny this reality.
In a December 13 letter to me, Stauber, who represents Minnesota’s 8th Congressional District, baselessly accused the “terrorist-run Gazan Health Ministry” of “inflat[ing]” Palestinian civilian casualties while he himself — in the very same letter — incontrovertibly inflated those of Israel. “On October 7, 2023,” he falsely wrote, “the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hamas attacked Israel and killed thousands of innocent civilians.”
The atrocities of October 7 were horrendous and inexcusable, and the documented civilian toll that day was bad enough. Why, then, does Stauber feel it necessary to exaggerate it? Contrary to his bogus assertion, no credible source — not even the Israeli government itself — claims that “thousands” of civilians were killed on October 7. The most precise figure, which derives from numerous data sources including the Israeli social security agency, indicates the number of civilians killed on October 7 to be 815. (Over 300 Israeli military personnel also died that day.) Note that this figure is less than half of what Stauber claimed as a bare minimum.
So why does any of this matter? On one level it doesn’t. It feels almost icky to have to point out that the number of civilians killed on October 7 is far less than what my congressman claimed. After all, one civilian casualty is one too many.
But on another level it matters a lot. It illustrates the serious intellectual deficiencies of Stauber, who clearly knows nothing about the Israel-Palestine conflict yet appears to feel no compunction in repeatedly lying about it. Facts and accuracy are of little concern to him. More significantly, the issue matters because Stauber seems to think that the crimes of October 7 justify his support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
“Genocide” is not a term I use lightly. Indeed, it was an e-mail I sent to Stauber following Amnesty International’s release of a 300-page report on December 5 concluding that “Israel has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip” that prompted Stauber’s letter. And Amnesty is not alone. Highly regarded scholars have found similarly, from Israeli historian Raz Segal — who was infamously denied the directorship of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies in a shameful violation of academic freedom by the university’s administration — to the eminent Holocaust historian Omer Bartov. Most recently, Human Rights Watch concluded on December 19 that “Israeli authorities are responsible for the crime against humanity of extermination and for acts of genocide” in Gaza.
When I wrote to Stauber on December 9, I asked him as my elected representative to work to immediately suspend the supply, sale or transfer of arms to Israel. Given that such arms were being used to conduct war crimes and crimes against humanity, their provision to Israel was a violation of both domestic American law and U.S. obligations under international treaties. This was not a partisan call on my part. With relatively few exceptions (U.S. Sen. Tina Smith, to her credit, among them), President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party led the charge in abetting the genocide, sending billions of dollars in military aid to Israel and vetoing several UN Security Council resolutions calling for an immediate Gaza ceasefire.
Despite the clear legal violations in continuing to provide Israel with U.S. weapons, Stauber, who claims to value law and order, ignored my request and made it clear that he supported the continuing atrocities. “I will continue to stand with our ally, Israel, as it fights for its right to exist,” he told me in his December 13 response.
Someday, when the history of this genocide is written, Stauber will be remembered for having cowardly sided with the perpetrators. When law and morality called on him to stand up and try to end the suffering of millions, he spat on the victims, denounced those trying to save them, and said God should bless the genocidaires. Shame on him.
