Message to Ritchie Torres from Bronx Healthcare Workers and Constituents

We are here as students, teachers, healthcare workers, and, notably, your constituents. As Bronxites, we are horrified at the policies supported by “Representative” Ritchie Torres.

We are here to protest his active participation in the US/Israeli genocide in Gaza. Not only does Ritchie vote for every new massive weapons package to Israel, so they can continue their genocidal, colonial ambitions for Gaza, but in April, he also took a trip to Israel, paid for by the Israeli Lobby, to meet with Israel’s Minister of “Defense” Yoav Gallant.

We have not forgotten how Gallant dehumanized Palestinians on October 9 when he said, “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly… We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel.” And we know that in January, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Gallant’s statement was a plausible case of genocidal intent.

We demand to know what Ritchie said to Gallant?

After the meeting, Ritchie lied when he told the press: “I have enormous empathy for the plight of the defense minister, who is fighting a defensive war in the most complex war zones in human history… I reminded the minister to ignore the mixed messaging and background noise of American politics. Most Americans support Israel.” 

Ritchie is saying that he has enormous empathy for someone trying to racially annihilate 2.3 million people, half of whom are children. It is an absurd statement that even Chuck Schumer, by far the most loyal supporter of the state of Israel in Congress over the past 30 years, would not make. 

Not only is the Bronx strongly opposed to the US-funded Israeli genocide in Gaza, but also, a large majority of people living in the U.S. do not support genocide or ethnic cleansing. According to a Gallup poll taken at the end of March, 55 percent are opposed to it, and among Democrats, 75 percent say that all aid to Israel should be conditioned on the end of its genocide on the Palestinians of Gaza. 

Ritchie, we Bronxites do not consider the bombing of schools, daycare centers, maternity wards, and hospitals to be defensive in nature. We do not believe executing newborn babies is self-defense. We do not think the targeted assassination of doctors, nurses, paramedics, aid workers, teachers, and professors is defensive. Like all sane people in the world, we understand these Israeli atrocities to be major war crimes and crimes against humanity. 

We know that millions of dollars are behind Ritchie’s insane statements and enthusiastic legislative work in defense of Israel’s genocide. Since he was elected to New York City Council in 2013, he has taken more than $1 million from AIPAC and other Zionist lobby groups. In the past three months alone, he has taken from the lobby $368,000. The largest donor to the Zionist Lobby, the billionaire Haim Saban, sees Ritchie as his puppet in Congress and recently applauded him for calling for a U.S. war against Iran. When asked how a war against Iran is in the interests of people in the US, Ritchie stated: “I try to approach the [Iran] issue not from the perspective of an American, but from the perspective of an Israeli.”

But we now know the real reason for the big infusion of new cash from the Zionist Lobby into the campaign coffers of Ritchie: to crush the popular anti-genocide student activism against the state of Israel.

On April 26, just a week before the brutal repression of student encampments across the country, he co-sponsored a bill in the House of Representatives, dubbed the “COLUMBIA Act,” which makes federal funding for universities conditional on their elimination of protests against Israel’s genocidal campaign. In Ritchie’s and the Zionist lobby’s absurd definition, any protest against Israeli state policy is antisemitic, even when these protests are led by Jewish people in the US.

As we have seen and experienced this past week, Ritchie is not alone in putting the colonial genocide of Israel before the First Amendment rights of people in the US and academic freedom. Like Ritchie, almost every university and college president in the country immediately complied with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s demand that the US crush the rapidly growing student-led anti-genocide protests by calling onto their campuses city and state riot police, snipers, and SWAT teams, with hundreds of students arrested and suspended, now unable to graduate. Some were violently physically assaulted. Faculty attempting to protect their students from police violence were body slammed to the pavement. Journalists were expelled from campuses so that they could not document the university-sanctioned police violence. Zionist thugs were allowed to violently attack anti-genocide student protesters while the police stood on the sidelines cheering. 

What we are witnessing, and which Ritchie Torres is the face of, is the attempted normalization of genocide and colonialism by the US and Israel.

The normalization process can be summed up simply. The state of Israel cannot exist without apartheid and genocide since its goal of creating a white supremacist ethnostate relies on exterminating all Palestinians. Therefore all those who oppose white supremacy, Israeli racism, and genocide are enemies of the “Israeli” state and deserving of dehumanization and repression, even if they are Jewish (matter of fact, especially if they are Jewish)!

In our borough of the Bronx, the majority is poor despite working hard and following the rules created by the current regime. We pay high rents for mediocre or substandard housing. Our public school system is underfunded and failing students. Our dilapidated mass transit system is too expensive for most riders and requires enormous new investments. Most Bronx residents rely on Medicaid or, if they’re ineligible for Medicaid, have inadequate health insurance plans that often force them to go to public hospital emergency departments instead of the big private hospitals in their own neighborhoods, like Montefiore and New York Presbyterian. 

Bronxites need housing as a human right and a guaranteed job. We need free universal healthcare and free mass transportation. Instead of funding a genocide, you should be focused on meeting our needs and reconstructing our public education system, getting rid of all the failing charter schools, and demanding universal programs as they have in almost every other country, where every person gets exactly the same quality of resources, and where every child begins their development on a truly equal playing field.

All of these systems are realistic and exist today in countries like Cuba. What’s stopping us from getting them are people like Ritchie, who right away made the decision that he was going to tapdance for dollars instead of fighting in Congress for the betterment of the working class of the Bronx. You cannot do both.

The great Palestinian scholar and professor Edward Said, who, were he alive today, would have been on the frontlines of the student Gaza Solidarity encampments, said that the United States will never be free until the Palestinians are free. 

That is worth fighting for.

From the beginning of our protest movement against Israel’s genocide, we have been seeing exactly what Professor Said meant. 

Palestine will set us all free!

The Palestinian resistance has awakened the working class of the U.S. and put us on the path to fighting for a real democratic system where the interests of the working people of our country come before the interests of the wealthy. It’s as simple as that, and now there’s no turning back.

FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA, PALESTINE IS ALMOST FREE!

VIVA PALESTINA LIBRE!