Moral injury

An open letter to US elected officials

On the sad anniversary of Israel’s intensified attacks on Gaza, recognized around the world as a genocidal campaign but supported unconditionally by my own government, I have written a letter that I will be posting in the following online forms. If you feel moral injury as I do, you are welcome to copy and adapt this letter to share with your own electeds. Here are sites for my representatives, along with links you can use to communicate with yours:

President Biden: https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/share/

Vice President Harris: https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/vicepresident/

Senator Richard Durbin: https://www.durbin.senate.gov/contact/email

Senator Tammy Duckworth: https://www.duckworth.senate.gov/connect/email-tammy

Representative Jan Schakowsky: https://schakowsky.house.gov/zip_authentication?form=/contact/email-me

Find your senators: https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm

Find your congressperson: https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative

Dear President Biden, Vice President Harris, Senator Durbin, Senator Duckworth, Representative Schakowsky:

The Earth has made a complete orbit around the Sun since October 2023, and thanks to all of you, the world has been witnessing the first genocide of the twenty-first century during these twelve months.

• You did not acknowledge that Hamas’s incursion into Israel on October 7, 2023, was inevitable given the cruel and unrelenting blockade of movement and resources that Israel had maintained over Gaza for many years.
• As Israel began carrying out its revenge and targeting the civilians of Gaza, you seized the opportunity to assist it with countless lethal weapons, including 2,000lb bombs, which it has used to incinerate refugee camps, killing whole families, and has dropped on other homes and on schools, universities, churches, mosques, markets, and farms. It has targeted water plants and left people drinking fetid water from puddles and ditches. It has committed one war crime after another. Its snipers have gleefully targeted older women like me, its snipers have shot children in the head. Its soldiers film themselves laughing while they humiliate prisoners. These videos have been posted on social media for the whole world to see.
• You have wrinkled your faces in expressions of empathy and urged Israel to minimize civilian casualties and investigate a couple of the many reported incidents of human rights abuses. You know full well that Israel will not investigate its misdeeds honestly.
• While supposedly waging this assault in the name of freeing the hostages held by Hamas, Israel has killed a number of those hostages, again with US weapons.
• About a dozen employees of UNRWA were accused of participating in the October 7 raid or supporting it some way. UNRWA promptly fired those employees. But instead of lauding its quick response, you cut off support for UNRWA, the only source of food for thousands of Gazans, and you influenced other Western governments to do likewise. With trucks carrying aid blocked by Israeli soldiers and settlers at all the crossings, the people of Gaza who have not been killed are starving. They walk the streets like ghosts.
• Rep. Schakowsky, months ago you justified voting for a bill that included another huge sale of weapons to Israel with a long statement arguing that it was the only way to get desperately needed food aid to Gaza. Do you not understand that dropping boxes of food is stupendously offensive when you have also provided Gaza’s enemy with massive weapons and artillery to kill those hungry people?
• President Biden and Vice President Harris, you claim to be working “tirelessly” for a ceasefire. Surely you are aware that Hamas is not the one putting up obstacles to a ceasefire agreement. It has agreed multiple times to US-backed proposals. Netanyahu’s government is the intransigent party every time. Indeed Israel sent assassins to kill Hamas’s chief negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran. Netanyahu knows that his administration will fall apart if he says yes to a cessation of hostilities. And he has absolutely no positive reason to say yes, given that the United States continues to blithely send weapons at the rate of two shipments every single day.
• You are violating multiple US laws each time you send those weapons to Israel. We are under obligation to stop arming any country that commits human rights abuses in its conduct of war. But somehow you see yourselves as above this law.
• Emboldened by your encouraging words (“we will never abandon Israel”), Israel has increased its violence in the West Bank. And now Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, Syria . . .

I am deeply ashamed of you as representatives of the country where I vote and pay taxes. You seem blissfully unaware that as you enable the destruction of Gaza and its people, you are also inflicting profound moral injury on the people whom you were elected to serve and represent. Moral injury happens when great evil is done in our name and we are powerless to stop it. The people of the United States do not approve of your support of Israel’s carnage, and we have been letting you know in polls, petitions, phone messages, street protests. But you do not listen to us. In this election season you are probably glad to be running against Trump and all the Project 2025 people, because their plans are so horrific that when we shut our eyes to Gaza, you seem like the good guys. But we know. Even ardent Democrats know that you are injuring us as you wrap yourselves in the Israeli flag. You are injuring the whole world.

Do you remember Aaron Bushnell, the Air Force serviceman who immolated himself in front of the Israeli embassy last February, crying out “Free Palestine”? Did you dismiss his agony because he wasn’t your constituent? Aaron saw your complicity in genocide—a complicity that we all share as taxpayers. You are using our money and you are killing our souls as you arm Israel so that it can starve, torture, and kill the people of Palestine.

I am seventy years old, a mother and grandmother, an artist and writer, a follower of Jesus. I live very modestly but have a rich and beautiful life. And on this anniversary I am contemplating Aaron Bushnell’s action. I am wounded by what you are doing in my name, and I’m wondering what desperate public step I could take to wake you up.

You probably wouldn’t care much because I don’t donate to your campaigns. And since you can see the images of Gazan babies killed by US bombs and you keep sending the bombs anyway, you wouldn’t be moved by any sacrifice I might make. You have political reasons that completely override public or personal ethics.

It is exhausting and heartbreaking to live in the world that you are destroying. But I believe that somewhere in your core, you, like me and like every human being, still have a soul that longs for God and reaches for the good. Will you begin to shut out the political pressures and listen to your own soul? Are you able to reverse course—to repent, to use an apt biblical term? You don’t have to stop being a politician: you could actually start listening to your constituents and help to assuage our moral injury. You could uphold US law and impose an arms embargo. You could save dollars that way and direct them toward reparations for the people of Gaza and meeting urgent needs for healthcare, education, and housing here in the USA.

You could. Will you?

In grief and necessary hope,

Ruth Goring

Photo by Michael Bracey.