My Commentaries for Local Rag Gets Me Banned … Censorship is Riding Roughshod in Newport, OR
I've been here before: terminated from jobs, stopped from writing things, ghosted and gas-lit, banned from teaching at a college or two and even sanctioned at a K12 district, but it still stinks!
Calling a public official, a dirty politician, no less (that’s what many of us call politicians), a piece of shit? That’s it, no? Bye bye discourse. David Gomberg, a Jew who spent his political time on a dog and pony show to be propagandized by Israel in September.
CANCELLED by the event sponsors and board.
They (OCCA) are scrubbing all evidence that the Oregon Coast Center for the Arts ever invited me to speak/give a master class. Yep, two days before I was going to give a short, intense master class, cancelled.
Read the flyer above that is posted all over the county, pinned up here and there.
Here, my letter to the board:
Dec. 2, 2025
RE: Censoring my talk at the Newport Performing Arts building as part of the Hear Here series
TO: Oregon Coast Council on the Arts; David Gomberg, Editor of the Leader
What a sham, really, as I received a call today, Dec. 2, two days before my scheduled talk, around media and news literacy, at the PAC.
Wayne Caputo called me from an airport around noon, and alas, he was the one who basically convinced me to do a talk, and he approved of the theme and subject matter.
He told me that “the board” decided to cancel my presentation “based on things you’ve written.” I pressed him further, and he stated that “some board members were upset with the comments I made in a Commentary in the Leader tied to David Gomberg’s trip to Israel.”
Then he stated something about OCCA’s stated values and mission which they/he said I do not represent.
Censorship, that is for sure, a value I do not stand for. Denying the community OCCA is supposedly in favor of supporting through this discussion/master class on journalism, digital media and the death of critical thinking? Not a value I ascribe.
Again, stopping a preplanned event, 48 hours before, that is a sign of small minds, odd pressure from one or several board members, and outright blatant censorship.
Lack of critical thinking and holding to unfair rules of debate? OCCA’s values, that’s for sure. Having a member of the community publicize the event for the greater community to attend and then reneging on that discussion is antithetical to free speech and educational honesty. Again, OCCA is quite a culprit in this regard.
I am not going to go over just all the issues your censorship covers. The unprofessional manner of contacting me so late in the game, well, that goes without explaining. My reputation being sullied by this? Hmm, what lies have you conjured up as to why the “Hear Here” talk for Dec. 4 has been cancelled. I see you scrubbed my talk from your website. Such efficient censors you all are!
Caputo, Eastman, Richardson, Gardner, Jones, Madnick, Burke, Klose, Shreiber, Llumiquinga Perez, Ledonne, Sinnamon, Pridgeon, Chadwick – what small minded, cloistered and strange people you are, involved in The Arts, no less.
It doesn’t take long to wash the stink away from my mouth after hearing about and cogitating around this cancellation. Yes, censorship. Podunk Newport, sure, but the land under Trump and before, Biden, well, well, what censorious fools both parties represent. You are welcomed into both camps, I am sure.
Just two months ago, Chris Hedges, a well-known journalist, who is listed in my PowerPoint talk, just faced the same sort of little Gestapo treatment in Australia:
Hedges’s scheduled address to the National Press Club of Australia was canceled. The speech, titled “The Betrayal of Palestinian Journalists,” was intended to discuss the high number of journalists killed by Israel in Gaza and the media’s pro-Israel bias. The cancellation drew significant criticism, with Hedges and others stating it was due to pressure from the club’s sponsors, some of whom are embedded in the Israeli war machine. Hedges later delivered the full, uncensored speech online.
Oh, the list of how badly Americans of both parties treat truthtellers and so-called outside the mainstream news reporters, well well, it can fill books. Project Censored was also part and parcel included in my presentation. Your little action fits that great nonprofit’s work around just how badly Americans treat writers, thinkers and the Press.
What a failure of leadership and vision AND values to quash discussion. This talk is/was about media and the press and how quickly people in the West have been propagandized to the hilt, causing a mass collective misunderstanding of history, breaking news, contexts around news events, and just plain denuding of basic clear thinking.
You failed your own mission and soiled the value of debate, discourse and discussion on a super valuable and relevant topic for a small community, Newport. To add to this infamy, a few comments in the local newspaper attributed to me involving a public figure, a politician, no less, as being another basis for cancellation is both infantile and retrograde.
How dare you, Caputo, Eastman, Richardson, Gardner, Jones, Madnick, Burke, Klose, Shreiber, Llumiquinga Perez, Ledonne, Sinnamon, Pridgeon, Chadwick, that you individually and collectively even breathe a word about values. What a disgrace you are associating yourselves with “the arts,” an even more troubling reality surrounding your pedestrian and sad Board.
Shame on you.
Paul Haeder, writer, educator, photographer, journalist, teacher
Was it this?
“But make no mistake about it – the US, Britain and Germany are the major weapons suppliers to Israel. However, there are literally tens of billions of dollars going back and forth from and to that genocidal state.
Sort of like the good old days when Hitler and his regime had that back and forth commerce, with, hmm: German and international corporations like IG Farben, Ford, General Motors (GM), IBM, and Standard Oil. There were hundreds of smaller companies.
We have now in Lincoln County, thousands losing their Medicare Advantage plans through Samaritan Health. And what are the democrats up against the republican reprobates doing?
Well, we have two senators, one who is Israel-First and who puts his Jewish background above America, for sure, in many people’s minds: The genocide campaign has killed more than 350,000 Palestinians, almost all civilians, and left the rest of the population of Gaza in plots of land that make concentration camps look livable.
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) co-sponsored six bills in September 2024 to halt a $20 billion U.S. arms sale to Israel. Some of it: $675 million worth of bombs and a shipment of 20,000 assault rifles to Israel.
“We have a profound moral responsibility to end this collective punishment of innocent civilians,” Merkley said in a statement, adding that until the Israeli government makes critical international food and medical aid available to Palestinians in Gaza, the U.S. should not send any more weapons.
Yet, the other senator, Ron Wyden (D-OR), voted with all Republicans against stopping the military killing materiel to Israel.
Even non-Jewish Merkley drops caveats in his statement:
“Every moment the U.S. fails to demand a massive influx of food or to provide that massive influx of food ourselves, we are complicit in Netanyahu’s strategy of starving Palestinians. This breaks every moral code and every religious code. Until every child and every mother have sufficient nutrition, America should not send a single dollar or a single bomb to Netanyahu’s government. No more bombs. More aid.”
Some of us journalists go way back (since 1973) and we’ve even studied rhetoric and propaganda and taught college communications (since 1983).
Let it be known: Israel has been practicing genocide since 1948, and has been an apartheid state the same number of years. “Mowing of the grass” was a practice Israel used to murder peaceful protestors and medical workers going to the aid of wounded protestors. Before Oct 2023.
With no political resolution in sight, Palestinian hardliners continue their attacks, Israeli hardliners continue to build new settlements in the Occupied Territories, and Israeli security forces seek to keep the violence at an acceptable level by periodically mowing the grass.
“Israel is acting in accordance with a ‘mowing the grass” strategy.”
Many western commentators have questioned whether Israel was justified in killing so many innocent Palestinian civilians in its effort to root out Hamas. Some have gone much further:
Avi Shlaim, Emeritus Professor at Oxford University, stated that the war was “an act of state terrorism. Terrorism is the use of force against civilians for political ends.”
In the face of such criticism, Ron Dermer, Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, felt the need to justify to reporters why the attacks were not disproportionate.
The discussions of proportionality did not change Israel’s approach, and public opinion polls in Israel showed overwhelming support for Operation Protective Edge. However, international public opinion polls place Israel’s approval rating above only North Korea, Pakistan and Iraq, and indicate declining support for Israel’s action among Americans under age 49.
In July 2014, Israel dropped leaflets into Shujaiya, a densely populated residential neighborhood in Gaza City, warning that the IDF would be attacking soon and residents should evacuate. 11 artillery battalions—at least 258 artillery pieces—rained down over 7,000 explosive shells (nearly 5,000 were within seven hours), alongside a ground assault supported by armored cavalry, helicopters firing rockets, and F-16s firing bombs.
“The only possible reason for doing that is to kill a lot of people in as short of a period of time as possible,” said one senior U.S. military officer quoted by Al Jazeera America. “It’s not mowing the lawn. It’s removing the topsoil.”
On July 20, nearly one hundred people were killed in Israel’s attack. Eran Efrati, a former Israeli soldier, was arrested days later after sharing details gleaned from interviews with soldiers there who claimed the military was deliberately targeting civilians as “punishment” and “retribution” of the deaths of fellow Israeli soldiers.
The IDF took to Twitter that day. In one thread, it insisted the assault was necessary because Shuja’iya was a “neighborhood for civilians, fortress for Hamas terrorists.” Earlier, the IDF had tweeted “Days ago, we warned civilians in Shuja’iya to evacuate. Hamas ordered them to stay. Hamas put them in the line of fire.”
The phrase “mowing the lawn” has long been used as shorthand for Israel’s strategy towards Gaza: bursts of horrifying violence—collective punishment of Palestinians for Hamas operations—followed by periods of “calm” where survivors are left to clear the rubble and bury dead civilians, rebuilding increasingly less of their ailing infrastructure while Israel commits to deepening its occupation, expanding its settlements, and bolstering its apartheid regime.
This is not one man’s or one Israeli government’s genocide. Most Israeli Jews want Palestinians gone. Troubling, also, is these Americans supporting Israel with any sort of financial and military and non-military aid are complicit.
Just a month ago the world’s largest association of academic scholars studying genocide passed a resolution saying Israel’s “policies and actions” in Gaza “meet the legal definition of genocide,” established by the U.N. in 1948.
The International Association of Genocide Scholars states that Israel’s “policies and actions” in Gaza amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Aiding and abetting war crimes is a crime. The crime of genocide.
This American society is broken, and has been way before Ronald Reagan, for sure, but like exponential growth of a bacteria left to grow, each year there are more deaths by 1,000 cuts to social, health, education, economic, spiritual social safety nets.
Throwing money at the MIC – Military Industrial Complex – for seventy years, and throwing money at Israel for 77 years has done its work by lining the pockets of CEOs, bankers, billionaires in finance, and now the techno fascists. Names like Ellison, Altman, Ackman, Karp, Zuckerberg, Adelson, Brin may not be on readers’ tongues, but beware of these new titans of pain.
Former CIA analyst and now activist, Ray McGovern calls that military machine the MICIMATT: Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence- Media-Academia-Think-Tank Complex.
In reality, a society that has outrageously costly and failing medical care for all, let alone seniors, is a society that has been bought and sold down the river. For profit medicine? For profit electricity? Telecommunications? Hell, we can’t even run our own county’s school busses anymore without paying a for-profit outfit to transport our kiddos – Student First, owned by EQT Infrastructure, a Swedish private equity firm.
If you were to take one of my critical thinking writing courses from a few years ago, you’d be flummoxed with these sorts of stories. You’d be exposed to censored stories and memory-holed history. You would have learned about amazing facts that have been held back from the average American citizen.”
*****
Were these the offending words in a commentary I wrote?
“….I remember telling my daughter, who never got to meet my old man, her grandfather, that I was diametrically opposed to his 32 years in the US military. I told her that I even ended up in Vietnam two years before she was born to work with a science team from England.
I visited all parts of Viet Nam, after doing intensive biodiversity studies along the Laotian border.
She has some of my large prints of kiddos on motorcycles piled high with live chickens. She has a photo I took of a female Buddhist monk near where a more famous monk self-immolated in protest of the US and French backed repressive South Vietnamese president.
That is Ho Chi Minh City, called Saigon back then.
It was just before 10 in the morning on June 11, 1963, when 300 monks and nuns marched down a busy Saigon street. This 73-year-old monk named Thich Quang Duc emerged from a car at this crowded intersection and sat down in the lotus position on a cushion. Two fellow monks poured gasoline from a five-gallon can. As the fuel was emptied over his head, Duc chanted, “Nam mo amita Buddha,”
— “return to eternal Buddha.”
Sixty years later a similar event was repeated here in the USA, although in this intentionally amnesiac and superficial society, it seems like a distant memory. But my friend from Wisconsin talks of this hero much.
That distant memory occurred just over a year ago—February 25, 2024. Remember? Twenty-five-old Air Force serviceman Aaron Bushnell died after setting himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington in an act of protest against the Gaza genocide.
Less than two years ago, and I have students who are afraid of calling “it” a genocide. I have fellow faculty in many parts of the country who are not just chastised for supporting innocent Palestinians but are fired.
Is this newspaper going to get the “hammer” or “ax” for republishing Aaron’s words before he set himself on fire?
“I am an active-duty member of the United States Air Force. And I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers—it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”
The last words of his life were ‘Free Palestine.’”
*****
I’m in good company with Chris Hedges, who I don’t always agree with, but sometimes it’s just words, man, discussion. In October 2025 (future date in search results, likely recent/current event), Hedges’s scheduled address to the National Press Club of Australia was canceled. The speech, titled “The Betrayal of Palestinian Journalists,” was intended to discuss the high number of journalists killed by Israel in Gaza and the media’s pro-Israel bias. The cancellation drew significant criticism, with Hedges and others alleging it was due to pressure from the club’s sponsors, some of whom are embedded in the Israeli war machine. Hedges later delivered the full, uncensored speech online.
Text of the Rockford College graduation speech by Chris Hedges, author of the book, War Is a Force That Gives us Meaning)
First published on Wednesday, May 21, 2003 by Rockford Register Star (Illinois).
I want to speak to you today about war and empire. Killing, or at least the worst of it, is over in Iraq. Although blood will continue to spill—theirs and ours—be prepared for this. For we are embarking on an occupation that, if history is any guide, will be as damaging to our souls as it will be to our prestige, power, and security. But this will come later as our empire expands and in all this we become pariahs, tyrants to others weaker than ourselves.
Malcolm, Martin and Mahatma united in global protest, February 15, 2003 —photo Tanbou
Isolation always impairs judgment and we are very isolated now. We have forfeited the good will, the empathy the world felt for us after 9-11. We have folded in on ourselves, we have severely weakened the delicate international coalitions and alliances that are vital in maintaining and promoting peace and we are part now of a dubious troika in the war against terror with Vladimir Putin and Ariel Sharon, two leaders who do not shrink in Palestine or Chechnya from carrying out acts of gratuitous and senseless acts of violence. We have become the company we keep. The censure and perhaps the rage of much of the world, certainly one-fifth of the world’s population which is Muslim, most of whom I’ll remind you are not Arab, is upon us. Look today at the 14 people killed last night in several explosions in Casablanca. And this rage in a world where almost 50% of the planet struggles on less than two dollars a day will see us targeted. Terrorism will become a way of life, and when we are attacked we will, like our allies Putin and Sharon, lash out with greater fury. The circle of violence is a death spiral; no one escapes. We are spinning at a speed that we may not be able to hold. As we revel in our military prowess—the sophistication of our military hardware and technology, for this is what most of the press coverage consisted of in Iraq—we lose sight of the fact that just because we have the capacity to wage war it does not give us the right to wage war. This capacity has doomed empires in the past. “Modern western civilization may perish,” the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr warned, “because it falsely worshiped technology as a final good.” The real injustices, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, the brutal and corrupt dictatorships we fund in the Middle East, will mean that we will not rid the extremists who hate us with bombs.
Indeed we will swell their ranks. Once you master people by force you depend on force for control. In your isolation you begin to make mistakes. Fear engenders cruelty; cruelty, fear, insanity, and then paralysis. In the center of Dante’s circle the damned remained motionless. We have blundered into a nation we know little about and are caught between bitter rivalries and competing ethnic groups and leaders we do not understand. We are trying to transplant a modern system of politics invented in Europe characterized, among other things, by the division of earth into independent secular states based on national citizenship in a land where the belief in a secular civil government is an alien creed. Iraq was a cesspool for the British when they occupied it in 1917; it will be a cesspool for us as well. The curfews, the armed clashes with angry crowds that leave scores of Iraqi dead, the military governor, the Christian Evangelical groups who are being allowed to follow on the heels of our occupying troops to try and teach Muslims about Jesus. (Hedges stops speaking because of a disturbance in the audience. Rockford College President Paul Pribbe now takes the microphone: “My friends, one of the wonders of a liberal arts college is its ability and its deeply held commitment to academic freedom and the decision to listen to each other’s opinions.” [Crowd Cheers]
If you wish to protest the speaker’s remarks, I ask that you do it in silence, as some of you are doing in the back. That is perfectly appropriate but he has the right to offer his opinion here and we would like him to continue his remarks. [fog horn blow, some cheer].
The occupation of the oil fields, the notion of the Kurds and the Shiites will listen to the demands of a centralized government in Baghdad, the same Kurds and Shiites who died by the tens of thousands in defiance of Sadaam Hussein, a man who happily butchered all of those who challenged him, and this ethnic rivalry has not gone away. The looting of Baghdad, or let me say the looting of Baghdad with the exception of the oil ministry and the interior ministry—the only two ministries we bothered protecting—is self immolation.
As someone who knows Iraq, speaks Arabic, and spent seven years in the Middle East, if the Iraqis believe rightly or wrongly that we come only for oil and occupation, that will begin a long bloody war of attrition; it is how they drove the British out and remember that, when the Israelis invaded southern Lebanon in 1982, they were greeted by the dispossessed Shiites as liberators. But within a few months, when the Shiites saw that the Israelis had come not as liberators but occupiers, they began to kill them. It was Israel who created Hezbollah and was Hezbollah that pushed Israel out of Southern Lebanon. As William Butler Yeats wrote in “Meditations in Times Of Civil War,” “We had fed the heart on fantasies / the hearts grown brutal from the fair.” This is a war of liberation in Iraq, but it is a war now of liberation by Iraqis from American occupation. And if you watch closely what is happening in Iraq, if you can see it through the abysmal coverage, you can see it in the lashing out of the terrorist death squads, the murder of Shiite leaders in mosques, and the assassination of our young soldiers in the streets. It is one that will soon be joined by Islamic radicals and we are far less secure today than we were before we bumbled into Iraq. We will pay for this, but what saddens me most is that those who will by and large pay the highest price are poor kids from Mississippi or Alabama or Texas who could not get a decent job or health insurance and joined the army because it was all we offered them. For war in the end is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of soldiers by politicians, and of idealists by cynics. Read Antigone, when the king imposes his will without listening to those he rules or Thucydides’ history. Read how Athens’ expanding empire saw it become a tyrant abroad and then a tyrant at home. How the tyranny the Athenian leadership imposed on others it finally imposed on itself. This, Thucydides wrote, is what doomed Athenian democracy; Athens destroyed itself.
For the instrument of empire is war and war is a poison, a poison which at times we must ingest just as a cancer patient must ingest a poison to survive. But if we do not understand the poison of war—if we do not understand how deadly that poison is—it can kill us just as surely as the disease. We have lost touch with the essence of war. Following our defeat in Vietnam we became a better nation. We were humbled, even humiliated. We asked questions about ourselves we had not asked before. We were forced to see ourselves as others saw us and the sight was not always a pretty one. We were forced to confront our own capacity for a atrocity—for evil—and in this we understood not only war but more about ourselves. But that humility is gone. War, we have come to believe, is a spectator sport. The military and the press—remember in wartime the press is always part of the problem—have turned war into a vast video arcade came. Its very essence—death—is hidden from public view. There was no more candor in the Persian Gulf War or the War in Afghanistan or the War in Iraq than there was in Vietnam. But in the age of live feeds and satellite television, the state and the military have perfected the appearance of candor. Because we no longer understand war, we no longer understand that it can all go horribly wrong. We no longer understand that war begins by calling for the annihilation of others but ends if we do not know when to make or maintain peace with self-annihilation. We flirt, given the potency of modern weapons, with our own destruction. The seduction of war is insidious because so much of what we are told about it is true—it does create a feeling of comradeship which obliterates our alienation and makes us, for perhaps the only time of our life, feel we belong. War allows us to rise above our small stations in life; we find nobility in a cause and feelings of selflessness and even bliss. And at a time of soaring deficits and financial scandals and the very deterioration of our domestic fabric, war is a fine diversion. War for those who enter into combat has a dark beauty, filled with the monstrous and the grotesque. The Bible calls it the lust of the eye and warns believers against it. War gives us a distorted sense of self; it gives us meaning. [A man in the audience says: “Can I say a few words here?” Hedges: Yeah, when I finish.]
Once in war, the conflict obliterates the past and the future all is one heady intoxicating present. You feel every heartbeat in war, colors are brighter, your mind races ahead of itself. [Confusion, microphone problems, etc.]
We feel in wartime comradeship. [Boos] We confuse this with friendship, with love. There are those who will insist that the comradeship of war is love—the exotic glow that makes us in war feel as one people, one entity, is real, but this is part of war’s intoxication. Think back on the days after the attacks on 9-11. Suddenly we no longer felt alone; we connected with strangers, even with people we did not like. We felt we belonged, that we were somehow wrapped in the embrace of the nation, the community; in short, we no longer felt alienated. As this feeling dissipated in the weeks after the attack, there was a kind of nostalgia for its warm glow and wartime always brings with it this comradeship, which is the opposite of friendship. Friends are predetermined; friendship takes place between men and women who possess an intellectual and emotional affinity for each other. But comradeship—that ecstatic bliss that comes with belonging to the crowd in wartime—is within our reach. We can all have comrades.
The danger of the external threat that comes when we have an enemy does not create friendship; it creates comradeship. And those in wartime are deceived about what they are undergoing. And this is why once the threat is over, once war ends, comrades again become strangers to us. This is why after war we fall into despair. In friendship there is a deepening of our sense of self. We become, through the friend, more aware of who we are and what we are about; we find ourselves in the eyes of the friend. Friends probe and question and challenge each other to make each of us more complete; with comradeship, the kind that comes to us in patriotic fervor, there is a suppression of self-awareness, self-knowledge, and self-possession. Comrades lose their identities in wartime for the collective rush of a common cause—a common purpose. In comradeship there are no demands on the self. This is part of its appeal and one of the reasons we miss it and seek to recreate it. Comradeship allows us to escape the demands on the self that is part of friendship. In wartime when we feel threatened, we no longer face death alone but as a group, and this makes death easier to bear. We ennoble self-sacrifice for the other, for the comrade; in short we begin to worship death.
And this is what the god of war demands of us. Think finally of what it means to die for a friend. It is deliberate and painful; there is no ecstasy. For friends, dying is hard and bitter. The dialogue they have and cherish will perhaps never be recreated. Friends do not, the way comrades do, love death and sacrifice. To friends, the prospect of death is frightening. And this is why friendship or, let me say love, is the most potent enemy of war.
Thank you.
[Boos cheers, shouts, fog horns and the like]
*****
Did this worthless board scan-seek on the Internet “Paul Haeder and David Gomberg” in their AI search?
Oregon is in shambles from the spineless democrats and the fascist Trump, but this fucking doughboy David Gomberg goes to the 51st State, Israel, or in the words of a great scholar, the USA is the Jewish State of Murder and Starvation’s BITCH:
Finally, as a legislator required to file an annual Statement of Economic Interest (SEI), you will be required to report the aggregate value of any paid expenses provided under ORS 244.020(7)(b)(H) on your 2025 SEI. As the source of the paid travel expenses, the Consulate General of Israel should provide you with a notice or a summary of the expenses paid.
Before David Gomberg and the other state legislators left Israel, each state was encouraged to plant a tree. Gomberg said he responded to a reporter’s question about what the tree planting meant to him.
“People who plant trees think of the future,” Gomberg replied. “I plant it today and think of a time in the future when Arab and Jewish children can sit in the shade of this tree in peace and friendship.”
Fucking piece of shit:
email: vog.erutalsigelnogero@grebmoGdivaD.peR
phone: 503-986-1410
address: 900 Court St NE, H-480, Salem, OR, 97301
website: http://www.oregonlegislature.gov/gomberg
Rep. David Gomberg, D-Otis and Rep. Emily McIntire, R-Eagle Point joined a bipartisan delegation of 250 legislators from across the U.S. for the trip.
The visit comes as the Israeli military begins its ground invasion of Gaza City this past week, pushing troops into the war-torn city after nearly two years of raids and bombardment. It also coincides with Oregon’s junior U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley introducing legislation calling for the U.S. to formally recognize a Palestinian state, according to an Oregon Capital Chronicle report filed before the trip.
Source: Two Oregon lawmakers are among 250 state legislators across the U.S. visiting Israel this week on a trip sponsored by the Israeli government.
Israel hosted Rep. David Gomberg, D-Otis and Rep. Emily McIntire, R-Eagle Point, on a trip Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as the largest-ever bipartisan delegation of American lawmakers to visit. The Consulate General of Israel, calling the trip “50 States, One Israel,” is covering the lawmakers’ cost of air travel, lodging, ground transportation and meals between Sept. 13 and Sept. 18.
The visit comes as the Israeli military begins its ground invasion of Gaza City this week, pushing troops into the war-torn city after nearly two years of raids and bombardment. It also coincides with Oregon’s junior U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley introducing legislation Thursday calling for the U.S. to formally recognize a Palestinian state.
Gomberg, answering a phone call from the Oregon Capital Chronicle at 1 a.m. in Israel, said the week has been emotional, full of sleepless nights and that he’s still processing what he’s seen.
He said the group of lawmakers had the opportunity to ask Netanyahu and Israeli President Izaac Herzog questions and visit the music festival site where Hamas militants raided an Israeli community near the Gaza Strip, killing and kidnapping dozens in a surprise attack on Oct. 7, 2023.
At the same time, he said he heard bombs going off in Gaza a mile and a half away.
“I’m not here to support what’s going on,” he said. “I’m here to better understand what’s going on. I know Oregonians have strong opinions about this, so they deserve to have legislators who care about the facts and care about the people. Getting an opportunity to go to the places where this sad conflict began is very distressing.”
Gomberg, who is Jewish, said he understands if constituents and legislative colleagues are upset by his visit to Israel. Outside of the itinerary organized by the Israeli government, he said he and other lawmakers have met with local Israelis who believe the country is guilty of genocide in Gaza.
“Certainly the government of Israel has an agenda, but that doesn’t mean it’s my agenda or the agenda of all the legislators that are here,” he said. “I think it’s time for this conflict to end, and I’m trying to better understand why it’s continuing.”
Before the trip concludes Thursday, Gomberg said he and other lawmakers will meet with the U.S. Ambassador to Israel.
McIntire said in an email from Israel that traveling to the country has always been a dream for her, and the trip has only solidified her support for Israel.
“To see what the Israelites endure, bomb shelters in every home or village, on the streets, the bus stops, and in hotel basements, knowing their children grow up with the sound of war, like thunder in the background, sirens at all hours of the day and night — and for what?” she said.
The trip will forever change her perspective, she said.
“These people fight to defend their country, their families, their freedoms, as would we — and we did — when terrorists attacked our country 24 years ago. Israel wants and desires peace, but for them, there is no peace if Hamas exists,” McIntire said.
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