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veterans for peace
‘We’re Being Lied To’: Veterans Protest Trump’s March to War With Iran
Veterans groups are urging members of Congress to invoke the War Powers Act to stop the president from launching an unauthorized attack on Iran.
Jun 19, 2025
As the Trump administration threatens imminent war with Iran, veterans of other destructive American wars are sounding the alarm.
As protests broke out across American cities on Wednesday, veterans in cities such as Portland, Oregon and San Antonio, Texas have joined a growing chorus of national anger about the prospect of another Middle Eastern war and called on Democratic leaders to act swiftly to invoke the War Powers Act.
The demonstrations have been organized by groups like About Face, which describes itself as "post-9/11 military members and veterans organizing to end a foreign policy of permanent war," and Veterans for Peace, "a global organization of military veterans" that seeks to "inform the public of the true causes of war and the enormous costs of wars."
On Wednesday evening, a group of protesters gathered outside the Portland office of Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).
One member of the group, who identified himself as Chris, described the parallels to the Iraq War over two decades ago.
"We saw 20 years ago, we were lied to about weapons of mass destruction with Iraq. And we're being lied to about weapons of mass destruction again with Iran," Chris told KATU-TV, an ABC affiliate.
He called on Congress to invoke the War Powers Act.
"Congress is the branch of government that's supposed to be declaring war, not the executive branch unilaterally," he said.
Following Israel's airstrikes against Iran last week, Wyden called for "diplomatic efforts to curb Iran's nuclear program," adding that Americans "do not want U.S. troops to be dragged into another war in the Middle East." However, he stopped short of co-signing Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) No War Against Iran Act, which would ban the use of federal funds to fight Iran without congressional authorization.
Oregon's other senator, Jeff Merkley, has called for Congress to invoke its war powers.
"It's long past time for Congress to reassert its constitutional role and prevent another disastrous conflict," Merkley said in a statement signing onto Sanders' bill.
About Face held another demonstration in San Antonio on Wednesday night alongside the Party for Socialism & Liberation, where the message was much the same.
"These criminal, genocidal lies killed over a million people, ruined countless lives, wrecked the legitimacy of the United States at home and abroad," the group's South Texas chapter wrote in an Instagram post comparing the current conflict to the war in Iraq.
In recent weeks, veterans' groups have been increasingly outspoken against the Trump administration. According to a June 3 poll from Data for Progress, 70 percent said they opposed his use of active-duty troops in this past weekend's military parade. More than 50 veterans were also arrested protesting the spectacle in Washington, D.C.
That same survey also found that just 10% of veterans believed the U.S. should send more troops to the Middle East, compared with 47% who said there should be fewer.
The demonstrations have been organized by groups like About Face, which describes itself as "post-9/11 military members and veterans organizing to end a foreign policy of permanent war," and Veterans for Peace, "a global organization of military veterans" that seeks to "inform the public of the true causes of war and the enormous costs of wars."
On Wednesday evening, a group of protesters gathered outside the Portland office of Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).
One member of the group, who identified himself as Chris, described the parallels to the Iraq War over two decades ago.
"We saw 20 years ago, we were lied to about weapons of mass destruction with Iraq. And we're being lied to about weapons of mass destruction again with Iran," Chris told KATU-TV, an ABC affiliate.
He called on Congress to invoke the War Powers Act.
"Congress is the branch of government that's supposed to be declaring war, not the executive branch unilaterally," he said.
Following Israel's airstrikes against Iran last week, Wyden called for "diplomatic efforts to curb Iran's nuclear program," adding that Americans "do not want U.S. troops to be dragged into another war in the Middle East." However, he stopped short of co-signing Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) No War Against Iran Act, which would ban the use of federal funds to fight Iran without congressional authorization.
Oregon's other senator, Jeff Merkley, has called for Congress to invoke its war powers.
"It's long past time for Congress to reassert its constitutional role and prevent another disastrous conflict," Merkley said in a statement signing onto Sanders' bill.
About Face held another demonstration in San Antonio on Wednesday night alongside the Party for Socialism & Liberation, where the message was much the same.
"These criminal, genocidal lies killed over a million people, ruined countless lives, wrecked the legitimacy of the United States at home and abroad," the group's South Texas chapter wrote in an Instagram post comparing the current conflict to the war in Iraq.
In recent weeks, veterans' groups have been increasingly outspoken against the Trump administration. According to a June 3 poll from Data for Progress, 70 percent said they opposed his use of active-duty troops in this past weekend's military parade. More than 50 veterans were also arrested protesting the spectacle in Washington, D.C.
That same survey also found that just 10% of veterans believed the U.S. should send more troops to the Middle East, compared with 47% who said there should be fewer.
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Can We Stage a Jailbreak From the Grim Prisons Created by the Gaza War?
Life becomes limited when we accept that it must be a nightmare for the weak, when we confess that we are more addicted to comfort than we are to compassion.
Jun 04, 2025
Here at the United Nations in New York City, the Security Council is expected to vote on a resolution calling on all parties to respect an immediate and permanent cease-fire in Gaza.
The slaughter in Gaza entraps and attacks the helpless, turning shelters into mass graves, erasing entire families, weaponizing nutrition and famine. The spiraling violence shrieks for our attention, screams for effective protection. Who will save innocent people from snipers, aerial attacks, tank-fired missiles, poisoned water, and starvation? The U.S. and many allies instead work to insulate Israel from accountability.
“Overcoming this cocoon of protection,” said international human rights lawyer and former U.N. official Craig Mokhiber, “requires solidarity between movements, unions, religious communities, and like-minded states working to isolate the Israeli regime and to impose economic, trade, travel, diplomatic, cultural, and other consequences to compel change.”
Meanwhile, all of Gaza remains an open-air prison containing numerous centers where people, including children, are tortured by Israel’s starvation, siege, and bombing.
In NYC, on day 14 of a Veterans For Peace and Allies Fast for Gaza, a former U.S. Marine who helped initiate the fast, Phil Tottenham, urges us to care about Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian woman whose witness on behalf of Palestinians apparently led to her unjust imprisonment.
The current administration has slated her for deportation purely on the grounds that she criticized the government of a foreign country. Far from her home in New Jersey, she is trapped in a Texan county jail. Her plight makes me think of another prisoner, Ron Feiner, an IDF soldier who chose to face prison rather than continue attacking people in Gaza. “I’m horrified by the never-ending war in Gaza,” said Feiner, “by the abandonment of the hostages, by the continued killing of innocent people, and by the complete lack of political vision.” He is now on day nine of what could be a quite dangerous 20-day sentence in an Israeli military prison.
The director of Gaza’s now-demolished Kamal Adwan Hospital, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, is suffering a longer and much more perious sentence at Israel’s grim Ofer Prison, where his work to heal the sick has seen him designated an “enemy combatant,” and where multiple protracted beating sessions—torture sessions really—have possibly cost him an eye
I think of pediatrician Dr. Alla al-Najjar, whose valuable work at the Nasser medical complex has cost her the lives of all but one of her 10 children, as well as her husband, also an M.D. They were taken from her in a targeted strike on her home while she was at the hospital complex attempting to save other Gazan children. Now she continues her work, trying mightily to save 11-year-old Adam, her only surviving child.
We must also note the appalling conditions of ordinary Palestinian prisoners, many of them held without charge. “They are subjected to a systematic campaign of abuse, starvation, and deliberate medical neglect,” said a recent Addameer report, which goes on to describe “widespread arrest campaigns across cities, villages, and refugee camps, which have led to a massive increase in the number of prisoners and detainees.” Prisoners survive on minimal rations, and many endure brutal and life-threatening treatment.
Meanwhile, all of Gaza remains an open-air prison containing numerous centers where people, including children, are tortured by Israel’s starvation, siege, and bombing.
None of this has been inflicted for the purposes of freeing the remaining hostages captured by Hamas and by the other armed groups who flooded into Israel on one day of rebellion, 20 months ago. The cease-fire agreed upon last November would, had Israel and the U.S. honored it, have provided for the release of all the hostages. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist collaborators would have lost their excuse for ethnically cleansing Gaza, and after that the West Bank.
In 1972, an iconic photo of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, “running naked, screaming in agony, her body burned by napalm dropped by the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese army,” became a catalyst which helped end the war in Vietnam. Now, 50 years later, images of burning children in Gaza are relentless.
Recently, a video of 7-year-old Ward al-Sheikh Khalil, her tiny body surrounded by flames, went viral. She and her family were sleeping in a school where forcibly displaced Palestinians had moved into classrooms and the courtyard. She survived Israel’s aerial attack, but her mother and five siblings did not. Her father remains in critical condition.
Life becomes limited when we accept that it must be a nightmare for the weak, when we confess that we are more addicted to comfort than we are to compassion—when the service of our appetites causes us to ignore the starving and those deliberately consigned to flames. We who fast might not succeed in our attempted “jailbreak” from this grim prison where we must watch the inmates die off one by one in the next ward over. But in whatever way you can, we urge you to join the attempt.
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Finding Hope for the Future in a Gaza Mother and Doctor
This is peace—this is love—standing in the aftermath of war, refusing to give up.
May 30, 2025
The slaughter goes on, usually in the name of war, which reduces human life to, at best, a strategic abstraction. Dead civilians—dead children—are collateral damage, which means they’re nothing at all.
How can we be more than just spectators as we learn, every day, more stunning details about the hell going on across the planet? How can the human race stand up collectively to the cancer of war? Humanity, in the name of nationalism, has essentially organized itself against itself: We’ve declared one another “the enemy,” which means that only some of us are human. The others are simply in the way.
And nowhere, as we all know, is the news more hellish and shocking than the stories that emerge daily from Gaza, which continues to undergo, in full view on social media... genocide. It looks like this, according to CNN:
Dr. Alaa al-Najjar left her ten children at home on Friday when she went to work in the emergency room at the Nasser Medical Complex in southern Gaza.
Hours later, the bodies of seven children—most of them badly burned—arrived at the hospital, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza. They were Dr. Najjar’s own children, killed in an Israeli airstrike on her family’s home... The bodies of two more of her children—a 7-month-old and a 12-year-old who authorities presume to be dead—remain missing.
Only one of her ten children, 11-year-old Adam, survived. Dr. Najjar’s husband Hamdi, himself a doctor, was also badly injured in the strike.
This is the context in which another piece of news emerges, an opposite event, a beam of light which, oh God, I pray represents the dawn of humanity’s future: Veterans For Peace, along with 28 co-sponsoring organizations, has launched a 40-day fast calling for an end to Israel’s genocidal war on, and starvation of, Gaza. Some of the participants gather daily in front of the United Nations headquarters in New York, aligning themselves—in all their vulnerable humanity—with the organization’s founding purpose.
A letter the fasters wrote to U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres concludes: “Uppermost in our minds with this request to meet with you at your earliest convenience is the U.N. founding goal to save ‘succeeding generations from the scourge of war.’”
I quote these words not with a sense of “yeah, yeah” abstraction but rather because the writers are people like you and me, stepping out of their daily lives and into a determination to be part of, and help create, a world beyond war—beginning with an Israeli cease-fire and the salvation of Palestine, but hardly stopping there.
To put it another way: The words attempt to link individuals with a global institution. What I hear in these words is the call for a collective, planetary effort to transcend war. This effort must include every single human on this planet, including you and me, and demands our participation and sacrifice, not simply our shrug of hope. I hear a call for the United Nations to reinvent itself as United Humanity. And thus the future emerges.
One of the participants in the fast is my old friend Kathy Kelly. I talked to her on day six of the fast. Participants are limiting themselves to consuming 250 calories a day, she noted, which is about the amount Palestinians have available to them. Several hundred people are participating in the fast in New York, with more people, around 600 in total, throughout and beyond the United States. If you’re interested in joining the effort, visit the websites of either Veterans for Peace or Friends of Sabeel North America.
The fast is very much a public event, Kathy told me. On Memorial Day, for instance, a few days into the fast, they ceremonially honored not just veterans but some of the victims of the current genocide, bringing the al-Najjar family into public grief by reading the names of the children who were killed.
Kathy gave me a list of their names and ages. I feel like they belong here: Yahya: 12 years old; Rakan: 10 years old;; Eve: 9 years old; Jubran: 8 years old; Ruslan: 7 years old; Reval: 5 years old; Sadin: 3 years old; Luqman: 2 years old; Sidra: 6 months old. Adam, age 11, the sole surviving child, was critically injured.
Yeah, this is war. Its details matter. And as an American, I am complicit in the hell this country’s militarism has wreaked throughout my lifetime: the collateral damage, the environmental damage, it has bequeathed Planet Earth, followed by nothing more than an indifferent, strategic shrug.
So I feel compelled to return for a moment to Alaa al-Najjar, the doctor and mom who recently lost 9 of her 10 children, with her husband and last surviving child seriously injured. Her niece told CNN that
Dr. Alaa broke down when she showed the last bottle of breast milk she had expressed for her infant daughter, Sidra, whose body remains missing.
She told me today that her chest aches so much as she was breastfeeding, every day at work, Dr. Alaa pumped milk to provide for Sidra, and today she showed me the last bottle she prepared for her.
Dr. Alaa can barely speak. If you could see her face, you would understand her pain. She is only praying for her son and husband to recover.
And also, this: According to a fellow doctor at the hospital, Alaa al-Najjar has “continued to work despite losing her children, while periodically checking on the condition of her husband and Adam.”
This is peace—this is love—standing in the aftermath of war, refusing to give up. I see hope for the future here. I see humanity’s role model.
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