Active Duty Military Calls on Congress to Stop Funding Genocide

By Marjorie Cohn / TruthOut / June 13, 2024

On June 4, a coalition of active duty military, veterans, and GI rights groups launched a campaign called Call for Reparations V2 to encourage military personnel to ask Congress to stop funding genocide in Gaza. Israel’s genocidal operation, now in its ninth month, has killed more than 37,000 Palestinians and injured nearly 85,000.

The campaign is sponsored by Veterans For Peace (VFP), the National Lawyers Guild Military Law Working Group, About Face: Veterans Against the War, and the Center on Conscience & War. It draws inspiration from the 2006 Appeal for Reparations launched during the occupation of Iraq. During this campaign, nearly 3,000 active duty, reserve and guard military personnel sent protected communications to their members of Congress demanding an end to the wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Call for Reparations V2 was formulated to help GIs tell their representatives directly that they oppose American support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

“We will not stand idly by while the genocide unfolds,” Senior Airman Juan Bettancourt, an active-duty member of the U.S. Air Force, said at a June 4 news conference announcing the campaign. “We refuse to be complicit” in this “indescribable carnage,” said Bettancourt, who is asking to separate from the U.S. military as a conscientious objector.

Kathleen Gilberd, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild’s Military Law Task Force and my co-author of Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent, told Truthout there has been an increase in the number requests for conscientious objection (CO). and other types of honorable discharges from the military. “Many in the military have serious objections to U.S. support for Israeli genocide against the Palestinians,” Gilberd said.

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