Mitch Green, a member of the city council of Portland, Ore., said on Thursday that he and five fellow council members intend to announce their “landmark” pledge to launch a “municipal approach to challenging U.S. complicity in Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestine.”
The self-identified Socialist said that the local officials aim to push for a probe of the “manufacturing and transport of weapons to Israel within Portland’s city limits.”
He also said that they will encourage colleagues across the country to follow suit and create a “national groundswell of local action for an arms embargo and to end municipal support for what the pledge describes as ‘Israel’s illegal occupation, apartheid or genocidal violence against Palestinians.’”
Green made the announcement after U.S. President Donald Trump brokered a peace deal between the Jewish state and the Hamas terror organization. Hamas violated the terms of the deal almost immediately by withholding the overwhelming majority of the bodies of hostages, whom it murdered and whose bodies it was supposed to return.
The Portland city councilman connected what he and colleagues called Israeli war crimes with U.S. federal troops operating in Portland.
“Portland in this moment cannot be separated from the broader historical context of the militarization that we are embedded in,” he stated. “For my entire adult life, I have witnessed the federal government pour trillions of dollars into a machine that wages war on a global scale, and now that war has come home.”
Per Green’s office, the pledge calls for a ban on weapons and weapon parts manufactured in Portland for the Israeli military, city contracts with or investments in companies “complicit in Israeli policies” and diplomatic ties, including intercity ones, with Israel.
Earlier in the month, the White House stated that it was deploying troops to the city, because “for years, an antifa-led hellfire has turned Portland into a wasteland of firebombs, beatings and brazen attacks on federal officers and property.”
“It’s obvious that what’s happening in Portland isn’t mere protest,” the White House said. “It’s premeditated anarchy. The latest chapter of violence in Portland at the hands of antifa and the radical left.”
