Christopher Claar is a 20-plus year activist for Palestinian rights , a steering member with Maine Voices for Palestinian Rights and organizer for Maine Coalition for Palestine.

It is sometime said that silence is deafening. At a time when Palestinians in Gaza are suffering a genocide that hasn’t stopped during a ceasefire that never started, silence when it comes to atrocities committed by Israel is ear-splitting.

While organizations like Maine Voices for Palestinian Rights have been speaking for decades, and in recent years the larger Maine Coalition for Palestine, those voices have not been loud enough to break the silences felt here in Maine.

One of the most notable silences is that of the Maine medical community concerning the year and a half that Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya has been held without trial, whose torture and mistreatment has him near death. Many other healthcare workers are undergoing the same and many more than that have already been murdered.

Many healthcare workers within the ranks of activism for human rights here in Maine have participated and organized demonstrations outside Maine’s major hospitals, including Portland just this last week and Lewiston in the freezing winter months. Lack of knowledge is not an excuse, and frankly, not even possible. Maine’s larger medical community, especially when tax dollars are spent to fund these atrocities, needs to speak up and stand in solidarity with their Palestinian colleagues.

Equally deafening is the silence of mainstream media in Maine and across the country when Israel has purposefully targeted and killed over 300 of their fellow journalists in Gaza. Again, ignorance cannot be feigned and while understanding may be lacking, knowledge in the form of facts is not, as similar demonstrations have been organized in honor of these fallen journalists by Maine’s activists for Palestinian human rights.

Perhaps the most deafening silence of all has been the absence of Palestine in Maine’s Democratic Party. For all his faults, and regardless of the validity of the accusations made against him, Graham Platner gained a significant bulk of his popularity due to his willingness to call a genocide a genocide (even before the UN/ICC/ICJ came to the same, obvious, conclusion).

Yet, there was little to nothing said or asked about Palestine in the debates to pick his replacement. Even the candidates’ stances and history range from taking AIPAC-linked money, to grave misunderstandings of the history of atrocities and propaganda leading up to and including Oct. 7, to supporting defensive armaments (imagine supporting defensive armaments to Nazi Germany), to not connecting justice for indigenous communities in Maine to the indigenous people of Palestine whose colonization and ethnic cleansing has been happening for over 100 years.

Whether in the boardrooms of hospitals and news outlets or the offices and desks of medical and journalistic staff, Maine’s professionals need to stand up and speak out against the atrocities being committed on their peers in Gaza.

Whether currently representing Maine’s people and interests or seeking to be elected to do so, Maine’s political representatives and candidates have both a moral and strategic obligation to hold the rights and justice of the Palestinian people, whose lives their votes at both the state and federal level directly affect, as one of the vital bullet points in their platforms and not merely a soundbite for their campaign to be forgotten once elected.

Strategy cannot, however, stand alone. Morality and strategy are a package deal here. Israel is Hitler’s Germany if Germany was founded on Nazism. For anyone who does not understand this, I suggest that you dip into resources that you haven’t used before to learn the history of both Zionism and Israel until you do.

If you find that you cannot come to that conclusion, talk to and spend time with people who are already there. If you find that no amount of soul searching or learning brings you to that understanding and you expect to win the vote of Mainers with an ounce of humanity and a decent education, expect to be disappointed. If you win and falter on Palestine, prepare for accountability.