Hickenlooper Won’t Be Honest On Israel’s Genocide - Here’s Our Response

This is a rebuttal to Senator Hickenlooper’s response to constituent letters calling for a halt to U.S. military aid to Israel. Unfortunately, his response was deeply disappointing, filled with platitudes and evasions rather than substance or accountability. Senator Hickenlooper, You claim that the United States “remains dedicated to ensuring the safety and security of all Israelis and Palestinians.” But this is a false equivalence. There is no parity here. The United States gives billions in unconditional military aid to Israel—a nuclear-armed apartheid state currently carrying out a genocide in Gaza—while Palestinians remain stateless, besieged, starved, bombed, and criminalized. Calling this “security assistance” is a euphemism designed to obscure the brutality we are funding. You also refer to supporting a two-state solution. This is wholly unacceptable while you continue to back Israel politically and materially as it expands illegal settlements, annexes Palestinian land, and murders civilians with U.S.-supplied weapons. You have done nothing to actually support the creation of a Palestinian state. In fact, your record shows complicity in its destruction. And even if we were to entertain the idea of a two-state framework, it is not the business of the United States to impose a model of governance on a people it does not represent. Palestinians have the right to self-determination—just like every other people. The form their state takes, or whether they seek a state at all, must be theirs to decide. U.S. interference—especially without consent—does not qualify as diplomacy. It’s colonial arrogance. Your response fails to address or even acknowledge the mass atrocities committed by the Israeli government, which has killed more than 58,000 Palestinians, including tens of thousands of children, used starvation as a weapon of war, targeted hospitals, and blocked life-saving aid. These are not allegations—they are well-documented and condemned by international human rights organizations, UN officials, and even former U.S. diplomats. You write that you will “keep our thoughts in mind,” but you offer no commitments, no policy shifts, no action. Meanwhile, we watch you vote repeatedly to send more weapons to a government carrying out mass murder. The time for polite deflection has long passed. We will not be complicit in genocide. We will not be pacified with empty language. Coloradans are watching your choices, along with the rest of America, and your silence and inaction make clear where you stand. If you are unwilling to use your office to uphold international law, defend human rights, or end the flow of U.S. arms to genocidal regimes, then you have forfeited your moral and political credibility.