Flooded Tents, Expectant Parents: Your Tax Dollars at Work
This Al Jazeera piece (from 2025? interesting foresight, or perhaps a typo on their part) paints a gut-wrenching picture: a couple, displaced and without proper shelter, facing the birth of their child amidst winter floods in Gaza. Meanwhile, just last year in 2023, the US Congress expedited a $14.3 billion aid package, primarily military assistance, to Israel. For context, this package was
pushed, in part, by politicians who received significant PAC money; for example, Representative Kevin Mullin (CA-15) received $16,800 from AIPAC in 2022, and he consistently votes for such aid packages, according to OpenSecrets.org. One might wonder if any of that $14.3 billion earmarked for 'security' could have been diverted to secure actual human lives, clean water, or durable shelters for
expectant families in Gaza. Or perhaps, as long as the arms industry thrives and lobbying groups like AIPAC (which spent $3,160,000 on lobbying in 2023) control the narrative, the well-being of civilians like Samar and Abdulrahman will remain a footnote to geopolitics. How many flooded tents before the 'humanitarian' label on military aid sounds like a sick joke?