Senator Tester,

We are Montanans in Solidarity with Palestine, a group representing the undersigned constituents across the state. We marched by your office on Saturday 10/21 but could not reach you. We came again on Saturday 10/28 and again, we could not reach you. Many of us have called you multiple times asking for a meeting and have yet to receive a reply.

We write because we are facing an unprecedented climate catastrophe and war is the biggest polluter. We are facing an unprecedented housing crisis and yet money is going to bombs, not housing. We are facing an unprecedented threat to democracy but we fear you and the rest of our political leadership is more focused on protecting an increasingly authoritarian and anti-democratic state in the Middle East. We, your constituents, want money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation

Amid the risk of the outbreak of yet another costly and immoral regional war in the Middle East, the US government needs to take immediate steps to deescalate the situation. This petition demands the following:

Work for and publicly endorse an immediate and unconditional ceasefire in Gaza.
Work for the provision of unfettered humanitarian aid to Gaza including food, water, fuel, medicine, and the restoration of electricity.
Vote No on Biden’s proposed emergency military aid to Israel. According to former State Department staffer Josh Paul, Israeli military units receiving the aid are not being vetted. This contravenes the Leahy Laws, which prohibit funding military units that have committed or may commit human rights abuses.

After the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7 that left 1,400 people dead, Israel intensified its illegal 16-year land, air, and sea blockade of Gaza by cutting off over 2 million Palestinian civilians - a population cruelly characterized as “human animals” by the Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant - from critical supplies of food, water, fuel, and electricity. This is a crime against humanity as defined by the Geneva Conventions. The paltry recent aid that entered falls shamefully short of what is needed; without fuel hospitals and water treatment plants cannot operate. Israel’s relentless bombing of Gaza has killed 30,000 people, a huge number of whom are young children and women, while it intentionally deprives civilians of what they need to live. For this, and other reasons, Israeli Holocaust historian Raz Segal and other experts have called the two-week slaughter in Gaza “a textbook case of genocide.” As you are a proponent of common ground solutions, we also urge you to view the results of the recent Data for Progress poll taken during President Biden’s speech: 80% of Democrats support a ceasefire now, not to mention a majority of Republicans. Only 12% of those polled “strongly disagree” with a ceasefire. Stand with the majority, sponsor a Senate ceasefire resolution, and end the genocide of Palestinians.

Signed,