Jews shut down the New York Stock Exchange to protest Israel. Here’s why | Elena Stein

Time after time, Sha’ban al-Dalou, a 19-year-old software engineering student living in Gaza, nearly escaped death. He began studying at Gaza’s al-Azhar University two months before it was destroyed in November by a US-made bomb dropped by Israeli forces.

Sha’ban posted videos to social media, describing how his family – which he took care of, as the eldest of five – was displaced five times by the assaults and asking for financial support to flee to Egypt.

On 6 October, another US-supplied bomb blew up a mosque, killing 20 people and burying Sha’ban beneath rubble. Against all odds, he was dug out and saved, and went to seek treatment at the al-Aqsa hospital for his many injuries. There he built his family a tent to shelter together.

Then, on Monday morning, Israeli forces dropped another US-supplied bomb just outside the hospital, and 30 tents, including Sha’ban’s, were set ablaze. People held back his 16-year-old brother as he watched Sha’ban, still attached to an IV, and his mother, aged 38, burn alive. It was all caught on video.

Hours later, 500 Jews and friends shut down the New York Stock Exchange, the epicenter of global capital, demanding the US stop arming Israel and stop profiting from genocide. In horror and agony over the US-funded slaughter of Palestinians, and this most recent news of Sha’ban’s murder, we chanted “stop arming Israel, let Gaza live,” as cops arrested over 200 of us, dragging elders and descendants of Holocaust survivors out by our arms and legs.

Day after day over the past year we have witnessed the Israeli military commit heinous crimes, bombing hospitals and mosques, slaughtering more children than any other war in recent years and forbidding the entry of humanitarian aid. The commissioner for the UN Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa) has called it “a war on children”.

Although the world is crying out for the horrors to stop, Joe Biden and the US Congress continue to send weapons and money, totaling more than a staggering $18bn since last October.

Everyone has the same question: why is the US – and a Democratic administration at that, which is trying to win an election – still arming Israel when it’s carrying out what the international court of justice (ICJ) has deemed plausible genocide, while violating the US’s own laws?

The Biden administration wants you to believe that the reason they are funding the Israeli military is out of a commitment to Jewish safety. This is the moral cover they use, a cloak for their collaboration in heinous war crimes.

As Jews, we reject this myth with every fiber of our beings. Together, with tens of thousands of American Jews who have spent the last year protesting for an end to the slaughter, we refuse to let our histories, identities and traditions be used as the justification to massacre Palestinians.

The true interest of the US government? Control of the region and is its own financial gain.

Over the past year of Israel’s relentless bombing that has killed at least 46,000 Palestinians, including at least 16,500 children, with the true death toll probably much higher, the stock prices of leading US weapons manufacturers have been soaring.

Their bottom line is boosted by the fact that the only condition placed by the US government on its $18bn slush fund for the Israeli military, is not on how those bombs may be used, but instead on how they must be bought.

Israel is stipulated to purchase from US weapons manufacturers. In turn, two such leading corporations, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, have posted staggering record-breaking returns.

Meanwhile, at least 50 members of Congress or their spouses are owners of their stock. While they should be voting based on the will of their constituents, they have profits to gain from voting to send billions of dollars in military funding to Israel while it carries out a genocide.

The reason I am alive today is because the day that my entire family was massacred in their shtetl in Lithuania, in another genocide – the Holocaust – my grandmother just happened to be away.

I grew up aware that I am not supposed to be here. I also grew up agonizing over these questions. Where were the neighbors? Why did they just stand by? Why didn’t they hurl their bodies between the killers and my family?

As the NYPD dragged me by my arms and legs out of the New York Stock Exchange, I felt all of my Jewish ancestors at my back, the one who survived and all those who didn’t. We say now, with more conviction than ever before: we refuse to be neighbors who just stand by.

Sha’ban should have celebrated his 20th birthday today. In one of the most urgent tasks of our lifetimes – stopping our government from continuing to arm Israel – we all have a role to play.

• Elena Stein is director of organizing strategy for Jewish Voice for Peace, the largest anti-Zionist Jewish organization in the world and currently the fastest-growing Jewish organization in the country.