Robert Azzi is a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter. His columns are archived at robertazzitheother.substack.com.

I love the American Civil Liberties Union and as a board member my work has been fulfilling and challenging; fulfilling because our interests align, challenging because I want more. Today, I want more.

I have witnessed ACLU-NH doing transformative work, from filing federal lawsuits challenging unconstitutional voting laws to opposing classroom and viewpoint censorship laws; from supporting transgender students to opposing (and defeating) anti-BDS bills, its dedication and work, as is the case for affiliates across the country, is inspiring.

(Disclosure: ACLU-NH, in a case personal to me, filed an amicus brief with the NH Supreme Court arguing for dismissal of a case charging the Union Leader and me with defamation. We won: The NH Supreme Court affirmed protected political opinion!)

I want more.

Therefore, being witness to the best of America, I was surprised and disappointed by an action the ACLU’s National Board recently took. It not only rejected a petition presented by members of the Palestine Solidarity Working Group and signed by over 680 ACLU staffers (about 1/3 of its employees) but it also rejected both a follow-up petitioners’ request to hold a “town hall” on the issue (saying it was too busy with “election-related work”) and a request for a post-election town hall.

The petition demanded the organization take a public stance against America’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza and Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories of Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and read in part:

“It is long past time for the ACLU to condemn U.S. complicity in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, oppose legislation supplying the Israeli government with more U.S. weapons, and disclose and divest from companies profiting from the Israeli government’s human rights violations ... If the ACLU fails to act during this pivotal moment, our organization risks damaging its credibility and undermining the very principles it advocates for.”

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The petition opposed further American military aid to Israel, military aid today threatening loved ones, family, and friends of mine in Palestine and Lebanon, many who have for generations resisted occupation and oppressive and illegal authority, was an important and courageous act.

Today, I write not as an ACLU board member but as a fully empowered American affirming solidarity with the petitioner’s actions and beliefs.

To my mind, their petition was calling for a re-affirmation of a fundamental American understanding that all people are created equal as well as an affirmation of the principle, as President of South Africa Nelson Mandela once said, that “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

The call to action was not without precedent.

For example, the ACLU opposed the Vietnam War and even issued a resolution calling for an immediate end to the war and “the immediate withdrawal of all United States troops from Southeast Asia.”

Further, the ACLU opposed apartheid in South Africa, and it called for total divestment from companies who did business in or with South Africa: “Because of its commitment to civil rights, human rights and civil liberties, and its respect for international law, the ACLU believes that government should not engage in any action that reinforces and intensifies the apartheid system and denies the most elementary rights to South Africa’s black majority.”

Today, just as protesters at Sharpeville, Tiananmen Square, Selma, Stonewall, Ferguson — and today at campuses across America including Harvard, Columbia, UNH, and UC Berkeley — receive our support I believe that the Palestinian people deserve no less, remembering as Bishop Tutu wrote in 2014, “I know first-hand that Israel has created an apartheid reality within its borders and through its occupation. The parallels to my own beloved South Africa are painfully stark indeed.”

While I recognize, and support, that the ACLU is committed to fighting, domestically, across many platforms, to protect the free speech rights of those protesting the genocide and ethnic cleansing taking place in Palestine; protecting the rights of protesters, writers, artists, students, faculty, journalists, politicians across America, I disagree with ACLU-National’s argument that “a position on the war is not needed to carry out this essential domestic work.”

To my mind, the war is the reason that the ACLU is being called upon to carry out so much “essential domestic work,” a war of genocide and ethnic cleansing abetted by American support and paid for by tax dollars of Americans who are, at this moment, being hounded and prosecuted for exercising their First Amendment rights.

The ACLU is doing its “essential domestic work” very well, but it’s not enough. I want more.

Today, they should listen to Mr. Aryeh Neier, who was once national director of the ACLU. Mr. Neier, born into a Jewish family in Berlin, Germany, became a refugee at age two when his family fled the Nazis in 1939 and came to America.

Today, Mr. Neier is an American human rights icon and activist who co-founded Human Rights Watch, who was involved with the creation of the group SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, and served as the president of George Soros’s Open Society Institute as well as national director of the ACLU from 1970 to 1978.

In June of this year, being deeply concerned about the genocidal war being waged against the Palestinian people, I, an Arab-American-Muslim, was deeply moved by a contribution by Mr. Neier to The New York Review in which he wrote:

“I am now persuaded that Israel is engaged in genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. What has changed my mind is its sustained policy of obstructing the movement of humanitarian assistance into the territory.”

We all know what that means.

Over the years, from defending James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” to protecting the rights of Jehovah’s Witness’ during WWII, to defending the free speech of Nazis who wanted to march through Skokie, IL, the ACLU has stood for and protected the rights of all Americans, including the vulnerable, marginalized, and delegitimatized. We are capable of more.

Over the decades the ACLU has risked much, offended many, to successfully defend and advance civil liberties without favor or prejudice, and it has done much to make possible the empowerment of all peoples, including both petitioners like the PSWG and people like me.

With such a legacy, with such commitment and authority, I wonder if, today, we can begin to have conversations about the intersectionality of privilege and power, about colonialism, genocide, and apartheid, about how much borders matter in an increasingly interconnected, interdependent world.

Today, listen to Rev. Munther Isaac, academic dean of Bethlehem Bible College in Palestine, who has preached: “If you fail to call this a genocide. It is on you... Your charity, your words of shock after the genocide won’t make a difference ... We will not accept your apology after the genocide. What has been done, has been done. I want you to look at the mirror… and ask: where was I when Gaza was going through a genocide?”

Tomorrow, I hope, there will not be a day when we will be compelled to ask where was ACLU national leadership when Gaza was going through a genocide. Today, demand more, so that tomorrow even Palestine is possible.