Open Letter to the Portland Trail Blazers from Veterans and First Responders

We write to you as veterans, first responders, and, most importantly, as members of the community strongly urging you to immediately cease your partnership with Leupold & Stevens. We love this town and its teams, and so our call to end this partnership is not based on animosity towards Blazers. We are members of the community who have served in the armed forces or in our community as first responders, who hold a moral commitment to opposing systematic oppression, racism, and apartheid. Tragically, the Israel Defense Forces maintain these monstrous systems while using equipment manufactured by Leupold & Stevens. Because the Blazers have partnered with Leupold & Stevens, we must come forward as members of the community whom the Blazers has committed to honoring for our service, to condemn this partnership on moral grounds.

Leupold & Stevens has chosen to do business with the Israel Defense Forces, the military force of a country that regularly brutalizes and massacres Palestinians in order to maintain its regime of settler colonialism and apartheid. Nearly a decade ago, Operation Cast Lead resulted in the slaughter of over 1,000 Palestinians in Gaza. Most recently, IDF soldiers have used Leupold & Stevens optical equipment to massacre at least 150 unarmed Palestinians and wound over 10,000 more during the Great March of Return. Casualties of Israel’s Palestinian policy include children, medical personnel, and journalists.

Those of us who have served, either in combat zones or as civilian first responders, are all too familiar with these types of horrific casualties. We have held victims of gunfire as they died, and now we watch as a local company and Portland Trail Blazers partner is complicit in the massacre of civilians. While we are not your enemies, we do hold you accountable for partnering with a company that is complicit in genocide. If you truly want to honor our service, truly hear what we are saying; rather than use us simply as public relations material, listen to us. If you are genuine in your desire to honor us, please end this partnership.

We recognize that it is easy to lump the veterans and first responder community into a fairly simple identity group that seems to fit with a particular sort of politics that would be unlikely to take the position we are staking out here. But it’s important to remember that our lived experiences serving our communities have given rise to a richer understanding of how seemingly far-flung business relationships can have important consequences abroad. Recognize that we are taking a moral stand for Palestinians, and that we recognize Palestinians as members of our community and will sacrifice in the service of their freedom, too. We want the Blazers to be our partners in this.

Sincerely,

The Veterans and First Responders of Portland DSA; and
Veterans For Peace, Chapter 72