A U.S. Special Forces combat veteran spoke out during the public comment period of a recent Texas city council meeting, condemning Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza and United States support for the slaughter.
“My name is Alan Shebaro,” the 47-year-old 3rd Special Forces Group veteran—who fought during the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq—said during the February 20 meeting in McKinney, Texas, north of Dallas.
“I know war,” he continued. “What is going on in Palestine right now is not a war. It is the dehumanization, it’s the genocide, it’s the ethnic cleansing of a specific people to take their land. This is wrong, and there’s nothing more American than speaking out against what’s wrong.”
Shebaro served 15 years in the U.S. military. Today, he is a 5th-degree jiu-jitsu black belt who owns the Combat Base Texas-Shabaro Jiu-Jitsu academy, which is also the headquarters of the We Defy Foundation, a group co-founded by Shebaro that’s dedicated to preventing veteran suicides. An average of 16 U.S. veterans kill themselves daily.
On Sunday, Aaron Bushnell, an active-duty U.S. airman, fatally self-immolated outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., declaring, “I will no longer be complicit in genocide.” His last words were, “Free Palestine!”
Shebaro and Bushnell decried U.S. complicity in the Gaza genocide. The U.S. provides Israel with nearly $4 billion in annual military aid and diplomatic support including three vetoes of United Nations Security Council cease-fire resolutions. The Biden administration—which has repeatedly sidestepped Congress to expedite emergency armed aid to Israel—is also seeking an additional $14.3 billion in military aid for its key Mideast ally.
Israel relies heavily upon U.S. weapons to wage a war in which Israeli forces have killed or maimed at least 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza while forcibly displacing around 90% of the besieged strip’s 2.3 million people since the October 7 attacks by Hamas-led militants. Most of the dead are women and children. Thousands more people are missing and presumed buried beneath rubble. Diseases and deadly starvation have taken hold, with children and elders the most severely affected.
“The U.S. taxpayer is paying for this, which makes it even more frustrating,” Shebaro told the McKinney council. “This needs to stop.”
