Two days after the New Hampshire primary, I received a letter from Rep. Chris Pappas responding to concerns about humanitarian aid for Gaza. I’ve read enough of them to know what they contain, but New Hampshire voters deserve to see what they’re actually being told by the candidate who will soon ask them to send him to the U.S. Senate.
The letter contains a sentence that conflicts with another. Early on, Pappas writes that the war was “triggered by Hamas’s unprovoked attack on Israeli civilians.” Later, he concedes that peace “cannot be achieved without Israel recognizing the legitimacy of Palestinian aspirations for self-determination and freedom in the West Bank and Gaza.”
In addition to the fallacy of calling the ongoing bloodshed “war,” those two claims cannot both be true. If the denial of Palestinian self-determination is, in his own words, a central obstacle to lasting peace, then October 7 did not spring from a vacuum. It emerged from 78 years of occupation, illegal settlement expansion, decades of bombardment and a 19-year siege on a largely defenseless civilian population (80% of whom are classified as refugees and half of whom are children) and a systematic refusal to grant Palestinians the right to self-determination and right of return consistent with international law.
To call the attack “unprovoked” while simultaneously acknowledging that Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights is central to the crisis reveals a bias that sustains the ongoing genocide. When Pappas uses the word “unprovoked,” he implies that decades of Palestinian death, displacement and dispossession are irrelevant context. Doing so denies Palestinians’ right to resist Israel’s illegal settler-colonial apartheid system as deemed by international law.
This is not to excuse or justify the events of October 7. The killing of civilians on October 7 was horrific. Targeting non-combatants is never justified, either by Hamas or Israel.
This is not an isolated slip. For the past two to three years, Pappas has sent essentially the same response to constituents who write about Gaza — regardless of what they actually asked. Last week, I did not write to him about humanitarian aid. I wrote about something else entirely, and received the same boilerplate reply that closes with “nothing is more important than listening to my constituents.”
I once told his staff that a letter thanked me for a concern I didn’t raise at the time. Yet he continues sending the same template anyway. It is easy for a reader unfamiliar with the history to breeze through these letters. The language sounds measured, compassionate, bipartisan. But it is not factual, and it is not responsive. It is a script designed to sound like engagement while delivering nothing that changes.
This matters now, specifically, because Pappas won the Democratic primary and must now earn the trust of New Hampshire voters who did not support him — including many Democrats who voted for Karishma Manzur or stayed home because Pappas does not speak the truth about Palestine. Those voters are not going to show up in November out of habit.
The numbers confirm what we’ve all been watching: A YouGov poll conducted by the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project, released in August 2026, found that 78% of likely New Hampshire Democratic primary voters believe Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians, 75% want the U.S. to cut off weapons to Israel and 74% said U.S. foreign policy in relation to Israel will play a role in how they vote in 2028. These aren’t fringe positions. They are the mainstream view among the voters Pappas needs to win the seat.
Americans are sick and tired of underwriting Israel’s unjust, illegal apartheid system and the ongoing genocide with billions of our tax dollars. If Pappas keeps recycling the same AIPAC script that distorts reality, he risks losing the voters he needs to beat Sununu while continuing to support a U.S. foreign policy that has prolonged so much death and destruction, and the misuse of our tax dollars.
Voters who supported Manzur or who stayed home in September are watching to see what Pappas will do.
Karina Quintans is a Portsmouth community leader and the 2026 recipient of the David Van Strien Award for her Palestinian human rights advocacy work.