The Obscenity of War

by Amy Goodman

Truthdig

President Barack Obama has just returned from his first trip as commander in chief to Afghanistan. The U.S.-led invasion and occupation of that country is now in its ninth year, with increasing comparisons to Vietnam.

Daniel Ellsberg, who Henry Kissinger once called “the most dangerous man in America,” leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Ellsberg, who was a top Pentagon analyst, photocopied this secret, 7,000-page history of the U.S. role in Vietnam and released it to the press, helping to end the Vietnam War.

“President Obama is taking every symbolic step he can to nominate this as Obama’s war,” Ellsberg told me recently. He cites the “Eikenberry memos,” written by U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, which were leaked, then printed last January by The New York Times.

Ellsberg said: “Eikenberry’s cables read like a summary of the Pentagon Papers of Afghanistan. ... Just change the place names from ‘Saigon’ to ‘Kabul’ ... and they read almost exactly the same.”

The Eikenberry memos recommend policies opposite those of Gens. David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, who advocated for the surge and a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan. Eikenberry wrote that President Hamid Karzai is “not an adequate strategic partner,” and that “sending additional forces will delay the day when Afghans will take over, and make it difficult, if not impossible, to bring our people home on a reasonable timetable.” Petraeus and McChrystal prevailed. The military will launch a major campaign in June in Afghanistan’s second-largest city, Kandahar. Meanwhile, with shocking candor, McChrystal said in a video conference this week, regarding the number of civilians killed by the U.S. military, “We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat.” U.S. troop fatalities, meanwhile, are occurring now at twice the rate they were one year ago.

Tavis Smiley has a PBS special this week on one of the most powerful, and overlooked, speeches given by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Given on April 4, 1967, exactly one year to the day before he was assassinated, King titled his speech “Beyond Vietnam,” and controversially called the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

The press vilified King. Time magazine called the speech “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” Smiley told me: “Most Americans, I think, know the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. Some Americans know the ‘Mountaintop’ speech given the night before he was assassinated in Memphis. But most Americans do not know this ‘Beyond Vietnam’ speech.” Smiley added, “If you replace the words ‘Iraq’ for ‘Vietnam,’ ‘Afghanistan’ for ‘Vietnam,’ ‘Pakistan’ for ‘Vietnam,’ this speech is so relevant today.”

Like King, Obama is a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. In his acceptance speech, Obama mentioned King six times, yet defended his war in Afghanistan. Princeton University professor Cornel West, interviewed by Smiley, said of Obama’s Nobel speech, “It upset me when I heard my dear brother Barack Obama criticize Martin on the global stage, saying that Martin Luther King Jr.‘s insights were not useful for a commander in chief, because evil exists, as if Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t know about evil.”

In early March, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, offered a resolution to end the war in Afghanistan, saying: “We now have about 1,000 U.S. troops who have perished in the conflict. We have many innocent civilians who have lost their lives. We have a corrupt central government in Afghanistan that is basically stealing U.S. tax dollars.” The resolution was defeated by a vote of 356-65. A Washington Post poll of 1,000 people released this week found that President Obama enjoys a 53 percent approval rating on his handling of the war in Afghanistan.

The public is unlikely to oppose something that gets less and less coverage. While the press is focused on the salacious details of Republican National Committee spending on lavish trips, especially one outing to a Los Angeles strip club, the cost to the U.S. taxpayer for the war in Afghanistan is estimated now to be more than $260 billion. The cost in lives lost, in people maimed, is incalculable. The real obscenity is war. Ellsberg hopes that the Eikenberry memos will just be the first of many leaks, and that a new wave of Pentagon Papers will educate the public about the urgent need to end Obama’s war.

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 800 stations in North America. She is the author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.

Obama’s Bad Prescription for Indonesia

by Amy Goodman

Truthdig

President Barack Obama dedicated the signing of health care legislation to a number of people, including his mother, S. Ann Dunham Soetoro, who, he said, “argued with insurance companies even as she battled cancer in her final days.” The health care legislative process and its frenetic endgame prompted the president to postpone a trip to the country where his mother raised him for several years of his childhood: Indonesia. While his health care bill is considered by many a huge step forward, Obama is simultaneously, and with far less scrutiny, potentially taking a huge step backward with Indonesia.

News is breaking in Indonesia about the role of the Indonesian military in the murder of political activists in the province of Aceh last year, in the lead-up to elections.

This is happening while the White House is engaged in fierce behind-the-scenes negotiations with Congress on whether to restore aid to the Indonesian military, including one of its most notorious elements, the special-forces command known as Kopassus. Military aid to Indonesia was suspended in 1999 after its military, the TNI, unleashed a campaign of terror on the people of East Timor. In 2005, the Bush administration partially restored military aid, but conspicuously denied aid and training to the Kopassus, thanks largely to the efforts of grass-roots activists and the intervention of Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.

My colleague Allan Nairn, reporting from Indonesia, broke the story this past week on “Democracy Now!,” the news hour I host, and on his blog, allannairn.com. He reported that the TNI “assassinated a series of civilian activists during 2009 ... as part of a secret government program, authorized from Jakarta, coordinated in part by an active-duty, U.S.-trained Kopassus special-forces general who has just acknowledged on the record that his TNI men had a role in the killings.” Aceh is a resource-rich province at the western tip of Indonesia. After the devastation Aceh suffered in the tsunami of 2004, the government reached a political settlement with the Free Aceh Movement. The elections in 2009 were a result of that. Nairn details two of the eight assassinations of members of the pro-independence Partai Aceh, citing numerous sources, most of whom, fearing for their safety, remain unnamed.

Allan and I are no strangers to the Indonesian military. In 1991, we survived a massacre in East Timor. East Timor was invaded by Indonesia in 1975, with the full support of President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. In the next quarter-century, the Indonesian military killed more than 200,000 Timorese, a third of the population. Allan and I went there to report on the situation and ended up covering a march to a cemetery in Timor’s capital city, Dili. As the mass of unarmed civilians was hemmed in by the cemetery walls, Indonesian soldiers marched in formation, their U.S.-supplied M-16s at the ready, and without warning, without provocation, opened fire on the crowd. Allan and I were beaten to the ground. Swinging their M-16s like baseball bats, the soldiers fractured Allan’s skull. We survived, but more than 270 Timorese were killed that day. We managed to escape, and to report on the massacre. While I was denied entry in 1999, Allan sneaked in to Timor and reported on the TNI atrocities there, as they burned much of East Timor to the ground. They arrested Allan, but he continued reporting from prison, giving new meaning to “cell phone.”

Since Allan broke the news this past week, the Indonesian press has been buzzing with the allegations. Air Vice Marshal Sagom Tamboen, a spokesman for the TNI, told the Jakarta Globe that the military is considering legal action against Nairn. Nairn told me, “I welcome this threat from TNI, a force which has murdered many hundreds of thousands, and challenge them to arrest me so that we can face off in open court.”

Human Rights Watch recently wrote a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, outlining serious concerns about possible re-engagement with Kopassus. ETAN, the East Timor and Indonesia Action Network, has launched a petition campaign at etan.org to block the funding.

Much of the political class in the United States is now chattering and twittering about the health care bill’s passage into law, and the potential political consequences. They should spend time focusing on Obama’s plans for Indonesia, and the possibility that he may restore funding and training for one of the world’s most notorious, human-rights-abusing military forces, the Indonesian Kopassus.

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 800 stations in North America. She is the author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.

Seven Years of War: On Anniversary of US Invasion, Iraqi Feminist Yanar Mohammed Says Iraq Is No Different Under Obama than Bush

Democracy Now!

JUAN GONZALEZ: Today marks the seventh anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq. On March 19, 2003, the United States began dropping bombs on Baghdad as thousands of US forces poured across Iraq’s borders. Seven years later, the occupation continues. In that time, over 4,300 American soldiers have died. Many thousands more have been wounded. As many as 650,000 Iraqis have been killed, with the number of wounded unknown.

Meanwhile, Iraq is suffering the worst refugee crisis in the world today. According to the United Nations, more than 4.2 million Iraqis have fled the country, many of them to neighboring Jordan and Syria. Another 1.9 million are internally displaced.

And seven years after the invasion, the US occupation of Iraq continues. Last month, the top US commander in Iraq, General Ray Odierno, said the US is preparing contingency plans to delay the withdrawal of all combat forces in Iraq if violence or political instability increases in the aftermath of this month’s parliamentary elections. Under President Obama’s current band, the US has vowed to cut the number of troops in Iraq in half, to 50,000, by August. A full withdrawal is scheduled to occur by the end of 2011.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, to mark the seventh anniversary, we turn to a perspective rarely heard in the US media: an Iraqi woman living in Baghdad. Yanar Mohammed is president of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq. I reached her by phone yesterday in Baghdad and began by asking her to describe the situation in Iraq seven years after the US invasion of her country.

YANAR MOHAMMED: The situation now, after the end of seven years of invasion, is at a point where we have many questions at hand. The first one is we are waiting now every day for the final result of the elections. And there is some competition between the Prime Minister’s list and Iyad Allawi’s and other groups. But mainly they are mostly the same groups that had started off in the first place.


The other side of the issue, which not many people are talking about, is the economic agenda in Iraq, the privatization, the heavy privatization, that’s happened in Iraq in the last two years, where tens of thousands of workers have been laid off, with no work to go to, with no social insurance to support them, while in the same time there is an economic agenda of supporting foreign investment in a way where there is protection for foreign investment, but there is no labor law, no unemployment insurance for people. And in the same time, we are being surprised by the Ministry of Finance telling the Iraqis that we need to have a loan from the World Bank, which will put the Iraq policies under such pressure, and it is a surprise to everybody because the revenues of oil are so high that we do not really need a loan from the World Bank. So, economically, it’s a rollercoaster here in Iraq—privatization, no security for the working class, much investment for multinational countries, and, in the same time, a democracy which has brought forward groups which are transformations of the first political forces that started off with militias, but now they are politicians and they are sitting in the Green Zone.


So it’s a very strange scene that we are in Iraq now. High poverty among women, very high poverty, especially among the millions of population, the millions of widows of war and orphans of war, who do not have sufficient social insurance to support them. And there are no social programs to tell us what to do with these millions who do not have a place to go or a economy to support them. And in the same time, the oil law has been signed already, big investment for foreign companies. We do not have any promises of a good labor law.


And the Constitution has established a state of inequality for women. There is an article in the Constitution, Article number 41, which has cancelled, almost cancelled for good, the civil rights, the minimal civil rights which women had under Saddam, under what was called the personal status law. And it is these civil rights are being substituted with Islamic sharia and other religious laws that are of minorities in Iraq.


There is a quota for ethnicities, according to ethnic groups, some for Christians, some for other religions, for Assyrians. And this was a message to the Iraqis that representations are upon religions, upon sectarian lines and upon ethnicities, and not upon political affiliations. So it’s finally, after eight years, the Bush’s agenda of representing the Iraqis upon very backward representations has become a reality. And it’s a very bad form of democracy that we have to live in in Iraq. The ethnicities has grouped us all upon ethnic lines, and it only—such a situation needs only a little bit of sparkling to start a civil war anytime, could happen anytime.


AMY GOODMAN: Yanar Mohammed, can you compare the war under Bush and under the current president, Obama?


YANAR MOHAMMED: Inside Iraq, a citizen, a citizen inside Iraq, a woman in Iraq, or a worker or even an official, you would absolutely see no difference. We did not feel any difference inside here. People are so exhausted economically that there isn’t much hope that something very good could happen soon. There are hopes that maybe on the long run we could—our struggles could get us something, but for the time being, the extreme privatization of Iraq, the oil revenues that go to places we don’t know where they are, 80 percent unemployment among the women of Iraq, the extreme poverty that’s pushing women to being trafficked and prostituted, it’s all a situation that’s overwhelming. It would be hard for me to have a very clear vision right now.


We just want to have some relative security to us to organize our ranks for the coming times. And we are optimistic that if the American—if the US Army leaves us, we may be able to have the dynamics of the people and to make the wheels go the other way around to the way that will help us have—claim our resources again, our oil again, and our lives again.

AMY GOODMAN: Yanar Mohammed, president of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq. We were speaking to her in Baghdad. When we come back, we’ll go to Cindy Sheehan in Washington, DC. Stay with us.

Part II: Michelle Alexander on “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”

Democracy Now!

JUAN GONZALEZ: We turn now to the second part of our interview with legal scholar, civil rights advocate and author, Michelle Alexander. Her book is The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. A former director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, she now holds a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University.

AMY GOODMAN: We continued yesterday’s interview with Michelle Alexander after the broadcast, and we started with a clip of President Obama’s speech at the NAACP centennial celebration last year.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We’ve got to say to our children, yes, if you’re African American, the odds of growing up amid crime and gangs are higher. Yes, if you live in a poor neighborhood, you will face challenges that somebody in a wealthy suburb does not have to face. But that’s not a reason to get bad grades. That’s not a reason to cut class. That’s not a reason to give up on your education and drop out of school. No one has written your destiny for you. Your destiny is in your hands. You cannot forget that. That’s what we have to teach all of our children. No excuses.

AMY GOODMAN: Michelle Alexander, “no excuses.” Can you respond to President Obama?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Well, I think, you know, a major point that is often lost in debates about the so-called underclass, you know, poor African Americans who are trapped in racially segregated ghettos, the point that’s often missed is that huge percentages of the people residing in those communities have been branded felons, and therefore discrimination is perfectly legal against them. You know, employment discrimination is perfectly legal. Most job applications, ranging from Burger King clerk to accountant, ask whether you’ve been convicted of a felony. And studies show that, you know, about 70 percent of employers say they won’t even consider hiring someone who’s been convicted of a drug felony.

Public housing is off-limits to you if you have been convicted of a felony. For a minimum of five years, you are deemed ineligible for public housing once you’ve been branded a felon. Discrimination in private housing market’s perfectly legal. So here you are, recently released from prison, having been branded a felon for engaging in precisely the kind of drug activity that’s ignored in middle-class white communities. You’re branded a felon. You can’t get a job. And then public housing is off-limits to you? Where are you expected to sleep? So an aunt or grandmother takes you in.

Now, let’s say you’re one of the lucky few who manage to get a job. Well, up to 100 percent of your wages can be garnished—that’s right, up to 100 percent of your wages can be garnished—to pay the cost of your imprisonment. Increasing numbers of states are requiring former prisoners to pay back the cost of their imprisonment, pay back court costs, court processing fees, even the cost of their representation, even if they’ve been assigned a public defender, and back child support. You’re required to pay back all of the accumulated child support that you incurred while you were in prison. So up to 100 percent of your wages can be garnished, even if you’re one of the lucky few who manage to get a job after being branded a felon.

What is the system designed to do? The system is designed to send you right back to prison, which is, in fact, what happens to the vast majority of people who are released. About 70 percent of former prisoners are returned within three years. And the majority of those who are returned are returned within three months, because the obstacles, the legal barriers to just surviving on the outside, are so great. I’m often—you know, people often say to me, “Well, I know somebody who is a felon and who managed to get a job. You know, it’s possible to get a job,” they say.

Well, it may be possible, but what kind of job? Why is it that, you know, our young kids, young black and brown kids, are expected to be locked into low-wage jobs for life, if they’re lucky enough to get them, but kids in other communities are given the opportunity to go on to college, to compete for a full range of job opportunities? During the Jim Crow era, the problem wasn’t that black people couldn’t get jobs; it was that they were locked permanently in a lower tier of jobs. And that’s the reality. That’s the reality.

For us to tell young African American kids in ghetto communities, “Your destiny is in your own hands,” that may be an inspirational message, but for many of them it may turn out to be a lie, because the rules and laws that govern ghetto communities today and the war that is being waged there ensures that a large majority of black and brown boys in those communities will be branded felons and then relegated to a permanent second-class status for life.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Michelle Alexander, I’d like to ask you about Arnold Schwarzenegger. Governor Schwarzenegger, at his State of the State address in January, called for privatizing some of the state’s prisons.

GOV. ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER: The priorities have become out of whack over the years. I mean, think about it. Thirty years ago, ten percent of the general fund went to higher education, and only three percent went to prisons. Today, almost 11 percent goes to prisons and only seven-and-a-half percent goes to higher education. Spending 45 percent more on prisons than universities is no way to proceed into the future.

AMY GOODMAN: Your reaction to Governor Schwarzenegger’s newfound concern about the situation with the prison system in his state?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes, well, many people reacted with glee to Governor Schwarzenegger’s kind of apparent embrace of the Books Not Bars theme that had been a rallying cry for grassroots organizations in the state for more than a decade. But if you read between the lines there, what Schwarzenegger is actually saying is not that we should change our laws to ensure that nonviolent drug offenders don’t end up spending years or decades behind bars or that we should rethink harsh mandatory minimum sentences or our three-strikes laws, which have been responsible for the prison boom in California and other states around the country. His remedy has not been to reduce prison populations through kind of rethinking draconian laws, but instead to privatize, try to save money, make warehousing and caging human beings cheaper by privatizing the system.

Certainly, you know, this announcement must have been met with glee on Wall Street, where, you know, many companies like the Correctional Corporation of America, you know, is making millions of dollars, and it hopes to expand its market of caging human beings for a profit. So, sadly, although, you know, Schwarzenegger embraced the Books Not Bars motto, what he actually plans to do in practice is, or may well be, worse than the system that we have today.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to ask you about another aspect of this whole issue, in terms of—you mentioned mandatory sentencing laws, especially in relationship to the war on drugs. One of the aspects that rarely gets much attention, and you might want to talk about it, is how mandatory sentencing laws have essentially corrupted the criminal justice system by pressuring many defendants to basically cop a plea rather than take their chances through an actual trial, where their guilt or innocence might be decided by a jury.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: That’s right. We will never know how many innocent people are doing time for supposed drug offenses in the United States, but there’s good reason to believe that those numbers are higher than they’ve ever been, because of mandatory sentencing laws. Today, for a relatively minor drug crime, you could be looking at five, ten, even a life sentence in prison. Now, if you are arrested and charged with, you know, a relatively minor drug offense and told that you will spend twenty-five years in prison if you take your case to trial, but if you cop a plea and get only three years, a few months, or even be willing to be labeled a felon for life, you know, you’ll be out in a matter of months, days or just a few years, most people aren’t willing to take the risk that they could be forfeiting decades of their life for a minor drug offense and will take the deal, whether innocent or guilty.

AMY GOODMAN: And then, explain, Michelle Alexander, what—

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: The pressure to plead guilty is overwhelming.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain then what that means, once a person is a felon, in terms of the rights they lose for life.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes, well, once you’re branded a felon, you may be denied the right to vote; automatically excluded from juries; and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits. You know, the very rights that we supposedly won for African Americans in the civil rights movement no longer exist for those labeled felons. That’s why I say we have not ended racial caste in America; we’ve merely redesigned it. All the old forms of discrimination, the forms of discrimination we supposedly left behind, are now perfectly legal once you’ve been labeled a felon. And thanks to the war on drugs, millions of people of color have been branded felons for relatively minor drug activity, you know, in the past few decades.

AMY GOODMAN: Michelle Alexander—

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Our prison population has quintupled.

AMY GOODMAN: To what, in terms of the world, comparing our prison population to the rest of the world?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes, well, our prison population has quintupled. We’ve gone from about 300,000 people behind bars in the 1970s—you know, a time, by the way, that many civil rights activists thought that our rates of incarceration were egregiously high. But we went from about 300,000 people in prison and jails to more than two million today. And the vast majority of that increase has been due to drug offenses. About two-thirds of the increase in the federal prison population is due to drug offenses, and more than half of the increase in the state population.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk, Michelle Alexander, for one sec—

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Now, in fact, if we had to go back—

AMY GOODMAN: I just wanted to ask if you could talk about the jailing of black men often in white, rural communities and what that means in terms of bringing federal aid into those communities.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes. You know, kind of a well-kept secret about the way our census laws and redistricting operates in the United States is that people who are warehoused in prisons—and the majority of new prison building in the United States has taken place in relatively white rural areas—the majority of the people who are put in those prisons, particularly in a state like New York, are poor people of color. But the people warehoused in those prisons are denied the right to vote, right? But those people behind bars are counted through the census as part of the local population for the purposes of redistricting, leading to a greater number of state representatives assigned to those rural communities, even though the people behind bars can’t vote, and they’re not accountable to them. And additional federal funding flows to those communities, because their population has been inflated because they have such large prison populations. Meanwhile, the poor communities of color, you know, from which these prisoners came, lose representation in their state legislatures, because their population has declined. And the funding and support that might otherwise flow to those communities is reduced, because their numbers have been deflated as a result of the mass imprisonment of their community members in rural white communities.

AMY GOODMAN: Michelle Alexander, we want to thank you very much for being with us. Her new book is called The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Thank you so much.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Thank you for having me.

Legal Scholar Michelle Alexander on “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”

Democracy Now!

JUAN GONZALEZ: President Obama’s election a year and a half ago continues to be lauded for ushering in a new era of colorblindness. The very fact of his presidency is regarded by some as the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow. Yet, today there are more African Americans under correctional control, whether in prison or jail, on probation or on parole, than there were enslaved in 1850. And more African American men are disenfranchised now because of felon disenfranchisement laws than in 1870.

A new book by legal scholar and civil rights advocate Michelle Alexander argues that although Jim Crow laws have been eliminated, the racial caste system it set up was not eradicated. It’s simply been redesigned, and now racial control functions through the criminal justice system.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now from Columbus, Ohio by Michelle Alexander, author of the new book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Her latest article exploring how the war on drugs gave birth to what she calls a permanent American undercaste is available at tomdispatch.com. She’s a former director of the Racial Justice
Project at the ACLU of Northern California. She now holds a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University.

Michelle Alexander, welcome to Democracy Now! Nearly half of America’s young black men are behind bars or have been labeled felons for life? That’s an astounding figure. Also, what does it mean in terms of their rights for the rest of their lives?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes, thanks largely to the war on drugs, a war that has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies have consistently shown that people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites. The war on drugs waged in these ghetto communities has managed to brand as felons millions of people of color for relatively minor, nonviolent drug offenses. And once branded a felon, they’re ushered into a permanent second-class status, not unlike the one we supposedly left behind. Those labeled felons may be denied the right to vote, are automatically excluded from juries, and my be legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, public benefits, much like their grandparents or great grandparents may have been discriminated against during the Jim Crow era.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, you mention that the—in the war on drugs, four out of five people arrested have actually been arrested for use of drugs, not for—or possession or use of drugs, not for the sale of drugs. Could you talk about how the—both political parties joined in this increasing incarceration around drug use?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: That’s right. The war on drugs, contrary to popular belief, was not declared in response to rising drug crime. Actually, the war on drugs, the current drug war, was declared in 1982 by President Ronald Reagan at a time when drug crime was actually on the decline. A few years later, crack cocaine hit the streets in poor communities of color across America, and the Reagan administration hired staff to publicize crack babies, crack mothers, crack dealers in inner-city communities, in an effort to build public support and more funding, and ensure more funding, for the new war that had been declared. But the drug war had relatively little to do with drug crime, even from the outset.

The drug war was launched in response to racial politics, not drug crime. The drug war was part of the Republican Party’s grand strategy, often referred to as the Southern strategy, an effort to appear—appeal to poor and working-class white voters who were threatened by, felt vulnerable, threatened by the gains of the civil rights movement, particularly desegregation, busing and affirmative action. And the Republican Party found that it could get Democrats—white, you know, working-class poor Democrats—to defect from the Democratic New Deal coalition and join the Republican Party through racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare.

And the strategy worked like a charm. You know, within weeks of the Reagan administration’s publicity campaign around crack cocaine, you know, images of black crack users and crack dealers flooded, you know, our nation’s television sets and forever changed our nation’s conception of who drug users and dealers are. And law enforcement efforts became targeted on poor communities of color in the drug war. And drug law enforcement agencies, state and local law enforcement task forces committed to drug law enforcement, have been rewarded for drastically increasing the volume of drug arrests. Federal funding flows to state and local law enforcement that boost the volume of drug arrests, the sheer numbers.

Many people think the drug war, you know, has been targeted at violent offenders or aimed at rooting out drug kingpins, but nothing could be further from the truth. Local and state law enforcement agencies get rewarded for the sheer numbers of drug arrests. And federal drug forfeiture laws allow state and local law enforcement officials to keep 80 percent of the cash, cars, homes that they seize from suspected drug offenders, granting to law enforcement a direct monetary interest in the profitability and longevity in the drug war.

And the results have been predictable. Millions of poor people of color have been rounded up for relatively minor nonviolent drug offenses. In fact, in 2005, four out of five drug arrests were for possession. Only one out of five were for sales. Most people in state prison for drug offenses have no history of violence or significant selling activity. And during the 1990s, the period of the greatest expansion of the drug war, nearly 80 percent of the increase in drug arrests were for marijuana possession, a drug now widely believed to be less harmful than alcohol or tobacco and at least as prevalent in middle-class and suburban white communities as it is in the ghetto.

AMY GOODMAN: Michelle Alexander—

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: President Clinton—

AMY GOODMAN: Yes, I just wanted to bring it up to President Obama, because this piece you wrote, very interesting, at tomdispatch.com called “The Age of Obama as Racial Nightmare.” Explain.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes, well, you know, today, people around the globe, people of color in particular, have been celebrating the election of Barack Obama as kind of our nation’s triumph over race and the history of racial caste in America. Yet, the appearance of racial equality, the superficial appearance of racial equality that Barack Obama’s election has afforded, serves to mask a deeply disturbing underlying racial reality, which is that large segments, you know, a majority, of African American men in some urban areas, are either under the control of the criminal justice system or branded felons for life, locked in a permanent second-class status.

This vast new racial undercaste—and I say “caste”, not “class,” because this is a population which is locked into an inferior status by law and by policy—this vast population has been rendered largely invisible through affirmative action and the appearance of success with, you know, a handful of African Americans doing well in universities and corporations. The sprinkling of people of color through elite institutions in the United States, due to affirmative action policies and the limited progress of middle-class and upper-middle-class African Americans, creates the illusion of great progress. It helps to mask the underlying racial reality, which is that a racial caste system has been reborn in the United States. Young men of color, in particular, are labeled as felons, labeled as criminals, at very young ages, often before they even reach voting age, before they turn eighteen. Their backpacks are searched. They’re frisked on the way to school, while standing waiting for the school bus to arrive. Once they learn to drive, their cars are searched, often dismantled in a search for drugs. The drug war waged in these poor communities of color has created generations of black and brown people who have been branded felons and relegated to a permanent second-class status for life.

And the reason for their excommunication from our society, our mainstream society, is for engaging in precisely the same kind of drug activity that is largely ignored in middle-class and upper-middle-class white communities. People often say to me, “Well, if people—if, you know, black and brown men don’t want to be labeled felons, well, then they just shouldn’t commit drug crimes.” But, you know, we have known, as a nation, for a long time now that simply prohibiting drug activity does not lead people to stop using illegal drugs. We learned that lesson with alcohol prohibition. Banning the use of alcohol didn’t discourage many people from using or selling alcohol. And people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites. Our stereotype of a drug dealer in the United States is of an African American kid standing on a street corner with his pants hanging down. But the reality is that drug dealing happens everywhere in America. Drug markets in the United States, much like our society generally, is relatively segregated by race. Blacks tend to sell to blacks. Whites tend to sell to whites.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there for the part one of this interview, Michelle Alexander, but we’re going to ask you to stay after for part two, which we’ll play on Democracy Now! Michelle Alexander, her new book is called The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

7 Years After Killing, Family of Slain US Peace Activist Rachel Corrie Heads to Israel for Wrongful Death Suit Against Israeli Gov’t

Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: In the midst of Joe Biden’s first visit to Israel as vice president, the Israeli government has embarrassed the Obama administration by announcing plans to add 1,600 more homes to a Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem. Biden said Israel’s move “undermines the trust we need right now and runs counter to the constructive discussions that I’ve had here in Israel.” His comments were released Tuesday after a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, where he reiterated the “unbreakable” ties between Israel and the United States. Biden is scheduled to meet with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah today.

This comes as an unusual trial gets underway in Haifa. An American family is suing the state of Israel for the unlawful death of their daughter, Rachel Corrie, a twenty-three-year-old student from Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington. She was crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer in Gaza seven years ago. Today, the Haifa District Court in northern Israel will begin hearing evidence from eyewitnesses to Rachel’s death. An earlier internal army investigation exonerated the bulldozer drivers, concluding the soldiers could not see the young American peace activist in front of them. The eyewitness testimony is expected to challenge Israel’s version of events with evidence that she was clearly visible to the soldiers, standing before the bulldozer in her florescent orange jacket.

Well, I interviewed Rachel Corrie’s parents, Cindy and Craig Corrie, and her sister, Sarah Simpson, a few days ago, just before they headed to JFK Airport here in New York to go to Israel. I asked Rachel’s mother, Cindy, to go back to those events of March 16, 2003, and explain why Rachel had gone to Gaza to begin with.

CINDY CORRIE: In January of 2003, Rachel went first to the West Bank for training with the International Solidarity Movement. It was a Palestinian-led nonviolent resistance movement to oppose the occupation and what was happening to Palestinians at the time. That movement was founded because there was a resolution in the United Nations, submitted by the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, to have a human rights monitoring force in the area after the start of the Second Intifada, when there was so much killing and violence. And that resolution was vetoed by the United States and by Israel. And at that point, ISM was formed.


Some of the co-founders included an Israeli woman, Neta Golan; Americans, Adam Shapiro and Huwaida Arraf; a Palestinian academic, Ghassan Andoni; and others. And Rachel joined that effort. She was trained in Beit Sahour. She had prepared here before she left. She was studying Arabic. She had done a lot of education, and she was beginning to educate our family, because we were new to this issue.


She went—she chose to go to Gaza, to Rafah particularly, because she felt that it was maybe the most forsaken part of the Occupied Territories. It was where she felt her focus and attention was needed. She was there for about seven weeks. She was working, doing a lot of things during the time. Part of what she was doing was writing back and informing us about what she was seeing. And her words have since been incorporated into a play, and her writing from there is in a book of her work.

AMY GOODMAN: Called?

CINDY CORRIE: Called Let Me Stand Alone, published by Norton some years ago. But the play is My Name is Rachel Corrie, is still being seen around the world. Craig and I, just before we came to New York, saw a reading of it in Tacoma, Washington. We went to a performance in Reykjavik, Iceland last year. So it just keeps moving around the world.


But she was working with children and with women’s groups. One of the women in Gaza, when we visited there in 2003, was so happy to show me a note that Rachel had left for her on International Women’s Day. She wanted to connect women in Rafah with women near our community in Olympia. And so, she wanted to start a sister city project between Rafah and Olympia, which people in our community have supported since that time.


She was opposing—one of the things that she did was to oppose home demolitions, along with the other internationals who were there at the time to support Palestinians. Human Rights Watch reported that between September 2000 and 2004 over 1,700 homes in Rafah were destroyed. It was mass clearing demolitions, is what the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions tells us. These were not punitive demolitions. Those were occurring in the West Bank for people who were accused of doing some harm to the Israeli citizens through suicide bombings or some other way. But these were clearing demolitions. And the neighborhood where Rachel was staying, it had been a neighborhood with many, many homes at one point. But these were being massively destroyed to clear a buffer zone and to put in a large steel wall, that now largely has come down. But it was standing and was being built at the time we were there in 2003.


The home that Rachel stood in front of that day had two families in it—two brothers, an accountant and a pharmacist, and their five young children. Craig and I have come to know that family. We visit them whenever we go. We have communications with them. Part of the family came to the United States. The Israeli government had nothing against this family. They allowed them to go to Tel Aviv in order to get their visa to come to the United States to travel with us in the year 2005. And yet, their home was destroyed without any, you know, accommodation of any sort and under great threat to the family, as well. It didn’t happen the day Rachel stood there; it happened later that year.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Rachel standing there that day, what did she decide to do? What happened that day?

CINDY CORRIE: I think Rachel knew that Reem and Iman, that Kareem, that those children were behind that wall. She had been helping them with their English homework and with their—they were helping her learn Arabic. She had slept at the foot of their parent’s bed, because they couldn’t sleep in their own bedroom because of the shots that would be fired through the wall as Israeli military equipment drove past the house. So she slept at the foot of the family’s—the parent’s bed with the other children to offer some international protection to that family.


The bulldozer was coming toward their house, and she knew that the kids and the parents were behind her. I don’t think there’s any way that—you know, I think she also believed that the bulldozer would stop. It had stopped for activists, came right up to them, pushed into them, but stopped at other points during that day. I don’t think she believed this was going to happen to her. But she couldn’t move, because right behind her were these kids and people that she had grown to know and to care for.

AMY GOODMAN: And what you understand the bulldozer did?

CINDY CORRIE: We have eyewitnesses, seven international eyewitnesses. We have photographic evidence from all of those eyewitnesses that, according to their report—we were able to read the Israeli military report, which happened in Rachel’s case, happens for almost no Palestinians, but there was a—because of US insistence, there was a military police investigation. They indicated, though, they didn’t use the photographic evidence that the ISMers had, but anybody looking at those photos can see that what the ISMers say is accurate, that the bulldozer proceeded toward Rachel, that she took a position indicating that she was not going to move.


She was in her orange jacket. She, when it kept coming, she rose on the mound, and the eyewitnesses testified that her head rose above the top of the blade of the bulldozer, so she could clearly be seen, but the bulldozer continued and proceeded over her, and so that it was covering her body. It stopped and then reversed, according to the eyewitness testimonies, without lifting its blade, so backed over her once again. Her friends were screaming at the bulldozer drivers through this to stop. They rushed to her, of course, and she said to them, “I think my back is broken.” And those were her final words. And they squeezed her hands and told her that they loved her. And I feel like she had good people with her.

AMY GOODMAN: Cindy Corrie, explaining how her daughter Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer while protecting a Palestinian family’s home from demolition in Gaza seven years ago. An Israeli court is now beginning to hear evidence in the Corrie’s lawsuit against Israel for the unlawful death of their daughter, twenty-three-year-old peace activist from Olympia, Washington, Rachel Corrie. The trial begins today in Haifa.

This is Democracy Now! We continue with Rachel’s family—her mother, her father and her sister—in a minute.

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AMY GOODMAN: We return now to the family of Rachel Corrie. Seven years after their daughter was crushed to death by an Israeli military bulldozer and five years after filing a civil lawsuit against the Israeli government, the case has moved ahead. Today a district court in Haifa will begin hearing evidence about the circumstances of Rachel’s death.

On Friday, just before they left for Israel, I sat down with Rachel’s family—her father Craig, her mother Cindy, and her sister Sarah—for an in-depth interview about the case. I asked Rachel’s father Craig to lay out the particulars of the court case.

CRAIG CORRIE: This is a culmination, really, of seven years of our family searching for some sort of justice in the killing of Rachel. And we’ve tried to do that through diplomatic means, and we’ve asked for a US-led investigation into Rachel’s killing. We also understand that the Israelis, through Prime Minister Sharon, promised President Bush a thorough, credible and transparent investigation of Rachel’s killing. But, by our own government’s measure, that has not happened. So we’re left with simply a civil lawsuit.


So, we’re accusing the state of Israel of either intentionally killing Rachel or guilty of gross negligence in her killing seven years ago. And so, we’re seeking—the only thing you can seek in a civil case is damages. You know, so it’s really a very small part of the story that’s gone on in our lives. But it’s critical to have our time in court.


Our motivation for that was largely that it is an avenue which we understood we would be able to pursue and get information. So, through the discovery process, we were hoping to get a good deal of information. We have gotten some, but they’ve used sort of secrets of state to keep us, block us, from getting other evidence into court. But we’re going forward, and we’re very hopeful that we will get a fair trial.

AMY GOODMAN: Cindy Corrie, speaking of blocking information, the Palestinian doctor who first treated your daughter, who first treated Rachel, is not being allowed out of Gaza to testify? Is that right?

CINDY CORRIE: That’s our understanding at this point. We were alerted by our attorney, really about a week or so ago, that the Israeli government seemed to be dragging its feet about having our eyewitnesses. We have four international eyewitnesses. There were seven on the scene when Rachel was killed. Four will be coming to testify. Our attorney told us that the Israelis were not agreeing to let them into Israel. We sought help from the US government, from the State Department, and from our ambassador. And subsequently, the four international eyewitnesses have been given approval to come, and they will be entering the same day that we are.


But the doctor, who’s in Gaza, who was with Rachel at the end of her life, or soon after, who administered to her there in Gaza in the hospital, was called as a witness on our side, and the Israeli government has not yet approved entry for him. He also could testify, we hoped, by video conference. That’s what’s been offered, and they have not agreed either to having him come into Israel or to testify by video conference. And we are pursuing that. We know that Ambassador Cunningham has also been pursuing this with Israeli officials.

AMY GOODMAN: The US ambassador to Israel?

CINDY CORRIE: The US ambassador to Israel, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: He’s been pushing for the Palestinian doctor to be able to testify.

CINDY CORRIE: To be able to testify by video conference, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Sarah, the autopsy of your sister, of Rachel—and I’m still sure that is hard to hear seven years later—can you talk about the significance of that?

SARAH CORRIE SIMPSON: Yes. First of all, when Rachel was first killed, our family really didn’t want to have an autopsy done. It just wasn’t in our beliefs or wishes. And it seemed at the time quite apparent how she was killed, so the necessity of it didn’t seem like it was necessary at that time. But my mother and father were in Congressman Baird’s office and were basically told that the Israelis would refuse to release Rachel’s body back to the United States unless an autopsy was done.


They understood, through the State Department, Congressman Baird, that there was some sort of court proceeding going on in Israel, and there wasn’t a lot of information about that court proceeding. But they were allowed to give a statement of the family’s wishes about the autopsy, and they did a written statement that said the autopsy could only occur if it was done in the presence of a US embassy official and also if it was performed by a civilian doctor. And that was placed in writing and signed and faxed to a Captain Margolin [phon.] with the IDF. And what we didn’t know was that Captain—

AMY GOODMAN: The Israeli Defense Forces.

SARAH CORRIE SIMPSON: The Israeli Defense Forces. And what we didn’t know at the time was that Captain Margolin took that to the Israeli court and submitted it into the court record. And the judge granted the wishes and said that the autopsy could only occur with the US embassy presence and by a civilian doctor. In 2003, my parents were allowed to read the military police report about the investigation into Rachel’s killing. And in that report, it said that a US embassy official was present at the autopsy, so we always assumed that that had happened and had gone as our wishes had stated.


It wasn’t until several years later, through US government FOIA records, that I first saw some mention of the fact that there was no US embassy official present during the autopsy. And it took us until 2007 to confirm with the State Department in writing that absolutely there was no US embassy official present. So that goes against an Israeli court order in terms of the autopsy wishes. So we actually amended our complaint against the government of Israel to bring the violation of the Israeli court order into these proceedings, and information about that will be heard.

AMY GOODMAN: How will this proceed? It starts Wednesday, March 10th, which is actually just six days before the seventh anniversary of Rachel’s death. Cindy?

CINDY CORRIE: Well, I think we have to see how it all unfolds. What we know now is that we will be presenting our witnesses, the witnesses that we have called. That includes Craig, because he can testify to the wishes about the autopsy. It includes the four eyewitnesses. It includes the doctor, Dr. Hiss, who performed the autopsy, and an expert witness who will testify that he believes that the stipulations by which bulldozers are supposed to be used—there are manuals that we obtained through the courts about how the bulldozers are supposed to be used. Those state clearly that when people can’t be dispersed or are in the area, they’re not supposed to operate. And so, the expert witness will testify to a number of things, but he’ll testify about that piece of things. And our witnesses will be presented.


We thought that we would then hear the state’s witnesses, but we just learned last week that, in an unconventional motion, according to our attorneys, the Ministry of Defense applied to not have to submit any of their affidavits to the court—our witnesses had to submit affidavits months ago—but not to have to submit their affidavits to the court and to have thirty days after they hear all of our witnesses testify before their affidavits are submitted. Once that happens, then there will be another court proceeding, apparently, when their witnesses will have to testify and be cross-examined by our attorney. But at this point, we don’t know what that date will be.


The case will be heard by a judge, Judge Gershon, in the Haifa district court. District court there is not equivalent to our district court. This is the court there that falls under their Supreme Court, or their High Court. And our understanding originally was that he would hear the testimony from both sides and then would get final reports from the attorneys in both sides. Following the presentation of evidence, he would then take that and review it, we were told, up to several months and then would come back with a decision about responsibility. And depending on how that turned out, then there would be another phase in which there would be discussion in the court about damage and how parties were damaged.

AMY GOODMAN: Sarah, this is your first time in Israel?

SARAH CORRIE SIMPSON: Yes, it is. It will be my first time in Israel. And honestly, I wish that there would have been a way for me to go without the focus being entirely on the trial, because, you know, I do feel like I need to get a chance to experience a little bit of the culture, meet some of the people. And I’m sure there’ll be some opportunity, but the focus is entirely on the trial at this time, and, you know, it’s a difficult time for our family because of that.


I also—one of my main purposes in going was just, personally, I wanted to be able to hear the IDF’s side of the story. We were asked very early on whether or not we would want to meet any of the military that were involved in killing Rachel, and I’ve always said, “Yes, that’s true.” I’ve told our US government that if given the opportunity to meet the bulldozer driver, that’s something I would want to do. I know it would be very difficult and very challenging, but I think it’s a step that I would have to be open to. And now I feel like it’s been a real violation that in the time that it was set to go to see those soldiers hopefully testify, hopefully they would be called, that that opportunity is not going to be available to me. And I don’t know whether or not I’ll be able to travel back when the government presents its side. So, you know, it’s going to be a challenging time when we’re there.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you know, Craig, if the man who drove the bulldozer will be there?

CRAIG CORRIE: We don’t know that. If he comes, it’ll be because the state calls him as a witness, and that’ll allow our attorney to cross-examine him. And we certainly hope that he comes. As Sarah alludes, I mean, there’s another way to handle some of this. We would like to meet that person.


There are lots of victims, Amy, when you look at a war and what happens. And we lost Rachel, and that hurts every day, but that bulldozer driver lost a lot of his humanity when he crushed Rachel. We’re told by B’Tselem, for instance, that in 2004, I believe, the highest—the cause, proportionately, of deaths in the Israeli soldiers, the highest one is suicide. There’s a big toll to soldiers. And I guess I have to hold out my hand, in some way, that if that man could understand what he’s done, in terms of our loss, if he could mourn our loss of Rachel, I could mourn his loss of humanity.


There’s a lot of steps, as Sarah says, that would have to happen that way. But yeah, I’d like to meet him. And it’s not about trying to put him in jail. It doesn’t do me any good if his children don’t have a father, if he has children. But some way, like Desmond Tutu talks about, of mending the tear in society, and I think it’s more like a wound in your arm, and to expect that one half of a wound would heal and the other half stay unhealed is impossible. Both halves have to heal.

AMY GOODMAN: Cindy?

CINDY CORRIE: I think it’s important for people to understand that this lawsuit, as Craig said in the beginning, was just—it’s one step, one piece of what we’ve been doing in the past seven years. And we did pursue answers diplomatically. We worked with the State Department, with—you know, trying to work with the Israeli government to get answers to our questions early on. It was actually in the Department of State quite early that the suggestion was made that we sue the Israeli military and the Israeli government as a way to address this. But it wasn’t—

AMY GOODMAN: The State Department suggested that.

CINDY CORRIE: It was through the State Department that the suggestion initially was made for us to—

AMY GOODMAN: This was during the Bush years.

CINDY CORRIE: This was during the Bush years, yeah.

CRAIG CORRIE: It was. It’s our first meeting within—actually in the State Department in June of 2003, and we were discussing trying to get an independent investigation. And Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Larry Wilkerson, so chief of staff to Colin Powell, turned to me, and he said, “If it was my daughter, I’d sue them. I don’t care about money. I wouldn’t care about anything. I would sue the state of Israel.” And we were surprised—

SARAH CORRIE SIMPSON: And I think that was reiterated.

CRAIG CORRIE: —but ended up doing it.

AMY GOODMAN: Sarah?

SARAH CORRIE SIMPSON: We didn’t file the final lawsuit almost up until the last minute that the statute of limitations would wear out, because we wanted to do this diplomatically. We thought, given the relationship of the United States with Israel, that there was the means to resolve this diplomatically. And no family wants to go through a lawsuit in these kind of matters. And my father and I actually met with Larry Wilkerson in, I believe it was, December 2004, and again that statement of filing a lawsuit was reiterated. And we did file the lawsuit then in the spring of 2005.

AMY GOODMAN: You have lost a lawsuit against Caterpillar—

CINDY CORRIE: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —the company that made the tractor that crushed your daughter that the Israeli military used.

CINDY CORRIE: Yes, uh-huh.

AMY GOODMAN: What were the grounds of that suit and the rejection of it, the denial of it?

CINDY CORRIE: And that suit was brought in US court and in western Washington. But some people really misunderstand the direction of it. In international law, there is the obligation to hold corporations accountable if they sell their products, continue to sell their products, knowing that human rights violations, a pattern of human rights violations, are occurring with their equipment. And Caterpillar Corporation had been on notice for years that their Caterpillars were being used to harm Palestinians, to destroy their homes, but also to take their lives. Rachel was not the only person on that lawsuit. There were a number of Palestinian families. I’ve been to the gravesite of a Palestinian family in Nablus. I recognized the name when I was walking through the gravesite of a family, eight family members that were destroyed when their house was demolished with Caterpillar equipment on top of them. It isn’t that Caterpillar sold a piece of equipment, and then something bad happened; it’s that Caterpillar continues to sell the equipment knowing that their equipment is being used for human rights violations.


Now, in the—the case was dismissed in western Washington in the district court there but was appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. And in their ruling, the Ninth Circuit Court upheld the decision of the lower court, primarily because the US government entered into the discussion, and there is separation of powers. And the court did not discuss the merits of the case at all, but said that they were cognizant of the fact that—a political question is the legal term for this, but that cognizant of the fact that if they ruled against Caterpillar corporation or address this, that they could be implicating the United States because of its role in funding all of this equipment, so could be—they were cognizant of the fact that they also would be possibly intervening in terms of who has the right to make these decisions within our own government. It’s a separation of powers question.

AMY GOODMAN: You will be going to Israel at the same time as the Vice President. He’s here—he’s in Israel for the week. Now, interestingly, Joe Biden, as senator, raised the question of the death of your daughter. Can you explain the circumstances of this, Cindy Corrie?

CINDY CORRIE: Yes. You know, during the course of the last seven years, our family visited nearly every congressional office, my extended family. And, of course, many constituents brought Rachel’s case before congressional members when we were trying to get a resolution passed for an American investigation, HCR 111. But we visited every congressional office. So President Obama’s office as senator was visited by members of our family also.

AMY GOODMAN: Did you meet with him?

CINDY CORRIE: We have—we talked—Craig asked questions of Obama during the Iowa campaign season. We were in Atlantic, Iowa when he was speaking there. And he knew about Rachel’s case.

AMY GOODMAN: Before, then, I ask about Biden, OK, Craig, what did you ask—

CRAIG CORRIE: Well, actually, it’s a pretty—

AMY GOODMAN: —President-to-be Obama?

CRAIG CORRIE: Yeah, it was strange, because we were in Atlantic, Iowa, so western part of Iowa, farmland, huge farmland. We’re in county fairgrounds in a cow barn. And I’m sitting on a fence behind the crowd, and the President-to-be Obama is actually asking people for questions, and he called on me.


And so, I ask a very easy question, because I just simply said I have friends in Palestine whose homes are being destroyed, whose farms are being taken from them by the Israelis, with no compensation. And I also have—and it’s true—I have Israeli friends who have lost family members in suicide bombings and stuff. So what could he do to protect the farms of my friends in Palestine and also assure my friends in Israel that there wouldn’t be any more suicide bombings? And then I told him why I was interested in the case and about Rachel’s killing there. And he recognized the name Rachel Corrie. He was familiar with that without an aide or his wife or somebody explaining it to him.


And so, he went on about five minutes talking about what was necessary, and essentially a two-state solution is what he said, for that and giving his commitment to a viable, contiguous state of Palestine alongside a state of Israel, living in peace and dignity and having a future for their people. So it was pretty much a standard US stated foreign policy, not actually the foreign policy we often pursue and enforce, but what we state, and a pretty good answer. And he went on, like I say, for about five minutes. It was very personal.

AMY GOODMAN: So back to Joe Biden. Talk about the questioning—

CINDY CORRIE: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —that he did of the—

CINDY CORRIE: Well, it was also during the Iowa campaign, with my Iowa family members. Rachel’s case was brought to his attention in quite a large way. He was asked repeatedly about her case. And he did become interested. He finally said he wanted to see what was going on. And we know—we have copies of questions that he then submitted to Ambassador-Designate—the American ambassador to Israel, James Cunningham, who now is the Israeli ambassador, questions that he asked about Rachel’s case. He asked about what had been done in the State Department and in the embassy in Tel Aviv to pursue a thorough, credible and transparent investigation. And he also asked whether or not they thought that there had been a thorough, credible and transparent investigation. Clearly, getting this is important to officials in the US government.

AMY GOODMAN: And what did James Cunningham answer?

CINDY CORRIE: He laid out the steps that had been taken in pursuit of a transparent investigation and the communications that have occurred between the Department of State and Israel about the case and indicated that they have continued to ask the Israelis to answer questions and to comply with a thorough, credible and transparent investigation.


The communication—one communication that he cited was when Mora Hardy from the State Department went to raise some issues about it, a trip that she made. And we, in a follow-up to that, had a communication from Michelle Bernier-Toth in the State Department, who said that they continue to ask questions and that their questions go either unanswered or ignored by the Israeli government. And what the ambassador assured Biden was that he would continue personally to make sure that a thorough, credible and transparent investigation was pursued. And that was during his—during confirmation in 2008.

AMY GOODMAN: Will you try to meet with Vice President Biden in Israel?

CINDY CORRIE: I think it would be really helpful to us if we could, just to let him know—

AMY GOODMAN: The significance of—

CINDY CORRIE: —the status of it and the significance of it.

AMY GOODMAN: What would be the significance of him showing up in court?

CINDY CORRIE: I don’t think we’re asking for him to show up in court. But I think what we’re wanting—and I know our officials have to walk a very careful line. They can’t appear to be interfering at all in a court process. But I think what we know is that this has continued to be a problem and a matter that US officials do care about. And I think that his meeting with us—and others there, as well, could do that. We do have an invitation to meet with the ambassador. And I think they’re sending that message that this remains a concern to the US government and that they wish to see a fair trial.

AMY GOODMAN: Cindy Corrie, on the trial that begins today in Haifa in the Corrie family’s lawsuit against Israel over the death of their daughter Rachel, a twenty-three-year-old peace activist from Olympia, Washington. We’ll be back with the conclusion of the conversation in a minute.

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AMY GOODMAN: We return now to the final part of my interview with the family of Rachel Corrie, as their civil lawsuit against Israel goes to court today, suing Israel for the unlawful death of their daughter Rachel. Rachel’s father Craig Corrie explained the importance of American officials showing interest in the case.

CRAIG CORRIE: When we’re talking about US officials and US government showing some interest in this case, Congressman Brian Baird, who is our congressman and was the congressman for Rachel when she was killed—and it was his office that we were right after Rachel was killed. He has now written a letter to the judge and is asking that he be able to testify in the case, come to Israel overnight, but he needs that to be—him to be heard on either Sunday the 21st or Monday the 22nd, because, of course, there are votes in Congress and all that. But it’s pretty amazing to me that a US congressman would be willing to take a redeye to Israel, come and testify, and then pop back onto a redeye back to Washington, DC. And, you know, my thanks go out to the congressman. I hope he’s allowed to do that. But his willingness to do it is just flooring to me.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s very interesting. He also went to Gaza, right?

CINDY CORRIE: He did.

AMY GOODMAN: Along with Keith Ellison, the congressman.

CRAIG CORRIE: Three times ago. He just got back, actually, a couple of weeks ago from his third trip to Gaza. And so, you can see, with him, because he’s somebody that we now have, you know, had personal contact with over a number of years. And he got there and saw, you know, worse than what Rachel saw, but he got there and saw it, and it was, as his chief of staff said, life-changing. And you can see that in what he writes and says about it.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ll also be there as Tristan Anderson continues to, well, undergo rehabilitation. He’s in a very serious state, the American citizen who was photographing protests, who was shot by the Israelis. Will you be visiting him? Did you know him?

CINDY CORRIE: We didn’t know Tristan Anderson. Craig and I were in Cairo last year on March 14th, just two days before the sixth anniversary of Rachel’s killing, when we got word about what had happened to Tristan.

AMY GOODMAN: And what exactly happened?

CINDY CORRIE: He was shot with a high-velocity tear gas canister when he was at a demonstration, I believe in Nil’in village. And he has been, you know, in treatment ever since. Very, very seriously injured. I don’t know the status. I hope—we have talked to his parents, and my understanding is that there are still family members there. I know Tristan is still there, and we hope to be able to connect with him when we’re in Israel.


But one of the connections, I think, about accountability for Rachel that I hope others will make is to what’s happened to nonviolent human rights observers and activists, Palestinian, Israeli and international, in the West Bank and elsewhere. There’s been an assault on these people. And it continues. We have friends from—Palestinian friends who were—that we met at demonstrations or we met in Israel in the West Bank, who have made the decision to nonviolently resist what’s happening to their villages with their land being taken, because they believe that’s the best path for their children. And some of those people have been imprisoned in the past year because of their activity in nonviolent efforts. And I think we have to challenge that, and I hope people will be making the connections between what happened to Rachel and that issue.

SARAH CORRIE SIMPSON: I’d just quickly like to point out—

AMY GOODMAN: Sarah?

SARAH CORRIE SIMPSON: One of my frustrations in all the work that we did in Congress was that I think we thought, in the initial days after Rachel was killed, if the US government took a very strong stance against her killing, that perhaps it would have given some more protection to the others—I mean, to US citizens that are traveling in that region. And what we know is that shortly after Rachel was killed, Tom Hurndall, who was a British peace activist, was killed in the same two-mile stretch of Rafah, Gaza. Then there was James Miller, who was a British reporter that was also shot and killed in that same two-mile stretch. On the US side, we had Brian Avery in the West Bank, who was severely injured when he was shot in the face by the IDF. And now we have Tristan Anderson. And some of the frustration was that if there was accountability in Rachel’s case, I wonder how many of those other cases would not have happened.


I do like to point out that in the case of the British citizens, that the British government took a very strong stance against those killings. In the case of Tom Hurndall, they actually managed to get a criminal conviction. And much of that came by the work of the family and the work of the UK government to put pressure on Israel to do a credible investigation. In the case of James Miller, that criminal process did not occur. It was very similar to our case. They closed the case without bringing charges. But the British government continued to push so that there would be basically a damages claim. I believe that it was about $2.4 or $2.5 million to that family. And I don’t think it’s about the dollar figure, but it’s about saying that there was something very wrong that went on in that case. Iain Hook was another British citizen that they did not get—he was killed, as well, and they did not get a criminal conviction in that case. But again, that damages claim does say that the [UK] government believed that there should be accountability in that case.


And I just think that the US government certainly has the ability to push for the rights of their citizens and the safety of their citizens as hard as the UK government does. And I think both President Obama and Vice President Biden would understand that and want to make sure that the safety of the US citizens that are traveling in Gaza and the West Bank is the highest priority, when we’re over there.

AMY GOODMAN: The anniversary of Rachel’s death will be taking place in the midst of the trial. Trial begins March 10th. Her death occurred on March 16th. What are you calling on people to do?

CINDY CORRIE: We’re calling on people to be visible on March 16th, calling for accountability in Rachel’s case, but also making the linkages between accountability for her and the lack of accountability that’s occurred in—particularly with Gaza, with what happened in Operation Cast Lead in December of 2008 and January of 2009, but really for all of the acts of violence against Palestinians and others in the Occupied Territories.


And we’re also calling for attention to the assault on nonviolent human rights observers and activists that continues in various ways. There are Palestinians, now a growing number of Palestinians, who have died in nonviolent protests to the wall in the West Bank. People can find their names, I think, by going to the International Solidarity Movement website.

AMY GOODMAN: The separation wall.

CINDY CORRIE: The separation wall. And sometimes I read the list of those names. Palestinians resist nonviolently in many different ways. But this is in nonviolent protest to the wall.


And also, I think it’s important for people to make the link between our ability to access the Israeli courts and the fact that Palestinians have really little opportunity to do that. We understand that currently Palestinians who want to operate in the courts or to take their cases to the courts have to put a bond forward of something between twenty and fifty thousand dollars in order to bring a suit. And this is, of course, very prohibitive to them to be able to do that.


B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch and other organizations have talked about the impunity that the Israeli military enjoys because of lack of accountability through the courts and in other ways. And I hope that people will be visible to say, “We’ve had enough of this,” and to call for accountability for Rachel, but to link it to these other larger issues.

CRAIG CORRIE: Amy, one other very specific thing that people could do, and I’m calling for people to do—the US government has come out against the blockade or the continued occupation and siege on Gaza. The children that were behind the wall that Rachel stood in front of are still under a state of siege. And I think that, very specifically, people around the world and certainly in this country could write, call or fax the White House and say, not only should we be working to have the Israelis lift that siege, but if they continue to be unwilling to do so, then the United States should come in there, work out a way that they could come in and—the Berlin airlift, it sent a message to the world about our ability to protect people around the world and our willingness to do so. If we did something similar by sea to the Gaza Strip, it would change the view of Americans around the world for maybe another fifty years. It is something that’s doable, and it’s something that the people out, your fans, could actually physically do and ask the White House to do that.

AMY GOODMAN: I don’t know who wants to take this on, but what did happen to your daughter on March 16th? What do you understand happened?

SARAH CORRIE SIMPSON: My understanding of the case—

AMY GOODMAN: Sarah?

SARAH CORRIE SIMPSON: —you know, after looking at all the evidence that I have seen—and in particular, there’s an IDF video. It’s a still camera that was out on the border that day that filmed the area that Rachel and the activists were in. It did not actually film the incident of her killing. The camera, at the time that she was killed, just happened to pan towards the Egypt border and was focused on the Egypt border away from where Rachel was at the time, and then, after she was hit, quickly panned back around to where she was. And I’ve looked at that video in second-by-second detail, painstakingly trying to figure out exactly what was going on. After looking at that and other evidence, I am very confident that the bulldozer driver and operator knew that Rachel was in front of that bulldozer as it began to move forward towards her. We know that they did not see Rachel leave that visibility field, because of course she was hit and injured. So she did never leave that visibility.

AMY GOODMAN: What she was wearing?

SARAH CORRIE SIMPSON: She was wearing a red vest, like what you would see a flagger on the side of the road wear, so very obvious red reflective vest. And one of the things was, when I first got that copy of that IDF videotape, the US government requested that tape. It came in very grainy black-and-white footage. Since that time, more recently, an Israeli reporter was able to obtain a color copy of that film. And when you see that color copy, the red vest—there was another activist who was wearing a red vest, as well, and he’s on the scene—it stands out, remarkably, in that color film. There’s no doubt that she would have been visible wearing that vest.


I want to point out about the color copy of the tape, too. In the black-and-white version, it actually does show Rachel standing on the scene prior to her being killed. We know from testimony that the scene that she’s—the place that she’s shown on that video, she actually walks forward slightly, I think about twenty to thirty yards, and she’s actually hit and killed about about twenty and thirty yards in front of where she’s seen on that black-and-white tape. But when the color copy showed up, amazingly, that point at which Rachel was still alive and could be seen, that portion of the tape wasn’t provided to the reporter. It was cut out.


So there is this feeling, when I look at that, that there’s a great attempt to try to depict that Rachel couldn’t be seen on the scene that day. But why aren’t we given the whole copy of the tape? Why wasn’t our US government given the color version of that tape when they repeatedly asked to have the audio transmissions of the bulldozer drivers in their headquarters, as well as the videotape sent to the US government on behalf of our family.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you hoping to get that in this trial?

SARAH CORRIE SIMPSON: We already had the discovery process, and we have not been given any further tape. So, at this time, I’m not confident that that would come forth.

AMY GOODMAN: Is that a violation, Cindy, of the judicial process in Israel that, in discovery, you’re not getting what you’re asking for, if it exists?

CINDY CORRIE: Well, I believe that it is. We have asked for the evidence that’s available. And the videotape has been controversial from the beginning. You know, part of it is that the first stories that we got from the Israeli government—I think the first one was that Ed McKeon, who was in the American embassy, said he was told initially that a wall fell on Rachel from a home demolition. And then the story went to “No, we weren’t doing any demolitions that day.” And then a PowerPoint, taken from this video, was circulated through the United States Congress and shows a picture of the bulldozer with a high mound of earth and says here’s—puts an X where Rachel’s body was and says, “See, she couldn’t be seen.” What we know through—and have been speaking about for some time—through Sarah’s analysis, is that that wasn’t the bulldozer that hit Rachel. There were two bulldozers in the area that day. Each of them had two people inside. There was an armored personnel carrier there, as well, that was supposed to also be looking at what was happening in the area. But the photo that was circulated to the members of the United States Congress to say to them, from the Israeli officials to the US Congress, “See, she couldn’t be seen,” is false. And so, there’s been a repeated effort that we’ve seen through the years to provide misinformation.

AMY GOODMAN: Rachel’s parents, Cindy and Craig Corrie, and her sister, Sarah Corrie Simpson, on their quest for the truth and accountability for the death of Rachel Corrie. The civil trial begins today in Haifa, Israel. Rachel was killed seven years ago, on March 16th, 2003.

Rachel Corrie’s (Posthumous) Day in Court

by Amy Goodman

Truthdig

An unusual trial begins in Israel this week, and people around the world will be watching closely. It involves the tragic death of a 23-year-old American student named Rachel Corrie. On March 16, 2003, she was crushed to death by an Israeli military bulldozer.

Corrie was volunteering with the group International Solidarity Movement (ISM), which formed after Israel and the United States rejected a proposal by then-United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson to place international human rights monitors in the occupied territories. The ISM defines itself as “a Palestinian-led movement committed to resisting the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land using nonviolent, direct-action methods and principles.” Israel was building a large steel wall to separate Rafah from Egypt, and was bulldozing homes and gardens to create a “buffer zone.” Corrie and seven other ISM activists responded to a call on that March day to protect the home of the Nasrallah family, which was being threatened with demolition by two of the armored Israeli military bulldozers made by the U.S. company Caterpillar.

Cindy Corrie, Rachel’s mother, related what happened: “The bulldozer proceeded toward Rachel. ... She was in her orange jacket. When it kept coming, she rose on the mound, and the eyewitnesses testified that her head rose above the top of the blade of the bulldozer, so she could clearly be seen, but the bulldozer continued and proceeded over her, and so that it was covering her body. It stopped and then reversed, according to the eyewitness testimonies, without lifting its blade, so backed over her once again.

“Her friends were screaming at the bulldozer drivers through this to stop. They rushed to her, and she said to them, ‘I think my back is broken.’ And those were her final words.”

Shortly after Rachel’s death, the Corries met with the Bush State Department. It was there that the idea of a civil lawsuit was first presented, by Secretary of State Colin Powell’s own chief of staff, Lawrence B. Wilkerson. Craig Corrie, Rachel’s father, recalled: “He said: ‘If it was my daughter, I’d sue them. I don’t care about money. I wouldn’t care about anything. I would sue the state of Israel.’ ” Ultimately, this is what the Corrie family did.

Just before heading to JFK Airport in New York to attend the trial, Craig Corrie told me about the lawsuit: “We’re accusing the state of Israel of either intentionally killing Rachel or of gross negligence in her killing seven years ago.” The day after Rachel was killed, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon promised President George W. Bush a “thorough, credible and transparent investigation.” Yet according to a Human Rights Watch report from 2005, Israel’s “investigations into Corrie’s killing ... fell far short of the transparency, impartiality, and thoroughness required by international law.”

The civil trial, Craig Corrie says, is not about the monetary damages, but discovering information, and “like [South African Archbishop] Desmond Tutu talks about, of mending the tear in society.” The Corries never speak solely about their daughter, but about the plight of the Palestinians and the Israeli siege of Gaza. According to the latest figures of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, 24,145 houses have been demolished in the occupied territories since 1967, including the 4,247 that the United Nations estimated were destroyed during Operation Cast Lead, the name Israel gave to its military assault on Gaza in December 2008 and January 2009.

Of course, more than houses were destroyed there. More than 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed. The Corries also express concern about the psychological toll exacted on Israeli soldiers. Craig Corrie said, “We lost Rachel, and that hurts every day, but that bulldozer driver lost a lot of his humanity when he crushed Rachel.”

The trial begins during the same week that Joe Biden makes his first trip to Israel as vice president. As chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden sought answers on the death of Rachel Corrie during the confirmation hearings for U.S. Ambassador to Israel James Cunningham.

Biden knows the pain of losing a daughter. His daughter was killed with his first wife in a car accident in 1972. The Corries are calling on people around the world to stand with them on March 16, the anniversary of Rachel’s death, for truth, accountability and justice, “to raise and highlight many of the critical issues to which Rachel’s case is linked.”

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 800 stations in North America. She is the author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.

Boycott, Divest From, and Sanction Israel?: A Debate on BDS with Omar Barghouti and Rabbi Arthur Waskow

Democracy Now!

JUAN GONZALEZ: Indirect negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders are expected to begin next week as US Middle East envoy George Mitchell returns to the region. The Arab League has agreed to back the US proposal for four months of indirect talks.

While many observers are skeptical of these so-called proximity talks succeeding, when years of direct negotiations have failed to produce an equitable and lasting peace, meanwhile Palestinian civil society and international solidarity activists are using very different tactics to push for a just resolution of the conflict.

In 2005, a coalition of Palestinian civil society groups called for people all over the world to engage in a nonviolent campaign to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel until it complies with international law. Inspired by the international boycott and divestment initiatives applied to South Africa in the struggle to abolish apartheid, the new movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, or BDS, for short, was born.

AMY GOODMAN: This week marks what many BDS campaigners call “Israeli Apartheid Week.” First launched at the University of Toronto in 2005, it now includes events at university campuses in more than forty cities around the world.

Several Israeli officials and diasporic Jewish organizations have criticized the events, and a recent report by an Israeli think tank highlights the BDS movement as part of a “deligitimization network” that Israel should treat as a “potentially existential threat.”

Well, today we’re going to host a debate on the BDS movement, the call to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel. Omar Barghouti is a founding member of the BDS campaign. He’s a Palestinian human rights activist and commentator. He’s joining us from Berkeley, California. And for an anti-BDS position, we’re joined from Philadelphia by Rabbi Arthur Waskow, a longtime antiwar and civil rights activist, founder and director of the Shalom Center, theshalomcenter.org.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Omar Barghouti, why don’t you lay out why you established the BDS campaign, why you want people to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel?

OMAR BARGHOUTI: The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, or BDS, campaign is a call by Palestinian civil society. It’s supported by almost the entire Palestinian civil society, political forces, NGOs, women’s organizations, unions, and so on.

It’s calling upon people of conscience around the world to boycott Israel and institutions that are complicit with Israel, including companies and so on, because of its three-tiered system of oppression against the Palestinian people: its occupation, 1967 occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and that includes East Jerusalem; as well as its system of racial discrimination against its non-Jewish citizens, the Palestinian citizens of Israel; and the third and foremost is its denial of the right of return for the refugees, Palestinian refugees, in accordance with UN Resolution 194. So these three forms of injustices are exactly what we’re targeting. We’re targeting Israel because we want to end its impunity, and we want to end complicity of the world in this system of injustice.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And Rabbi Arthur Waskow, could you explain to us why you think this is a wrong approach to the problem?

RABBI ARTHUR WASKOW: So, first let me say shalom and salaam and peace to you, Amy and Juan, and to Mr. Barghouti, and to say, to begin with, that in a sense I think the question, yes or no on BDS, is the wrong question. The right question is, how do we bring about an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and the blockade of Gaza, and of East Jerusalem? And it seems to me that when you put the question that way, BDS really becomes an ineffective and, in some ways, unethical way of going about it, that the major change that needs to happen is a profound change in the actions of the United States government, and that there were hints of that, more than hints, in the rhetoric of President Obama, but a total failure to carry through in policy on the rhetoric of the Cairo speech and some work since then.

The real question is, can the United States—will the United States—it can, for sure—will the United States use its enormous influence and power to end the occupation, to end the state of war between Israel and the entire Arab world except for Egypt and Jordan? Can the United States bring about a full-fledged peace treaty between a new state of Palestine, the state of Israel, and the Arab states. The Arab states have, in fact, proposed this. The Israeli government and the last US government, the Bush administration, totally ignored the proposal. There are hints that that’s what the Obama administration wants to bring about.

But it won’t happen unless there is a public movement in American society to demand that. It won’t happen otherwise. And when I ask the question, so what’s the most effective way of bringing that about, it seems to me an alliance of the three groups of people in America who care passionately about the peoples of the Middle East—Muslims, serious Christians and serious Jews—an alliance of those in those three camps who are committed to peace is now possible. In the Jewish community, there are now organizations and commitments and human beings ready to act on this, even though the classic, formal, institutional structure of the established Jewish institutional system doesn’t. But the Jews do, and among Muslims and among most Protestant and Catholic Christians—not some of the right-wing fundamentalist Christians, but the rest of the Christian community. But they have not come together in any way to make this happen. And that’s what needs to happen.

There are reasons that I think BDS is a mistaken approach. And I’ll explore those—

OMAR BARGHOUTI: If I may interrupt?

RABBI ARTHUR WASKOW: —but I wanted to make clear that I think there is another way to go at this.

AMY GOODMAN: Before Omar Barghouti responds, I wanted to stay with you, Rabbi Waskow. You supported the anti-apartheid movement. You supported the divestment movement and the sanctions movement against South Africa. But you call the BDS movement against Israel, as you were just saying, perhaps unethical. What do you see as the difference?

RABBI ARTHUR WASKOW: Well, one major difference is a strategic difference. The enormous support for the South African apartheid regime did not come from governmental sources. It came from private banks. I did a sit-in at the Chase Manhattan Bank in 1965 to demand an end to its loans to the apartheid government. In this situation, the enormous economic support is not coming from private banks and industry. There’s some, but that’s not the big support. The big support is from the United States government. That’s totally different from the South African situation. If you apply the kind of basic issue in South Africa, how do you change the economic relations, with the unjust behavior of the Israeli government now and the unjust and violent and occasionally vile behavior of some Palestinian leaders? How do you change that? It’s the United States government you’ve got to look to, not private industry or private commerce. So that’s one really big difference simply at strategic and tactical levels.

Ethically, the problem is that there is a real Israeli society with a decent substructure: culture, economics, life process, the revival of Hebrew, the creation of novels, etc., etc. The trouble with the BDS, across-the-board sanctions and boycotts and so on, vis-à-vis Israel is that it demonizes Israeli society. It does not say there is an Israeli government which is behaving badly, and therefore we need to bring pressure to bear on the Israeli government, as, by the way, and not so by the way, the folks who actually did the Gaza Freedom voyage found that when they got into Gaza, Hamas acted unjustly and repressively toward them. It didn’t want them to make contact with the Palestinians of Gaza, the real folks in the streets. So there is not just the demonization of a whole people and the sanctification of another people. The Israeli government, overwhelmingly, some Palestinian leaders, less powerfully, because they have less power, are acting unjustly and oppressively. And that’s where the focus needs to be. BDS demonizes a whole society.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Omar Barghouti, what about the issue, one, of whether the campaign demonizes an entire society? And also, if you can speak about the similarities that you see between the anti-apartheid boycott campaign and this one, especially in the situation where states, the existing states in the world, were unable to remedy either the South Africa situation or the current situation in the Middle East?

OMAR BARGHOUTI: OK, there are obvious similarities, but this is not just about similarity between the Israeli apartheid and colonial system and the South African apartheid system. This is about whether Israel is indeed practicing apartheid and colonial rule against the indigenous Palestinians. And it is. And this is according to the UN Convention on the Suppression of the Crime of Apartheid. We don’t have to prove that Israel is identical to South Africa to prove that Israel is practicing apartheid. We’re saying that it conforms to the UN definition of the system of apartheid.

What do we mean by that? Inside Israel proper—forget the occupied Palestinian territories of 1967—inside Israel, there are two systems of laws: one applying to its Jewish citizens, who are also nationals, and another applying to its non-Jewish citizens. So there’s clear discrimination. Even the US State Department, in its annual human rights reports, accuses Israel of institutionalized legal and societal discrimination against the Palestinian Arab citizens of the state of Israel.

So how do we end the occupation, apartheid, as well as denial of refugee rights? It’s through boycott, divestment, and sanctions as an empowering tool that can have the masses, that can have the social movement acting to change US policy, exactly as we did—and I was in the anti-apartheid movement in the South African case—as we did against South African apartheid.

Of course there’s complicity from Western governments, but so was the case in the South African apartheid case, and companies and institutions. The most important way to challenge this system of complicity and to challenge Israel’s impunity and exceptionalism—Israel is put on a pedestal, and it’s not treated like the rest of the world when it comes to its violations of human rights and international law—we need to take it down from that pedestal and treat it like every other offender, every other system, that creates such injustices.

This is not about demonizing Israel as in an abstract term. What BDS is delegitimizing is delegitimizing racism, apartheid and colonial rule, exactly what BDS in the South African case was delegitimizing. It was not delegitimizing white people or Christians; it was delegitimizing apartheid. So this is what we are against. We’ve never come out and said we’re against this or that group of people based on their identity. We’re against Israeli apartheid and colonialism. We couldn’t care less if Israel were a Jewish state, Catholic state or Muslim state. So long as it’s oppressing us, we will continue to resist it.

And BDS is a very nonviolent and effective form of resistance. It is growing tremendously. No one can speak on behalf of the Jews of the world, as if they’re are all in one basket. I think that’s completely inappropriate. There are many Jewish groups that do support the BDS movement, including inside Israel, including in this country. And increasingly in Western Europe, many Jewish groups are joining the BDS movement, because they see it as one that’s very morally consistent. It’s based on international law and universal human rights. It does not distinguish between people based on their identity, as the Israeli system does.

Second, the Israeli state is not standing alone in space. It is completely supported by the institutions of the state of Israel, including academic and cultural institutions. No amount of rebranding and dance groups and music and poetry can cover up Israel’s apartheid and colonial system. So this rebranding effort is exactly unethical, because it’s trying to whitewash this system of oppression.

And the last point I want to mention is that it’s a very opportune time to debate this, at a time when the University of California students are striking against the incredible rise in the tuition fees and the privatization, so to speak, from the back door, of college education in this country. Why should the University of California raise the fees by 32 percent, while Israel is receiving from the United States more than $5.6 billion a year in military aid as well as other forms of aid? Why should Israel, an apartheid and colonial system, continue to receive this huge subsidy, tens of billions of dollars over the years of the occupation and apartheid, while the health system, education system, infrastructure in this country are crumbling, and education, college education, is again becoming a privilege of the rich? Education should be available to everyone. And to do that, we really need to address where the priorities are in US funding.

AMY GOODMAN: Omar Barghouti, what about Rabbi Waskow’s point that it matters less to target Israel, it’s the United States that’s the real power in this situation in its huge support for Israel? And also, in your BDS movement, which companies would you be targeting?

OMAR BARGHOUTI: OK. But precisely because it’s the US that’s the sponsor of Israeli oppression and apartheid, we are indeed trying to change US policy. The issue is how to do that. We have the South African precedent, a very good lesson to learn from, that this is the way of changing policy in the US. It’s not through begging. It’s not through writing letters to Obama that he would ignore. It’s through mass movement, social movement at the grassroots level, students and churches and unions and women’s groups and feminists and so on, all of them acting together on a platform that’s anti-racist, progressive, and wants to end injustice.

RABBI ARTHUR WASKOW: I agree with that, but the question is whether BDS is the way to bring that social movement together.

OMAR BARGHOUTI: So I think—I think—I think this is the point, that we have to act from the grassroots up to pressure and change.

The companies—your second question is what companies we do target in the BDS movement. It varies. BDS is not a one size that fits all. It’s context-sensitive. In every situation, we target companies that are complicit in Israel’s apartheid and occupation that we can win our battle against. So in the US, many American military companies are being targeted. In Sweden, a French company was targeted. In Britain—and so on and so forth. So it’s Israeli companies as well as international companies that are complicit in Israel’s apartheid and occupation.

AMY GOODMAN: Rabbi Waskow, your response?

RABBI ARTHUR WASKOW: Well, first of all, it’s interesting that Mr. Barghouti focuses on the certainly unreasonable military aid the United States gives to Israel—and, by the way, to Egypt, as well—as the problem for the University of California, when in fact ten or twenty or thirty times that amount of money is being spent on the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s where the huge amounts of money that should be going to American schools, universities, infrastructure, ought to be coming from. And by that standard, it’s almost—it’s a dangerous and poisonous drop in the bucket, but it is a drop in the bucket, the aid to Israel and to Egypt for—with military aid to them. The big question in American society ought to be the overwhelming distortion involved in the massive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the American military that is engorged even aside from and beside those wars.

But secondly—

OMAR BARGHOUTI: Which is the same agenda.

RABBI ARTHUR WASKOW: —the question is, indeed, how do you create a mass movement? How do you create a social movement? And what I said is what I think needs to happen. Mosques, churches, synagogues, and, yes, feminists and students and so on, ought to be gathering around a demand that the United States government insist on the Palestinian independence, on the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, all of it, in approximately the 1967 boundaries, and a full peace treaty for Israel with the Arab states. That is an ethical demand. It doesn’t demonize anybody. It ends the oppression of the occupation. It ends the danger—

OMAR BARGHOUTI: But you’re ignoring the majority of the Palestinians.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well—

OMAR BARGHOUTI: You’re ignoring the majority of the Palestinians.

RABBI ARTHUR WASKOW: No, it doesn’t ignore the majority of the—

JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to ask Rabbi Waskow, the issue of—Israel is obviously worried about this delegitimization campaign, and one of the Israeli think tanks, Reut, issued a whole analysis and a strategy for combating it. And it talked about the fact that generally Israel has concentrated on state-to-state relations to achieve its ends. Here in the United States, you say that we should be focusing, or the people should be focusing on effecting government policy. But doesn’t the fact that both the Democrats and Republican parties, virtually all of the leadership of both parties has lined up for decades behind Israeli policy, indicate that perhaps a different direction, a civil society approach, as this one represented by the BDS campaign, is a new way to go and that precisely it’s the fact that it is a non-state movement that is developing under BDS that has some sections of Israeli society worried about its effectiveness?

RABBI ARTHUR WASKOW: No, that’s not the reason. They’re upset because there is some organizing going on. I assure you that if, in American cities, mosques, churches and synagogues, together, said—together said, “We are going to demand that our members of Congress insist—and the President—insist on a full peace treaty for an independent Palestinian state, alongside Israel, and a full peace treaty with the rest of the Arab world,” that the Israeli—present Israeli government would be a great deal more scared, and the Israeli people would become excited at the idea of, at last, at last, a peace treaty that ended the pressures on Israel, with the only tradeoff—and for many Israelis, it would be a good tradeoff—being getting off the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

And in the American Jewish community, which has been hostile to any kind of arrangement that the Israeli government didn’t like, such an approach, which included a full peace treaty for Israel, as well as a full peace treaty with Palestine, that would appeal to a huge proportion of the American Jewish community. And organizations that didn’t support it would fall into line or would fall apart as a result. It’s the social—I agree about the social movement being necessary, but it’s not going to get there by BDS. It’s going to get there by targeting the most important target—

OMAR BARGHOUTI: But it’s happening.

RABBI ARTHUR WASKOW: —the government of the United States.

OMAR BARGHOUTI: It is happening.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Omar Barghouti, your response?

OMAR BARGHOUTI: Yeah, well, first, it is happening. I mean, the rabbi is denying that this is happening. BDS is indeed spreading tremendously. We have major support from large trade unions in Britain, Norway, Spain, France, Italy and many, many countries, Canada, of course. And increasingly it’s entering the United States, slower than the rest of the Western world, but it’s happening. There’s a huge movement supporting BDS that includes several Jewish groups, and that’s being ignored. There’s a disproportionately high number of Jewish—conscientious Jewish citizens of the Western countries that are not just acting, but leading some BDS movements around the Western world.

But again, let’s go back to the issue. This is not just about ending the occupation. There are three basic rights for the Palestinian people. The majority of the Palestinians happen to be not in the occupied Palestinian territories; they happen to be refugees, ethnically cleansed, during the creation of the state of Israel in and after 1948. These are completely ignored in addressing—reducing Palestinian rights to self-determination to simply ending the occupation will not do. This is simply unacceptable. We have to address Israeli apartheid, the system of racial discrimination, and we have to address the UN sanctions rights of the refugees.

But the most critical issue to address now—not strategically, now—is ending the siege of Gaza. There’s a criminal siege of Gaza. The Goldstone report, the UN rapporteur for human rights, all of them describe the war crimes committed by Israel in Gaza. And the siege is certainly a big form of collective punishment, which is a crime against humanity. People are dying. Real people are dying. This is not an abstract notion. The siege must end.

So we’re reaching a stage where Israel is committing slow acts of genocide against 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza. This is extremely critical, and it demands people of conscience around the world to act, and act very effectively. And the BDS movement offers them an empowering, nonviolent tool through which they can impact policy in the US, in the Western world, and certainly in Israel.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you feel, Rabbi Arthur Waskow—

RABBI ARTHUR WASKOW: Well, I agree that the—

AMY GOODMAN: —there is a point—Rabbi Waskow, is there a point that you would support—a point at which you would support BDS? What would—what do you think has to get worse?

RABBI ARTHUR WASKOW: No, it’s not a matter of what has to get worse. The question is how to end the worse. And I don’t think BDS is going to end it. And if BDS spreads in Western Europe, it isn’t going to matter. It’s the United States that has the actual power to make a difference. And BDS is not going to engage enough of the American population to matter. What is going to matter is the structure of American military aid and the structure of American diplomacy toward Israel, toward Egypt, toward the Arab world. That’s what matters. And BDS in Western Europe is not going to matter. So it’s not a matter of what gets worse; it’s a matter of how to end the worse.

And I say again, the—yes, there needs to be a social movement. There now is—in the Jewish community, there’s not only J Street having absorbed and empowered the folks of Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, there is also movement inside the Reform Jewish movement. There is movement among Jews who, in theory, are unaffiliated, but care about this issue, and who feel unrepresented by most of the American Jewish established institutions. That’s where the change has to include, and along with that, it has to include the Protestant and Catholic churches, it has to include Islam in America. And the working together is what’s going to make the difference. Those are the only Americans, aside, I guess, from the big oil, who care about the Middle East.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have—we’re going to have to leave it there for now. We want to thank Rabbi Arthur Waskow, founder and director of the Shalom Center, and Omar Barghouti, who is one of the founding members of the BDS campaign, the boycott, divest from and sanction Israel campaign.

RABBI ARTHUR WASKOW: And I want to end by saying again, shalom and salaam and peace to all of us.

AMY GOODMAN: Thank you.