By Kay Campbell | [email protected]
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on March 22, 2014 at 9:10 PM, updated March 23, 2014 at 6:09 PM
HUNTSVILLE, Alabama – Peace between Israel and Palestine will not come through American policies – which are moribund in a blinkered pro-Israel ideology no matter who is in the White House- but through grassroots efforts. And those efforts — to boycott Israeli goods made in occupied Palestinian lands, to get investment firms and institutions to divest of stocks in companies getting rich by selling tools to Israel that hurt Palestinians, to pressure governments to impose sanctions on Israel — are beginning to make a difference, says Josh Reubner, author of “Shattered Hopes: Obama’s Failure To Broker Israeli-Palestinian Peace.”
“In the 15 years I’ve worked on this issue as an activist, I have never been more optimistic,” Ruebner said. “We are clearly at an historical turning point. Just as the international spread of boycotts, divestments and sanctions against South Africa helped to delegitimize that regime, they are having the same impact on Israel.”
Ruebner spoke in Huntsville Friday, March 21, 2014, as the guest of the North Alabama Peace Network at the Huntsville Islamic Center. Ruebner is founder of Jews for Peace in Palestine and Israel, which is now part of Jewish Voice for Peace, and current director of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. The campaign seeks to pressure Israel to back out of the lands it occupied after the 1967 war.
“I’m not picking on Obama,” Ruebner told the crowd of about 60 people who attended the lecture, referencing the title of his book. “I give Obama credit where credit is due and blame where blame is due. But inside the (Washington, D.C.) Beltway, there is a bi-partisan tradition of nearly unqualified military and diplomatic support for Israel. This is an institutional problem.”
‘Shattered Hopes: Obama’s Failure to Broker Israeli-Palestinian Peace’ by Josh Ruebner
Reubner’s book analyzes Obama’s initial attempts to provide a different leadership on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, an attempt that was quickly reigned in so that Obama capitulated to the traditional American position of protecting Israel from international law and UN scrutiny. Documents made public by the Wikileaks episode prove that during the same time when Obama would travel to Stockholm to accept the Nobel Prize for Peace, he was secretly conspiring with Israel to squelch a report detailing Israel’s crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip. Obama has also allowed American military aid to Israel to increase 25 percent over the levels provided by George Bush’s administration, bringing the U.S. military aid to Israel to $30 billion over 10 years.
“This was during a time of sequestration here in the U.S.,” Ruebner said. “We can’t provide cancer-fighting drugs to senior citizens, yet we can provide $30 billion to Israel to kill Palestinians?”
Reubner himself grew up with an inherited interest in Israel. Since his Jewish father was born in what would become Israel, even though Ruebner himself was born in Chicago, where the family immigrated, he holds an Israeli citizenship. The connection shaped his career. Reubner earned a bachelor’s degree in political science and Near Eastern studies from the University of Michigan and a master’s in international affairs from Johns Hopkins University. He worked as an analyst in Middle East affairs at the Congressional Research Service before becoming a full-time activist in 2000 with the founding of Jews for Peace in Palestine and Israel.
The fact that he, a Jew, is criticizing the way Israel is treating Palestinians and the continuing colonization of Palestinian lands by Jews is becoming less and less rare, Ruebner said, in answer to a question about that.
“For as long as I’ve had a political awareness, I have been appalled by the brutality and racism of Israeli policies,” Reubner said. “As both an American and an Israeli, I feel a dual obligation to do something about it. Most younger Jewish-Americans think a lot like I do.”
For more information about the BDS, Boycott, Divestment, Sanction, Movement of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation – a national coalition of more than 400 groups – see EndtheOccupation.org.