WRMEA, December 2013, Pages 65-66

Waging Peace

Ruebner Book Talk Tours California

Author Josh Ruebner. (Staff photo Samir Twair)

Josh Ruebner closed a whirlwind Southern California tour Oct. 13 at Pasadena’s All Saints Church to promote his latest book, Shattered Hopes: Obama’s Failure to Broker Israeli-Palestinian Peace (available from the AET Bookstore).

Ruebner, who is national advocacy director for the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, argues that Barack Obama had a far better understanding of the Palestinian narrative because of his senatorial constituents in Chicago, including scholar Rashid Khalidi. The new president got off to a fine start on challenging the U.S. pro-Israel bias with his June 2009 speech in Cairo, where he spoke of the daily humiliations the Palestinians go through at the hands of the Israelis. Despite objections by the Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxman that Obama had become neutral, the president called for a freeze on Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

The Obama period of enlightenment drew to a close in May 2009, Ruebner said, after the U.S. Senate opposed the settlement freeze and Obama capitulated by putting Dennis Ross on the National Security Council, to the detriment of negotiation efforts of George Mitchell. This about-face intensified when Obama vetoed the U.N. resolution on war crimes committed in Gaza during the summer of 2009.

In Ruebner’s opinion, the solution is for progressives to increase their objections to gross handouts to Israel. “The game changer is political action to end military aid to Israel,” he said. He asked Episcopalians to join Methodists and Presbyterians in Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns demanding that U.S. corporations and pension funds no longer invest in Israel.

—Pat McDonnell Twair