Anti-Occupation Activists Question U.S. Aid

Stop American Billions for Israeli Bombs

by Alisa Solomon

The Village Voice

Week of December 26, 2001 - January 1, 2002

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0152/solomon.php

There weren't any surprises in the foreign-aid bill Congress passed last

week, least of all in the appropriation the U.S. handed Israel: more than

17 percent of the entire foreign-aid expenditure, $2.7 billion. That's on top of the $2.5 billion in military support from the defense budget,

forgiven loans, and special grants the tiny state rakes in each year. Up to 80 percent of this aid never leaves the U.S., because it's earmarked for arms purchases that must be made here.

As usual, there wasn't any significant debate, and to be sure, nobody

seriously suggested America's largesse be linked to Israel's compliance

with human rights accords, UN resolutions, or international law. The

prevailing viewas the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC puts itis that "U.S. aid to

Israel enhances American national security interests by strengthening our

only democratic ally in an unstable and vital region of the world."

Nonetheless, in the 15 months since the outbreak of the Al Aqsa Intifada,

scores of groups around the country have come out against the Israeli

occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem - some pressing

for a two-state solution, others emphasizing the Palestinian right of

return. Now the question of U.S. aid is at the cutting edge of this

activism. Campaigns from Berkeley to Boston are connecting demands for

peace and justice in the region to Congress's underwriting of the

occupation and Israel's use of F-16s, Apache helicopters, and other

American-made weapons against Palestinian neighborhoods and refugee camps.

SUSTAIN (Stop U.S. Tax-Funded Aid to Israel Now) has point people in a

dozen cities around the country organizing teach-ins and letter campaigns.

The San Francisco group A Jewish Voice for Peace is, among other things,

conducting a petition drive, asserting that "as Americans, we do not want

our foreign aid dollars used to deprive Palestinians of justice and human

rights. As Jews, although we support a democratic Israel, we must criticize

its security policies that have the effect of making it less safe, not

more." And on campuses like the universities of California, Michigan, and

Illinois, a movement modeled on the anti-apartheid activities of the 1980s

is beginning to call for divestment of university funds from companies with

strong ties to Israel.

Even if none of these groups actually expects Uncle Sam to cancel Israel's

allowance anytime soon, they understand how effectively American aid can

function as a focal point for the most important step in any movement for

Israeli-Palestinian peace: basic public education. "People don't understand

that there's still an occupation," says Chicago-based writer and analyst

Ali Abunimah. "Even so, they are paying for it."

Between corporate media's presentation of foreign policy from the State

Department's point of view and a pro-Israeli PR machine that treats the

conflict as if the parties were both powerful nations, a common perception

persists of Israel as a besieged little democracy under constant attack

from preternatural Jew haters. But even with the horrific suicide bombingsa

series of bloody attacks claimed more than 30 Israeli lives in the last

month aloneIsrael remains the powerful partner, controlling the lives of 3

million disenfranchised and dispossessed people and responsible for killing

more than 800 Palestinian civilians since the hostilities boiled over last

year. Nothing is likely to shift in the conflict without significant

pressure from the U.S., so cracking public perception here is key.

"Like Cuba," explains Hussein Ibish, of the American Arab

Anti-Discrimination Committee, "Israel is as much a domestic as a foreign

issue, especially given the incredible power of the Christian right and

Jewish pro-Israel lobbies as well as the major defense contractor lobbies.

To get through to people in ways that can counteract those lobbies," Ibish

adds, "you need to describe the reality of occupation precisely. You can't

substitute a slogan for the details; it's just not helpful. In the U.S.,

the most important activism is discursive."

The divestment movement growing on dozens of campusesand Jewish

organization efforts to discount it provides an example in miniature of the

way different narratives of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict compete in the

U.S. Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of California,

Berkeley, have used street theater to drive their campaign, once setting up

a mock checkpoint at a campus gate, for example. According to SJP member

Snehal Shingavi, the group has already collected 5000 student signatures on

a divestment petition, specifically targeting, among others, General

Electric, which produces propulsion systems for Apache helicopters and

F-16s and in which UC invests hundreds of millions of dollars. Currently

SJP is planning a national student conference for mid February; they expect

several hundred students from all over the country.

If UC regents have so far shrugged off SJP demands, major Zionist

organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League have expressed some alarm,

creating resource kits for Jewish students so they can rebut

anti-occupation claims. True, the rhetoric can get overheated (it's not all

that rare for somebody to charge Israel with "genocide" at campus rallies).

Still, progressive Jewish students find themselves equally turned off by

the one-sided bromides proffered at the local Hillel. "I don't agree with

the Israel-is-always-right attitude I get from Jewish groups on campus

because I think the occupation is absolutely wrong and must end," says an

Ann Arbor student who requested anonymity. "But I can't join a

demonstration with banners that say 'Zionism Equals Racism' because I don't

buy into that, either. It's also too knee-jerk and simplistic."

For longtime activists, recognizing how much discursive ground has been

lost in recent years is profoundly demoralizing. "I feel like we've taken

so many steps backwards," said Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz after a meeting last

Sunday in which she and half a dozen other Jewish feminists, all

anti-occupation veterans of 10 to 20 years, planned a midtown vigil in

solidarity with a Jerusalem rally organized by Israel's Women in Black for

December 28. "True, some things are better. It used to be you couldn't even

say 'Palestine,' " Kaye/Kantrowitz explained. "But now we have to correct

the almost universally held but completely wrong idea that Israel offered

peace and the Palestinians answered with violence."

A little more than a decade ago, as the first intifada brought the

occupation into American living rooms with TV coverage of Israel's

bone-crushing response to a mostly nonviolent popular uprising, at least

some of the public understood who was the occupier and what that meant, and

a movement to link aid to human rights compliance began to take shape. The

taboo on questioning Israel's foreign-aid entitlement was even broken on

the floor of Congress in 1990, when Wisconsin Democrat David Obey suggested

future budgets reduce aid to Israel by the amount that country spends to

build or expand settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Two months later, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, setting off the Persian

Gulf War and foreclosing any statementsmuch less actionsthat might have

made America's Middle East ally fear abandonment. Soon after, Yitzhak Rabin

and Yasir Arafat signed the Oslo accords at the White House, heartening all

who hadn't bothered to actually read the agreement or look at a map with

the hallucination that the occupation was ending and peace was at hand.

Congressional criticism, as well as grassroots activism, faded away. But

the occupation did not. And despite Representative Obey's suggestionand

worse, despite the Oslo agreementIsrael rapidly expanded settlements,

doubling their population in the years since the accords were signed.

Palestinians' lives got worse: Israel continued to demolish homes;

Jewish-only bypass roads connecting settlements to Israel increasingly

chopped up the West Bank, dividing Palestinian communities into

disconnected Bantustans; Israel retained control of water and other

resources and continued to confiscate Palestinian land. And it certainly

didn't help that corrupt officials in Arafat's Palestinian Authority

pocketed funds meant for economic development. Americans hadn't paid much

attention, so when the Al Aqsa Intifada erupted, it was easy enough for

them to buy the Israeli version of what had gone wrong: the Palestinians

simply didn't want peace.

"We had done a good job during the first intifada of showing the

occupation," says Phyllis Bennis, a fellow with the Institute for Policy

Studies who specializes in the Middle East. "But our mistake was in not

continuing to talk about human rights violations as an ongoing reality of a

repressive, spirit-killing, military occupation. It seemed as though if

guns weren't being fired, then things must have been fine. But you don't

have to fire a gun to control someone, you only have to have it. That's why

if you hold up a store by aiming a gun at the cashier, you've committed

armed robbery, even if you never pulled the trigger. Israel was still

holding the gun, but we had stopped pointing at it."

Now that the guns are blazing again and the wider war rages nearby,

threatening to expand ever more explosively, Israel-Palestine activists

feel both that their efforts are more urgent and more inadequate. Despite

last week's declaration of a ceasefire by Hamas, nobody expects a miracle.

Though "not an optimist in the short run," Ali Abunimah remains convinced

that "a broad-based movement against the occupation and in favor of a just

peace, based on equality and ending domination," can succeed. "People

forget that there was a strong business lobby in this country for South

Africa during apartheid and that American policy was turned around entirely

due to public pressure," he says. "There are precedents."

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