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The Role of Activism and Non-Governmental Organizations

Edited Transcript of Remarks by Mr. Josh Ruebner
'For the Record' No. 301 (21 August 2008)

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and activists have played crucial roles throughout history in the struggle for equality and justice. Josh Ruebner, National Director for the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, discusses the role of NGOs and activism in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as his personal challenges and successes with his career in advocacy.
 

The Palestine Center
Washington, DC
22 July 2008


Mr. Josh Ruebner:

Thank you very much for that kind introduction and thanks to the Palestine center for inviting me to be here with you today. It's always an honor to be here. I've got a little PowerPoint presentation here to go along with my remarks.

As was mentioned, I'm the National Advocacy Director for the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. We're a national coalition of more than 250 organizations, which are working together to end U.S. support for Israel's military occupation and human rights abuses and to change our current policy to support one that's based on human rights, international law and equality for all.

Well, I've been asked to speak with you today about the role of activism and the role of non-governmental organizations in helping to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to help bring about peace and justice. Before I jump into speaking specifically about the work that our organization does, the work that we can do in the United States to help change policy, I think it's important to situate the work we do in a historical context and look back at great heroes of the United States, of U.S. history who have taught us an incredible deal about how to organize, what the purpose is of activism and how social change is created in this country. We're going to kick it a little bit 'old school' today because I like to go 'old school.' We're going all the way back to the 19th century for some of this. 

So, this is, of course, Frederick Douglass, a former slave, Abolitionist leader, author, activist and lecturer. He had a profound understanding on the process of historical change and lived through a huge process of historical change in this country'the abolition of slavery. He said:

If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will.

So, what he is saying here is that change does not happen of its own. We can't just hope to see the change that we want to see in this world. Change happens because people organize to take political power, to make political demands. Also, what's very important to recognize, in which Frederick Douglass recognizes, it's not politicians that create change; it's people organizing together, working together, struggling together to bring about that change that eventually forces the politicians to accede to that demand. And we've seen time and time again in the history of this country, that politicians are usually the last ones to get it. They're the last ones to respond to the demands of the people, but when they do, it's as a result of us organizing for that change.

Now, here is someone who might hopefully not be more obscure, but let's see if folks can identify this gentleman. Henry David Thoreau, another author, activist, Abolitionist, anti-imperialist, fighter for peace and justice. He said:

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth ' certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.

What he was talking about in his classic essay on civil disobedience was a lot of things. He was also talking about not buying into government and not supporting a government in any way which supported slavery. But he was also talking about what was the United States' biggest war of imperial aggression back in the mid-19th century, and that was the war on Mexico just like today we have our war on Iraq. What Thoreau was saying is that we have to look within ourselves to create the change we want to see in the world. We have to analyze what are the different components of injustice. So, when he was looking at the issues of slavery, he saw lots of different pulleys and cranks and levers and mechanisms that supported slavery, and he understood that you didn't need to be a slave owner to support the system. Even just by paying taxes to a national government that was established in support of slavery, you were in part responsible for that.
 
I think that Thoreau definitely speaks to us today, especially when we're talking about U.S. policy towards Palestine-Israel. We have to ask ourselves how can we be a counter-friction to the injustices that we see, how can we identify the different components of the injustice of the policy, and then organize to be a counter-friction. And for some of us, this will be different. For some of us, we'll like to engage in political activism, talking to our legislators. Others of us will like to contact the media and write letters to the editor and so forth. Other people will want to work within their religious institutions to affect campaigns of boycott divestment and sanctions against Israel. It doesn't really matter what you do. Nothing is more of an effective tactic than one another. But you should find where you can make the greatest impact and try to create that change and to be a personal counter-friction.

The first thing that we have to do to bring about the changes that we want to see in regards to our country's policy toward Palestine-Israel is to educate people because the reality is a lot of people don't know what this policy is, don't know the effects it has, don't know the ramifications that it has for Palestinian human rights and the violation of Palestinian human rights. So, one thing that we do is a lot of public education work. This takes a lot of different forms. What I'm showing you is an ad that we placed in the Washington, D.C. metro last summer  in May to advertise a rally that we did on Capitol Hill to mark the 40th anniversary of Israel's illegal military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. This advertisement was seen millions of times by people in the course of a month throughout the D.C. metro system, and I hope you all got a chance to check it out.
 
We also did some public advertising campaigns this year to mark the 60th anniversary of the Nakba, or 'catastrophe' in English, where Palestinians refer to the ethnic cleansing and disposition that they suffered in 1948 when Israel was created and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven from their homes and hundreds of  villages were demolished and destroyed. This is an advertisement that we ran in New York, actually in Manhattan, to coincide with the country's largest pro-Israel 60th birthday celebration, which was a march down up 5th Avenue through the heart of Manhattan. So, we put up 1,000 of these posters. It has the names of Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948 parachuting down onto the skyline of Jerusalem and then it has a few sentences about what took place in 1948.

Another thing that we did to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Nakba was to use this as a billboard, a mobile billboard on a big flat bed truck that circled the National Mall on June 1 when there was a festival to commemorate Israel's 60th anniversary. We also took it the next day to the AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] conference and circled it around the Washington Convention Center. These are the type of things that we do publicly to raise awareness, to challenge people to think, to get people to understand the role that the United States plays in maintaining this conflict and maintaining violations of Palestinian human rights.

We do, I'd say, almost all if not all of our educational work within what we call an anti-apartheid framework. Most of you are probably familiar with the term of apartheid from its historical example in South Africa. Indeed, apartheid is an Afrikaans word meaning 'separateness' or 'segregation,' but it's actually acquired a universal meaning. Apartheid was not limited to South Africa and has never been limited to South Africa. In fact in the early 1970s, the U.N. passed an international convention, the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of apartheid. In this convention, the U.N. universalized the theme of apartheid and said that any governmental system that promotes segregation and differences based on race, based on ethnicity, based on religion is inheritably illegal and immoral and it is actually considered a crime against humanity.

Well, we use the language of apartheid not only because of South African leaders, such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former President Nelson Mandela, have used these words in describing Israel's conduct. Actually, I don't know if you all saw this, but just a few weeks ago a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious delegation of high ranking South Africans went to Israel-Palestine. And they reported that what they saw. It was far worse than anything that their country had experienced under apartheid in South Africa. It's not just because the South Africans are speaking up against Israel's apartheid policies that we use this as a framework. We use this as a framework because apartheid is a very precise legal term that I mentioned earlier but also because it's something that is very applicable not only to Israel's treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories but also applicable to how Palestinians are treated as citizens of Israel and as refugees who are not allowed to return to their homes.

Let me just say a brief word about the differential legal systems involved for all three of these different categories. Of course in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, I'm sure you're all aware you have segregated roads, you have travel restrictions and curfews and so forth that is collectively imposed on the Palestinian people, where Israeli settlers are living there in violation of international law and violation of the Geneva Conventions and really subject to no law at all. Brutalized and harassed on a continual basis are the Palestinians who live there with almost no accountability whatsoever for their [settlers'] actions. So, you have clearly two regimes'one for Palestinians and one for Israeli Jews in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Whereas Israeli settlers in the occupied territories are subject to the Israel's civil justice system, Palestinians are, of course, subjected to Israel's military justice system, which is no justice system at all. So, you very clearly have a case of apartheid here in terms of how Palestinians are treated on one hand and Israeli Jews are treated on the other hand.

Of course, that applies to the way Palestinians are treated as second class citizens of the state of Israel. Palestinians are approximately 20 percent of Israel's population, and they are subject to a whole series of discriminatory laws based on religion or based off ethnicity that prevent them from receiving adequate and equal allocations from the government, for human services like schooling and health and infrastructure and so forth. They're subject to a whole bevy of discriminatory laws in terms of how they can and can't organize politically, who they can and can't marry, how they can or can't develop their own land, etc. Again, these are discriminations based on ethnicity, based on religion that makes Israel's treatment of Palestinians within Israel clearly apartheid. With refugees, you have a very clear-cut example of apartheid. Whereas a Jewish person, like myself, could claim automatic citizenship to Israel if I so chose, Palestinian refugees who were forced out of t heir homes are not allowed to return back to Israel.  So again, you have a discriminatory policy on the basis of ethnicity or religion, and this, as I mention before, is the very basis of apartheid.

This is why we use the apartheid framework as a basis for discussing Israel's policies towards the Palestinians and also U.S. support for these polices.  And I'll say one more thing about this before I move on to the next slide. Using the apartheid framework, we don't like to call it an analogy; it's not an analogy. There are similarities and differences between Israel-Palestine and South Africa, but the important thing to remember is that apartheid is this universalized term that has a specific legal connotation. The thing is that the word apartheid in the minds and ears of Israel's supporters and defenders and apologists is something that is very scary.  It's something that's very delegitimizing.

The more apartheid is used in a mainstream context by people like Mandela, Tutu and [former U.S.] President Jimmy Carter, the more its supporters feel on the defensive. But as probably all of you are aware, educating people about issues is clearly not enough. And in some respects, only educating people about the issue can actually be very disempowering. It can actually prevent people from doing anything and paralyze them because we all know how dire and grave and desperate the situation is and how it only seems to get worse every day. Well if you beat people over the head with that information and then offer them no light at the end of the tunnel, they are just going to get depressed and they are going to ask, 'Well what can I do about this, how can I make a difference?'

We're going to have to think back to what Fredrick Douglass said, think back to what Henry David Thoreau said and figure out how we can be counter frictions to stop these polices and U.S. support for them. So, we have a number of different action campaigns that we're working on. One is to challenge U.S. policy of support for Israel's military occupation and, specifically, to challenge the increase level of military aid that's now flowing to Israel.  As I'm sure most of you are aware, Israel is the largest recipient of military aid from the United States, and in August of 2007, the United States and Israel signed a memorandum of understanding to increase that aid even further to $30 billion dollars over the next decade. This is a 25 percent increase over current year levels of military support for Israel. [U.S.] President [George W.] Bush requested $2.55 billion dollars for the financial year 2009, which starts this fall in 2008; it's the first installment of this ten year memorandum of understanding.

So, what we're doing [is] we're trying to organize people to go out into their communities across the county and challenge people and educate people to challenge this policy. A lot of people don't know [about this] unless you read the [U.S. Senator Barack] Obama speech in the AIPAC conference very carefully where he said he would work to implement this ten year memorandum of understanding. Other than that, there's been virtually no mention of this deal in the U.S. media whatsoever and considering that it's a huge amount of money with huge implication for our policies. We really need to do a better job of going out and educating people on the grassroots level and then getting them to take action to challenge this. So, we've printed up post cards like this, 'I want you to spend $30 billion on Israeli apartheid.' Since we've launched this campaign in February of this year, we've gotten more than 300 people organizing work around the country in, I think, 41 or 42 states. And we've sent about 250,000 letters to members of Congress on the Appropriation Committee that deals with the military asking them to oppose this aid. So, one thing we can do is challenge military aid to Israel.

As we do this work of educating people and organizing them to challenge U.S. support for Israel's military occupation and the military aid that makes it possible, it's very important to link up to other peoples' struggles. Sometimes people make the mistake of thinking, 'The issue I care about is the most important thing in the world.'  Maybe for you personally it is, but for another person they have their own struggles; they have their own issues that they are working on. And some of them can be much more immediate. We're in a huge economic crunch right now in this country, and a ton of domestic social needs are going unmeet. It's our job to take the issue of this $30 billion and explain the human rights violations that are involved with this military aid to Israel and then counter pose that to the unmeet domestic needs in this country, such as clearly funding social security, funding health care for all, rebuilding the Gulf Coast, cleaning up the environment, etc. This is a good way to link up with people who are doing local social justice organizing and to say, 'We can spend this money better. We have mistaken priorities in terms of how we fund our budget in this country, and we need to work together to reorient our spending priorities and make sure that we're taking care of important human needs both here and abroad rather than giving all this money to military contractors so that Israel can oppress the Palestinians.'

Now in 2005, Palestinian civil society issued a very important call to the world, to the international community'a call to initiate campaigns of boycott divestment and sanctions against Israel and against companies that profit from Israel's human rights abuses until the time when Israel ceases to be in violation of human rights standards and international law. This was manifested. It was signed by 180 Palestinian civil society organizations both in the Occupied Territories, within Israel and in the diaspora. It's a call that's been picked up all over the world. You have unions in South Africa, in Canada, in the U.K. that have already divested from their Israeli institutions. You have mainstream churches in this country like the Presbyterian Church, the United Methodist Church, I believe, the Lutheran Church as well that are beginning to take steps to look into their investments, look into the corporations that they have their money invested in and take money out of stocks and corporations that are literally making money off of Israel's military occupation and human rights violations.
               
So, we view this call for campaigns of boycott divestments and sanctions as the natural flipside to our campaign to challenge current U.S. policy towards Israel-Palestine because on the one hand, we the people, the voters, the constituents in this country give Israel this money every year; that's on one hand. That's on the policy side. And then on the corporate side, these corporations like Motorola, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and so forth get these contracts and, with our taxpayer dollars, give these pieces of equipment to Israel to commit these human rights violations. So, it's like the flipside of the same coin, and the reason why we're targeting Motorola is because Motorola very clearly profits from Israeli apartheid and Israeli human rights violations. You might say, "Well, what's wrong with Motorola? They just make nifty cell phones." Well, they actually make a lot more than cell phones, and cell phones are actually a small part of their global sales. They make fuses for aerial-to-ground bombs. The MK-80 series of bombs explode with a Motorola fuse. In 2006 during Israel's war on Lebanon, you may remember when the bomb was dropped on the apartment building in Qana, Lebanon where a lot of children had taken refuge from the bombing and 28 civilians were killed. That was a bomb with a Motorola fuse in it. Not only does it make fuses, but it has a huge $100 million contract with the Israeli army to supply them with advanced communications gear. This helps Israel commit human rights violations from many different perspectives'from the ability to shut down Palestinian travel and movement to the ability to coordinate troops to do various operations. The whole entire communication system of the Israeli army is premised on Motorola equipment as is the U.S. army in Iraq, actually. So, Motorola is not only profiting from human right violations in Palestine; it's doing it in Iraq as well.  

In addition and in contravention of the International Court of Justice's [ICJ] Advisory Opinion that the Wall that Israel has built in the West Bank is illegal and has to be torn down, Motorola has provided surveillance equipment that Israel uses along the fence/Wall/barrier that it constructed in the West Bank, and it's also provided advanced communications gear for 47 illegal settlements in the Palestinian West Bank. So, all of these different things and this is all done by Motorola's fully owned subsidiary, Motorola Israel. All of this implicates Motorola in profiting from military occupation, profiting from human rights abuses. Just as was the case in South Africa when the corporations had invested in the apartheid, racist regime, they were subject to international campaigns of boycott and divestment. We need to start doing the same thing with Motorola, with other corporations that profit. So if you have a Motorola phone, perhaps you'll consider choosing another phone when your contract expires and calling Motorola and telling them why you're not renewing or why you're not using their phone. Actually, Motorola's not a service provider; it's just a phone provider that works on all networks. Whatever cell phone company you have, they're probably selling Motorola phones as well. So, you can go to your cell phone provider and ask them to provide alternatives to Motorola phones. I've got some postcards here which are deliverable to Greg Brown, the CEO of Motorola, who has been incredibly uncooperative with our campaign and who has not seriously addressed these, well they're more than, allegations. It's research that we have done that clearly implicated Motorola in human rights abuses. They sent back a very meaningless rejoinder to our charges against them saying that Motorola has a human rights policy. That was basically it.

Another corporate accountability campaign that we are engaging in is against the Caterpillar Corporation. This might be a more well-known campaign to some of you as it has been going on for the past five to six years and has involved other organizations as well such as "Stop Caterpillar" based in Chicago. Jewish Voice for Peace and a number of mainstream churches that I mentioned before are in dialogue with Caterpillar. The problem with Caterpillar is that they are selling these monster bulldozers'this is the D9 model that you're looking at'to Israel and these have been used to demolish thousands of Palestinian homes, to uproot agriculture, to uproot infrastructure, to help build the Wall, to help build settlements. And here you can see it's taking down some kind of agricultural tree. Caterpillar fully knows that it is profiting from Israel's military occupation and human rights abuses, and it chooses to do nothing. In fact, at least 18 people have been killed by Israel with Caterpillar bulldozers in home demolitions over the past seven years since the outbreak of the current intifada, including U.S. peace activist Rachel Corrie who was crushed to death by one of these D9 bulldozers in Rafah, in the Gaza Strip back in 2003. Caterpillar has been subject to numerous lawsuits and investigations by Congress and the State Department.  The issue of its sale of bulldozers to the Israeli army has been the dominant point of discussion during their last five shareholder meetings.

 So you say, 'What can we do? It's a multi-billion dollar corporation?' We don't have multi-billion dollars to invest in tarnishing the image of Caterpillar. But the reality is even though you and I don't use Caterpillar products on a regular basis, unless you happen to be a contractor or something like that, working through institutions like religious institutions, like unions and so forth can really bring a lot of pressure to bear on Caterpillar and the fact that a very underfunded international campaign has brought so much pressure to bear on Caterpillar. I think that's really a testament to the power that we do have as individuals and collectively. I do have some Caterpillar postcards as well. We like postcards at the U.S. Campaign if you can't tell. Again, pass these out to friends, family, acquaintances, co-workers, etc and be sure to sign one and send it into James Owens who is the CEO of Caterpillar. So, these are the two main boycott and divestment campaigns that we're working on as a contribution to this call from Palestinian civil society. Challenging military aid, challenging U.S. policy, challenging corporations that profit from Israel's military occupation and human rights abuses are all ways that we can get involved.

Before I close and open it up for questions and discussions, I want to leave you with one more quote. This one is a little more contemporary than the others. I'm sure you'll recognize this person. That's Martin Luther King, Jr. who said:

Let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.

I'll say a little to add on to that quotation. The arch of the moral universe doesn't bend of its own volition. Historical change and social change doesn't happen through inevitable processes. It doesn't happen because people think it might happen. It doesn't happen through impersonal forces. It happens as a result of people like you and me taking the initiative, taking the power that we have as individuals to create social change and our understanding that we are the agents of social change and we are the agents of creating that arch of the moral universe bending towards justice. So, I hope that all of you will join with us at the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation in helping us to bring this about. Thank you very much.


Josh Ruebner is national advocacy director at U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.