 For me, this issue is so important that Code Pink is addressing because it's a conversation that our whole society has not had and our media are unable to have and that Code Pink has been pushing us to have for 10 years, or since the war began, I'm sorry, for 15 years. Most vividly, I remember that moment when I was at the Republican Convention in New York in 2004 and I was sitting with all these important media people and they're all, you know, I was then part of the mainstream media and we're all tiered in terms of our importance and we're standing there listening to, sitting there listening intently to George Bush and in the middle of it, Jody Evans stands up and tears off a shirt and says, you know, your hands are covered with the blood of Americans and Iraqis, something like that and she starts screaming that and they dragged her out of Madison Square Garden right past the media. I'll never forget that. It was one of the most important moments for me on my journey and I think in the end for our country to see this brave person being dragged out, manhandled with her shoes flying off right by the media and they did not pay any attention. In early 2003, when I was demonstrating against the war and I saw my brother in California and he said to me, what do you think of this plan to invade Iraq? Phil, we demonstrated against the Vietnam War but my Jewish newspaper says that this war could be good for Israel and I just sat there and I was just so shocked by that. It was just a real revelation to me that American Jews in any dimension would be supportive of this war and yet my brother was telling the truth. His Jewish newspaper was pushing for this war as a good thing for Israel and many Jews were affected by that. Now, it's true that overall American Jews were opposed to this war more than any other group just about but leading Jewish organizations, Jewish newspapers, the Union for Reform Judaism, the Reform Jewish Organization and APAC, the leading Israel lobby were quietly pushing this war and not so quietly pushing this war and that for me was a signal moment. I realized that I'm a Jew and though I have not been as a writer and reporter and journalist, I haven't said I'm a Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew. On this moment I just stand up and say I'm a Jew, Jew, Jew and I am against this war as an American and as a Jew. What you will see is that in the run up to the war, leading figures inside the Israel lobby were endorsing this war and so APAC, though its official position was neutral on a war, it was lobbying Congress people to support the war and years later President Obama would refer to this when he said the same people who were pushing the Iraq war are trying to kill the Iran deal, a direct reference to APAC trying to kill the Iran deal. You also had sort of leading figures in the Israel supporting community who were pushing this war as a good thing for Israel. So that Benjamin Netanyahu testified who was not then Prime Minister, one of the few times he hasn't been Prime Minister in the last 15 years, was testifying to Congress that this war could remake the Middle East for the best. And the neo-conservatives were echoing that policy all through the Bush administration, many of them big supporters of Israel. And Hillary Clinton was then a senator from New York and she had no choice but to support the war. It's been said Gerald Nadler, a Jewish congressman from New York, bravely opposed this war and had members of the Jewish community, the right wing Jewish community saying you've got to support this war for Israel. He said no. Hillary Clinton was unable to buck these forces inside the pro-Israel community. She supported the war and she paid for it. She lost the 2008 nomination for the Democratic nomination for the presidency because of her support for the Iraq war and arguably it affected her this year as well when a populist revolution, kind of right wing revolution, upended her plans. When you look at this war from Israel's point of view, you have to remember that Iraq attacked Israel in 1991 during the Gulf War and fired scuds at Israel that Israel agreed not to retaliate against. So and Iraq had been among the Arab armies that had invaded Palestine and Israel in 1948 to oppose the creation of the Jewish state in Palestine. So there's been a long opposition between Israel and Iraq and as recently as 1996 leading American neoconservatives who care about Israel, Richard Pearl, David Wormser had advised Netanyahu that an Iraq war would be good in what they called the clean break proposal because it would rearrange the Middle East and it would rearrange it in a way that would make Israel more secure. So Israel believed that or many in Israel believed that within Iraq or successful Iraq war, the Arabs would sort of move over one was the expression and move over one meant that the Palestinians would get Jordan. They now have a state it's no longer an Israeli problem. The West Bank who knows what exactly how we divvy that up but we have a Palestinian state in Jordan and the Jordanians sort of take over Iraq and our problems are taken care of. They really did see this as a major potential reshuffling of the Middle East and that is what has happened and arguably it has actually served Israel in the end the destabilization of the Middle East.