 Hello and welcome to the latest in a series of interviews that Main Voices for Palestinian Rights is conducting with various outstanding leaders in the area of seeking a just peace in Israel and Palestine. My name is Bob Scheivel. I am the chair of Main Voices for Palestinian Rights. It is our primary mission to educate the people of Main about the history and current happenings in Israel and Palestine. We are very fortunate today to have with us Anna Baltzer. Anna has been an outstanding leader in this field. She has appeared on television some 500 times, including the John Stuart's The Daily Show. I believe I had that wrong. You've been on TV over 100 times, but I remember looking at the publicity stuff somewhere. Anna has spoken at some 500 venues at churches, synagogues, mosques, policy institutes around the world. And so we're very fortunate to have her here in Portland, Maine to speak with us about the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Anna, could we begin by having you tell us a little bit about your life and how you got involved in this issue in the first place? Sure. Thanks so much for having me here in Maine. It's been really great to be here. It's beautiful. I'm a Jewish American. I grew up with a very positive view of Israel. It was when I had graduated from college and was living in Turkey and was backpacking around the Middle East. I loved to travel. I started to hear a very different version of what was happening on the ground in Israel-Palestine from anything I had ever heard growing up, and it was through my friendships with Palestinian families that I met along the way, that I began to question what I had grown up hearing and believing, and I decided that it was very hard to kind of figure out the truth, and I wanted to go and see with my own two eyes to really try and understand the situation, and so that's when I went and began to live in Israel-Palestine, documenting the situation, human rights abuses, and working with farmers and women and others who were working non-violently for justice in the region, and since then I've been really interested in sharing some of what I saw with people here in the United States. I've been here to Maine, and I'm really happy to be back to talk about boycott divestment sanctions as a really tangible way that people in Maine can support justice for all people in Israel-Palestine. And you have also authored a book, and I regret to say that as I think about that question, I don't have a copy with me that I can hold up for everybody to see, but it's called a news... It's called Witness in Palestine, a Jewish American woman in the occupied territories, and my website, AnnaInTheMiddleEast.com, A-N-N-A, InTheMiddleEast.com, it's got the book and the DVD and other stuff. And I can say to all of our viewers that it's a wonderful book. It has lots of wonderful photographs in it, lots of personal stories about people living under the occupation. It's well researched and documented, so it has a mixture of research, documentation with personal stories. Is that, you think, covered pretty well? Yeah. It's got a lot of photographs, it's full color, and it really... It also sort of documents my journey of coming to understand and the interactions I had with people there. It's very personal, and then there's also a lot of history and other appendices, original maps, those kinds of things. So it's a good introduction for people who are not... Yeah, who maybe, like myself, didn't really know very much about Israel-Palestine. Well, maybe as a way of leading into, or as preparation for getting to BDS, people, which is Boycott Divestment Sanctions, about which people will say, well, why do you even need to do that? Why do you do that? Maybe a way of getting into that would be for you to say just a few things about what you experienced when you were traveling through the occupied territories so that we can have a better understanding of why is there a need for this. Yeah, good idea. So I worked with the International Women's Peace Service documenting the situation, and I was horrified by what I saw in the occupied Palestinian West Bank. There are segregated roads, one kind of road for Palestinians living there, and the other kind for Israeli citizens who live there, who are settlers, and who I can talk about as well. Really, very blatantly segregated roads. There's segregated license plates. You can tell which car has which kind of person by the color of the license plate. It's really what many South African leaders, including the anti-apartheid activist Desmond Tutu, have called apartheid, or in some cases worse than apartheid. Israeli settlements are towns and cities of Israeli citizens that have moved onto the Palestinian West Bank. This is land that's internationally recognized as Palestinian land. It's owned by Palestinian farmers and families who've been living there for generations. And yet Israel, which occupies the area and has since 1967, a military occupation with soldiers and checkpoints and everything, Israel is moving its own citizens onto this stolen land basically and building up towns and cities. And meanwhile, Palestinian farmers and families no longer have access to their olive groves. Their homes are demolished to make way for settlers to move in. If they resist, they're put into prison with no due process. In fact, not even charged a lot of the time. I could talk for hours about the ways in which Palestinians are suffering under this military occupation and their very basic rights to access to their own water, to their own trees, to their own jobs, to be able to visit one another, to be able to hold down a study job, to be able to get an education. Things that we really take for granted here in the United States are things denied to Palestinians every single minute of every single day because of this occupation by Israel. And this occupation is not happening in a vacuum. In fact, it's happening with full U.S. diplomatic and military support. The way that Israel is able to carry out this military occupation is through the billions of tax dollars that go to Israel in the form of weapons every single year. So we are very much a part of this. We are complicit. And that's why it's so important that we all here in the U.S. understand what's happening and do something about it. What you were saying there about the money at the end, I saw figures recently that the state of Maine between 2009 and 2018, people in the state of Maine will, through their federal tax dollars, have spent over $73 million to support Israel. And you can go online to a website. I think it's aidtoisrael.org. And punch on your state, click on your state, and you'll find out all the other ways that money could, if that same amount of money were used here. And I know that there's some 30,000 or 40,000 people in the state of Maine for whom basic health care could be provided if that money were here. So that's something for people to think about. Absolutely. Absolutely. There's a real cost to this. And the good people of Maine don't want their tax dollars going towards oppressing another population. And the people of Maine need their services and their own rights to be respected. You can even, on that website, you can click on your own city or your own county and see how much of that money is going to support Israel's oppression of Palestinians instead of being used in ways that respect human dignity and rights. When I am making the case for Palestinians in various venues, I will frequently hear, well, they have to have those separate roads and they have to have that wall and they have to wall off and protect the settlers because the Palestinians are a terrorist and they throw bombs or they throw rocks at cars and they're suicide bombers and that kind of thing. That's the reason we have to have all of this, including the occupation. How do you respond to that? I'm sure you've heard some of this. Sure. And that's actually one of the most, that's one of the ways in which it's been most important to see the situation with my own two eyes, to see how many of these institutions just don't make sense within the context of security. If you want to secure your population, why would you move them onto more Palestinian land? That doesn't protect your civilians. And the State of Israel pays its own citizens to leave their homes in Israel to move on to occupied Palestinian land. That cannot possibly make the Israelis or Palestinians safer. Building this apartheid wall that Israel has built, it's not being built between Palestinian towns and Israeli towns, it's being built between Palestinian towns and other Palestinian towns so that Palestinians cannot reach each other, cannot go to their jobs, cannot go to their schools, cannot go to their olive groves. In what way does it make Israel safer to separate Palestinians from their fields and from water and from education? I mean, when we read about these things in the US media, we are able to chalk it up to security, but when you see it on the ground, it just doesn't make sense. If they wanted to make those people safer, they could just bring them back into Israel and put that wall right along the green line in 67. Personally, I don't think that the way to peace is to just put one group on one side and one on the other and stick a wall between them. I mean, there were people who said that was a way to address apartheid in South Africa. There were people who, after slavery in this country, said, well, black and white people can't get along anymore, so let's just separate them. Personally, I would like to see a situation that gives true freedom and rights to all people in the area and does not try to solve the issue with ethnic segregation in apartheid. But certainly what we have now is even more absurd, which is that Palestinians are separated from each other and from their basic human rights and of course they're going to resist. Do you think the people of Maine would do nothing if their water was taken away from them and their children was taken away and their food and their land and their dignity? People are going to resist and if you're serious about seeing peace and justice in Israel-Palestine, you have to address the very basic human rights abuses that Israel is perpetrating with our tax dollars. Well, let's talk then a little bit about boycott and investment sanctions. So why don't you, first of all, just tell us what that is and then we'll go from there. Yes, I'm so passionate about BDS. I'm so excited to talk about it. In 2005, the Palestinian civil society, a group of 170 Palestinian civil society organizations issued a historic call for BDS, boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel and complicit institutions until Israel complies with international law and three very basic human rights of the Palestinian people are realized. And these three rights that the BDS call is focused on are, first of all, ending the occupation that we've been talking about. But it doesn't stop there because there are more Palestinians than just those living in the West Bank. There are those and Gaza. There are those living inside Israel as non-Jewish citizens of a Jewish state who are denied their equal rights, living inside Israel as Israeli citizens who are denied and we could talk about that if you wanted. People can also look online. There's a great group, Adallah, in Insight Israel that documents the situation. And then the majority of Palestinians who are refugees from 1948 when Israel was created as a Jewish state in an area that was predominantly non-Jewish, they had to remove the vast majority of the Muslim and Christian Palestinian population in order to create Israel as a Jewish state. And there are millions and now Palestinian refugees from this initial and in the words of Zionist forces, ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Anyway, the BDS call aims to achieve the basic rights for all Palestinians, those living under occupation, so an end to the occupation, equal rights for Palestinians inside Israel that they should not be second or third class citizens. And then that Israel must respect and promote the right of return for Palestinian refugees who are living today in exile, which is the majority of Palestinians. And this exciting Palestinian call for boycott divestment sanctions is very focused on these three rights. It's not focused on one solution or another, but it says that if we wanna see a real just and lasting peace, Palestinians' basic rights need to be respected. And so the ask is basically, I mean, to put things in perspective, the way that Israel is able to continue its oppression of the Palestinian people and its gross violations of international law and its war crimes, the 2100 Palestinian men, women and children, more than 500 children killed in Gaza last summer, the way that Israel is able to carry out these massacres of the Palestinian people and the military occupation in the West Bank and deny rights to Palestinians inside Israel and deny the right of return to Palestinians outside who have been living in exile. The way Israel can do this is with the, really the support of the international community, the outright diplomatic and economic military support from the United States and then really an international community that has done nothing. And so the idea is basically, there is no incentive right now for Israel to change its ways. And we need to create a cost to this occupation. We need to show that there will be consequences when Israel is violating these Palestinian rights and that if our governments are not going to do it, then we are going to do it. And we're going to do it non-violently. We're going to do it in a way that follows a time-honored tactics of the anti-apartheid movement. In South Africa. In South Africa, that's right. To say that we are going to end our complicity. And I can talk about some very sort of basic ways that people can do that. So for example, did you wanna? Well, I just wanted to ask you, how do you respond to an objection to BDS that comes from even so-called liberal Zionists in our country who will say, really, BDS sounds innocuous, but when they talk about the right of return, let's be honest, they're really talking about the end of Israel. They're talking about the destruction of Israel. They're talking about the demographic swapping of Jews with all of these Arabs. So how do you feel about that? How do you respond? Well, so the, okay, so Israel's Jewish majority is not an organic majority. The fact that Israel today as a Jewish state has a Jewish majority is not an organic phenomenon. What do you mean by that? It's an artificial one. Israel's Jewish majority was created and is maintained through the violation of Palestinian rights, through the removal of non-Jews from the area in 1948 up until today, through the preventing of Palestinians from exercising real self-determination and having equal rights. So what I would like to turn the question back and say if having a Jewish majority in a Jewish state requires the perpetual discrimination and brutality against non-Jews, what does that say about Israel? What is, you know, the Palestinians do not have to defend that they are human beings. That they, I mean, that if somebody said, well, allowing people of color to move into Maine that's gonna threaten the demographics of Maine, I would call that person a racist. And so we have to be really clear here that everybody deserves dignity and everybody deserves their human rights to be met. And absolutely, I want security and peace for all people, including Jewish Israelis, absolutely. But it can't come on the backs of the Palestinian people. This is the indigenous population of the land and they need to be included in any solution. And they need to have the right to live on their historic lands in the same way that Jewish Israelis are able to live there. So the right of return is not controversial. I mean, it's controversial among, you know, critics, but it's not controversial in international law. It's very, very clear. Palestinian refugees have the right of return and it's been prevented year after year by Israel and that has got to stop. You know, I'm sort of reminded as you're talking about a statement I read, it was in a book called Wrestling with Zion and it's a set of readings by many Jews. I don't know if they're all in America or, but anyway, many, many different Jews. And one of them is a piece written by Albert Einstein when he was being urged to support this new Jewish state in the Middle East. And his comment was that, no, I will not support that because what I would like to see is a state created by the two great Semitic peoples and see what kind of civilization these people would produce. And so it sounds like maybe that's sort of what, you would endorse that, I think, that why not have a cosmopolitan state that would invite and welcome all people and see what they create instead of just a narrowly defined state for one group. I mean, a narrowly defined state for one group is we've seen, it's not sustainable, it doesn't work. And it can't be called a... The violence today is not because there's not enough separation, it's because Palestinians have been left out of the solution, absolutely. Palestinians must have equality and the solution is not for us to decide here in Maine but really for the people on the ground too, but it can only be built upon the foundation of equal rights and justice and freedom for all people, including Jewish Israelis, but not only Jewish Israelis, it has to be Palestinians too. And this BDS call gives us a very tangible direction from the Palestinian people and I think many of us have often searched for, well, how can we support justice in Israel, Palestine? We're here, we're so far away. What does it mean really to follow the voices of the oppressed themselves? And we've been given a very clear answer. Palestinians from all parts of Palestine and in exile have said very clearly that if you wanna support our freedom, please end your own complicity in our oppression. And that means boycotts, divestment, and sanctions. So for example, when you shop at Haniford, grocery store here in southern Maine, are you buying products that are produced in Israeli settlements? Are you economically funding the military occupation of Palestine? You're a professor at the University of Southern Maine. Is USM invested in US and other corporations that are carrying out the occupation of Palestine and perpetuating Israel's apartheid policies? The University of Southern Maine, if that is the case, is complicit and needs to end that complicity, needs to divest its funds from these corporations in line with the Palestinian BDS call. Same with Bowdoin College recently had a BDS campaign where the student body had a referendum about the Palestinian call for academic and cultural boycott of Israel, which I'd also like to mention. Yeah, would you talk about that? Why is that so important? Absolutely, it's so important. So there is a Palestinian call for academic and cultural boycott of Israel. I think a lot of people tend to think of academic and cultural institutions. So for example, in the Israeli Bacheva dance troupe, the Jerusalem Philharmonic, Israeli state academic institutions, we tend to think of these things as sort of separate from politics, separate from Israel's oppressive apartheid regime. It's just art, it's just academia, it's just culture. But they are part and parcel of Israel's occupation and apartheid policies. It is in these academic institutions that settlements are designed, that state-of-the-art weapons used against the people of Gaza are designed. It is these cultural performers that are specifically tasked with representing Israel in a positive light as they tour around the world. So if the Jerusalem String Quartet comes to Southern Maine to do a string quartet performance, that is not just about music. That is about rebranding Israel in a positive light because Israel's image has been so deteriorating around the world because of its horrible policies and because of the good work of activists who are trying to bring the realities to light. Israel is in a PR crisis and basically has said, well, since people no longer believe that we are just a victim, now let's try and distract them away from our war crimes. And we know, right, that they're deliberately- Yeah, it's called brand Israel. You can Google it. It was developed by an Israeli think tank called the Reut Institute in conjunction with the Israeli government. That basically the idea is to rebrand Israel to divert attention away from Israel's political situation with the Palestinians and instead focus people's attention on Israel's cultural achievements, artistic achievements, academic, technological, scientific achievements. So when you see things about how Israel is so good of with ecologically sustainable technology, that is part of a branding campaign that is about whitewashing Israel's treatment of the Palestinian people. And don't they tell, that I hear you say at one point earlier that when art groups or performing groups are coming over that they are foreign ministry or to actually it tells them. They have to actually sign a document that says that they will be coming as representatives of the state of Israel. They are ambassadors of the state of Israel. Academic and cultural boycott as all parts of BDS never targets individuals, it targets institutions. So when we evaluate whether to boycott a particular Israeli dance troupe, for example, it's not about the politics of the individuals involved in the dance troupe. That's the relevant. They can be as racist or progressive as you want. What's important is are they here as ambassadors of the Israeli apartheid state? Are they here with a political angle? Are they connected institutionally to Israel's oppressive systems against the Palestinian people? That's what's important. It's about the institutional ties. And what you'll find as you do research is it is quite insidious that many of these cultural ambassadors are here precisely as representatives of the state and not simply to tap dance or do ballet or whatever it might be. So academic and cultural boycott can be a really, really powerful tool for us to use here in the United States. If you see institutional partnerships between universities here in Maine and those in Israel, those are things to look out for and could be good targets for a boycott campaign. I also wanna mention normalization which is part of the academic and cultural boycott call. Normalization refers to basically instances where Palestinians and Israelis are presented as two equals who are coming together to solve their problems through dialogue and through getting to know one another without actually talking about the political situation. So you can imagine how absurd it would be for someone during slavery to say, well, these slaves and their masters don't seem to be getting along very well. Maybe they should have some joint dinners together and tell stories and listen to one another and hug a little bit more and hold hands and sing kumbaya. You would say, what? The problem is not that slaves and their masters don't know each other well enough. The problem is slavery. And likewise, it's very tempting a lot of times for us here in the West to wanna bring together Palestinians and Israelis to talk, to get to know one another, to have dialogue, to see past their differences. But if you're coming together to coexist without resisting the system that is keeping these two people apart, you're doing more harm than good. And Palestinians have said very clearly. Because you're normalizing. Because you're normalizing. You're taking something that is utterly abnormal, namely Israeli apartheid, and you're making it seem like these two people have a normal relationship, but they don't. One has power over the other. And so if we really wanna see Israelis and Palestinians living together in peace, which I believe from the bottom of my heart is possible, we have to remove the system of apartheid that separates them. And so we need to be not coexisting, we need to be co-resisting that system. And I think it's worthwhile stressing, isn't it, that the BDS movement is a nonviolent movement. People, you hear them say, the Palestinians are so violent, they're so violent. And yet here's a nonviolent process. And then you would have some of those same people reacting as though, look, they're trying to destroy Israel, how horrible they are. Would you comment on that? It's really quite hypocritical and unreasonable for people who have been saying how Palestinians have to be more nonviolent. Well, here is something that is 100% nonviolent. It's built on tactics that were used by Nelson Mandela and Gandhi and Martin Luther King. These are well-tested, time-honored tactics to use in anti-colonial, anti-racist struggles throughout history to shame Palestinians for now using, what do you want Palestinians to do? You know, it's really quite hypocritical and unreasonable to not support this effort. It is nonviolent, it has incredible power, and we've seen incredible successes actually around the country which I can talk about. Yeah, yeah, so this is, I mean, I'm a BDS organizer today, and I remember a time when we were just kind of getting started and now I can't even keep up with the number of victories unfolding seemingly every day from corner to corner of this country and of the world. There are victories happening on campuses around the country where student governments are voting in favor of divesting their university's funds from companies involved in the Israeli occupation and calling on their universities to divest. Churches, the Presbyterian Church of the United States of America, voted to and divested from corporations involved in the occupation, including Caterpillar, Motorola, Solutions, and Hewlett-Packard. And that's pretty mainstream. Absolutely, just get more mainstream than that. It's not just a fringe, it's not just a fringe movement. No, no, the Quakers have divested and the Mennonite Central Committee has divested and the United Methodists will be considering divestment next year in 2016, other denominations are considering it this year, including the Episcopalians, including the United Church of Christ. I mean, this is not marginal, this is really mainstream and I'm hopeful to see churches taking the lead on this in the way that they very much did in the civil rights movement. What about Soda Stream? Soda Stream, so Soda Stream is a in Israeli settlement product. It's a homemade seltzer maker. It's made, or was made, manufactured on stolen Palestinian land in the Palestinian West Bank. And Soda Stream came under such scrutiny through boycott campaigns around the world that it finally was forced to move its plant out of this Israeli settlement. Unfortunately, it chose to move into the Palestinian Negev, which is inside Israel. Human Israeli, the Palestinian Negev. Well, it's onto the Negev, which was home to Palestinian Bedouins who are now displaced, unfortunately, by the factories. So we have to keep the pressure on and say, no, Palestinians in the Negev are also human beings. But it really shows the power of this movement. That there's this Gandhi quote, I may not, I may, I'm not sure if I'm saying exactly right, but the essence is, first they ignore you and then they laugh at you and then they fight you and then you win. And it's very clear, it's very clear that they can't ignore us anymore and they're not laughing, they're trying to fight. I mean, there's anti-BDS legislation being considered in Congress because just showing just how powerful this burgeoning grassroots movement has become, there are millions and millions of dollars being poured into fighting BDS efforts and yet the movement is only growing, becoming more creative and having more victories with every passing day. It's really holding us all accountable as individuals and it's also giving us back our power that we're not gonna wait anymore for the U.S. Congress or for the Israeli government or for the president to come to their senses. So let me ask you, because we've got just a few minutes left. Sure. What do you think we in the state of Maine can do? How can we become a part of this? You can, I'm so excited for Maine to become a part of the BDS movement and I know that there are already groups that have been working on BDS. It's really, one of the great things about BDS is that it's context specific. So it's up to each local community to evaluate different potential targets and then come together to focus on one. That's the most effective thing, is to really focus. And it's really up to you to look, what are targets in the area? Is it gonna be a product in Haniford stores and you grow a campaign asking Haniford to de-shell that product? Is it gonna be a local university where you're calling on the university to do it best? Is it going to be a remax, which is a real estate seller provider that's based in Denver, Colorado and has franchises all over the world, including inside settlements, they're selling settlement property and making a profit from it. And there are remax agents right here in Maine. There could be a campaign asking remax to have a policy of not selling in settlements and stopping profiting from the occupation. There are lots of exciting possible targets next time there is an academic partnership with an Israeli academic institution or next time there's an Israeli official cultural ambassador coming to town. That could be a great campaign. I'm so jealous at the wealth of possibilities here in Maine and I hope that those watching will be able to follow up and contact Maine Voices for Palestinian Rights and the Maine BDS Coalition to get involved. Let me just mention that there are actually two groups. One is called Maine BDS Coalition and the other is called Down East BDS Coalition. And so I think we've got a basis here for work and if there's anyone in our audience, you out there who would like to get involved with this at all, you can just send an email to mvprites. mvprites at gmail.com. That's rights like R-I-G-H-T-S. R-I-G-H-T-S, right. So it's sort of Maine Voices for Palestinian Rights. We just go mvprites at gmail.com and express your interest in this and then we will send on your name an interest to those who are heading up this particular campaign. Well Anna, it's been a real pleasure having you here and hearing your voice and getting your ideas about what we might do and just learning more about BDS. Thank you very much. I'm so grateful, thank you so much for having me and I can't wait to see the great work that happens here in Maine. Let me just add that you are seeing this particular interview on a CTN slash five, community television network channel five. And if you'll go to their website and look under memberships and then the members and go down to mvpr, you will find some other interviews on there that you might really be interested in seeing. Thank you.