 Hello, my name is Bethany Sack. I'm a team organizer with Main Voices for Palestinian Rights. MVPR is an educational organization focused on Palestinian rights and focused on supporting the international boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement, which is a nonviolent movement to put financial pressure on the Israeli government to change their oppressive policies. I'm here this morning with Josh Rubner, who is the National Advocacy Director of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. And the author of the recently released book, Shattered Hopes, Obama's Failure to Broker Israeli Palestinian Peace. Thank you so much for being here, Josh. Thanks for having me. Why don't we start with what prompted you to write this book? Well, during President Obama's first administration, there were two massive leaks of official documents that really shed light on how US foreign policy actually works. This was, of course, WikiLeaks and Chelsea Manning on the one hand. And also, within the Palestinian negotiating team, there was a huge leak of documents to Al Jazeera in 2011. And together, these two sets of documents really paint an intimate picture of how US policy toward Israel and the Palestinians is actually made. And I feel that our policy is so wrong in terms of being biased towards Israel's oppression of the Palestinian people that these documents really made it a necessity to try to get this story out about how the current president is actually approaching this issue in the hopes that our policy changes for the better to support human rights, international law, and equality for everyone. Can you tell us a little bit more about the peace talks that have been going on? What was on the table? Had they gone through? And now that they've failed, what do you anticipate coming next? Sure. Secretary of State John Kerry's deadline for Israeli-Palestinian talks just passed. It was on April 29. And the original intent of these talks was to have a full-blown peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinians within this nine-month frame of negotiations that he was helping to broker. That was later scaled back to only be a framework accord for figuring out how to move forward. But it became very clear early on in these talks that there was going to be no substantive breakthrough between the sides. And the reason for that, I think, is because what the United States and what Israel were putting on the table and offering the Palestinians was not a Palestinian state that would have any form of sovereignty, but it would be a non-sovereign entity under the complete control and thumb of Israel's control. So for example, this so-called state that the United States and Israel were proposing, Palestine would not be able to control its borders. It wouldn't control its airspace or its territorial waters or its natural resources. And Israel would annex all of its major settlement blocks and keep its military bases in place. This would be a very, very constricted non-sovereign entity, which was one of the reasons, among many, why these negotiations failed. And they have failed now for more than two decades. The United States has been trying to broker Israeli-Palestinian peace. And they failed, I think, in essence, because they're not designed to end Israel's separate and unequal treatment of the Palestinian people. And it's apartheid policies toward the Palestinian people, but rather the reverse is true. This is about trying to entrench and make permanent Israel's apartheid grasp on the Palestinians. And that's not the basis for a just and lasting peace. How long would you say that Israeli apartheid has been going on for? Yeah, John Kerry recently got into trouble in a closed-door meeting. He warned world leaders that in the indeterminate future, Israel may become an apartheid state by continuing this military occupation of the Palestinian people. But I would argue that John Kerry is wrong on this score. I believe that Israel has always been an apartheid state since it was established in 1948, because it has always defined itself not as a state of all of its citizens and certainly not a state with equal rights for all of the people over whom it rules, which is Palestinians living under military occupation since 1967, but because it defines itself in this way, where it privileges its Israeli Jewish citizens and discriminates against both Palestinian citizens and Palestinian refugees who are ethnically cleansed from their homes by Israel's establishment in 1948. And the non-citizenship status that many Palestinians have under Israeli military occupation, these are all clear signs of Israel's separate and unequal policies toward the Palestinians. So I would argue that these apartheid policies have been in place since Israel's establishment in 1948. At this time, would you say there's any glimmer of hope? I think there is. It certainly doesn't come from the official governmental level and I don't have any hope that US politicians are in the near term going to wake up and pursue a radically different course toward these negotiations, one that's truly even handed and promotes equality and human rights. But where I do draw a lot of hope from is the fact that we've seen a huge tremendous increase in the Palestinian civil society-led campaign for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel, against corporations that are profiteering from Israel's oppression of the Palestinians. And this is a very, very significant development and it's a movement that is self-consciously emulated on the successful international campaigns of BDS that helped bring about an end to apartheid in South Africa by isolating and yes, by delegitimizing South Africa's apartheid policies because apartheid, as defined by the international community, is a crime against humanity. And it refers to any system of racial or ethnic or national distinctions drawn by a country to institute policies that benefit one set of people and discriminate against another set. And what we're seeing today unfold is the exact same process which unfolded in terms of turning apartheid South Africa into a pariah. And even US political elites understand that there's nothing that they can do to prevent this situation from unfolding. Even though at both the federal level and at the state level we're seeing attempts by US politicians to try to penalize and even criminalize the freedom of expression to engage in these campaigns of boycott, divestment, and sanctions. But they're spreading like mushrooms on college campuses, especially today. There are hundreds of Students for Justice in Palestine chapters around the country, many of which are passing successful divestment resolutions on their college campuses. And this is very reminiscent of where things stood, I would say in the late 70s, in the early 1980s in terms of the growing isolation of South Africa, basically a decade away from the transition to democracy and equality there. But I think the process actually might unfold even quicker with Israel and the Palestinians. I don't think Israel's apartheid policies toward the Palestinians are sustainable in anything but the short term at this point. And because of revolutions in technology and media, the ability to organize and spread ideas is much easier and much quicker than it was back in the days of organizing to end apartheid in South Africa. And we're seeing victories build and build and the movement's really snowballing at this point. And I think it's causing Israel and its supporters great worry. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the successes that have happened within the BDS movement? Sure, absolutely. There have been corporations like the French multinational firm Violia, which is involved in all kinds of ways with Israel's military occupation in terms of providing environmental services for Israeli settlements in terms of providing transportation infrastructure for Israel's settlements and so forth. Violia has literally lost billions of dollars in contracts because of their profiteering from Israel's military occupation and they're desperately now trying to get out as a result because they understand that this is bad business for them. We've seen the Morgan Stanley Capital Index remove a corporation like Caterpillar, which gives bulldozers to the Israeli military that they're actually paid for by our taxes. And these bulldozers are in turn used to uproot Palestinian agriculture, demolish Palestinian homes, build Israel's apartheid wall in the West Bank. So we've seen Morgan Stanley Capital Investment delist Caterpillar from its socially responsible investment funds, and this in turn has caused many other social responsible investment funds to stop investing in Caterpillar. So we've seen these kind of divestment initiatives. We've seen mainstream Protestant denominations like the United Methodist Church, like the Presbyterian Church, pass resolutions for the boycott of Israeli settlement goods for sanctioning Israel in terms of ending US military aid. And this year, 2014, I think we'll actually see some of these churches begin to actually divest funds from problematic corporations. So we're seeing these type of wins and we're also seeing wins on the cultural and academic level. There was a very widely reported resolution passed by the American Studies Association in December of 2013 endorsing the Palestinian call for the academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions. And there have been three or four different US academic institutions and institutions that have now endorsed this call for the academic boycott. So we're seeing things like that. And we're also seeing that cultural figures like Snoop Dogg, like Elvis Costello, like Santana, like the Pixies are refusing to play in Israel and heeding the Palestinian call for Israel's boycott. Can you tell us a little bit more about the root of the BDS movement, where it came from and who put the call out for it? Sure, this call came from within the Palestinian civil society in July of 2005 on the one-year anniversary of the International Court of Justice ruling that Israel's apartheid wall in the West Bank was illegal, had to be dismantled and compensation had to be paid for those affected by it. And one year after this decision came down without anything changing on the ground and in fact Israel proceeding with the construction of this apartheid wall, Palestinian civil society came together to say we have to take matters into our own hands and 170 plus different Palestinian civil society organizations came together, issued this call and called for these campaigns of BDS to be run against Israel until it ends its military occupation of Palestinian lands occupied in 1967. So that means the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip until Palestinian citizens of Israel who today are 20% of Israel's population receive full and equal citizenship rights. And until Palestinian refugees are allowed to exercise their internationally guaranteed right of return to the homes from which Israel expelled them in 1948. So these are the three conditions that need to be fulfilled by Israel, by the way, all of which are in compliance with human rights and international law standards in order for these campaigns to be called off. It's not an open ended call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel until eternity. It's a call for certain policies of the Israeli government to be changed to bring it into compliance with international law. And the Palestinian BDS call also called upon conscientious Israeli Jews to join them in their efforts and indeed many groups of Israeli Jews have done so and partner with Palestinian civil society in moving forward these BDS campaigns. Great. As far as the US's ongoing ties with Israel, what's at the root of the US backing Israel regardless of what's going on on the ground? I think for the most part, US almost unconditional support for Israel stems from the fact that you have a very large and influential Israel lobby in this country. You have probably hundreds of different groups that are part of this Israel lobby. Some are Jewish, some are Christian, some are secular. But they're all united in lobbying for the maintenance and even the deepening of US support for Israel in terms of military aid, in terms of diplomatic support at the United Nations. So this I think goes a long way towards understanding why this policy is the way it is today. But it's not the whole story because certainly the United States derives benefits from this relationship with Israel, especially in the military sphere. So today we see a lot of coordination and integration between the military industrial complexes of Israel and the United States. There are actually dozens of different Israeli military corporations that have set up subsidiaries in the United States to work both jointly and by themselves, winning Pentagon projects that have in many cases nothing at all to do with Israel. So for example, Elbit, which is an Israeli corporation that helped build Israel's wall in the West Bank now actually won a very lucrative contract from the Department of Homeland Security to help construct the border wall with Mexico and the United States. So we're seeing this kind of integration. We see the next generation of F-35 fighter jets being produced by consortium of US corporations but also with heavy involvement from the Israel aircraft industries which is doing the avionics and doing the jet wings for these fighter planes. So there's a lot of integration. There's a lot of R&D jointly between the two countries and a lot of the weapons that Israel develops or tests out on behalf of the United States then make its way into the US arsenal for us fighting our wars declared and undeclared around the world. Mm-hmm. The US's financial contribution to Israel, what does that look like today? And what does that money actually go to? Right. How does that play out? Right. Israel gets the lion's share of the entirety of US military aid around the globe. US military aid is about $5 billion a year for the entire world and Israel gets $3.1 billion of that amount. So more than 60% goes to Israel. And the way this works is that Congress, when they complete their budget, they appropriate an earmark for military aid to Israel. This money goes directly into a bank account in New York controlled by the government of Israel. And what the government of Israel does is then draw on this funds to purchase, purchase because it's really US taxpayer money, but purchase these weapons. And we hugely, massively armed the Israeli military. We underwrite about 20% of Israel's entire military budget. Israel spends $15 billion a year on its military. We provide more than $3 billion a year of that financing. And in the 2000s, the military aid that we provided to Israel resulted in the United States transferring more than 600 million weapons and pieces of ammunition to the Israeli military, which makes us really deeply implicated. And deeply complicit in Israel's human rights abuses of the Palestinians, because every single time a Palestinian is injured or killed and this sadly happens on an all too frequent basis, those weapons are often provided to Israel at US taxpayer expense. So in a very real and tangible way, this is why we're responsible for ending this issue because we are responsible for perpetuating it by providing Israel with the weaponry that's necessary for it to maintain the suppression of the Palestinians. Would you say that the BDS or the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions Movement is the number one way to oppose what our taxes are going to? Or what would you suggest that we as a community in the United States do to be addressing the oppressive policies that we are intrinsically involved with? BDS is definitely a very strong avenue to pursue to achieve this, absolutely. And our campaign to end US military aid to Israel is the S, component of the BDS movement, is the sanction that we are trying to get the US government to impose on Israel. So that's part and parcel of the BDS movement, but I would also say that it's important not to ignore our politicians and for those people who want to see a change in US policy toward Israel, toward the Palestinians, to support a true just and lasting piece is based on human rights and international law inequality. We also have the responsibility to make sure that we're communicating our opinions to our elected decision makers as futile as that may seem at points because if we don't, then it only reinforces this dynamic of our elected decision makers only hearing from members of the Israel lobby. And so this reinforces in their mind that the only people who care about this issue are those who are advocating for Israel's oppression of the Palestinians. Now, politicians are not moral creatures. They don't make their decisions based on morality or ethics or what's good for the United States. They make their decisions based on what's going to win them the next election. And there's two things that influence how someone gets elected in this country, votes and money. And money is playing a much, much more prominent role these days than the former. So if politicians are only hearing from one side of this equation, it's going to reinforce strategic calculation in their mind that it's only going to help them to win the next election to tow this pro-Israel line, which is why we also need to push back at the official level. Can you tell us a little bit more about the US campaign to end the Israeli occupation? Sure, the US campaign is a nationwide coalition of more than 400 organizations with people from all different constituencies, women, student groups, different ethnicities and religions and so forth that have all united into this coalition to come together to challenge our country's policies and institutions in the broadest sense of the word to end our complicity in Israel's oppression of the Palestinian people and to change our policy to support human rights, international law and equality. So we're talking about BDS campaigns, we're talking about trying to influence our elected officials, we're talking about doing grassroots education and advertisements, trying to change the discourse in the media and so forth. So all of these things are components of what we do and it's clear that the Israel lobby is very, very worried by these largely grassroots efforts which are tremendously underfunded. I mean, it's really a David versus Goliath type of struggle here because on the one hand, you have largely grassroots groups or small organizations with maybe a million dollar budget at most going up against organizations that have tens if not hundreds of million dollars in their annual budget. So that's part of the reason why the Israel lobby has been successful up until a few years ago in really keeping a lid on the discourse because of these overwhelming resources. But the reality is that more and more Americans are waking up to the fact that we are responsible for Israel's ongoing oppression and apartheid policies toward the Palestinians and that this grassroots pressure is now beginning starting to even overwhelm the very well-funded efforts of the Israel lobby. What brought you into this work personally? Yeah, my father was born in Palestine when it was still the British mandate when Britain controlled it in 1944. And so he grew up as an Israeli, as a Jewish Israeli and immigrated to this country with his family back in the 1950s. So I've always had a very close, personal and family connection to this issue. And really for as long as I've had any political awareness and consciousness and began to see with my own two eyes Israel's policies toward the Palestinian people, I've just been very troubled and upset by what I've seen. Because I think if you go there, especially today with such glaring examples like the apartheid wall in the West Bank, if you go there with an open heart and an open mind, it really won't take you more than five minutes to understand that there is a structure of oppression that Israel has created over the Palestinians, which has to be lifted, has to be dismantled for there to be any chance of just peace and reconciliation. So you are on book tour with your book Shattered Hopes. Where have you visited and where else are you gonna be visiting? I think Maine is the 23rd state that I've visited since September. So I've been going all around traveling this country and just amazed at how big and beautiful it is. Yeah, wonderful. I want to make sure to mention two websites. One is the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. Their website is endtheoccupation.org. And Josh's website is joshrubiner.com, that is J-O-S-H-R-U-E-B-N-E-R dot com. And you can, can you order the book from that website or where would you recommend people go to order your book? Yes, you can order it from the website or any online bookstore service. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for being here, Josh. We really appreciate having your presence and all your information and experience here up in Maine. So thank you everyone for joining us today.