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All right you guys, Scott Horton's show.
Introducing Josh Rubner.
He is the director of the U.S. campaign for Palestinian rights.
Isn't that funny?
A Jewish guy is the head of the U.S. campaign for Palestinian rights.
He's the author of Shattered Hopes, Obama's Failure to Broker Israeli-Palestinian Peace, and he's got a new one that's coming out soon entitled Israel, Democracy or Apartheid State.
He's a former analyst in Middle East Affairs at the Congressional Research Service.
That's interesting.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Josh?
I'm doing well.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Welcome to the show.
I've been reading you for years.
Happy to have you on.
Very important piece that you have here at electronicintifada.net.
New U.S. bill would punish settlement boycotters.
And well that just sounds like it couldn't possibly be true.
Please fill us in.
There's a bill introduced in March concurrently with the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee called the Israel Anti-Boycott Act.
And what this act would do is that it would not only penalize but actually criminalize U.S. corporations and individuals from supporting or furthering the impact of a boycott against Israel or Israeli settlement products called for by an international organization.
It's the most extreme and draconian of the dozens of different anti-BDS bills that have been introduced both at the federal level and at the state level in recent years to try to combat through this very heavy handed top down way the growing success of this international movement in support of Palestinian rights.
Well I don't know maybe this is just me but it seems like this is the kind of thing that is on the face of it trying to push too far and guaranteed to generate a counter reaction create more publicity for BDS and there's no way in hell it would stand even in 2017 America the Supreme Court would never allow a law like this right?
One would hope and hopefully it doesn't get to the stage where it needs to be challenged in court thanks to the ACLU's very strong opposition to this bill which came out last week.
Both Democratic and Republican members of Congress who have signed on as supporters of this bill are making all kinds of excuses for not understanding what they signed on to saying that they don't want to take away anyone's personal right to engage in boycotts against Israel or settlements and I understand to a degree their confusion about this bill because it's not very it's not very clear-cut when you read the bill the text of it it doesn't say that you are going to be imprisoned for 20 years if you boycott an Israeli settlement product instead what it does is it references other laws and amends those and you have to look to yet another law to discover the penalties that are involved for breaking the amendments to the existing law so it is very convoluted and I think that was part of the reason why AIPAC wrote it in this way because there's no conceivable way that Congress would pass a bill that out and outright criminalizes individuals taking their own economic decisions on what products they should or should not purchase in response to an international call for boycotts.
Well you know never even mind how unconstitutional and everything it is it seems completely unenforceable in just in the sense that you know if a store decides to buy this brand of food or that brand of food are they now that's a predicate for a criminal investigation to find out what their motive was in not buying Israeli?
Well according to the text of the bill the company in question would have to state publicly that they were doing it to further a boycott called by the UN by the EU by any other international organization never mind the fact that there is not any international organizational boycott call on Israel or its settlement products right now but what's really disturbing even if a small business decides not to stock this or that Israeli wine made in a settlement in the West Bank even if they are not doing so in direct response to one of these calls for an international boycott of Israel they could still conceivably be criminalized under this bill if it became law if their action had the effect of furthering that boycott.
All right and now so you're saying that a lot of the is it congressman too or is it just the senate version so far?
Sorry the same version was introduced in both houses.
And now so you're saying that now that they're being notified and a little bit scandalized about this on the margins anyway are some of them actually backing off?
I've heard some weasel words like well I'll have to have my staff investigate this and this kind of thing but has anybody said no I changed my mind?
No office has yet to drop their sponsorship of the bill but Senator Kirsten Gillibrand from New York was confronted by multiple constituents of hers at a town hall meeting last weekend in the Bronx and she basically pledged that if after talking to the ACLU and understanding that they had legitimate first amendment concerns about this bill that she would withdraw her support so we're still waiting on her to do that and we're certainly mobilizing activists to press her to do that in response to her pledge to take another look at this bill.
All right now so this part of it I don't know if this account is a bill of attainder or something like that it's a lot less controversial to me because I'm against anybody getting any subsidy from the Export-Import Bank but says in here that people would be specifically excluded or companies would be specifically excluded from operating through the XM Bank if they were part of the boycott in any way is that part being challenged as well?
Yeah absolutely we're raising that issue with congressional offices and that is indeed another unconstitutional aspect of this bill because what it's doing is denying a governmental service to a corporation based solely on their first amendment protected right to freedom of speech and the Supreme Court has ruled on many different occasions over the past half century that the government cannot deny services to a company or an individual based on their political viewpoint.
All right and then so now is there any I mean there's got to be at least some public blowback against the American Israel Public Affairs Committee about this too right you seemed certain a minute ago that they're the ones who wrote this legislation.
Yeah absolutely and in all the congressional offices that we're talking with none of them have said well AIPAC came up to here to lobby for this bill and told us that we'd be imprisoning people for 20 years if they boycott Israel.
They haven't been pitching this at all in that fashion and I think that that is creating a lot of dissonance between offices and AIPAC especially offices that are used to just signing on to whatever AIPAC proposes they realize that in this case AIPAC went not only too far but way too far and didn't even explain to them the true implications of this draconian bill.
Well you know so this is kind of a side question but it's sort of the point of the BDS in the first place right is to draw attention to the reason behind it.
It says here the tentative title for your new book has the word apartheid in it.
There's some kind of emergency people are being oppressed and yet certainly that's not the kind of thing that these senators and congressmen ever talk about the occupation in terms of you know anything about its effect on the occupied only maybe you know on the occupied only maybe you know how Israel might be inconvenienced by it or something like that or need better weapons from us so that they can carry it out better but I wonder if any of them while you mentioned Gillibrand there I think I read a little bit about that at Mondo Weiss about some of the conversation at that town hall meeting but I wonder if anybody else is actually being kind of forced to participate in a further discussion about the occupation itself.
I guess she had said in that thing that yeah we asked Netanyahu what was your plan for peace and he had no answer because of course that's not what he wants so that was pretty good she was kind of provoked into making a statement further than she had ever made before on that issue I think so any anything else along those lines?
Yeah absolutely I agree that you know when you have constituents who are out there at town hall meetings pressing their members of congress about this issue it makes it much much more difficult for them to hide behind the traditional pro-Israel arguments that they're used to deploying at AIPAC conventions and so forth but what's really interesting I think in congress right now is that we're seeing at least the progressive wing of the democratic party feel more and more emboldened to take stances in support of Palestinian human rights that we didn't see even a few years before and I point you to a congressional dear colleague letter that was sent to the state department last month signed by 32 democratic offices calling on the United States to urge Israel to drop spurious charges against the Palestinian human rights defender who's now under trial in an Israeli military court for engaging in peaceful non-violent protests against Israel its military occupation and its settlement so to have that big of a block of members of congress come out very forcefully in this type of letter is signs of growing unease I think within the democratic party or at least certain parts of it over continued support for Israel's policies and I think what's happening is that these members of congress are responding to developments in public opinion so for example there's a brookings institution poll from December of last year that found that 60 percent of all democrats now support the idea of sanctioning Israel which was never the case before so members of congress are political animals and they're responding to shifting tides and realizing that in many cases the base of the democratic party is no longer in tune with the traditional pro-israel policies of the past all right hang on just one second hey guys the war state by mike swanson great book about the rise of the military industrial complex after world war ii and check out all his great investment advice at wallstreetwindow.com and if you want to buy some precious metals you go to roberts and roberts brokerage inc that's rrbi.co rrbi.co buy your anti-government propaganda at liberty stickers.com stickers for your band or your business at the bumper sticker.com 3t editing for your writing project at 3t editing.com and of course sign up for tom wood's liberty classroom darren's coffee etc via my links on scotthorton.org go kart galaxy for your minibike parts too and yes the book is coming out very soon so how about that rex tillerson the secretary of state and the state department's official statement the other day that the uprising in jerusalem and in the west bank and i guess overall unrest in palestine is due to their oppression by the israeli occupiers yeah i don't think they used the the o word of oppression but i think they referred to palestinians not having uh any any sense of hope and uh what's what's interesting when you dig into the official state department publications it's actually very different than the policies that are pursued out of the white house so for example uh there were some right wing pro-israel groups that were very very upset and called for tillerson's resignation because under the trump administration in the annual terrorism report which was recently published it did list acts of israeli settler violence as being terrorism and this is a practice that started during the obama administration so there's a lot of uh upset that there is a certain continuity in in these formal policies uh in the state department despite the obvious change in administration yeah all right now so i'm afraid to ask about this uh whether the the trump team has weighed in and whether they want this thing because that could make a lot of difference for the worse on this particular bill yeah uh not that not that i'm aware of but uh the the really scary thing about this bill i mean there are many scary things is that it would give attorney general jeff sessions the power to throw someone in jail for 20 years for their political beliefs and so what we're saying to congressional offices especially those that view themselves as part of the resistance to the creeping authoritarianism that we're seeing under the trump administration is that this is part and parcel of a broader effort to repress dissent in the united states this is a canary in the coal mine here so if if we who support palestinian rights are able to be put in a situation where we could face jail time for engaging in a non-violent means of political protest who's next and there will be many who are next yeah well geez i don't know thinking ahead by a couple of weeks that's out of bounds you know we can't have that uh right i was actually very happy to see when max blumenthal went on fox news to dispute the russia hysteria the first point he made was that anti-war people on the left have got to be able to see that this is the exact accusation that's going to be turned against them when they prefer peace to the next stage of escalated conflict with us in russia that whose side are you on and that it's pretty easy to see the way these kinds of things can be you know weaponized and uh be turned back on those who would attempt to wield them so and then yeah you know my it was a pretty loaded question earlier right that like yeah but no the supreme court would never allow this but just think of all the things the supreme court allows you know what i mean there's there's no reason to count on them or to count on any court in this land uh any more than any specific legislator or legislature and sound like yeah i would agree i think the only only thing we have going for us in that regard is the very pro-corporate nature of the supreme court these days you know ruling and citizens united that corporations are people and here you have a bill that is seeking to punish corporations for their political viewpoint yeah well and you know as greenwald pointed out in defense of uh citizens united the aclu is a corporation you know there's a there's a lot of private companies that are things that you're damn right you want the bill of rights to apply to them don't you so where do you draw those lines and i'm always on the side of expanded rights and limited powers in every sense but uh anyway certainly we're thinking about the whole universal thing if they can do it to them they can do it to you and you know it's on this most important issue which you're on the forefront of here which is that it's not just that the israelis treat the palestinians so unfairly it's that america's in on it from beginning to end we pay for every bit of it you look at your paycheck on friday and the part that the government took they spent giving that to the israelis to use against some kid you know to steal a house from some old lady some atrocity and so it absolutely affects us it implicates us every single day even if we live right in the middle of flyover country and don't think we have anything to do with it that's absolutely right and on his way out of office president obama signed a record-breaking deal to give israel 38 billion dollars of u.s taxpayer funded weapons over the next decade which is a huge increase over president george w bush's former huge increase over the amount before that so we have ever escalating amounts of u.s taxpayer dollars that are going to fund the israeli military in fact the u.s subsidization of the israeli military accounts for a full 20 percent of the entire israeli military budget so one out of every five dollars that the israeli military spends to oppress the palestinians through its now 50 year old military occupation of the west bank east jerusalem and gaza strip comes courtesy of u.s taxpayers yeah well and you know people spend that and go well but they have to spend all that money in america yeah like we're all stockholders in lockheed and we all benefit from that money bouncing back to specific politically connected interests inside the united states when in fact all that really means is that brand usa f-16s are flying over the gaza strip as it was happening yesterday threatening those people from you know completely helpless people from the air that's exactly right and we have laws on the books which are supposed to prevent u.s weapons from either being given or sold to foreign countries that engage in systematic human rights abuses and the problem is we've been pointing out on end to members of congress over the years is that the united states refuses to enforce these laws when it comes to israel gives israel a free pass to violate the terms of the arms export control act the leahy law which are supposed to take away weapons from countries that are using u.s money and u.s weapons to commit grave human rights abuses all right well so this is a big question but i got a little bit of time if you do i'm curious to know uh i mean it seems like anybody with a heart at all or even any sort of dedication to the law as you were just saying has got to agree that the status quo uh absolutely cannot stand the occupation much must end and then after that they seem to fall in two camps the one state or the two state camp i'm for no state but nobody's listening to me so um i wonder if it's one state or two state do you have a preference and why well as an organization we don't take a position on that question we believe that that's ultimately up for palestinians and israelis to figure out what kind of political configuration is going to make sense we do however insist that any resolution to the issue be based on universal principles of human rights and international law and respect principles of equality and dignity and justice for all and so in the case of the israeli palestinian issue that means not only ending israel's 50-year military occupation of the west bank east jerusalem and gaza strip but also ensuring that palestinian citizens of israel who by the way are 20 of israel's population receive equal rights because now there are dozens of discriminatory laws against them on the books in israel which place them as second-class citizens merely because of their religion and it also means justice for palestinian refugees who are the largest refugee community in the world and have been for the past seven decades because israel was created with with a jewish majority in its country only through a massive premeditated act of ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population so the idea of maintaining israel as a quote-unquote jewish state meaning a majority of the jew the population being jewish can only be done at the expense of the rights of the indigenous inhabitants who are expelled or left and who are not allowed to return by israel even though they're guaranteed that right under international law and even though israel was only admitted to the united nations back in 1949 on the condition that refugees be allowed to return to their homes and their property so any resolution whether we're talking about two states or one state has to encompass those three demands for freedom equality and justice for palestinians which are actually the three foundational principles of the global bds movement which is led by palestinian civil society yeah well um maybe just for my own uh cognitive dissonance reasons i just rationalized and justified to myself or maybe reality that i'm trying my best to perceive here it seems to me josh that most americans don't understand and that's why they're so horrible on this issue and i mean as you're saying certainly on on the left people are getting better uh all the time but i really think that people think that palestine is the country next door and that they're constantly attacking uh and and threatening the israelis to give up their land and how unfair that is the poor israelis and that's the narrative that um they're the ones who are being extorted and they're the ones who are being threatened and i see i just saw the other day a guy on twitter i didn't bother getting into it but i think he was being honest and not mean-spirited anyway and he just said i just can't understand how anyone would take the side of the palestinians over the israelis and of course the answer must be that he doesn't know who's occupying who he doesn't know that the jordanians got the palestinians into a whole heap of trouble back in 1967 and that they've been under a foreign military occupation with no independence and no sovereignty whatsoever since then under this false claim that someday they're going to get their state after some peace process that's now 30 years old you know all this mess 25 um so they just don't know and that's what i think and i think and i i mostly think that because i used to not get it because they always talk about land for peace as though you know the israelis are the ones with a gun to their head kind of thing um but anyway so uh i i think it's really important what you're doing i think that if once people understand the first thing about it they go wow oh no wonder everybody is so upset you know if there's no if how can you call it an apartheid state oh well because half the population is completely disenfranchised oh well okay that makes sense right it's a it's like it's outrageous if all you're familiar with is the common tv narrative but once you learn about it then you realize it who's the underdog and who's the oppressor it's as simple as that and so um i think the bds movement never mind the economic uh effect on the israelis which i don't even know how to measure i don't know who's doing real reporting on that but just in the sense of getting the word out to regular americans as to who's zooming who over there i think is just huge i think we couldn't possibly overstate its importance and i think apax decision to try to screw us all with this bill is proof of how serious they take it and i think they're right to take it that seriously absolutely uh you know it brings to mind the uh the famous adage you know first they ignore you then they laugh at you then they fight you then you win and there was a long period of time when israel and its supporters dismissed the bds movement said it was ineffective and consequential but the fact is that bdf campaigners around the world have brought huge multinational corporations to their knees and forced them to exit the israeli market completely because of their complicity in israel's human rights abuses of palestinians for example the french multinational company violia which does a lot of infrastructure and water projects all over the world has literally lost billions and billions of dollars in contracts because of bds activism pressure on that company and they withdrew from the market they said it's not worth it anymore for us to take these huge hits over our tiny contracts in occupied palestine wow you got some more examples like that i didn't really realize uh how successful they'd been oh yeah absolutely if you go to the website of the bds movement which is bdsmovement.net the movement actually just turned 12 years old uh this month and they have that and dozens of other examples of how this movement has become so effective and has accomplished in a decade what took really decades to do with the anti-apartheid movement in south africa which is not because this movement is smarter or better organizers or anything like that but just because of the speed with which information travels in this day and age the uh alternative media and social media as a means not only to get information out but to organize is in enabling and empowering these global boycott campaigns all right well listen i really appreciate all your efforts and your time on the show talk about this important stuff with us josh thanks so much scott all right you guys that is josh rubner this time you can find him at electronicintifada.net it's called new u.s bill would punish settlement boycotters he is the policy director of the u.s campaign for palestinian rights that's at uscpr uscpr.org he's the author of shattered hopes obama's failure to broker israeli palestinian peace maybe that is the one i have i really want to read that and uh he's got a new one coming out israel democracy or apartheid state and that's scott horton show thanks you guys 4,500 and something interviews there for you at scotthorton.org uh follow me at the libertarian institute at libertarianinstitute.org and on twitter at scott horton show thanks
