All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
First guest on the show today is Josh Rubner.
He is the National Advocacy Director of the US campaign to end the Israeli occupation and is also co-founder of an organization named Jews for Peace in Palestine and Israel, which later merged with Jewish Voice for Peace.
He used to work as Middle East analyst with Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan federal government agency which conducts research for members of Congress, member of the Arlington Green Party.
And I guess that's in Arlington, Virginia.
Josh, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for having me.
Yes, that's correct.
All right, now, and we've talked with Josh one time on the show before.
You can look it up at antiwar.com/radio.
And I wanted to mention the website here, endtheoccupation.org.
And that's the US campaign to end the Israeli occupation.
And now, so there's something very specific at issue here today, at least to start, Joshua.
And that is, is it Josh or Joshua?
I'm sorry.
Either one's fine.
OK.
Caterpillar, the guys that make tractors and bulldozers and such, have suspended delivery of, I believe, a $50 million order to the Israeli military.
Now, was that because they were made to somehow by the government or they decided to do that?
And if so, or either way, based on what?
How did this happen?
To be honest, we're not exactly sure what's going on.
All we know is that according to the Israeli media, on October 25th, there was a report that Caterpillar suspended the delivery of dozens of D9 bulldozers, which is the same kind which crushed to death the US peace activist Rachel Corey back in 2003, that they suspended the delivery of these bulldozers to Israel.
Caterpillar has no comments in communications with us.
And we've been trying to get more information out of the federal government.
But we've been having a very difficult time with that.
So we're not exactly sure what's happening.
We're just going off of these press reports.
Well, and I should not go without saying, as told to me by Rachel Corey's mother on the show last week, there were five children in the house that the Israeli army Caterpillar brand bulldozer was headed toward to kill them and destroy their home.
And that was the situation in which Rachel Corey was killed.
She was standing between the bulldozer and the house to actually successfully protect the lives of those five kids.
That's correct.
And unfortunately, in the course of Israel's demolition of thousands of Palestinian homes, innocent civilians often get injured and killed by these Caterpillar bulldozers that Israel employs to demolish Palestinian homes.
According to the Israeli Human Rights Organization, B'Tselem, since September of 2000, 21 Palestinian civilians, not including Rachel Corey, have been killed in these home demolitions, which have included seven children.
So it's really a tragedy.
It's really human rights abuse of terrible proportion.
And it's being funded by the US government in the form of military aid.
These Caterpillar bulldozers are being sent to Israel and paid for and financed by the US taxpayer.
Well, in effect, we're talking about what the FBI and the Army Delta Force did at Waco, Texas, back in 1993, demolishing people's homes while they're still inside.
They're not even pretended rules of engagement that say you've got to make sure everybody's out of the house before you demolish it?
Often what happens is that Israel will give maybe 20 minutes, maybe sometimes even less time than that, for a family to try to haul out all of its belongings onto the street before the home is demolished.
But in many cases, there have been elderly people or disabled people who are not mobile and haven't been able to evacuate their houses.
And Israel has proceeded to demolish them with the occupants inside.
Well, and you know, it's amazing and almost unreal, in a way, surreal, to read that some of these demolitions, for example, in East Jerusalem are, or were, maybe this part is already a done deal, they're destroying these homes in East Jerusalem in order to build a museum of tolerance.
Right.
In this case, it's actually bulldozing over a very ancient medieval Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem to build that museum.
But often- All right, maybe it was a park I was reading about.
They were going to build a new park.
And so they were destroying an entire neighborhood in East Jerusalem.
And I'm conflating those two things together.
It's very possible.
And you know, the overall policy of demolishing Palestinian homes is a component of Israel's very slow and deliberate campaign of ethnically cleansing Palestinians from their homes.
It's obviously designed to force them off of their land to make life intolerable and to make people homeless.
Well, you know, it reminds me that the Republican hack pollster Frank Luntz had done this study for some Israeli think tank, I think, I forget.
Or maybe it was an American pro-Israel lobby group.
And it said, when addressing Americans about the demolition of homes, particularly in East Jerusalem and in the West Bank, do not use the term eminent domain.
Do not use the term zoning, because oftentimes that's the excuse of the Israeli government.
Oh, your house that's been there since 1920-something is not up to code.
And so therefore, we're just zoning you out here.
We're going to put a warehouse here instead or whatever.
And Frank Luntz advised, do not use the terms eminent domain or zoning to Americans.
They hate that.
Just go ahead and say Palestinians are beasts and have no rights.
They'll go along with that.
But don't call it zoning, or it'll backfire on us.
It's true that Israel uses a lot of very bureaucratic terms to quote, unquote, justify these home demolitions.
For example, they often say that Palestinians don't have the requisite permits to build this addition to this house.
So therefore, it's an illegal building and an illegal structure.
And we're just tearing it down for bureaucratic reasons.
But the reality is that Israel doesn't grant these permits to Palestinians to build.
So Palestinians are forced to build without getting the required permits from Israel, which doesn't deliver them ever.
So yeah, I mean, it's very much this weird alternative universe type of thing that's going on, whereby Israel uses these bureaucratic methods to commit these terrible human rights abuses against Palestinians living under military occupation.
Well, it seems to me like a major part of the reason why the American people continue to go along with paying for all of this is basically due to the misunderstanding about who's occupying who and what.
I mean, in the American media, you could be left with the impression that the Palestinian occupation of Israel has been going on all this time, the poor things.
And that, for example, in the West Bank, it's like the Jim Crow South over there, where these Palestinians are the Arab supremacists.
And they won't just let Jews live freely in whatever neighborhood they want around there.
It's terrible.
And they just turn the entire thing upside down and inside out.
So the words used to describe the situation mean completely different things to different people.
That's very true.
Fortunately, though, I think that things are beginning to change finally, thanks to alternative media, such as what you're doing, and thanks to people being able to access news directly and not having it have to be filtered through the mainstream media.
So I think that some of that discourse is crumbling.
I think it's becoming more and more difficult for Israel and its supporters to keep up this fiction that they are the oppressed instead of the oppressors.
But it's a point well taken that that still is, I would say, an overwhelming way that this issue is talked about in this country.
Now, I'm not sure if this is exactly your purview, but something I'm very interested in, so I'm going to try it anyway.
Hamas rules the Gaza Strip, and the old PLO, Palestinian Authority, led by Mahmoud Abbas, nominally controls the West Bank over there.
And I remember from a few years back that General Dayton of, I believe, the US Army, as part of one of these negotiations, had gone and started building a Palestinian army to be used by the Palestinian Authority toward the idea of a second Palestinian state there.
And so when we get back, I'm going to ask you, whatever happened to that?
Since there's no state, what are they going to do with this army?
It's Josh Rubner from the US campaign to end the Israeli occupation, Antiwar Radio.
All right, y'all, it's Antiwar Radio.
Talking with Joshua Rubner from endtheoccupation.org.
And now, I'm sorry I asked you this question before the break there.
I'll let you answer about, what do you know about this army that General Dayton has built for the future Palestinian state in the West Bank?
And then we'll get back to this campaign to keep Caterpillar from delivering these weapons, these bulldozers, to the Israeli army to be used against civilians in the West Bank and Gaza.
Sure, this is a program that started under the Bush administration, maybe around 2006, 2007, somewhere in that neighborhood, where General Keith Dayton is providing training and assistance in building up the Palestinian Authority's security forces strictly in the West Bank.
They're being trained and armed in Jordan and then being sent back to the West Bank, basically to act as subcontractors for Israeli military occupation at this point.
But it's being done under the guise of so-called state building and so-called institution building for an eventual Palestinian state to emerge.
Yeah, well, it might be worth explaining, too, how it was that Hamas came to power in the Gaza Strip, why they're not included in this plan going nowhere.
Hamas came to power after the 2006 legislative elections, which were actually pushed very strongly by both Israel and the United States.
And I don't think either one predicted a Hamas win.
If so, it was very Machiavellian.
But that definitely was the result of the election, which was not so much a vote for Hamas as it was a protest against the ineffectual peace process policies of groups within the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, that control the Palestinian Authority.
And ever since then, of course, you've had the siege on the Gaza Strip.
And you've had a bifurcation in power between Hamas controlling things in the Gaza Strip and Fatah, which is part of the PLO, controlling things in the West Bank.
The parliament hasn't met in several years.
And the notion that there's actually a functioning Palestinian government is really, I think, just a fiction for the international community to pretend that Israel is not in complete control of the situation and that Palestinians somehow have some degree of autonomy living under Israeli military occupation, which they don't.
Right, and they need that so that they can pretend that whenever the negotiations go nowhere, it's all the Palestinians' fault.
Exactly.
And already, the negotiations that President Obama had reconvened at the beginning of September broke down about three weeks after they started because of this ineffectual pledge by Israel to put a moratorium on settlement building, which Israel has refused to extend.
So Israel is not even willing to go through a fictional process of saying that they're going to stop settlements in order to continue these negotiations.
And Palestinians have rightfully said, well, we're not going to negotiate as long as Israel's actively colonizing the land that's supposed to go toward an independent Palestinian state.
So it's been a real foreign policy disaster for the Obama administration.
Yeah, well, and even when they had the so-called freeze on the expansion of settlements in the West Bank, that never amounted to anything, really, to read the Israeli press about it, anyway, right?
That's exactly right.
I mean, there were thousands of new units worked on and built during the so-called moratorium, which never even applied to East Jerusalem, which is really the heart and soul of Israel's colonization efforts in the first place.
Well, can you elaborate on that a little bit?
Well, sure.
About half of the 500,000 Israeli settlers living in occupied Palestinian territory live in settlements in East Jerusalem.
And what these settlements have done is virtually encircle and cut off Palestinian East Jerusalem from the West Bank, making it difficult, if not impossible, to see how Jerusalem could be the future shared capital of an independent Palestinian state, because there's no longer any geographical contiguity between Palestinian East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank.
Well, and there was that piece in Vanity Fair back in, I think, 2007 about how even after the election where Hamas won in the Gaza Strip in 2006, they still had to form a coalition government.
And then the Americans funneled all these weapons through Egypt to the Fatah faction to try to whoop Hamas in a military defeat, which only empowered them and made the Palestinian Authority, so-called PLO types, have to leave completely and just go to the West Bank and turn the entire Gaza Strip over to Hamas.
So there's all these little steps on the way to the situation where it is now.
But I guess when it comes to the peace process, every day is a brand new day.
History just began today.
And whatever problems over there are the fault of whoever's Palestinian.
Ray, it'll be interesting to see now that we're done with the midterm elections what happens.
It was clear that everyone was very deliberately keeping things on a very low key prior to the elections so as to not to have this explode into something very combustible right before the elections.
But now that the elections are done, we'll see what's going to happen.
I don't think it's going to remain quiet for very long.
All right, now just a couple of minutes here left, maybe only less than that, to tell us again about this effort to make sure that Caterpillar continues to not deliver these weaponized bulldozers to the IDF.
Right, if indeed the deliveries have been suspended, we are putting as much pressure as we can on the Obama administration to make sure that the suspension is made permanent and that Israel will not be eligible to receive these deliveries of bulldozers because they violate the terms of the Arms Export Control Act in terms of not using US weapons to commit human rights abuses against civilian populations.
So people can go to our website at www.endtheoccupation.org to sign a petition to the president.
And then also there's an open letter to organizations that organizations can sign.
We've got more than 12,000 individual signatures and more than 100 organizational endorsements on these letters.
And your listeners can sign those things by going to www.endtheoccupation.org.
You know, I have this article in The Washington Post.
I think that's the same set of laws that Obama just signed waivers about child soldiers so we can still fund Congo, Sudan, and Yemen.
Yeah, unfortunately, that law is hardly ever followed.
And hardly ever is a country that violates human rights sanctions under that law, sadly.
Yeah, well, I guess it all just depends on who donates to who, doesn't it?
Yep.
Tell us about the website, www.endtheoccupation.org.
Sure, the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation is a national coalition of more than 300 organizations working to change US policy towards Israel-Palestine to support human rights, international law, and equality.
We have a number of ways for people to get involved with our goal, both on the political level and also on the level of engaging in boycott, divestment, and sanction campaign.
All right, well, thank you very much for your work and for your time on the show today, Joshua.
Really appreciate it.
Thanks so much for having me.
Everybody, that's Joshua Rubner, www.endtheoccupation.org.
