09/15/09 – Rebecca Vilkomerson – The Scott Horton Show

Welcome back to the show, it's Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
We're streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com slash radio.
And our next guest on the show is Rebecca Vilkemeersen from Jewish Voice for Peace.
That's JewishVoiceForPeace.org.
Welcome to the show, Rebecca.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well.
Thanks so much for having me.
Well, thanks very much for joining us.
And now, I think my understanding is that you're the brand new director of the place, right?
That's right.
I'm the brand new director, although I've been a member of JVP since 2002, so it's not a new organization to me.
Okay.
And so, I guess, tell us all about the group.
Exactly what do you do, if you can kind of compare and contrast maybe other political lobbies that people are familiar with, how you operate, that kind of thing?
Well, first of all, we're not a lobbying group.
We're a grassroots organization, a diverse and democratic group of activists who work in the Jewish tradition.
We have both Jewish and non-Jewish members, although, again, we are a Jewish affiliated group that works on the issues of Israel and Palestine.
Some of the campaigns we're most famous for are attempting to get Caterpillar to divest from supplying Israel with bulldozers, including Caterpillar was the company that supplied the bulldozers that actually killed Rachel Corey in 2003, and so we've worked on that campaign for about six years.
We have a blog called muzzlewatch.com, which calls out incidents of anti-Semitism, using anti-Semitism to stifle debate about Israel and Palestine in the United States.
We work in solidarity with Israeli and Palestinian peace organizations and offer them support.
Groups like the Shministeim, who are the 12th graders who have refused to serve in the military, Most recently, some of the recent campaigns we've done that are online campaigns, is we got 20,000 people to send support letters for an amazing activist named Ezra Naoui, who worked in the South Hebron Hills and is arrested and may go to jail just next week for non-violently defending a Palestinian Bedouin home from destruction by a bulldozer by the Israeli army.
We have recently defended Nev Gordon, who is an Israeli academic who has endorsed the call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, BDS, which is a call that's been endorsed by a wide swath of Palestinian civil society, and he got viciously attacked by his own university and all the way up to the Minister of Education in Israel, so we defended his right to speak out on a non-violent tactic against the occupation.
And we have chapters all over the country, in the Bay Area, Sacramento, in the southern part of California, in Seattle, in Boston, in Chicago, in Detroit, and we're trying to get a lot more people involved all over the place.
Wow, wow, that sounds like a pretty good operation you've got going there.
Do you have any kind of relationship with J Street, or any of the new kind of more liberal, more two-state solution-leaning Jewish lobbying groups in Washington?
Right, well that's a good question.
Our position on that sort of thing is that we don't take a position on either one state or two states.
Partially that's because we want to be a big tent and have as many activists as possible who are anti-occupation, but it's also partially because we believe that we're not the ones to dictate a final solution, that the Israelis and the Palestinians themselves need to come up with that.
Well that's a great point, you know, because I was even kind of using it just as shorthand for people who are against the permanent occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, which apparently is the other choice, as far as I can tell, but what you're saying is a very important point.
Ultimately, I don't know why anyone who wants peace should have to be married to a two-state solution either.
Right, and that's our position, and I think that's a very important point about this, that we are American activists, we're an American organization, we feel it's our responsibility, not only as Jews, but as Americans, to change U.S. foreign policy towards Israel and Palestine.
It's not our place to dictate the terms of whatever else the Israelis and Palestinians will come out with on their own.
And so J-Straight, we have, you know, we're all part of the same movement, and some groups are, you know, everyone has different tactics.
They're essentially a lobbying organization, they don't have a grassroots base the way that we do, and because they are two states, unfortunately, they're not that eager to be, or I should say they're not willing to be associated publicly with groups that don't endorse the two-state solution, so we're sort of, you know, in the same movement, but working in different wings, I would say.
Well, and that's important.
In fact...
Right, I mean, and we're very grateful for the work that they're doing, they've obviously changed the dynamic greatly, and made a lot of inroads in terms of having people who weren't happy with AIPAC have some place to go, and it's an incredibly valuable thing that they're doing.
Right.
Yeah, you know, the neoconservatives have been masters, the war party, that is, they've been masters at creating 100 front groups at a time, and writing for 10, you've got like, you know, 40 guys, and yet they're newspaper editors at every newspaper in the country, and just their echo chamber that they create is magnificent to behold, in fact, and I read something in the Jerusalem Post about how the right wing of the Israel lobby in America led by AIPAC was descending with hundreds of maybe thousands of people to educate Congress on why we ought to have a blockade against Iran, and the list of groups involved, I think it was the Jerusalem Post article, it just had an entire paragraph, you know, of equal size to any of the other paragraphs in the article, was just the list of groups involved with going down there, and I can't imagine that it's really that many people, but it's, you know, every time you get three people who like war together, they create an organization, and so it seems really impressive, so maybe that's really the solution, that's what the peaceniks need to do too, right, is have 100 peace groups to all sign on to things and look really impressive.
Well, you know, I think we have a lot to learn from the right wing, they're incredibly well organized, they know how to get to go after people's emotions and their hearts, and they know how to, they certainly have a lot of money at their disposal, way, way, way, way more than we do, that couldn't be emphasized enough, but you know, I think, you know, I don't know if just having names on a paper is enough, I think that they have the clout to do what they say they're going to do, and that's what we have to do too, we have to build a movement that can actually move things, you know, not just protesting, but can move things, and that's our goal.
Right.
Well, and so, you know, what's the difference, because people always ask me all the time, well what can I do, and I always say, well I don't know, I just kind of do a radio show and interview journalists and activists and different people, but, you know, it sounds like you really are, you know, rubber meets the road, let's go ahead and organize and get things done and check our goals off our list, what is it exactly that you're doing, how do you do it, how do people help out with something like this?
Right, well, I mean, you know, I think it's, one thing, there's tons of different things people can do, and every, you know, one thing that we try to do at JVP is find different ways for people to be involved, so, you know, some people love writing letters to the editor and they write letters to the editor all day long, and some people, you know, are really into technology and they have a Twitter feed and they're updating the Facebook page and they do that, and that word gets out to people that way, you know, I think the whole thing of this online organizing, which is not such a new thing anymore, but it's a very, very powerful piece, I mean, we ourselves are at the point where we can generate, you know, 5,000 pieces of mail within a few hours, and that's important, you know, but then I think, you know, and so I think, you know, it's what we call the ladder of activism, so maybe someone who first signs an online petition, maybe the next time they'll actually write their own letter to the editor, maybe the time after that, you know, organize a meeting with your local congressperson, get a meeting and talk to them about what's happening in Israel and Palestine, and get a group of people, neighbors and friends together to, and like-minded folks to go and have that meeting, and maybe the first time you'll only meet with the chief of staff, but eventually you'll get a meeting with the actual congressperson, you know, build a chapter, there's so many groups, you know, so much of what our local groups do, which is so interesting, is that because the, is that there's been so little challenge of the narrative around Israel and Palestine, that there's so much to do locally, you know, you have some, you know, crazy, I don't know, stand-with-Israel group that does a parade every year that celebrates the unification of Jerusalem in 1967, which is, you know, from our perspective, not something much to celebrate, because that was when the occupation started, and you can go and counter-protest that, you know, I mean, there's just all kinds of things that can be done on a local level, and then also joining with the national level, and I think that's where we've done a pretty good job, is linking the local groups and giving them the resources they need, and the ideas they need, and the larger-term campaigns they need to both be able to be active locally and nationally.
Well, that's really good, and you know, I guess part of this is...
But I would want to say, you know, if you have people listening, anyone who wants to get involved, needs help starting a group, wants to start a group, just send us an email at, you know, info at jvp.org, and we will try to help you out as best we can with setting, you know, by examples of how previous groups have gotten started, and with resource materials, and that sort of thing, to get started.
Well, you know, you live in a society where, I don't know what giant percentage, certainly a double-digit percentage of people believe like Mike Huckabee believes, and as he said when he was overseas, the former Republican presidential candidate, that there's no such thing as a Palestinian.
The West Bank and Gaza, that's Jewish land, it belongs to them, and in fact, you're like some kind of Palestinian supremacist Jim Crow person if you think that Jews ought to be forbidden from living wherever they want, in their own country.
So I think a big part of this, you must think, I guess, that a big part of this is educating people as to the fact that no, actually there is such a thing as Palestinians, millions of them, and they live under occupation, it's not all so pretty.
Yeah, and I mean, I think that's actually something that as a movement we can take a little bit of credit for, although the actual conditions on the ground in the occupied territories have gotten nothing but worse over the years.
One thing that's changed is the discourse, and I do think that that's important, in that the word Palestine used to basically not exist in official circles, the word Palestinian didn't exist, and the word apartheid in relation to Palestine and Israel didn't exist, and all those things have definitely shifted.
President Obama himself said no people have suffered like the Palestinian people in his big speech in Cairo.
So that's something that I think we as a movement can take credit for, is that we've sort of chipped away at the terminology that's used to talk about it, and I think that does make a difference ultimately in the way policies are formulated, at least I hope so.
Well the fact that you're the director of the Jewish Voice for Peace, does that protect you from the accusation that you're an anti-Semite?
Absolutely not.
That's amazing.
You know, I'm Jewish, I grew up in a synagogue, I was bat mitzvahed, my husband is Israeli, my children and my husband have Israeli passports, I just came from living for three years in Israel.
Well your last name isn't obviously Jewish-sounding, I guess, maybe to most people.
Is that it?
Well that's true, but I mean, I think that's sort of irrelevant.
The point is, it doesn't matter, the moment that you come out against Israel, against Israel's policies, then you're called a self-hating Jew.
And I think that's a big part of the work, is sort of saying, look, that there's not, and I think that's what J Street and Jewish Voice for Peace and so many other groups that have come before us and that continue to work, is saying, look, you know, there is no one position on Israel that the Jewish community has, the Jewish community versus any other community, and you need to be aware of the fact that there's a wing of it that does not accept the AIPAC line, or the Mike Huckabee line, or any of these other lines.
Well, and in fact, as Glenn Greenwald has been pointing out recently, in fact, in his recent article about Norman Podhoretz, he points at the polls that say that if we're just counting American Jews, they mostly agree with you, not with the neoconservatives, Bill Kristol and those warmonger types.
Yes and no.
I mean, there's an interesting thing, which is that there's been a very, very strong alliance between AIPAC and the sort of military, both with the military-industrial conflicts, you know, which is very powerful, and they are obviously extremely economically interested in continuing the status quo, because they get enormous free contracts for, you know, for their arms sales to Israel, so that's the first thing, and there's also been very strong coalitions with the Christian right, you know, with the sort of evangelical right, which talks about Jews, that the Jews, you know, need to rule the land of Israel in order for the Messiah to come.
So those, you know, Jews in the United States are actually a very, are extremely small numerically, and so it's not just the Jewish population that's behind us, but there's some very, very powerful coalitions that are maintaining what we have right now.
Right.
But the thing is that Noram Podhoretz is constantly claiming to speak for you.
Right.
Yeah, exactly, and that's the problem, and I think that's something that Jay Street, for example, has done an excellent job of saying, you know, AIPAC doesn't speak for all of us, and I think that's what all of us, when we speak as Jews on this issue, we're helping to open a wedge, to say nobody elected you, nobody appointed you, you know, you're saying it for yourself.
Thanks, but no thanks.
Right, and the thing is, you know, there's plenty of reasons at this point, at this late date, it seems like there's plenty of reasons for people who aren't anti-Semitic at all, who aren't Jewish at all, but to be critical of Israel.
There's plenty of things to be mad about Israel, and the amount of influence that the Israeli lobby, especially the right wing of the Israeli lobby, and especially in their alliance with the military industrial complex, as you say, and the power that they hold in Washington D.C., and it's really just ridiculous, and certainly it's unfair, sometimes it's horrible, the way decent people are accused of being anti-Semitic in a way that their careers are destroyed or worse, or maybe not quite as bad, but still they get their character smeared in the public, just for being critical of, you know, what's ultimately, I mean, if we're dealing with sovereign nations and their relationships with each other, presumably, if you're from here, then, you know, you have an American view of what our relationships should be.
There's nothing inherently anti-Semitic about that at all.
Right, that's exactly right, I mean, and I will say, I mean, there's two things.
The first is that we absolutely, that's the exact position we take, you know, and we always are, of course, on the lookout, and we'll fiercely fight anyone who is anti-Semitic, because you can't say that there aren't anti-Semitic people in the movement for Israel, there are, but that doesn't, it certainly doesn't say anything about the movement as a whole, and if we see anti-Semitism, we call people on it, and if we see people using anti-Semitism as a way to stifle debate, we call them on that, too, so I think, you know, it absolutely goes both ways.
Yeah, well, and as it should.
Yeah.
Right.
You know, Philip Weiss, I think, is really brave.
He just has this open comment policy where just go ahead and all the neo-Nazis congregate in his comment section, and he just continues telling the truth anyway, what are you going to do about it, you know?
If you're one of the few people who's willing to speak honestly about America's relationship with Israel, then the Nazis are going to find you, but you know what, so what?
That doesn't really, as you say, that doesn't have anything to do with the actual character of the debate.
Right, right, right.
Yeah, I mean, pretty much any movement will attract a few people who are a little bit not quite with you, or not with you for the right reasons, but that has nothing to do with the general thrust.
You know, MuzzleWatch, our blog, MuzzleWatch.com, we actually, in the end, we closed it to comments because it was just getting so vicious and violent and racist and anti-Semitic and, you know, every kind of disgustingness you can imagine, so in the end, we closed the comments page, which was too bad, because we really would have, of course, liked to have an open debate about this, this very topic that we were talking about, which was open debate, but we, unfortunately, we really weren't able to continue doing that just because of the crazy, the sort of really vicious attacks that we were getting, so, you know, I agree with you, like Phil Weiss, you know, there's some, I read those comments, I just read those comments this morning, and like you said, he just keeps on going, it's no different than what you read, by the way, in Haaretz, which is one of the Israeli papers, you know, what they call the talkbacks there, just really, really brings out, like, I think the anonymity of the internet brings out people's worst.
Well, yeah, that's certainly true, to a certain degree, and, you know, it's also kind of Isaac Newton's theory of the equal and opposite reaction, too, where if the debate is so shut out that you and I are in the position of complaining about how closed it is, that's the kind of thing that really makes people mad, where not only are they mad about something, but now they're not allowed to talk about it, and now you're going to call them a racist anti-Semite if they do, and whatever, and then people get madder and madder and madder, and the discourse gets worse and worse, and then I guess that's the excuse for excluding it more and more, and on it goes.
Yeah, although, you know, I have to say, I see some of the hysteria recently as a good sign.
I feel like the forces that have been so used to having the upper hand and having a real stranglehold on what the official discourse is about have noticed, and this is especially since the invasion of Gaza last year, have noticed the shift in tone, and so they've gotten actually more hysterical and more patriotic as they see their sort of hegemonic position slipping out of their fingers.
So I almost sometimes, when I'm in the right kind of mood, can see it as sort of a good sign of the level of hysteria that happens, even when we make very mild statements.
Well, now, so tell us a little bit of the history of this boycott of Caterpillar.
That to me, I mean, here's, this is an extremely powerful American corporation.
I would hazard to guess, just considering that, you know, it's basically them and John Deere are the tractor companies in this country, right?
What did you do, and what did you change?
Right.
Well, I have to preface this discussion by saying that I, you know, like I said, I only started as JVP's director in September, and I was active in the movement back, in this campaign back in like 2003, 2004, 2005, but then I was away from it completely for a few years, so I can't say I have a great mastery of the details right now.
I think what was most interesting about the Caterpillar campaign is that we targeted Caterpillar for several reasons.
First, because they were very, very guilty.
They were using, they were, what was happening, they were, you know, these aren't like sort of like your mother's, your mother's bulldozers that you're using to, I don't know, like plow your farm or something.
These were like massive military machines that are outfitted with armor and these giant, you know, and these giant sort of weaponry, and were really killing machines, as we saw to great tragic effect when Rachel Corey was killed.
So that was one very obvious reason to target them, because they were receiving also U.S. funding by, as a pass-through, basically, you know, military funds that were given to Israel were being passed to Caterpillar, and Caterpillar was then providing the Israeli Army with these machines.
The other thing that was interesting about that campaign is that we had a great cooperation with some Christian denominations, the Presbyterians and I think the Methodists, although I wouldn't want to say for sure, I think the Methodists, though, who were also active on this issue.
Some nuns had been working on this issue for years before us, and they held stock in Caterpillar.
And what we actually did was buy some stock in Caterpillar so that we would have the right to come to the, come to the shareholders' meetings.
And what we tried to do was actually, this was sort of like almost like a pre-divestment or pre-boycott type of action, because we weren't actually saying, let's boycott Caterpillar, but we're saying, as shareholders in Caterpillar, we're telling you, you have to hold to your own code of ethics, which they had, you know, a published code of ethics about how their work was never going to violate certain human rights or standards or international law, which they absolutely were doing.
And we kept, you know, and we got, and the other thing is that Caterpillar is guilty of many other things.
It was known to be terrible in terms of its labor standards.
So we got some nice allies together with the unions who were also, you know, sort of perpetually angry with Caterpillar.
And we built a very nice coalition of Christian groups, Jewish groups, anti-occupation groups, labor groups, that sort of thing.
And we were able to make quite a lot of noise at the, at the shareholders' meeting, but we were never able to get more than 6% of the shareholders to actually vote to stop selling to Israel.
So in that sense, I would say the campaign was not a huge success in terms of the ultimate goal, but in terms of education and being, you know, and I think that's always a big goal of any campaign you do, you know, in terms of educating people about what it means to be a military supplier to Israel, that, and in terms of embarrassing Caterpillar and making it things much more difficult for them for a few years, in that sense, it was an accomplishment.
But, you know, I think, and we learned a lot from the next time around.
I think one problem with the campaign was that it was hard to get a lot of people involved because most people are not going out and buying, you know, bulldozers every day.
So I think for our next target, what we want is something that all kinds of people all over the country can become, you know, can actively get involved in.
Well, you know, Frank Luntz did some focus groups and what he determined was whatever you do, don't tell the American people that the Israeli government uses zoning laws in order to justify taking Caterpillar bulldozers and knocking their houses down and building condos for Israelis to live on because Americans hate zoning laws.
So don't tell them that because they'll immediately take the side of the Palestinians, especially if they can see a picture and see that the Palestinian homes that don't live up to code are older than the state of Israel and that's why they don't live up to code.
Oh boy.
So instead, tell them that the Jews are victims of Jim Crow under the oppression of the Palestinians.
That's what works best.
Yeah.
I mean, I think, you know, unfortunately we were handed the best illustration of what the Caterpillar bulldozers could do when Rachel Corey was killed by one in Gaza in 2003, which was a very unfortunate kind of visual symbol to be handed, to be sure.
But you know, I think the, you know, whenever Israel feels threatened or when the Jewish community feels threatened, the Jewish community in the United States feels threatened on behalf of Israel, but you know, they sort of turn to the perpetual we are victims argument.
And I think, you know, there's a real generational divide on that.
I think in my generation, which did not grow up in the shadow of the Holocaust, it's no longer a valid argument.
For some folks in the older generation, which I can understand, you know, having grown up in the shadow of the Holocaust, it's very, very hard for them to hear any other sort of reality.
Yeah.
It's Rebecca Vilke-Mersen and the website is jewishvoiceforpeace.org and muzzlewatch.com.
Thank you very much for your time on the show.
Sorry, muzzlewatch.org, by the way.
Oh, .org.
Thank you very much for that.
Yeah.
I appreciate it.
Bye bye.
All right, everybody.
That's it for the show.
I'm sorry.
I forgot to say at the end, but I'm glad I remembered to say it here at the end.
At the beginning.
Now I'm going to say it here at the end.
This show was dedicated to Muntadhar al-Zaidi, the Iraqi shoe thrower who was finally released from prison and is, of course, reporting that he was tortured for throwing his shoes at George W. Bush.
My hero.
Thanks, man.
I'm saluting you here over the radio.