Keynote Address, WESPAC Fundraising Dinner

Chappaqua, New York, April 26, 2007

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It is very good – and important – to be here tonight. We of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions really see ourselves as part of the international civil society – which is the fancy words these days for the people. And you’re our allies; the people who are going to make the revolution, as the previous speaker before. So I want to thank WESPAC for inviting me, thank Nada Khader [Director of WESPAC] for dinner last night, and thank my hosts in Tarrytown. And it’s good to see Yonatan Shapira here, who is a very important voice in the Israeli peace movement, and a lot of people here that I know, I also knew Tanya Reinhart fairly well. [Tanya Reinhart had been invited to be the keynote speaker but she passed away a few weeks before the dinner took place.] We would appear together in different venues, be inspired at different times, and her writings are very important. Tanya was what I would call an engaged intellectual; which I think is really important. I sort of define an engaged intellectual by the three P’s: combing in an integral way your personal, professional, and political lives in a kind-of seamless whole. And Tanya certainly did that. I’m sorry that in some sense I’m speaking here because of her untimely death. Certainly we should remember Tanya as a very important voice in this whole struggle.

What I’d like to do tonight is share some thoughts with you. I had a different talk prepared, but I don’t think the structure here is appropriate for that. Just picking up on vibes over the last few days, I know that some of the criticism toward WESPAC has been that the middle east conflict – certainly the Israeli/Palestinian part of the middle east conflict – has been getting an over-proportionate amount of attention.

There are two problems. One is that there are a lot of issues in the world, and the other is – and since I’m Jewish I can say this – that many Jews who are liberal have a lot of trouble with the Israeli/Palestinian issue. I don’t know if it’s changed, but I remember Naomi Klein, who once wrote that she’ll speak or write about any issue in the world – but not Israel. It’s very hard for Jews to deal with. I think the Jewish voice is extremely important and it is missing to some degree. I’m heading off to the first national conference of the Jewish Voice for Peace which is trying to become a national movement. I think it fills a very important place in the peace movement, so I think Jewish voices are being heard. There is Tikkun, Brit Tzedek, Friends of Peace Now… there are groups that I don’t agree with, completely, but nevertheless I think there are important critical voices and I certainly don’t feel alone in that.

What I want to do is relate to this issue: Why Israel/Palestine all the time? There are thousands of conflicts in the world; why this one? I think there is a good reason and I want to address that.

Sometimes a conflict assumes global proportions. I think the Israel/Palestine conflict is not simply a localized conflict between peoples in some far-off corner of the world. Sometimes a conflict assumes global proportions because it touches a nerve. I think it happened with South Africa and the struggle against Apartheid.

Objectively, why South Africa? Here’s a conflict, an oppressive situation, at the far end of Africa, it wasn’t a geopolitically important place. The economy – although it provided diamonds – wasn’t indispensable to the global system. Why did South Africa assume that universal importance that many of us were involved with for years and years?

Because it touched a nerve with us. The idea that you could have a country, based on racism, that could carry on a life within the international community, go to sports tournaments, be in the Olympics, sit in the UN, as if nothing was wrong – was something that sullied everyone. It made a mockery of … All of us became complicit in that. And therefore it was so intolerable that it simply became an issue that had to be dealt with; and that was the struggle against Apartheid.

There are other issues like that. I think the Israel/Palestine conflict is assuming that kind of significance. Certainly, simply in practical terms, the Baker-Hamilton Report of a couple months ago; James Baker says that this is the epicenter of the conflicts in the middle east; you are not going to get on with business as usual – in Iran, or Iraq, or Afghanistan or further afield – unless you address the Israel/Palestine conflict. It’s destabilizing. The impact on the entire global system is tremendous.

Certainly for the Moslem world, it’s tremendous. Talk about a clash of civilizations. This is the clash of civilizations from the Moslem point of view. And I’ve talked to journalists who say that wherever you go in the Moslem world, from Nigeria to Indonesia, whatever the tremendous local issues are, in a Moslem country, you scratch the surface, and the Palestine issue comes up. Because this is the place where there is a hot war, a war against an Arab people, there are settlements and expansion, a kind of neocolonialism, and certainly the idea of American imperialism. The Palestinians are being killed with American weapons.

I think that from the point of view of the global system, and American interests, talking to an American audience, trying to relate it to an American audience, this conflict really is an epicenter of global instability and is something that I think has to be addressed – especially by Americans – because it is clear that Israel could not pursue its policies for a month without the political and financial and military umbrella that the United States provides.

The Israeli occupation is absolutely untenable and unsustainable. It’s cruel, it involves massive violations of human rights, it’s right in the face of… It challenges the entire framework of international law – which is something that I think endangers all of us – and what’s important to understand is that the Moslem world, and even beyond the Moslem world, the occupation is not seen as an Israeli occupation. It’s seen as an Israeli/American occupation. .

That’s why I think it has to be of particular concern to Americans, and why in general this conflict is of global significance, but it should especially be of significance to Americans because the United States is so complicit and is so a part of this particular conflict.

What I’d like to talk about is the global aspect of this conflict and how it does impact on the United States in particular, because we’re use to looking at Israel from the top down – in other words looking at Israel in relation to the occupation. From Israel down onto the occupied territories. Which is very important. But what we try to do as part of our advocacy is to reframe the conflict. Framing is crucial. You can get all kinds of alternative information through, but if people don’t have anything to look up to, a coherent framework, they don’t know what to do with it,

In the framing as represented by Israel, Israel is the victim. Israel is this little, peace loving country, that’s facing terrorism, and then, of course, we do what the United States does – 9/11 helped a lot – you conflate all the terrorist things.

In other words, Hamas is Jihad, Jihad is Arafat, Abu Mazen is the PLO, the PLO is Hizbullah, Hizbullah is Al Qaida, Al Qaida is Saddam Hussein, Saddam Hussein is Iran, Iran is Chechniya, somewhere down the line France falls into the pot, and then you go to Tarrytown and eat Freedom Fries!

It’s all a clever use of language in terms of framing something so you see it in a certain way. And in this whole framing, of course, there is no occupation! Israel formally denies it has occupation. Because Israel has claims… The entire country is the land of Israel from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, and how can you occupy your own country? So if you take out occupation, you de-politicize the conflict and then you mystify it – which is what Bush does as well – you mystify it and you make it out to be: us and them, good and bad, clashes of civilizations and all this stuff. Then you can reduce it all to terrorism.

And here, again, the language is so important. There is no internationally accepted definition of terrorism. Amnesty talks a lot about suicide bombing and condemns it. But if we adopt a human rights language, you don’t use the word terrorism because it’s such a loaded term. In human rights language, it is forbidden to kill, or attack, or harm civilians. Period! I don’t care who you are. If you’re a state, if you’re a freedom fighter, if you’re anything you can not attack and harm civilians.

But the word terrorist in the popular language, of course refers only to non-state actors. So states are off the hook! And in terrorism is another thing – and this is pretty much what the United Stated plays on – the definition of terrorism is all dependent on intention. What is a terrorist? A terrorist is a non-state actor (in the right wing use of the term) whose intent is to kill civilians, and therefore they’re bad guys. Whereas states like the United States in Iraq – and who knows? – the Johns Hopkins study talks about 650,000 civilians that have been killed in Iraq but certainly there have been hundreds of thousands. But because the United States is a state, so having a legitimate monopoly over the use of force, and because it doesn’t have the intention of killing civilians – it has the intention of bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq – it’s off the hook.

There is a very interesting book I’ll suggest to you called "Death by Government" by a fellow named Rummel, and he has a very interesting web site, and he calculates that over the course of the whole 20th century, about 170,000 innocent people – non-combatants – were killed by what we would call terrorists in the popular use of the term. Non-state acts. About 170,000 people; which is a lot of people. But he calculates that over the course of the 20th century, at least 170 million – and he said that the figure could easily go up to 360 million – innocent people were killed by states. The ones that killed civilians, 170,000, they’re the bad guys and they are bad guys – they’ve killed civilians. But the states that killed hundreds of millions of civilians are off he hook because they’re states. That’s how framing is so powerful, the use of language, and how it gets us to thinking about things like that.

So in the Israeli framing, Israel is the victim. And since it’s the victim, because it’s facing terrorism, and if you’re taking occupation out of the equation, then it’s like a mugging. You know, for instance, we hear about the soldier in Gaza who was kidnapped; we use that kind of language because there is no political context to it. So that, in the Israeli framing, Israel is the victim – which is a great thing to be because if you’re the victim you have no responsibility. No one can hold you accountable; international law, or human rights, or whatever, because you’re the victim.

So if you can be the fourth largest nuclear power in the world, and an occupying power, and you’re the victim, you turn everything on its head. Framing is very important.

I’ll say some hard things about Israel; I’ve live there 35 years, I have all the credentials that you want, but the basis of our [ICAHD’s] reframing is there is an occupation, and the occupation and the denial of the right of self determination to the Palestinians is the basis of the conflict.

This doesn’t let the Palestinians off the hook in terms of responsibilities as well, but it doesn’t create a false symmetry – all this talk about both sides, this tit-for-tat thing, both sides have to end the violence, both sides have to negotiate – that’s a false way of presenting it because one side has the power. There’s a power differential in here; one side is a state, it’s a global military power, the Israeli economy is three times larger than Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon put together.

It’s a small country, true, but it’s a very powerful country. And because it’s powerful, and because it has a lot of buying power, it can be held accountable. And so this reframing, to present Israel as it is, with the policies that it has, that opens the door to accountability, is crucial if we’re ever going to be able to break through and resolve this conflict.

So one of the questions we ask – and it has to do with framing – is: How does Israel get away with it? Here you’ve got a country, a powerful country. Israel is the third largest arms exporter in the world. No one’s ever going to catch up to the United Sates with 70% of the market; way down number two is Russia; Israel is number three. Israel produces more arms than China, or Britain, or France. So how does a country that’s powerful economically, that’s powerful militarily, and it’s a strategic ally, formally, written in treaty with the United States, the world’s major super power, an occupying power, violating human rights and international law in the light of day… How does it get away with that? – in this most transparent of all conflicts?

I would submit to you, that there is an elephant in the room.

Now we all know there is an influence of the Jewish media in the United States, which is true… I wouldn’t make out the Jewish media to be running the United States by any means, but the Jewish media does have a lot of clout. It’s very strategic in its use of resources, and we all know the power that AIPAC has. Of course, we have to bring in the Christian Fundamentalists into the equation as well. Jerry Falwell claims there are 70 million Christian Zionists in the United States. The fundamentalists have renamed themselves Christian Zionists because Zionism has really replaced abortion as their number one issue – because this is Armageddon – and it’s cute and everything but it’s very important politically. These guys have a lot of power – including having a president. So that, in the last Lebanon war, when Israel finally got into a cease fire, Pat Robertson was furious. On his 700 Club, which is a very watched program, he just railed against Olmert and against the Israeli government because they betrayed the entire world – that war was supposed to spark Armageddon. And the second coming of Christ. And Olmert did not play the role that God had set out for him. You know, Pat Robertson is not some little preacher in some little town somewhere; he has a lot of clout in the corridors of power.

It still doesn’t explain things (how Israel gets away with that). Kissinger used to say that countries don’t have friends; they have interests. And there is something else going on. The United States is not going to sacrifice its position in the world, alienate the entire Moslem world, get in the conflicts its getting into, because of Jews, because it loves Jews so much, or because Israel is so important. Something else is going on.

The elephant in the room, that something else I want to suggest to you, is the military. And what’s very interesting is that this is an issue that is not talked about very much in the United States. So in order to start getting to the answer – how does Israel get away with it? – we started to look into its involvement in the world’s arms trade, and especially in the American military-industrial complex and what is called the "defense" industry – another cute use of terminology.

It’s interesting. We’re working with an organization called CAAT, in the UK, the Committee Against Arms Trade. There are organizations in Scandinavia that work a lot, here and there; there are individuals that are doing a little bit of something… It’s interesting, on the radical left agenda in the United States, arms is not a huge issue. This whole elephant in the room doesn’t only apply to Israel in the occupied territories, I think this is a part of the political equation in this country – that people don’t get it. And I think that’s what the previous speaker was talking about – that you don’t get the enormity of what’s happening in Iraq – I don’t think people get the enormity of the American military presence in the world.

The defense budget – the budget of the Pentagon – is 500 billion dollars a year. The United States today has already budgeted – it isn’t to be budgeted – 1.4 trillion dollars for the development of new weapons systems in the United States. The American economy is so committed to the military – so that it’s very nice for us to say, it’s important for us to say, we should be taking these billions and putting them to health care and education and so on – but the American economy is so committed to the military, that I’m not so sure that the United States is capable of what we used to call even a peace dividend, let alone retooling the entire economy. And here is where Israel plays a tremendous role, because Israel has inserted itself very squarely in the center of the military industrial complex in the United States.

Sometimes we talk about Israel being the 51st state. But there’s a joke, actually I heard it from the State Department: Why doesn’t Israel want to be the 51st state? Because then it would have only two senators.

Israel is right in the center, and since ’67 – when really it made everybody sit up with defeat of the entire Arab world in the Six-day War – Israel has been very much in the center of American military and foreign policy.

We all know the neocons – and again I can say this because I’m Jewish – most of whom are Jewish; the children of Norman Podhoretz, of Commentary Magazine; you know Elliot Abrahms, who is head of the middle east desk of the National Security Council, is his son-in-law. Paul Wolfowitz, president of the World Bank, who got us into Iraq, was Netanyahu’s campaign manager in 1996! This isn’t only somebody who drew up papers about the American century, laid out; this is part of that group of Perle [Richard Perle; Defense Policy Board for Rumsfeld; member of JINSA], and Feith [Douglas Feith; Under Sec. Of Defense for Policy until 2005, member of JINSA], and this group of Jewish neocons that laid out the papers in the 1980s that led to American policy in the Bush Jr. administration, but these are people intimately involved in Israeli politics.

Wolfowitz, who was Deputy Secretary of Defense, the architect of the Iraq war, was the campaign manager of Benjamin Netanyahu. And wrote, with some of the leading neocons in Washington, Netanyahu’s entire policy as Prime Minister of Israel – a paper called The Clean Break which you can read on the internet. So there is an intimate, intimate relationship here, between the powers that be in Washington.

But I have to tell you, you can’t just blame the Republicans either; the Democrats have always been worse on this issue than the Republicans. Your neighbor in Westchester, Hillory Clinton, came to Israel, about six months ago – and this is how powerful framing can be – she stood in front of the Wall in Bethlehem – and those of you who have been there know what I’m talking about – this is a twenty-six foot concrete wall surrounding the city of Bethlehem (not only the city of Bethlehem) – the wall that Israel is completing today is twice as high as the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall was twelve feet high; this is twenty-six feet high. The Wall around all the Palestinian areas is five times longer than the Berlin Wall was; the Berlin Wall was linear; our Wall is a complex of walls that encompass entire cities like Bethlehem. And neighborhoods, and secondary walls, and tertiary walls, and trenches, and check points, and electrified fences, and watch towers, and patrolling dogs; you wouldn’t believe what this complex is that’s imprisoning the Palestinian people.

And what’s ironic is: you can go to Bethlehem; there’s a huge terminal that you have to go through to get into this walled city now. And there’s a huge sign put up by the Israeli Ministry of Tourism that says "Peace Be Unto You" – talk about Orwellian stuff.

And Hillory Clinton comes, and stands in front of this wall and says, and I quote, "This fence," – because Israel will not allow you to use the word Wall -- "is an appropriate, non-violent, response to terrorism."

So if you can say that, standing in front of a twenty-six foot concrete wall completely surrounding a city of people, then that just shows you the power of framing, but also the complicity of the Democrats in all of this. So our problem is, of course, when we try to go to Congress, to advocate, to lobby in Congress, the people you would go to normally – who would you go to? – you would go to the liberals, you would go to those… I’ll give you an example: Tom Harkin, of Iowa, this is Mister Human Rights in the Senate, he’s made his entire career… he’s one of the most liberal guys, he’s talking about human rights – and human rights is not really a part of the American discourse – for years. He voted for a bill last year that annexes the major settlement blocks to Israel. It was a bill that passed – actually in was in 2004, annexing the settlement blocks to Israel – that people don’t know about. It was passed in the Senate by a vote of 95 to 1; the only vote against it was Senator Bird of West Virginia.

And here you get Tom Harkin, from Iowa – there are six Jews in the state of Iowa! It’s not a huge Christian Fundamentalist population – here’s the best case: a liberal who’s been in office for years and years in Iowa, without all those contravening forces, who votes for a bill for no reason whatsoever, to annex the settlement blocks to Israel, thereby – in my view at least – completely eliminating the two-state solution as a possibility.

So where do you go with this, in terms of action? And again the question is, "well why"? What’s going on here? Now, Tom Harkin happens to get $100,000 or so for his election campaign from AIPAC, but again that doesn’t answer the question. And again I think the answer is military. This is a whole area that I think has to be looked into.

Last year, the Pentagon published what it calls the "QDR," the Quadrennial Defense Review, that you should look up, presented by Rumsfeld in the Pentagon. This is the Pentagon’s twenty year work plan, entitled The Long War, and it says in the QDR that the term "the long war" is intended to replace the term "the war on terrorism." What it says in this workplan is that the United States is involved in a generational long war with radical Islam. So that if we’re talking about getting out of Iraq, don’t think that that’s the end of the story. Rumsfeld stood at the podium of the Pentagon and said there will be wars in North Africa, in the horn of Africa where we already have an American sponsored war where Ethiopia invaded Somalia, in the Caucasus Mountains, and in Southeast Asia.

There is going to be a generational long war against radical Islam and, oh yes, to contain China as well. And this is what the $1.4 trillion is geared for, and it’s even worse than war, because 20% – the cutting edge of those funds – is intended for what is called "counter insurgency warfare," or urban warfare. Now, this is crucial stuff, and again it’s framing, again it’s language. "Insurgents" is a popular characterization(????); there are insurgents in Iraq. But insurgents are the people; they’re the people! Whether you call them rebels in 1776, or revolutionaries; insurgents are the people.

In Mexico City, the major avenue is called the Avenue of the Insurgents, because in Mexico the insurgents or the heroes – they’re the good guys. Pancho Villa, Zapata. It’s only now we’ve co-opted the vocabulary, and insurgents become terrorists and they’re non-state, and so the non-state people, rebelling against unjust regimes are the bad guys, and the states – by definition – are the good guys, especially if they’re allied with the United States.

So the whole thing gets turned on its head. And so the Long War is really a war of counterinsurgency against the people; this is a war against the people of the world, led by the United States with a $1.4 trillion budget.

And this is where Israel enters into it, because part of Israel’s contribution to all of this is weapons development. Israel specializes in high-tech weaponry. It tried, over the years, to build its own weapons systems; it tried to build a jet fighter, it tried to build a tank, it tried to build ships. It’s too much for Israel. We figured out: why do that? So it’s changed its strategy in the 1990s, and Israel specializes in developing high-tech components for weapons systems, so that you can’t build a modern weapons system without using Israeli technology. That’s where Israel gets access to American military technology and that’s where it becomes tremendously useful for the United States.

Intel, for example. It’s nice to have the Pentium chip but it’s much more than that, has its major research and development sites in the Silicon Valley, Ireland, and Israel. This is the specialty of Israel, its high-tech components. For example, the wall that you’re now building on the Mexican border, all the surveillance equipment, the cameras and everything, are all Elbit Systems – a leading Israeli surveillance company. So Israel specializes in these kinds of technologies but also in counter-insurgency because there is another way to look at the occupied territories – true they are occupied territories and all that stuff – but they’re a laboratory. What is Israel’s edge in this? The counter insurgency; urban warfare market. Urban warfare is the cutting edge of counter insurgency,

Traditionally, armies avoided cities. They would bomb cites, they besieged cities, you didn’t go into cities. Look what’s happening in Baghdad. But that’s where the people are these days – which we call now the insurgents, and so urban warfare is becoming a major area of counter insurgency warfare – which is the cutting edge of the long war because this is a long war against people – and that the occupied territories are the laboratory for Israel. Israel has four million people. And sometimes you can throw Lebanon in there, every few years, for some experimenting too. Israel has four million people in a whole variety of settings, from villages to encampments, to towns, to cities, that you can do anything you want to it.

There’s no oversight. Nobody cares. Nobody’s looking. And every single day the Israeli army is in these Palestinian cities, testing out new counter insurgency weaponry. It’s been in the Israeli papers over the last couple of months; it’s common practice when you’re training new units in the army to conquer a village, a Palestinian village, as a training exercise. You come in at night, you capture a village; you can imagine the terror; the Israeli army – with shooting and everything going on – coming into a village in the middle of the night as an exercise.

Israel, for example, has developed… this is important stuff and I’ll tell you why in a second. The Israeli army has a school of architecture – one of the most sophisticated schools of architecture in the country – whose job is to learn the semantics of the city because this is the future battleground. And the principle is to try to turn the city inside out – which is what the Israelis have been teaching the Americans to do in Iraq. Fallujah was absolutely an Israeli style attack on a city. Go through walls… The whole idea is that what you think is private becomes public domain, where armies go through, Turn the cities inside out. So, for example, Israel has developed a kind of a helmet, a heat sensory helmet, that lets you see through walls; you don’t see clearly, but you see figures through walls. And then there are special bullets that have been developed that can shoot through concrete blocks like butter. You can shoot people through walls, and walk on, and nobody ever knows it.

Israel is specializing in what’s known as nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is microscopic; it’s like what they use in pacemakers, or put things in your bloodstream; the medical profession uses nanotechnology a lot. In the military realm, this is an Israeli specialty. So, for example, Israel has developed what it calls a wasp; it’s a microscopic flying wasp equipped with cameras – Elbit cameras that are microscopic. They can send a swarm of these wasps into a neighborhood, and they’re all over the place; in your bedrooms, in your living rooms, you don’t even see them; they’re microscopic, flying around with cameras. You can also equip them with poisons, and target particular people for assassination; kinds of military technologies that we haven’t even dreamed about.

And one of the points I’m trying to make here is that this presents a tremendous danger to civil liberties in the Hudson Valley. I’m writing an article now that’s called The Road from Nablus, Gaza and Fallujah Leads to Your Door. I’m trying to say, it’s a slippery slope from the military to security firms to police forces. This isn’t contained within the military; these kinds of technologies get into security firms. You know that Israeli security firms run the New York City security system of the New York City Police Department. Every year, twice a year, there is a conference of police chiefs of major American police departments in Israel. [Google: JINSA Wikipedia] You have Israeli security firms all over the United States. And going from military to security firms to police forces with kinds of technologies designed for urban warfare… They decide, you know, that the people of Tarrytown are terrorists… When you start to make the private public, this is a real violation, a danger to civil rights.

What I’ve tried to say, here, is: Don’t think that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is just another conflict far away and why are we taking so much time dealing with it? But it is a domestic issue; a domestic issue in terms of the American economy, in terms of the American status in the world, in terms of what the United States is doing in the world, but also in terms of protecting your own civil liberties. And I just want to say that there is an Israeli architect named Ayal Weizman, an Israeli architect who’s done a lot of work on this – and you can look up a lot of this on a web site – stuff that he’s done work on.

So, we are the civil society. And I think we really have to be the ones that raise the alarms, and we have to be on top of these issues, and part of our job is to relate all these issues in a coherent way for the people so they begin to see what’s going on.

And I want to thank you for inviting me here.

Jeff Halper is the founder of Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and was nominated in 2006 for the Nobel Peace Prize by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker social justice organization.