Stand up to AIPAC in Cincinnati

For years the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has served to prevent an honest discussion of the Israel-Palestine conflict and supported actions that block a peaceful resolution. This month they are fundraising in Cincinnati.

Come out and show that you don’t agree with AIPAC’s support of the most oppressive of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians and their constant drive for war with Iran.

FB event updates: https://www.facebook.com/events/509002149146920/

What: Protest AIPAC
When: Monday April 22nd, 5-7pm
Where: Meet on the street across from the JCC
(8485 Ridge Rd Cincinnati, OH 45236)

See you there!
Cincinnati Palestine Solidarity Coalition

Read media coverage of the weekend convergence!

Read US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation’s write up about the Expose AIPAC weekend!

Take online action: ‘AIPAC Wants War With Iran. Americans Don’t!‘

Where: Between the Historical Society Building and the Washington Convention Center
When: Monday, March 4, 7-8:30pm

CODEPINK will talk to the hundreds of Congresspeople going into the gala to show their support for AIPAC. CODEPINK and allies will say no to AIPAC, yes to equality and freedom for Palestinians, yes to peace with Iran. It is time for a new US foreign policy in the Middle East.

Codepink & DC area supporters have protested outside the AIPAC Policy Conference over the weekend. Visuals have included a village of settlements to show they are an obstacle to peace, a solemn 100+ person kneel-in outside of AIPAC to support Palestinian political prisoners and hunger strikers, the construction of a Separation Wall and more. Video and photographs available for press use upon request, email alli@codepink.org.

The Expose AIPAC coalition gathered to urge US officials to reject the Israeli administration’s push for war on Iran and insist on respect for Palestinian rights. Timed to coincide with the annual AIPAC policy conference, the Expose AIPAC summit was a weekend series of events and protests to draw attention to the role of AIPAC as a special interest lobby that maintains a stranglehold over US policies.

Where: In front of the AIPAC building (251 H St., NW Washington DC)  

When: 12:00pm,  Friday, 1 March 2013

To kick off a weekend of actions to protest the Israel lobby’s annual policy conference, CODEPINK and other human rights organizations will converge at the AIPAC headquarters in Washington, DC at noon on Friday, March 1st. Activists will “occupy” the AIPAC building by setting up a “settlement village” in front of the building’s main entrance. Visuals include “settlement homes” that protesters will wear, and they will arrange themselves symbolically to represent how much of an obstacle to peace real settlements in the West Bank are. Other activists will hold banners calling for new American policies in the Middle East that are not dictated by AIPAC.

AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) is holding its annual policy conference in DC next week, March 3-5, at a time when tensions are high in Israel/Palestine. Demonstrations have erupted all over the West Bank in response to the death of Arafat Jaradat, who died while in Israeli prison as a result of torture. Several other Palestinian prisoners are nearing death as they protest torture and abuse through organized hunger strikes.

Other upcoming actions throughout the weekend, March 2-5:

Full-day mobilization in front of Historical Society Building,
When: Sunday, March 3rd, 11:00am-8:00pm
Where: Corner of Massachusetts and 9th, outside the annual AIPAC Policy Conference; and in front of the Washington Convention Center

11am: Rally including debka (traditional Palestinian dancing), a flashmob, people dressed as settlements, and much more.

2pm: Press conference featuring Palestinian activists, co-founder of CODEPINK Medea Benjamin, former diplomat Colonel Ann Wright, members of the peace group Jewish Voice for Peace, and more. Rally will follow.

3pm: Choreographed action to honor the Palestinian political prisoners who are currently on hunger strike by dramatically posing outside the AIPAC conference. Protesters will assemble along the sidewalk, solemnly kneeling, facing the AIPAC conference during their break time between sessions when thousands of AIPACers will be milling around outside.

7pm: Protest as AIPAC’s conference day is ending

Protest of AIPAC’s Gala Event
Where: Between the Historical Society Building and the Washington Convention Center
When: Monday, March 4, 7-8:30pm
CODEPINK will talk to the hundreds of Congresspeople going into the gala to show their support for AIPAC. CODEPINK and allies will say no to AIPAC, yes to equality and freedom for Palestinians, yes to peace with Iran. It is time for a new US foreign policy in the Middle East.

Can’t make it? Consider donating to our scholarship fund.

Last year we gathered under the banner of Occupy AIPAC for a weekend of workshops, protest, culture and direct actions. This year, Interfaith Peace Builders will put on a day-long Grassroots Advocacy Training, US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation will coordinate a lobbying workshop and CODEPINK will be leading the creative protests and direct actions outside the AIPAC Conference. Register today! 

Highlighted Actions: 

Expose AIPAC Grassroots Advocacy Training, hosted by Interfaith Peace Builders 
When: Saturday, March 2nd, 8:30 am
Where: Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church (900 Massachusetts Ave)
Speakers include Rebecca Vilkommerson, Jonathan Kuttab, Josh Reubner, Phyllis Bennis, Philip Farah, Jamal Abdi, Robert Naiman and more!
Registration for the Grassroots Advocacy Training is a sliding scale of $40 – $125 ($30 for students), payable when you register.
Register now! 

New Perspectives on Peace with Justice 
An Evening with Interfaith Peace-Builders
When: Saturday, March 2nd, 6:30 pm- 9:00 pm
Where: The Goethe Institut, 812 7th St NW, Washington, DC 20001
Requested Donation: $30 – $100; Food and Beverage provided
Featured Speakers: Reverend Carolyn Boyd - Adjunct Pastor at Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ, former national Co-Chair of Black Voices for Peace; Hanan Idilbi - Board Member of Interfaith Peace-Builders, and member of the US Palestine Community Network.
Musical Guests: Feras and Ehab - Playing modern oud compositions rooted in the deep cultural traditions of Palestine; Luci Murphy - a D.C.-based vocalist and community activist in the peace and social justice movement, singing songs of freedom.

Expose AIPAC Mobilization and Street Protests, hosted by CODEPINK 
When: Sunday, March 3rd at 11:00 am
Where: Outside the AIPAC Conference (corner of Massachusetts and 9th) for dubka, a flashmob, and greeting AIPAC goers as they leave the convention center at the end of the day!
11am: Our actions will begin. We’ll have awesome visuals (including “settlements” you can wear so we can show AIPAC just how obstructive settlements are) but feel free to bring your own signs! We’ll be rallying, protesting, singing and dabke dancing.
2pm: Press conference and rally.
3pm: We need 150 people for an amazing visual/action (non-violent and non-arrestable) to commit to joining us from 3:00pm-4:00pm…sign up here so we know you’re coming!!
5 pm: Take a break by going to eat (we’ll congregate as a group!) and then come back to protest as AIPAC’s conference day is ending at 7:00 pm.

Protesting the AIPAC Gala!
When: Monday, March 4, 7:00-8:30 pm 
Where: In front of the Washington Convention Center
Join CODEPINK as we talk to the hundreds of Congresspeople going into the gala to show their support for AIPAC.
Say no to AIPAC. Yes to equality and freedom for Palestinians. Yes to peace with Iran. Time for a new US foreign policy in the Middle East. Join us, or please consider making a donation.

Love & Struggle,
CODEPINK, Interfaith Peace Builders and US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation

This past year, AIPAC has provided cover for Israel to continue war crimes against Gaza with impunity, ensured the continuation of weapons transfers to Israel and pushed for war on Iran. We need you to join us in Washington D.C. to show the growing opposition to AIPAC’s influence and US complicity in the oppression of Palestinians.

Join us for insightful workshops during the IFPB organised Grassroots Advocacy Training on Saturday, March 2nd, CODEPINK organized creative direct actions and protests outside the annual AIPAC Policy Conference March 3-5 to show our Congress and President Obama that we do not support the AIPAC stranglehold over US foreign policy and US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation organized lobbying workshop and Congressional visits.

Stay tuned as we develop our program for this exciting weekend gathering. All updates will be posted to http://www.occupyaipac.org/.

Visit http://www.ifpb.org/education/grassroots/2013/ to learn more & register! 

Love & Struggle,
CODEPINK, Interfaith Peace Builders and US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation

Activists briefly disrupted a private fundraiser of the powerful Israel lobby group AIPACat the Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco on 4 December.

A video posted on YouTube shows three activists, who had been among a group demonstrating outside the hotel, marching into the private ballroom where the fundraiser was being held.

They were quickly surrounded and expelled, but not before shouting “Free Palestine” and other slogans at the attendees.

Captions in the video explain the activists’ motivations:

Outside the hotel activists staged a noisy demonstration demanding among other things an end to US military aid to Israel.

We had been demonstrating at the Israeli consulate for weeks, standing, yelling, outside, often in the rain. After a short demo some of us were still dissatisfied. We wanted to be sure fundraiser attendees received our message. We hand-wrote some notes and delivered them…

One of the notes read, “Your $$$ goes to help fund the slaughter of innocent children and civilians. FREE PALESTINE.”

The video captions direct people to stopaipac.org for additional information.

AIPAC has increasingly become a target of Palestine solidarity protests, especially at its annual policy conference, under the banner of Occupy AIPAC.

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Imagine you are a student activist trying to get tobacco products banned from your university. You insist that cigarettes cause cancer, as so much research has shown. Your opponents are other students who claim the connection is tenuous and controversial, that student government should not make judgments on complex health issues, and that some students are so attached to their cigarettes that their very identities would be under attack if such a measure were passed. What if these students called themselves regular smokers, but were in fact trained and sometimes paid representatives of Philip Morris and Marlboro? How much credibility would they have on campus?

The answer depends on whether opponents of tobacco products buy into the frame of two symmetrical student groups – “pro-smokers“ and “anti-smokers,” or whether they call out their opponents for being representatives of external bodies.

One of the biggest failings of pro-Palestine student movement in many U.S. schools is buying into the symmetry frame. We’ve largely accepted the idea that efforts to divest from Israeli apartheid are promoted by pro-Palestine student groups, and opposed by pro-Israel ones (“the Zionists”) – as if these are two symmetrical parties.

But this is a completely false picture. Groups like Students for Justice in Palestine truly are grass-root organizations. Despite persistent rumors about their secret Saudi oil money, SJP chapters hold bake sales to send students their national conferences. On the U.C. Berkeley campus, attention was diverted from SJP’s cookies and brownies by the College Republicans, who put on a lavish spectacle involving students in swimsuits. The SJP sale raised a little under $6.

Such financial improvisation is one of the hazards of truly independent student organizing. But contrast that with a recent complaint from a “pro-Israel” student: “students are bombarded with funding opportunities to engage in pre-formed activities from a dozen different organizations. There is little opportunity to be creative and scant motivation to develop programming that comes from students themselves.”

It is in fact misleading to characterize this student as simply “pro-Israel,” or “Zionist,” any more than a representative of Philip Morris is simply “a smoker.” She is a Hasbara Fellow, atrained advocate for an external organization founded in 2001 by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She will be paid back a deposit of $250 if her activism is considered satisfactory. The program is currently run by Aish HaTora International, a huge international Jewish outreach organization with private donors that works closely with the Israeli government. Aish operates “dozens of full-time branches and programs on six continents.” It is based not in the U.S. but in East Jerusalem, and supports continued settlement of the West Bank.  This organization tells its members that the occupation is nothing more than a “myth,” and disseminates hardcore islamophobic materials, like the films Obsession and Third Jihad (which wereproduced in millions of copies by an offshoot of Aish International).

One of the features of Hasbara Fellows’ activism is a relentless attempt to smear pro-Palestine students as anti-Jewish. In a failed lawsuit against her former university, U.C. Berkeley, this student claimed that Jewish students’ experiences, especially as a result of protests against checkpoints, are comparable to “incitement, intimidation, harassment and violence carried out under the Nazi regime and those of its allies in Europe against Jewish students… during the turbulent years leading up to and including the Holocaust.”

When routinely compared to Nazis (a comparison considered extremely offensive if made in the opposite direction), pro-Palestine students often get defensive. They protest that they’ve succeeded in drawing the line between anti-semitism and anti-Zionism, and display some of their Jewish members as proof. By doing so they implicitly accept the idea that what is at stake here is the feelings of Jewish American students, and that these students should therefore be the main parties to the debate. This framing doubly undermines our own work: first, it reproduces the very structures of power and prejudice that marginalize Palestinians in the first place. Secondly, by obscuring the voices of Palestinian American students it contributes to the perception that human rights abuses happen far away – an international issue so complex that U.S. students cannot form an opinion about it, much less act on it. But the most compelling arguments are the ones that draw connections between companies our schools are invested in and human rights abuses suffered by students in those same schools – from H.P.’s equipment for checkpoints to General Electric’s parts in helicopters which are used to attack civilians in Gaza. Palestinian students who’ve been impacted by these horrors are the experts, and they are students on our campuses. They are our best advocates.

A better way of countering these endless accusations of anti-Semitism would be to clearly distinguish the diverse community of Jewish students in each university from advocates of particular external groups. Many accusations of anti-Semitism are made by Hasbara Fellows, members of an organization that disseminates extreme islamophobic materials, as mentioned above. Similar accusations of antisemitism come from student representatives of AIPAC, whose group seeks tocut aid to Palestinian refugees, is pushing the U.S. towards war with Iran, and hasa long history of preventing recognition of the Armenian Genocide. In 2010 after a divestment resolution was initially passed at UC Berkeley (before it was vetoed), an AIPAC official promised “we’re going to make sure that pro-Israel students take over the student government and reverse the vote…This is how AIPAC operates in our nation’s capital. This is how AIPAC must operate on our nation’s campuses.”

This year, a student body representing the University of California system passed a resolution distinguishing anti-semitism from criticism of Israeli state policies and affirming the legitimacy of calls for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. In response, several current and former student senators published an open letterthat contained the following language:

“UCSA’s resolution refers to “Israel’s illegal occupation” and charges Israel with “racism and Apartheid in the context of Israeli policies” without recognizing the level of debate and dissension constantly occurring around this hostile rhetoric. Furthermore, the resolution takes a stance “in strong opposition to…the racism of Israel’s human rights violations” and “encourages all institutions of higher learning to cleanse their investment portfolios of unethical investments” in companies that do business with Israel. This extreme language alienates a significant portion of the campus community, especially those whose identities are closely tied with the Jewish state. As a governing body, it is the responsibility to create a safe campus environment and avoid making comprehensive statements that can be perceived as an attack on those UCSA claims to represent.”

This letter is being disseminated by the AIPAC representatives in each school. Imagine students openly representing Exxon disseminating a letter that called any talk of global warming “extreme language” that creates an unsafe environment for students whose identities are closely tied to purchasing oil. Most students would see this as absurd. But pro-Palestine students have been very hesitant to draw these connections. Part of the reason lies in conflict avoidance: why criticize fellow students who already say (or are told to say) we are hurting their feelings? Shouldn’t we be gentler with them?

Again, being gentle to trained representatives of an advocacy group makes as much sense as reaching out to a Bank of America employee who is about to foreclose your home. Of course there is no need to deliberately offend. But if external advocacy organizations are like big corporations, pro-Palestine students can borrow from the rich traditions of anti-corporate activism. Where are our adbusters? What can we learn from Naomi Klein’s No Logo? Why should paid advocates of external bodies have unrestricted access to student newspapers, without providing full disclosure? Shouldn’t we be demanding a protocol to pre-empt that? What transparency do they owe if they serve in elected student bodies? How can the Freedom of Information Act be used to expose their typically covert lobbying? You’ve seen Shit Zionists Say – how about Shit AIPAC Says? What about a “Who Advocates?” website, modeled on Who Profits? When will “Hasbara Fellow” become a familiar term that every student associates with a tiny group of advocates for external anti-Palestinian groups – instead of seeing them as representing the voice of Jewish students? In 2011 there were only 250 Hasbara Fellows in 80 U.S., universities, an average of 3 students per school, yet they consistently speak in the name of entire Jewish communities.

While Hasbara Fellows themselves are concerned that their student groups could be seen as “a façade for multi-million dollar organizations,” the pro-Palestine movement has rarely attempted to call out the Israel Lobby on our campuses. We cannot tell our local AIPAC representatives from the Hasbara Fellows. We do not even know the names of other external advocacy groups. Serious and well-documented research on each school can engender new and creative strategies to challenge these champions of the status quo, who are blocking crucial action to end Israeli apartheid in all its forms. There is no time to waste, especially after the latest slaughter in Gaza. It’s time to call out the campus Israel Lobby.