We are disturbed that our tax dollars are used to violate both American and international laws, and to support very un-American values. Our Arms Export Control Act of 1976 limits use of American weapons to "legitimate self-defense." In Israel's 12 wars they initiated all but one, each of which also violated the UN and Nuremberg charters prohibiting aggressive war. In addition, US military equipment has been used relentlessly to steal and destroy Palestinian property, kill Palestinian civilians and both Palestinian and international human rights activists resisting the occupation, all masquerading under a transparent charade of "self-defense" to evade our law that should never be permitted.
Under our Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, "No assistance may be provided...to the government of any country which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights." Review of our pages on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Fourth Geneva Convention show that Israel clearly fits this description.
Our Declaration of Independence asserts that all people are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This means not being killed by Israeli F-16s, helicopter gunships, remote-controlled aerial drones, and IDF snipers. It means not being illegally occupied (in defiance of international law and multiple UN resolutions mandating withdrawal) by a foreign power. It means not having vital infrastructures (schools, hospitals, public buildings, places of worship, waste water facilities, power supplies) destroyed and access to external resources blocked by an external aggressor.
The US has not only continued to fund these illegal and criminal actions by Israel in violation of American laws but has provided diplomatic protection from legal consequences for these violations by 43 UN Security Council vetoes that might have subjected Israel to international sanctions. As American citizens we have no right to ignore or approve these actions by our state and these uses of our tax dollars.
Our authority? American citizens who can read. We are not historians, but read historians such as Israeli professors Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim and Shlomo Sand. We are not international attorneys, but read international legal authorities such as Francis Boyle and Richard Falk.
We advocate freedom, justice and equality in the Holy Land.
Consequently, we lack support from AIPAC, the U.S. Department of Defense, the imperial corporatocracy, or other profiteers from the organized lethal violence of war, colonial exploitation and colonial occupation.
We have assembled a comprehensive photo gallery, original signage and a comprehensive library of written information which we have exhibited for eight years in a prominent public location each Saturday from April through October. We show educational films and sponsor educational events featuring important speakers such as Dr. Jeff Halper of ICAHD, an Israeli NGO actively resisting Palestinian dispossession, Palestinian professor and author Mazin Qumsiyah, attorney Tom Nelson of the National Lawyers Guild which has investigated Israeli war crimes in Gaza, Palestinian author Ali Abunimah advocating a single democratic state, and journalist Alison Weir of If Americans Knew who has documented the severe pro-Israel bias in US news reporting. We engage in public debates. We write regular op-eds and letters to the editor in several papers, challenging and deconstructing the Zionist story-lines. We support awareness-raising programs in other communities. We have established this website and contribute to national online dialogues through Veterans for Peace, US campaign to end the Israeli occupation, and other groups and coalitions of groups.
One of our co-directors is Palestinian, from a family that once owned the Palestinian Bus Company but was expelled from Ramle by Zionist terrorism in July 1948 following perhaps the most hideous of the 33 Jewish massacres in neigboring Lydda. He is the former media director of the Arab Anti-discrimination Committee of Oregon.
One of our co-directors is Jewish, national chair of the Veterans for Peace working group on Palestine and the Middle East, who hosted and broadcast a progressive radio program for 15 years in the San Francisco Bay area.
One of our two founding co-directors, a woman aware and disturbed by racism and injustice since childhood, was awakened many years ago to deceptions, evasions and misrepresentations within our local "peace and justice" activist community. Such community activists, recently come to be known as "Progressive except for Palestine," serve as local enforcers of The Offical Story and obstructors of progress toward just and realistic solutions. Whether deliberate cointelpro or innocently manipulated, she works tirelessly to expose and oppose these local representatives of "The Lobby" as it is known in the halls of Congress.
Our other founding co-director, also aware and disturbed by racism since childhood and currently national vice-chair of the Veterans for Peace working group on Palestine and the Middle East, is a transactional psychologist who identifies the Israel-in-Palestine relationship as a sinister international game. Transactional games involve three roles and three players with the third providing a key role that either facilitates or resolves the game. As an everyday example, the third player in a marital conflict can be a therapist working to resolve or a romantic interloper working to disrupt.
All players disguise their actual role identity behind another, analogized by Transactional Analysis founder Dr. Eric Berne as the front of the sweatshirt that invites engagement and the back of the sweatshirt that reveals the payoff only when walking away. The three roles, deeply rooted in our fundamental stress (autonomic nervous system) responses conditioned in the nuclear family dynamics of early childhood, are the Victim (who has pain), the Aggressor (who is blamed for the pain) and the Rescuer (who relieves the pain).
The Middle East morass has remained a continuously recycling destructive game, kept unresolved by a duplicitous third player, initially the British and for the last half century the U.S. The deceptions maintained by the controlling governments and their compliant media are as follows:
Front of sweatshirt
Back of sweatshirt
Israel
VICTIM
AGGRESSOR
Palestine
AGGRESSOR
VICTIM
U.S.
RESCUER
AGGRESSOR
Are we "taking sides"? You bet we are. We align ourselves squarely with:
We are trying to model responsible American citizenship and to encourage all other Americans - especially Jewish Americans with potential influence upon the very powerful Israel lobby network - to do the same. We claim no special expertise. Don’t take our word for anything. Do the research yourself. We provide many links and sources for doing so. Are we objective? Judge for yourself. We rely on established historical and United Nations records, applicable international law, and multiple materials from reputable scholars and other reliable sources. We include numerous original sources on these pages.
Although well-known as public exhibitors and program sponsors in our local city, we choose to remain anonymous here. Why? Because critics of Israeli policies and conduct are invariably subjected to virulent attack in this country. Unable to counter the facts with rational or empirically grounded argument, defenders of Israel and the "Zionist project" resort to ad hominem attacks, spurious and defamatory howls of "anti-Semitism," smearing and whisper campaigns, and other dishonorable tactics to distract, distort and delay the growing international demand for justice which would serve the best interests of both the United States and Israel as well as Israel’s victims. In a recent example, the tenure denial suffered by professor Norman Finkelstein at De Paul University, despite the unanimous recommendation of his faculty, occurred in response to direct external interference with the normal academic review and promotion process by Alan Dershowitz .
In another recent example, professor William Robinson of UC Santa Barbara was subjected to vicious attack by ADL director Abe Foxman after posting photos of Gaza casualties alongside similar images from the 3rd Reich. This visual history lesson cost him a several month ordeal before the attackers were beaten off, but the chilling effect on academic freedom to speak truthfully about Israel was no doubt achieved. Both victims of the Lobby pit-bulls are Jewish (Finkelstein is the son of Auschwitz survivors), and they are perhaps perceived therefore as a special threat to the long-standing Israeli campaign of concealment.
We choose not to waste our time and energy on personal defense against the pro-Israel pit bulls of America. Instead, we refer visitors to many information sources and hope to launch them on their own search for truth and justice which are the only sure paths to an enduring peace in the Middle East.
Demand Freedom, Justice and Equality in the Holy Land