International Day of Peace: From Rhode Island to Palestine No Justice, No Peace
The Insufferable Human Cost of Militarism, Poverty, and War
Providence, September 21, 2024 — To commemorate the UN International Day of Peace, the Rhode Island Anti-War Committee organized a rally with the following calls to action:
An end to wars and aggression across the globe
An end to U.S./Israel genocide and ethnic cleansing in Palestine
An end to the U.S./NATO proxy war in Ukraine
An arms embargo on Israel
An end to U.S. militarism and weapons exports
An end to nuclear weapons for all nations
The event was co-sponsored by:
East Bay Citizens for Peace
Food Not Bombs Providence
George Wiley Center
Jewish Voice for Peace
Just Peace Rhode Island
Party for Socialism and Liberation
Pax Christi Rhode Island
Reclaim RI
Rhode Island Poor People's Campaign
Rhode Island Democratic Socialists of America
Tuesday Peace and Justice Group
Two a Day
I spoke on behalf of the Rhode Island Poor People's Campaign — A National Call for Moral Revival. To that, I added my own personal testimony:
“No justice, no peace!” we say.
There is no peace when we’re drowning in war spending. There is no peace when militarism starves justice.
Just this week, Rhode Island Energy’s own Public Utility Commission—because let’s be honest, they own the PUC—approved yet another price hike.
Since 2016, utility earnings have surged by 260 percent. Meanwhile, natural gas prices have dropped by 75 percent since Rhode Island Energy's price hike in October 2022.
Only the willfully blind can see a reason for yet another price hike.
In April, the U.S. approved $95 billion in aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. Over a year, that’s $60 per month for the average U.S. family. And U.S. total yearly war spending? $1.4 trillion—that’s a twelve-figure number. That’s almost $900 per month for a U.S. family.
But what’s a $30 increase in a monthly utility bill? It’s people losing their homes. It’s stress that kills. It’s life on the streets that cuts decades off your life.
Providence has a mayor who will veto rent stabilization if the City Council passes it. Tell me, which political leader has ever vetoed our obscene military spending?
Poverty already kills 800 Americans a day—nearly six million over 20 years. Six million… I chose 20 years deliberately.
Our political leadership says “national security.” We say “social murder.” We say “policy murder.” We say, “No justice, no peace!”
We’re grateful to Reps. David Morales, Enrique Sanchez, and Jenn Stewart, and Senators Tiara Mack and Sam Bell, who are present today. [Not all of them seem to have made it, but] They are here, as they have been over the years, in the struggle for justice and peace.
Now, let me share my personal story about Israel and Palestine.
My grandfather bought land in Palestine in the 1930s. Zionism? Business? Foresight? Who knows? But without that land, my mother and her parents wouldn’t have escaped Nazi Austria. British policy at the time gave property owners priority for entry into the Palestine Mandate. That’s how they got out.
After the war, my parents ended up in the Netherlands. Seventy-five percent of Dutch Jews had been murdered during the war.
I understand why my relatives and friends moved to Israel. I understand how we were fooled, misled, and deceived. I started to see the light after the Six-Day War of 1967. Maybe some of my relatives and friends over there did too, but they’re stuck and lack my luxury of being here.
“A land without people for a people without land.” Have you heard that lie? Demographically, Palestine was overwhelmingly Arab. According to a British census from 1922, nearly 700,000 Arabs lived in Palestine compared to 84,000 Jews. That’s almost ten to one.
And see, the oppressed became the oppressor; the victims of oppression are now the perpetrators of oppression.
They talk about a one-state solution, a two-state solution. But in 1964, and even before, there was talk of a confederative union—a United States of the Middle East—with national autonomy, a right of return, and compensation.
I don’t know what happened to that idea. But I do know this: the only viable path forward is: truth, reconciliation, and, restorative justice.
We have a choice: to fight for a fairy tale or continue the nightmare.
Probably not too many in the audience caught my “fairy tale” allusion. It referred to Theodor Herzl’s words: “Wenn ihr wollt, ist es kein Märchen”—“If you will it, it is no fairy tale.” These were the words he wrote after the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897.
I didn’t have time to explain the origins of the 1964 confederative union idea. The story, as I know it, is detailed in chapter 65 of A Land of Two Peoples: Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs, edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr:
In December 1964, the Tunisian weekly Jeune Afrique, a leading forum on Afro-Arab affairs, published a dramatic editorial by its editor Bashir Ben-Yahmed in which he appealed to the Arab world to reconcile itself to the reality of the State of Israel:
The State of Israel, however unfortunate its creation may have been, is a reality which cannot be eradicated short of a war whose only certainties are the suffer- ing and destruction that will follow. . . . The real solution, therefore, does not lie either in the consolidation of Israel—a Sisyphean labor—or in its destruction. It could lie in the disappearance of all the states in the region, their fusion in a Federation of the States of the Middle East, in which Israel, having taken back part of the Arab refugees and compensated the others, would no longer be a sovereign and hostile state, but, like Texas or California, a Federal State linked with the others within a framework which could be that of the U.S. of the Middle East.
New Outlook, an English-language Israeli journal devoted to Arab-Jewish rapprochement, invited leading Israeli public figures to share their reaction to Ben-Yahmed’s editorial. The eighty-seven-year-old Buber’s response was his last published essay before his death on 13 June 1965.
Buber supported the confederation idea and thought that the call to strive for such an agreement could acquire historical significance, noting that:
such a union has already been advocated by some friends of mine and myself some time before the State of Israel came into being.
I am not naive and understand painfully well what +972 Magazine wrote in this week’s Sunday Recap:
As Israeli ministers, generals, and academics bay for a decisive new phase in the Gaza war — with some calling to seal off the northern half of the Strip, and starve and exterminate the remaining Palestinian population — Meron Rapoport imagines what such a scenario would look like, one he believes the majority of Jewish Israelis could support.
Starvation and extermination are deemed acceptable means to fulfill the Jabotinsky-Begin-Netanyahu dream of Greater Israel. The U.S. government—though many in the U.S. harbor reservations about such support—has buoyed up these methods, which have gone mainstream in Israel. Yet, they are funded by the taxes we all pay in this spiritually dead “Indispensable Nation.”
I appreciate learning how the current Palestine/Israel situation has evolved. And I will never understand how we can continue to kill people over land, and ? power, while other people live in poverty with not enough to feed their families due to corporate greed. Thank you!
Thank you Peter.