New leader speaks out about Jewish Voice for Peace

For Henri Picciotto, events in Lebanon and Palestine/Israel are not faraway disasters. They feel very close to home.

"I was born in Beirut," says Picciotto. "That was before Lebanon's civil war, when all of us — Christians, Muslims, Jews — sat with each other in every community. Our feeling of living together turned out not to be entirely true, largely because of outside powers' interference. Up until the 1967 war, I grew up never coming across anti-semitism."

Picciotto's parents lived in Syria until 1948, when the impact of turmoil in the region and especially the nakba in Palestine triggered the emigration of most of the Jewish community. Most of Lebanon's Jewish population also left following the war of 1967 — the year when, coincidentally, Henri Picciotto came to the United States to study and wound up staying.

A high school mathematics teacher, Picciotto serves today as the national board chair of Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area. JVP recently held a national conference with a view to expanding its outreach to other cities. He recently spoke at a gathering of two dozen supporters of Detroit Friends of Jewish Voice for Peace, which is in the process of developing a chapter here, and was interviewed by "The Arab American News."

Given his background, Picciotto's road to activism on Middle East issues was a distinctive one: "I wasn’t thinking about the Middle East that much until 1982, when the city where I grew up was attacked by Israel — and in my name, since the government of Israel claims a mandate to represent the Jewish people. Something like fifteen or twenty thousand people died in that war, mostly Lebanese and Palestinian civilians. That was too much to accept."

Jewish Voice for Peace is organized around the core proposition that a viable peace for Palestinians and Israelis must be based first of all on principles of human rights and international law. Without security for Palestinians, through implementing those principles and Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Palestinian Territories, no real security is possible for Israelis either.

JVP's slogan "Israelis and Palestinians — Two Peoples, One Future" expresses this interconnection, while leaving open the question of whether they will construct that common future in two states, or one, or a wider regional federation. JVP also avoids taking ideological stands around Zionism or anti-Zionism, keeping membership open for activists with diverse philosophies. "It's what we do that's important," says Henri Picciotto. JVP calls for suspending U.S. military aid to Israel until the occupation ends.

A clear stand of Jewish activists against the occupation is important, not only for making the argument within the Jewish community. It's also important for the broader American public — for example, church groups that are looking at potential divestment from Caterpillar, the U.S. supplier of massive tractors that crush Palestinian homes — to know that Jewish opinion is not monolithic in support of Israeli government policies.

"Our opponents," notes Picciotto, "are extremely concerned by any possibility of Jewish dissent." In a document leaked to JVP several years ago from a national meeting of Jewish Community Relations Councils, a speaker from San Francisco on dealing with Jewish dissidents, clearly with JVP in mind, told her audience that this phenomenon would be coming to their cities — a prediction that JVP is trying to make come true.

Locally, members of Detroit Friends of JVP have spoken at a conference on Middle East peace and justice organized by the First Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, participated in a forum organized by the local Ameinu group on Jimmy Carter’s book "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid," and several other events. Members also traveled to the June 10 demonstration in Washington, called jointly by the antiwar coalition United For Peace and Justice and the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, where national JVP had a substantial contingent.

I asked Picciotto how JVP has been able to support Arab American activists under fire for pro-Palestinian advocacy. In Berkeley, JVP along with other organizations came to the defense of a city-supported art gallery that was attacked for hosting an exhibition on the history of the Palestine-Zionist conflict. In Boston, JVP filed a court brief supporting a Muslim group's right to build a mosque when it came under attack from the far-right wing "David Group," and assisted in finding a new site for a Palestinian art show that was evicted from Brandeis University.

The campaign around Caterpillar, Picciotto believes, has been very effective in bringing people to annual shareholder meetings to protest supplying Israel with home-crushing bulldozers. "The funding is very opaque," he says. "We still don’t know how they're paid for." The aunt and parents of Rachel Corrie, the young American activist who was crushed and murdered by a Caterpillar bulldozer while protecting a family's home in Gaza, have attended the shareholder meetings and magnified the protests' impact.

At the Detroit meeting, several activists raised the question of campaigning around the theme of "Israeli apartheid." Picciotto explains, "We work very closely with the U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation, and this is the direction they adopted at their last national meeting."

At the same time, he points out, South African apartheid was supported in the United States only by the U.S. government and corporations with profitable operations in South Africa — whereas Israeli policies are supported by a well-organized lobby with roots in virtually every institution and community. This means that the struggle to change public opinion at the base is essential.

JVP's national mailing base has more than doubled in the past year — "mostly because of last summer's war in Lebanon, unfortunately," says Picciotto, who has written eloquently of how the war dashed his plans to revisit his homeland with his family.

"The U.S. government makes the whole situation in Palestine impossible. Ending U.S. military aid — even cutting it in half! — would change everything. But U.S. policy will not move so long as the Republicans and Democrats believe that Jewish public opinion won't accept a change. JVP's role is to challenge U.S. policy. That's where we have standing, as a U.S. organization – it's our government and our money"

David Finkel is a coordinating committee of Detroit Friends of Jewish Voice for Peace. JVP's website is www.jvp.org.