The past week in Gaza has seen a major escalation in Israeli attacks against the besieged and starving Palestinians trapped in a killing cage. The Biden administration has aggressively sought to portray itself as being increasingly at odds with Israel’s tactics, mostly focusing on U.S. threats to withhold some weapons shipments if Benjamin Netanyahu conducts an invasion of Rafah. But the cold reality is that Israel has already bombed and occupied large swaths of Rafah.
The regime has ordered the forced exodus of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, not only from Rafah, but also from areas of northern Gaza, once again thrusting masses of civilians — many of whom are wounded, starving, dehydrated, and traumatized — on a desperate hunt for a place to pitch a makeshift tent as they await either death or a ceasefire.
Despite the White House leaking stories to insider media outlets about how Biden is fed up with his great friend Netanyahu, the U.S. has made clear it continues to arm and support the Israeli regime.
This week on Intercepted, Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the feminist antiwar organization Code Pink, speaks with Jeremy Scahill. Since the launch of the so-called war on terror in 2001, the 71-year-old activist has spent more than two decades disrupting congressional hearings, chasing members of Congress through the halls of the Capitol for answers, and traveling to countries the U.S. has labeled as enemies. Benjamin discusses her personal path to activism and the siege on Gaza, and offers a guide on how ordinary people can disrupt business as usual in the chambers of power in Washington, D.C.
Transcript
This transcript is generated from audio recordings and may not be in its final form.
[Intercepted theme music.]
Jeremy Scahill: Welcome to Intercepted. I’m Jeremy Scahill.
The past week in Gaza has seen a major escalation in Israeli attacks against the besieged and starving Palestinians trapped in a killing cage. The Biden administration has aggressively sought to portray itself as being increasingly at odds with Israel’s tactics, mostly focused on U.S. threats to withhold some weapons shipments if Benjamin Netanyahu conducts an invasion of Rafah.
But the cold reality is that Israel has already been bombing and has occupied parts of Rafah. They brought tanks in and knocked down the I-Heart-Gaza sign at the Rafah border crossing. This was essentially a stunt by the Biden administration to say, well, we’re going to pause the shipment of certain kinds of weapons. And then, the next day, you have John Kirby, the national security council spokesperson, coming out and saying, well, ho-ho-ho, people are making a big deal about this. Let me be clear: most of the weapons are still flowing to Israel.
The Israeli regime has ordered the forced exodus of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Not only from Rafah, but also from areas of Northern Gaza, once again thrusting masses of civilians, many of whom are wounded or starving, dehydrated, all of whom are traumatized, on yet another desperate hunt for a place to pitch their makeshift tent as they await either death or a ceasefire.
Now, despite the White House leaking stories to insider media outlets about how Joe Biden is fed up with his great friend Benjamin Netanyahu, the reality is that the U.S. continues to make clear that it stands behind Israel, that it continues to arm it and support it. Well, today on the show, we’re going to spend the hour with one of the most dedicated peace activists in the United States, Medea Benjamin, the cofounder of Code Pink.
Since the launch of the so-called War On Terror in 2001, The now 71-year-old activist has spent more than two decades disrupting congressional hearings, chasing members of Congress through the halls of the Capitol, trying to question them on issues like the war in Gaza. Medea has traveled to countries around the world that the United States has labeled enemies. And, in addition to her work with Code Pink, Medea is also the cofounder of the human rights group Global Exchange as well as the Peace in Ukraine Coalition, Unfreeze Afghanistan, and other antiwar and international solidarity organizations.
Medea Benjamin, thank you so much for being with us here on Intercepted.
Medea Benjamin: Great to be on with you, Jeremy.
JS: Let’s begin by talking about the latest developments out of Gaza and, specifically, Rafah. What we’ve seen over the past several days [is] Israel really re-intensify its military operations; not just in Rafah, but also in other parts of Gaza. We have a situation now where there is, once again, this forced internal expulsion happening, where Gazans in the north are being told that they need to move to the south, Palestinians in the south of Gaza are being told they need to move north. There are hundreds of thousands of people that yet again are having to move with their families, with children, with sick people. It’s like this sick kind of game show that the Israeli state is subjecting the Palestinians to, making them forced contestants in this murderous game show.
I just want to hear your analysis of what we’re witnessing right now, and also the moves on the part of the Biden administration to project this notion that somehow, behind the scenes, they’re trying to implement some form of restraint against the Netanyahu government.
MB: Well, as your listeners know, this scene is just unbelievable. I have friends in Gaza who are sending me notes saying, “We wish it was over already. The martyrs are the lucky ones. They have died and we are living in hell.”
I talk to a lot of women. We recently had Mother’s Day and, looking at our own children, our own grandchildren, and thinking every moment about what the mothers are going through in Gaza. Not only is it heartbreaking, but we feel so impotent to stop it, with all the work that people are doing all over the world, from the U.N. to the streets. Trying to say, no, this must end, this must end, and yet we see it still go on.
Which brings me to the issue that you brought up about Biden, acting like he is doing something by putting a halt on these weapons. And yet, we have sent tens and tens of thousands of these bombs and missiles, and been a partner in this genocide for seven months now. So, to say we’re putting a pause on these weapons, and then to see the outcry from Republicans, from even more hawkish Democrats than Biden, from Biden’s donors, from Republicans wanting to really take advantage of this, as if they think it’s some popular position among the American people to say, no, you can’t put a halt on weapons.
In fact, bringing into Congress this week a new piece of legislation, I think t’s called The Israel Security Assistance Support Act, which says that the president could not halt these weapons. So, it’s a mind-spinning kind of moment to be living in, to be seeing every day the suffering, and now the lack of water and food, and people leaving on donkey carts and not knowing where to go. And yet feeling what more can we do to make this stop? And not knowing what more we can do.
JS: People who are following developments closely, especially on social media, are certainly familiar with the direct action that you’ve been undertaking on Capitol Hill over these past seven months, as well as your friends and colleagues from Code Pink and other activist groups. And I wanted to ask you a little bit about your strategy there.
When Tony Blinken is in front of Congress — or, recently, Lloyd Austin, the defense secretary — you often will see, if you watch the hearings, bloodied hands come up behind them, people disrupting and getting up and speaking, advocating for the Palestinians of Gaza. Explain a little bit about the strategy that you all are employing on Capitol Hill throughout these seven months.
MB: What you don’t see is behind the scenes that we are going into offices every single day and having discussions with staff members, and trying to move them a tiny bit. Whether it’s getting them to sign onto a letter calling for conditioning of aid, while we want to see a total end to aid, or whether it’s trying to stop a bill that is going to enshrine a definition of antisemitism that could make it illegal to talk about the crimes that Israel is committing.
So, we are having those discussions all of the time, and working with the more progressive offices to try to come up with some kind of strategy. Alternative letters, alternative bills, use of the War Powers Act, whatever we can find in the very, very limited toolbox that is our Congress.
In the meantime, when we are walking down those halls and we see a guy with a button on that indicates — and usually it’s a guy, there are women, too — that indicate that they are a member of Congress — I must admit, I do not know 435 members of Congress, but you can identify them by the buttons. And we start running after them with our cameras on to ask them questions.
If they’re friendly congresspeople that we know, we ask them, what other vehicles can you introduce that could then work on? And if they are unfriendly members of Congress, we ask them questions to try to get them on record, oftentimes to show just how heartless, soulless, callous, disgusting these people are, because we think it’s important for the general public to know that, as well as people around the world to watch these.
And then, in the hearings we don’t want there to be a hearing in which a witness is going to speak about the correctness of the U.S. position of supporting Israel without there being an outcry in the public. Sometimes we can’t even get into these hearings, and the Armed Services Committee — these are public hearings, you know, and it’s supposed to be first come, first served — they keep us out of these hearings beforehand. So we can’t always get inside, although we try to send other people who dress up to look like they are professionals, and send them in instead of people like us, clad in pink or in keffiyehs.
So, strategy-wise, I would say our strategy is really to try to get members of Congress to sign on to ceasefire pieces of legislation, to vote against sending more weapons to Israel. But what you see more publicly is this naming and shaming of some of the worst members of Congress.
JS: Give us an example of a hearing where you’ve stood up and denounced whether it’s the defense secretary or the secretary of state. Walk us through what happened. So you have to wait in line outside the hearing room, I would imagine, in the cases where they haven’t already preemptively blocked you from entering this public hearing.
Walk us through the first exchange you have with security or the police as you’re filing into the room, all the way up to the point where you decide to stand up and speak out in the middle of a hearing.
MB: Well, first let me go even further back than that, Jeremy, because I am amazed that so many Americans — I would say, probably the majority of Americans — don’t know that you can just walk into the buildings of Congress. And, not only that, you can walk into most of the offices of congresspeople; you don’t have to have an appointment, the doors are open for the most part. There are exceptions. And some, ironically, some of these exceptions are the most progressive members of Congress, like Bernie Sanders, who keeps his door locked.
But, for the most part, you can just walk into offices, and that is so important for people to know. You can come to Washington, D.C., anytime, Monday to Friday, walk into the building, and walk into your congressperson’s office. And I say this also, Jeremy, because we walk in and we say, we want to speak to somebody who deals with foreign policy, and they say, well, here’s their card, you should write to them and ask to schedule a meeting.
Well, we do, time and time again. We write to them hundreds of times and ask for a meeting and, about 95 percent of the time, we never hear an answer. And it’s not just because we’re Code Pink; I ask people who are listening, try it out. Write to your member of Congress, call them, ask how you get in touch with the scheduler to try to schedule a meeting, and you will probably not get a response. And so, we just walk into their offices.
Now you asked about walking into the hearings. They are called “public hearings” because the public is allowed into them. That’s something I didn’t know until about 20 years ago, when I started to go to these public hearings to protest the Iraq War. You stand on line. Again, first come, first served. The door opens about 15 minutes before the hearing starts. And, because they want to keep us away from the C-SPAN cameras, they usually put “reserved” on all of the most prominent seats, so that you have to sit in the corners, on the sides, not right behind the witnesses.
But sometimes we get lucky, and they forget to put those on the seats, and we get to have a good place. And we sit behind. Usually what happens is there is an opening statement from the majority and minority chair, and then the witness has an opening statement. We usually listen to most of the opening statement, just in case there is a great surprise and they say something good. And then, right before the end of that opening statement, which is about five minutes long, if we are going to interrupt, we stand up and we speak out, and say something like, why did you not even mention the word Gaza? Why did you not even talk about how you are complicit, you are a partner with Israel in sending these weapons? The blood is on your hands. What are you going to do to stop this genocide? The whole world is watching. The American people don’t want us to be doing this, that kind of thing, as the police come in and they start to drag us out.
If you’ve done two of these interruptions in two years, you only have to pay a fine of about $50. And you’re taken to the police station, you are processed, but you are let go in a couple of hours. If you do this more than a couple of times, as in my case, the penalties start getting more difficult, and what we really try to avoid is a stay away order, in which you’re not allowed to go back to Congress for a certain amount of time.
But for people who haven’t done this, we say, come on down, come to Washington, speak out at one of these hearings, get arrested, and wear it as a badge of honor, because you have to, many times in life, go to jail for justice.
JS: On April 30, you had a run in with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin that then resulted in you being arrested in the halls of Congress, and friends of yours captured on video what happened to you. And people can go on Code Pink’s feed on X — or Twitter, or whatever we’re calling it these days — or Medea’s own feed and see this, but a female Capitol police officer then really aggressively patted you down. I think, for a lot of people, this was really stunning to watch it.
Now, of course, this happens to people across the United States all the time. You can talk to any African American in the United States that’s had an interaction with the police, and they’re being searched like they’re Pablo Escobar, or worse. But what I witnessed on this video is just an extremely aggressive patting-down of your body.
Walk us through what happened there.
MB: Well, I got up and spoke out, and let’s put this in the context that we are peacemakers trying to stop a genocide. We certainly don’t have any kind of weapon. I’ve never carried a weapon in my life but, if I did, you have to go through metal security just to get into the building, so there’s nothing on you. The same as whatever purses or packages you’re bringing in, they go through a metal detector.
It’s just an exercise in humiliation, where they just pat down every part of your body openly in the public space, right in the hall, including your private parts. Pull out your bra, as if you’re going to have a pencil or something stuck in your bra. [They] do this several times in that hallway, and your hands are zip-tied behind your back.
Then [they] take you in a paddy wagon, take you to the police headquarters, where you are patted down all over again, at least one more time if not two more times. So, it is ridiculous. The other thing is, I’m 71 years old, I’ve been doing this now for a long time. They know me in Congress, they know that I am totally peaceful. They know they don’t have to do this and, especially, so aggressively.
So, yes, I think it did stun a lot of people. But, as you say, not only does this happen to members of particularly minority communities in the United States, but all the time they were doing that. I was just thinking of what people go through in Gaza, and to not get upset about a pat-down while people are being slaughtered and starved.
JS: I want to back up and ask you a bit about your political trajectory and the activism that you’ve done over all of these years. I’ve known you for a long time. I met you when I was 19 years old.
My dad had been on the 2nd Venceremos Brigade to Cuba, when Fidel Castro invited young people from around the world to come and participate in the harvest of 10 million tons. And he had been living at the Catholic Worker with Dorothy Day at the time, in 1971. And he wrote an article for the Catholic Worker newspaper that Dorothy Day put on the front page, and it was called “Up from Nonviolence,” and it was about pacifists coming to terms with the fact that a violent revolution had overthrown a U.S.-backed dictatorship. And there was great debate in the Catholic worker movement — which was an anarchist pacifist movement — about supporting a revolution that used armed struggle.
So, my father wrote an article out of that experience defending the Cuban revolution, and Dorothy Day put it on the front page of the Catholic Worker newspaper and then defended it, in her own “On Pilgrimage” column.
And so, when you’re a kid, you tend to not really pay much attention to your parents’ stories. You think they’re boring or, because they’re your parents, they’re not interesting to you. But it was really the first time in my personal life that I understood something really cool about my dad. And he had recommended to me, I want to go to Cuba with you; he hadn’t been back to Cuba since then.
And so, we found an organization called Global Exchange that was running trips to Cuba to challenge the U.S. blockade, and it was the Freedom to Travel campaign. And so, we wrote to Global Exchange, and you were the one that was in charge of the delegation that we ended up going on in 1994. And, for me, it was a life-changing experience because, on that trip, where I got to know you, we also spent a lot of time with Philip Agee, the late and great whistleblower who was a CIA operative that had actually participated in the operation to capture and ultimately kill Che Guevara. And we also met Assata Shakur, the Black Panther who has been living in exile in Cuba for many, many decades, and a whole slew of other really interesting people.
So, when I first met you, you were very focused on Cuba, on the blockade, on the U.S. economic war against Cuba. So, I know your story begins before that but, first, maybe just pause to talk a bit about your work on Cuba and that era of your life.
MB: Well, it is very much related, actually, to my work around Gaza because I was working as a nutritionist in Africa and seeing starving children all around me. I worked in rehydration centers and had babies dying in my arm. And I thought, this cannot be. I know there’s enough food in the world to feed all these children. Why is this happening?
And so, I started looking for other models of society that took care of children. And I met Cuban doctors in Africa, and they said to me, “We don’t have any malnourished children in Cuba.” And I said, oh, I don’t believe that. I haven’t seen a country — even in my own country, the rich United States, there are children that go hungry. And they said, “Go to Cuba and see for yourself.”
And so, that was the first reason I went to Cuba. And I traveled all around Cuba going into what I consider the poorest parts of the country, and all the children were so well taken care of. And that’s because, after the revolution, they put this incredible emphasis on making sure all the children had good health care and good nutrition. This is something that just astounded me.
And so, I wanted people to see that there was another model of society that could be different. And I didn’t totally think that Cuba was a model, because I did criticize the restrictions on freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, but I was just so amazed at a society that didn’t have malnourished kids. And a poor society, you know? A poor Caribbean island.
And so, in a sense, that’s what keeps me going around the Gaza issue, and issues I’ve dealt with for decades since then is, can’t we develop models of society where there is no child that goes hungry? Where there is no child that is suffering? And, of course, the interplay with that and war is that I grew up during the Vietnam era, and I knew that war is just a blight on civilization that we should, as we develop as a society, as a global society, be able to do away with war.
So, I think those two things have been threads throughout my life, of trying to think of ways that we can move towards a global society where we don’t kill each other, and where we actually take care of each other.
JS: And, am I correct, as a teenager, you lived on a kibbutz?
MB: I did. My parents were very pro-Israel, and they sent me when I was 16 to go live on a kibbutz. And it was such a contradictory experience. Because, on the one hand, I loved the socialist nature of the kibbutz.
At that time, it was Ein Gedi, it was on the Dead Sea, it was one of the more socialist kibbutz, and they had a work ethic that I thought was terrific. Where everybody got up together in the morning, ate breakfast together, and then went out in the fields to work, did hard labor, and then enjoyed our time together. And, in fact, it was such a radical experience that, at that time, all the children did not grow up in their individual homes; they grew up in a collective house. So, I thought that experience was quite marvelous.
On the other hand, it was so jarring to me the attitude they had towards the neighboring Arabs. In fact, they told me not to go out and talk to the Arab communities, which I immediately went and did, and found a warm and welcoming greeting in the Arab communities. But I started to question the racism that existed in the general Israeli society, just like I was growing up [with] in Long Island, New York, in a high school where there were race riots.
So, that kind of thing got me thinking and questioning what was Israel all about, if people were so dismissive and worse towards their Arab neighbors.
JS: You were primarily focused on Cuba when you were at Global Exchange. And then, 9/11 happens, and the Bush administration — and correct me if I get any of this timeline wrong — but the Bush administration gets its effective blank check from the U.S. Congress, and begins ratcheting up for, initially, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and then very quickly starting to put the focus on invading Iraq.
When was Code Pink started, and what was the initial mission or focus?
MB: Well, just to say that Global Exchange was not just focused on Cuba. We were really a global organization, we were taking people to places all over Africa, all over Latin America. We were working on issues throughout Latin America, and really had a very broad perspective on how do we stop U.S. policy, particularly in places that were trying to do something different, create a new model.
Yes. After 9/11, I personally switched to focusing on Afghanistan and the Middle East, and [was] trying not to give up some of the other issues — For example, Cuba, I’m going in two more weeks. I’ve been going every couple of months taking powdered milk to the pediatric hospitals there, because the economic situation is so bad. But yes, I have felt compelled to focus on the area of the world where the U.S. was creating so much havoc.
And, as you know, the illegal invasion of Iraq took many of us to Iraq and then throughout the region, to just see how much the U.S. was in bed with the most repressive dictatorships in the region, and how our presence — including bases, U.S. troops — were propping up these very repressive regimes, and how, then, the U.S. lied to the American public to get us into the war in Iraq. We also opposed the invasion of Afghanistan, which many people didn’t at the time.
So, yes, my focus changed very much, and I moved out of working on the more general issues of Global Exchange, and we started Code Pink as an organization that was just going to be a temporary thing. We were going to organize against the invasion of Iraq, be successful as good citizens who tell their government what they can and can’t do, and then move back into the other work we were doing. But, obviously, that never happened.
JS: I want to ask you a couple of questions about other actions that you’ve been involved with, and initiatives. There was quite a bit of hope that there was going to be a flotilla that would launch from Turkey that would try to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza from the sea and bring in humanitarian aid.
Now, of course, the last time there was a flotilla of this nature back in 2010, the Israelis raided the ship, and killed a number of the activists and humanitarians that were on board. And, in fact, Joe Biden was the vice president at the time, and was dispatched by the administration to defend the Israeli deadly operation on the ship that had tried to break the Israeli siege at that time. And Joe Biden appeared on MSNBC and was defending it — I believe maybe it was even Meet The Press — and defended the Israeli military attack on this nonviolent activist convoy to Gaza.
But you were recently in Turkey with others, and you were trying to organize this flotilla that would break the blockade. What happened to that?
MB: Well, I do want to say I wasn’t one of the organizers, I was a participant. And there is a wonderful group that has been working on this for years. The first flotillas were actually successful in getting small boats into Gaza but, after that, the Israelis have been stopping them, and boarding the ships on international waters, illegally boarding the ships, kidnapping the people on board. And, for the most part, taking them into Israeli jails and then deporting them. The worst was, as you mentioned, 2010, on the Turkish ship, Mavi Marmara, in which the Israelis murdered 10 people.
We felt like this was an incredibly important moment to try to send another flotilla, so we met in Istanbul. And it was a beautiful gathering of people from about 40 different countries, there were hundreds and hundreds of us wanting to get onto these ships. The Turkish community had raised millions of dollars, mostly from small donations all around the country, bought an enormous cargo ship and a very big passenger ship that could hold up to about a thousand people. And we were ready to set sail, and if we had to confront the Israeli military, then so be it. But we felt that this was an important way to not only get humanitarian aid into Gaza, but also to break the siege.
The unfortunate consequence is that the Turkish government, under tremendous pressure from the United States and, of course, Israel, did not let us out of the port. And the ship was flying under the flag of the small African nation Guinea-Bissau and, under pressure from those same countries, Guinea-Bissau pulled its flag.
So, we returned from Turkey, but that’s not the end of this. There are still efforts to get a new flag from a country that won’t be intimidated, and also to go to a different country where we will be allowed to leave from the port. But this just shows you the power of the United States to reach out to countries, even like Turkey, where the president has shown his support for the Palestinians time and time again, and tried to have an independent policy from the United States. But, even in that case, the United States and Israel were successful in blocking us.
JS: What do you think is motivating Joe Biden right now? I mean, I’ve done a lot of writing on this, and none of us are actually in Joe Biden’s head, but there is a many-decades-long history that we can assess involving Joe Biden. And, of course, you’re familiar with it.
But the guy comes to the Senate in 1973, meets early on in his tenure as a Senator with Golda Meir. And he spends the next several decades bringing up that meeting, and regularly calls himself a committed Zionist. He has defended Israel when it’s at its most violent, its most extreme through the decades. He’s, by his own personal accounts, been a great, great friend of Netanyahu for more than 40 years now. Even though there are questions about Biden’s mental acumen, it does seem that he has a lifelong commitment to a very extreme Israeli agenda. And, specifically, has bolstered Netanyahu, even at times when Barack Obama was at odds with Netanyahu, it seems like Biden has served as Israel’s man in Washington in many, many ways.
I mean, there’s the issue of illegal settlements that Biden occasionally has carved out to say, oh, I have a different position here. And he’s very fond of telling stories about how he stood up to Bibi. But on the issues that really matter, on a military level, the scorched-earth campaigns against the Palestinians, Biden has been a stalwart defender of Israel for many, many decades.
But, now that you’re immersed in the world of Washington, and you’re on Capitol Hill, and you’re talking to lawmakers and chasing down policymakers, what is your assessment of where this is coming from, from this White House?
MB: Well, I think you have written and spoken a lot on Biden’s connections over the years to Israel, and he’s traveled to Israel many times. And there are different ways to travel to Israel; one is to see what the Israelis want you to see, and that’s what Biden does, and the other is to go off and go to places like Hebron and, of course, go to Gaza. Which the people in Gaza have been asking presidents to do over and over again, and none of them have dared to go to Gaza.
So, Biden sees what the Israelis want him to see. As you say, this has been ingrained in him for decades. I don’t say he does this because of the money, I think it’s a lot more than the money. But I do want to say that, being in the halls of Congress, you see this tremendous impact that the pro-Israel lobby has on our government. And that, even at this moment, when Biden had called for a, “pause” in sending the weapons, the backlash is so intense. And it’s almost like they’re tripping over themselves to see who can be the most pro-Israel hawk. And is it because they want to please their masters in AIPAC? Christian Zionists, who are very close to groups like CUFI [Christians United for Israel], the backlash is intense.
So, I think that Biden has boxed himself into a corner of his own decades-long support for Israel, his, “rock-solid” support for Israel. And then, these people that are surrounding him — he put them in there, Anthony Blinken and others who are part of this extreme pro-Israel mindset — and then a Congress that really is so corrupt that you can see people who are in there only because they were put in there by AIPAC. And the fear of AIPAC, I think, is even more important than the money that AIPAC puts in, because people are so afraid of being targeted by AIPAC and other pro-Israel lobby groups that that keeps them silent at best. But mostly keeps them jumping on this bandwagon of the extremists of pro-Israel.
You see when Chuck Schumer — who, like Biden, is a lifelong supporter of Israel and, of course, Jewish as well — when he criticized Netanyahu, there was a tremendous backlash against him, when he said that Netanyahu was one of the obstacles for peace. He has since backtracked on that, and joined with extremist Republican leader in the House Mike Johnson to invite Bibi Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress. And this will probably happen in the coming weeks.
And it’s just astounding. I mean, I hope it happens because I think it would be a chance to get many, many, many, many thousands of people to flood Washington, D.C. and try to shut it down. But this is part of the bubble of Washington that is such a disconnect.
I mean, Jeremy, I think you and I have seen so many times in our lifetimes — although I still think of you as a 19-year-old — how our government doesn’t represent us. But, at this point, the disconnect is just so enormous that one thing is what the public opinion polls show, what the people on the campuses are saying. What the uncommitted voters in key swing states are saying. What is happening every time a politician goes home into their communities and gets interrupted by angry constituents saying, stop supporting Israel, and what they are doing in the White House and in the Congress.
So, I don’t know how we’re going to get out of this morass, but I do see it coming to a head right now, in that the people in office are so disconnected to reality, to global opinion, and to public opinion in the United States.
JS: Now, I wanted to ask you a bit about Bernie Sanders, but it’s not just Sanders. This is kind of the emerging Democratic Party line on Israel, is to really make sure that the political focus is on Netanyahu, and a portrayal of this as everything we’re seeing here is a result of Netanyahu. But if you look at actual public opinion polling in Israel, there is widespread support for Israel’s military actions in Gaza, there are indications that a solid majority of Israelis are perfectly fine with the reported documented level of deaths of Palestinians in Gaza. And I think that there is a bit of a dishonest game that’s being played by the Democrats, even those that are starting to increasingly speak out.
If you listen to Bernie Sanders — I’ll just use him as an example — right after October 7, Sanders’ position on Israel’s military actions in Gaza was deeply troubling, and a lot of people were calling him out on that. Since then, Sanders has gotten increasingly better in his positions, particularly about military assistance to Israel. But if you listen, 90 percent of the time, what Sanders is saying is, not a nickel more for this extremist right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu. Occasionally he’ll say “Israel” but, generally speaking, he wants to identify the problem as being Netanyahu.
And that is also part of what’s behind all these leaks from the White House, about how Biden is becoming frustrated with his great friend Netanyahu. Biden threatened this, Biden said, we’re going to withhold that. Then they actually pause — and it really was more or less a symbolic action — they pause some weapons shipments. And then, the next day, John Kirby, The NSC [National Security Council] spokesman at the White House, comes out and says, oh, but the vast majority of the weapons are still going to Israel. You know, Lloyd Austin said similar things.
And I don’t mean to just single out Sanders, but he’s probably the most prominent one delivering this line. And you see it with the leaks coming from the White House about Biden being frustrated with Netanyahu, you see it with the symbolic pause of the weapons shipment. The framing of it is that Netanyahu is the problem.
And, at the end of the day, it seems like what they want to do is put all of this on the bad ship Netanyahu and sink it. Like, the problem was Netanyahu here. The problem wasn’t the Israeli state, the problem wasn’t Israel’s actions, the problem was this extremist right-wing political figure.
MB: Well, yes. We see a lot of that, and it is a way to hide what is the Israeli state. Not only Netanyahu’s cabinet and who he brought into the cabinet, but the whole Israeli state. That this is an apartheid state, that this is a state that’s built on separate roads, separate checkpoints, separate villages, separate everything.
Also, I think we have to do a better job of not only talking about the horrors of Gaza, but talking about the horrors of the West Bank and east Jerusalem, the horrors of the prisons. The horrors of the way children are treated in military courts in Israel. Talking more about the administrative detention, and how many thousands of Arabs are in Israeli jails.
I mean, all of this, in terms of speaking about what the Israeli state is built on, how it maintains itself. And that, yes, Netanyahu is the most prominent figure, but he is in charge of a country that is built on such incredible inequities that it’s the whole state that is the problem.
But you’re going to have a hard time getting that talked about in the U.S. Congress. I mean, Bernie Sanders, it took him months and months to even use the word genocide, and he does not like to use that word. He does want to talk about conditioning aid, but he doesn’t want to talk about stopping aid, halting aid. I think out of the 435 members of Congress on the House side and the hundred on the Senate side, there’s really two that we can count on to talk about what Israel is really like, and that is Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush. They’re the ones that are under tremendous attack, because they tell the truth about what the Israeli state really is.
I mean, we have to look towards Bernie Sanders in the Senate, because we have so few other people. You have Chris Van Hollen who went to the Rafah border and saw the hundreds and hundreds of trucks that couldn’t get in, and came back very angry about that. But then he went in ahead and voted for a package that included $17 billion in weapons for Israel. And we have so many examples of that in the Senate.
So, yes, they like to blame Netanyahu. And yet, when Netanyahu comes, how many of them — if indeed he comes to address the Joint Senate — how many of them will protest when he is there? How many of them will speak out against an incredible war criminal coming to address Congress in the midst of a genocide?
JS: We only have a couple of minutes left, Medea, but I want to ask you about the November election coming up. And, of course, I think you and I are both very well aware that whether Trump wins or whether Biden wins, this is going to be the war state. And I think you can make an argument that Trump may have been worse than Biden in the face of this Gaza war, but not necessarily.
I mean, I think it’s hard to imagine anything short of— Maybe Trump would have started doing U.S. drone strikes, maybe there would have been a different kind of political rhetoric coming from the White House, but I’m not sure anyone can convince me that Trump would have necessarily been worse than Biden.
I think we’re looking at atrocity here. You’re talking about minor gradations of difference on this. The style might have been different, maybe we would have seen more resistance from some Democrats if it was Trump implementing this but, on this issue, I don’t think you’re going to effectively be able to convince anyone that pays attention that, somehow, Palestinians should be hoping that Biden wins another term, or anyone that cares about Palestinians that Biden wins another term.
But I do want to ask you about how you see the argument that is often made, which is, OK, yes. We know that Joe Biden is a horrible warmonger. We get all of that. He’s atrocious on this, this, this, this, this. But it would be worse domestically under Trump, and it would be much worse for the world at large.
Because you’re immersed in this discussion, how do you respond to people who say, I’m afraid of what these people are going to do to a woman’s right to choose. I’m afraid of what they’re going to do with deportations and immigrant raids, etc. What is your answer to people who say, well, if we don’t vote for Joe Biden, or we vote third party — this is as old as dirt that we have this conversation in American politics — but specifically about this election. What is your response to people who say, if we don’t vote for Biden, we get Trump?
MB: My response is that we are screwed either way. That we do not have the choices that the American people deserve, and people should rise up against the whole system. I hope we shut down the democratic convention in Chicago. I hope we shut down the Republican convention in Milwaukee. I hope that these students who we’re seeing on their encampments, that this is not just an issue about Palestine, this is an issue about the U.S. system that is so outrageous, and that it has to be changed.
And if we have two choices — although I will be voting for Jill Stein, and I also really support Cornel West — but if this system gives us these two choices, then people have to really look at the system. Vote whatever way you want to vote, but look at how we can really use this moment to work with people whose eyes have been opened by the support for the genocide in Gaza to say, how are we going to really, really change the system? How are we going to make such a change in this country that we will never have those kinds of choices again?
And that’s why I’m in the halls of Congress every day. After this conversation, I’m getting on my bike and running over to Congress. And I do want to say that anybody who is listening to this [who] can get themselves to D.C., you can join us any day, 10 o’clock in the Rayburn cafeteria. Come. We should be flooding the Hall of Congress. We can’t walk into the White House, but we can walk into Congress, and we should be shutting that down every day.
The system doesn’t work. The people need to rise up. Let’s rise up any way that we can think of it, to say, we need another system. The two choices of Biden and Trump; neither of them work.
JS: Medea Benjamin, thanks so much for all of your work and your activism, and for being with us here on Intercepted.
MB: Thank you, Jeremy.
JS: That was Medea Benjamin, cofounder of the antiwar organization Code Pink. And that does it for this episode of Intercepted.
Intercepted is a production of The Intercept. Laura Flynn, our wonderful producer, made this show possible. Rick Kwan mixed our show. Legal Review by Shawn Musgrave and Elizabeth Sanchez. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Fireman. Our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.
If you want to read the work of the journalists of The Intercept, the people who are the true heart and soul of this organization, you can go to theintercept.com. Now, more than ever, it is vital to protect independent journalism, because there are a lot of nefarious actors who are trying to crush it. I stand in solidarity with our colleagues from Al Jazeera, whose offices in Israel were raided, and the network has been banned in Israel.
The Intercept newsroom is powered by a unionized workforce, and I’m honored to work with every single one of these talented journalists.
Thank you so much for joining us. I’m Jeremy Scahill.
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