“There is nothing antisemitic about fighting for people’s right to live,” says Jewish Voice for Peace organizer Elena Stein, who on Monday joined hundreds of protesters arrested to block entrances to the New York Stock Exchange. We discuss the historic mass protest, which called for an Israeli arms embargo and an end to war profiteering by companies like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. “We are filled with horror beyond words and are attempting to embody just an ounce of that refusal,” Stein says of the moral urgency of protesting Israel’s actions in the Middle East, which she describes as a “war of extermination … done with U.S. cover.” She says JVP chose the stock exchange in order to draw attention to the role of U.S. financial and corporate interests in arming the Israeli military.
Transcript
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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
Protests over the U.S. arming Israel are continuing. On Monday morning, more than 200 Jewish activists and their allies were arrested as they blocked entrances to the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street. The protesters were calling for an Israeli arms embargo and end to war profiteering by companies like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin.
PROTESTERS: Let Gaza live! Stop arming Israel! Stop arming Israel! Let Gaza live! Let Gaza live! Stop arming Israel! Stop arming Israel! Let Gaza live! Let Gaza live! Stop arming Israel!
AMY GOODMAN: The protest was organized by Jewish Voice for Peace, which said the action was the largest act of civil disobedience in history outside the New York Stock Exchange. Participants in the protest included descendants of Holocaust survivors, as well as Emmy Award-winning comedian Eric André, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras, the acclaimed artist Nan Goldin, the Oscar-nominated actress Debra Winger and the artist Molly Crabapple. Police forcibly removed many of the peaceful protesters, including our next guest, Elena Stein. She’s director of organizing and strategy for Jewish Voice for Peace. She was arrested, held for eight hours.
Welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us, Elena. There’s a very dramatic picture of you being taken out, held, carried by police on your back. You’re wearing the T-shirt you’re wearing right now, “Stop Arming Israel.” Explain what this action was all about.
ELENA STEIN: First of all, thank you so much for having me, Amy and Juan. Been watching Democracy Now! every morning for about 15 years, so so appreciate everything you all do.
Yesterday, 500 Jewish New Yorkers and friends shut down business as usual at the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street, demanding — you know, the epicenter of global capital — demanding that the U.S. stop arming Israel and stop profiting from genocide.
And, you know, as we arrived in the morning, we were learning the news that just that night Israel had bombed the Al-Aqsa Hospital and had set at least 30 tents ablaze full of people who had already been displaced, who still had IVs in their arms from being at the hospital, burning people alive. And this comes after days and days of massacring whole families in the Jabaliya refugee camp as part of the larger strategy to block off, to starve, to essentially complete the ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza, where 400,000 people are.
This is being called a genocide within a genocide. People are posting their final goodbyes. So we are filled with horror beyond words and are attempting just to embody just an ounce of that refusal in our actions.
And, of course, what’s so important for all of us here in the U.S. to understand is that this is being done with U.S. bombs, those bombs that are massacring family after family in this war of extermination — because, make no mistake, that is the goal: extermination. It is being done with U.S. bombs, with U.S. weapons and with U.S. cover, with shielding Israel from accountability at any international institution.
Now, the Biden administration wants you to believe that the reason the U.S. is arming and funding and covering the Israeli government like this is for the sake of Jewish safety. Right? This is the moral cover that they use. This is the justification used to cloak the entire enterprise.
And so, we are there to say we reject this myth, this sick myth, with every fiber of our beings. We refuse to let our histories, our identities, our traditions be used to torture, to starve, to massacre, to erase Palestinians. And we are there to say the true interests of the Biden administration, the true interests of the U.S. government are this: its own imperial interests and its own financial interests. And so, we are there to say to the U.S., “Stop arming Israel. Stop profiting from genocide.”
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Elena, could you talk about why you chose the stock exchange? Because the reality is that every war that the United States has ever fought, some people have made money off of, some sector of American capitalism. And in this case, could you talk about the arms makers and the huge, obscene amounts of money they are making from this war, companies like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin?
ELENA STEIN: That’s exactly right. So, most know that every year the U.S. sends $3.8 billion in military funding to Israel. Now, first thing to know is that this is an unprecedented amount of money. There is no amount of public taxpayer money going annually to any other country like this.
The next thing to know is that none of that money is used — when we hear the word “aid,” we might think, “Oh, that’s for recovery from a natural disaster or for housing or education.” No, all of this money has to be used on the Israeli military, for military purposes. And not only that, but all that money has to be used then back in the United States on U.S. defense contractors, on U.S. weapons corporations. So we see here that the entire enterprise has the goal of propping up the U.S.’s war economy.
Now, $3.8 billion is just the amount of money typically going in taxpayer public funding. It is nothing to say of the billions going in private funding. But this year, the U.S. sent — in public funding, the U.S. government sent 18 — 18 — billion dollars in taxpayer funds to the Israeli military. There are no words to describe how unprecedented this is.
And so, when we say that it’s all in the service of propping up the U.S.’s war economy, it works. This year, the stock prices of weapons manufacturers were skyrocketing. Last year, if you were to invest $10,000 in Raytheon, right now you would have $18,000, in just one year. That’s an 80% return in one year. Raytheon is the firm making the bunker buster bombs, that are prohibited from use in civilian areas, that Israel is currently using right now in southern Lebanon.
Now, not only that, 50 — over 50, at least, members of Congress and their spouses are invested in Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, two of the leading weapons manufacturers. So, we can see they are, quite literally, profiting from this genocide. And these are the people who are voting on increased funding and arms to the Israeli military. Our elected officials should never be able to profit off of genocide. They are there to carry out, supposedly, the will of the people.
And you think about this: Just last week, Hurricane Helene ravaged communities across Appalachia — right? — killing hundreds of people, displacing thousands. This is just one week before Hurricane Milton did the same, ravaged Florida. And before the wreckage could even be accounted for after Hurricane Helene, FEMA reported a $9 billion shortfall. At the exact same time, President Biden announced that he’d be releasing another $8.7 billion in military funding to the Israeli military. This is almost the exact same amount of money. So what we are seeing is that, quite literally, the United States government is choosing to massacre en masse Palestinians over supporting our communities here in the United States who are trying to recover from this devastating climate crisis, as well as the chronic disinvestment from their communities.
And so, that’s why we were there with 500 people yesterday to say, outside of Wall Street, this epicenter of global capital — and, yes, as you said, Juan, you know, Wall Street has been profiting off of genocide, every genocide of this country since the founding of this country, since the founding genocides. Wall Street was actually built as the first marketplace to trade enslaved people kidnapped from the shores of Africa in — and then traded in 1711 on Wall Street by the European settlers, who had also carried out the genocide against the Indigenous people of Manahatta. And we were there yesterday on Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and so that’s part of why this history is so important to root in.
And we pay homage to the many movements that have been protesting Wall Street ever since, from ACT UP, that actually had its founding protest on Wall Street in 1987, delaying the bell — and, actually, one of the organizers of that demonstration was with us yesterday in jail, which is so meaningful — to Occupy Wall Street to many Palestinian-led demonstrations at Wall Street this year. And so, that is why we were there, to say, all together, fund FEMA, not genocide; fund housing, not genocide; fund healthcare, not genocide.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to Sumaya Awad of Adalah Justice Project. She’s a Palestinian who participated in the protest you were arrested at the New York Stock Exchange. She’s speaking here to CBS News.
SUMAYA AWAD: We refuse for our government to continue doing this, using our tax dollars while our country is suffering from climate disaster, from lack of healthcare.
AMY GOODMAN: I also want to turn to 82-year-old Ros Petchesky, a MacArthur fellow, former anti-Vietnam War activist, current member of Jewish Voice for Peace. On Monday, she was one of the oldest people to chain herself to the Wall Street gates. She told CBS why she participated in the protest.
ROSALIND PETCHESKY: A lot of our resources are going to war. Jews have a long tradition of opposing war.
AMY GOODMAN: Ros Petchesky is a professor emeritus at Hunter. As we hear those voices, Elena, you yourself are the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor. Talk about that, how that informs your activism today, as the back of your T-shirt, that says “Stop Arming Israel” on the front, says “Not in Our Name.”
ELENA STEIN: The day that my grandmother’s entire family and village was massacred in a different genocide, the Holocaust, my grandmother just happened to be absent. I grew up knowing this fact and understanding that it means that, first of all, I’m not supposed to be here. My life is a fluke. And I also grew up agonizing over the question of “Where were the neighbors?” Why did they just stand by? Why didn’t they hurl their bodies between the killers and my family? And so, today, it’s with all of my Jewish ancestors at my back, the one who survived, my grandmother, and all those who didn’t, that we, I and all of them together, say loudly, more profoundly than ever before, “We refuse to be neighbors who just stand by.”
And I think so many of us in these demonstrations, especially as we watch the Israeli government cynically use the excuse, use the conflation of Judaism and Zionism — let’s be clear, Judaism is our rich thousands-year-old tradition; Israel is a 76-year-old apartheid state. The cover has been pulled off Israel. People can see it for what it is and for the Zionist project and the project of ethnic cleansing and genocide and the full, the full expansionist goals that it has, and it will use any means it can to make that project a reality. And the only excuse they have left, the only cover they have left, is to call any resistance to it antisemitism. We refuse this. There is nothing antisemitic about fighting for people’s right to live, to live on their land, to thrive, to be safe at home. We refuse to let our traditions, our identities, our histories be used to allow for the mass torture, the mass starvation, the massacre and the erasure of Palestinians.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The protest on Monday was the latest in a long string of nonviolent protests led by Jewish Voice for Peace — at Grand Central Terminal during rush hour, at the Statue of Liberty, at the Manhattan Bridge. Do you feel the Biden administration is hearing your voice?
ELENA STEIN: May it be so. Listen, the Biden administration is watching all of us. They have watched the needle move. I mean, two-thirds — the polls are showing that two-thirds of Americans now want an arms embargo. Two-thirds of Americans are saying that they don’t want arms to go to Israel. This is astonishing. And let’s understand it for what it is, which is an extraordinary win by the Palestinian-led movement for Palestinian liberation. And, of course, we see the Biden administration not listening. We see Congress not listening. All of us are asking, “Why is this?”
Well, first of all, it’s because we don’t live in a democracy. They don’t have to listen to us. It is for their own imperial and financial interests. It is for their own interests in controlling the region, which have been broken open and uncovered in so many of the interviews you’ve done here on Democracy Now! And it’s for their financial interests and financial gain, because we know of the corporate control of this country.
And so, we see this moment of — I mean, to be quite honest, we see a lot of despair and a lot of hopelessness right now, especially as Israel expands its war of extermination deeper into Gaza and then throughout Lebanon and, you know, bombing Lebanon and Syria and Yemen and the West Bank, and the risk, the threat to soon be bombing Iran at the same time. To watch them not just listen but to expand it at the same time is truly extraordinary, and to feel so many millions more terrorized as they’re watching their loved ones in these other countries now fleeing for their lives, as well.
And we refuse to give up. Right? We take inspiration from all of the movements that came before us that never gave up after one year of not winning. We take inspiration especially from the Palestinian struggle, that has been here fighting for 76 years and has never thrown in the towel because it is such an uphill battle. And all of us here in the belly of the beast, where we know is in control of these arms and this funding, we must do the exact same. We cannot give up. We must double down right now. And even if the path to that arms embargo is getting increasingly muddled as we see them refuse to listen to us, we know that what all of us must be doing is applying this pressure from every angle possible, and that every single one of us has a role to play.
AMY GOODMAN: Elena Stein, I want to thank you for being with us. She is the Jewish Voice for Peace director of organizing strategy, a descendant of a Holocaust survivor. On Monday morning, she was arrested along with about two [sic] other Jewish activists and allies in one of the largest acts of — 200 Jewish activists and allies in one of the largest acts of civil disobedience the New York Stock Exchange has seen, demanding the U.S. stop arming Israel.
When we come back, Union. It’s the name of a new film. We’ll speak to the co-director and organizer, a documentary about the historic campaign of Amazon workers to unionize their warehouse in Staten Island, New York. Back in 30 seconds.
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