Rae Abileah is the woman who made headlines when she disrupted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speaking engagement at the United States Congress on May 24, 2011. She held a banner that said “Occupying land is indefensible” and shouted “No more occupation, stop Israel war crimes, equal rights for Palestinians, occupation is indefensible.”
Rae Abileah is a national organizer for CODEPINK, an anti-war group composed mainly of women. CODEPINK calls itself a peace and social justice movement (pacifist) that they state is working to end U.S. funded wars and occupations, to challenge militarism globally, and to redirect US resources into health care, education, green jobs and other life-affirming activities.
The name “CODEPINK” is a play on the American government’s color-coded terror alerts. The group started up in 2002 as a “preemptive strike” to protest the war in Iraq. “Basically it was a group of women camping out outside the White House that wore pink and said ‘Don’t invade Iraq!’ and it just started catching on like wildfire around the country,” said Abileah, who joined the movement after graduating college in 2004.
As one of the few paid staffers with Code Pink, Abileah is responsible for the group’s Middle East campaigns. While a San Francisco resident, she travels the USA organizing protests. Most of the group’s activities in the past focused on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but Abileah said that emphasis changed in the year 2009 when Israel became a special concern of the organization.
Rae Abileah is an American Jew whose father was born in Israel and who was raised in Half Moon Bay, California where her family belonged to Burlingame’s Peninsula Reform Temple Sholom. Rae Abileah first visited Israel in 1998 on a five-week trip with her BBYO chapter, going as a Diller Teen fellow. The Diller Teen Fellow program is for 11th graders designed to inspire leadership among Jewish youth in their community and focusing on social action, community involvement and Jewish learning.
She claims to be proud of her Jewish heritage but the only principle she takes from this background is “tikkun olam,” and not “Am Yisrael” which involves a national identity. “Tikkun olam,” means repairing the world that in traditional Jewish thought has meant the creation of a model society among the Jewish people, which will in turn influence the rest of the world. It is only recently within the Reform and Conservative traditions in America that it ignores nationhood and instead makes Jews responsible for the welfare of the society at large.
When asked: Your father is Jewish and an Israeli. Why did you decide to protest?
Abileah answers that the plight of the Jewish people is not as important as that of the Palestinians. She sees “Israel’s brutal occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people as contrary to Jewish values.” She then turns to a supposed family heritage of pacifism by her relationship to a great uncle, who “was one of the first Israeli conscientious objectors in 1948 and I feel I am following in his tradition of non-violent resistance to oppression.”
Her great-uncle, Joseph Abileah, was a conscientious objector. Joseph Abileah was born in in Mödling, Austria in 1915, and left for Palestine in 1923, sending for the rest of his family in 1926. His father, Ephraim Abileah (born Niswizski; 1881-1953), was a pacifist during World War I. Joseph was a violinist and the founder of the Haifa Symphony Orchestra.
During World War II Joseph Abileah refused to join either the Hagana or the Jewish Brigade. After the war in 1948, Abileah was charged with failing to fulfill his military obligations. He was imprisoned briefly and tried. The court, convinced of his sincerity, offered him the option of doing non-combat service, but he refused as that would make him an accomplice to their violent acts.
But the family tradition is not only of pacifism. Joseph’s three brothers served in the Israeli army, and this included Raae Abileah’s grandfather. Joseph's two sons and his daughter served, and a grandson of Joseph is in an elite combat unit in the Israeli army. After the holocaust when so many Jews were unable to defend themselves against the Nazi army, and with a threat of extinction from Arab armies, the need to fight for survival has been a very convincing argument for almost all Israeli Jews.
Rae Abileah constantly emphasizes in her work against Israel that she is the Jewish daughter of an Israeli who came from Ramat Gan. She may be the daughter of an Israeli but her relationship with him was far from ideal and she feels much more comfortable with her stepfather with whom she enjoys surfing. She describes her mother Karen’s – of Dutch descent - bruised and battered relationship with her alcoholic father that finally led to a divorce while she was in high school. She apparently had little contact with her father after the divorce and does not seem to contact her large extended family when she visits Israel.
The divorce of her parents produced money problems that raised questions about her ability to attend a good college. She says that she considered joining the military in order to get a college education. But she concluded that she would be able to reach her highest dreams “without needing the kind of discipline the armed forces offer: harsh orders, violence, and power through physical prowess rather than mediation and dialogue.” She has a truly anti-war view of those who serve in the armed forces.
Instead she applied for dozens of scholarships and to at least fourteen colleges. She succeeded in receiving some merit-based scholarships and a large financial aid package based on her financial need to attend Barnard College, which is an all-women’s school, but is also part of the co-ed Columbia University in New York City.
Abileah graduated from Barnard College in 2004 with a dual degree in Environmental Science and Human Rights. She apparently was strongly influenced toward pacifism by her time at the college where she studied Gandhi’s nonviolent movement in India, and her mentor was a professor who was an expert scholar on nonviolence. Abileah said: at a university where fireside chats focused on such preposterously academic questions as “What constitutes a Just War?” this professor’s classes were a refreshing dose of hope and sanity, to say the least, and I had fallen in love with Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience and the redemptive autobiography of Malcolm X.
Since her graduation, she has been very active with CODEPINK and one can only admire her energy. She has been the key organizer for many protest actions against Israel, has been the person to interrupt different speakers including Netanyahu, travelled a good deal to promote her beliefs, with the highlight her time being a visit to Gaza in 2009. While condemning Israel, she and CODEPINK have little to say about the terrorist organization Hamas, rockets fired on Israel, suicide bombers, or the refusal of the Arab world to accept a nation state for the Jews in the Middle East.
In October 23, 2008, when Karl Rove, the former Bush Administration chief of staff, took the stage at the Mortgage Bankers Association annual convention at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Rae Abileah stood up and said: "Karl Rove, how can we believe you when you lied to get us into the war in Iraq?." "You are under arrest for contempt of Congress (under California Code 837]." Abileah held up a banner that read: "ARREST ROVE/ Lying about War/ Outing C.I.A. Agent/ Contempt of Congress/ Supporting Torture." Three security men tackled her and clasped their hands over her face. She broke free and repeated, "Rove is under arrest for treason."
Rae Abileah was one of the six CODEPINK activists to interrupt Israeli President Shimon Peres’ speech at the May 4, 2009 AIPAC (American Israeli Political Action Committee) policy conference at the Washington Convention Center. They raised banners saying “Want Peace? End the Occupation,” “What About Gaza?,” and “No Money for War Crimes.” They of course ignored the fact that Shimon Peres received a Nobel Prize for Peace because of his efforts to bring an end to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
While were forcibly dragged away from the stage, they shouted similar phrases including “Tikun olam (Heal the world) for Gaza, too!”, all meant to draw attention to their opposition to AIPAC’s policies that they claim include support and financing for Israel’s militaristic policies including the invasion of Gaza, building of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the security (separation) wall, refusal to negotiate with the Palestinians’ democratically elected representatives, and threats to attack Iran.
She returned to Israel in June of 2009 with a CODEPINK delegation that attempted to break the “siege of Gaza.” For four days, her delegation stood at the Erez border crossing to Gaza with valid passports, pleading with the heads of security to let them in. They were denied entry to deliver playgrounds to children.
Abileah then headed up to Tel Aviv and launched the group’s international boycott of Ahava by getting muddy in bikinis and effectively shutting down the flagship store inside the seaside Hilton for the afternoon. "We will paint ourselves with mud to show AHAVA's dirty side."
CODEPINK's "Stolen Beauty" AHAVA boycott campaign is part of the International Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement for Palestine (BDS). They see this action as a way to economically pressure the Israeli government to end “its assault on Palestine.”
Rae Abileah returned from her trip to Israel in time to organize a Code Pink protest during Tel Aviv Beach Day in New York’s Central Park in August 2009. On the sands of the Israeli Ministry of Tourism's Tel Aviv Beach in Central Park, bikini-clad activists from CODEPINK covered themselves in mud to expose the truth: the tourist event was a tool to clean up Israel's reputation in light of its dirty policies toward Palestine, including West Bank settlements, a border blockade of Gaza and the devastating 22-day war on Gaza.
The women also distributed information charging Israeli Dead Sea cosmetics company AHAVA ("love" in Hebrew) as using mud illegally extracted from and packaged in the occupied territories. Abileah said: "Despite its name, there is nothing loving about a company that profits from stolen resources and oppressed people,"
In October of 2009 when former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert came to speak at the World Affairs Council in San Francisco, Rae Abileah was one of 22 activists arrested for attempting a citizen’s arrest of Olmert and effectively shutting down much of his talk.
Inside the auditorium, activists charged Olmert with killing innocent civilians, held up bloody hands, and displayed banners that read “Lift the Siege on Gaza” and “War Crimes are Not Free Expression!” A protest also gathered across from the hotel in Union Square, where about 150 people carried signs bearing the names and pictures of children killed during Operation Cast Lead.
By December of 2009, Abileah was busy organizing the Gaza Freedom March. “As a Jewish American of Israeli descent,” Abileah said, “I feel a responsibility to bear witness to the suffering of the people in Gaza, and be part of the transformation that will ultimately tear down the walls that enclose the world’s largest open-air prison.”
To pro-Israel activist Dr. Michael Harris, Abileah and other Jews participating in the Gaza Freedom March are deluded. The leader of StandWithUs/S.F. Voice for Israel cuts them little slack. He says what Abileah and her colleagues are doing is “providing support for Hamas, and that doesn’t do anything to further the cause of peace.
I would say the people going on this are overtly against the existence of a Jewish state of Israel. They are trying to encourage the eternal jihad against the existence of Israel.” “There are plenty of people who support a Jewish state of Israel and also want to see peace between [Israel] and an Arab state of Palestine,” he said. “But these aren’t the people doing the Gaza march. I think if someone is going to those lengths, they’re not being duped. They know exactly what they are doing.”
When the coalition finally cut off registration, 1,362 people from 43 countries were signed up. Delegations from Japan to India, from Australia to South Africa would travel to Egypt. CODEPINK helped fundraise for 21 American students to go on the march, and over 100 US students joined together in Cairo.
Abileah took on the task of coordinating the women’s contingent for the march. She put out some outreach letters to women who had signed up for the march and built a group of marchers who wanted to meet with women’s groups in Gaza and march as women in solidarity.
On the night of Christmas 2009, she boarded the plane to Cairo. When she arrived, she learned that the Egyptian government denied the entire delegation – 1, 362 people! – access into Gaza. The marchers demonstrated in the streets of Cairo, took over embassies, raised a ruckus in a country where uprisings were forbidden by the ruling dictatorship.
After days of protests and the intervention of First Lady Mrs. Mubarak via her humanitarian organization, the Red Crescent (the Middle Eastern version of the Red Cross), a small representative delegation of 100 was allowed to enter Gaza for 3 days.
Abileah went on the bus to manage trip logistics and to witness the destruction in Gaza, searching for the keys to transformation, as an American Jew of Israeli descent. People, mostly Palestinians with family in Gaza, humanitarian aid workers, and journalists, board the buses totaling 86 people who did not match the names on the original list given to the Egyptians. After a full day of traveling and waiting at the border, they reached Gaza City by about eleven at night on December 30.
From the outset, Hamas set conditions: No more than 5,000 marchers, no approaching the wall and the fence, how to make speeches, how long the speeches should be, who will make speeches. In short, Hamas hijacked the initiative and the marchers gave in.
Hamas, or its Popular Committee, brought 200 or 300 marchers. The march turned into nothing more than a ritual, an opportunity for Hamas cabinet ministers to get decent media coverage in the company of Western demonstrators. Especially photogenic were four Americans from the anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox Jewish group Neturei Karta, who joined the trip only at Al Arish. There were no Palestinian women among the marchers – a slap to the many feminist organizers and participants, both women and men.
It’s the morning of New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2009, Abileah and the international delegation pushed on beyond the line where Palestinians were allowed to go, and went another 100 yards toward the Erez border. The delegation sang freedom songs, held out peace flags, and sat down on the border for several minutes in solemn observance of the siege and the looming wall in the distance.
Nonetheless, Abileah had taken part in a march to the border with Israel at Erez, and though it was not what was originally envisioned, it was nonviolent and people in Israel marched to that same wall. All around the world at roughly the same time, people held 130 solidarity actions that focused world attention on the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza.
The two days she spent in Gaza were a flurry of activity as everyone was trying to do, see, and connect as much as possible in our extremely limited time. In Gaza she visited orphanages, refugee camps, fishermen, bombed out neighborhoods, human rights groups, the main hospital, families in their homes.
Abileah makes no mention of the complete unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in August 2005, and the removal of all settlements in the Gaza Strip and four settlements in the northern West Bank. This withdrawal did not bring the peace that Rae Abileah claims would be the result of the destruction of settlements, but instead created a terrorist state under Hamas with thousands of rockets fired into Israel. The scenes she saw during her visit in 2009 cannot be claimed, as she does, as due to the Occupation of Gaza soil by the contaminating influence of Jews, since they were no longer there.
On May 24, 2010, Rae Abileah shouted anti-BP slogans outside the company’s headquarters in Houston at a protest about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The demonstrators from CODEPINK, some wearing bizarre costumes and some nearly nude, marched from Transocean offices on Memorial Drive to the BP building in the Energy Corridor. Once at BP, the group launched into a series of chants and play acting. A man dressed in coveralls and wearing a hard hat bearing a BP logo ran around the group of costumed and scantily clad women, dousing them with what was supposed to be oil.
On October 18th, 2010, Rae Abileah was one of five CODEPINK women that disrupted Condoleezza Rice’s talk at the Commonwealth Club event at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco. They had red painted hands, dangled handcuffs, and unfurled pink banners which read, "Condi is a war criminal."
During the event Rice was asked if she would write another book, she replied that she would like to write a book about the Bush years, Saddam Hussein, Iraq and the intelligence. Abileah called out: "The intelligence was wrong, there were no weapons of mass destruction. You lied to the country and lead us into an illegal war. Thousands of soldiers and innocent Iraqis died."
Rae Abileah was one of the first to join the new group called “Young, Jewish and Proud” created by the organization “Jewish Voice for Peace.” Obviously, her paid activities with CODEPINK did not adequately take advantage of her Jewish background. A group that could scream that they represented Jews against Israel could be very useful when demonstrating against Jewish organizations.
The Young Jewish Declaration made use of their Jewish identity by stating: "We will not carry the legacy of terror. We refuse to allow our identities to be cut, cleaned, packaged nicely, and sold back to us. We won’t be won over by free vacations and scholarship money. We won’t buy the logic that slaughter means safety. We will not quietly witness the violation of human rights in Palestine." Like young Abraham destroying his father’s icons, we are standing up to the hypocrisy and corruption of our elders by calling out our community on its most sacred of sacred cows: namely, the unquestioning, unconditional support of the state of Israel.
“Young, Jewish and Proud” (YJP) debuted in November, 8, 2010 during the annual convention of The Jewish Federations of North America in New Orleans. Abileah and four more demonstrators disrupted Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's speech. After Netanyahu summarized the two “greatest threats” to Israel – a nuclear Iran and “delegitimizers”– she interrupted Netanyahu with a pink banner that read, “The settlements betray Jewish values” and in Hebrew: “Justice, justice you shall pursue,” a verse from Deuteronomy. Rae Abileah shouted “The settlements betray Jewish values”
Netanyahu accused the protesters of joining those who believe “Israel is guilty until proven guilty.”
Abileah then flew to London to participate in demonstrations in November of 2010 for a boycott of Ahava beauty products. She was in London in order to testify at the Russell Tribunal on Palestine about the corporate complicity of Ahava in Israeli human rights abuses and its violations of international law.
Code Pink alleges that the Israeli cosmetics company that promises to share the "beauty secrets from the Dead Sea" is also "hiding the ugly truth—its products actually come from stolen Palestinian natural resources in the occupied territory of the Palestinian West Bank. This is a problematic statement since the State of Israel from before 1967 also had shores on the Dead Sea and has every right to extract minerals from it.
Nevertheless, Abileah still attacks Ahava Dead Sea Laboratories for manufacturing products using minerals and mud from the Dead Sea. Its products generate nearly $150 million in annual sales in thirty countries.
CodePink, however, found that 44% of Ahava is owned by the settlements of Mitzpe Shalem and Kalia. Both of these settlements are inside what the organization considers to be Palestinian territory. Ahava’s profits are therefore subsidizing illegal settlements and their residents. In conclusion, the company Ahava Dead Sea Laboratories is clearly an Israeli profiteer in Occupied Palestinian territory.
Abileah was one of the organizers of the 2011 “Move Over AIPAC conference” that was held on May 21-24, 2011 in Washington, DC. The organizers were somewhat disappointed since only a few hundred attended instead of the thousands they sought. Indeed, the vast majority of the attendees seemed to be leftist or liberal American Jews.
The demonstrators protested as AIPAC delegates entered and exited the Washington convention centre, with some individuals gaining admittance and staging impromptu demos. The demonstrators used chants, music, and visuals like an apartheid wall that turned into a Palestinian village scene and a human-powered flotilla to Gaza.
Rae Abileah was an honored speaker at the ThoughtWorks convention in Brazil in late October 2011. She lectured on social justice around the world, from the current movement Occupy Wall Street, past the demonstrations against the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the conflicts and revolutions in the Middle East.
Rae Abileah spoke at the “fourth World Peace Forum Teach In” in Vancouver, Canada from November 11- 13, 2011. It was an opportunity for her to meet like-minded activists and speakers during the peace-themed teach-in at Langara College.
Abileah’s panel at the Peace Forum focused on the question, “Where do we go from here?” – a question she said relates well to both her work with CODEPINK and to the current Occupy movement. “It’s been an evolution, from looking at this single issue to looking at the bigger picture of US Foreign Policy,” she said. “We’re trying to push for systemic change, so it’s hard to see results. And it can feel really exhausting,” she said.
She is now, in the early part of 2012, working to organize events for Occupy AIPAC, a counter demonstration intended to disrupt the annual AIPAC confab during March 2-6, 2012 in Washington, D.C. This action is based on the same group of organizations that has been re-invigorated—or at least re-branded—from their previous name of “Move Over AIPAC,” which they used when they disrupted last year’s AIPAC conference.
The mission,” Abileah said “is to expose AIPAC as a lobby not representing the best interests for the American people, putting the Israeli government’s agenda before most Americans—a lobby that is in opposition to what the 99 percent want. To show that they’re pushing for military aid to Israel when we need cuts to our military budget given the austerity.
The conference changed it name to Occupy AIPAC (along with that 99 percent rhetoric) in order to piggyback on the popularity of the Occupy movement. Abileah clarified: “Occupy is focusing on ending corporate personhood, economic justice, and fair/real democracy where corporate and one percent cash doesn’t drive politics, election, and legislation; AIPAC is a natural target within those demands/issues as a huge K Street lobby with a stranglehold on Congress.” (“A typical example of a one percenter,” she noted, “is Sheldon Adelson.”)
Further Reading:
“Occupy AIPAC” plans to disrupt the AIPAC Conference on March 2-6, 2012 in Washington DC.
Richard Allen fights Jewish organizational support for the boycott of Israel (BDS)
Does the “Occupy Wall Street” Movement have an Anti-Semitic Dimension?
