Since 1996, IPS has been working in the U.S. and in various international venues towards the broad goal of crafting a new kind of UN-centered, democratic and people-based internationalism. The project's work is in three major areas: the fight for peace with justice in the Middle East, defense of the United Nations against U.S. domination, and the challenge to U.S. unilateralism and military interventionism, especially in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks. Directed by IPS Fellow Phyllis Bennis, the project works closely with a number of partner organizations both in the U.S. and abroad.
MIDDLE EAST PEACE WITH JUSTICE
This project works primarily on two issues: Iraq and Palestine/Israel. In both arenas the project focuses on education and activism regarding the problems caused by failed and failing U.S. policies, and how those policies should be retooled to meet the goal of a comprehensive peace with justice, rather than an unequal imposed stability.
IRAQ - Bennis has been working on the issue of the aftermath of the U.S. war against Iraq since the Gulf crisis began in 1990. Much of her work has focused on opposing economic sanctions, which continue to devastate the Iraqi population while having little impact on the regime, while simultaneously working to oppose the on-going U.S. military strikes against Iraq. At the U.S. policy level, the call is to delink economic from military sanctions: ending all economic sanctions, and redefining military sanctions to focus on arms suppliers, primarily the U.S. and its allies, and on a regional arms control regime rather than solely focusing on Iraq. The project is also in the forefront of the national and international challenge to the Bush administration's threat of a new war.
In early 1999 Bennis participated with former UN Assistant Secretary General Denis Halliday in a six-week, 22-city speaking tour sponsored by seven national peace, Arab-American and faith-based organizations, aimed at building opposition to economic sanctions (www.afsc.org/iraqhome.htm ). She testified, with Halliday and others, in several congressional hearings on the same issues. And in August 1999 she accompanied the first group of U.S. Congressional staffers to Iraq, to report back to their bosses on the impact of U.S. policy in Iraq: on the humanitarian crisis facing Iraqi civilians and on the effect of depleted uranium. (Read the Report from Congressional Staffers' 1999 trip to Iraq.)
The project works closely with members of the Black and Progressive Caucus of Congress and their staff, including those who traveled to Iraq, in educational work aimed at ending economic sanctions, and most urgently, work aimed at preventing a catastrophic U.S. war against Iraq.
Bennis travels frequently for speaking engagements at universities and community, church, and peace organizations across the country and abroad. Op-eds and other articles from the Project appear frequently in numerous U.S. and international newspapers and magazines (see www.merip.org) and Bennis is a regular guest on numerous television and radio programs. The project is a co-sponsor of the National Iraq Task Force, and participates in most of the national anti-sanctions campaigns in the U.S.
PALESTINE - The Project's work is based on a commitment to ending Israel's occupation and realizing Palestinian national rights, including the right to an independent and viable state. The three areas include U.S. policy towards the Palestinians, Europe's role in the Middle East peace process, and the role of the UN and international law.
Early Project work has included holding a conference on alternatives to a "two-state" solution for Palestinian nationalism, including Palestinian scholars and analysts from the West Bank and Gaza, as well as numerous U.S. Palestinian and American counterparts.
U.S. POLICY - From the time of the collapse of the Camp David talks and the beginning of the "second intifada" in September 2000, Bennis was involved in discussions and analysis about the central role of U.S. policy in the Palestine-Israel conflict. Those discussions and analysis (see Strategy Paper - "A Memo on Palestine & the U.S., on Palestinians & Americans") led to the creation of the U.S. Campaign to End Israeli Occupation. Bennis now serves as co-chair of the Campaign steering committee. The Project is also part of the steering committee of the new UN-based international coordinating committee of NGOs on Palestine.
Other Project work in this arena also includes speaking (in venues including the Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine, numerous universities, and conferences throughout the U.S.) and writing in a number of magazines and newspapers. Bennis has worked with members of the Progressive Caucus of Congress to arrange appearances before Congress of Yasir Arafat and other Palestinian leaders. The Project is a member of the North American Coordinating Committee of NGOs working on the Palestine question, and Bennis served as a special analyst for the NACC in examining major developments such as the Madrid process, the Oslo Accords, the Wye River Memorandum, etc. Project work also challenges Israeli settlements and U.S. reluctance to challenge the illegality of settlement policy. Bennis played a major role in 1998's successful campaign to urge Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream to end their contract with a settler company.
EUROPE'S ROLE - This work focuses on increasing European participation in Middle East diplomacy, and urging Europe to challenge more directly U.S. control of the diplomatic process. Bennis addressed the European Parliament in Brussels on this issue, and has written and spoken widely in European venues and European media. The Project works closely with partners in Europe, particularly at the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam, and TNI fellows based in Germany, Brussels, the UK and Spain, to create collaborations dealing with Europe's alternative approaches to Israel-Palestine diplomacy.
UN & INTERNATIONAL LAW - The focus is on maintaining the primacy of international law and UN resolutions in Middle East policy, against U.S. efforts to deny the relevance or undermine the significance of them. The project works with civil society organizations as well as government officials from UN member states to build support for new United Nations initiatives to reclaim the diplomatic center on the Israel-Palestine conflict. This means including all pertinent UN resolutions as relevant to Middle East diplomacy. Bennis has been a featured speaker about the primacy of the UN role in Israel-Palestine diplomacy at UN conferences on Palestine, in venues including Madrid, Toronto, New Delhi, Prague, Athens, New York, Paris and elsewhere.
Earlier Project campaigns included work with the Center for Economic & Social Rights (www.cesr.org) to pressure the U.S. to recognize the legitimacy of the 4th Geneva Convention's applicability to Israel's occupation of Palestinian land, through participation (which the U.S. rejected) in the 1999 international conference of signatories to the Convention.
UNITED NATIONS - This area of the Project's work challenges U.S. domination of the United Nations, and works to maintain the centrality of the UN in international diplomacy. Bennis' 2000 book, Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today's UN (contact www.interlinkbooks.com) continues to be used both for university classes and as a background primer for activists wanting to support the UN. She speaks often in both university and political settings on this issue, and her writings appear in a wide variety of journals and books. The Project also supports campaigns aimed at forcing the U.S. to pay its back dues and peacekeeping arrears to the United Nations, and related issues of UN legitimacy and primacy.
The Project's Iraq work overlaps with the United Nations arena, through the effort to challenge how the UN itself has been made a victim of U.S. policy towards Iraq. That includes focusing on the illegality of U.S.-British unilaterally-imposed "no fly zones" in Iraq, and on the illegality of U.S. decision-making regarding Iraq policy that routinely ignores the central role of the UN. This area has taken on new resonance with the Bush administration's preparation for war in Iraq based on a combination of sidelining and undermining the role of the UN, which should be the central decision-making actor in the Iraq crisis.
AFTER SEPTEMBER 11th: U.S. UNILATERALISM & INTERVENTIONISM -- This area of the Project's work challenges the growing unilateralist tendencies of U.S. foreign policy. Begun during the Clinton administration to challenge the sidelining of the UN and reliance on NATO to justify the bombing of Yugoslavia, the defense of internationalism and international law has become even more urgent with the Bush administration's assertion of preemption as a legitimate strategic option. The Project works with many organizations, including those such as Families for Peaceful Tomorrow and others made up of families of victims of the September 11th attacks, saying "not in our name" to the Bush administration's "anti-terrorism" war. With the 2002 moves towards official U.S. embrace of unilateralism and the right of pre-emptive strikes, and the Bush administration efforts to undermine the legitimacy and integrity of the United Nations, the Project is working with national and international coalitions to prevent war in Iraq, and to restore the UN to its appropriate role. Bennis' newest book, Before & After: U.S. Foreign Policy and the September 11th Crisis, published in September 2002, analyzes the legacies of unilateralism, and dissects what changed and what did not with the September 11th 2001 attacks.
Earlier the Project was involved in the national coalition efforts to challenge U.S. intervention in Yugoslavia and Iraq, and Bennis is a frequent speaker and writer on the "laws of empire" that now govern U.S. definitions of international law. Bennis has also testified in Congress on the illegality of NATO's attack on Yugoslavia.
In doing a piece on public pressure to "end the War" that we didn't actually start in the first place, Reuters quotes a woman responsible for organizing a "project" that actively promotes some of the most anti-American vitriol one could possibly display.
