The nightmare of all nightmares

Published in Socialist Worker.

HURRICANE SANDY, which hit land in New Jersey on Monday evening, may be the worst storm to strike the East Coast in recorded history. It has already claimed more than 50 lives in the Caribbean, and it is certain to cause billions of dollars--maybe tens of billions of dollars--in damage in states across the Northeastern U.S.

But the threat of an even greater catastrophe remains--a nuclear nightmare. The effects of the storm could combine to produce the kind of disaster that took place at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan in March 2011--itself the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl 25 years before.

According to a Time magazine report, Sandy--whose impact has been magnified because it collided, as it hit land, with a cold front crossing the Northeast--will cause deadly flooding:

The real danger comes from the potentially huge storm surges the hurricane could cause along coastal areas. [The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] put the storm surge threat from Sandy at 5.7 on [a 6-point scale]--greater than any hurricane observed between 1969 and 2005, including Category 5 storms like Katrina and Andrew. NOAA's National Hurricane Center says that "life-threatening storm surge flooding" is expected along the mid-Atlantic coast.

And to top it off, the storm is hitting at the full moon, when ocean tides are at their highest point--which will make the flooding even worse.

Some 60 million people will feel the impact of the storm before it's over. Already, half a million people have been evacuated from coastal areas where the storm surge could hit 10 feet or more. Preparations for disaster relief by local, state and federal authorities are unprecedented.

But there's no preparing for the nightmare of all nightmares--if the so-called "Frankenstorm" causes a crisis at one of about two dozen nuclear power plants that are vulnerable to damage.

The fact that this scenario looms above the other tragedies caused by Sandy is further evidence--if more was needed--that nuclear power is too dangerous to be tolerated, and has to go.

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THE NUCLEAR plants are built to withstand a hurricane, but the greatest danger, according to former nuclear industry executive Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Energy Education, comes from the possibility of a loss of outside power, which is likely to occur up and down the East Coast during the storm.

Gundersen has worked in nuclear energy for 40 years, including as a licensed reactor operator, and has overseen projects at 70 nuclear power plants across the U.S. On the Fairewinds podcast on Sunday, Gundersen pointed out that this is "what happened at Fukushima Daiichi; the offsite power was eliminated."

Even if the plants shut down, according to Gunderson, "what Fukushima taught us is that doesn't stop the decay heat. There is still as much as 5 percent of the power from the power plant that doesn't go away...For that, you need the [backup diesel generators] to keep the plant cool."

Gundersen said that many plants have two or three backup diesel generators, but he says he has encountered situations where one generator failed, meaning that one other generator was all that was available against the possibility of a disastrous meltdown.

Speaking to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! on Monday, Gundersen warned:

A bunch of these plants are in refueling right now. And when you're in a refueling outage, you are not required to have all your diesels running. You can be tearing apart one and only have one diesel available. So the concern is that, should they lose offsite power, all of this heat needs to be removed, and you're relying on just one diesel to keep the nuclear reactor cool.

He continued:

The biggest problem, as I see it right now, is the Oyster Creek plant, which is on Barnegat Bay in New Jersey. That appears to be right about the center of [where the storm will hit].

Oyster Creek is the same design, but even older than Fukushima Daiichi unit one. It's in a refueling outage. That means that all the nuclear fuel is not in the nuclear reactor, but it's over in the spent-fuel pool. And in that condition, there's no backup power for the spent-fuel pools. So if Oyster Creek were to lose its offsite power--and, frankly, that's really likely--there would be no way cool that nuclear fuel that's in the fuel pool until they get the power re-established.

Gundersen explained that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission does not require nuclear power plants to be able to cool fuel pools with their backup generators. On the Fairewinds podcast, he explained that this would require much larger generators, which the nuclear plants' for-profit operators don't want to purchase.

In other words--once again--profits come before safety.

If the fuel pools get too hot, Gundersen explained, it's possible for the steel lining of the pool to "unzip"--and for the humidity released by the boiling water to damage the structure of the building housing it, which can lead to the release of radiation. Such releases have lasting impacts. New reports indicate that the Fukushima plant may still be leaking radiation into the ocean, contaminating fish--some 17 months after the disaster.

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OYSTER CREEK is the oldest operating nuclear power plant in the U.S. It was built to operate for just 40 years after going online in 1969, but its operating license was recently renewed in spite of protest from area residents and environmentalists.

As longtime anti-nuclear activist Harvey Wasserman wrote about the decaying Oyster Creek plant several years ago:

Perched 50 miles east of Philadelphia and 75 miles south of New York City, Oyster Creek could not be licensed at all by today's standards. Its reactor containment was never required to withstand a jet crash and is far flimsier than the lid that blew off Chernobyl Unit Four in the Ukraine in 1986, releasing massive quantities of radiation into the surrounding countryside. Because Oyster Creek's old core is laden with far more residual radiation, a breach could blanket the densely populated American northeast with an apocalyptic cloud of death and destruction.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) sent inspectors to Oyster Creek and eight other nuclear power plants for "enhanced oversight" during the storm, including Indian Point just north of New York City, and Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, the site of an accidental partial meltdown in 1979.

On Monday night, the NRC declared an alert at Oyster Creek "due to water exceeding certain high water level criteria in the plant’s water intake structure.” Although NRC officials emphasized that the alert status was the second-lowest of the NRC's four action levels, it admitted that "Water level is rising in the intake structure due to a combination of a rising tide, wind direction and storm surge."

More than 20 million people live within a 50-mile radius of Indian Point, which sits on the Hudson River just 25 miles north of New York City. The Hudson is expected to feel the effects of the storm surge from Sandy.

Entergy, the Fortune 500 company that operates Indian Point for a profit, claims the plant will be safe despite the dangers posed by the hurricane. But these claims should be taken with a grain of salt--especially after an un-redacted version of an NRC report, leaked to the press, showed evidence that the NRC and power plant operators have "misled the public for years about the severity of the threat" of flooding to U.S. nuclear power plants located near dams.

Indian Point hardly has trustworthy record on safety. Studies have found that "thyroid cancer rates in those four counties around Indian Point are also among the highest in the U.S., with a rate of thyroid cancer that is 66% above the U.S. average, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."

As of this writing on Monday afternoon, none of the plants in the path of the storm have shut down. Again, this is a case of corporations putting profits before people. As Gundersen pointed out on the Fairewinds podcast, "It would be better if the operators, instead of waiting for the power to fail, shut the power plant down ahead of time." A planned, gradual shutdown places much less stress on the plants' emergency systems than a sudden shutdown.

If the worst did occur at Oyster Creek or another plant, the storm will make evacuation efforts especially difficult. As of Sunday at 7 p.m., New York City subways and buses were shut down, along with Amtrak, Metronorth and New Jersey transit. Major bridges and highways in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut were closed, and U.S. Highway 6/202, a main artery in the case of an evacuation related to Indian Point, has been shut down through Wednesday at noon.

And it goes without saying that a nuclear disaster would take place while emergency and disaster response services are already stretched to the maximum dealing with the devastation caused by the hurricane.

The odds are that Hurricane Sandy will pass without causing a meltdown at a nuclear power plant. But the fact that this is even a possibility highlights the insanity of continuing to operate these plants, let alone in close proximity to several of the largest cities in the country.

That all this is happening in the days leading up to an election where both President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney support using public funds to build new nuclear power plants reveals the need for a mass movement for a nuclear-free society.

Chris Williams contributed to this article.

Operation Get Rid of the Vote

Published in Socialist Worker.

IT'S ELECTION time, so we'll be hearing plenty of pious tributes to the wonders of the U.S. political system. From members of both parties, as well as the media that cover them, it's a constant refrain that America is the "world's greatest democracy"--where citizens from every corner of society determine how their country is governed with their votes.

Only when you examine these claims, you find a completely different picture. The system is supposedly based on "one person, one vote"--only millions and millions of people are excluded from voting at all, while a tiny minority of people who run businesses and political institutions have considerably more influence over Washington politics than one vote gives them.

The myth of "one person, one vote" in the U.S. has been thrown into particularly sharp relief during Election 2012 by legislation, pushed in various states by Republicans, that seeks to limit who will cast a ballot. These so-called "voter ID" laws are justified as a measure to stop vote fraud--but in reality, they are explicitly aimed at disenfranchising likely supporters of Democratic candidates.

And after Barack Obama's lead in opinion polls slipped following the first presidential debate, the push for "voter ID" laws suddenly seemed like it had the potential to tip the presidential election.

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IN OCTOBER, federal courts blocked enforcement of voter ID laws in Pennsylvania and South Carolina, at least for the 2012 election. Weeks earlier, a federal court blocked a similar law in Texas, with judges ruling that the legislation "imposes strict, unforgiving burdens on the poor, and racial minorities in Texas," according to the Houston Chronicle.

Still, these are only a few of the voter ID laws now in place. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, nearly 1,000 voter ID proposals have been introduced since 2001, and a dozen states passed or strengthened such legislation in the last two years.

Voter ID laws fall into multiple categories. "Strict photo ID" laws--which will apply in four states for the 2012 election and are pending, due to legal challenges, in five others--require people to show a photo ID in order to cast a ballot. In six other states, and one more pending a legal challenge, a photo ID is required, but voters without one may cast a provisional ballot that will be counted if it meets various other requirements. Three more states require some form of ID, but not necessarily a photo ID, in order to vote. In 13 others, voters are asked for identification, but it isn't required in order to cast a ballot.

In all but one of the states that tightened their ID restrictions in the past two years, the proposals were introduced by Republicans. Over half of the bills were sponsored by lawmakers affiliated with the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), according to an analysis by News21.

ALEC, which created model voter ID legislation in 2009, is the same conservative organization behind the "Stand Your Ground" and "Castle Doctrine" laws that have been used to claim self-defense in the shootings of unarmed Black people like Trayvon Martin in Florida and Bo Morrison in Wisconsin.

The voter ID legislation has a clear aim: Depress the votes of people of color and other groups--young, poor, and working class voters--who are more likely to support Democrats.

Sponsors of voter ID legislation claim the proposals are intended to prevent vote fraud. But actual cases of vote fraud are so rare that this explanation rings hollow. Studies of 2004 elections in Ohio and Washington state found that vote fraud occurred in 0.00004 percent and 0.0009 percent of cases, respectively. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, "National Weather Service data shows that Americans are struck and killed by lightning about as often."

Ironically, it is the Republicans who face the most high-profile allegations of vote fraud in this election. The Republican National Committee recently had to cut ties with Strategic Allied Consultants, whose founder was accused of "dumping registration forms filled out by Democrats," according to a local Fox News report. The allegations are based on video in which an employee admits on tape that she was seeking to register only Romney voters. The RNC had paid the company $3.1 million.

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THE REASON for Republican enthusiasm for voter ID laws becomes clearer when you see who is disenfranchised by such laws and other attempts to discourage voting. Voter ID laws, like poll taxes and literacy tests in the Jim Crow South, disproportionately affect people of color.

A study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that "25 percent of African-American voting-age citizens have no current government-issued photo ID, compared to 8 percent of white voting-age citizens." Those earning less than $35,000 a year are twice as likely to lack a photo ID--the same percentage applies to people aged 18 to 24.

Some Republicans don't even hide their intentions. As Ari Berman reported in the Nation, the chair of the GOP in Franklin County said he opposed expanding hours for early voting because "we shouldn't contort the voting process to accommodate the urban--read African American--voter-turnout machine."
Over the summer, former Florida Republican Party Chair Jim Greer said GOP officials in his state had talked about suppressing the Black vote, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

For the racists of the Republican Party, voter ID laws are a win-win. They will place new obstacles in the way of people who are unlikely to vote Republican. And by raising the specter of vote fraud, the laws provide another means to rile up and mobilize the GOP base to come out on Election Day.

While the rulings in South Carolina and Pennsylvania will prevent implementation of those voter ID laws before the 2012 elections, they haven't stopped them for good or even prevented them from having an impact on the election.

For example, according to the Columbia Free Times, the federal court decision ruled that the South Carolina law didn't discriminate against minorities. It postponed enforcement because "there wouldn't be enough time to practically implement any changes here before the November 6 elections," according to the Free Times.

Similarly, in Pennsylvania, Judge Robert Simpson ordered a temporary injunction to prevent enforcement of the voter ID law in 2012--but this could be reversed and the law put in place for the next election. In addition, Simpson's ruling doesn't prevent election officials from asking for ID--only that they can't prevent people from voting if they don't have it. In other words, election officials could still find ways to discourage those without ID from voting.

The U.S. Supreme Court has only ruled once on voter ID laws--in 2008, the justices upheld a strict photo ID law in Indiana. This does not bode well for those seeking to overturn the South Carolina law through the courts alone.

The recent rulings against voter ID laws are at least in part the result of efforts of groups like the NAACP and ACLU to mobilize protests against the laws. But it will take a longer and more determined struggle--one that looks beyond the 2012 election--to turn the tide.

Such a struggle, in order to win a real victory over those who would deny the vote to people of color, will have to go beyond voter ID laws to take on the policy of felony disenfranchisement. As Elizabeth Schulte wrote in Socialistworker.org: "Some 5.3 million Americans with felony convictions--and in several states, with misdemeanor convictions--are barred from voting...[m]ore than 1.4 million of the disenfranchised are African American."

Winning that kind of struggle will require challenging politicians of both parties who, in their eagerness to appear "tough on crime," have been willing to strip voting rights from those caught in the web of the New Jim Crow.

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EXPANDING THE right to vote in the U.S. has been a struggle since the founding of the country, when only white male property owners had the franchise. Some of the most important struggles in American history--the women's suffrage movement and the civil rights movement in the Jim Crow South, for example--revolved around this very question.

What the current situation tells us is that this struggle is far from over. Even if voting ID laws are turned back and felony disenfranchisement abolished, about 20 million immigrants--documented and undocumented--are denied a vote in the country where they live, work and raise their families.

However, making "one person, one vote" a reality in the U.S. will be just one change among many needed to achieve real democracy in America.

Under the two-party system that prevails in the "world's greatest democracy," voters--even if they can cast a ballot unhindered--are effectively restricted in who they can vote for. Their vote is generally limited to candidates of the Democratic or Republican Parties, both of which are heavily funded by the 1 percent and serve their interests.

As a result, voters often encounter elections where neither main candidate represents overwhelmingly popular positions, such as ending the war in Afghanistan or curbing the power of the health care industry. Voters never had a chance to cast a ballot on whether the Bush tax cuts for the rich should expire. Nor does the electorate have any way of affecting what happens in workplaces or the broader economy.

Likewise, there isn't any effective way to use the ballot box to hold politicians accountable for the promises they do make. For example, union members who want to punish Barack Obama for breaking his promise to campaign for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act can hardly do so by voting for Romney, who would only do more to destroy workers' living standards.

Of course, voters are technically free to cast their ballots for a third-party candidate, but election laws make it very difficult for third parties to even run candidates for office. Those who do qualify for the ballot are certain to be ignored as an irrelevance by the mainstream media.

The collusion between the media and the major parties to exclude dissenting voices from the election campaign was illustrated this month with the leaking of an agreement between the two parties to ensure the presidential debates went as planned, with no surprises or difficult questions. When Green Party candidates Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala tried to enter the second debate at Hofstra University, they were arrested and handcuffed to chairs for eight hours.

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WHEN IT comes to undemocratic institutions, the clearest example of all is the Electoral College system that actually selects the president, rather than a democratic vote. The Electoral College was specifically designed by the "Founding Fathers" who wrote the Constitution to be a safeguard against voters electing a president opposed by the elite.

Actually, the story of the formation of the U.S. political system shows that the Founding Fathers--who were mainly Southern slave owners or Northern merchants--were deeply suspicious of democracy, and they constructed the Constitution to limit its scope.

Their other chief concern in writing the Constitution was to safeguard the right to "property"--including owning men and women as slaves. Thus, James Madison, known at the time as the "Father of the Constitution," worried in the Federalist Papers that without strict protections for the privileges of property owners, "the most numerous party" would be able to "sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens."

Some of the "Founding Fathers" went even further. For example, Alexander Hamilton proposed that both senators and the president be elected, but serve for life, like Supreme Court justices.

As the late people's historian Howard Zinn said in an interview:

The Constitutional Convention was animated by the rebellions in Massachusetts and other places, [which] caused the Founding Fathers to decide to get together in Philadelphia and draw up a document that would create a national government strong enough to deal with rebellions like this. And you have General Knox writing to [George Washington] before the Constitutional Convention, saying, "These soldiers of the revolution come back, and they think because they fought in the revolution, they deserve an equal share of the wealth of this country."

A genuine democracy must be able to achieve justice and equality for the oppressed and the exploited. But extending democracy to every part of our society where injustice, inequality and exploitation are found will require a determined struggle.

Testifying against Israel's apartheid

Published in Socialist Worker. Written with Daphna Thier.

NEARLY 1,000 people gathered in the Great Hall at Cooper Union in lower Manhattan on October 6 and 7 to hear two days of testimony on the complicity of the U.S. government and the United Nations in Israel's past and present crimes against the Palestinian people.

The testimony took place before the Russell Tribunal on Palestine. Modeled on a tribunal to investigate U.S. war crimes in Vietnam organized by British philosopher Bertrand Russell, the Russell Tribunal on Palestine is an effort, embraced by renowned writers and thinkers, to expose the barbarism and oppression against Palestinians carried out by the Israeli government and its allies.

A statement from the Tribunal said that this session in New York City was the last of four that "[aimed] to bring attention to the complicity and responsibility of various national, international and corporate actors in the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and the perpetuation of Israel's impunity under international law."

The New York session focused particularly on the role of the UN and the U.S. in supporting or failing to prevent or punish Israel's crimes.

Since it has no legal authority, the tribunal relies on its "members' prestige, professionalism and commitment to human rights." The jury for the New York session included activists, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, legal professionals and scholars, and prominent intellectuals, ranging from Native Americans to African Americans born in the Jim Crow South, to people from South Africa and Northern Ireland.

The week before the New York session, it was announced that musician Roger Waters, best known as a member of Pink Floyd, had joined the jury. Waters said in an interview that he had joined the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel a few years ago after he was contacted about canceling a concert planned for Tel Aviv. "It's an absolute tragedy that Palestinians have been thrown off land their families have been living on for thousands of years," Waters said.

This tribunal session was held in the U.S. to call attention to the American government's role as key funder and enabler of Israel's crimes, but also to connect the struggle of the Palestinians with that of African Americans and Native Americans.

Harry Belafonte, who attended the Saturday session, said the connection between civil rights for African Americans and justice for Palestinians is "a link that I've always recognized...In the midst of our struggles from the civil rights movement to the liberation of South Africa, we have found great synergy in our interests as oppressed people of color. Both benefitted from the presence of each other and we continue to experience the need for one another."

Organizers of the tribunal aimed not only to shed further light on Israel's crimes, but to build connections between struggles against oppression across the globe and inspire others to act in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

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THE FIRST day of testimony began with Israeli historian Ilan Pappé discussing the impact of early Zionism on Palestine, leading up to the ethnic cleansing that preceded the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.

Pappé testified there was a thriving Arab society in Palestine prior to the creation of the state of Israel. He said early Zionist colonizers viewed the native Palestinians as "usurpers" and "foreign agents," assigning them the Orwellian category of "alien native." These racist ideas remain "at the heart of Israeli Zionist policies towards the Palestinians," Pappé said.

The Zionist movement decided "to ethnically cleanse Palestine...a crime against humanity [such] that only genocide is above it," he said.

Immigration lawyer Susan Akram detailed the Palestinian refugee crisis and the unwillingness or inability of the United Nations to resolve it. There are now 6.8 million Palestinian refugees--half of the world's refugee population--most of them people who were expelled in 1948 and their descendants.

Akram explained that while the UN believes all refugees have the right to return to the homes from which they were expelled, it has not acted to force Israel to respect this right.

Pappé testified that while many falsely trace the beginning of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the 1967 war and Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, in reality, 1967 represented a continuation of the colonial project to establish "Greater Israel." In fact, the desire to take Gaza and the West Bank was a core Zionist aim that went unfulfilled in 1948, according to Pappé.

As law professor John Quigley testified, the U.S. "covered up what it knew about the run-up" to the 1967 war, which began with Israel's surprise bombing raids on Egypt. According to Quigley, neither U.S. nor Israeli intelligence believed that Egypt was going to attack Israel. Thus, the 1967 war wasn't defensive, as Israel and the U.S. have always claimed, but a war of aggression, in violation to the UN Charter that Israel is a signatory to.

Journalist and activist Ben White testified that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine is an ongoing process. He said the view that Palestinians within Israel represent a "demographic threat" is "commonplace among Israeli academics, think tanks, politicians, laypersons." White testified to the high rates of poverty among Palestinians, and that due to Israeli policy, "there is no practical means for the Palestinians to develop and independent economy."

Vera Gowlland-Debbas, of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, took up the question of the legal responsibility of the UN to enforce international and human rights law, including the issue of UN complicity in upholding a double standard for Israel.

She pointed out that when Iraq invaded Kuwait, the UN Security Council authorized the use of force, but the body has failed to act in response to Israeli crimes such as the construction of the separation wall in the West Bank or Operation Cast Lead in 2008-09, the barbaric assault on Gaza.

Suzanne Adely, a lawyer in attendance at the tribunal and member of the National Lawyers Guild and Defend the Egyptian Revolution Committee in New York, said in an interview, "We can't just say it's a double standard. Actually, structures such as the UN have been intentionally created by capitalist and imperialist entities to perpetuate and control this system, not make it more just."

Raji Sourani, a leading Palestinian human rights attorney from Gaza, was supposed to testify about conditions under occupation. However, the U.S. State Department refused him permission to enter the country. Instead, Jeanne Mirer, president of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, spoke about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza that has resulted from the Israeli siege.

She described Gaza as an "open air prison for 1.6 million people...Closures imposed [by Israel] are illegal collective punishment." Mirer denounced Operation Cast Lead, during which Israel killed as many as 1,400 Palestinians, as an "illegal war of aggression." Some 95 percent of factories in Gaza are closed because Israel won't allow in necessary raw materials, unemployment is around 50 percent, 1.1 million Gazans rely on food assistance, and two-thirds live in deep poverty.

Mirer spoke ominously about Gaza's water supply, which is under threat because of a lack of sanitation equipment and supplies banned by the Israeli blockade. "If massive investments in water treatment and desalinization plants are not taken immediately, the whole population of Gaza will be subject to a water crisis of genocidal proportions in a very few years," Mirer said.

The end of Ilan Pappé's presentation stood out during the first day of testimony, as he made a passionate appeal for a one-state solution as the only just solution:

The idea of two states is a Zionist idea...do not shrink Palestine into 20 percent of its geography and do not shrink the Palestinian people into 50 percent of who they are. If we are going to seek a just and peaceful solution...we should include everyone who is affected and who was affected so that we can build together a stable future.

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THE SECOND day began with Diana Buttu, a Palestinian-Canadian lawyer residing in Ramallah, who explained how the U.S.-brokered "peace process" has helped to legitimize Israel's crimes.
She explained how the Oslo Accords of 1993 aided the annexation of large parts of the West Bank to Israel and legitimized this in the eyes of the international community. According to Buttu, "34 separate countries established relations with Israel...so rather than Israel feeling disdain that it was still an occupier and a dispossessor, it was now suddenly being rewarded."

Katherine Gallagher a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, spoke about how the U.S. uses its veto power as a permanent member of the UN Security Council to protect Israel from accountability for its war crimes and other violations of international law. Of the 82 times the U.S has vetoed UN resolutions, over half were to protect Israel.

Noam Chomsky testified via Skype on the history of the relationship between U.S. interests in the region and its policies regarding the Israel/Palestine question. He began by acknowledging the 30-year anniversary of the U.S.-backed Israeli war on Lebanon that left roughly 20,000 Lebanese, Syrians and Palestinians dead, including the massacre of as many as 3,500 people at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

Phyllis Bennis, co-founder of the U.S Campaign to End Israeli Occupation, testified that public opinion continues to shift in favor of those working for justice for Palestinians--but also that public opinion has limited influence on U.S. policy. "When we look at the history of the United States, we see the legacy of genocide, of slavery, of disempowerment," Bennis said. "But parallel to that we see another history...a history of resistance, right from the beginning."

Craig and Cindy Corrie, the parents of Rachel Corrie, the 23 year-old U.S. activist killed by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza in 2003, made a surprise visit to address the tribunal.

Cindy Corrie spoke about the need to focus on civilian deaths, speaking of several dozen Palestinians who have been killed by Israel for nonviolently protesting the separation wall in the West Bank. "They all must be remembered," she said. "We must have accountability."

Craig Corrie said, "If you back over my car, I know you can replace my car. But you run over my daughter, I don't know what justice means. You have to prevent it from happening. So we have to keep preventing and preempting in our justice."

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AT A press conference held the day after the tribunal wrapped up, the jury's findings were announced. As in the previous sessions, the jury found Israel guilty of numerous violations of international law, including violation of the Palestinians' right to self-determination and refugees' right to return, as well as the "acquisition of territory through war."

The jury charged Israel with violating international humanitarian law prohibiting mistreatment, torture and prolonged administrative detention of Palestinians, and it confirmed the judgment of international activists that Israel is an apartheid state. "Because of their systematic, numerous, flagrant and sometimes, criminal character, these violations are of a particularly high gravity," the jury found.

The U.S. government has been guilty of complicity with Israel's crimes, according to the Russell Tribunal jury: "Since the Six Day War in 1967, the U.S. has provided unequivocal economic, military and diplomatic support to Israel in order to establish a qualitative military superiority over its Arab neighbors in violation of its own domestic law."

The U.S was found guilty of "obstructing accountability for violations of the Geneva Conventions" and "abusing its veto power within the Security Council," and it was charged with "continuing to provide economic support for the settlement expansion" and "failing to condition military aid to Israel...based on its compliance with human rights norms."

The United Nations was convicted for its failure to prevent Israel's violation of international law, which the UN is legally mandated to uphold.

The jury called for civil and criminal litigation against the perpetrators of the many crimes about which it passed judgment--and for the reform of the UN, including abolition of the veto power for permanent members of the Security Council.

Finally, the Russell Tribunal jury called for the mobilization of activists and trade unions for justice in Palestine, and for worldwide involvement in the BDS movement against Israel until the country complies with international law.

Zwelinzima Vavi, general secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, addressed the tribunal at the end of the second day. He called on unions in the U.S. to take a stand in support of the Palestinian people as they had against South African apartheid.

Vavi said in an interview that international solidarity on the part of unions and others is "absolutely critical. Any form of denial of human rights anywhere constitutes a reason for us to extend our hands of solidarity across borders."