Jewish Peace Letter Vol. 43 No. 2 Published by the Jewish Peace Fellowship March 2014 Murray Polner on the trial of the “Oak Ridge Three”: Our National Security State Stefan Merken Many Paths to Peace Lawrence Wittner Suckers for War Noam Sheizaf Ari Shavit’s Partial History Robi Damelin A Chain of Change ISSN: 0197-9115 From Where I Sit Stefan Merken Many Are the Paths to Peace hen President Obama took office in 2008, nuclear war moved them to put their bodies where their reli- like many others I was filled with hope that the gious faith led them. Not everyone can break the law, but there wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would come to a are many forms of protest available to those who believe war Wspeedy conclusion and we could remove all or most of our is not the way. troops. The Iraq war has wound down (finally), but the Afghan This led me to reexamine what I have been doing. Am conflict continues. I know there I active enough? Am I doing are promises of a reduction of all that I can do? By continu- our troops in the coming year, ing the work of the JPF, Mur- but the war just drags on. ray Polner, Adam Simms and I now wonder where our I at least keep the flame of JPF young people are and why we alive. By publishing SHALOM have heard so few protests and keeping our members and about our recent wars. I would readers informed, we are doing ask the identical question of something. I am sure you also older people as well. When the do worthy works of justice and Vietnam War was raging, and peace. needlessly cost more than fif- When I lived in Los Ange- ty-eight thousand US soldiers les, I was invited to Long Beach killed, many more wounded, to speak before an audience of and several million Asian dead, Where Have All the Activists Gone? Protesting the Viet- elderly members of the Fel- my generation hit the streets to nam War in Washington, D.C., April 24, 1971. lowship of Reconciliation who protest loud and clear. But with resided at a retirement home. I no draft at the present time — thank goodness — and with was met by a handful of members, some in wheelchairs, some no threat to the young and their parents who don’t want them not, but all anxious to hear my words. After telling them what to take part in more wars, the American public in general has the FOR was doing both locally and internationally, they asked been almost silent. me what they could do. I thought a minute and said: Go out on Why? the sidewalk nearest the nursing home and protest injustice. Perhaps there is little to gain from becoming involved in Make signs and stand or sit and let your voices be heard and the peace or antiwar movement now when wars seems so dis- your bodies seen. They took my advice and did exactly that. tant. Without actually seeing coffins returned home to griev- Several months later I received a message from someone ing families or badly maimed veterans struggling to regain who had been in the audience. They had gone out to the nearby their lives, we say little. And that is the opposite of what we corner with signs and protested for a couple of hours. Some should be doing. This Administration, as all Administrations, younger people had seen their protest and also wanted to be- needs to hear our voices protesting war. come involved and help. So the younger ones pushed the older In this issue of SHALOM you will read a moving article protesters up another block to a very busy street and they all about Michael Walli, Sister Megan Rice and Greg Boertje- protested weekly on that corner. The news media picked it up Obed — all peace activists who trespassed on the grounds and the protest grew. The smallest of deeds can blossom into of a nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and cut something much larger. through three fences in the pre-dawn hours to reach a $548 We’d love to hear from you! So sit down and write a million storage bunker holding the nation’s primary supply of short note telling us what you’re doing. We’re at JPF@forusa. bomb-grade uranium. The spirit to avoid war and especially org. We will try to include your actions in a future issue of SHALOM. You may just give ideas to others about what can be Stefan Merken is chair of the Jewish Peace Fellowship. done. Y 2 • Shalom: Jewish Peace Letter March 2014 Jewish Peace Fellowship Swords & Plowshares Murray Polner Our National Security State ews that Sister Megan Rice, an eighty-four- alone the American public, would merit some serious atten- year-old nun, and two army veterans, Michael Wal- tion from the mass media. But no one was murdered or even li, sixty-five, and Greg Boertje-Obed, fifty-eight, wounded by a hail of bullets from vigilant guards. No one was Nhave received prison sentences for challenging — no, for captured and beaten. No one resisted arrest. The trio did what Michael Walli, Sister Megan Rice and Greg Boertje-Obed displaying Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’s “Reaching Critical Will” banner. daring to protest — America’s long love affair with nuclear they did and surrendered, willing and eager to explain. weapons has drawn little or no media interest. Sister Megan The New York Times’s William J. Broad did have a sub- received a thirty-five-month sentence, and the two men six- stantial piece about Sister Megan Rice, “The Nun Who Broke ty-two months each. Into the Nuclear Sanctum,” but that was back on August 12, What was their crime? Cutting a hole in a barbed wire 2012, after the break-in. The last time I’m aware of any inter- fence at one of the ultra-secret national security sites at Oak est on the Times’s part was October 31, 2012, when an article Ridge, Tennessee, on July 28, 2012, and then crossing over discussed the failure of the site’s security, where, incredibly, into prohibited ground, hammering on the Highly Enriched no one at the facility shouted, “Halt, who goes there?” at the Uranium Material Facility and spray painting some “biblical trespassers. Since then, silence. graffiti,” leaving behind Isaiah’s subversive aphorism about In any event, the trio was tried and found guilty in fed- beating swords into plowshares. eral court in Knoxville and fined $52,053 — which the gov- You would think that the break-in at the highly secretive, ernment will obviously never collect since in all probability a presumably well-protected Y-12 National Security Complex at nun, a house painter and an unemployed activist do not usu- the Oak Ridge nuclear facility, their subsequent federal trial in ally generate much financial gain from a personal portfolio Knoxville, why they did it yet failed to convince the jury, let of stocks and bonds. What they accomplished wasn’t much, just shutting Murray Polner, Shalom’s co-editor wrote, with Jim down some Oak Ridge activities for two weeks. But they also O’Grady, Disarmed and Dangerous, a dual biography of reminded the guardians of the nuclear site that apparently Daniel and Philip Berrigan. anyone — even people bent on doing real damage — could www.jewishpeacefellowship.org March 2014 Shalom: Jewish Peace Letter • 3 just saunter in and possibly do as they pleased. So here’s U.S. attorney told the jury that nuclear deterrence was vital another question for our national media, print and online: for our defense, but few outside of that Knoxville courtroom What are we paying those private security companies for? seemed interested in asking why. It’s as if the Berrigan brothers, Dan and Phil, suddenly But what if we have a nuclear accident, or just anoth- returned for a second act. It was Phil’s quixotic brainstorm, er Petrov Incident? Remember that? In 1983, Soviet Army which he called the Plowshares movement and which re- Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov saw a missile heading jected our endless, unaccountable government-sponsored for Moscow on his radar screen and, soon after, four more violence. Some one hundred men and women during the US missiles approaching. But he didn’t report it because he Eighties and Nineties hammered on and spray-painted MX was smart enough to suspect a computer glitch. Had he re- missiles, Trident submarines, B-52 bombers and components ported his radar’s reading and had his bosses retaliated with of the strategic nuclear triad, sending some to prison. their nukes, most of us would no longer be among the living. Phil Berrigan once spoke about how hard it was to get There have been other near-misses, some reported, some not. fellow Americans interested in what they were saying. “Even You’ll need a Freedom of Information request to find out. sympathizers thought Plowshares actions look ridiculous Given the frightened and confused reactions in our nuclear now, a sermon to the converted, ignored by the government age, anything can happen. and the media, the public no longer listening.” Of course During the trial, the judge said he hadn’t found the defen- he was right. All the same, he and his friends left a gift to dants “contrite.” Kathy Boylan, a longtime peace worker, testi- anti-nuke radicals like Sister Megan Rice, Michael Walli and fied in their behalf, even alluding to the Holocaust.