#phyllis bennis

Phyllis Bennis, giornalista, scrittrice e attivista, è consulente internazionale del Jewish Voice for Peace.

Tra le principali sostenitrici dei diritti della popolazione palestinese, dirige il New Internationalism Project presso l’Institute for Policy Studies nato per monitorare, democratizzare e rafforzare le Nazioni Unite per liberarle dal dominio statunitense.

Consulente informale di diversi alti funzionari dell’ONU su questioni mediorientali, per due volte, è stata selezionata per diventare Relatrice speciale sui diritti umani nei Territori palestinesi occupati.

È leader di United for Peace & Justice e co-presidente della Rete di coordinamento internazionale delle Nazioni Unite sulla Palestina.

Ha scritto e curato diversi libri, tra cui Before & After: US Foreign Policy and the War on Terror e Challenging Empire: How People, Governments & the UN Defy US Power. Il suo testo più recente, del 2025, è Understanding Palestine and Israel.

Nata il 19 gennaio 1951, ha iniziato il suo attivismo contro la guerra in Vietnam, è stata nel CISPES (Comitato di solidarietà con il popolo di El Salvador) e militato in diverse organizzazioni.

Testimone della Prima Intifada, nel 1987, ha compiuto diversi viaggi in territorio palestinese che hanno portato alla stesura del libro, From Stones to Statehood: The Palestinian Uprising del 1990. 

Ha apportato il suo contributo durante la guerra contro l’Iraq e l’Afghanistan, alle successive sanzioni economiche e sostenuto i movimenti anti americani in quei paesi deplorando l’eccessiva influenza degli Stati Uniti nell’assetto internazionale. 

Ha contribuito a fondare la Campagna per porre fine all’occupazione israeliana, istituita nel 2002 durante la Seconda Intifada, e fa parte del suo comitato direttivo. 

Fa parte della BDS, il movimento palestinese per il boicottaggio, il disinvestimento e le sanzioni a Israele.

Convinta oppositrice dell’imperialismo americano e occidentale e del militarismo della NATO, ritiene che si debbano intraprendere azioni per contrastarne l’egemonia a livello globale. 

Ha ripetutamente accusato la ‘lobby israeliana’ di spingere per una guerra contro l’Iran.

Antimilitarista, ha spesso protestato per il diritto al lavoro, per l’istruzione pubblica, per aumentare le tasse sulle aziende e sui ricchi, per eliminare i sussidi sui combustibili fossili e tagliare le spese militari. 

È apparsa nel pluripremiato documentario Occupation 101.

Attiva su molti fronti, tiene discorsi, conferenze e seminari in tutto il mondo. Importante è il suo contributo attraverso i media statunitensi e globali.

Antisionisme=Antisémitisme, les Etats Unis et la France sont synchrones

Si en France, l’Assemblée Nationale a adopté une résolution non contraignante (ça on le verra surtout quand auront lieu les premiers procès) assimilant l’antisionisme à l’antisémitisme, aux Etats Unis c’est le président Donald Trump qui a signé un décret, un texte contraignant donc, qui interdit de critiquer l’entité sioniste sur les campus universitaires. L’hostilité au sionisme était ici aussi…

(The Real News)  The Roots of Israeli Attack on Gaza

AMY GOODMAN: Two thousand, the mark has been hit, of U.S. soldiers killed in Afghanistan.

PHYLLIS BENNIS: You know, there’s a big question, for one thing, about when the actual milestone was reached. We’re hearing from some media—the Washington Post, Businessweek said it was this week, this past weekend. The New York Times had actually said it was last August, and CBS News said it was last June. So, even when the count gets there is up for grabs.

But I think what’s more important is that that speaks to the fact that the counting is not the point. The 2,000th U.S. soldier, whether it was this week or last June, is no more or less important than the first or the 17th or the 129th. And what’s particularly left out in all of these counts is the scores of thousands—we don’t know the numbers—of the number of Afghan civilians that have been killed in this war. Since the records began to be kept, which was not until 2007, we know that 12,996 civilians, Afghan civilians, have been counted by the U.S. military just in those last five years. The first six years were not even counted, including the massive carpet bombing of Afghanistan that opened the war on October—beginning on October 7th of 2001.

So we’re faced with this massive level of casualties, giving rise to the kind of anger across society that is leading to these so-called “insider killings.” The U.S. military, of course, has acknowledged that only about 25 percent of those killings actually have anything to do with a, quote, “Taliban infiltrator.” The vast majority, they say, “We don’t know, but it seems to be personal animosity, personal grudges.” What seems clear is that the personal grudges are actually grudges against an illegal occupation that is widely despised throughout the region. So when you see the rising number of casualties—and the casualties have continued to rise throughout the years of the surge and continuing to rise now—that the surge troops, the 33,000 official surge troops that President Obama sent in the first year of his presidency, those are now on their way out, but the number of casualties continues to rise.

The consequences will be the same whether we pull out the troops last week, as I would have preferred, or at the end of 2014: there’s going to be, unfortunately, almost certainly, a violent struggle for power in Afghanistan, very much like what happened the last time a foreign occupation ended. And in that case, when the Soviet Union pulled out, there was a six-year civil war, until finally the Taliban won that war, with the support of the majority of the population at the time, because they promised to bring an end to war. What this is going to mean politically, we don’t know yet. The fact that the U.S. is now saying that they are not prepared to go forward on efforts to bring the Taliban into peace talks does not bode well for the possibility of the war ending sooner rather than later, because what we know is that all wars—and this is, as you said, the longest war in U.S. history—every war ends with some kind of negotiation, some kind of discussion, some kind of agreement. That can be now, or it can be at the end of 2014. It’s not going to qualitatively change the nature of that agreement or what happens on the ground.

What we need to worry about is that what the Obama administration is saying it plans for the end of 2014 is not the withdrawal of all troops and all U.S. paid mercenaries, as we saw in Iraq, when the U.S. was forced out. This time around, we’re hearing what we originally heard about Iraq: we’re going to withdraw the combat troops, meaning we will keep in place the trainers—they’re the ones that are being killed in the largest numbers—we will keep in place the CIA, we will keep in place Special Forces, and we don’t know how many thousands of troops that may mean. There are now 100,000 U.S. paid contractors operating in Iraq, along with 40,000 other NATO troops. Nothing is being said about the contractors. Will they be withdrawn, or will their numbers continue to escalate so we have essentially a continued occupation, but not with uniforms?