Medea Benjamin has been an anti-war activist since her opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam in the early 1970s. She is most recognizable today wearing her signature pink clothing during regular appearances at public events and outside of Congressional offices, holding elected officials and their appointees to account for their words and actions. Benjamin believes that as citizens in a democracy, we must make our voices heard more than just in the voting booth every four years. She spoke with The Progressive by telephone in late October and explained further:
I realize that we have very few tools in our toolkit to influence policy, and I certainly believe that things like demonstrations and mass mobilization are important, but being able to confront the powers directly is something that we still have an ability to do to a large extent in this country, more than people in other countries have, and we should take advantage of that.
When you look at Congress, for example, I don’t know any other country where you can walk into Congressional buildings by just going through a metal detector. No identification is required, you can be a foreigner, you can be a green card holder, whatever, and nobody’s going to ask you for identification. You can also walk into the offices of a member of Congress, and that’s tremendous access that we don’t take advantage of enough.
I realized that in 2002 in the lead-up to the Iraq War, when I didn’t know that a public hearing really meant that the public could go. I flew from San Francisco, California, to Washington, D.C., because I heard there was going to be a public hearing with [then Secretary of Defense] Donald Rumsfeld testifying about why it was in the U.S. interest to invade Iraq because they had weapons of mass destruction. I knew that was a lie, and I felt I had to be there.
I went with a colleague, and we dressed up in our pants suits as reporters with our stenographer’s notebook and a copy of The Washington Post under our arms, because we didn’t know we could just walk in as individuals, and indeed we did. We were the first in line, and the woman there said, “Take a seat right there in the first row.” Well, second row. We were right behind Donald Rumsfeld, and it was an incredible experience. We got up with our banners, and we said, “Weapons inspectors, not war.” That went around the world; people saw it everywhere. We were on CNN that night. We realized that that’s tremendous power and access that we need to use, and I’ve been trying to use that in different venues ever since.
People are often amazed, because they rarely see their elected official in an unscripted scenario, and they say to us, “Oh my God, he is representing me? This is a monster. How did he get elected?” They start getting interested in learning more about who is really representing them. So I think it’s been an eye-opener for many people, especially in this past year, to see how disconnected their elected officials are from the reality or the positions of their constituents.
We also oftentimes in our videos put the amount of money they’re getting from AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee] or the weapons makers, so people can see how sold-out their Congressperson is and how much they represent corporate interests, or in the case of Israel, even foreign interests instead of the interests of their constituents.
I’ve felt such a disconnect between what the people want, as we see in opinion poll after opinion poll, and what the people in power are doing. We saw early on, post-October 7, that the majority of people wanted a ceasefire, and yet at that time, I remember a list at the end of October 2023—there were only eighteen members of Congress who had called for a ceasefire, and that’s out of 535 members. Today, we see opinion polls that show the majority of Americans not wanting to support Israel with U.S. weapons, and yet I can count on my hands, on my fingers, the number of people in Congress who will call for an end to the war in Gaza.
We also go to conferences they have, any talks that they’re giving, any fundraisers they’re having, their offices, and their homes. I don’t think homes are sacred, separate spaces. I think given how little they listen to us, it’s perfectly fine and a good thing to go to where these people live and demonstrate in front of their homes. So I think we could be doing a much better job of putting pressure on our elected officials to listen to us.
Now, we don’t have that kind of access to people in the White House and the State Department. Those of us who live in Washington, D.C., do things like wake-up calls in the morning at the houses of people like [National Security Advisor] Jake Sullivan or [Secretary of State] Antony Blinken, but we have the privilege of living in D.C., and it’s easier for us to do that.
The democratic process is not working, so we’ve got to find more ways to influence the process, and one of them is to be much more vocal as citizens with our elected officials. I think people are way too timid or too disconnected or too cynical, and rightly so, but these are the officials that we have, not the ones that we want, and so we’ve got to find ways to impact them.
You don’t have to be an expert in the issues; you don’t have to be somebody who does this full time. We think the most impactful people are everyday citizens who take time off of their regular jobs to try to influence their policymakers. We had a woman with us recently who was on maternity leave, and she came up to the day before giving birth, going to Congress with us, because she said, “I can’t think of a better thing to do to welcome a new life into this world than trying to save the lives of children in Palestine.”
That’s just one example of an ordinary person who found a little space in her life to be able to dedicate to this, and I think people can find more spaces and do more than we’re doing. We always have to push ourselves beyond our comfort zone, beyond whatever we’re doing now, because it’s not enough, and we never know what will work. What we do know is that if we don’t do anything, it definitely won’t work, and the other side is constantly laboring in the direction of more war. We need the peacemakers to step up more.
We need to think both on the very micro level: How do I develop a relationship with my elected official, or at least with the staff, even if I don’t like them at all, and even if they have policies that are totally different from mine? You still have to know who your elected officials are and try to have some kind of rapport with them or their staff.
On a broader level, we have to build up our organizations so that we are not just doing this flurry of activity when it comes to election time, but also when it’s not election time. Whether it’s building up organizations that are local and that focus on war and peace issues, or making connections with other groups that work on other domestic issues, those kinds of coalitions are really powerful.
I also think there are other things that people can do when it comes to the Middle East and Gaza. They can give financial support to organizations that are helping; they can be monitoring their media and trying to put pressure on them to do a better job of covering these issues. There are all kinds of ways to be active, but it’s important that activism is happening all the time.
Voting is something that might take an hour of your time, but people spend an enormous amount of time arguing with each other about whom to vote for. I wish a lot of that time was spent in the building up of power from us, the grassroots, so that whoever is elected will have to modify their positions, because the pressure they’re getting from us is too strong for them to ignore.
There are also things that people can do in their professions. Pushing the American Nurses Association to take a better stand, the American Medical Association, the teachers’ unions—all of these groups need to be pressured. And of course there is the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which means that there are things you can do every day in terms of your patterns of consumption and protests. We just did a protest in Trader Joe’s in mid-October, telling them to stop carrying Israeli products, and it was very powerful. So those are other examples of things that you can do.