Robert Naiman
Policy Director, Just Foreign Policy, United States

“Robert sailed on board AlAwda (The Return) from Wilhelmshaven to Amsterdam.”

Robert Naiman is a U.S. citizen, born in Fayetteville, Arkansas, who lives in Urbana, Illinois. Naiman is Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy, a non-profit, non-partisan organization which educates and engages Americans to reform U.S. foreign policy to end the use of illegal violence and promote diplomacy. Naiman has been active in U.S. Jewish peace and justice groups for decades and has lived, studied and worked in Palestine. He was a student at Birzeit University near Ramallah in 1986-7 and a volunteer with Christian Peacemaker Teams in Hebron in 1996. He was a participant in the U.S. Boat to Gaza in June 2011. He has led efforts to end unconstitutional U.S. participation in the catastrophic Saudi war and blockade in Yemen. He wrote the Syria chapter in The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire. He is president of the board of Truthout, a progressive news site. Naiman has worked as a policy analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. He has Masters degrees in economics and mathematics from the University of Illinois.

QUOTE:  “As a 52-year-old American Jew who has devoted his adult life to reducing the violence caused by U.S. foreign policy and the abusive governments that the U.S. enables, U.S. backing of the Israeli-Egyptian blockade of Palestinian civilians in Gaza compels me to act. Like the Saudi blockade of civilians in Yemen, the Israeli-Egyptian blockade of civilians in Gaza would not be possible without U.S. weapons, U.S. tax dollars, and U.S. diplomatic shielding at the United Nations. This is a U.S. blockade as much as it is an Israeli-Egyptian blockade. More and more Americans, including prominent American Jews like Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the most popular politician in the United States, and Natalie Portman, the Academy Award-winning Israeli-American actress, are speaking out against the Netanyahu government’s illegal violence against Palestinian civilians. I hope that my participation in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla will encourage more Americans to speak out.”      

Robert Naiman
Robert Naiman

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