Wherever American human rights activist Medea Benjamin goes, she receives an unusually warm welcome. One of the main reasons is that she has become a target of US President Donald Trump and his supporters because of her opposition to US wars , her criticism of Israel, and her support for Palestine in the United States.
At the height of US and UK preparations for the 2003 invasion of Iraq , Benjamin and a group of friends founded the organisation Code Pink to organise the anti-war movement. They chose the name to mock the colour-coded terrorism alert system used at the time to indicate threat levels.
When Israel launched its genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023, a new chapter began in the targeting of Benjamin, her organisation and its members by the US authorities.
She says she could do nothing but oppose the war and Israel because she has "open eyes" that see what has happened "not only over the past three years" but also because she has been aware of events "since the Nakba in 1948".
That awareness, Benjamin tells The New Arab , allowed her to free herself from "the ideas and concepts my parents taught me". Instead, she says, she "saw the reality: that hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people were displaced and stripped of their property in 1948 with the creation of the state of Israel".
One source of that awareness, she says, has been her many visits to the occupied West Bank. She recalls seeing "unbelievable repression in places like Hebron".
Benjamin has also visited Gaza six times, long before 7 October 2023, the day of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and the Israeli military campaign that followed.
During those visits, she says, "I realised these people were living in a kind of unbearable prison". That is why, she adds, "my heart is with the Palestinian people, who deserve to live in a free country, deserve the right of return, and deserve to live in a democratic state."
Asked how, as a Jewish woman, she sees Israel's image around the world after continuing acts of genocide, the 73-year-old told The New Arab that Israel has become "hated around the world – hated, hated, hated".
Benjamin acknowledges that "hate" is "a strong word" but insists, "I don't use it lightly."
Even in the United States, she says, opinion polls show that people "have a more favourable view of Palestine".
She says this has surprised her because she never thought she would see such a shift in her lifetime, given intensive pro-Israel messaging from elected officials and the corporate media.
Benjamin says another indication of Israel's standing is that "it has become difficult for Israelis even to go on holiday around the world".
She points to signs declaring that "Israelis are not welcome", whether in Thailand, Mexico, Costa Rica or elsewhere.
"I understand that this also extends to Jewish people ," she says. That negative impact on Jews around the world, she argues, is "another reason why I have to strongly oppose Israeli policy", because she "doesn't want her religion to be associated with genocide". 'Bypassing' the American people Recently, public comments by Trump and Vice-President JD Vance have fuelled speculation about rare tensions in US-Israeli relations. Could Washington soon reassess its ties with Tel Aviv?
Benjamin says, "I don't know whether I'll see that in my lifetime, but I know we'll see it in the next generation, because you can't continue with a policy that goes against morality, goes against decency and goes against public opinion."
She believes "this has to change".
As an example of "enormous tension" between the allies, Benjamin says that "continuing to give Israel billions of dollars in US taxpayers' money is no longer popular".
Because of that decline in public support, she argues, the Israeli and US governments are trying to "bypass the American people – and even Congress – to ensure that this relationship continues indefinitely". Calls for a Ban and a Smear Campaign Code Pink's long-standing opposition to US wars, war profiteering, global conflicts and Israel has, according to its founder, exposed the organisation to "pressure on many different levels" within the United States.
One aspect of that pressure, she says, is "calls to ban" the organisation. Another is "calls to bar our organisation from entering Congress, as well as investigations by the Treasury Department into a recent trip we took to Cuba because we delivered humanitarian aid to children's hospitals there".
As with the Palestine movement in Britain, Benjamin says there have also been "many lawsuits filed against our organisation, not by the government but at the civil level, just as many lawsuits have been brought against other pro-Palestinian groups".
She says this has left the organisation and its members, estimated at around 100,000 people, most of them in the United States, "effectively under siege".
Among the allegations used to justify that pressure, she says, is the claim that "we're funded by the Chinese Communist Party" – an accusation Benjamin says "we laugh at because it's so absurd".
The purpose of repeatedly raising such claims in newspapers and on television, she argues, is "to smear our organisation and pretend that we're not genuine anti-war voices".
Benjamin insists that the organisation "takes no money from any government because we don't represent any government, unlike many of our elected officials, who represent the Israeli government".
Everything Code Pink members do, she says, is funded out of their own pockets, driven by "their disgust with our governments' policies and their love for the Palestinian people and other peoples around the world".
Benjamin delivered a forceful speech at the International Conference Against War, held in London on 20 June.
During her address, she surprised many in the audience by openly expressing support for Palestine Action, which the British government has banned under terrorism legislation.
Did she fear being accused of supporting terrorism in Britain?
"That's really absurd," Benjamin says. "How can we call ourselves Western democracies when you can't say you support a group that hasn't harmed anyone and whose actions have been limited to damaging property?"
She compares Palestine Action's tactics with "the same kind of property damage carried out by the Suffragettes when they were fighting for women's right to vote in Britain in the early 20th century".
She also cites "the property damage carried out by Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress when they were trying to overthrow the apartheid system".
The young people of Palestine Action, Benjamin says, have "tremendous courage to take direct action against the weapons systems that are killing people in Gaza, and they should be rewarded for it".
"They should receive the Nobel Peace Prize, not unjust prison sentences. I'm very happy, and it's an honour, to support them."
Asked why Arab societies have not exercised similar influence over Arab and US policies, Benjamin points to several reasons, including corruption, what she sees as the mistake of relying on the United States, and hostility toward Iran.
In the same context, Benjamin believes Arab leaders could have prevented Israel's genocidal crimes in Gaza.
"They could have done many things, but they did nothing," she says.
Among those steps, she argues, would have been "coming together as the Arab world and declaring a boycott of Israel", as well as "acting as a bloc and saying they would boycott oil sales to anywhere in the world unless those countries also agreed to stop supporting Israel".
Benjamin has visited Iran before.
She says she "would get on a plane tomorrow and go there" if she could, because she believes "there should be peace between the American and Iranian people".
She also believes that if the Iranian people want to change their government, "that's up to them", and that "the United States should not interfere in changing governments in other countries".
Reflecting on Trump's previous remarks about regime change in Iran, she says: "If we need regime change, we should start in our own country."
Code Pink launched its first protest on 17 November 2002 with a four-month sit-in outside the White House to oppose the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Since then, the organisation has continued campaigns in support of Palestine, which have expanded and intensified since the start of Israel's genocidal war on Gaza, while also promoting the boycott of Israel.
Campaigning against US sanctions on Iran and exposing their impact on the Iranian people has also become one of the organisation's leading priorities.
Since the outbreak of the US-Israeli war against Iran, the issue of Iran has moved alongside the war on Gaza to the top of its agenda.
In Benjamin's assessment of the war so far, "no one wins a war because people die in it".
She says she recognises that "Iran could not defeat the United States, just as the United States could not achieve a military victory".
"So the United States didn't win," she says, "and neither did Iran."
"When so many people are killed, and there's this much destruction worth hundreds of billions of dollars, that isn't a victory either."
Even so, Benjamin believes Iran "showed the world that it can fight against the world's greatest superpower and force that superpower to come to the negotiating table".
She says she cannot predict the fate of any agreement that may emerge, but believes it sends "a major lesson to the rest of the world: that the superpower can be stopped".
Benjamin argues that the Trump administration was "forced" to halt the war against Iran for three reasons: "failing to win the war, enormous international pressure on the United States, and even greater pressure at home from people who don't want to pay more to fill their cars with fuel because of oil prices".
Code Pink is using "the least popular American war" to launch a campaign urging "the American people to start thinking about the victims of these wars and to realise that every life is precious".
Benjamin recalls a US military attack on the first day of the war with Iran, on 28 February, against the Shajarat al-Tayyiba (Minab) Primary School for Girls in south-eastern Iran.
"I hate that the United States killed 168 children on the first day of the war," she says. "Just thinking about it breaks my heart."
Every child killed at the Minab school, she says, "was precious, and their families will suffer forever because of the loss of those lives".
She says the incident is one of the examples used in the campaign to persuade Americans that "if we started caring about other people, we would have a much better foreign policy and a much better world".
One way of advancing that campaign, she says, is through "global solidarity" against war.
That was one of the reasons for Benjamin's visit to London last week, where she took part in a historic international anti-war conference focused not only on the war with Iran but also on war more broadly.
"Since most of the world's people are affected by this war, we have to find a way to make our voices heard and to organise more collective action," she says.
Benjamin acknowledges that such mobilisation has not succeeded in stopping wars, citing the Iraq War as the latest example.
But she says conferences such as this demonstrated "to the tune of millions" that ordinary people opposed it.
"We were right then to say no to that war, and we're right now to say no to the war on Iran," she says.
At the same time, she argues, it is equally important to say no to "the continued support that many of our governments give to Israel". Article translated from Arabic by Afrah Almatwari. To read the original, click here .