VIDEO: Phyllis Bennis Says “Stop the War” at the National Moral Monday Peace Rally
Phyllis Bennis, director of the IPS New Internationalism Project, delivered remarks at the National Moral Monday Coordinated Peace Rallies at Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, DC.
Phyllis addressed the mounting human and financial costs of U.S. military policy, calling the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran “a war of choice and a war of aggression” that is “immoral and illegal” under both U.S. and international law.
She cited the more than $50 billion spent on that war so far, and noted that the same dollars could fund Medicaid coverage for 1.5 million people, 35,000 university scholarships, and living wages for 117,000 families. (Those figures came from our National Priorities Project’s Trade-offs Calculator. Other NPP trade-off data appeared on signs at the rally.)
On Gaza, Phyllis pointed out that the United States has paid nearly $28 billion directly to the Israeli military since the start of the genocide, and that in 2024 alone, U.S. tax dollars covered 40 percent of the entire Israeli military budget.
She also warned that the deployment of National Guard troops on American streets is a form of policy violence, designed to normalize military presence and suppress the votes of people of color and immigrant communities.
“When we fight for justice here — when we fight for jobs and health care and education — we know that fight is not complete until we include the Palestinians, the Venezuelans, and the Iranians in our fight.”
Watch Phyllis’s full remarks below:
The rallies, organized by IPS ally Repairers of the Breach, brought together communities outside the White House and Congressional offices in cities across the country in a coordinated act of nonviolent moral resistance. Organizers say they gathered to challenge a nation that “continues to spend billions on war while people suffer at home and abroad” — standing against what they call policy violence, abandoned communities, and the normalization of destruction.
