The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs - May 2024 - Vol. XLIII No. 3

DISPLAY UNTIL 6/12/2024

This Ramadan, Be a Light in the Darkness.

This year, Ramadan spirit is needed more than ever.

The widespread starvation in Gaza calls on us to act urgently. In the West Bank, many families have lost their source of income amid heightened restrictions while hardship echoes across Jordan and Lebanon. Together, we can affirm our solidarity and express gratitude for our own abundance by sharing our blessings with others.

Be a light in the darkness and give generously today.

TELLING THE TRUTH SINCE 1982

On Middle East Affairs

Volume XLIII, No. 3 May 2024

INTERPRETING THE MIDDLE EAST FOR NORTH AMERICANS ✮ INTERPRETING NORTH AMERICA FOR THE MIDDLE EAST

THE U.S. ROLE IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION OF PALESTINE

8 History Will Record That Israel Committed a Holocaust—Susan Abulhawa

10 Israel’s War on Gaza Is Also an Assault on Oral Health—Shahd Safi and Catherine Baker

12 Netanyahu’s Last Battle: No Victory, Just Slaughter in Rafah—Ramzy Baroud

14 Israel’s Achievements in Gaza: Making Gaza Unliveable—Ida Audeh

17 How Biden Uses Loopholes, Courts and Congress to Arm Israel’s Genocide Jack McGrath

20 Mission Creep: Will Pier Become a Beachhead for U.S. in Gaza? Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

22 Funding for Israel Usurps Domestic Priorities —Dale Sprusansky

24 Legislation in the Time of “Plausible Genocide” and Election Cycles—Julia Pitner

26 Israel’s Brutality and U.S. Blunders Harm Our Interests in the Middle East—Two Views Dr. James Zogby and Delinda C. Hanley

30 Voters Seeking a Pro-Peace Candidate Have Options —Two Views Sam Husseini and Ahsan I. Butt

36 Out Like Lions, In Like Lambs (or Lizards): The West Restores Funding to UNRWA—Ian Williams

42

Political Statement Catherine Baker

44 The Stones Cry Out Solidarity Delegation Relays Messages from Palestinians Dr. Michael Spath and Delinda C. Hanley

46 Palestinian Poet Hala Kofa: The Only Thing You Have Is Your Voice Candice Bodnaruk

48 Can Russia Gain From Unrest in the Middle East Stasa Salacanin

50 Gaza Horror Prompts Rapprochement Between Türkiye and Regional Adversaries Jonathan Gorvett

52 The Limitations of Elections in Resolving Political Divisions in Tunisia and Libya Mustafa Fetouri

ON THE COVER: A Palestinian solidarity mural on the International Wall on Falls Road in Belfast, Northern Ireland on March 18, 2024. The wall is renowned for its political murals related to the Irish Republican movement and political struggles around the world. It now features a series of new murals supporting the Palestinian cause. Three Palestinian artists who were involved in the project have since been killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza.

(PHOTO BY CHARLES MCQUILLAN/GETTY IMAGES)

Other Voices

The Perfect Recipe for a Real Anti-Semitism Crisis, Caitlin Johnstone, www.caitlinjohnstone.com.au

OV-1

After 150 Days of Death and Destruction in Gaza, Israel Is Neither Stronger Nor Safer, Gideon Levy, Haaretz OV-2

Neocon Iraq War Architects Want a Redo in Gaza, Jim Lobe, www.responsiblestatecraft.org OV-2

“Two-State Solution” as a Distraction—The Problem Is Zionism, Ramzy Baroud, www.ramzybaroud.net

OV-4

This Is Not “Netanyahu’s War,” It Is Israel’s Genocide, Ahmad Ibsais, www.aljazeera.com OV-5

Red Line, What Red Line? Daniel Larison, daniellarison.substack.com

“If UNRWA Goes, So Do Our Dreams of Returning Home,” Palestinians Fear, Monjed Jadou, www.aljazeera.com

DEPARTMENTS

5 PUBLISHERS’ PAGE

6 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

54 ARAB AMERICAN ACTIVISM: A Celebration of Palestinian Resilience

54 MUSIC & ARTS: “Israelism”: American Jews Confront Their Relationship to Israel

55 HUMAN RIGHTS: Cultural Heritage Under Attack in Gaza

56 WAGING PEACE: Noura Erakat: Don’t Count on ICJ to Save Palestinians

63 BOOK TALKS: Sanctions: Ineffective Economic Warfare

65 THE WORLD LOOKS AT THE MIDDLE EAST—CARTOONS

66 MIDDLE EAST BOOKS REVIEW

72 OTHER PEOPLE’S MAIL

OV-7

OV-7

Compiled by Janet McMahon

Thirty Years After Baruch Goldstein’s Massacre, His Followers Are Now Carrying Out a Genocide, Elias Feroz, http://mondoweiss.net

OV-8

Abu Jawad’s Heart Breaks Daily As He Buries the People Killed By Israel, Abubaker Abed, www.aljazeera.com OV-9

Biden Owes an Apology to The Volunteers of The Mavi Marmara, the First Aid Flotilla To Gaza, Juan Cole, www.juancole.com OV-10

Good Christians, Bad Christians, Mayssoun Sukarieh, www.aljazeera.com OV-11

Washington’s Renewed Urgency For TikTok Ban Is Due to War On Gaza, Kyle Anzalone, www.antiwar.com OV-13

A Brief History of Dearborn, MI—The First Arab-American-Majority City in the U.S., Sally Howell & Amny Shuraydi, www.theconversation.com OV-13

Villa Mokbel: New Hope for Beirut’s Forgotten Architectural Gem, Maghie Ghali, www.aljazeera.com OV-15

PHOTO BY CHARLES MCQUILLAN/GETTY IMAGES

Many volunteers worked to create the Palestinian solidarity artwork on the International Wall, in Belfast, Northern Ireland (also featured on this May issue’s cover), including muralists Danny Devenny, Marty Lyons and Mickey Doherty.

American

Gazans are Starving

Last issue, this publisher’s page started with a grave warning about the looming famine crisis unfolding in Gaza from the World Peace Foundation’s executive director Alex de Waal. The situation has only gotten worse. “In Gaza we are no longer on the brink of famine; we are in a state of famine, affecting thousands of people,” the European Union’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell declared as we went to press. “This is unacceptable. Starvation is used as a weapon of war.”

Publishers’ Page

“This is 100 percent a man-made crisis. There’s no hurricane, there’s no cyclone, there’s no 100-year flood. There’s no protracted year-on-year drought,” Beth Bechdol, deputy director general at the Food and Agriculture Organization adds.

UNRWA in Crosshairs

As we went to press, a shameful ban on direct funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) is heading for a vote in Congress (see p. 24). Canada, the European Union and other countries have reinstated aid to UNRWA after a rash pause (see p. 36) caused by the Israeli government’s unproven accusations that UNRWA staff were actively involved in the Oct. 7 attack. Need we remind U.S. leaders that UNRWA’s vital programs include education, health and food assistance to nearly six million Palestinian refugees in the Occupied Territories, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria? Israel has long sought to discredit and dismantle the agency to harm Palestinian refugees and delegitimize their right of return. The U.S. government is complicit in this genocide.

Elections

The ugly truth is that in American democracy, parties and politicians ignore constituents’ demands unless they can credibly threaten to lose them an election. A vote to destroy UNRWA, starve Palestinians and send even more military aid to

Israel will cost the Biden administration and candidates for office in the upcoming elections. Arab, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Black, young people and other pro-Palestinian Americans can leverage their precious vote in November for a just future at home and abroad (see p. 30).

Pressure Works

In March, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) gave a major speech in which he condemned Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s far-right government and called for new elections in Israel. The comments, while hardly showing an understanding of the decades-long existential racism and apartheid policies at the heart of left- and right-wing Israeli governments, was a major change of tone for the traditionally staunchly pro-Israel Schumer. That the senator felt the need to speak out against Israel’s genocide in Gaza shows both the extreme depravity of Israel’s actions and the impact of months of pressure activists have placed on politicians. Schumer and President Joe Biden may still show far too much deference to Israel, but their attempts to walk back some of that support prove that times are changing—albeit far too slowly and only after decades of complete U.S. acquiesence to Israel culminated in a genocide.

AIPAC’S Ire

Chuck Schumer’s long-time allies at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee

(AIPAC) did not take kindly to his speech. “Israel is an independent democracy that decides for itself when elections are held and chooses its own leaders,” they said in a tweet. Many others joined in condemning Schumer, accusing him of meddling in the affairs of a foreign country. The irony, of course, is that Israel has long meddled in U.S. politics. Who could forget Netanyahu’s 2015 speech to Congress when he attempted to undermine President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal? Israeli spying in the U.S. is notorious. The Israel lobby’s efforts to sway elections, manipulate public discourse and challenge free speech in the U.S. have been documented by this magazine for decades. Israel has also encouraged the U.S. to engage in regime change in Iran and pushed the George W. Bush administration to topple Iraq’s Saddam Hussain in 2003. Suddenly they are against meddling?

Expanded Store Coming!

Our bookstore, Middle East Books and More, will be undergoing an expansion in the coming months. Once completed, the incredible renovated space will allow us to host book talks, community events and much more. Our store has become the epicenter of activism in Washington, DC, hosting fundraisers and selling all the books and solidarity items people seek during these trying times. We know our new, larger store will help us better meet this need and fulfill our mission to serve as a space for community, education and organizing. We do need help making sure the expansion is sufficiently funded. Please consider contributing to our fundraiser to leave your mark on the store’s future: <https://gofund.me/ 7b2fdd7a>. Please also support our store by visiting our website, <MiddleEastBooks.com>, to purchase books, olive oil, pottery and more.

PHOTO BY AHMAD HASABALLAH/GETTY IMAGES

Displaced Palestinians decorate their tent for the holy month of Ramadan on March 10, 2024 in Rafah, Gaza. Mediators failed to reach a ceasefire agreement prior to the start of the Islamic holy month. Mean‐while, the humanitarian situation remains dire in Gaza.

Executive Editor: DELINDA C. HANLEY

Managing Editor: DALE SPRUSANSKY

Senior Editor: IDA AUDEH

Other Voices Editor: JANET McMAHON

Middle East Books and More Director: NATHANIEL BAILEY

Middle East Books and More Asst. Dir.: JACK MCGRATH

Finance & Admin. Dir.: CHARLES R. CARTER

Art Director: RALPH UWE SCHERER

Founding Publisher: ANDREW I. KILLGORE (1919-2016)

Founding Exec. Editor: RICHARD H. CURTISS (1927-2013)

Board of Directors: HENRIETTA FANNER

JANET McMAHON

JANE KILLGORE

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (ISSN 87554917) is published 7 times a year, monthly except Jan./Feb., March/April, June/July, Aug./Sept. and Nov./Dec. combined, at 1902 18th St., NW, Washington, DC 20009-1707. Tel. (202) 939-6050. Subscription prices (United States and possessions): one year, $29; two years, $55; three years, $75. For Canadian and Mexican subscriptions, $35 per year; for other foreign subscriptions, $70 per year. Periodicals, postage paid at Washington, DC and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, P.O. Box 292380, Kettering, OH 45429.

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NEEDING ISRAEL’S PERMISSION TO RECOGNIZE PALESTINE

The Israeli government has unanimously expressed its opposition to “unilateral” international recognitions of the state of Palestine, diplomatic recognitions already accorded by the United Nations and 139 states encompassing the vast majority of mankind.

The Israeli use of the word “unilateral” is intriguing and significant.

Any state’s diplomatic recognition of another state is an inherently unilateral, onesided decision and act.

So what does the Israeli government intend to convey by declaring only “unilateral” recognitions to be impermissible?

It appears to be reminding the states of the Global West, virtually the only significant states that have not yet accorded diplomatic recognition to the state of Palestine, that they cannot do so by their own free choice, without Israel’s prior permission.

Until now, these states have faithfully and obediently accepted this restriction on their sovereign rights.

Will they continue to do so or will at least some of them, to give peace a chance, finally assert their sovereign rights and declare their independence from Israeli domination and control?

John V. Whitbeck, Paris, France

TIME TO PUT AN END TO ISRAEL’S IMPUNITY

How can cutting off humanitarian aid to desperate Palestinians as collective punishment for the alleged misdeeds of a handful of UNRWA workers not be considered a criminal abuse against humanity?

Evidence for this claim is lacking, but on the single word of a government on trial for genocide, multiple governments led by the U.S. suspended aid.

It’s important not to forget that UNRWA is the U.N. agency that assists millions of Palestinian refugees who were victims of the 1948 Nakba and that the 2.3 million people of Gaza have the agency’s aid as almost their sole source of help. Suspending funding to the entire aid system

to punish a few accused people is vindictive retaliation, it is complicity in crimes against universal human rights. Additionally, nothing meaningful was done when Israel murdered over a hundred U.N. employees in Gaza, the worst attack on the United Nations in their existence.

The horror hardly stops there. Israel has at various times in this conflict dropped thousands of leaflets ordering Palestinians in Gaza to flee their homes and go to conflict “safe” areas, and then bombed the “safety” zones and the “safe” routes to them. You couldn’t expect anything more devious from the villains of any totalitarian regime in history. I, for one, cringe from the barefaced hypocrisy we are expected to believe and accept. The stories that attempt to whitewash Israeli atrocities in the papers and on social media and the mainstream TV news are nauseating. Has the West allowed Israel’s impunity to go on for too long to be able to put an end to it?

I can say here that I am glad to be retired and able to speak my mind without fear of workplace repercussions or damage to my non-existent professional life—not many people are so lucky these days and they perhaps could be forgiven for remaining silent.

Ken Green, Cooper Landing, AK

U.S. CAN’T SUPPORT BOTH SIDES OF A GENOCIDE

The unfolding situation in Gaza has brought to light a perplexing dichotomy in the Biden administration’s approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict. On one hand, the United States has been actively supplying Israel with military aid. On the other, President Joe Biden has begun airdropping aid into Gaza and making appeals to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to ease attacks.

This juxtaposition of actions—arming one side of the conflict while simultaneously calling for restraint and providing aid to victims of your own weapons— raises profound questions about the coherence and ethical grounding of the U.S. foreign policy stance.

Jagjit Singh, Los Altos, CA ■

History Will Record That Israel Committed a Holocaust

By Susan Abulhawa

IT’S 8 P.M. in Gaza, Palestine right now, the end of my fourth day in Rafah and the first moment I’ve had to sit in a quiet place to reflect.

I’ve tried to take notes, photos, mental images, but this moment is too big for a notepad or my struggling memory. Nothing prepared me for what I would witness.

Before I made it across the Rafah-Egypt border, I read every bit of news coming out of Gaza or about Gaza. I did not look away from any video or image posted from the ground, no matter how gruesome, shocking or traumatizing.

I kept in touch with friends who reported on their situations in the north, middle and south of Gaza—each area suffering in different ways. I stayed current on the latest statistics, the latest political, military and economic maneuverings of Israel, the U.S. and the rest of the world.

I thought I understood the situation on the ground. But I didn’t.

Nothing can truly prepare you for this dystopia. What reaches the rest of the world is a fraction of what I’ve seen so far, which is only a fraction of this horror’s totality.

Gaza is hell. It is an inferno teeming with innocents gasping for air.

But even the air here is scorched. Every breath scratches and sticks to the throat and lungs.

What was once vibrant, colorful, full of beauty, potential and hope against all odds, is draped in gray-colored misery and grime.

BARELY ANY TREES

Journalists and politicians call it war. The informed and honest call it genocide.

What I see is a holocaust—the incomprehensible culmination of 75 years of Israeli impunity for persistent war crimes.

Rafah is the southernmost part of Gaza, where Israel crammed 1.4 million people into a space the size of London’s Heathrow Airport.

Water, food, electricity, fuel and supplies are scarce. Children are without school—their classrooms having been turned into makeshift shelters for tens of thousands of families.

Nearly every inch of previously empty space is now occupied by a flimsy tent sheltering a family.

There are barely any trees left, as people have been forced to cut them down for firewood.

I didn’t register the absence of greenery until I happened upon a red bougainvillea. Its flowers were dusty and alone in a deflowered world, but still alive. The incongruity struck me and I stopped the car to photograph it.

Now I look for greenery and flowers wherever I go—so far in the southern and middle areas (though the middle increasingly became more difficult to enter). But there are only small patches of grass here and there and an occasional tree waiting to be burned to bake bread for a family subsisting on U.N. rations of canned beans, canned meat and canned cheese.

A proud people with rich culinary traditions and habits of fresh foods have been reduced and accustomed to a handful of pastes and mush that have been sitting on shelves for so long that all

Susan Abulhawa is a writer and activist. This piece was written dur‐ing her visit to Gaza in February and early March and published on The Electronic Intifada website. Reprinted with permission.

A child drinks water from a dirty plastic bottle as Palestinians who fled from Israeli attacks and took refuge in Rafah city continue their daily lives in makeshift tents with limited means and under difficult conditions in Gaza on Feb. 19, 2024.

PHOTO BY ABED ZAGOUT/ANADOLU VIA GETTY IMAGES

you can taste is the metallic rancidity of the cans.

It’s worse in the north.

My friend Ahmad (not his real name) is one of a handful of people who have internet. It’s sporadic and weak, but we can still message each other.

He sent me a photo of himself that looked to me like a shadow of the young man I knew. He has lost over 25 kg. (55 pounds).

People first resorted to eating horse and donkey feed, but that’s gone. Now they’re eating the donkeys and horses.

Some are eating stray cats and dogs, which are themselves starving and sometimes feeding on human remains that litter streets where Israeli snipers picked off people who dared to venture within the sight of their scopes. The old and weak have already died of hunger and thirst.

Flour is scarce and more valuable than gold.

I heard a story about a man in the north who managed to get his hands on a bag of flour recently (normally costing $8) and was offered jewelry, electronics and cash worth $2,500 for it. He refused.

FEELING SMALL

People in Rafah feel privileged to have flour and rice reaching them. They will tell you this and you will feel humbled because they offer to share what little they have.

And you will feel ashamed because you know you can leave Gaza and eat whatever you want. You will feel small here because you are unable to make a real dent to assuage the catastrophic need and loss and because you will understand that they are better than you are, as they have somehow remained generous and hospitable in a world that has been most ungenerous and inhospitable to them for so very long.

I brought as much as I could, paying for extra luggage and weight for six pieces of luggage and filling 12 more in Egypt. What I brought for myself fit into the backpack I carried.

I had the foresight to bring five big bags of coffee, which turned out to be the most popular gift for my friends here. Making

and serving coffee to the staff where I’m staying is my favorite thing to do, for the sheer joy each sip seems to bring.

But that will soon run out too.

HARD TO BREATHE

I hired a driver to deliver seven heavy suitcases of supplies to Nuseirat, which he ferried down a few flights of stairs. He told me that carrying those bags made him feel human again because it was the first time in four months that he had been up and down stairs.

It reminded him of living in a home instead of the tent where he now resides.

It is hard to breathe here, literally and metaphorically. An immovable haze of dust, decay and desperation coat the air.

The destruction is so massive and persistent that the fine particles of pulverized life don’t have time to settle. The lack of petrol made people resort to filling their cars with stearate—used cooking oil that burns dirty.

It emits a peculiar foul smell and film that stick to the air, the hair, clothes, throat and lungs. It took me a while to figure out the source of that pervasive odor, but it’s easy to discern others.

The scarcity of running or clean water degrades the best of us. Everyone does their best with themselves and their children, but at some point, you stop caring.

At some point, the indignity of filth is inescapable. At some point, you just wait for death, even as you also wait for a ceasefire.

But people don’t know what they will do after a ceasefire.

They’ve seen pictures of their neighborhoods. When new images are posted from the northern region, people will gather to try to figure out which neighborhood it is, or whose house that mound of rubble used to be. Often those videos come from Israeli soldiers occupying or blowing up their homes.

ERASURE

I’ve spoken to many survivors pulled from the rubble of their homes. They recount what happened to them with a deadpan countenance, as if it didn’t happen to

them; as if it was someone else’s family buried alive; as if their own torn bodies belong to others.

Psychologists say it’s a defense mechanism, a kind of numbing of the mind for the sake of survival. The reckoning will come later—if they survive.

But how does one reckon with losing your entire family, watching and smelling their bodies disintegrate around you in the rubble, as you wait for rescue or death? How does one reckon with total erasure of your existence in the world— your home, family, friends, health, whole neighborhood and country?

No photos of your family, wedding, children, parents left; even the graves of your loved ones and ancestors bulldozed. All this while the most powerful forces and voices vilify and blame you for your wretched fate.

Genocide isn’t just mass murder. It is intentional erasure.

Of histories. Of memories, books and culture.

Erasure of potential in a land. Erasure of hope in and for a place.

Erasure is the impetus for destroying homes, schools, places of worship, hospitals, libraries, cultural centers, recreational centers and universities.

Genocide is intentional dismantling of another’s humanity. It is the reduction of a proud, educated, high-functioning ancient society into penniless objects of charity, forced to eat the unspeakable to survive; to live in filth and disease with nothing to hope for except an end to bombs and bullets raining on and through their bodies, their lives, their histories and futures.

No one can think or hope for what might come after a ceasefire. The ceiling of their hope at this hour is for the bombing to stop.

It is a minimal ask. A minimal recognition of Palestinian humanity.

Despite Israel cutting power and internet, Palestinians have managed to livestream a picture of their own genocide to a world that allows it to continue.

But history will not lie. It will record that Israel perpetrated a holocaust in the 21st century. ■

Israel’s War on Gaza Is Also an Assault on Oral Health

By Shahd Safi and Catherine Baker

ADD TOOTHACHE to the list of woes for Gaza’s war-battered civilians.

Untreated diseases of the teeth and gums are among the worsening health effects of Israel’s military assault on the 2.3 million people living in the Gaza Strip.

It’s already a problem for Najwa, a 48-year-old woman from Shuja’iyya. Last fall she began to experience severe tooth pain. A dentist put in a temporary crown, and she was scheduled to get a permanent crown on Oct. 7. After the violence broke out, that appointment never happened.

Her temporary crown fell out. “The empty area in my teeth got infected and an abscess appeared and filled it instead,” she said.

Shahd Safi is a Gaza‐based journalist who trained with We Are Not Numbers (WANN), a project to amplify the voices of young Palestinian writers. Catherine Baker serves as senior editor for WANN.

“My cheek swelled up and I couldn’t open my mouth. I spent three days without being able to eat or drink, which also caused me headaches.”

Najwa found her way to a United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) clinic that provides services to Palestinian refugees. A dentist opened up the abscess and cleaned the infected area.

None of the local pharmacies, with their dwindling supplies, still stocked the painkiller she’d been prescribed. She was forced to make do with a less effective medication.

“Regardless of the intensity of pain, there is no way to deal with it,” confirmed Mohammad Safi, a 30-year-old dentist. He noted that “there are literally no dental clinics still functioning” because of the widespread destruction and lack of electricity and medical supplies.

Hospitals and health clinics prioritize patients with life-threatening injuries and are not dealing with dental cases except perhaps to provide painkillers, Safi said. Routine checkups are out of the question. Gaza’s fluoridated tap water is unavailable.

Oral health was an issue for many Gazans even before the latest violence, mainly due to the Strip’s high rate of poverty, which limited access to toothbrushing materials and a healthy diet. The majority of Gazans received dental care from clinics operated by the Ministry of Health or UNRWA, but neither could meet the demand, according to Lamis Abuhaloob, a research associate at Imperial College London who specializes in dental public health. As a result, treatment of dental caries (tooth decay) was highly deficient for the two decades before the war, she noted.

Recent efforts had sought to improve Gaza’s oral health. Abuhaloob coauthored an evaluation of a school-based preventive oral health program that showed a decline in the rate of caries among Gazan school children of more than 47 percent over a twoyear period. But much of that progress is now being lost, because Gaza children have not attended school for more than four months.

Today, prices for toothbrushes and toothpaste have skyrocketed. Aid groups have been distributing tens of thousands of hygiene kits

Dr. Mohammad Safi at his dental practice before Israel’s war on Gaza.

PHOTO COURTESY SHAHD SAFI

that include toothbrushing materials. But that’s woefully insufficient considering that more than 85 percent of Gazans have been displaced one or more times, and many have likely lost their toothbrushes as they fled from one location to another.

Food is scarce, and virtually no one in Gaza has a healthy diet. Much of the food that remains available is canned and contains preservatives that contribute to plaque buildup, Safi said. “The most important products for teeth are those high in calcium and protein. Unfortunately, now there is a scarcity of chicken, beef and fish.” Without enough protein, teeth enamel can become defective.

Malnutrition has additional consequences for oral health, according to researchers. It can reduce the body’s ability to produce saliva; it can also change the

composition of the saliva and adversely affect tooth enamel. These changes can make the oral cavity more vulnerable to bacteria and reduce the capacity of gum tissue to heal. For children, malnutrition can lead to underdevelopment of the jaw and teeth and a higher incidence of tooth decay throughout life.

In turn, poor oral health increases risk for heart disease, diabetes complications and adverse outcomes of pregnancy, mental well-being and quality of life.

Yet with everyone facing starvation, toothbrushing is not a priority. “Even people who manage to have access to water and dental care materials struggle to take care of their teeth,” Safi said. “They are depressed, distracted and fatalistic. They are now more concerned about their safety than their health.”

Even if a ceasefire were to occur today, there’s no avoiding the long-term consequences for the Gazan population: more cavities and periodontal disease, more tooth loss or displacement within the mouth, more malformed mouths in the young, worsened self-image and increased reluctance to smile.

Meanwhile Safi, the Gazan dentist, is not only concerned about the oral health of his patients, but also about his own practice. “I lost my job and salary. I’m no longer able to help defuse others’ pain. All my plans and dreams have become distorted.”

And for Najwa, the woman with the decayed tooth? “I feel left out by the world and abandoned. I’m anxious all the time and worried about the continuing attacks. What makes things even worse is my tooth’s intense pain.” ■

IN THE NORTH, ONE MEAL A DAY

“We’ve started doing strange things to stay alive,” reports Ahmed Dremly, a 28-year-old sheltering with family in Gaza City. Flour is in extremely short supply, he says, and it’s price is always fluctuating and exorbitant, sometimes as much as 100 shekels for a kilo compared to 4 shekels before the war. “If we find anything to be an alternative to the flour to make bread, we use it—the animal food, the birds’ food, and many strange things.”

Each material makes a different shape and taste of bread. “Both of them are worse than the other,” says Ahmed. If the bread doesn’t look appetizing, “we don’t say we won’t eat it. No, we eat it.”

But, he adds, “it’s really hard to chew. It hurts the teeth because it’s too tough, and its taste is…it’s not good, but we have no choice.”

The people in his household, adults and children alike, get one

meal a day. “For example, there is only one piece of bread for me for the day. Sometimes I cut it into two pieces. I eat one as a breakfast and the other as a dinner.”

Ahmed recounted a recent frightening moment when there was a sudden knocking at the door. He heard his name being called, and all of his family was nervous. He ran to the window and saw it was a friend who asked him to come down. The friend’s face was pale. Without saying hello, the friend said, “I am so hungry.” Ahmed gave him the half of his daily bread that he had not yet eaten.

He is quite discouraged by this slow wasting away. “Being killed via the shelling and airstrikes is much better than being killed by starvation. Because with starvation we die every moment, every second, but if we are killed by the airstrikes, it’s [over in] a second and we’ll be dead. Can you imagine what point we’ve reached, that this is how we’re starting to think?”

—Catherine Baker

Gazans are making bread from animal fodder. Two different breads, each “worse than the other.”

PHOTOS COURTESY AHMED DREMLY

Netanyahu’s Last Battle: No Victory, Just Slaughter in Rafah

By Ramzy Baroud

THE PALESTINIAN CITY of Rafah is not just older than Israel, it is as old as civilization itself.

It has existed for thousands of years. The Canaanites referred to it as Rafia, and Rafia has been almost always there, guarding the southern frontiers of Palestine, ancient and modern.

As the gateway between two continents and two worlds, Rafah has been at the forefront of many wars and foreign invasions, from ancient Egyptians to the Romans, to Napoleon and his eventually vanquished army.

Now it is Binyamin Netanyahu’s turn. The Israeli prime minister has made Rafah the jewel of his crown of shame, the battle that

Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle. His latest book, co‐edited with Ilan Pappé, Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out, is available from Middle East Books and More. Dr. Baroud is a non‐resident senior research fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is <www.ramzybaroud.net>.

would determine the fate of his genocidal war in Gaza—in fact the very future of his country. “Those who want to prevent us from operating in Rafah are essentially telling us: ‘Lose the war,’” he said at a press conference on Feb. 17.

Currently, anywhere between 1.3 to 1.5 million people have sought refuge in Rafah, an area that, before the war started, had a population of merely 200,000 people.

Even before the start of this genocidal war, Rafah was still considered crowded. We can only imagine what the situation is right now, where hundreds of thousands of people are scattered in muddy refugee camps, subsisting in makeshift tents that are unable to withstand the elements of a harsh winter.

The mayor of Rafah says that only 10 percent of the needed food and water is reaching the population in the camps, where the people are suffering from extreme hunger, if not outright starvation.

These families are beyond traumatized: they have lost loved ones, homes and have no access to any medical care. They are trapped

Displaced Palestinians camp in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, amid Israel’s attacks on Gaza, on Feb. 16, 2024. Nearly 1.5 million displaced Palestinians—more than half of Gaza’s population—are seeking shelter in a sprawling makeshift encampment near the Egyptian border.

PHOTO BY MOHAMMED ABED/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

between high walls, the sea and a murderous military.

An Israeli invasion of Rafah will not alter the battlefield in favor of the Israeli army, but it will be horrific for the displaced Palestinians. The slaughter will go beyond everything we have seen, so far, anywhere in Gaza.

Where will up to 1.5 million people go when the Israel tanks arrive? The closest so-called safe area is al-Mawasi, which is already overcrowded and very small. The displaced refugees there are also experiencing starvation due to Israel’s prevention of aid and constant bombing of convoys.

Then, there is northern Gaza, which is mostly in ruins; it has no food to the extent that, in some areas, even animal feed, which is now being consumed by humans, is no longer accessible.

If the international community does not finally develop the will to stop Israel, this horrific crime will, by far, prove worse than all the crimes that have already been committed, resulting in the death and wounding of over 100,000 people.

Even with the invasion of Rafah, Israel would achieve no military or strategic victory. Netanyahu simply wants to satisfy the calls for blood emanating from throughout Israel. After all of this, they are still seeking revenge. “I am personally proud of the ruins of Gaza,” Israel’s minister of social equality, May Golan, said at a Knesset session on Feb. 21.

But, still, there will be no victory in Rafah, either.

At the start of the war, Israel said Hamas was concentrated mostly in the north. The north was duly destroyed, though the Resistance carried on unabated. Then they claimed that the Resistance headquarters was under Shifa Hospital, which was bombed, raided and destroyed. Then they claimed Bureij, Maghazi and central Gaza were the main prizes of the war. Then, Khan Younis was declared the “capital of Hamas.” And on and on.

Aside from the mass destruction and the killing of hundreds of civilians daily, Israel has won nothing; the Resistance has not been defeated, and the alleged “Hamas capital” has conveniently shifted

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from one city to another, even from one neighborhood to another.

Now, the same ridiculous claims and unsubstantiated allegations are being made and leveled against Rafah, where most of Gaza’s population was told by Israel to run, in total despair, to survive the onslaught.

Israel had initially hoped that Gazans would rush in their hundreds of thousands to the Sinai Desert. They did not. Then Israeli leaders, like far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, began speaking of “voluntary migration” as the “right humanitarian solution.” Still, the Palestinians stayed. Now, they have all agreed on the invasion of Rafah, a last-ditch effort to orchestrate another Palestinian Nakba.

But another Nakba will not happen. Palestinians will not allow it to happen.

Ultimately, Netanyahu’s and Israel’s political madness must come to an end.

The world cannot persist in this cowardly inaction.

The lives of millions of Palestinians are dependent on our collective push to bring this genocide to an immediate end. ■

Israel’s Achievements in Gaza: Making Gaza Unliveable

By Ida Audeh

IN LATE JANUARY,

the International Court of Justice (ICJ) announced its finding that South Africa presented plausible evidence that Israel has committed acts that violate the Genocide Convention in Gaza.

The Court ordered that Israel must take all measures in its power to stop the commission of genocide in Gaza and to take “immediate and effective” measures to ensure that humanitarian aid and basic services are afforded to Palestinians in Gaza.

air, land and water resources, the largescale destruction of flora and fauna, and any action capable of producing an ecological disaster or destroying an ecosystem.”

Like the evidence for genocide, the evidence for ecocide is glaringly obvious.

ECOCIDE PRIOR TO 2023

Genocide is the “crime of crimes”; there is no worse crime. Needless to say, Israel has thumbed its nose at the finding. In the first two weeks after the decision, Euro-Med Monitor reported that the Israeli army killed 1,864 Palestinians—including 690 children and 441 women—and injured more than 2,933.

And then there are war crimes, which Israel commits routinely and on a daily basis: killing noncombatants at point-blank range; attacking first responders; kidnapping noncombatants and torturing them; killing starving noncombatants who rushed to aid trucks, desperate for food; looting abandoned homes; attacking hospitals. Is the desecration of the dead a war crime? If it is, then that can be added to the list, because Israel has been doing that, too—removing corpses for a few hours (possibly for organ removal), returning them, and bulldozing the corpses.

Israel’s devastating attacks on Gaza in the first few months of the war provide evidence that ecocide is part of its war plan. Ecocide is defined as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.”

The Pope defined the term this way: “the massive contamination of

Back in 2015, the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development reported that Gaza could become uninhabitable by 2020 as a function of “ongoing de-development, eight years of economic blockade and three military operations in the past six years.” The findings were based on the effects of the ongoing blockade, repeated wars, economic losses, deteriorating water quality and damage to infrastructure such as homes, schools and hospitals.

In November 2022, the Institute for Middle East Understanding reported that the occupation and blockade led to environmental degradation affecting land, air and water. Because Israel bombs sanitation systems and pipelines, wastewater seeps into the groundwater and contaminates agriculture and air quality. The report claims that 96 percent of the water is undrinkable, and that this is a contributing factor in 25 percent of all diseases, including kidney disease, and 12 percent of deaths in infants and children. Water and soil quality contributes to a spike in cancer incidence as well.

The Wadi Gaza is a main water source for Palestinians in Gaza. Israel’s blockade has led to extensive pollution and overuse, which harms the natural ecosystem and causes a continuous decline in the water supply. Global warming threatens the long-term availability of groundwater; in Gaza Israel’s blockade degrades Gaza’s only natural aquifer.

In short, Gaza’s access to clean drinking water, its housing supply, wastewater management and agricultural output were already se-

Cold weather and heavy rainfall has exacerbated the already challenging living conditions for Palestinians amidst Israeli attacks on Gaza’s roads and buildings. The inclement weather led to flooding in the areas where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians sought shelter, on Jan. 27, 2024.

PHOTO BY DAWOUD ABO ALKAS/ANADOLU VIA GETTY IMAGES

verely compromised by the 17-year Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip, even before Israel began bombing in October 2023.

WHAT HAS ISRAEL DESTROYED IN GAZA TO DATE?

In February 2024, Resistance News Network published a list of sites in Gaza destroyed by Israel to date. All of these “targets” are part of the civilian infrastructure that sustain life.

• More than 500 mosques and churches, over 300 universities and schools, more than 360,000 civilian housing units, more than 31 hospitals and dozens of vital civil centers.

• More than 200 cultural, heritage and archaeological sites, some of which are centuries and decades older than the occupation itself, including some dating back to 1,400 and 800 years ago.

• Thirty-one hospitals out of 35 have been put out of service.

• One million square meters of streets and roads have been destroyed.

• 55,000 trees have been uprooted.

• 40 wells, constituting 60 percent of the wells in Gaza City, have been destroyed.

• Sanitation and water treatment systems are inoperable.

To accomplish these feats in just a few months, Israel has used internationally banned and prohibited weapons, including white phosphorus and dumb bombs.

LINGERING ENVIRONMENTAL TOXINS

Since Oct. 8, Israel’s incessant bombing of Gaza (a strip of land no more than 25 miles long and less than 8 miles across at its widest point) has been compared to levels not seen since World War II, a bloodbath with dozens of state actors.

Israeli and Western bombs pounding Gaza not only kill people but also pollute the air and leave toxic chemicals in the soil, compounding what is already there from previous wars. The U.N. reported that Israel dropped 42 bombs an hour during the first weeks of the war, destroying more than 60 percent of the housing inventory. The dust and debris of demolished structures contribute to the pollutants.

Because Israel uses Palestinian populated areas as laboratories for its weapons (which it then markets to governments as “battle-tested,” as described in Antony Loewenstein’s The Palestine Laboratory), it has likely used new weapons in Gaza during these past few months, testing them on Palestinian bodies. An Al Jazeera article dated Dec. 29, 2023 cites a doctor who described the kinds of injuries he is seeing, which he called different than those caused by the internationally banned white phosphorus (which Israel is also using): he describes them as “a combination of some kind of incendiary bomb wave and other components.” These and other weapons, including the bunker busting bombs and joint direct attack munitions (used by the U.S. in Afghanistan) are especially lethal in crowded areas. And their effects linger in the soil for years. It would take many years to clean up the pollution to the soil, air and water caused by war after war in a short period of time.

ISRAELI-INDUCED FAMINE

Israel’s response to the ICJ decision was to fabricate a new talking point: it declared war on the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (an organization it has long had in its crosshairs that provides essential food assistance to Gaza’s refugee population) on trivial grounds and provided no evidence to support its accusations. This, combined with its policy of preventing aid trucks from entering

the Strip, has resulted predictably in widespread hunger.

The U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, told Democracy Now on Feb. 29 that Israel “is intentionally starving Palestinians and should be held accountable for war crimes.” He elaborated: “We’ve never seen an entire population, 2.2 million people, made to go hungry this quickly and this completely. And people’s health is rapidly declining. What’s really concerning now is we’re starting to hear reports of children dying from dehydration, malnutrition and starvation. We’ve never seen children pushed into malnutrition so quickly.” That same day, Palestinian resistance sources reported that 10 children had starved to death.

Prior to Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, 80 percent of Gaza’s population depended on humanitarian aid. Since October 2023, Israel decided Gaza’s food systems had to go.

An article dated Feb. 5, 2024 published on the Anera website elaborates:

“Israeli ground forces have systematically decimated food production systems and prevented Gazans from harvesting and making their own food. United Nations reports and FAO data (provided to Anera, pre-publication), indicate that Israel has blocked access to farmland and the sea, razed 28 percent of Gaza’s cropland, destroyed over 70 percent of Gaza’s fishing fleet, and damaged 488

Palestinian children carry empty bowls during a march demanding an end to the war and an end to the famine due to the war, on March 6, 2024 in Rafah, Gaza.

PHOTO BY AHMAD HASABALLAH/GETTY IMAGES

agricultural wells and 21 percent of Gaza’s greenhouses (bold in original). Livestock are starving and unable to provide a source of food, while Israel’s restrictions on fuel reduce Gaza residents’ ability to cook for themselves.”

Now, with Israel’s destruction of their food system, the situation has gotten much worse.

Northern Gaza, home to the farmlands that produce most of Gaza’s fruit and vegetables, is now in ruins as a result of incessant bombing. An Oxfam report cites Palestinian Agricultural Development Association estimates of agricultural ruin: nearly 25 percent of the farms in northern Gaza completely destroyed; greenhouses and buildings razed to the ground; 70 percent of Gaza’s fishing fleets in ruins. It draws the stark conclusion: “The farmers, the people, the animals have nothing. The minimum requirements to stay alive do not exist in North Gaza....This crisis will lead to the overall collapse of Gaza’s agriculture for many years to come.”

The World Food Program says that 80 percent of people threatened with famine globally live in Gaza today.

ISRAEL’S COLONIAL AIMS

Having corralled 1.5 million Gazans into the southern city of Rafah, Israel threatens now to invade it. French author Guillaume Ancel (also a former military officer) told France24 in January 2024 that a military operation in Rafah has no strategic

value and can only be intended to make Gaza uninhabitable.

Palestinian analyst Mouin Rabbani came to the same conclusion as early as Nov. 30, 2023, seven weeks into the war. He maintained that Israel was determined to make the Gaza Strip “unfit for human habitation.” The goal is political: to effect “large-scale emigration after the initial U.S.-Israeli initiative for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza’s Palestinian population to the Sinai desert was obstructed by Arab governments and Palestinian resolve, and to destroy the civilian (including medical, social, educational and cultural) infrastructure to deprive Palestinian society of its integrity and fabric.”

Palestinians are determined to avoid a second Nakba no matter the cost. The

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world watches while Israel acts with sustained savagery and barbarity not seen since World War II. Genocide, war crimes, ecocide, deliberate starvation of a captive population—Israel is guilty of them all. Yet it persists, apparently gambling (correctly thus far) that no government has the backbone to demand that the Jewish state stop slaughtering Palestinian noncombatants and respect the neutrality of hospitals, bakeries and refugee centers.

The meaning of the attacks on Gaza is not lost on people, and this explains at least in part the sustained global outrage over what world leaders have allowed to happen to the people of Gaza over the past five months. The violation of every human norm in Gaza sets a precedent for what world governments will allow to happen to any population that proves—for whatever reason at all, the reason to be determined by the killers—to be a nuisance. We are watching colonial logic on full display in all its freakishness and demented evil, all the more freakish and evil because it believes in its own righteousness, its demand that it need not be bound by any constraints it deems inconvenient. For the past several months, Israel has demonstrated why it cannot be allowed to persist as a colonial, Zionist state in the Arab world in the 21st century: its supremacist ideology poses an existential threat to Palestinians, to the region, and even globally. ■

Palestinians flock to a distribution center to receive flour distributed by UNRWA in Deir al‐Balah, Gaza on March 3, 2024, where there is famine due to Israeli attacks and prevention of aid trucks from entering the Strip.

PHOTO BY ASHRAF AMRA/ANADOLU VIA GETTY IMAGES

How Biden Uses Loopholes, Courts and Congress to Arm Israel’s Genocide

By Jack McGrath

AS ISRAEL KILLS tens of thousands of civilians and starves 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, the Biden administration has gone above and beyond to provide military support for the genocide. By doing so, the executive branch flouts international law, domestic law and its arms transfer policy.

In the domain of foreign policy, the executive branch is functionally exempt from most of the checks and balances intended to limit the powers of government. Courts have consistently dismissed cases involving U.S. actions abroad, deferring to the executive and, to a lesser extent, the legislature. The Department of Defense and the State Department are wings of the executive, enabling the president to enforce and disregard their human rights safeguards at will.

Congress can block foreign military sales that exceed varying monetary thresholds, but unconditional support for Israel remains the dominant position among Republican and Democratic legislators.

Although partisan gridlock is obstructing a formal military aid package, the Biden administration bypassed Congress twice to facilitate immense munitions sales to Israel. Additionally, the administration has covertly approved more than 100 arms transfers to Israel since last October. Instead of spurring more restrictions on executive power, the House Foreign Affairs Committee has endorsed increasing the number of weapons sales the president can authorize without informing Congress.

This article explores how the administration that claims to have “made human rights a centerpiece of our foreign policy” is supplying arms for one of the 21st century’s greatest atrocities.

THE JUDICIARY

Last November, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) filed a federal lawsuit charging the Biden administration with “failing in its duty to prevent, and otherwise aiding and abetting, the unfolding genocide in Gaza.” The 89-page complaint, filed on behalf of Defense for Children International-Palestine, Al-Haq and several in-

Jack McGrath is assistant director of Middle East Books and More bookstore.

A shipment of 155 mm artillery shells used by the Israeli army is transported on a truck along a highway between Jerusalem and Beersheba in southern Israel on Oct. 14, 2023.

PHOTO BY YURI CORTEZ/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

dividuals, details how the U.S. is providing Israel “unconditional military [and] financial assistance, equipment and personnel to support and further its assault.”

Citing the administration’s refusal to “monitor how assistance or weapons are used” or to take “measures to deter Israel’s killing,” the lawsuit accuses President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin of complicity in the “staggering civilian casualties and unlivable conditions imposed on Gaza.” The plaintiffs requested that the court instruct the defendants to cease all “sales, transfers, or delivery of weapons and arms to Israel” and exert all possible influence to lift the siege, stop the bombing and prevent the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza.

The U.S. District Court in Oakland, CA heard arguments in Defense for Children International-Palestine v. Biden in January despite a dismissal motion by the Justice Department. Leading genocide experts and 77 human rights groups submitted declarations and amicus briefs supporting the case. The live-streamed hearing included testimony from seven Palestinian plaintiffs, including a doctor who called in from a Gaza hospital and a man who lost 60 family members to Israel since the complaint was filed. “My family is being killed on my dime,” Palestinian American author and plaintiff Laila el-Haddad testified. “President Biden could, with one phone call, put an end to this.”

In his decision, Judge Jeffrey White wrote that “disputes over foreign policy are considered nonjusticiable political questions” because “foreign policy is constitutionally committed to the political branches of government.” Noting “the primacy of the Executive in the conduct of foreign relations,” White found “the claims presented by Plaintiffs here lie outside the Court’s limited jurisdiction” and dismissed the case. However, the judge determined “it is plausible that Israel’s conduct amounts to genocide” and implored the defendants “to examine the results of their unflagging support of the military siege against the Palestinians in Gaza.” CCR has appealed the ruling.

THE EXECUTIVE

Multiple laws ostensibly prohibit the United States from transferring arms to foreign governments that commit gross human rights violations. However, the president has unparalleled authority to circumvent these statutes, and the State Department consistently refuses to examine violations pertaining to Israel.

The Biden administration’s 2023 Conventional Arms Transfer Policy states that weapons sales won’t be authorized if “it is more likely than not” that the recipient will use them to commit “genocide; crimes against humanity; grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, including attacks intentionally directed against civilian objects or civilians.” This laudable standard is nullified by the directive’s final sentence, which clarifies that it is not legally enforceable.

Section 620I of the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act prohibits U.S. aid “when it is made known to the President” that the recipient “prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance.”

Section 502B of the Act also bars security assistance to governments that engage in a “consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.” The president can override these provisions by informing Congress that “national security interests” or “extraordinary circumstances” necessitate the sale.

Few have greater firsthand experience with U.S. arms transfer policy than Josh Paul, a senior State Department official who oversaw weapons sales at the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs before quitting in mid-October. In his resignation letter, Paul protested the decision to rush arms to Israel as “shortsighted, destructive, unjust and contradictory to the very values that we publicly espouse.” Paul characterized the Biden administration’s unconditional support as “an impulsive reaction built on confirmation bias, political convenience, intellectual bankruptcy and bureaucratic inertia” that left no avenue for internal debate or discussion.

The Leahy Law requires the State Department to vet foreign security units before supplying military aid, prohibiting it if “the U.S. government has credible information that they [the units] have engaged in a gross violation of human rights.” However, Paul explained, “In the case of Israel, we provide the assistance and then look out for reports of violations,” which are reviewed by the State Department in consultation with the Israeli government. “Through this process, which is called the Israel-Leahy vetting process, there has never been a determination that Israel has committed a violation of human rights,” he said. Rather than investigating alleged abuses, the State Department, at most, issues perfunctory statements of concern, which Paul believes “has given Israel at senior government levels the sense that it is immune.”

Former Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the law’s namesake, also opposes Israel’s unique treatment. “The law has not been applied consistently, and what we have seen in the West Bank and Gaza is a stark example of that,” Leahy stated. “Over many years, I urged successive U.S. administrations to apply the law there, but it has not happened.”

Nearly all rules intended to restrict weapons transfers include technicalities that render their enactment almost impossible without the executive branch’s assent. According to John Ramming Chappell, Advocacy and Legal Fellow at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, these laws are frequently “constructed in ways that make enforcement difficult and also that [are] open to interpretations by U.S. government lawyers, that allow maximum flexibility.” These loopholes include clauses such as “when the secretary of state has credible information or when the U.S. government determines,” Chappell noted. “You have standards that are put into law, but you have deference to the executive branch about how those standards are actually implemented.”

Despite several laws appearing to ban weapons sales to militaries engaged in gross human rights violations and overwhelming documentation that Israeli forces are committing war crimes, the

Biden administration may not be in technical violation of the statutes. “Many of these laws require the [State] Department to come to some sort of a determination before any sanctions or withholding of assistance occurs,” Paul said. “If you never come to the determination, you’ve never broken the law.”

THE LEGISLATURE

The Senate and House of Representatives constitute the only branch of government with the power to block foreign military sales, although they have never successfully done so. The last serious effort was made in 2019, when the chambers passed a joint resolution that barred the Trump administration from selling $8 billion in arms to Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Although former President Donald Trump vetoed the resolution, a bipartisan majority in Congress at least attempted to prevent additional U.S. arms from being used on civilians during the Gulf states’ devastating war in Yemen.

Congress has not extended the same courtesy to Palestinians, as both parties oppose legislation that could limit the flood of American arms to Israel. In December, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced a resolution calling for the State Department to produce a report investigating alleged human rights violations by the Israeli military. The proposal threatened to suspend military aid under Section 502B of the Foreign Assistance Act if the State Department did not furnish the report after a month.

Pressing the executive branch to exercise basic due diligence proved a bridge too far for the Senate, which voted down the resolution 72-11.

The Biden administration has repeatedly attempted to pass a bill providing over $14 billion in military support to Israel on top of the $3.8 billion that U.S. taxpayers subsidize annually. The GOP prevented the Israel aid from passing as part of a $118 billion package that funded Ukraine and border security. Democrats blocked a Republican effort to pass a standalone version of the legislation. In February, the Senate approved the latest iteration of the spending package, the $95.5 billion National Security Act, which allocates $14.1 billion to Israel.

Although partisan dysfunction remains an obstacle to passing the legislation, the president has taken extraordinary measures to arm Israel. Last December, the State Department made an emergency determination to authorize munitions transfers that totaled $253.5 million, bypassing Congress to supply Israel with 155-mm artillery shells and almost 14,000 rounds of tank ammunition.

The Arms Export Control Act requires the executive branch to inform Congress 15 days before transferring over $25 million in military equipment or $100 million in defense services to Israel and treaty allies. In a bid to avoid public scrutiny, the Biden administration has stealthily conducted more than 100 military sales to Israel under the congressional notification threshold since

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October. The Washington Post reported that the transfers include “thousands of precision-guided munitions, small-diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and other lethal aid.”

Ideally, the Biden administration’s evasion of congressional review would galvanize the legislature into supporting stringent regulations on foreign military sales. The House Foreign Affairs Committee has opted for the opposite response, approving legislation that further reduces congressional oversight over arms transfers. The Foreign Military Sales Technical, Industrial, and Governmental Engagement for Readiness (TIGER) Act would raise the notification threshold for arms sales to Israel and treaty allies from $25 to $42 million and defense services from $100 to $166 million. If passed, the TIGER Act would empower the executive branch to unilaterally approve 66 percent more armaments in foreign military sales without informing Congress, let alone the American people.

Over the past five months, the Biden administration has exploited caveats in the Conventional Arms Transfer Policy, Foreign Assistance Act, Leahy Law and Arms Export Control Act to enable that Israeli soldiers use U.S. weapons to commit genocide. Enabled by ineffectual courts and congressional complicity, President Biden has taken full advantage of executive primacy to arm Israel’s war of annihilation, shattering any pretense of institutional accountability or human rights law in the process. ■

Mission Creep: Will Pier Become a Beachhead for U.S. in Gaza?

By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

THE PENTAGON’S plans for floating piers and a causeway to surge humanitarian aid into Gaza is drawing fire from military experts for its lack of detail, potential danger to U.S. troops, and risk of mission creep. Bottom line, it’s a bit of a head-scratcher.

“Biden is committing the United States military to conducting a highly complex, very expensive, low-production operation to bring food into the strip—when Biden could massively increase the amount of food into the strip with far less effort or expense: demand that Israel merely open the damn gates and roll the hundreds of trucks awaiting entry right now. Today,” exclaimed (Ret.) Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, senior fellow at Defense Priorities.

“This is an absurd idea, on so many levels,” Davis added.

The Pentagon said March 12 that five Army cargo and support ships have left their base at Fort Eustis, VA, to assist the building of

“roll on-roll off pier capability” just off the Gaza shore in order to begin a mission of injecting “two million meals a day” into the starving strip. The efforts, as announced during the State of the Union speech, will take an estimated 60 days.

These massive ships will be able to carry the enormous amount of materials and personnel needed to construct what the Pentagon says will be a floating pier to which aid loaded at Cyprus will be taken. That aid, according to Pentagon spokesman Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, will then be moved by Navy logistic support vessels to a floating causeway—about 1,800 feet long with two lanes and anchored to the beach of Gaza—that will also be constructed by the U.S. military as part of the mission.

Questions remain how the aid will get to the beach (the Pentagon insists it won’t be via U.S. military) and to actual Gazans, given the intense Israeli security there and ongoing shelling, bombings and other combat activity inside the strip. As to the delivery and security questions, Ryder said in his March 8 briefing that “we’re continuing to plan and coordinate with partners in the region.”

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is editorial director of Responsible Statecraft, which published this article, and senior adviser at the Quincy Institute. Reprinted with permission.

U.S. Army soldiers stand in the bay of the USAV SP4 James A. Loux ship before it sails away from the pier at Joint Base Langley‐Eustis during a media preview of the 7th Transportation Brigade deployment in Hampton, VA, on March 12, 2024. The brigade is deploying to the Middle East to assist in the multinational humanitarian aid corridor for Gaza.

PHOTO BY ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Much of the criticism about this plan points out that there has been plenty of aid waiting at the borders already, but Israeli inspections and the lack of security—including incidents where Israel has been accused of attacking aid workers and Palestinians forming up for aid—has prevented critical deliveries.

According to reports on March 1, a new inspection process will supposedly take place in Cyprus, the starting point of a new maritime corridor just established by the U.S., United Arab Emirates and European countries. But there has been no official confirmation from Israel that it has agreed to allow aid into Gaza from the beach.

Furthermore, this U.S. effort is expected to involve “more than 1,000 U.S. forces”— quite a fungible number—between the Army and Navy. Michael DiMino, a former career CIA military analyst and counterterrorism officer who is now a program manager at Defense Priorities, notes that Ryder did not have much to say March 1 when asked about the potential vulnerability of troops and how much role they might play in staging aid operations.

“It is a non-trivial concern that troops may come under attack,” by militants, particularly Hamas, DiMino said. “That is shocking to me that there is no real explanation about what the contingency plans are. How are we going to respond if our troops or government personnel come under attack?”

The hackles were raised when Ryder was asked two key questions in the DoD briefing room. One, if the U.S. has received assurances from Israel that it will not fire on Palestinians seeking to retrieve the aid, and the second, whether there is concern that U.S. troops could be fired upon by Hamas.

On the first, Ryder said, “look our focus is on delivering the aid, I’m not going to speak for the Israelis.” On the second, he said, “that’s certainly a risk, again if Hamas truly does care about the Palestinian people then one would hope that this international mission would be able to happen unhindered.”

DiMino says his “Spidey senses are tingling,” as there is “no such thing as zero risk.”

“I think the biggest potential problem is mission creep,” he said, noting we have no

guarantee that this won’t go from “one pier to two piers, to beach head, to forward operating base—in for a penny, in for a pound.”

Ultimately, DiMino said, “you’ll now have a fixed U.S. presence in the warzone, in what is probably the most unstable place in the world right now."

He said the lack of detail from the Pentagon (Ryder said that, for operational security reasons, they would not say exactly where the construction would take place) on the size, scope and manpower, and most importantly, what the beach operation would look like and who would secure deliveries there, is raising serious questions.

The Wall Street Journal published an article March 10 that suggested that the administration was in talks with private contractors specializing in humanitarian aid missions in conflict zones. The one named is Fogbow, which is run almost entirely by former U.S. military and intelligence officers, including Mick Mulroy, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East under Trump, U.S. Marine and 20year veteran of the CIA. The administration has not yet entered into any formal arrangements, according to the paper.

Fogbow has quite a bit of cross pollination with the Lobo Institute, a consulting firm which also counts former military and intelligence officials, along with diplomats and humanitarian experts, among its expert ranks. The institute says it advises on current wars and “how to end conflicts and prevent their recurrence, and how to help those most affected,” but it also provides tactical training “to prepare intelligence and special operations units for both current and future irregular warfare operations.”

Using private contractors to deliver the aid from causeway to beach and beyond could be a gambit to put a “non-military face” on these military operations, as (Ret.) Col. Doug Macgregor points out, and there are plenty of former Special Operations forces ready to earn a paycheck. It was also suggested in the WSJ article that Fogbow has already offered to begin delivering aid by sea before the pier is built and to start dredging a corridor on a “private beachfront” to allow barges to land close to shore.

The WSJ also confirmed that the Qatari government has already offered $60 million for Fogbow's efforts. This begs the question of how much this has already been spelled out and greenlighted, in addition to the ultimate cost to U.S. taxpayers. That angle has yet to be revealed, but considering the heavy lift of ships, materiel, fuel and labor, this is going to run into the hundreds of millions, at least, say experts.

Lt. Col. Davis said he is incensed with what he said is a needless burden and potential risks. “Instead of using the powerful leverage we have—plane-loads of military kit and ammunition daily to Israel and diplomatic resources at the U.N. Security Council—Biden is leaving all the tools unused and is instead allowing [Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu to fully run the show, and Biden is spending millions of American dollars and diverting U.S. military assets to do what Netanyahu could do for free.”

“It is shameful at every level,” he added. “There’s nothing good for the U.S. in this, and it won’t even do much to alleviate the suffering of the Palestinians.” ■

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Funding for Israel Usurps Domestic Priorities

By Dale Sprusansky

THE VAST MAJORITY of lawmakers on Capitol Hill want to give billions of taxpayer dollars to Israel—they just can’t agree on how to pass the massive military aid package.

On Oct. 20, 2023, the White House sent a $105 billion funding request to Congress, which included $61.4 billion in support for Ukraine and $14.3 billion in assistance to Israel. Since then, the aid has been held up on Capitol Hill, largely due to domestic policy disagreements. Some Republicans have objected to packaging military aid to Israel with money to Ukraine, since they no longer wish to fund Kyiv’s defense against Russian aggression. Others in the GOP are comfortable with the joint aid package

but want the foreign assistance tied to legislation tackling the southern border.

In November 2023, Speaker of the House Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) attempted to break the stalemate by pushing a standalone bill to provide $14.3 billion in aid to Israel while cutting the IRS budget by the same amount. The bill narrowly passed the House but was a non-starter in the Senate. In February, Johnson again attempted to pass a standalone bill for Israel—this time increasing the assistance to $17.6 billion and removing the IRS cuts—but the legislation failed a procedural vote. Days later, the Senate passed a bill allocating $14.1 billion for Israel, $60 billion for Ukraine, $9.2 billion for humanitarian assistance to Palestinians and Ukrainians and $8 billion for Indo-Pacific “defense” spending. The failure of the Senate bill to address the southern border and its inclusion of aid to Ukraine means it has low prospects of passing in the House.

Despite all these hiccups, it is expected that Israel will eventually

A truck parked near the Capitol questions the wisdom of U.S. aid to Israel, on March 8, 2024.

STAFF PHOTO PHIL PASQUINI

receive a hefty aid package from its throng of admirers in Washington. When it does, the country that enjoys a GDP per capita that exceeds the likes of New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Germany, France and the UAE could receive more money in federal appropriations than 12 U.S. states have received in assistance from federal agencies in the past year.

If Israel were to receive $17.6 billion in emergency funds, as proposed by the February House bill, it would obtain a total of $21.4 billion in U.S. assistance this year, factoring in its annual pro forma $3.8 billion in aid (per the 2016 memorandum of understanding signed by President Barack Obama). By comparison, Wyoming has received $5.3 billion in federal agency funding in the past year, the least of any state. Meanwhile, West Virginia, which has an 18 percent poverty rate according to the U.S. Census Bureau, has received $20.9 billion in federal funds over the past year. Ten other states and four U.S. territories have received less money in the past year than Israel is being offered, according to USAspending.gov, which tracks federal grants, contracts, loans and other financial assistance to states. (A recent report by the Congressional Research Service notes that the website’s data is incomplete, but provides a good snapshot of federal government spending.)

Bipartisan outrage over such excessive U.S. assistance to Israel, while confined to a minority of representatives, is nothing new. Protesting Congress’ 2021 decision to give Israel an extra $1 billion in Iron Dome assistance after pummeling Gaza that year, Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) asked why it’s so hard for her economically disadvantaged district to receive comparable assistance. “We shouldn’t be sending an additional $1 billion to an apartheid state’s military, especially not when we are failing to adequately invest in the health care, housing, education and other social services our communities need,” she tweeted.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) has similarly balked at aid to Israel. “Our country is going bankrupt and we can’t afford to

borrow money to send overseas, yet this resolution [funding Israel] states that we should,” he tweeted in October 2023. After being attacked by the Israel lobby for his resistance to providing aid, he fired off another tweet in November 2023: “Why does Israel historically get more foreign aid than any other country? Because they have the most aggressive lobbyists working for them. I voted NOT to send another $14.3 billion overseas, so now they’re running ads on radio, TV and Facebook. I won’t vote to give them your $.”

As Rep. Massie cautioned, the U.S. currently has a $34 trillion national debt. At the personal level, Americans are struggling with $1.74 trillion in student loan debt and $220 billion in medical debt. The Century Foundation reports that K-12 schools are underfunded by $150 billion annually. Days after requesting $14.3 billion in aid to Israel, the White House asked Congress for just $2.7 billion to fight fentanyl trafficking and fund state opioid response grants. More than 100,000 Americans die from drug overdoses each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The list of urgent domestic needs is long.

There are limitless ways aid to Israel could be reallocated. As just one example, if Congress gave each West Virginian living in poverty—318,600 people—an equal share of the $21.4 billion proposed to Israel, they would each receive just over $67,000. Money currently assigned to facilitating mass death in Gaza could instead be used to reinvigorate the lives of countless Americans.

The cost of U.S. support for Israel goes beyond direct military aid to that country. Washington provides $1.3 billion in annual assistance to Egypt (a small portion of which has been withheld in recent years due to human rights concerns), largely a reward for sustaining its peace deal with Israel. Jordan, similarly, has received at least $1.5 billion annually from the U.S. in recent years, in no small part thanks to its recognition of Israel. The Pentagon recently estimated that its post-Oct. 7 Middle East buildup will cost $1.6 billion—yet an-

other cost of protecting Israel’s interests in the region.

The U.S. also typically gives several hundred million in humanitarian and economic aid to Palestine each year to undo a small part of the damage it helps Israel inflict on Palestinians—though this aid is frequently subjected to rigorous monitoring and restrictions, as well as suspensions at Israel’s request. (Israel is never held to these same rigid standards, as evidenced by the U.S. recently suspending aid to UNRWA at the mere Israeli allegation of wrongdoing by some of the organization’s staff, while the U.S. has continued to supply Israel with weapons as its soldiers openly and proudly broadcast their war crimes on social media.)

All told, this year the U.S. could incur more than $25 billion in direct costs related to its fervent support for Israel.

However, perhaps the biggest cost to America is its moral and reputational stain for unwaveringly supporting Israel—particularly at this moment. In the days after Oct. 7, the White House and others relentlessly compared the Hamas assault to 9/11, noting the death toll from that day was the equivalent of 15 9/11s, on a per capita basis. (Given that Israel has since revised its estimated death toll downwards, it’s now the equivalent of about 12 9/11s.) Over 30,000 Gazans—1.3 percent of the population—have been killed since Washington’s wave of moral indignation greenlighted Israel’s total flattening of Gaza, yet few have bothered to draw comparisons to the suffering of Palestinians. For those still interested in 9/11 comparisons, here’s some horrifying data: Since Oct. 7, Gaza has experienced the equivalent of 1,250 9/11s, on a per capita basis. Put another way, Gaza has experienced 8 and a half 9/11s every day since Oct. 7. Put more plainly, Gaza is enduring a genocidal assault.

It’s perhaps too much to ask Washington to humanize Palestinians or care about international law. But can lawmakers at least begin prioritizing the myriad needs of their own citizens over the funding of a rogue foreign state?■

Legislation in the Time of “Plausible Genocide” and Election Cycles

By Julia Pitner

AS WE WENT TO PRESS, Israeli forces have killed 32,238 Palestinians, 44 percent of whom are children (24 starved to death), and 78,624 have been wounded while almost all hospitals and clinics are inoperable. Thousands more are missing, either buried in the rubble or held by Israel. Yet the Biden administration blocked the third call for a ceasefire in the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 20, despite small fissures appearing in the U.S.-Israel relationship.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s comments publicly rejecting the idea of an independent Palestinian state on Jan. 18 created a new rift with the Democratic Party as several emergency aid bills for Israel were being de-

bated in the House and Senate.

Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) and Jamie Raskin (D-MD) led 60 House lawmakers, on Jan. 19, in urging the State Department to affirm the United States’ strong opposition to the forced and permanent displacement of Palestinians from Gaza and to support an increase in humanitarian aid to the region.

On Jan. 23, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) and 42 Democratic colleagues sent a letter to President Joe Biden expressing their “support for a two-state solution as the only viable path for a sustainable peace between the Israeli and Palestinian people.” They expressed deep concern over Netanyahu’s public rejection of a two-state solution.

On Jan. 24, congressional Democrats delivered their latest rebuke to Netanyahu, aligning behind a symbolic declaration that

the U.S. remains staunchly supportive of a Palestinian state as part of any ultimate resolution to unrest in the Middle East. A group of 49 Senate Democratic caucus members led by Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) offered an amendment to H.R. 815, reiterating that U.S. policy favors a two-state solution, to the Senate’s version of an emergency supplemental package with funds for Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan and border security.

The proposed amendment is a clear pushback against Netanyahu’s recent rejection of that approach, giving Democrats a fresh opportunity to channel their frustration with his conservative government.

However, because this is an election year and political posturing is the norm, Rep. Tom McClintock’s (R-CA) bill H.R. 6679, “No Immigration Benefits for Hamas Terrorists Act,” introduced in Dec. 2023, passed out of the Judiciary Committee for a full House vote on Jan. 31. The “amend the Immigration and Nationality Act with respect to aliens who carried out, participated in, planned, financed, supported, or otherwise facilitated the attacks against Israel” legislation amends existing law to bar entry to the U.S. to people who participated in the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel (a category that includes people who are not members of Hamas) but also expands current law to bar entry to the U.S. of any member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)— an organization that nobody has argued had anything to do with the Oct. 7 attacks. It passed out of the House by a vote of 4222 with 1 voting present. “No” votes were Reps. Cori Bush (D-MO) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI); Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-IL) voted present. It now goes to the Senate.

This took place against the backdrop of the International Court of Justice ruling on South Africa vs Israel alleging genocide, which was delivered on Jan. 26. Türkiye, Jordan, Brazil, Colombia, Bolivia, Pakistan and Malaysia are among the states that

Demonstrators demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza unfurled a large Palestinian flag and staged a sit‐in along the route U.S. President Joe Biden’s motorcade would nor‐mally use to reach the Capitol building, just minutes before his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress in Washington, DC, on March 7, 2024.

PHOTO BY CELAL GUNES/ANADOLU VIA GETTY IMAGES

Julia Pitner is director of programs and op‐erations at the Museum of the Palestinian People in Washington, DC.

have publicly supported South Africa's application, along with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, consisting of 57 member states. Although the ruling did not call for an immediate ceasefire, it found that an investigation into the allegations under the Genocide Convention was warranted and ordered Israel to refrain from any acts that could fall under the convention and to ensure its troops commit no genocidal acts in Gaza.

The next day, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that Israel had made “credible allegations” that 12 of United Nations Relief and Works Agency’s (UNRWA) 13,000 staff in Gaza took part in the Oct. 7 attack. The Israeli accusations led 16 countries including the United States to pause $450 million in funding, throwing UNRWA operations into crisis.

For many U.S. congress members, it was a validation and a rationale for a longheld goal of defunding UNRWA permanently. It has also been a desire of Israel and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), as many readers know.

H.R. 7111, “The UNRWA Elimination Act,” introduced by Rep Brian Mast (R-FL) with no cosponsors on Jan. 29, aims to “establish the policy of the U.S. that UNRWA should be disbanded completely, and for other purposes,” placing UNRWA responsibilities and services under the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. It also requires any country receiving U.S. foreign assistance to support the above policy.

H.R. 7122, the “Stop Support for UNRWA Act of 2024,” was introduced on Jan. 29 by Rep. Christopher Smith (R-NJ) and eight Republican cosponsors. The bill states that “The U.S. may not make any voluntary or involuntary contributions to UNRWA , to any successor or related entity, or to the regular budget of the U.N. for the support of UNRWA or a successor entity.” After mark-up the bill was passed out of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and placed on the Union Calendar, Calendar No. 334 for a full House vote.

While 25 Senate Democrats wrote a letter pushing Biden to pressure Israel to increase humanitarian aid to Gaza, Sens. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Ted Cruz (R-TX), along with two Republican cosponsors, introduced S. 3723, “Defund UNRWA Act of 2024,” aka “A bill to prohibit funding for the

UNRWA, and for other purposes.” Unlike previous Senate versions, this bill goes far beyond blocking U.S. funding to UNRWA in punishing anyone who has ever worked for/with UNRWA, and seeks to impede private citizens from supporting UNRWA. It also seeks to revoke visas already issued to such people, by changing current law such that henceforth “any officer, official, representative or spokesperson” of UNRWA would, by definition, be considered “to be engaged in a terrorist activity; and (c) revoke the tax-exempt status of UNRWA USA.” A separate bill, sponsored by Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. Tim Scott (RSC), S. 3717, “Preventing Terrorism at the U.N. Act,” not only prohibits funding of UNRWA but also requires counterterrorism vetting for all U.N. employees and contractors operating in the jurisdiction of UNRWA and ensuring that there is no teaching of content that “promotes anti-Semitism or encourages violence or intolerance toward other countries or ethnic groups.”

AND JUST BECAUSE

On Feb. 6, H.R. 7256, “U.S.-South Africa Bilateral Relations Review Act,” was Introduced by Reps. John James (R-MI) and Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), “To require a full review of the bilateral relationship between the U.S. and South Africa.” In his press release, James said, “South Africa has been building ties to countries and actors that undermine America’s national security and threaten our way of life through its military and political cooperation with China and Russia and its support of U.S.-designated terrorist organization Hamas.”

Sen. Cotton introduced two bills on March 7. S. 3890, “Prohibiting Certain OffPost Demonstrations Act,” was in response to the self-immolation of active-duty member of the U.S. Air Force, Aaron Bushnell, who declared that he “will no longer be complicit in genocide.” This bill would “prohibit certain off-post demonstrations.”

The second bill was S. 3887, “Stop ProTerrorist Riots Now Act.” Cotton explained these two pieces of legislation in a press release: “The mission of our service members is to defend America, and anyone who supports Hamas or any other terrorist group should not receive a security clearance. Likewise, no active-duty members of the

military should be allowed to participate in demonstrations that aim to undermine the security of America and our allies.” S. 3887 was introduced in response to the increasing number of “protests often led by proHamas leftists” and would increase the punishments for rioting and provide mandatory sentences for anyone committing violence as part of a riot.

ELECTION SEASON IS HERE

AIPAC’s lobbying season before the end of the 118th Congress and ahead of elections is underway. During the week of March 14, the AIPAC conference was convened, attended by the group’s smaller PAC representatives, lobbyists and congressional leadership as well as several members. It was an opportunity to remind congressional members of Israel’s legislative (and budgetary) wish list and to highlight the PAC’s campaign support.

Although the conference was closed to reporters and social media posts, unlike conferences past, the Prospect managed to obtain conference talking points and legislative strategy in support of the $14 billion additional unconditional military funding currently being tossed between the House and Senate. The talking points also include “numerous positions on aspects of the U.S. response to the war that have not previously been made public, from abolishing UNRWA to opposing recent restrictions imposed by the Biden administration on Israeli settlers.” Mention of the two-state solution was glaringly absent.

The conference also informed members about the PAC’s congressional spending plans. AIPAC is pledging to spend over $100 million on campaigns “to defeat any congressional candidates critical of Israel.” As Luke Goldstein noted in his March 14 American Prospect article, “They’re exclusively directed at combating rhetoric and policy from Democrats, Squad members, ceasefire advocates, and even President Biden, who has only recently mildly criticized Netanyahu’s handling of the war.”

Not to worry, several other pieces of legislation introduced in the House limit speech in order to “combat anti-Semitism,” now conflated with criticism of Israel and Zionism, using the definition of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.■

Two Views Israel’s Brutality and U.S. Blunders Harm Our Interests in the Middle East

Why the U.S. Continues to Fail in the Arab World

By Dr. James Zogby

THE SUCCESS or failure of a president’s term in office is rarely judged by whether he accomplishes the agenda he set for himself. A more important measure is how effective he is in responding to the unexpected challenges with which he is confronted. And more often than not, these unexpected challenges originate in the Middle East.

One week before the Oct. 7 Hamas attack in Israel, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan was quoted as saying:

“The war in Yemen is in its 19th month of truce, for now the

Iranian attacks against U.S. forces have stopped, our presence in Iraq is stable, I emphasize for now because all of that can change. And the Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades. Now challenges remain…but the amount of time that I have to spend on crisis and conflict in the Middle East today compared to any of my predecessors going back to 9/11 is significantly reduced.”

Four and a half months later: Israel is pursuing a devastating genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza; Israeli soldiers and settlers are engaged in widespread, often uncontrolled, violence in the West Bank with at least 360 killed and thousands injured; Israeli attacks on Lebanon have killed nearly 200, including women and children, and a number of journalists, with an estimated 90,000 Lebanese displaced from their homes due to ongoing ominous cross-border shelling between Lebanon’s Hezbol- Dr.

James Zogby is president of the Arab American Institute.

Protesters gather at Tahrir Square during an anti‐Israel demonstration in Baghdad on Oct. 13, 2023. People traveled from different parts of the country in what Iraqi media called a “million man march.” The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad warned its citizens to avoid large gatherings due to the potential for anti‐U.S. sentiment due to the Israel‐Gaza war.

PHOTO BY AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

lah militia and Israel; Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria continue to challenge U.S. forces in the region; and another Iranian ally, the Houthi movement in Yemen, has created havoc by attacking ships in the Red Sea. Needless to say, the White House has had to shift from neglecting the Arab world to making it a fulltime concern—one they neither expected nor prepared for.

This isn’t unique to the Biden administration. Since the end of the Vietnam War, and despite their best efforts, every U.S. president has had the trajectory of their time in office shaped by conflict and repeated blunders in the Arab world. During the last half century, the U.S. has sent more weapons, spent more money, committed more troops, lost more lives and expended more political capital in the Arab world than anywhere else, and yet, time and again, we have failed. The problem isn’t just the wars, lives, treasure, prestige and trust that have been lost. It’s also that we’ve never acknowledged these failures or are simply oblivious to them.

It’s fascinating that during this entire period, candidates competing for the presidency have never seriously debated U.S. policy in the Middle East. They have never made a course correction in the U.S. approach toward the region. The media has rarely called them to account for their inadequate policies. And so we continue to fail, and each time we are either surprised by or oblivious to our failures. This is so for three important reasons.

In the first place, we don’t know the region and its peoples. Too many of our policymakers see the Middle East through the lens of Israel looking out, instead of the Arab world looking in at Israel. Because of this, we have failed to recognize the centrality of the issue of Palestine to the Arab people. Since 1948, Palestine and the fate of Palestinians has been “the wound in the Arab heart that has never healed.” Time and again, policymakers have either proclaimed the issue dead or made efforts to sideline it, only to be stunned when Palestine erupted in violence and reasserted its centrality in Arab consciousness.

A corollary to this has been our refusal to acknowledge the consequences of our self-imposed limits on how we deal with the Middle East. Because of domestic political considerations, concern for Israel is the cornerstone of too many policy decisions made in Washington. We don’t challenge or sanction Israel for its bad behavior or even for violations of U.S. law. It is spoiled while the Palestinians are abused. To ensure the protection of Israel we have insisted on dominating the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, refusing to allow others to partner in decision-making or accepting their challenges to our hegemonic role.

And finally, we have not recognized the disastrous impact that our failed policies have on the trust needed for us to pursue the leadership we insist on having as we seek to shape the region’s future.

What follows is a simple list of surprises that have confounded U.S. presidents since the Nixon/Ford administrations a half century ago. They all occurred because we didn’t understand dynamics unfolding across the region and what Arabs were thinking about their lives, needs and aspirations for the future. Each of these momentous events shaped the presidencies of those who tried to manage them while in office.

Think of the impact of the 1973 war and Arab oil embargo on the

Ford and Carter administrations. Or how Carter’s time in office was shaped by President Anwar Sadat’s surprise visit to Israel and the resultant Camp David Accords, followed by the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis.

Reagan had to contend with Israel’s bloody 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the killing of more than 240 U.S. marines who had been positioned to facilitate Israel’s withdrawal from Beirut, the 8-year Iran-Iraq war, and his administration’s Iran-Contra scandal as they sought to play both sides of the conflict.

The George H.W. Bush administration woke up to Iraq’s sudden invasion of Kuwait, took months assembling an international coalition to free that country, and then used its political stature to convene an international peace conference to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

That conference failed, as did efforts that preceded it, because we had tied our hands more than a decade earlier by promising Israel that we would never talk to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). So Israel and the PLO surprised Bill Clinton with their own negotiating effort, which was incomplete because of the asymmetry of power between Israel and the Palestinians. The U.S. refused to provide balance, and so the years after Oslo were up and down with no serious steps toward peace and a continued brutal occupation with never-ending tension mounting across the Palestinian Occupied Territory.

The George W. Bush administration opened with the deadly attack of 9/11 and the second Palestinian uprising. In both instances, Bush’s responses to these “surprises” were flawed. Aligning with the neoconservative ideologues who populated his administration, Bush embarked on two misguided wars that devastated Afghanistan and Iraq and cost the U.S. lives, treasure, prestige and the capacity to lead.

Barack Obama tried to recoup these losses, but one speech without a change in policy wasn’t enough. His inability to effectively plan for the withdrawal from Iraq, to firmly challenge Israel on its refusal to meaningfully pursue peace, and his floundering and lack of understanding in the face of the Arab Spring uprisings all proved costly to his administration.

The only surprises that occurred during the Trump era were his unilateral moves to remove “Occupied Territories” from the State Department lexicon and to accept Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. This led some Arab states to move to normalize ties with Israel in an effort to forestall further Israeli moves toward annexation. But Israel, emboldened by its support from Washington, remained intransigent.

With this as background, it’s not surprising that the Biden administration failed to adequately understand or respond to Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7, the subsequent Israeli genocidal assault and the Arab world’s deeply emotional response. Not exceptional, but also not excusable.

We have been down this road too many times and are still being led by the same policymakers who’ve failed in the past, haven’t learned and seem determined to fail again. Given the scale of human loss now, in the end, Biden’s presidency will be judged not by his domestic successes—which are many—but by his failures in the Middle East.

Looking for Love in the Middle East? Read the Room

By Delinda C. Hanley

I SPENT MOST of my childhood in the Middle East accompanying my foreign service officer father, Richard Curtiss, cofounder of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs magazine. He and his friend Andy Killgore, another U.S. diplomat, launched the magazine and a book club, which turned into the popular DC bookstore, Middle East Books and More, when they retired in 1982. They’d spent their careers telling Arabs about America and they decided to spend their retirement telling Americans about Arabs in an effort to improve U.S. foreign policy.

Our family roamed deserts, mountains and beaches as we made ourselves at home all over the Middle East in the 1960s and ’70s. I remember getting lost on my bike in the Mansour suburb of Baghdad—which the U.S. bombed later in 2003. A kind man walked my bike and me home, fondly reminiscing in English about his time working in a Detroit store. Our dad used to tell a story about leading visiting U.S. dignitaries through the Al-Hamidiyya souq in Damascus. He was startled when a small child ran up to him yelling “Daddy Daddy!” It was my younger brother Drew who used to like exploring with his Pakistani friend (who had bus-riding savvy). Dad taught Kameel (who owned a shop near our school) and other young Lebanese how to body surf at our favorite beach in Beirut. Later, in the ’80s, I joined

the Peace Corps and taught English in the Sultanate of Oman, staying on to work there and in the Arab Gulf. Throughout my life, American students, tourists and workers all fell in love with the region—its people, land, history and food.

Americans were also loved. Many of our friends were missionaries, doctors, professors, artists, diplomats and businesspeople who were having the times of their lives as they worked alongside Arabs building close ties between our countries. In those days there was a Kennedy street in every country in the Middle East. We could strike up conversations with men and women everywhere who had gone to college or worked here in the States and loved this country.

I know when that love began to change—even though Arabs have long had the knack of separating American visitors from our government’s actions. In 1972 I began saying I was Canadian when I hitchhiked to the beach in Beirut.

That July, Israel’s Mossad had begun assassinating Palestinian leaders, including the prominent poet and author Ghassan Kanafani in Lebanon. After the September 1972 kidnapping by Palestinians of Israeli athletes at the Summer Olympics in Munich, Israel began bombing PLO bases in Syria and Lebanon. In April 1973, Israeli special forces landed on the beach in Beirut with their commander, future prime minister Ehud Barak (disguised as a woman) to assassinate Palestinians believed to have masterminded the Olympics kidnappings. So it was no wonder that a few weeks later my clueless friends and I were hauled off to a police station during a beach party near our school in Beirut. Soldiers thought the American teenagers drinking beer on the beach were more Israeli assassins. Israel won the Arab-Israeli War of 1973 and captured Egyptian and Syrian land in Sinai and Golan because the U.S. airlifted military equipment to replenish Israeli forces. By then I was attending college in the States and horrified that my classmates were cheering for the wrong side.

Today our diplomats work in fortresses and our countrymen are continuing to sell, send or even wield weapons to fuel destruction in the Middle East. Somehow, at least before the current Gaza war, American visitors were welcomed by Palestinians even though our government has funded, protected and supported the harsh Israeli occupation of their land.

How could they love us when our U.N. vetoes have blocked

PHOTO BY HOUSSAM SHBARO/ANADOLU VIA GETTY IMAGES

People carrying the Palestinian flag and banners gather in front of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon on Oct. 18, 2023 to protest the Israeli attacks on Gaza.

Delinda C. Hanley is executive editor of the Washington Report

ceasefires and peace efforts? Since the United Nations was established in 1945, three years before the State of Israel, the United States has used its veto to shield Israel from Security Council resolutions 45 times, as of Dec. 18, 2023, including recent worldwide demands for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

Our lavish financial support for Israel, our military bases in the region, and our own attacks on Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Yemen (pushed by foreign policy hawks, neocons and knee-jerk supporters of Israel) have destroyed our reputation. If we had continued to use American know-how, expertise and diplomacy to build up the Middle East instead of bombing it to smithereens or supporting Israel’s ongoing genocide, we would still be loved.

It is galling that we can’t have reasonable conversations about Israel/Palestine in our media, government, churches, classrooms and even around dinner tables. If we suggest that it is perhaps not a good idea to send a nation the size of New Jersey an extra

$14.3 billion (on top of the $3.8 billion we already send them each year) to help them kill and starve their neighbors in Gaza and build more settlements in the West Bank, we are silenced by charges of anti-Semitism.

More and more American voters understand that a ceasefire in Gaza and a just and sustainable peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians are the only alternatives to endless violence. It’s time for the U.S. to use “tough love” on Israel and stop giving Tel Aviv the financial, diplomatic and military support that has diminished the reputation of the U.S. globally. Once our government and candidates for office “read the room” and start listening to their constituents, we will regain the love and respect that our country has lost in the Middle East. Americans will rush to the polls if we’re offered candidates bold enough to resist American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) pressure and money to support peace in the Middle East. ■

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Two Views

Voters Seeking a Pro-Peace Candidate Have Options

How This Election Can Go From Farce to Glory: VotePact

By Sam Husseini

PEOPLE NEED to reject the inevitability of the oppressive duopoly. A key part of that is people joining together across the political spectrum. In 2024 voters need to finally stop pretending their “choice” is between the establishment Democratic Party nominee (likely Biden) or the establishment Republican Party nominee (likely Trump).

And yes, Trump is part of the establishment.

People in this “democracy” have allowed themselves to be pawns in this sick scheme for literally decades.

My entire adult life.

I knew Bill Clinton was a phony.

Virtually everyone I knew voted for him.

He deregulated Wall Street, which led to financial disaster for millions of regular people—and a bailout for Wall Street. He expanded

Sam Husseini is the founder of VotePact.org, which fosters left‐right cooperation. His writings can be found at husseini.substack.com.

NATO, which led to tons of money for military contractors and ultimately the Ukraine war. He did the Oslo deal, which eventually led to the current Israeli genocide.

I didn’t vote for him. I found someone who was going to vote for George H.W. Bush and convinced them not to vote for him. I wrote in Ralph Nader, they stayed home.

I made a VotePact with someone. We agreed that neither of us would vote for the “lesser evil”—so we could vote for who we wanted. I’ve done much the same in successive elections.

People need to do that on a mass scale if they are the least bit serious about change.

Actually, they should do more. They shouldn’t stay home.

They should get behind an actual, decent person for president. An authentic antiestablishment candidate, someone who is against the genocide this current establishment is ensuring, someone who believes in civil liberties, someone who can take on Big Tech and Wall Street and the Federal Reserve—someone who can galvanize people across the political spectrum.

Who that is is secondary.

The imperative is that people wake up to the fact that they

People vote at a voting site as Democrats and Republicans hold their Michigan primary presidential election in Dearborn, Michigan, on Feb. 27, 2024.

PHOTO BY MOSTAFA BASSIM/ANADOLU VIA GETTY IMAGES

are putting chains upon themselves. For decades on end. In perpetuity.

I am not simplistically backing Jill Stein (or any other current candidate) here. I don’t see her as meaningfully appealing to people across the political spectrum. Jill Stein was the Green Party nominee in 2016. She got 1 percent.

Part of the reason she got 1 percent is that many people who ostensibly agreed with her on many issues attacked her campaign as a “spoiler.” And she had no real answer to that. She didn’t lay out a strategy for winning, she didn’t seriously try to get votes from Republicans. If she’s changed in this regard, I’d be happy to hear of it, but I’ve not seen it.

The idea behind VotePact is that antiestablishment forces need to unify.

Rather than hem and haw over which of these horrors—Biden or Trump—may somehow be portrayed as tolerable to stop the other, Arab Americans—and indeed all Americans—should strive for paths out of this.

Aaron Bushnell burned himself alive screaming for a free Palestine.

Can others at least try to think through how to stop the machinery of the Democratic-Republican establishment that is hell-bent on slaughtering Palestinians?

Unfortunately, the opposite is happening.

They are fragmenting. Cornel West has torn through the People’s Party and the Green Party. Robert Kennedy, Jr., as I argued last year, took dissent over pandemic policies and used it to relentlessly back Israel and its multitude of crimes.

There is an opening for an authentic populist to rip through the phoniness of the duopoly.

If that doesn’t happen, this election will be an enormous farce, with Biden and Trump feeding off the depravities of the other, each enslaving enough of the public to vote against the other.

Why would ANYONE vote for someone who is overseeing a genocide?

The alternative is that people can start talking to each other, realizing that the duopoly is a major oppressive force and the public uniting against it may be the last chance to save what actually remains of U.S. democracy.

BEYOND “UNCOMMITTED” PATH TO DEFEAT BOTH BIDEN AND TRUMP

Many in the Democratic establishment and its many tentacles hope that the “uncommitted” vote in the Michigan Democratic primary on Feb. 27, 2024 was a good way to let people blow off steam. The corrupt DNC wants it to be a symbolic gesture they can pretend signifies a functioning democratic process—so now everybody, get behind Biden!

Doing just this to get Biden to stop the genocide while looking to vote for him in the general election is akin to Biden pretending to be upset and allegedly urging Netanyahu to show restraint as he hands him the bombs and vetoes U.N. resolutions.

Arab Americans have hopefully learned that simply being a voting block for Democrats boxes you in. And that box is a Palestinian coffin. Or thousands of them.

And no one who has been paying attention thinks that Trump can seriously be viewed as any sort of salvation. His recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital (the Oct. 7 operation was called AlAqsa Flood) and making dirty deals with despotic rulers over Arabs for Israel’s benefit set much of the stage for the carnage of the last five months.

The actual base of the Democratic establishment is funders, like AIPAC bigwig Haim Saban, who just threw a big bash for Biden, the largest all time recipient of Israel lobby cash.

I don’t think Arab Americans should be saying they won’t vote for Biden. They and others should be imploring all: Why would ANYONE vote for someone who is overseeing genocide?

Moving forward, people should ensure they will vote independent. Yes, there are no ideal independent candidates, at least not yet. But there are non-genocidal ones.

If people are determined they will not vote for either Biden or Trump, great. Tell that to others.

If anyone is hesitant, they need to call a friend. Or find one.

Someone on the other side. If anyone leans toward Biden, they can pair up with someone who might lean toward Trump. And syphon votes from the two war criminals. Then both vote for someone(s) who you know is not genocidal.

Or both write in: Stop Genocide. Or—if there are no decent candidates, Aaron Bushnell.

Can Michigan Save Palestine?

By Ahsan I. Butt

THESE ARE DARK times for anyone with even a modicum of sympathy for the Palestinian people, who are facing another national catastrophe, comparable to the Nakba of 1948.

The despondency is entirely merited. Victimized by Israel’s war in Gaza, which many experts consider genocidal, the Palestinians are up against the strongest military in the region, which also enjoys billions of dollars of military aid and diplomatic carte blanche from the most powerful country in the world.

True to form, Washington has repeatedly blocked international efforts to impose an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza.

Ahsan I. Butt is an associate professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University and a senior nonresi‐dent fellow at the Atlantic Council. He is the author of Secession and Security: Explaining State Strategy Against Separatists. This article was first published in Al Jazeera and is reprinted with permission.

Worse still, there appears little recourse to the Palestinians’ main demand for self-determination.

Yet there is a glimmer of hope. Recent events in U.S. politics point to a potential pathway to better times for the Palestinian people. To be sure, it is not a probable or even a likely path. Much has to go right, not least the Democratic Party replacing its current sclerotic leadership.

But thanks to Michigan, the pathway does exist, and it is now reasonable to conjecture that the road to East Jerusalem may run through Dearborn.

DOMESTIC POLITICS IN THE U.S.

Regardless of what form Palestinian self-determination takes, one certainty is that it cannot be achieved without buy-in from major global and regional actors.

Though much has been written about the decline of U.S. power and the return of multipolarity, the reality is the U.S. remains the hegemon in the region—if not the rest of the world.

In this sense, waiting with bated breath for the rise of China or another superpower to result in a breakthrough on the Palestinian question is a strategy doomed to fail. The focus must be on changing the direction of U.S. policy, not wishing away U.S. power.

Specifically, the best bet for the Palestinian cause is for it to become a major goal of a U.S. president’s foreign policy. So how do pro-Palestinian activists go about making this a reality?

Basic demographic and political factors make the Republican Party a dead end. Neo-conservatism, an ideology that still holds the center of gravity among foreign policy elites on the right in the U.S., albeit less so than 20 years ago, considers Israel an indispensable ally, often elevating Israeli interests to the equivalent of American ones.

Furthermore, at the voter level, Christian evangelicals are one of the strongest constituencies of the GOP—and among the staunchest supporters of Israel. Finally, older and white voters are disproportionately Republican, while the biggest supporters of Palestinians are the young and people of color. Put it all together, and you get unsurprising results such as a recent poll that found that, among Republicans, 56 percent favor Israel compared to only 2 percent favoring the Palestinians.

In this context, the Democrats remain the only hope for the Palestinian cause, notwithstanding President Joe Biden’s wholehearted support for Israel’s program of ethnic cleansing and mass atrocities in Gaza.

The only pro-Palestinian voices in the U.S. Congress and other institutions come from the Democratic Party, such as Representative Rashida Tlaib. Even those expressing milquetoast bothsidesism, such as Senator Elizabeth Warren, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are part of a political species whose presence would be unimaginable in the Republican Party.

To be clear, I am not claiming that the Democratic Party is a likely savior of the Palestinian people. Only that it is more probable to lead a change in U.S. policy on Israel than the alternative.

THE IMPORTANCE OF MICHIGAN TO THE MIDDLE EAST

And this is where Michigan comes in. By a fortunate happenstance, there is a high concentration of Arabs and Muslims in a state that is deeply important to presidential elections. Michigan is one of the last standing bricks of the erstwhile “blue wall” in the Midwest.

In the present configuration of U.S. politics, it is essentially impossible for a Democrat to win the presidency without Michigan’s 15 electoral college votes.

This is why the results from the recent primary should send shudders down the collective spine of the Biden 2024 campaign. Usually, when incumbents are running, primaries are not just a formality but a coronation. In this context, 13.3 percent of Democrats (more than 100,000 people) in Michigan voting “uncommitted” is ominous.

Though its success was considerably more tepid across other states during primaries on March 5 (also called Super Tuesday)— partly due to a lack of organizational and institutional support, and

Abdullah Hammoud, mayor of Dearborn, speaks during a press conference held by the Listen to Michigan campaign one day after the Michigan presidential primary in Dearborn, MI on Feb. 28, 2024.

PHOTO BY MOSTAFA BASSIM/ANADOLU VIA GETTY IMAGES

partly to the differences in Muslim and Arab population density— the support of the “uncommitted” project does not need to be broad as long as it is deep. If pro-Palestinian Michiganders’ hard feelings carry over to November, it portends utter disaster for Biden’s re-election plans.

The ugly truth is that in American democracy, parties and politicians will ignore constituents’ demands unless they can credibly threaten to lose them an election. Until now, it was easy for Biden and mainstream Democrats to ignore Arab and Muslim opinion on Palestine. What are they going to do—the thinking went—vote for Donald Trump?

But now, Muslim, Arab and young voters’ threats to stay home this fall are a lot more credible and less likely to be dismissed as cheap talk and false bravado. Simply put, they have shown they mean business.

THE PATH FORWARD

Ideally, Biden would get the message and dramatically change course. In the short run, this would entail making U.S. military, economic and diplomatic aid to Israel conditional on adherence to basic human rights and international law, while laying out a viable pathway for a settlement of the Palestinian question in the medium term.

But realistically, for someone with a record as deeply pro-Israel as Biden’s, such a drastic shift in the twilight of his career is unlikely. It is, indeed, unlikely that a man in his 80s will change the worldview that has undergirded his foreign policy thinking, as senator, vice president, and now president, for half a century.

As things stand right now, therefore, the most likely outcome appears to be Biden sleepwalking into a loss in November, largely due to a hangover from the high inflation of 2021-23, but also the largescale abandonment of young voters and important pockets of support, including the Arab and Muslim vote, that helped secure his 2020 victory.

If that is indeed what happens, then Muslims and Arabs will be hoping the loss conveys the importance of the Palestinian issue to the Democratic Party elite, and that, going forward, those vying for the party’s (and country’s) leadership would understand that they can no longer marginalize the Palestinian cause.

THE TRUMP COUNTERARGUMENT

A common counterargument to this logic from Biden supporters is that doing anything to help elect Trump runs contrary to Palestinian interests. Trump, after all, was pro-Israel to an almost absurd and comical extent in his first term, delegating his entire Middle East policy to his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who went about sidelining the Palestinians in the so-called “Abraham Accords” and moving the American Embassy to Jerusalem.

There should be no mistake: Trump’s victory will be a disaster for the Palestinians and the Palestinian cause. But the Palestinian

people and their supporters are entitled to ask: How exactly would Biden’s be any different? Would more, fewer or roughly the same number of Palestinians have been bombed, shot, crushed and starved had Trump been president post-Oct. 7?

More importantly, from a strategic perspective, this counter-argument ignores that not all political life has a four-year span; a longer term horizon yields a clearer picture of why not voting for Biden could help the Palestinian cause. The logic is simple. Only by costing Democrats an election would Arabs, Muslims and other pro-Palestinian Americans be able to leverage their votes for meaningful change.

In other words, while Trump would be assuredly worse for the Palestinians than Biden, the Democratic candidate in 2028, and forever after, would understand at a deep and visceral level that they cannot go on ignoring Palestinian aspirations and behaving as Israel’s lawyer, banker and arms dealer. In so doing, party elites would be merely catching up to their base, which already demands more of an even-handed policy in the Middle East.

In this rendering, Michigan could serve as the anchor of U.S. policy in the region the way Florida does for Cuban policy. The obvious difference between the two is that while the anti-Castro/communist lobby does not face organized opposition, this provisional Palestinian lobby would be taking on one of the most powerful forces in U.S. politics: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the rest of the pro-Israel lobby.

Indeed, it is this feature of U.S. politics that represents the most likely pitfall for Plan Michigan. Any electoral benefit that accrues to a candidate for a more pro-Palestinian position will probably be drowned out by the immense cost of taking on the AIPAC machine, which has a long history of heavy spending against perceived critics of right-wing Israeli leaders and policies. In these conditions, even politicians privately sympathetic to the Palestinian cause may rationally end up deciding that discretion is the better part of valor.

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A FIRST STEP?

Aside from the genocide of the Palestinian people, the Gaza war has also resulted in irreparable harm to U.S. foreign policy, its image as the leader of the so-called rulesbased international order lying in tatters.

As for Biden, his financial, military and diplomatic support for the annihilation of Gaza will undoubtedly be the first thing his name will be associated with by those around the world. It will be his historical legacy.

But as leaders, neither Biden nor Trump— if elected in November—will be around forever. By channeling their demographic power to change the equation on the Palestine question in U.S. politics, Muslims and Arabs in Michigan may have taken the first step to pushing the U.S., the only great power with leverage over Israel, to actually deploy it for a sovereign Palestine. ■

Sacred Constitutional Rights Like Politically Motivated Boycotts Can’t Be Surrendered

By Bruce Fein

The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), the largest coalition in Palestinian society that is leading the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, targets companies that play a clear and direct role in Israel’s crimes and where there is real potential for winning, as was the case with, among others, G4S, Veolia, Orange, Ben & Jerry’s and Pillsbury. Visit <https://bdsmovement.net>.

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE has become a satellite of Israel. That status is exhibited not only by the Empire’s indulgence of the postOct. 7 Israeli government’s war in Gaza, but since Israel’s founding in 1948, and in the Empire’s eagerness to surrender sacred constitutional rights to strengthen the Israeli state.

A conspicuous example is the First Amendment right to boycott to advance a political objective, as represented by the Boycott,

Bruce Fein was associate deputy attorney general and general counsel of the Federal Communications Commission under President Reagan and is author of Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy and American Empire Before The Fall. Twitter feed: @brucefeinesq. Brucefein@substack.com. <www.lawofficesofbrucefein.com>.

Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. It coalesced in 2005 to protest Israel’s treatment of Arab Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

The most memorable precedent in the United States was the 1956 Montgomery, Alabama, municipal bus boycott led by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. to protest segregated seating. It was no novelty. The 1773 Boston Tea Party protested import duties on British tea without representation in Parliament using the slogan “no taxation without representation.” Abolitionists urged a boycott of products made by slave labor before the 13th Amendment prohibiting slavery.

In modern times, the National Organization for Women (NOW) boycotted states that failed to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. The State of Missouri sued NOW using an antitrust challenge,

claiming that the boycott violated the Sherman Act, but the court rejected the argument and found that boycott was protected from antitrust liability when it can be shown to be for “legitimate attempts to petition the government.”

The First Amendment protects the right to free speech. It equally protects the right to refuse to associate with speech or entities in furtherance of political objectives. In 2010 the United States Supreme Court recognized in Citizens United v. FEC, that money is speech. As a corollary, withholding money is also speech: it constitutes a statement opposing what the boycotted party is doing, saying or symbolizing. As an example, declining to donate to the American Nazi Party is protected speech.

These bedrock constitutional and philosophical principles are abandoned by the American Empire when Israel enters the stage and excites political fury. Back in 1904, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes aptly explained, dissenting in Northern Securities v. United States, “Great cases, like hard cases, make bad law. For great cases are called great not by reason of their real importance in shaping the law of the future, but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgment.”

BDS proponents urge businesses, institutions and individuals to boycott Israel or companies or individuals doing business in Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian territories, to divest investments in companies doing business in Israel or the settlements and to impose sanctions on Israel. The goal is to create political or economic pressure on Israel to bow to a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, to end discrimination against Arab Israeli citizens and to establish a right of return for Palestinian refugees.

More than 30 states have taken steps against the BDS movement to show their political solidarity with Israel. Most have taken one of two forms: contract-focused laws requiring government contractors to promise that they are not boycotting Israel; and investment-focused laws, mandating public investment funds to avoid invest-

ments in companies that boycott Israel. Both forms are unconstitutional.

Boycotting for political objectives is protected speech under the First Amendment, subject to restriction only to advance a compelling and legitimate government interest. Foreign nations and foreign citizens residing in foreign nations are unprotected by the U.S. Constitution. Thus, states have no legitimate constitutional interest in protecting Israel or Jews residing in Israel or the West Bank from BDS promoted boycotts.

The law is equally clear that a state may not burden the constitutionally protected right to advocate politically motivated boycotts against Israel by requiring support for a foreign country as a condition to obtaining a government contract. In the 1958 case Speiser v. Randall, the Court held that a state could not deny tax exemptions to persons who refused to sign a loyalty oath. Similarly, the Court concluded in 2013 in Agency for International Development v. Alliance for Open Society, International, Inc. that USAID could not condition grant money to American recipients to combat the HIV/AIDS pandemic on expressly opposing prostitution and sex trafficking. The Court explained that the government could not condition the receipt of federal funds on a refusal to embrace and promulgate as its own a government-authored political message that the recipient had a First Amendment right to resist.

These decisions provide the analytic framework for evaluating the constitutionality of state laws that deny contracting opportunities to people or businesses that refuse to renounce their First Amendment right to boycott Israel. That compelled renunciation serves no legitimate state interest. Israel and Jews residing there have no constitutional or legal right under American law to escape politically motivated boycotts. And to the extent state anti-BDS contracting laws purport to establish a friendly foreign policy toward Israel, they are unconstitutional by encroaching on a domain entrusted under the Constitution exclusively to the federal government.

The nation must speak with one voice to

the rest of the world. States confound that objective by laws establishing their own parochial policies to advance political objectives. The Supreme Court precedents are definitive: interested readers can look up Crosby v. National Foreign Trade Council (2000) and American Insurance Association v. Garamendi (2003).

Moreover, state anti-BDS statutes are also preempted by the federal anti-boycotting policy enshrined in the Anti-Boycott Act of 2018. The federal policy prohibits compliance with boycotts ordained by foreign countries. It leaves undisturbed home-grown boycott movements like BDS. State laws prohibit what the federal law permits. The Supremacy Clause of the Constitution in Article VI resolves the conflict over foreign policy in favor of the national government.

Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, warns that a new bill seeks to make this speech illegal: “H.R. 3016 seeks to extend the Anti-Boycott Act to also cover U.S. citizens who boycott Israel and/or settlements not because they are being compelled/coerced, but because it reflects their own values/political views, including support for international law.”

The investment-focused state laws are unconstitutional for the same reasons as their contract-focused counterparts. They espouse a foreign policy toward Israel which unconstitutionally invades an exclusive federal domain.

There is no Israel exception to the First Amendment or the Supremacy Clause. The constitutional method of opposing the BDS movement is more convincing speech and arguments, not a government contracting or investment sledgehammer in hopes of silencing its proponents.

A first cousin of the unconstitutional antiBDS laws is the top-secret executive order prohibiting federal officers or employees from acknowledging what all the world knows and Israel affirms: It sports a robust nuclear arsenal. What is said in the Knesset cannot be said by the United States government. But this is a topic for a separate article. ■

By Ian Williams

Out Like Lions, In Like Lambs (or Lizards): The West Restores Funding to UNRWA

Palestinians gather in front of the UNRWA building in Jabalia, north of Gaza City, on March 17, 2024, to receive 5 kg of flour aid as the first humanitarian aid convoy in months enters Gaza. Israeli forces attacked an UNRWA distribution building in Rafah, killing five people on March 13. More than 400 Palestinian aid‐seekers have been killed since the Feb. 29 Flour Massacre, including Anera’s logistics coordinator Mousa Shawwa killed on March 8.

IN EARLY MARCH, Western governments began to quietly restore funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) that they had cut at the behest of deranged and provably dissimulating Israeli authorities. With no apology, countries began to restore aid that they had cut on no evidence at all, and generally without admitting error. The Flour Massacre, hugely expensive but ineffective airdrops and a sea voyage remarkably reminiscent of the Turkish flotillas attacked by Israel in 2010 might have persuaded politicians about the indispensability of UNRWA. Perhaps leaders began to wonder how voters would regard the starving of two million besieged victims on the word of proven unrepentant recidivist liars and murderers.

The timing of Israel’s allegations is surely no coincidence: on the day that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) declared that there

U.N. correspondent Ian Williams is the author of U.N.told: The Real Story of the United Nations in Peace and War (available from Middle East Books and More).

was plausible evidence of genocide in Gaza and ordered Israel to stop it, up popped the report from the Israeli perpetrators, alleging that UNRWA staff were actively involved in the Oct. 7 attack. Israel knew what the judgment would say and clearly had prepared to blunt its unwelcome assessment of “plausible genocide.”

To some extent it was a self-inflicted wound by UNRWA. In a moment of weakness, UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini almost destroyed both UNRWA and Gaza— and also put the named staff as scapegoats out for IDF jackals to hunt at will. The Western media and governments can turn a blind eye to innumerable reports from human rights and legal commissions on Israeli crimes but preach as inerrant word from on high every extenuation from U.N. bodies. After decades of accusing UNRWA of anti-Semitic lies, they immediately took UNRWA Commissioner Philippe Lazzarini’s ill-advised precautionary move as a full confession of guilt.

The surprise was that the Israelis had actually coerced Lazzarini to fire all the libeled staff on no evidence beyond their repeatedly refuted claims about UNRWA that Israel and its NGO cabal had been pushing for 20 or 30 years. In fact, Israel had not provided the dossier and has not since.

But UNRWA should have known better. Of all agencies it should have learned the precautionary principle—if Israel says it, it is untrue. UNRWA has spent decades swatting aside such hysterical accusations, but this time Lazzarini accepted and implicitly validated them, in what later he shamefacedly admitted was a case of “reverse due process.” This was a mistake that became a catastrophe. Cer-

PHOTO BY DAWOUD ABO ALKAS/ANADOLU VIA GETTY IMAGES

tainly he bitterly regrets it now, as do millions of Palestinian refugees.

Almost immediately 18 Western governments suspended funding for UNRWA, the only effective lifeline for two million Gazans. Western countries were basically precipitating a famine. They acted without seeing evidence—because there was none—and usually against the advice of their diplomats. Even now, they have yet to see the dossier. Lazzarini’s implicit confession was enough to trigger the hasbara trap.

The seemingly spontaneity and simultaneity of the governments’ actions bears questioning. It would under other circumstances merit suspicion of conspiracy and a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) investigation. The hasbara experts, assured of a sympathetic and uncritical hearing, showed the dossier to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal who rushed to parrot it. The following morning, the front page of the New York Times, which some might see as an integral part of any such hasbara conspiracy, gave exactly equivalent front page positioning and space to the reports of the declaration of genocide as to the spurious allegations about UNRWA. As hasbara goes, it was a masterstroke.

It was the same insubstantial rubbish that NGO Watch had been promoting for years. The newspapers of record just recorded it without asking for further evidence. Any conspiracy suspicions might fall on them as well—as when the New York Times later recruited a former IDF soldier to do an investigation of the Oct. 7 mass rape allegations.

One has to wonder what the decisionmaking process was and whose persuasive advice tipped the scale for Lazzarini to make that call. In these columns we have detailed how successive Israeli ambassadors to the U.N. have pursued their obsessive phobias about UNRWA as a fundraising tool for political ambitions. We also have to admit it might not be an entirely irrational obsession. After all, UNRWA is the official U.N. repository of the property claims of the dispossessed Palestinian refugees

from the Nakba, which both Israel and the U.N. promised would be redeemed.

And in the meantime, further cases went to the ICJ at the Hague, indicting the world community’s failure to meet the conditions with which the judges had garnished their provisional finding as the Israeli government starved the Gazans—or rather, not the government but pogromistic Israeli citizens blocking trucks attempting to make Gaza aid deliveries. But few, least of all President Joe Biden, wanted to imagine how long the IDF would take to mow down a Palestinian picket line stopping supplies from getting to West Bank settlers.

When handwringing liberal Zionists wailed about finding homes for the Gazans, not enough people shouted that the Palestinians did indeed have homes to return to—some of them the villages now relabeled as the kibbutzim across the fence that Hamas had stormed. UNRWA has the list.

The incident shows how even in the U.N., many people accept the Western assumption that Israel is social democratic, internationalist and humane. Otherwise good guys like Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon deplored what they saw as occasional Israeli aberrations. They need to wake up. The “aberrations” have it.

ALLEGED MASS RAPES REPORT

I would hope that one of the last manifestations of such atavistic visions is the report of U.N. Special Representative Pramila Patten on the events on Oct. 7.

One key indicator of bureaucratic bull, as George Orwell pointed out, is the use of the passive voice, which has rarely been so actively deployed as in this travesty of recycled obfuscation. Unlikely to get any reward in heaven, one hopes that she has garnered credible offers from proWestern agencies or governments for her report on the alleged mass rapes, which she compiled without speaking to witnesses, based entirely on Israeli documentation. It mumbled, passively, “Credible circumstantial information, which may be indicative of some forms of sexual violence, including genital mutilation, sexualized torture, or cruel, inhuman and degrad-

ing treatment, was also gathered.” In a report filled with such classic evasions, Patten admitted after weeks of soaking up Israeli hasbara that her team was not able to meet with any victims of sexual violence “despite concerted efforts to encourage them to come forward.” Like Biden recalling non-existent beheaded baby photos, she told the U.N. Security Council that “What I witnessed in Israel were scenes of unspeakable violence perpetrated with shocking brutality resulting in intense human suffering.” She admitted that in fact she met no first-hand witnesses.

From this underwhelming body of evidence, she concluded: “There are reasonable grounds to believe that multiple incidents of rape, including gang rape, occurred.” In fact, the only reasonable grounds are that Israel and the U.S. insisted so and this form of collective hypnotism is worth serious study. So many people under the influence of the Western media suffer from these forms of hasbara memory recovery while developing instant amnesia about dismembered Gazans and flattened Gaza and Gazans.

Few special representatives have been treated with such scorn and incredulity for their reports. Her presentation to the Security Council was not the hasbara triumph it was designed to be: she was forced to admit that even if everything she hinted at were provable, it would not justify the rampages against Gazans.

In the meantime, the ICC has yet to initiate prosecutions even though the IDF has indeed televised its holocaust, rewarded and honored its perpetrators and bulldozed its victims into mass graves under the eyes of the world. And the ICJ judgment stands ignored. The U.S. and the West have assiduously tried to prove every global south suspicion about international law and justice to be true. They are blowing up the foundations of the U.N. system of 1945 as methodically as Israel is plowing salt into the soil of Gaza. Supporters of the U.N. should limit their ambitions for it to being a standards-setting body—they must avoid all thought of it as an enforcement body. ■

When the Imperial Media Report On an Israeli Massacre

By Caitlin Johnstone

IN WHAT MANY are now calling the Flour Massacre, at least 118 Gazans were killed and 760 more injured after Israeli forces opened fire on civilians who were waiting for food from much-needed aid trucks near Gaza City on Feb. 29, 2024.

Initial investigations by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor found that the crowd was fired upon by both IDF automatic rifles and by Israeli tanks and that dozens of gunshot victims were hospitalized after the incident.

Caitlin Johnstone is a reader‐supported independent journalist from Melbourne, Australia. Her political writings can be found on Medium and on her Facebook page.

Israel’s version of events has of course changed over time as narrative managers figure out how best to frame publicly available information in a way that doesn’t harm Israel’s PR interests. Currently we’re at Israel admitting that IDF troops did indeed fire upon the crowd after previously denying this, but claiming that this isn’t what caused most of the casualties, saying it was actually the Palestinians trampling each other in a human “stampede” that caused them harm. Essentially the current argument is “Yes we shot them, but that’s not why they died.”

The IDF claims Israeli troops only began firing on the Palestinians because the soldiers “felt threatened” by them, which goes to show that there is no atrocity Israel could possibly

The body of a Palestinian killed by Israeli forces when residents rushed toward aid trucks in Gaza City is carried on a donkey‐pulled cart on Feb. 29, 2024. Israeli troops said they “felt threatened” by the hungry civilians.

PHOTO BY AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

commit where it wouldn’t frame itself as the victim. Israel’s Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir took the opportunity to praise the IDF for heroically fighting off the dangerous Palestinians and to argue that the incident proves it’s too dangerous to keep allowing aid trucks into Gaza.

As terrible as the Israeli spin machine has been on this atrocity, the Western imperial media have been even worse. The verbal gymnastics they’ve been performing in their headlines to avoid saying Israel massacred starving people who were waiting for food would be genuinely impressive if it wasn’t so ghoulish.

“As Hungry Gazans Crowd a Convoy, a Crush of Bodies, Israeli Gunshots and a Deadly Toll” reads one New York Times header, like the summary of an episode of a Netflix murder mystery show.

“Chaotic aid delivery turns deadly as Israeli, Gazan officials trade blame,” says an indecipherably cryptic headline from The Washington Post

“Biden says Gaza food aid-related deaths complicate ceasefire talks,” says The Guardian. “Food aid-related deaths”? Seriously?

“More than 100 killed as crowd waits for aid, Hamas-run health ministry says,” reads a BBC headline. The UK’s state broadcaster is here using a tried and true tactic for casting doubt on death counts by deliberately associating them with Hamas, despite the fact that the Gaza health ministry’s death counts are considered so reliable that Israeli intelligence services use them in their own internal records.

“At least 100 killed and 700 injured in chaotic incident,” says CNN, like it’s describing a frat party that got out of control.

“Carnage at Gaza food aid site amid Israeli gunfire,” reads another CNN headline, as though the carnage and the Israeli gunfire are two unrelated phenomena which just unluckily occurred at around the same time.

CNN also repeatedly refers to the killings as “food aid deaths,” as though it’s the food aid that killed them and not the military of a very specific and very nameable state power.

(It’s probably worth noting at this point that CNN staff have been anonymously reporting through other outlets that there’s been a uniquely aggressive top-down push within the network to slant reporting heavily in favor of Israeli information interests, driven largely by the new CEO Mark Thompson.)

So that’s what happens when the imperial media report on an Israeli massacre, in case you were curious and haven’t been paying attention since Oct. 7 or the decades which preceded it. The propaganda services of the Western press operate in a way that is typically indistinguishable from the spinmeistering of officials in Western governments, framing the Western empire and its allies in a positive light and their enemies in a negative one.

This happens because the Western mass media do not exist to report the news and give you information about what’s been going on in the world, but to manufacture consent for the political status quo and the globe-dominating power structure it supports. The only difference between

our propaganda and the propaganda of a ruthless dictatorship is that the people who live under a dictatorship know they are being fed propaganda, whereas Westerners are trained to believe they are ingesting impartial factual reporting.

The demolition of Gaza is alerting more and more Westerners to the fact that this is happening, though, because the more blatant the atrocities the more ham-fisted the propaganda machine needs to be about running cover for them. It’s even opening eyes within the propaganda machine itself, which is why we’re seeing things like CNN staff blowing the whistle on their own CEO and New York Times staff telling The Intercept that their bosses committed extremely egregious journalistic malpractice in producing atrocity propaganda alleging mass rapes by Hamas on Oct. 7.

The only good thing about what’s happening in Gaza is that it’s waking Westerners up to the fact that everything they’ve been told about their society, their media and their world is a lie. Cracks are appearing in the illusion, and those of us who care about truth, peace and justice need to help draw attention to them. From there, real change becomes a genuine possibility. ■

Ructions Over Palestine in Britain, France and Germany

By John Gee

THERE WAS MUCH SOUND and fury in Britain’s parliament on Feb. 21 over the Scottish National Party (SNP) motion for an immediate ceasefire in the Israel-Gaza war. It wasn’t the ceasefire that generated discord but rather a row over procedure.

A Labour Party amendment to the SNP motion was given first preference in debate in the House of Commons by the speaker over both the SNP’s motion and a Conservative amendment. The Labour amendment called for an immediate ceasefire but allowed that Israel could not be expected to observe it if Hamas threatened further violence; the Labour leadership wanted it to be debated first because it believed it could persuade all its MPs to vote for it, whereas there could be a division if the SNP motion was taken first. Claims were made that MPs faced threats of violence if they did not vote for an immediate ceasefire and this was why the speaker acceded to pressure from Labour leader Keir Starmer to prioritize the Labour amendment.

The SNP and Conservative MPs walked out in protest and the Labour motion was carried without opposition. It may not do much

for the Palestinians or for peace, but it maintained a facade of Labour unity on Palestine.

The bill targets politically motivated boycotts by public bodies (including local councils) in general, but the government said that it aims to stop “businesses and organizations—including those affiliated with Israel—being targeted through ongoing boycotts by public bodies.” Israel is the only state explicitly mentioned in the bill, but the West Bank and Gaza Strip are referred to as if they are part of Israel. This thereby contradicts the government’s claimed support for a two-state solution, in addition to prohibiting even boycotts limited to the products of illegal Israeli settlements in the 1967 occupied territories. (See pp. 34-35)

The bill passed its Second Reading in July by 268 votes to 70. Supporters of Palestinian rights campaigned against it and human rights organizations (including Amnesty International) argued that democratically elected bodies should be able to make ethical choices when buying or investing. It still has to go for further review to the House of Lords, where it will also encounter criticism, and it will not proceed if the present discredited government calls an election before the Lords’ review.

PUBLIC OPINION ON PALESTINE

British politicians continue to lag behind public opinion on Palestine. A poll commissioned by Medical Aid for Palestinians and the Council for Arab-British Understanding and conducted by YouGov on Dec. 20-21, 2023 found that 48 percent of the British public definitely favored an immediate ceasefire. A further 23 percent thought that there should probably be one. Only 12 percent were opposed. The government’s handling of the conflict was approved of by 17 percent and disapproved of by 29 percent. The Labour Party’s performance was approved of by 9 percent and disapproved of by 30 percent.

Elsewhere in Western Europe, public opinion in Ireland, a country with its own experience of being colonized, has been predominantly sympathetic to the Palestinians, as has public opinion in Portugal, Spain and Italy. In France and Germany, where past

John Gee is a free‐lance journalist based in Singapore and the au‐thor of Unequal Conflict: The Palestinians and Israel.

Thousands of people, holding banners and Palestinian flags, gather at Kant Street in Berlin, Germany to stage a solidarity demonstration with Palestinians and protest against the Israeli attacks on Gaza, on Feb. 24, 2024.

PHOTO BY ERBIL BASAY/ANADOLU VIA GETTY IMAGES

support for Israel was higher than it was in the UK, certain patterns have been evident since Oct. 7.

Across political divides, there was condemnation of the Oct. 7 attack. French President Emmanuel Macron during a ceremony to commemorate 42 French nationals killed during the attack described it as the “biggest anti-Semitic massacre of our century.” The few politicians and commentators who tried to put what happened in a longer term context, alluding to Israeli colonialism and the dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 and since, came in for condemnation from people who had closed their ears and eyes to Palestinian suffering and appeals for justice in previous years.

PRO-PALESTINIAN PROTESTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

When Israel began to bombard the Gaza Strip and civilian casualties started to mount, efforts by Palestine supporters to hold protests were either banned or blocked in France, Germany, Austria and Hungary.

Anti-Palestinian measures were especially pronounced in Germany. Although no one in a leading position in Germany today had a hand in implementing the Nazi regime’s policies and few were even born before 1945, a sense of collective culpability for the Nazis’ World War II genocidal campaign against Europe’s Jews makes political parties and large sectors of the public reluctant to even countenance criticism of Israel.

Apart from initially banning pro-Palestinian protests, action was taken against expressions of pro-Palestinian sympathies in the arts. Oyoun, a Berlin cultural center, lost its funding for an event with Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East, which supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and was labelled “anti-Semitic” by the German parliament in 2019. The prestigious Frankfurt Book Fair cancelled a prizegiving ceremony for Berlin-based Palestinian writer Adania Shibli in October— being Palestinian was sufficiently problematic. More than 100 Jewish cultural and artistic figures in Germany

signed a petition condemning the official handling of pro-Palestinian views.

As Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip became more offensive with its evergreater toll on the civilian population and its claim to be acting in self-defense lost all credibility, public opinion took a more sympathetic view of the Palestinians and increasingly favored an immediate ceasefire. Large demonstrations took place against the war in most European countries, including in Berlin and in many cities in France. In Germany in December, courts in Munster and Cologne ruled that certain slogans whose use had been grounds for arrest were protected on free speech grounds. These included “Stop the genocide in Gaza” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free.” The Cologne court judge made a clear distinction between slogans directed against Israel and any that might be directed against Jews in Germany.

Politicians shifted ground: in November, Macron called for a halt to the bombardment of Gaza. The standard position for most political leaders became one of calling for respect for the lives of Palestinian civilians, even as they resisted implementing practical measures to bring Israel’s war on Gaza to an end. They affirmed support for a two-state solution, without saying anything about how that might be achieved in practice, beyond pious references to a nonexistent “peace process.”

FAR-RIGHT PARTIES IN FRANCE AND GERMANY

Well aware of the indefensibility of Israel’s actions in the eyes of most of the public, the default setting for its apologists was to make prolific use of charges of antiSemitism against supporters of Palestinian rights. Big marches against anti-Semitism were organized in London, Paris and Berlin; overtly pro-Israel demonstrations received limited support.

Far right parties took the opportunity of the war to showcase their claimed rejection of anti-Semitism through support for Israel, as if that proved anything. Following Oct. 7, Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Rally, spoke in the French Na-

tional Assembly of “pogroms on Israeli soil.” Representatives of her party have taken part in pro-Israel demonstrations. Some commentators suggested that this represented a distancing from the antiSemitism of the National Rally’s forerunner, the National Front, and its founder (and Marine’s father), Jean-Marie Le Pen, but its anti-Semitism did not get in the way of a benign attitude toward Israel, especially given its deep hostility to Arabs and Muslims. Daddy Le Pen had welcomed Israel’s victory in 1967.

In Germany, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) Party has taken a strongly pro-Israel stand. Following the Hamas attack on Israel, it called for aid to the Palestinian people to be cut.

The AfD’s true character was dramatically underlined in January, when Correctiv, an independent news outlet, revealed details of a secret meeting of AfD politicians and neo-Nazi activists that took place in November 2023 in a hotel near Berlin. Participants discussed a masterplan for the mass deportation of those considered to be foreigners in the event of the AfD gaining power. At the time, polling figures suggested that it had the second highest public support among German parties.

The AfD’s opponents reacted strongly. Large protest rallies against the party took place in cities across Germany, including one of 100,000 people in Berlin. It is ironic that the plan for the AfD’s mass expulsion of “foreigners” aroused such opposition and yet Israel’s mass expulsion of the majority of the Palestinian people from their homes in 1948 and subsequent efforts to encourage more to leave is for many Germans something that is never examined or questioned.

Around 100,000 Palestinians live in Germany—more than 25,000 of them in Berlin. Members of the community who went to the anti-AfD rallies with Palestinian flags were made to feel unwelcome by many participants, despite their strong opposition to the AfD. Anything that touches Israel is a sensitive issue for most Germans and thus Palestinians pay for opposing Israeli rather than British, French or indeed, German settler colonialism.■

Palestine Poster Artists Respond to Aaron Bushnell’s Political Statement

By Catherine Baker

IN A TREND increasingly observed in the Palestine context, poster art closely follows events. The speed of this output means that artists can get in front of, or at least compete head-to-head, with countervailing Zionist narratives about an incident that just occurred.

As example of this phenomenon: within 48 hours of Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation at the Israeli Embassy on Feb. 25, posters began to appear on the internet commemorating the man as an honorable and courageous hero.

Setting oneself on fire is an awful (and awe-full in the original sense) form of protest, leveraged when governmental leaders are resistant to normative political pressure (e.g., calls, letters, protests, poll results, elections) and the people have reached a high level of desperation to make government heed their will. This extreme form of protest is centuries old but also rare. Sometimes an individual— such as Thích Quảng Đức protesting the persecution of Buddhist monks by the South Vietnamese government, Norman Morrison protesting the Vietnam War and Aaron Bushnell protesting an ongoing, U.S.-complicit genocide—decides that it is necessary.

It is too soon to speculate on the long-term impact of Bushnell’s fatal political protest; the repercussions of Rachel Corrie’s martyrdom are still playing out 20 years after she was crushed to death in Gaza by an armored Israeli bulldozer. Will Bushnell become an iconic touchpoint in the long quest for justice in Palestine? This sampling of posters, by unidentified artists and from a growing collection assembled at the Palestine Poster Project Archives, <https://www.palestineposterproject.org>, provides initial evidence for that possibility.

1 AARON BUSHNELL—1998-2024

An obvious way to read this poster is to see Bushnell as standing before the Gates of Hell.

Bushnell could have selected as the location for his action an Air Force base where he served, the U.S. Capitol, or a random street corner. But he chose instead the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC, a location that implicates as the object of his political statement both Israel and its patron, the U.S. Furthermore, Bushnell did not choose a random point along the embassy’s fenced perimeter, but rather, in front of the entrance gates; thus, this dramatic backdrop.

Bushnell was not the first to apply the “Gates of Hell” metaphor in the Gaza context. On Oct. 7, Israeli Major General Ghassan Alian blamed Hamas for “opening the gates of Hell on the Gaza Strip.” People may debate who opened the Gates of Hell, and when, but there is no question that today “Gaza is hell on earth,” in the words of Jens Laerke, a spokesperson for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

2 SACRIFICING HIMSELF FOR PALESTINE

Bushnell recorded himself making a cogent final statement in plain language, so there is no doubt as to his political purpose. This poster presents that speech in the bottom text. The text at the top of the poster is excerpted from a statement released by the Central Media Department of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and it reinforces the political implication of Bushnell’s gesture:

“The act of an American soldier sacrificing himself for Palestine is the highest sacrifice[...] A poignant message to the American administration to stop its involvement in the aggression.”

Bushnell’s final words, expressed repeatedly, are emblazoned here as the headline, “Free Palestine.” Half of the 27 posters collected to date in the Archives feature these two words. At least in the present moment, Bushnell’s action and “Free Palestine” are linked in the minds of many, such that when the phrase is used, the event of Feb. 25 reverberates.

The image in this poster is of Bushnell, the fire not consuming him but rather subdued, standing before a giant, sun-like circle. One possible way to read this image is as a metaphor for the immense impact of his words and deed over time.

3 OUR RULING CLASS

By eschewing civilian clothes for his final act and donning his uniform instead, Bushnell intimated that he was acting not as a private citizen but as a public servant. As if to emphasize this, he doused himself with accelerant first and then put on his military cap.

Given his decision to die in uniform, Bushnell may have been rejecting the label of “suicide” and instead embracing the military term, “the ultimate sacrifice.” Certainly this is how his act is being interpreted by some people in the Middle East, where his martyr poster has already appeared.

The poster reinforces the military connection by preceding Bushnell’s name with “USAF.” An upside-down flag, a symbol of patriotic protest, is background to the uniformed Bushnell on fire in the foreground.

4 FREE PALESTINE—AARON BUSHNELL

After catching fire, Bushnell stood stock still. He did not, as you might expect, run. He stood and repeated his final words, “Free Catherine Baker is a member of the Palestine Poster Project Archives Advisory Board. She is also a member of the steering com‐mittee of Voices From the Holy Land, which conducts online film discussions; a senior editor with We Are Not Numbers, a Gaza ‐based project to amplify the voices of young Palestinian writers.

Palestine,” until he was no longer able to.

The stoic pose is repeated across multiple posters, suggesting that it could potentially become an iconic representation of resistance. Yet variations have also appeared, such as with Bushnell saluting or wearing combat gear.

While Bushnell planned out his action—notifying the media in advance, preparing and sharing his will, live-

streaming himself on Twitch—he could not have arranged in advance for an officer to point a gun at his flaming body. Yet that did occur, and in this poster that moment is recreated as a metaphor for America’s current militaristic response to human suffering.

As if following the call to demonstrate that complicity in genocide is not normal, veterans are burning their uniforms and

citizens are surrounding the Israeli Embassy in Washington in nonstop protest and holding vigils at other locations across the nation. The loathing felt by much of the American electorate at the ongoing genocide is being channeled into actions that build upon Bushnell’s protest.

See the growing Special Collection of Aaron Bushnell posters at the Palestine Poster Project Archives.■

The Stones Cry Out Solidarity Delegation Relays Messages from Palestinians

By Dr. Michael Spath and Delinda C. Hanley

WHAT DID CHRISTIANS DO when Israel bombed the St. Porphyrius Greek Orthodox Church in Gaza, one of the oldest churches in the world, killing 18 of the hundreds of Palestinians sheltering there on Oct. 19? What have religious leaders said as Israel damages or destroys more than 200 cultural and religious sites, including some of the oldest in the world?

A group of 23 American Christian activists decided to do something about the crisis in the Holy Land. The pastors and lay people visited the West Bank from February 27 until March 3, and were sponsored by Kairos Palestine, Kairos USA, Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, Palestinian Christian Alliance for Peace, Indiana Center for Middle East Peace, Friends of Sabeel North America, Pax Christi

Dr. Michael Spath is the executive director of the Indiana Center for Middle East Peace and served as the leader of the delegation to Pales‐tine. Delinda C. Hanley is executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

USA and the Episcopal Bishop’s Committee for Justice and Peace in the Holy Land-Diocese of Olympia. They held 17 meetings in Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Ramallah and Hebron and asked Palestinians what they themselves would say to policymakers in Washington, DC, and churches and communities around the U.S. The Palestinian religious, political and non-governmental organization leaders told the delegation they’ve felt isolated and alone since Oct. 7. “Where are the churches?” they kept asking. The delegation’s presence, especially during a time of war, was so important to them.

Together, the mission produced a hard-hitting report, “The Stones Cry Out: From the Ground in Palestine to the U.S. Government and Churches.” The report states, “Let us be clear: it is our shared faith, our shared humanity, that compelled us to be here, in the land where our faith was born. But it is also as U.S. citizens that we’ve come, knowing that our U.S. tax dollars are funding this crisis. Our government, the administration and Congress support these war crimes.”

The Stones Cry Out Delegation visiting Bethlehem, in front of the iconic Banksy mural “Target Dove,” painted on the separation wall.

PHOTO COURTESY M. SPATH

The report emphasizes that the deadly oppression of the Palestinian people has been ongoing for 76 years and Israel’s relentless land, air and sea blockade of Gaza has continued for 17 years. After the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, Gaza has become a “killing field” and “the atrocities perpetrated by the IDF are broadcast before our eyes, on our phones, in real time...Apartment blocks, schools, hospitals, churches and mosques, markets are leveled.” Relief and food convoys are denied entry and “mass starvation is rampant.” Palestinians told the delegation to tell Americans:

• They fervently believe in nonviolent resistance.

• They feel abandoned, forsaken by the world, to face the genocide of their people alone. Our visit and solidarity comfort them and gives them courage to carry on.

• The genocide in Gaza is now in its sixth month, and the world has done nothing to stop it. Palestinians are incredulous. There is palpable anger, righteous anger, even from clergy, from activists devoted to nonviolence. They want no more high and mighty lectures from the West about values, democracy, equality and human rights. The sheer tonnage of U.S. hypocrisy is epic in its scale in the bombs paid for by the U.S. that Israel drops on Gaza.

• We call for a ceasefire now, a release of hostages held by Hamas and political prisoners held by Israel. No mincing words. No equivocation. NOW!

• We heard again and again that while our eyes are fixed on Gaza—and rightly so —there is a “slow massacre,” a “slow genocide” taking place in the West Bank. While there is genocide in Gaza, ethnic cleansing is exponentially increasing in the West Bank “under the radar.”

• End the occupation of Palestine by Israel. Stop illegal settlements. The West Bank is not Samaria and Judea. It is Palestinian territory and Palestinians cannot continue to exist as stateless people without human rights.

• Children as young as 5 years old are arrested, abused, tortured and held in prisons without trial for months or years. Night raids into Palestinian homes occur every night.

They are tried in military, not civil, courts. Confessions are extracted by torture.

• There are 700+ checkpoints in the West Bank, an area the size of Delaware, Joe Biden’s home state. Restricting freedom of movement is a tool of torment to make daily life unbearable for Palestinians. IDF teens with machine guns man these checkpoints and kill Palestinians with impunity.

• Home demolitions have increased. We visited a man whose home was demolished two weeks earlier. His crime: he was a spokesman for Palestinians in Silwan, a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem. We sat under a tarp in his yard amidst the rubble. Israel is ethnically cleansing, stealing and Judaizing his neighborhood, Silwan, on the hills below the Old City of Jerusalem. Silwan has been zoned for demolition by the Israeli government to expand an archaeological site and create a theme park. Israel uses home demolitions as a potent weapon for ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. We call for an end to Israel’s policy of house demolitions of Palestinian homes.

• The knee-jerk reaction by the Biden administration to cut off funding for UNRWA (based on unfounded Israeli allegations against a few employees out of thousands) was unjustified. We call for the full restoration—and increase—of UNRWA funding immediately. UNRWA is the only organization that can deliver mass human services to Gaza. To withhold food and relief from starving people is a war crime.

• This is a U.S. war; the weapons are U.S. made. The money is U.S. money. The shameful United Nations veto against a ceasefire is U.S. policy. We say it again loudly and clearly: This is a U.S. war!

• The U.S. selectively applies international law. Compare the U.S. response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine to the U.S. response to Israel’s open genocide in Gaza and its takeover and oppression in the West Bank. The world is watching. We continually heard the words applied to the United States: “hypocrisy,” “double standard.”

• The nations supporting a ceasefire, who continue their support of Palestine, the South Africans’ ICJ case, the Global South

understands and is making their voices heard. The people of the Global South see the hypocrisy.

• The West’s response is profoundly racist. Again, compare the response to Ukraine, a predominantly white Christian country, to the response to Palestine, a predominantly Arab Muslim country. The world is watching. The people of the Global South see the injustice.

• They—and we—say to our churches: Both those who unconditionally support Israel as well as those who are silent, not wanting to offend, “You are complicit in Israel’s genocide of Gaza!” Following Jesus, listening to Jesus’ Gospel message, loving your neighbor, even your enemy— that is our call. It is morally derelict that some Christians insist on undying loyalty to Israel. Scripture is not to be manipulated to crush one of God’s peoples for the gain of another. We heard from many about the scourge of Christian Zionism. It is equally sickening to be silent in the face of evil.

• Nonviolent resistance can only succeed if people of good conscience take bold and decisive action in support of the cause. The Palestinian people cry out, “Hear our call. Take up our cross with us.”

Delegates heard various political solutions offered, but all agree that Zionism— and support by the U.S. government and Christian Zionists in the West—is the problem. The racist, settler colonial project that is Zionism must be rejected out of hand, dismantled, and a system of government based on equity, human dignity and full civil, political and human rights created. Zionism makes Jews around the world less safe and contributes to anti-Semitism. If the U.S. wants to be Israel’s friend, it must realize that this genocidal action fosters even more acts of anti-Semitism and disgust for the U.S.

As soon as the delegates returned, they met with DC allies, including the Washington Report, religious leaders and members of Congress. They held a talk at the K Street Busboys and Poets and a multi-faith vigil, “Nonviolent Witness Action 4 Ceasefire in Gaza,” in front of the White House on

Continued on p. 74

Palestinian Poet Hala Kofa: The Only Thing You Have Is Your Voice

By Candice Bodnaruk

HALA KOFA is struck with “survivor’s guilt” when she sees Palestinians suffering in Israel’s war on Gaza. The Kuwaiti-born poet (who now lives in Winnipeg) spent 13 years trying to immigrate to Canada. She arrived in August 2023.

“I look at these people and think I could have been there,” she told the Washington Report, referring to Palestinians under attack by Israel in Gaza. Kofa has cousins in Gaza and her brother was born there.

She studied literature at Qatar University and wrote her first poem, “It’s That Time of the Year,” in 2014. It was inspired by her children, who asked on the last day of school before Christmas why other children “go home” for the holiday season, while they are never truly “home.” Kofa recites the poem at rallies for Gaza in Winnipeg.

It ends with the stanza:

It’s that time of the year

When I say I don’t envy people for anything

When they should know they are blessed

When many wish to have what they have

When I know it snows in my country

When I know my boys can’t play there

When they can’t create memories there

When I miss Palestine the most.

For Kofa, “art is a healing process” because it’s heartwarming when readers share her poems, like them online or try to understand the background story. “If I can speak and anyone could feel just a bit of what I feel, then I am making a difference,” she believes. “The only thing that you have is your voice.”

Two of her newest poems, “Lullaby” and “Ceasefire,” address Israel’s war on Gaza.

Kofa’s entire family—grandparents, parents and all of her ancestors—were born in Palestine. The family originally came from Isdud, a village that Israel occupied in 1948 and then destroyed. After their village was ethnically cleansed, Kofa’s parents walked to Gaza and

Candice Bodnaruk has been involved in Palestinian issues for the past 14 years through organizations such as the Canadian BDS Coalition and Peace Alliance Winnipeg. Her political action started with feminism and continued with the peace movement, first with the No War on Iraq Coalition in 2003 in Winnipeg.

settled there. In 1967 they were displaced a second time, when Israel occupied Gaza. Kofa’s older brother was born while Israeli soldiers were right outside the door. “My mother was giving birth, not making a sound to protect herself and her baby,” she said.

Her family then walked from Gaza to Jordan; they could have obtained Jordanian passports, but they decided not to, because her father was convinced that they would return to Palestine. The family settled in Qatar when Kofa was two years old.

“Palestinian refugees are stuck wherever they are,” she explained. No matter where they live, they have only residency papers. Their only option, she believes, is to immigrate as skilled workers to other countries like Australia, the U.S. or Canada, which is what she did.

Some Caribbean countries offer passports to Palestinians, but the cost—hundreds of thousands of dollars—is a barrier.

Kofa decided to go to Canada because she wanted to secure a future for her sons. “I was always a second-class resident. I wanted them to be like everybody else,” she concluded.

Kofa’s poems can be found on Instagram at writings.byhala.

SPEAKING UP ABOUT ANTI-PALESTINIAN RACISM IN THE MEDIA AFTER OCTOBER 7

Fareed Khan, the founder of Canadians United Against Hate, noticed a deep-seated, ingrained anti-Palestinian racism in Canadian media after Oct. 7. Khan set out to address institutionalized media bias by writing “A Quick Reference Guide to Apartheid Israel and the Israeli Occupation of Palestine.”

The guide contains a selection of resources, article links as well as graphics that are sourced with quotes from people talking about Zionism, Israeli apartheid and racism. Khan has included sections entitled “Einstein’s Reflections on Israel,” “Jews Against the Occupation” and “Born Unequal—Visualizing Palestine.”

Khan hopes the project will help educate people about what is happening in Palestine and why it is happening. He believes that Canadian society and media are either being controlled by Israeli

PHOTO COURTESY HALA KOFA

Hala Kofa at a recent rally for Gaza in Winnipeg.

interests or have been indoctrinated to accept Israeli narratives as fact. “Not only do we have to fight a battle against our political leaders, but we have to fight the battle within our media,” he said.

Khan also pointed out that since this war on Gaza started, even non-Zionist Jewish organizations like Independent Jewish Voices have been called antiJewish hate groups.

“They are reaching a point where they [Israel] are losing the narrative,” he said. He mentions Holocaust survivors and descendants of Holocaust survivors who have been demonstrating in front of Senator Chuck Schumer’s office in New York. Khan’s father-in-law was a Holocaust survivor.

He said he is thankful there are Jews who realize what Israel is doing and are speaking up. “What Gaza is right now, it’s a death camp,” he observed.

He said people must start talking in those terms. There is a growing awareness among Jews that their identities should not be tied up with a racist, fascist government.

He told the Washington Report that he wants to see Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and their caucus members held accountable for being genocide collaborators.

“In the coming two years before the next election, we have to keep reminding voters to look at the people who stood by and did nothing when children were being slaughtered in the name of self-defense,” he concluded.

PALESTINIAN COMMUNITY LEADER: ORGANIZATIONS “STEPPING UP THE FIGHT” IN CANADA

A Palestinian community leader who travelled to the West Bank in January said Palestinian organizations are now “stepping up the fight” in Canada. Ramsey Zeid, president of the Canadian Palestinian Association of Manitoba, was travelling with other members of the Coalition of Canadian Palestinian Organizations as well as five Canadian MPs.

Zeid told the Washington Report that of all the times he has been to the West Bank, this is the worst he has ever seen it.

“We want to concentrate more on pressuring our governments that if they don’t do more, we will vote them out,” he said.

He said groups like Canadian Muslim Vote are encouraging voters not to support the current Liberal government in the next federal election. Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East is also putting a lot of pressure on government officials by letting them know that the Palestinian community has a voice as well as a vote.

“There are enough of us that we could sway a vote one way or the other,” Zeid said. According to Statistics Canada, the country’s Muslim population has more than doubled in the past 20 years. Currently, Muslims represent about 4.9 percent of Canada’s population, or about 1.8 million people.

who can come to Canada to 1,000. Canada has a large Palestinian population with family in Gaza, and they want to bring their relatives to safety.

Zeid pointed out that Canada prides itself on being a humanitarian country that follows the law, but it is not following international law right now. “It’s a lot of words not backed up many actions,” he said.

In December, Canada was co-signatory to a statement with 13 other countries expressing “grave concern” about Israeli settlers intimidating and terrorizing Palestinian communities and advising that it would sanction Canadian Israelis found guilty of such conduct. Zeid sees this as a token gesture to appease Palestinian Canadians; he does not think individuals can be sanctioned in any meaningful way.

Zeid also spoke about Canada’s decision to limit the number of Palestinian refugees

Zeid pointed out that Ukrainian refugees are still arriving in Canada and no limits have been placed on their numbers. Moreover, the Canadian government does not require Ukrainian refugees to have family in Canada.

In sharp contrast to requirements for Ukrainian refugees, every Palestinian wanting to come to Canada as part of the program is required to provide proof they have family members in Canada who can support them for three years. In addition, they must disclose details that include all previous jobs, social media accounts and phone numbers they have had since they were 16. Zeid finds such disclosures unreasonable.

“I’m 46 years old, and I don’t remember every job or social media account I have had. Does that give Canada grounds to deny an application form?” ■

Ramsey Zeid in the Jenin Refugee Camp in January 2024.

PHOTO COURTESY HALA KOFA

Can Russia Gain From Unrest in the Middle East?

By Stasa Salacanin

VLADIMIR

PUTIN’S

December visit to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi may be interpreted as a message to Russia’s partners and rivals that Moscow remains an actor in the Middle East and that the West cannot completely isolate Russia, but it is unclear how much Russia can do in the region at the moment.

According to the former U.S. ambassador to Qatar, Patrick Theros, “Russia is seeking greater influence in the region,” although “it is hard to predict its success; if the Gaza campaign gets worse and the U.S. does nothing, Russia benefits. How much I cannot guess,” he told the English-language news website New Arab.

RUSSIA’S TIES WITH THE GULF STATES CORDIAL BUT LIMITED

The Russian president was warmly welcomed by Arab leaders. Upon his arrival, a 21-gun salute greeted Putin while Emirati mil-

Stasa Salacanin is a widely published author and analyst focusing on the Middle East and Europe. He produces in‐depth analysis of the region’s most pertinent issues for regional and international publi‐cations including the Al Jazeera Center for Studies, Middle East Monitor, The New Arab, Gulf News, Al Bawaba, Qantara, Inside Arabia and many more.

itary jets trailed red, white and blue smoke—the colors of the Russian flag. Both the UAE and Saudi Arabia saw this as an opportunity not only to increase their international profile as power brokers and facilitators in potential peace negotiations, but also to send the message to the West that they do not wish to get dragged into a new cold war rivalry between the West and Russia or between China and the U.S. Instead the Gulf states prefer to pursue their quite autonomous and diversified foreign policy approach, which some analysts view as a strategy to gain greater concessions from the West. Both Russia and its Arab partners will try to exploit the anger of the entire Arab world against unconditional U.S. support of Israel in its Gaza crusade.

However, it is unclear how much Moscow can achieve and to what extent it may project its influence in the region, given its preoccupation with the war in Ukraine.

According to Mark Katz, a Middle East expert and professor of government and politics at George Mason University, as long as Russia is conducting a major war in Ukraine, “it does not seem likely that it will be able to expand its strategic alliances in the Middle East. Middle Eastern governments have certainly been willing to profit from Western sanctions against Russia by increasing their trade

Jets fly through the sky as UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan welcomes Russian President Vladimir Putin with an officia l ceremony at Qasr Al Watan in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates on Dec. 6, 2023.

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with it.” But those Middle Eastern governments that fear Iran can hardly count on Russian support against Tehran when Moscow is now so dependent on Iran for drones and other weapons.

As Russia’s standoff with the West will likely last for a very long time, Moscow is seemingly looking toward an ever closer partnership with Tehran, which will exceed current ad hoc military cooperation. Both sides have already discussed energy projects, a future increase in trade relations and large infrastructural projects while adjusting and integrating the Russian Mir payment system with the Iranian version. The countries have also reportedly reached a long-awaited deal on the purchase of Russian Su-35 fighter jets and a new generation attack helicopter Mi-28, that have been successfully used in Ukraine.

Many observers believe that one of the main motives for Putin’s December visit to the Gulf was to reassure and calm Arab partners about Russia’s increased cooperation with Iran.

RUSSIA MUST BE CAREFUL WHEN DEALING WITH ISRAEL-GAZA WAR

While Russia’s deepening ties with Iran will probably continue to create sporadic hurdles with Arabic states, a greater challenge will be the maintenance of complex ties with Israel, especially after Israel’s attack on Gaza and its condemnation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Kremlin initially tried to achieve a balancing act in the Israel-Gaza crisis and took a guarded position, condemning the targeting of civilians and calling for a diplomatic solution to the crisis. But later on, Russia sharpened its rhetoric condemning the Israeli attack and sided with Palestinians, maintaining its ties with Hamas, which it sees as a legitimate Palestinian representative and not a terrorist organization.

On one occasion, for example, President Putin compared Israel’s besiegement of the Gaza Strip to the Nazi siege of Leningrad in 1941-1944, triggering anger among Israel’s leadership. Since the beginning of the conflict, Russia has been discrediting

the U.S. for its unconditional support of Israel in an attempt to divert attention from the war in Ukraine to the ethnic cleansing and massacres in Gaza.

The U.S. standing in the Middle East is certainly under stress. However, Aron Lund, a fellow at Century International and the Middle East analyst at the Swedish Defense Research Agency, argues that Russia can hardly exploit that as a consequence of its invasion of Ukraine. He thinks that Moscow’s Middle East presence is now severely under-resourced and its diplomatic initiatives have little reach outside the usual circle of Russian partners and allies. “That doesn’t suffice for meaningful political action, especially as Russia’s leverage over Israel has suffered since 2022,” he told the Washington Report.

In Lund’s opinion, at this point Russian policy on Gaza seems to be mainly “about public posturing, encouraging antiU.S. moves, and attempting opportunistically to insert itself in Gaza diplomacy through Security Council initiatives, vetoes, and so on.” Such a strategy may harm U.S. interests and solidify Russia’s ties with Iran-allied actors, at the expense of its ties to Israel, but that’s about all it does, Lund maintains.

However, both Russia and Israel have to be very cautious about not harming each other’s interests. In Syria there has been Russian-Israeli coordination, which has, on the other hand, caused some grievances in Tehran.

As Israel has reportedly stopped routinely warning Moscow of air strikes inside Syria, further frictions may have dire consequences for both sides as the ties between the two countries are at the lowest point in the last 30 years. While the war in Gaza is gradually destabilizing the region, powerful non-state actors, most of which are allies of Iran and Russia (such as the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthis in Yemen, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq and Hamas) have already caused much damage to U.S. interests and Israel. Russia has also demonstrated its diplomatic leverage when Hamas released all captives with

dual Israeli-Russian citizenship without a formal prisoner swap agreement, like the ones that have been mediated through Qatar and Egypt.

On the other hand, Moscow must be very careful about how to deal with the current crisis in Gaza and not to provoke Israel into providing advanced military technology to Ukraine.

Despite Russia’s very close relations with Arab countries, and despite Arab popular support for the Palestinians, Katz said that no Sunni Arab government has been willing to join Hamas in the fight against Israel or to trade their alliances with the U.S. for ones with Russia. “To be brutally frank: Sunni Arab governments fearing an American withdrawal from the Middle East understand that U.S. support for Israel keeps the U.S. in the region, and so U.S. support for Israel actually serves their interests,” he told the Washington Report.

The ongoing diplomatic efforts to end the war in Gaza may open another window of opportunity for some diplomatic offensive. Although Washington perceives itself as the main diplomatic player along with other regional actors such as Tehran, Cairo, Riyadh and Doha, and to a lesser extent to European allies, the U.S. reputation and infamous role of the blind supporter of Israel’s destruction of Gaza has cost Washington whatever little political credibility it still had.

In Lund’s opinion, Russia, China or both may seek to launch some initiative. “If they do, they may well draw a positive response from states in the region that are upset about Washington’s pro-Israel policies and want to stick it to Biden. But it’s unlikely to have a meaningful impact on the Gaza war.” Moreover, given the complexity of the Middle Eastern situation coupled with the growing leverage of Middle Eastern powers in an ongoing redistribution of global power, Russia will have to walk the tightrope and balance between the competing interests of other actors in the region, such as Türkiye and the Gulf states as well as the U.S., China and India, and try not to risk its assets. ■

FATIH

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Gaza Horror Prompts Rapprochement Between Türkiye and Regional Adversaries

By Jonathan Gorvett

NOT SO LONG AGO, reports of tensions in the Aegean, Eastern Mediterranean, Horn of Africa and North Africa were daily fare in Turkish media.

In Libya, Turkish troops and their allies faced the Egyptian, French, Russian and UAE-backed Libyan National Army, while at sea, Turkish warships attempted to enforce maritime limits contested by Greece, Cyprus and the European Union (EU).

Meanwhile, in the Arabian Gulf, Türkiye’s ally Qatar was being blockaded by Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain, while Ankara and

Abu Dhabi battled for influence in Somalia, Somaliland, Ethiopia and Sudan.

Now, though, much of that has changed.

In recent months, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has visited and been visited by many of the leaders with whom he was recently at loggerheads. Investment deals have been signed, agreements to normalize relations have been inked and tensions have noticeably eased in a range of contested spaces.

Ironically, conflict in Gaza has also now added to the incentives for collaboration elsewhere.

“By increasing tension and risk in the region,” Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, Ankara director of the German Marshall Fund, told

Palestinian patients evacuated from Gaza arrive at Etimesgut Airport in Ankara, Türkiye, with their caregivers via a Turkish Ministry of Defense plane on Feb. 14, 2024.

KURT/ANADOLU VIA GETTY IMAGES

Jonathan Gorvett is a free‐lance writer specializing on European and Middle Eastern affairs.

the Washington Report , “Gaza increased the motivation for reconciliation, making it mandatory for regional countries to talk.”

Yet doubts remain as to how far this normalization can go, as current motivations and needs may prove temporary while underlying antagonisms remain unresolved.

ZERO PROBLEMS 2.0?

Türkiye’s foreign policy advances have clear echoes of an earlier wave of reconciliation. Known as the “Zero Problems with the Neighbors” policy, it saw Ankara attempt to bury the hatchet with Greece, Syria, Iran, Egypt, the Gulf states–and even Armenia.

However, much has changed since Ahmet Davutoglu—then Erdogan’s chief foreign policy adviser and now leader of the anti-Erdogan Future Party—first advanced this strategy in 2004. “Zero Problems was a policy of choice,” Unluhisarcikli says, “while what’s happening now is more a product of necessity.”

Recent years have seen the Turkish economy hit by high inflation—still at 64.86 percent in January 2024—along with a major currency devaluation and a range of other challenges. This has created a major need for foreign capital injections, with the Gulf a major potential source for these.

Thus, with the UAE also looking to diversify its oil-rich economy through overseas investment, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of the UAE was invited to Türkiye soon after the end of the Qatar blockade in 2021.

Erdogan then visited the UAE the following year to sign a $4.9 billion currency swap deal, bolstering Türkiye’s foreign exchange reserves.

This was followed by a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement between the two countries in July 2023. This aims to double annual bilateral trade to around $40 billion by 2028. With this, Erdogan was able to announce that relations with the UAE were now at the level of a “strategic partnership.”

STRATEGIC RIVALRIES

That partnership may also now play out in the geopolitical realm, after recent years of high tension with EU states, the U.S. and Middle Eastern powers had left Türkiye with few allies.

That isolation goes back to the Arab Spring, when Türkiye and ally Qatar broadly supported the popular uprisings— a position that the Gulf monarchies in particular found alarming.

Türkiye also gave shelter to Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood figures after the military crackdown in Egypt in 2013, while in Syria it continues to support the anti-Assad opposition forces in Idlib.

A more activist Turkish foreign policy back then also left Turkish boots-on-theground all over the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. In Libya, Türkiye ended up on a different side to the UAE, Egypt, France and Russia in that North African country’s conflict.

This in turn led to the UAE, Egypt, Israel and EU-member states France, Greece and Cyprus banding together over oil and gas rights in the Eastern Mediterranean, where Ankara contests current maritime boundaries.

All thought of Türkiye’s EU accession— considered a real, if distant, possibility during the “zero problems” period—then also became firmly banished.

In the Horn of Africa, the Türkiye-UAE rivalry also played out, with Türkiye supporting the government in Somalia, while the UAE supports the internationally unrecognized Somaliland.

In Sudan, too, Türkiye supported the regime of former President Omar al-Bashir, while the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt backed his ousting in 2019.

UNSUSTAINABILITY

Now though, with the Arab Spring long over and years of tension producing little major gains, “Ankara sees normalization with Egypt and the UAE as a means of breaking out of its years-long regional isolation,” Berkay Mandiraci, senior Türkiye analyst with the International Crisis Group,

told the Washington Report. “These normalization tracks also help taper down some tensions in Libya and other conflict theaters.”

Recently, several Muslim Brotherhood figures have been effectively expelled from Türkiye, improving relations with Cairo, while Erdogan has moved to reduce tensions with Greece. On a December 2023 visit to Athens, the Turkish leader said he wanted to turn the Aegean into “a sea of peace.”

Erdogan has also eased relations with NATO by agreeing to membership for Finland and Sweden. Türkiye will get new F16s (though not F-35s) from Washington, and Erdogan may visit the U.S. capital in April or May this year.

One other pillar of reconciliation has, however, recently become more problematic: Israel.

While relations had also been quietly improving, Oct. 7, 2023 brought that to an abrupt halt. Since then, “Ankara’s rhetoric criticizing Israel has been harsh,” says Mandiraci.

Yet at the same time, behind the scenes, “The diplomatic brass has invested efforts in keeping channels with the Israeli establishment open at an institutional level,” Mandiraci adds.

In the medium term, Türkiye may resume reconciliation with Israel, preserving some contact with another state key to Eastern Mediterranean disputes. There is also potential space for Türkiye in Gaza reconstruction, if not in mediation.

What happens later, however, when the Turkish economy improves, or the security situation changes, is of course another matter.

Fundamental issues, such as Greece and Türkiye’s overlapping air and maritime claims in the Aegean, or the Cyprus problem, or the future governance of Libya, or the possible independence of Somaliland, are far from being addressed, despite the easing of tensions.

Nonetheless, for many of those in the region exhausted by years of tension and horrified by the slaughter in Gaza, the current thaw among regional powers is very much welcome. ■

The Limitations of Elections in Resolving Political Divisions in Tunisia and Libya

By Mustafa Fetouri

Voting continues for a second round of local elections in Tunis, Tunisia amid a boycott by opposition political parties, on Feb. 4, 2024. More than 4 million voters are eligible to cast their ballot to choose local representatives.

TWO NORTH AFRICAN countries—Tunisia, where the Arab Spring was born, and Libya, where it died—are dealing with election challenges, but their main problems are very different. Tunisia’s main headache is the lack of economic growth; in Libya, competition among political players has led to a stalemate. Tunisia lacks Libya’s oil-generated billions of dollars (mostly lost to corruption at any rate), while Libya lack Tunisia’s peaceful political social atmosphere, one in which guns and bullets have no place in the political struggle.

TUNISIA’S PRESIDENT UP FOR REELECTION

Tunisians are heading to the polls again. Before the end of October 2024, they will vote for a new legislature and by early November they will vote for a new president. President Kais Saied has not an-

nounced whether he will seek a second term; if he does seek a second term to “finish his work,” reforming the political system as many of his supporters want, he will not face any serious challenger and is likely to easily win a second five-year term.

The only person to announce her candidacy, so far, is 40-year-old Olfa Hamdi, a completely unknown and fresh political outsider. She was the CEO of Tunisia’s national carrier, Tunisair, for less than two months when she was dismissed in February 2021. Hamdi describes her goal as being a “realization” of the missed 2011 Jasmine Revolution’s objectives. In a rare interview she said that the revolution was about “jobs, dignity and freedom” but “we missed jobs” while achieving the other two. Notably, she quoted the late U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s famous line that “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” Her Third Republic Party for Tunisia is as new to the political scene as she is. Not many people take her seriously—but then President Saied himself was an outsider without political credentials when he first burst into the scene and won the presidency five years ago.

The economy is the top election issue for Tunisians as they struggle to make ends meet. Voters are eager for change but most political parties are banned from campaigning on national TV stations and their leaders are being prosecuted. Hamdi’s Third Republic Party focuses on the economy but it offers no comprehensive economic plan and seems to be supportive of the current President Saied’s policies. Independents are expected to win most seats making it difficult to form a government.

Compared to next-door Libya, Tunisia appears to be doing much better in terms of stability and social peace. At least the country, despite all its quarrels and differences, did not slide into war in the aftermath of its 2011 revolt as its eastern neighbor did. Overall, however, Tunisia hasn’t made any leaps forward to become a politically stable and economically prosperous country. Mustafa Fetouri is a Libyan academic and freelance journalist. He received the EU’s Freedom of the Press prize. He has written extensively for various media outlets on Libyan and MENA issues. He has published three books in Arabic. His email is mustafa fetouri@hotmail.com and Twitter: @MFetouri.

PHOTO BY YASSINE GAIDI/ANADOLU VIA GETTY IMAGES

Since 2011, Tunisians have voted at least five times either in local or national elections or to approve a new constitution their country adopted twice (the last being in July 2022). Their Libyan neighbors voted only two times in the same time period. However, Tunisian stability is superficial: the current president has been running the country on his own while many opposition leaders have been jailed or sentenced in absentia like former president Moncef Marzouki who received an eight-year-jail term in February 2024 while in exile in France. Critics of the situation in the country, like social scientist Afif Bouni, think what appears to be success is only a “mirage of success” creating a bigger “illusion of achievements” than have really been achieved on the ground.

LIBYA ELECTIONS ON HOLD

During the last few years Libyans have also voted in some partial municipal elections but no such votes really delivered any tangible results in terms of local government services, governance and improved living conditions let alone having any effect at the national level. Libya remains politically divided between two different administrations, one in Tripoli recognized by the United Nations and another in Benghazi, in the east, recognized by nobody, conditions that make both local and national elections meaningless.

The last time U.N. mediators attempted to organize presidential and legislative elections in Libya was in December 2021, but differences over election laws, eligibility and a host of other issues made it impossible for the polls to take place. No serious attempt has so far been made to tackle the issues, despite the efforts of U.N. envoy Abdoulaye Bathily of Senegal, who is frequently described as “hesitant, unimaginative and unfair.” The biggest bone of contention among always-quarrelling political figures and parties is elections laws.

A positive side of the deadlock is the emerging national consensus that another violent episode will not produce any winners and would further divide the

country along regional lines, and this after it was divided along tribal lines years ago.

Libyan protagonists appear to agree on three nos: no war, no elections and no unified government before 2025. This means Libyans are likely to endure the status quo for at least another year before any serious work is done toward elections. Libyans hope elections, whenever they come, will end the long transitional period. Many are happy that war is not an option this time because it could be even more devastating than the last war in 2019-2020 and it might lead to a partition of the country.

SIMILAR RESERVATIONS TO ELECTIONS IN LIBYA AND TUNISIA

But in both Libya and Tunisia the legality of elections within the present constitutional settings in each country are a huge source of contention. In Tunisia the entire opposition is refusing to take part in any elections under the 2022 constitution, which was edited by the president himself who happened to be a former constitutional law professor before turning politician in 2019. Opponents claim that the document gives little authority to parliament because the president, not the prime minister, has veto powers and is not accountable to parliament, undermining democratic gains made since 2011.

Libya is similar but with a twist: the main

issues in contention are eligibility for the presidency and how to determine the legality of an election outcome. Last October, the parliament passed two new laws to govern the process: law 27 for parliamentarian elections and law 28 governing the presidential poll. However, neither law cleared up the issues of eligibility and determining the electoral winners. The U.N.’s mission in the country found the laws unhelpful.

Current Libyan laws exclude any holder of a second citizenship from running for office. Many presidential hopefuls are thought to have a second nationality including the eastern-based strongman General Khalifa Haftar, who is believed to be an American citizen. Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the son of the overthrown leader, enjoys wide public support to be president but is still wanted by the International Criminal Court despite being pardoned along with hundreds of others by Libya’s general amnesty law of 2015.

The presidential elections law, weirdly, requires two rounds of voting even if a candidate wins the first round with an absolute majority. Since it was passed, the law has become a source of contention and ridicule by many Libyans. Organizing elections and making sure everybody accepts their outcomes are big hurdles and even if they are overcome it is unlikely that elections will settle the country’s issues once and for all. ■

ARAB AMERICAN ACTIVISM

A Celebration of Palestinian Resilience

Billed as a celebration of resilience, the American Palestinian Women’s Association (APWA) hosted an evening event on March 2 in honor of International Women’s Day. Labeled “We Will Rise,” the program featured song, poetry, dabke and short videos describing some of APWA’s recent projects in Gaza since the war began in October 2023.

The mood in the auditorium of the Vienna, VA Community Center was solemn yet also uplifting. The program, hosted by member Tamara Zeidan, began with a lovely rendition of the anthem “Mawtini” (“My Homeland”) sung by Nibal Malshi, a vocalist from Haifa. APWA executive director Mona Sadeq introduced the association and described some of its projects, including financial support for an autistic program in Marka Refugee Camp in Jordan and congressional lobbying for a ceasefire. Treasurer Amal Garada gave a breakdown of dispersals and described the food packages that APWA distributed in recent weeks through its partners to families in the central Gazan city of Deir al-Balah. Later in the program the audience viewed short videos showing distributions of food, diapers and baby formula to Gaza.

And then the cultural part of the program began in earnest. The sweet soprano voice of Malshi filled the auditorium with the Fairuz song “Zahrat al-Mada’en,” known to and beloved by every child and adult in the Arab world. This song about Jerusalem under threat resonated with the audience, which was fully aware of the enormous restrictions placed on Jerusalem both before—and especially after–Oct. 7.

It is no easy thing to be a Gazan in the U.S. at this time, considering that the U.S. is complicit in Israel’s ongoing genocide. Poet Mohammad Arafat described daily contacts with his family in Gaza and how the dozens of people sheltering in his home barely missed being bombed to death. The audience held its collective breath as he read his poetry of loss and sorrow.

Event hosts and performers take a bow at the end of the American Palestinian Women’s Association program in Vienna, VA on March 2, 2024. Singer Nibal Malshi is in the center, surrounded by the dabke dancers and their trainers.

APWA recognized three women it labeled “women of impact,” and each is a force to reckon with.

Medea Benjamin, cofounder of Code Pink, has been a constant presence on Capitol Hill, leading delegations of activists demanding a ceasefire in Gaza. She strongly urged the audience not to give up on Congress and to make their voices heard; she acknowledged that it might seem futile at times, but relayed that congressional staffers have told her that when the public brings pressure to bear on members of Congress, staffers can supplement those efforts by pressuring them from within.

Hazami Barmada, a social innovator, impact strategist and activist, is the driving force behind the encampments outside the residence of Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC. In a video message, she emphasized the importance of grassroots activism and the need to go beyond calling for a ceasefire to demanding a reevaluation of U.S. support for Israel. The goal of the actions she has organized is to meet people complicit in the Israeli genocide where they are and to make them uncomfortable with their decisions, she said.

Adlah Sukkar is a Syrian American physician and the driving force behind Doctors Against Genocide, a group of concerned physicians that came together in 2023 as a response to the genocide in Gaza. It lobbies Congress and is trying to lobby the American Medical Association to

take a stand against genocide.

The evening felt like one long embrace. Attendee and Alexandria City Poet Laureate Zeina Azzam described the event as a “beautiful and nourishing evening” and told the Washington Report, “I felt the pride and solidarity in the room. The speakers offered inspiring words about the amazing activism in which our community, and our allies, have been engaged to create awareness about the war on Gaza and the injustices in Palestine, driving all of us to want to act to push for change.”—Ida Audeh

MUSIC & ARTS

“Israelism”: American Jews Confront Their Relationship to Israel

“Israelism” has hit a nerve. Postponements and cancellations have impacted scheduled public screenings of the new documentary, which presents the stories of two young people who have separated Zionism from their identities as Jews. Yet the controversy seems only to incite greater interest, to judge by the 829 attendees at a Jan. 21 online discussion of the film, with nearly 3,100 registrants using the event’s free link to watch the documentary itself.

One of the reasons why the film has become a lightning rod is because it critiques how “the Israel that is at the center of many of our [Jewish] identities is in many ways a fantasy…a Disneyland,” said Erin Axelman, co-director of the film (with Sam Eilertsen), speaking at the Voices From the

PHOTO FIRAS ALALLAQ

Holy Land (VFHL) event.

Peter Beinart, editor-at-large of Jewish Currents and moderator of the online discussion, personally experienced that struggle. Growing up, he was influenced by his grandmother who was forced to relocate repeatedly because of her Jewishness. For her, the existence of Israel “created a kind of psychological security” that made Zionism “nonnegotiable.”

Like Axelman, Beinart’s first visit to the West Bank triggered his transformation. “It was really within hours of that experience that I realized I would have to rethink some really important things.” He noted that his process of learning is ongoing. In particular, listening to Palestinians has helped him better envision the possibility of Jews and Palestinians coexisting in equality, he said.

One of the protagonists in “Israelism” is Simone Zimmerman, co-founder of IfNotNow, a Jewish organization opposed to the Israeli occupation. At the Jan. 21 discussion, she noted that social media is now delivering the same kind of transformative opportunities. American Jews can now see and hear directly from young people in Gaza “who speak great English, know how to use social media, and are telling the world the stories of the horrors that they’re experiencing.” They can also see and hear the celebratory videos from Israeli soldiers “who are live streaming their war crimes.”

Panelist Lubna Alzaroo is originally from Hebron, the West Bank setting for several scenes in “Israelism,” where Jewish Americans first encounter Israel’s apartheid system. An instructor at the University of Washington specializing in settler colonialism, Alzaroo first encountered American Jews through the group Birthright Unplugged, an organization that provides a counternarrative to the story that American Jews receive when they participate in Birthright visits to Israel. She witnessed the Americans “coming through Hebron and leaving in tears...Seeing that struggle is, I think, really important for me as a Palestinian.”

Beinart acknowledged that for Palestinians, having to repeatedly share their stories to help Jewish Americans untangle Zionism from their Judaism can be difficult and even

traumatizing. Alzaroo concurred, using the terms “hard” and “exhausting” to describe the effort. Particularly after Oct. 7, she said, it felt like people only cared about the issue because Israelis had been killed; Palestinians had to justify themselves because they weren’t “the perfect victims.”

Nonetheless, she distinguished between the explaining that Palestinians are called upon to do in planned, public debate-type events versus that which can occur in personal conversations. The former can recreate and normalize the power imbalance, while the latter are “absolutely worth it,” she said, pointing to the film “Israelism” itself as one fruit of exchanges between Palestinians and American Jews.

Zimmerman said she has been repeatedly approached after “Israelism” screenings by people who say, “your story is my story” and asked how to have conversations with family and friends who remain Zionist. She advises them to do so “with love” and “to show that you’re also in pain, and you’re also grieving”—but also to hold your position.

For herself, Zimmerman said, “the choice that I’ve made is to be raising my voice and helping mobilize as many people as possible to advocate for a ceasefire, to build up an uncompromising voice within the Jewish community calling for Palestinian freedom and an end to this genocidal violence in Gaza….A lot of people are mad at me for that, and I’m okay with that.”

Zimmerman finds affirmation in the various efforts to reclaim Jewish tradition outside of a Zionist framework, such as the work of the Israeli group Faithful Left, which uses Jewish texts and traditions to promote leftist politics within a religious framework; the growing number of non-Zionist and antiZionist synagogues in the U.S. that are enabling young Jews to return to their religious traditions without internal contradiction; and Rabbis for Ceasefire.

The event was co-sponsored by Northern New Jersey Jewish Voice for Peace and Independent Jewish Voices Canada.

Catherine Baker

HUMAN RIGHTS

Cultural Heritage Under Attack in Gaza

Considering the speed with which Israel has killed about 30,000 noncombatants, injured tens of thousands more and imposed famine conditions on the entire Gaza Strip, it is easy to lose sight of other targets of Israel’s carpet bombing, such as Gaza’s cultural heritage. This was the topic of a Feb. 15 virtual lecture held by the Jerusalem Fund featuring Dr. Akram M. Lilja, an expert in historic conservation and cultural heritage and the former director general of antiquities in Gaza, who now teaches in Sweden.

Lilja began by taking the audience on a brief tour of Gaza’s history, and it immediately became apparent that its size belies its significance. At one time Gaza was at the intersection of the ancient Spice Route and the Silk Road. Napoleon referred to Gaza as “the outpost of Africa, the door to Asia.” In every era, Gaza was a flourishing hub of international commerce; it holds archeological remains from every era. For that reason, Lilja maintains, Gaza’s sites belong not only to Palestine but are in fact part of world heritage.

Lilja described some of the monuments destroyed or damaged by Israel that have international significance: the Church of St. Porphyrius, the oldest active church in Gaza and the third oldest church in the world; Sayed Al-Hashim Mosque, one of

the largest mosques in Gaza, believed to be the burial place of the great-grandfather of the Prophet Muhammad; Al-Basha Palace, built in the mid-13th century and the seat of government during the Mamluk and Ottoman periods, later becoming the first girls’ secondary school in Gaza and the first archeological museum in Gaza; and the first floor of Isra’ University’s main building, which housed an archeological museum. All in all, Israel has bombed more than 200 sites of archeological significance. To date, 283 mosques and four churches have been completely or partially destroyed, including religious historical monuments.

International law clearly prohibits attacks on the cultural heritage of warring parties. The Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and its two protocols (1954 and 1999) prohibit “damage to cultural property belonging to any people whatsoever” and consider such acts “damage to the cultural heritage of all mankind.”

Why might Israel find it useful to target the cultural monuments of Gaza, which are supposed to be immune from attack? By attacking symbolic targets that are important to a people’s sense of who they

are, the goal seems to be to destroy Gazans’ “thread of continuity,” by harming their sense of belonging to Gaza, Lilja said. Attacks on cultural property are attacks on national identity construction and collective memory.

Lilja ended his presentation by outlining projects that can be initiated in the diaspora to help Gaza hold on to its cultural heritage. This includes developing educational programs within diaspora communities to teach language, history, traditional arts and practices to younger generations and advocating for policies and initiatives that recognize and support the preservation of cultural heritage in Palestine. He encouraged facilitating intergenerational dialog and knowledge transfer by creating spaces for elders to share their experiences (intangible cultural heritage) with younger generations. Networking and collaborating with Palestinian communities, cultural organizations, academic institutions and governmental agencies offer opportunities to share resources, best practices and experiences in preserving cultural heritage. The Bethlehem organization Centre for Cultural Heritage Preservation can serve as a liaison to connect organizations with related interests.

During the question-and-answer session, Jerusalem Fund board member and California State University professor Ahlam Muhtaseb described a project that was developed in 2022 to offer an immersive look into daily life in Gaza. The developer, a Gazan graduate student, sent a 360degree camera into Gaza and over the course of a year captured hundreds of reels of places and people living their lives, doing ordinary things—a kid skateboarding or walking through a neighborhood, the activity in a mosque or public bath, and so on. The video was spliced with current images of the same areas and structures, now in ruins. The project was made available to universities in California, and viewers who have never set foot in Gaza were moved to tears by the colossal material losses in Gaza that the world has allowed over the last several months.—

WAGING PEACE

Ida Audeh

Noura Erakat: Don’t Count on ICJ To Save Palestinians

Noura Erakat, a human rights attorney, associate professor at Rutgers University, coeditor of Jadaliyya and author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine, spoke at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies on Feb. 15 about the potential—and limits—of international law in Gaza.

South Africa’s landmark genocide case against Israel raised hopes that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) would call for an end to the destruction of Gaza. On Jan. 26, the ICJ issued a ruling that included six provisional measures but failed to order a stop to Israel’s onslaught. “The decision is actually precedent-setting in several regards,” Erakat said. “I know people were really, really, really disappointed that they didn’t demand a ceasefire,” she acknowledged; however, “that emphasis was misplaced because we should have been focusing on what the court actually did.”

“First of all, it [the ICJ] recognized that South Africa had prima facie jurisdiction: standing to bring the case,” Erakat noted, despite Israel’s argument that its conduct

The remains of Al‐Basha Palace in Gaza City, which served as a seat of power during the Mamluk and Ottoman periods, photographed on Feb. 9, 2024. Al‐Basha Palace is one of more than 200 sites of cultural and archeological significance in Gaza targeted by Israel since Oct. 7, 2023.

DAWOUD ABO ALKAS/ANADOLU VIA GETTY IMAGES

“should be evaluated by the laws of war, and not the genocide convention.” The judges overwhelmingly agreed that “four of the five enumerated acts [in the convention] were actually being committed on the ground” and “that the continuation of Israel’s campaign posed the risk of irreparable injury to the Palestinian people,” she explained.

“In so doing, it [the ICJ] rejected every single one of Israel’s arguments,” Erakat said. “Most significantly, it rejected the argument that this was a war of self-defense, at least at this stage.” The ruling also stymied “Israel’s argument that it has a right to [depopulate Gaza]” based on a “sui generis [unique] exception” to international law, a claim it has regularly invoked since 1948.

The court’s provisional ruling “was actually a very strong decision that we need to leverage” as a tool “to demand the means to impose an immediate ceasefire,” Erakat stressed. “Even if the court came out with a more strident ruling, it doesn’t have the authority to enforce it,” she added. “That authority is still our purview: it’s the work we do in our national governments.”

Erakat cited grassroots efforts across the world that have already utilized the ruling, including “nationals in the Netherlands who sued their government not to sell F-35 jet parts to Israel in light of this decision” and

the work of Japanese nationals to convince Itochu, a trading and investment company, to cut ties with Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit System. She also credited Mexican and Chilean citizens for convincing their governments to refer Israel to the International Criminal Court (ICC).

While the ICJ is also considering the legality of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Erakat is skeptical the court will find the country guilty of “an ethnic cleansing project of elimination in the settler-colonial sense.” This is because “the Nakba is naturalized in international law,” she said. The ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 by Zionist paramilitaries “was committed in the shadows of the drafting of the genocide convention, and Palestinians were excluded from its scope,” Erakat explained.

“The newly established United Nations had the opportunity to condition Israel’s U.N. membership on the return of Palestinian refugees but failed to do so,” she asserted. Instead, “the international community normalized the Nakba, accepted Israel’s claim for legal exception from wellestablished law,” legitimized the perpetual two-state “peace process” and “transformed Palestinian refugees into a humanitarian issue whose fate would be determined through political negotiations.” All of this, Erakat believes, regretably means “the

Nakba itself is beyond legal contestation” at the ICJ.

Although the ICJ proved receptive to South Africa’s arguments, Erakat does not believe that the court will “decide that this is genocide on the merits” when it eventually returns to the case. “So let me tell you now, six to thirteen years ahead of time: do not hold your breath,” she said. “Do not wait for them to save you. No one will save you. No one will save us. That is our job.”

Jack McGrath

Also Happening: Oppression and Violence in the West Bank

With so much attention on Gaza, it’s all too easy for the media to overlook increased Israeli military actions and growing settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.

More than 700,000 Israeli settlers live in 279 illegal settlements across the occupied West Bank, including 14 settlements in occupied East Jerusalem. Since Oct. 7, Israeli military and settler attacks have killed more than 400 Palestinians there.

Tariq Hathaleen is among the three million Palestinians who live in the West Bank. An English language teacher and community leader in the South Hebron Hills, he was a panelist at the Voices From the Holy Land online film salon on Feb. 18. His village, where Israel has demolished more than 80 buildings, is among more than 30 that are unrecognized by Israel.

In 2000, a security guard from the adjacent settlement attacked Hathaleen’s oldest brother. “This settler shot at and then beat my brother, who spent ten days in a coma and awoke with severe brain damage and a loss of memory,” he said. Such settler violence is not an isolated act, it’s part of a strategy of occupation and annexation by Israel, which gives subsidies and guns to settlers.

“The settlers, the occupation army, the police—they are the same,” said Hathaleen, and settlers often feel they can act with impunity. A settler militia attacked residents of Umm Al-Khair the night of Oct. 29, 2023. “They held more than 17 people, including children. I recognized the settlers from their voices, although they came

Palestinians dig graves for Gazans killed in overnight Israeli air strikes in Khan Yunis, on Feb. 26, 2024.

SAID KHATIB/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

masked and in military uniform. A man held a gun at the back of my head and warned two times that he would shoot me. I took the shahada [declaration of faith] which, in Islam, you do when you feel that this will be your last second in life.”

All three panelists ridiculed the Biden administration imposing financial sanctions and visa bans against just four settlers in the West Bank who have been accused of attacking Palestinians—as if that would change anything amid widespread, statesanctioned violence. (In March, Biden announced sanctions against three additional settlers and two small settlements.)

East Jerusalem is also often the site of violent incidents between Palestinians and settlers. “Many of the radical Jews live in or around Jerusalem and are always going into the city to start problems,” said panelist Omar Haramy, who is on the steering committee of Kairos Palestine, and describes himself as “an Arab, Palestinian, Jerusalemite and a Christian of Greek Orthodox faith.” About 400,000 Palestinians live in East Jerusalem, “but Israel is trying to Judaize the whole city, devoting lots of resources, lots of energy to the project,” he noted.

Panelists agreed that a ceasefire to end the genocide in Gaza is a prerequisite for

a reduction of violence in the West Bank. “Let’s end the siege of Gaza,” said Jonathan Kuttab, co-founder of the Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq. “Let’s begin to lift the burdensome occupation. And then let’s start a new conversation that’s based on justice, on equality, on human rights and human respect. There are solutions; it’s not that there aren’t. There’s just not yet the political will to bring it about….We should be open to new possibilities.”

Ariel Gold, moderator of the salon and executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation USA, added to Kuttab’s note of hope. “I never thought I would see the numbers of people out in the streets around the world for Palestine,” she said. “These are the largest anti-war protests that we have seen since the U.S. invaded Iraq. It’s truly phenomenal. These are young people of many different racial, ethnic and cultural backgrounds. And they see the Palestinian liberation movement as their struggle, as well as a universal struggle against racism, hatred and oppression.”

Massachusetts Peace Action and the Network of Evangelicals for the Middle East co-sponsored this event.

Steven Sellers Lapham

“Kibbutzim” Set up to Protest Genocide in Gaza

During the last week of January, activists who were appalled by the genocide in Gaza decided to set up an encampment outside the McLean, VA home of Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his wife Evan Ryan, a White House cabinet secretary. The ask was fairly straightforward: a ceasefire in Gaza. The site, referred to by the activists as “Kibbutz Blinken,” consists of a few tents to accommodate those who spend the night, a tent for supplies and lots of flags and signs lining both sides of the street.

At around 7 am every workday, at least half a dozen activists stand across the street from the house and next to the driveway, holding signs for the edification of rush-hour commuters. The chanting begins when Blinken’s driver arrives to take him to work: “Secretary of Genocide”; “War criminal”; “Israel bombs, USA pays.” (Sometimes the chants offer career advice to a staff member sneaking in through a side door or to Ryan: “Get another job. It’s not that hard.”) When Blinken’s limo pulls out of the driveway, the ceremonial spilling of “blood” into the street begins. Activists are on hand to greet him with chants when he returns in the evening.

The action to protest the genocide in Gaza is the brainchild of the charismatic and inspiring Hazami Barmada, a social impact strategist. Her Instagram page is full of videos of these actions and of reactions from people around the world who are inspired by them, have suggestions, want to donate and brainstorm about actions they could take locally. The encampment has had visitors from Ohio and Chicago, and at least one person moved from Boston and is now a regular at the site. Since Ramadan began, regulars at Kibbutz Blinken have invited community members to join them for evening iftar, donated by area restaurants.

Soon after U.S. Air Force member Aaron Bushnell self-immolated at the Israeli Embassy, the same group set up an encampment there (“Kibbutz Israel”). On Feb. 25, they set up tables, signs and Palestinian flags on the sidewalk outside the embassy’s front gate. The display was bold and impressive.

People attend the funeral for 16‐year‐old Palestinian Mustafa Abu Shelbek, who was killed by Israeli occupation forces in the West Bank’s Qalandia refugee camp, on March 4, 2024.

ULET IFANSASTI/GETTY IMAGES

siren recordings at eardrum-piercing volume and tried to intimidate individual activists by surrounding each one and broadcasting their own messages. Food from the embassy was brought to them. The proceasefire activists retained their cool and did not engage.

They plan to keep both protest sites active until a ceasefire is announced.

Ida Audeh

Mourning Aaron Bushnell Outside The Israeli Embassy

People holding candles, signs and Palestinian flags shared their grief for the death of U.S. Air Force service member Aaron Bushnell outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC and at vigils around the country on Feb. 26. Bushnell, 25, livestreamed his final message standing in front of the gates of that embassy in his Air Force uniform the previous day: “My name is Aaron Bushnell. I am an activeduty member of the United States Air Force and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.” Then he set himself on fire as he shouted “Free Palestine” six times to protest Israel’s war on Gaza. As Bushnell screamed in pain, a law enforcement officer yelled to “get on the ground” and a second officer pointed a gun at him while another called out “I don’t need guns, I need fire extinguishers.”

The embassy staff were clearly rattled. Barmada describes: “The people going in and out of the embassy and the staff are extremely hostile. They constantly harass us, they say very vulgar things, they curse us out. When we hold posters of burned and injured Palestinian children, they will laugh, they smile….They constantly complain to the police, they constantly ask for us to be removed, and it is quite ironic and hypocritical that a government that has systematically ethnically cleansed and removed people from their land is uncomfort-

able with settlements.” Because the group has faced hostility and even terror, especially when spending the night in the tents, they have hired security.

By the time the Washington Report went to visit the site, the embassy staff had apparently called for reinforcements. On March 15, about 15 pro-Israel activists, wearing and waving Israeli flags, were parading down the sidewalk. Several UHaul vans were parked in front of the embassy, blocking visibility of the pro-ceasefire tables and signs. They blasted emergency

Bushnell joined the Air Force in May 2020 and worked as a cyber-defense operations specialist at Lackland Air Force base in San Antonio, TX. His service was due to end in May and he was registered to attend Southern New Hampshire University. Hours before lighting himself on fire, Bushnell posted a Twitch link on his Facebook page with the caption: “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.” He

Activists throw fake blood at a motorcade departing from Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s home in McLean, VA on Jan. 4, 2024.

YASIN OZTURK/ANADOLU VIA GETTY IMAGES

The “Kibbutz Israel” encampment outside of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC, on March 15, 2024.

PHOTO I. AUDEH

also sent emails to news outlets warning, “Today, I am planning to engage in an extreme act of protest against the genocide of the Palestinian people.”

Former Army intelligence officer Josephine Guilbeau spoke to reporters outside the Israeli Embassy, saying Bushnell’s death cannot be in vain. “His message needs to get out. We also need to support anybody else like Aaron who’s having these feelings because how are we supposed to deal with a genocide?...Our government thinks we’re going to watch this unfold for five months now and there aren’t going to be any mental issues? Of course—there are mental issues across the board! Anyone with access to the Internet is watching a genocide unfold in modern-day times.”

The U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations posted a statement on Feb. 27 saying, we “know too well the great moral brink of sadness and frustration caused by President Biden’s steadfast support for the Israeli government’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. We encourage everyone who is frustrated and saddened by U.S. support for the genocide to join the front lines of the movement to peacefully stop it. Please do not harm yourself; this is not what God or the victims of this genocide ask of you. We need your voice, your time and your efforts more than ever.”

In December, a woman wrapped in a Palestinian flag lit herself on fire in front of the Israeli Consulate in Atlanta to protest the war on Gaza. She survived.

—Delinda C. Hanley

“Hands off Rafah” Rally at Israeli Embassy

The Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC on March 2 was the scene of a massive protest, “Hands off Rafah,” part of a worldwide day of action against the ongoing

genocide in Gaza. The rally was held days after 25-year-old active-duty Air Force member Aaron Bushnell self-immolated in front of the Israeli Embassy.

Thousands of protesters gathered outside the embassy’s exterior, which was ensconced with posters of Israelis kidnapped by Hamas on Oct. 7, along with Israeli flags in honor of those killed during Hamas’ invasion.

Speakers described the ongoing Israeli assault as one of the most documented genocides in history and demanded it be brought to an immediate end via a ceasefire. Protesters also called for the release of all Palestinian political prisoners, an end to U.S aid to Israel and the resumption of funding to the UNRWA aid agency.

At the conclusion of the rally, the massive crowd took over the streets, disrupting traffic along the Connecticut Avenue thoroughfare, while marching to Israeli Ambassador Michael Herzog’s residence.

Phil Pasquini

A “Two Plate Solution” Pop-Up

By March 14, the third day of a Washington, DC restaurant’s pop-up fundraising dinners, dubbed the “Two Plate Solution,” there was controversy—as fraught as almost every discussion of the Israel-Palestine issue can be in this city. There was such a big fuss that it captured the attention of a Washing-

Vigilers gather outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC on Feb. 26, 2024, the day after Aaron Bushnell’s self‐immolation.

STAFF PHOTO D. HANLEY

Human rights activists participate in the “Hands off Rafah” rally outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC on March 2, 2024.

STAFF PHOTO P. PASQUINI

ton Post food reporter who wrote an excellent article about it, touching on other Middle Eastern food fights in Seattle, Philadelphia and Brooklyn.

The Two Plate Solution invitation promised a six-course Palestinian-Israeli meal to benefit the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund and Women Wage Peace, an Israeli organization. The dinners were cooked by Nesrin Abaza, my family’s long-time Palestinian-Jordanian American friend, at the Pan-Latin DC restaurant, El Secreto de Rosita, she co-owns with her husband Mauricio Fraga-Rosenfeld.

While many restaurants, NGOs and even bookstores like ours (Middle East Books and More) are holding events to raise funds for Gaza, there was an immediate outcry on the restaurant’s Instagram page, calling the dinners “inappropriate and tone deaf” during a war in which Israel is blocking aid from reaching starving Palestinians in Gaza. “To see them fundraising for an Israeli organization and a Palestinian one, it’s very both sides,” said Jinan Deena, a well-known Palestinian-Honduran activist/food educator/chef also based in Washington, DC, who pointed out “there is nothing equal about the situation in the Middle East.” Israelis, she argued, “don’t need assistance. Those in Gaza are the ones clinging to life.” Deena hosts pop-ups she calls Bayti

(“My home”), which she describes as a Palestinian hospitality culinary experience. Deena was especially triggered because Israeli cuisine frequently appropriates Palestinian and other Arab foods.

In response to Deena, Abaza posted, “We must engage with all sides and be able to communicate, to discuss our differences, to bring humanity back to the table.” Abaza, who spent time in Beirut before the civil war, grew up in Greece, where our families became close when our dads worked for Voice of America. She traveled to Greece in 2016 to serve as an interpreter at a Syrian refugee camp. Abaza and Abbie Rosner, the Jewish American writer who cohosted and helped cook for the fundraisers, explained to Washington Post readers and Two Plate Solution diners why they decided to host the dinners. Rosner told us about living in Israel for almost three decades and described her best friend and culinary mentor, Balkees Abu Rabiya, a Palestinian cook from Nazareth. Rosner wrote a book called Breaking Bread in Galilee: A

Culinary Journey Into the Promised Land.

Deena, Abaza and Rosner each believe that sitting down and talking over a shared meal is the best way to hear each other’s stories. In fact, Deena and Abaza sat down for 90 minutes on the last day of the popup. The Post article concludes, “The women said they didn’t agree on everything, but they were fine with that. Their beliefs don’t have to align perfectly for them to find common ground. Deena said, ‘Conversation is one of the best ways, over a meal, to get through to people.’”

Abaza sent an email commenting on the Post article to her Beirut friends who’d gathered for the feast on the last night: “I think the most important sentence was at the end with Jinan’s quote, which was the whole purpose of the event!” —Delinda

Join Iqraa in Running for a Brighter Palestine

C. Hanley

The ongoing assault on Gaza is the most disheartening event I’ve witnessed in my lifetime. Fortunately, it’s not the end of the story. As Iqraa runners, we’re still committed to serving Palestine by supporting education and will continue our volunteer work in 2024. The brutal assault on Gaza makes our efforts more necessary than ever—and to be honest, there’s hope in action, and it’s healthy and therapeutic to run.

What does Iqraa do and how do we do it? In a watermelon seed, we run—since our founding in 2008—and raise money to expand educational opportunities for Palestinians. Our fundraising is focused at the university level, supporting annual scholar-

Diners listen as Nesrin Abaza (r) and Abbie Rosner (c) explain El Secreto de Rosita's special "Two Plate Solution" menu.

PHOTO COURTESY NERMIN ABAZA

Members of a past Iqraa running team, after raising money for university scholarships in Palestine.

PHOTO COURTESY

IQRAA

ships for Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and Jordan through our partnership with United Palestinian Appeal (UPA), which implements and oversees the Mahmoud Darwish Scholarship program. UPA is certified by the IRS in its charitable mission and rated at four stars (out of four) for accountability and finance, culture and community, and leadership and adaptability.

On the running side, we train with our Marathon Charity Cooperation (MCC) partners, meeting every Saturday from the beginning of May through the end of October at five to six venues in the Washington, DC metro area. These training runs prepare our runners for a variety of local races, typically from a 10K to a marathon of their choosing. The flagship event is the Marine Corps Marathon on Oct. 27 this year.

In addition to almost six months of training and coaching, the MCC partner charities provide aid stations with simple refreshments during the training runs and support our race day efforts at the Parks Half Marathon (Sept. 8) and Marine Corps Marathon. These races and each of the partners are located in the DC metro area, and we’re open to experienced runners who live elsewhere joining us.

Iqraa is a non-partisan running group with no political stance other than our deep commitment to helping Palestine shine intellectually. Our slogan—on our running shirts— is “Running for a Brighter Palestine!”

We’re holding information sessions at UPA’s Dupont Circle office on April 17 and 20, and MCC training starts on May 4. Learn more about Iqraa at <iqraadc.org>. Contact Iqraa coordinator, Kirk Campbell, at <kirkcruachan@yahoo.com>.

All are welcome to join us as we run for a brighter Palestine!—Kirk Campbell

The Houthis as Independent Actors

Amid the Biden administration’s continued bombardment of Yemen, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft (QI) hosted a virtual program on Jan. 26 to examine Washington’s ongoing failure to stop Houthi attacks in the Red Sea. Trita Parsi, executive vice president at QI, moderated the panel, which included Bruce Riedel, retired CIA analyst, senior adviser to four U.S. presidents

and author of America and the Yemens; Shireen Al-Adeimi, QI non-resident fellow; and Akbar Shahid Ahmed, senior diplomatic correspondent at the Huffington Post

While Washington and much of the media have characterized the Houthis as a proxy militia that disrupts Red Sea commerce at Iran’s behest, that explanation is erroneous, speakers maintained. “This idea that they’re proxies, of course, is just completely ridiculous,” said Al-Adeimi. “It speaks to the lack of understanding of who Yemenis are, what their motivations are, what their relationship is to Iran, and what their own geopolitical interests are in the region,” she argued. “The Houthis are not a proxy of Iran,” Riedel agreed. “I’ve heard otherwise quite knowledgeable Americans, experts on diplomacy, say in the last several days that all of this is being directed by Tehran. No, it’s not!”

While the Houthis receive support from Iran based on their shared opposition to Israel, the United States and Saudi Arabia, they are stridently independent actors. Al-Adeimi noted that Iran vocally opposed the Houthis’ takeover of Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, but was bluntly

rebuked by the militants. “The Houthis have very explicitly not followed Iranian advice,” Riedel added.

Al-Adeimi placed the Houthis’ actions in the context of Yemen’s longstanding solidarity with Palestine. Royalist Yemen opposed the 1947 U.N. partition of Palestine, communist South Yemen closed the Bab el-Mandeb Strait during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and President Ali Abdullah Saleh supported the PLO throughout his 33-year reign, she recounted. “Whichever government we’ve had in power in Yemen, they’ve been aligned with the people in their support for Palestinians and the Palestinian cause,” Al-Adeimi said. “The Houthi response in Yemen is a natural extension of that.”

The United States and the United Kingdom have depicted Houthi attacks as entirely self-serving, with White House condemnations omitting mention of Palestine and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak decrying the “malign narrative that this is about Israel and Gaza.” Al-Adeimi pointed out that the Houthis “never disrupted global shipping or Israel-bound ships throughout the

Interest,” Glazer said, “Our film shows where dehumanization leads….Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of

Protesters participate in a demonstration for Palestine near the Dolby Theatre, home of the Oscars ceremony, in Hollywood, CA on March 10, 2024. More than 1,000 people marched through the area, blocking roads and causing a delay to the Oscars broadcast. During the ceremony, director Jonathan Glazer made headlines for speaking out against Israel’s assault on Gaza. Accepting an award for his film about the Holocaust, “The Zone of

Oct. 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza.”

PHOTO SAMIR TWAIR

nine years that they’ve been fighting” against the Saudi-led and U.S.-armed Gulf coalition that intervened in the Yemeni civil war. “They’ve [the Houthis] said from the beginning: lift the blockade in Gaza, and we’re going to stop rerouting ships that are Israel-bound,” she said.

While the Houthis’ efforts reap substantial domestic support in Yemen and heighten the movement’s regional stature, they are not without drawbacks. The Houthis “have a lot to lose here,” Al-Adeimi contended. “Yemenis have suffered under the [coalition-imposed] blockade…and they’re very close to achieving this peace deal with Saudi Arabia,” she said. The conflict has been frozen since 2022, when the parties reached a ceasefire and Riyadh eased its devastating siege, but “Saudi is going to think twice before signing a deal with what their allies, the United States, have called terrorists,” she reasoned.

The United States initially proscribed the Houthis as a Foreign Terrorist Organization and Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGT) during the final weeks of the Trump administration in January 2021. The Biden administration promptly revoked the status “in recognition of the dire humanitarian situation in Yemen” before reinstating the SDGT designation in February 2024. According to Al-Adeimi, “The Biden administration knows fully well that this is going to cause massive disruptions to aid,” as the Houthis “are the de facto government and they control an area where 70 to 80 percent of the [total] population resides.”

Terrorist designations restrict the operational ability of aid groups, while punitive penalties for violations incentivize banks to over-comply with sanctions by prohibiting all business in the targeted nation. “Terrorist designations by the United States have always been very political,” said Riedel. “Do we really want to establish that firing drones is an act of terrorism? I don’t think that is in the American national interest.”

The Biden administration aims to restore Red Sea commerce by reducing the Houthis’ military capabilities through airstrikes on critical launch sites and weapons silos, Ahmed noted. “Clearly, Houthi capacity has not been degraded,” he observed, as attacks have persisted and even expanded to include the use of underwater drones. The U.S. has also intercepted multiple Iranian ships carrying Yemen-bound military aid, but the impact of these seizures is likely negligible.

Nearly a decade of asymmetric warfare against adversaries armed with U.S. planes, bombs and drones has left the Houthis well-prepared to endure Washington’s air campaign. “The Houthis could be able to sustain what they’re doing indefinitely without Iranian support,” as a “lot of the equipment that they’re using to make these things [weapons] are recycled pieces of tin and steel and stuff like that,” asserted Riedel. “We’re not bombing Germany in 1944,” he remarked, “we’re firing a several million-dollar missile at a facility which looks a lot like a neighborhood garage.”

With the Houthis evidently undeterrable

and U.S. airstrikes incapable of preventing attacks, the only way to stabilize the Red Sea is for Washington to impose a ceasefire on Israel, the panel concurred. Riedel characterized the argument that “there really isn’t much Biden can do to press Netanyahu for a ceasefire” as “hogwash” because “every day we provide Israel with the missiles, with the drones [and] with the ammunition that it needs.” He described how former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft kept Israel out of the First Gulf War by withholding Identification Friend or Foe codes from the Israeli Air Force, “which sent a signal very quietly…that if you operate in Iraqi airspace, we will shoot you down. That’s leverage.” —Jack McGrath

BOOK TALKS

Sanctions: Ineffective Economic Warfare

The controversial subject of U.S. sanctions against Iran was the focus of a Feb. 15 online discussion hosted by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft (QI).

In their new book, How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare, authors Narges Bajoghli, Vali Nasr, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani and Ali Vaez argue that punishing sanctions against Iran have not only been unsuccessful, but counterproductive.

“We wanted to bring together a comprehensive study looking at the impact of sanctions not only economically…but also from

Thousands attend a rally in support of Palestine in Sana’a, Yemen on March 15, 2024.

MOHAMMED HAMOUD/ANADOLU VIA GETTY IMAGES

the perspective of different sectors of society, both those that benefit from sanctions, including those connected to the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] and the supreme leader’s office, as well as those affected in adverse ways throughout the population,” Bajoghli, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), said.

The growth of the black market under sanctions has resulted in the construction of new high-rise buildings and luxury malls for those who trade everything from foreign currency to medicine underground. Meanwhile, ordinary people who were once in the middle class are getting poorer every day, unable to access basic necessities at reasonable prices, Bajoghli explained.

The black market has been given staying power and legitimacy by the realization that sanctions will likely remain in place for the short- to medium-term. “They stick, so therefore there is a vested interest now to create…infrastructure that allows for trade to happen away from the U.S. dollar,” Bajoghli said.

Sanctions, Nasr argued, have also made Iran “more aggressive, more nuclear, more dictatorial at home. On every indices that sanctions were supposed to work, they have had the opposite effect.”

The examples of Iran ramping up its aggression in response to sanctions are numerous, Nasr, also a professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS, argued. “They will build a nuclear program to force the United States to negotiate over sanctions. They will become involved in aggressive behavior in the region in order to force the United States back [to negotiations]. They insist on controlling Iraq in order to have outlets for Iran’s economy. Even if Iran is at the negotiating table…if you can’t or won’t lift sanctions those talks won’t go anywhere.”

In light of this, policymakers in Washington must discern the purpose of their sanctions, he urged: “Are they just punitive, are they for regime change or do they have a very specific goal in mind?” Nasr said the authors are “basically telling American policymakers that maybe it’s time for the United States to stop and pause and think.”

Nasr believes the Iranians have learned they are not going to receive any concessions from the United States by behaving well or reducing nuclear centrifuges, particularly after the Trump administration dropped out of the 2015 nuclear deal, despite Iran’s compliance. He described Tehran’s philosophy as, “You’re only going to get a response from the United States by becoming bigger and more menacing.”

This is the overarching problem with sanctions from a strategic perspective, Nasr argued. “It’s in that sense that sanctions have become completely counterproductive. So today we see an Iran that is far more dangerous in terms of its nuclear program than it was in 2015.”

Elaine Pasquini

The Collapse of Lebanon and the Women Who Survive

The Middle East Institute and the American Task Force on Lebanon held a virtual book talk on March 1 featuring award-winning multimedia journalist Dalal Mawad, who spoke about her recently released book All She Lost: The Explosion in Lebanon, the Collapse of a Nation and the Women who Survive. The Lebanese writer was a senior producer with the Associated Press (AP) based in Beirut when twin blasts rocked the city’s port on Aug. 4, 2020. The blasts were one the largest non-nuclear explosions in recent history, killing at least 220 people, wounding more than 7,000 and causing massive property damage. “The explosion was really the apocalypse and the death of

the Lebanon that I once knew,” she told the French-language Lebanese newspaper L’Orient-Le Jour. “For me and for many people, there is always a before and after Aug. 4. There’s something that died on this day, forever, that I’m never going to get back. It’s maybe a relationship I had with Beirut, my sense of security and safety.”

After Mawad moved to Paris to work as a freelance producer for CNN, she took a close look at her AP reporting in the aftermath of the blast and noticed that most of her interviews were with women. “Arab women are incredible storytellers but they rarely have a safe place or the opportunity to use their voices,” she said. Overall, women don’t write the history of the world even though they play a prominent role in events.

The story of Lebanon’s civil war, from 1975 to 1990, has been told by the winners, foreigners or experts but not by ordinary Lebanese survivors. The grievances that caused the civil war have never been addressed, so the war never ends. Mawad believes that documenting the port explosion and the civil war are the first steps toward truth and accountability. She hopes amplifying the voices of families calling for a port fact-finding mission will help victims recover.

Mawad spent two years interviewing survivors of the port explosion who lost loved ones. “I’d ask a general question and the interviewee would take the lead and tell me what they wanted to tell me. I recorded hours of interviews and returned for more… I used chunks of narration as is and then added context in my voice, including the recent history of Lebanon to explain to a non-Lebanese audience.”

Some of the women have turned grief into meaningful action, including daughters and mothers who lead the survivors’ fight for justice. Others, like Mawad, have left Lebanon. Those who remain lurch from crisis to crisis or have adjusted to the trauma of Lebanon’s economic calamity. The women who share their extraordinary stories of unimaginable loss, tragedy and corruption show us that history repeats itself in Lebanon—and everywhere else—when there is impunity.—Delinda C. Hanley

Correio Do Povo, Porto Alegre, Brazil

Lianhe Zaobao, Singapore

Daily Star, Beirut, Lebanon

The Irish Times, Dublin, Ireland

Middle East Books Review

All books featured in this section are available from Middle East Books and More, the nation’s preeminent bookstore on the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy.

www.MiddleEastBooks.com • (202) 939-6050 ext. 1101

Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-1978

By Geoffrey Levin, Yale

University Press, 2023, hardcover, 320 pp. MEB $38

Reviewed by Allan C. Brownfeld

Many are unaware of the fact that American Jews have a long history of debating issues related to the rights of Palestinians. In Our Palestine Question, Geoffrey Levin, assistant professor of Middle Eastern and Jewish studies at Emory University, recovers the voices of those Jews who first called for an honest reckoning of the plight of the indigenous population of Palestine.

These now largely forgotten voices include a former Yiddish journalist, antiZionist Reform rabbis and young leftwing activists. They felt drawn to support Palestinian rights by their understanding of Jewish history and their commitment to the Jewish moral and ethical tradition—which they saw being violated.

Levin notes, “It was 1953 when Rabbi Morris Lazaron walked through the Shatila refugee camp [in Lebanon], witnessing firsthand the suffering of Palestinian families who had lost their homes during the war in 1948. The ‘illimitable misery’ of the refugees had a decisive impact on the former head rabbi of the prestigious Baltimore Hebrew Congrega-

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.

tion. After his trip, Lazaron began calling on the Israeli government to recognize the right of Palestine’s Arab refugees to return to their homes and urged Israel to admit 100,000 immediately.”

Lazaron was an active member of the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism which had been established in 1942, Levin notes, “by a group of Reform rabbis unsettled by their denomination’s endorsement of Zionist aims. The Council envisioned Palestine’s future as a nonsectarian democracy for all its citizens and encouraged U.S. leaders to coordinate with the U.N. to settle displaced Holocaust survivors in countries throughout the world.”

Levin tells the story of a number of other Jewish Americans who embraced Palestinian rights, including academic Don Peretz, journalist William Zukerman, Rabbi Elmer Berger and philanthropists James Marshall and Lessing J. Rosenwald.

In the case of Peretz, he arrived as a 26-year-old in Israel, a young U.S. Army veteran on his way to deliver aid to recently displaced Palestinians as part of a

mission for the Quaker-affiliated American Friends Service Committee. When he returned to New York, he enrolled in Columbia University and began work on his doctoral dissertation on the Palestinian refugee question. He was soon hired by the American Jewish Committee, then proclaiming itself a “non-Zionist” group, and became the organization’s first Middle East consultant. He was told to put together an Arab refugee relief initiative with humanitarian aims.

Peretz detailed Israel’s “inflexible” position and its blaming of the refugee problem on Arab leaders ordering evacuations of Palestinian towns and villages in 1948, for which no evidence was ever provided and Israel’s own “new historians” later showed was without any foundation. As a result of constant Israeli pressure, the American Jewish Committee ultimately ended its relationship with Peretz and joined other Jewish organizations in embracing Zionism.

Levin also tells the story of former Yiddish journalist William Zukerman, who started an English-language newsletter, supported by the American Council for Judaism, and to which Peretz became a regular contributor. Zukerman’s concern about Zionism went back many years. In April 1934, he wrote in The Nation that “Jewish fascism” was poised to take over the Zionist movement.

The American Council for Judaism’s executive director, Rabbi Elmer Berger, was a key figure in early efforts to question and oppose Zionism. Berger was active in the American Friends of the Middle East (AFME), which led to his relationship with Fayez Sayegh, who headed the Arab Information Office in New York. Berger also became close to Dorothy Thompson, the prominent antiNazi journalist who later became an advocate for Palestinian rights and was a leading member of AFME, which was partially financed by the CIA to counterbalance the weight of the pro-Israel lobby.

Berger was also a valued friend and adviser to the Washington Report’s cofounders.

During the Eisenhower administration, Levin writes, “A close relationship devel-

oped between Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern, South Asian and African Affairs Henry Byroade and Berger. Berger had a hand in two of Byroade’s speeches in 1954. Byroade called on Arabs to accept Israel’s existence and on Israel to ‘drop your conqueror attitude and see your future as a Middle East state and not as a headquarters of worldwide groupings of people of a particular religious faith who must have special rights within and obligations to the Israeli state.’ This statement echoed the typical Council rhetoric.”

Also discussed is the group Breira, which attracted left-wing Jews including Noam Chomsky and Israeli Knesset member Uri Avnery. Breira, Levin points out, was the “first national American Jewish organization to openly oppose Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.” Israel finally succeeded in isolating Breira’s members from the American Jewish community, and the group ultimately disbanded. Today, of course, its successor groups—IfNotNow, Jewish Voice for Peace, Americans for Peace Now and a host of others—are thriving.

Levin concludes: “Whether Israelis want to admit it or not, the Palestinian question has always been their country’s most central, if not definitional dilemma… .The circle of American Jews critiquing Israeli policies has grown larger and larger...Palestinian rights advocacy has become a realm of Jewish politics in and of itself…It will define the transnational relationship between Jews even more as time goes by.”

Geoffrey Levin has performed a notable service by casting light on a chapter of American Jewish history of which too few are aware and which is likely to grow in importance in the future.

Behind You Is the Sea: A Novel

By Susan Muaddi Darraj, HarperVia, 2024, hardcover, 246 pp. MEB $26

Reviewed by Steve France

You might as well know right away that Behind You Is the Sea is a fun read. Palestinian American Susan Muaddi

Darraj is a warm and deft storyteller with a wicked wit. Her new novel about the lives of Palestinian immigrants in Baltimore has universal appeal. Readers can tell their friends they are reading about these immigrants adapting to being Americans—a classic genre.

Those whose hearts bleed for Palestine, however, may find themselves uncomfortable with stories of Palestinians escaping endless U.S.-funded horrors in their homeland for a piece of the American pie. Such a move seems to go against the Palestinian virtue of sumud —Arabic for “fortitude” and “steadfastness”—which is about never giving up.

Palestinians invest in this national stubbornness with humor, wisdom, pride and grit to carry their griefs and frustrations with style. Their sumud is a wonder to behold. But does it mean they can’t settle for ordinary happiness in America? Sumud can seem like a poor fit for the task of becoming American, which generally requires treating old-world cares and habits as distant memories.

Darraj keeps the focus on her characters’ American lives but signals her awareness of this issue with two introductory quotes: Ibrahim Nasrallah, “You have to be loyal to your exile as much as you are loyal to your homeland”; and the

Steve France is an activist and writer affiliated with Episcopal Peace Fellowship, Palestine-Israel Network.

poem “Ruin” by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, with the lines, “if all we love/is a lost world/then let the dust/swallow our names.”

In the novel, sumud shows up mainly in the form of parents being hard on their American kids for acting like Americans. Marcus Salameh, a Baltimore police detective, is one of the most assimilated and independent-minded characters. This independence costs him the rage of his father, who cuts him off when Marcus defends his sister, Amal, who is pregnant by her Black boyfriend, Jahron. Marcus slams his father’s attitude as “the old Arab way of sizing up a girl based on nothing and judging her future [negatively].”

High schooler Reema Baladi is also pregnant, in her case by her Puerto Rican boyfriend, Torrey. A gifted student of literature, she chafes at her teacher lauding the families of “Romeo and Juliet” for ultimately “realizing the error of their ways,” thinking, “F*** their families.”

Walid Ammar’s sumud flares up at his son Raed’s wedding to Ellen, the sort of American woman whose “pink nails, slim wrists and tiny waist drew Arab boys like planets to a fiery star” and turned them into “blushing, stammering fools.” Nothing at the wedding is familiar—not the food, not the drinks, not the music—yet Walid is paying a fortune for it all. When his new in-laws hope it’s okay that alcohol is being served, he snaps. “Yes, of course, I tell you before, we are Christians, not Muslims” and proceeds to get smashed. His irritability is attributed to the booze.

For all the acrimony associated with life in America, the worst pain may be how the old ways of Palestine reach back into Rania Mahfouz’s marriage, when it emerges that her husband is caught in the coverup of a family honor killing of a pregnant cousin back in Palestine. But Rania has the luck to find a tough lawyer, Samira Awadah, whose own PalestinianAmerican family taps her for money while treating her as a loser because she hasn’t been able to have children. Later, Samira’s mother practically disowns her when she falls for a very loving American—and gets pregnant.

Intensely close families are a big part of what makes Palestinian sumud so strong. In America, Darraj shows, such families are what keep immigrants connected to Palestine, which can be awkward and painful. She depicts the slights and suspicions that Palestinians face as the victims and enemies of America’s “greatest ally.” Shy high schooler Layla Marwan is humiliated when she tries but fails to get her drama teacher to see that Disney’s movie “Aladdin” showcases Arab stereotypes.

The novel’s younger characters show their own sumud as they stick with their families and homeland as hard as they can. When his estranged father dies, Marcus takes on the job of bringing his body back to Palestine for burial, despite never having been to Palestine. He uses some of his cop skills with Israeli border cops, closely observes Palestinian social interactions—and falls for a prickly, semioutcast Palestinian woman.

Reema, despite cursing family life, defiantly keeps her baby, sacrifices her own higher education to take care of her much younger sister and ill mother, and shepherds her child to scholarships at top universities.

One complaint: the book is too short. Darraj’s “mosaic novel” serves up a great many vivid, interrelated characters and tricky situations in chapters that each read like a short story. She surely kept back some of the fun.

Egypt Under El-Sisi: A Nation on the Edge

By Maged Mandour, I.B. Tauris, 2024,

Sana Abed-Kotob, Ph.D. is former deputy director at the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

Prior to joining the State Department, she served as director of publications and book review editor at the Middle East Institute. She is co-author, with Denis Sullivan, of Islam in Contemporary Egypt: Civil Society vs. the State. She holds a Ph.D. and MA in government and politics from the University of Maryland and a BA in psychology and mass communications from Cleveland State University.

hardcover, 224 pp. MEB $27

Reviewed by

Sana Abed-Kotob, Ph.D.

Political analyst Maged Mandour has written a thoughtful, well-researched and provocative chronology of the Egyptian regime under Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, the defense minister who became president after the 2013 coup. In chapter after chapter, the author outlines deep, systemic changes to Egypt’s economic, legal and political structures under El-Sisi, changes that have strengthened the military and ushered in severe repression. He contends that the Sisi regime is a new phenomenon, far different from previous Egyptian autocratic regimes—and not in a good way. For those who hoped Egypt’s 2011 Arab Spring would bring much-needed reforms to tackle oppression, poverty and corruption, the military regime depicted by Mandour leaves little optimism that any of those goals will be achieved in the foreseeable future.

The July 2013 military coup overthrew Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, and unleashed mass repression against his Islamist supporters, as well as the secular opposition and ordinary citizens. Mandour asserts that the military garnered public support for its repression by reviving a Nasserist ideal of unity and harmony—which allowed the regime to frame opposition as treason—and by co-opting secular figures who opposed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood. The theme of public support for repression is mentioned often in the

book, but with no clear evidence to back the assertion.

The summer of 2013 saw extreme violence by the emergent regime against its opponents. With Morsi removed from power, his supporters staged a sit-in in Cairo’s Raba’a Square, as well as several other peaceful protests against the coup. Egypt’s security forces responded with a swift and harsh “bloodletting,” resulting in a death toll of at least 1,150. The military regime painted the Brotherhood as terrorists and itself as the authority that would bring harmony to Egypt. The regime used conservative religious imagery and policies to counter the Brotherhood and appeal to the masses, and Sisi claimed for himself divine inspiration and providence.

Mandour outlines several constitutional amendments from 2019 that cemented the military’s power by establishing it as protector of “the constitution, democracy, the state and its secular nature and personal freedoms.” The far-reaching amendments also reduced the independence of the judiciary, giving the president authority over appointments in a way that eliminated opportunities for civilians to challenge the state. New laws also granted immunity to military officers for acts they may have committed during military massacres.

The right to protest was restricted by the “Protest Law” of 2013 and the “Terror Act” of 2015. The latter is used to repress dissent even when there is no clear connection to terrorism. Other laws restrict the work of civil society and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), limiting their ability to raise funds, work with foreign NGOs or experts and address topics like human rights. Likewise, social and traditional media were subjected to new legislation banning media that is deemed harmful to national security or public decency. The author discusses several politically motivated “disappearances,” numerous arrests and detentions, and a pattern of allowing political prisoners, like former president Morsi, to die under harsh conditions.

Mandour argues that the Egyptian military, as the “uncontested master of the

state,” significantly altered Egypt’s “ideological foundation of rule and the process of capital accumulation, giving birth to a militarized form of capitalism on a scale unseen in modern Egyptian history.” The Egyptian economy has endured major changes that benefit the military—which controls a hefty share of the economy. Military-economic enterprises were expanded and granted tax exemptions. The military embarked on immense construction projects that compelled the state to accrue massive debt but that were unable to generate meaningful income. The Egyptian pound has been repeatedly devalued, and social spending was reduced. As the elite grow wealthier, the poor become significantly more destitute.

Mandour soundly backs up his assertion that these systemic changes have left no legal or political channels to absorb popular anger. He offers several possible scenarios that Egypt may face over time, with the most likely being “slow decay, followed by a rapid implosion of the regime, very similar to the demise of [former President Hosni] Mubarak.”

Egypt Under El-Sisi is an unsettling overview of the legal, economic and political power grab by Egypt’s military at the expense of civil society and the public good. It is well worth reading.

The Land in Our Bones: Plantcestral Herbalism and Healing Cultures From Syria to the Sinai—Earth-Based Pathways to Ancestral Stewardship and Belonging in Diaspora

By Layla K. Feghali,

North Atlantic Books, 2024, paperback, 352 pp. MEB $24.95

Reviewed by Ida Audeh

The Land in Our Bones is about “plantcestry,” the plants specific to one’s ancestral region, particularly those regarded for their healing powers. Author Layla K. Feghali maintains that “plantcestry” is as essential a part of our lineage as the ancestors whose DNA we share, and she focuses on the herbal lore prevalent in Canaan (the lands between Syria

NEW ARRIVALS

The Trinity of Fundamentals by Wisam Rafeedie, translated by Dr. Muhammad Tutunji, 1804 Books, 2024, paperback, 331 pp. MEB $23.95

The Trinity of Fundamentals follows the story of 22-yearold Kan’an during his nine years of hiding from the Israeli occupation, between 1982 and 1991. Driven by an unshakable commitment to the Palestinian cause, Kan’an takes the reader through his compelling journey filled with sacrifice and struggle, love and pain, isolation and liberation. All the while, major political and historical transformations unfold across international, regional and local contexts, including the First Intifada. Throughout all of this, Kan’an maintains a spirit of revolutionary optimism so strong that the reader is bound to be transformed. Love, revolution and life—these are the “trinity of fundamentals” that pave Kan’an’s path of struggle. Although the novel is set in the past, it holds many lessons that resonate with our current political moment, mobilizing us into collective action. It is all the more moving to know that Kan’an’s story is inspired by the real-life experience of Wisam Rafeedie as he organized and struggled against the Zionist oppression of his people. In fact, Rafeedie wrote this book while in an Israeli prison.

The Revolution of 1936-1939 in Palestine: Background, Details and Analysis by Ghassan Kanafani, translated by Hazem Jamjoum, 1804 Books, 2024, paperback, 102 pp. MEB $20

Ghassan Kanafani’s books have been flying off our shelves in recent months, and this newly translated work is sure to quickly join our best-seller list. In this pivotal text, Kanafani presents a concrete analysis of the early mass uprisings against Zionism—and for independence from British colonialism—that took place in Palestine from 1936 to 1939. With a methodical yet illustrative approach, Kanafani examines the economic, political, social and cultural conditions that contributed to, and limited, the anti-colonial struggle in this period. This radical analysis of Palestinian resistance from one of the country’s most influential voices is a must read in this time of struggle against genocide.

The Moon That Turns You Back: Poems by Hala Alyan, Ecco Press, 2024, paperback, 112 pp. MEB $17.99

A diaspora of memories runs through this poetry collection: a multiplicity of voices, bodies and houses hold archival material for one another, tracing paths between Brooklyn, Beirut and Jerusalem. Boundaries and borders blur between space and time and poetic form: small banal moments of daily life live within geopolitical brutalities and, vice versa, the desire for stability lives in familiarity with displacement. These poems take stock of who and what can displace you from home and from your own body—and, conversely, the kind of resilience, tenacity and love that can bring you back into yourself and into the context of past and future generations. Hala Alyan asks, “what stops you from transforming into someone or something else? When you have lived a life in flux, how do you find rest?”

and the Sinai, generally referred to as the Levant) and specifically her ancestral village in Lebanon.

She states her purpose for writing the book in the first paragraph: “The intention of this offering is toward deepening relationships, care and engagement with the layers of ancestral medicine abundant still in our daily practices and places, and shifting worldviews toward a way of life that is more liberatory, embodied and life-affirming for all as we build new worlds anchored in the earth’s most unwavering truths.”

It is also about community and belonging. Feghali weaves into this account her interactions with the aunties and elders who pass on to her the lore accumulated over centuries about the sources of healing all around her.

The two chapters that make up Part 1 (“Tracing Roots, Tending Futures”) provide the author’s background as a “child of diaspora,” whose roots are in her parents’ ancestral Lebanese villages, which serve as the theoretical foundation of the

book. Her internalization of her ancestors’ stories and wisdom “drew her closer to the land as our kindred source.” Her exploration of the “healing possibilities” therein is the subject of the book.

By reclaiming our relationship to the land, we have a means of healing from the trauma of colonialism, war and systems of domination generally, Feghali maintains. She labels this process “re-

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membrance,” a term that conveys the collection and mending of things scattered and fragmented, “to align with the axis of prevailing truths that do not waver.” Feghali writes, “The plantcestors…are a powerful and accessible way to rekindle the consciousness of earth’s life-giving elements inside our own bodies, recalibrating the genetic map of our deepest source and nature from the inside out.”

The five chapters that make up Part 2 (“Food Is Our Medicine, Love Is Our Medicine”) delve into the benefits of familiar herbs, floral foods and fruit trees. Chapters include sections for each food item (identified by the familiar English term, the Arabic and the Latin) in which its medicinal qualities and preparation method are described, as well as the conditions it heals. The section on tayyoun (sticky fleabane), for example, is typical of the type of information provided for herbs: we learn that it heals wounds and stops bleeding quickly; that it treats everything from respiratory disorders

and musculoskeletal pain to high blood pressure and cancer. It eases digestive distress and arthritic pain, and its leaves can be used to make a yellow dye. Rosewater, which gives a slightly sweet and floral taste to fruit or ice cream, is actually doing some cardiovascular heavy lifting; and violet helps in emotional release and restoration.

Two superstars among the food staples of the Levant get their own chapters. One of them is za’atar, which Feghali describes as “antiviral, antimicrobial and tonic to nearly every organ in the body.” Every kitchen in any village or city in the Levant is sure to have a supply of za’atar in the pantry, so versatile is it, whether in food or as treatment. The other item is the olive, described as a foundational food. Arabs have an almost religious belief in the efficacy of olive oil as a treatment and its health benefits in food. The olive’s rootedness in culture explains the anger but also deep sadness experienced by Palestinians who have had their olive tree groves chopped or burned by the Israeli army or settlers (or both, working in tandem)—a violent act that goes against nature (and, Palestinians might argue, against God).

The largest section of the book (Part III, “Matriarchal Medicines: Tending the Life in Front of Us”) consists of five chapters related to the female reproductive system: menstruation, conception, pregnancy, postpartum recovery and menopause. Feghali describes folk practices and rituals for these life events, making this section particularly interesting.

The three chapters that make up Part IV (“Soul Medicine and the Ritual of Belonging”) tackle how to heal spiritual displacement. The answer seems to lie in relationships—with people in one’s community, with indigenous plants, with the environment (in the author’s case, with cedar forests in her native Lebanon) and with ancestor healers, the local or regional saints whose stories instruct and give solace and guidance. ■

Ida Audeh is senior editor of the Washington Report

NEW ARRIVALS

Alexandria: The City That Changed the World by Islam

Issa, Pegasus Books, 2024, hardcover, 496 pp. MEB $35

Islam Issa’s father had always told him about their city’s magnificence, and as he looked at the new library in Alexandria, it finally hit home. This is no ordinary library. And Alexandria is no ordinary city. Combining rigorous research with myth and folklore, Alexandria is an authoritative history of a city that has shaped our modern world. Soon after its founding by Alexander the Great, Alexandria became the crucible of cultural exchange between East and West for millennia and the undisputed global capital of knowledge. It was at the forefront of human progress, but it also witnessed brutal natural disasters, plagues, crusades and violence. Major empires fought over Alexandria, from the Greeks and Romans to the Arabs, Ottomans, French and British. Key figures shaped the city, from its eponymous founder to Aristotle, Cleopatra, Saint Mark the Evangelist, Napoleon Bonaparte and many others, each putting their own stamp on its identity and its fortunes. From its humble origins to its dizzy heights and its latest incarnation, Islam Issa tells us the rich and gripping story of a city that changed the world.

Martyr! A Novel by Kaveh Akbar, Knopf Publishing Group, 2024, hardcover, 352 pp. MEB $28

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident, and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed. Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning in faith, art, ourselves and others.

Birthday Kunafa by Rifk Ebeid, illustrated by Noor Alshalabi, self-published, 2024, hardcover, 50 pp. MEB $22.95

Birthday Kunafa is a unique wordless picture book about Palestine that will fill your imagination and tickle your senses with a hearty dose of Palestinian family, food and fortitude. To celebrate her birthday, all Amal wants is to bite into the sweetest slice of cheesy kunafa from Nablus Sweets, the best place in town. When her party ends with no kunafa in sight, she comes up with a plan. Will Amal be able to overcome all the obstacles that she faces in order to get her birthday kunafa? This fun book offers children a relatable adventure while also connecting them to life in Palestine.

Other People’s Mail

Compiled by Jack McGrath

GOLDA MEIR STOLE MY FAMILY’S JERUSALEM VILLA

To the Glenwood Springs Post Independent, March 11, 2024

I am writing to show my support for Glenwood Springs’ decision to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. As a resident of this valley for two decades, and an American with Palestinian heritage, I’m proud to see such moral clarity shine through our local representatives. My great grandfather Hanna Bisharat built a 27-room villa in West Jerusalem in 1926, a home that still stands today. It was stolen from our family in 1948 when Israel was created, and subsequently occupied by prominent Israeli politicians, including Golda Meir, Israel’s fourth prime minister, a woman who is notorious for stating that the Palestinians never existed (I’m paraphrasing the full quote), which is a statement that has echoed painfully within the collective psyche of my family for generations knowing that Meir made this remark while living in our home, a home built by a Palestinian.

From an American position afar, I know that most of us are led to believe that the “Israel-Palestine conflict,” as it’s erroneously called, is too “complex,” is “complicated,” is inherently an intractable religious conflict that predates modernity, and so on. These are all myths and red herrings purposefully deployed to create enough fog of confusion such that Zionism’s colonialist project is allowed to continue unquestioned. The absolute scale of horror brought down upon Gaza has awakened many people to the true implications of Zionism and its genocidal com-

TELL YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS WHAT YOU THINK

SECRETARY OF STATE ANTONY BLINKEN U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE 2201 C ST. NW

WASHINGTON, DC 20500

COMMENT LINE: (202) 456-1111

WWW.WHITEHOUSE.GOV/CONTACT

ANY MEMBER: U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES WASHINGTON, DC 20515 (202) 225-3121

mitment to the complete destruction of Palestinian society and culture, through the forced removal by any and all means of Palestinians living on the land between the river and sea.

It is my and many Palestinians’ hope to see an end to this de facto apartheid, an end to the occupation, and ultimately the creation of one state where everyone, regardless of their religion or background, is given equal rights and opportunities to flourish. This political project is the only rational, liberal and humane option left— and it is the goal of many Jews, Christians, Muslims and people of conscience who care about justice. Calling for a ceasefire is the beginning of this work, and I applaud Glenwood Springs for boldly standing on the right side of history on this issue.

Andrew Bisharat, New Castle, CO

DON’T WAIT FOR ISRAEL TO ACCEPT PALESTINIAN STATEHOOD

To The Columbian, Feb. 5, 2024

During an Aug. 24, 2022, State Department press briefing, deputy principal spokesperson Vedant Patel said, “There are no shortcuts for Palestinian statehood outside direct negotiations between the parties.” The State Department website doesn’t outline the requirements for recognizing statehood, stating only that the U.S. supports a “negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

The U.S. will accept a Palestinian state only when Israel does. Yet Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is boasting about personally denying Palestinian statehood; Bibi is loudly guaranteeing that a free Palestine will never exist.

WASHINGTON, DC 20520

PHONE: (202) 647-6575

VISIT WWW.STATE.GOV TO E-MAIL

ANY SENATOR: U.S. SENATE WASHINGTON, DC 20510 (202) 224-3121

Israel controls all aspects of Palestinian life, even before Oct. 7—so how could America expect a negotiated settlement to come from such a skewed situation? Refusing to recognize Palestinian statehood while backing Israel to the hilt belies American proclamations of unwavering commitment to the two-state solution.

Let me be clear: Israel has no right to statehood, and Israelis have no right to that land which Palestine and Palestinians do not share. Palestinian statehood is not the last step on the path to peace; it is the first.

Support a ceasefire now, and support Palestinian statehood now.

Christopher DeWalt, Vancouver, WA

THE EFFORT TO REBUILD SETTLEMENTS IN GAZA

To the Los Angeles Times, March 18, 2024

Your article on the rise of far-right extremists and religious Zionists in Israel explained more than just the age-long settlement goals of these groups in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It also elucidated the machinery at play that has meticulously fostered such far-right ideas over many years.

These groups have made inroads into the military and the government. They have leveraged their ideas in a very opportunistic manner as a form of reprisal against the Palestinian people for Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7.

It is shocking and unsettling to learn that parts of the Israeli leadership are encouraging efforts by far-right groups to reoccupy Gaza by making the area uninhabitable for Palestinians. I hope other world leaders understand this phenomenon and don’t just try to justify it as rightful

on Middle East Affairs; (2) Publication No: 8755-4917; (3) Filing Date: 03/21/24; (4) Issue Frequency: Monthly except Jan/Feb, March/April June/July, Aug/Sept and Nov./Dec. combined (5) No. of issues published annually: 7; (6) Annual subscription price: $29; (7) Complete mailing address of known office of publication: American Educational Trust, 1902 18th St., NW, Washington, DC 20009-1707; (8) Complete mailing address of headquarters or general business office: American Educational Trust, 1902 18th St., NW, Washington, DC 20009-1707; (9) Full names and complete mailing addresses of publisher, editor and managing editor: Publisher: Andrew Killgore, 1902 18th St., NW, Washington, DC 200091707, Executive Editor: Delinda Hanley, 1902 18th St., NW, Washington, DC 20009-1707, Managing Editor: Dale Sprusansky, 1902 18th St., NW, Washington, DC 20009-1707; Editor: Ida Audeh, 1902 18th St., NW, Washington, DC 20009-1707; 10) Owner: American Educational Trust, 1902 18th St., NW, Washington, DC 20009-1707; (11) Known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding 1 percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities: none; (12) The purpose, function, and nonprofit status of this organization and the exempt status for federal income tax purposes has not changed during preceding 12 months; (13) Publication title: Washington Report on Middle East Affairs; (14) Issue date for circulation data below: Jan/Feb. 2024 XLIII v.1 (15) Extent and nature of circulation: (a) total no. copies (net press run): Average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 4671 No. copies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 5,000; (b) Paid and/or requested circulation: (1) Paid/requested Outside-County mail subscriptions stated on Form 3541 (include advertiser’s proof and exchange copies): Average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 2471; No. copies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 2675; (2) Paid In-County subscriptions stated on Form 3541 (include advertiser’s proof and exchange copies): Average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 42, No. copies of single issue published nearest to filing date,42; (3) Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors, counter sales, and other non-USPS paid distribution: Average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 115 No. copies of single issue published nearest to filing date,118 (4) Other classes mailed through the USPS: Average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months,60 No. copies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 66(c) Total paid and/or requested circulation [sum of 15b (1), (2), (3), and (4)]: Average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 2688; No. copies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 2901; (d) Free distribution by mail (samples, complimentary and other free): (1) Outside-County as stated on Form 3541: Average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 450; No. copies of single issue published nearest to filing date 509; (2) In-County as stated on Form 3541, Average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months,329, No. copies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 368; (3) Other classes mailed through the USPS, Average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 91, No. copies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 130; (e) Free distribution outside the mail (carriers or other means): Average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 993 No. copies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 1037 (f) Total free distribution (sum of 15d and e): Average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 1863 Average No. copies of single issue published nearest to filing date 2044; (g) Total distribution (sum of 15c and f): Average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 4551, No. copies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 4945; (h) Copies not distributed: Average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 120; No. copies of single issue published nearest to filing date 55; (i) Total (sum of 15g and h): Average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 4651 No. copies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 5000 (j) percent paid and/or requested circulation (15c/15gX100): Average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months,59%, No. copies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 58%; 16 Electronic Copy Circulation: a. Paid Electronic Copies: Average No. Copies Each issue during preceding 12 months: 380; No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: 440; Total paid print copies and paid Electronic Copies: Average No. Copies Each issue during preceding 12 months: 3068;Total paid print and Electronic Copies of Single Issue published nearest to filing date: 3168; Total Print Distribution +Paid Distribution: Average No. Copies Each

retaliation by Israel.

Malay Sinha, Moorpark, CA

DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE GENOCIDE IN GAZA

To The Source Weekly, Feb. 28, 2024

Bend Mayor Melanie Kebler and city council’s letter regarding the humanitarian tragedy in Gaza was a courageous move. The letter urged Oregon’s lawmakers and President Joe Biden to intervene to ease the dire situation in Gaza.

We, Central Oregon for a Free Palestine, are dedicated to a ceasefire resolution and getting humanitarian aid into Gaza. We appreciate and support the mayor and council’s letter and effort.

Ahmad Naeem and his wife waited 12 years to have a baby. Ahmad’s wife had an IVF treatment before the war. Now, they are trying to survive the Israeli bombing in a displacement camp in the southern city of Rafah.

“After 12 years, God honored me with my first child amidst suffering and displacement, making the joy incomplete and mixed with pain and sorrow,” Ahmad told the Middle East Monitor. With tears filling his eyes, “I am unable to do anything for my child, and I only have five shekels [$1.4] in my pocket,” he added.

Many of the 1.9 million displaced Palestinians in Gaza have much more harrowing stories than Ahmad’s. Gazans are struggling to survive in makeshift tents near the Egyptian border. More than 30,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed and 70,000 wounded, the overwhelming majority of whom are women and children. For humanity’s sake this senseless killing must stop immediately.

The scale of Israel’s destruction of lifesaving infrastructure, churches, mosques, schools and hospitals is of enormous proportions. Israel’s indiscriminate carpet bombing is turning Gaza into dust and threatens to make the continuation of life in Gaza impossible.

Gaza’s pain is incomprehensible. The despairing tears of the reported 20,000 Palestinian children who lost or got separated from their parents are heart wrenching. The fear of death raining from the sky by Israel’s fighter jets is traumatic. The stabbing pain of starving children, or the obliterating agony of mothers burying their infants, is unimaginable.

We can’t sit silent in the face of innocent civilians killed anywhere. Particularly now when it’s our tax dollars that enable Israel to continue the carnage. It’s our obligation to do something about it. How hard is it to ask for a permanent ceasefire to stop the violence? How hard is it to demand humanitarian aid to save the lives of children who are dying in droves?

This is the right, human and compassionate thing to do. Let’s join with the mayor and the city council and do something about it.

This statement of ownership will be printed in the May 2024 issue of this publication; (17) Signature and Title of Editor, Publisher, Business Manager, or Owner: Delinda Hanley, Executive Director, 04/21/24, I certify that all information furnished on this form is true and complete. I understand that anyone who furnishes false or misleading information on this form or who omits material or information requested on the form may be subject to criminal sanctions (including fines and imprisonment) and/or civil sanctions (including civil penalties). Failure to file or publish a statement of ownership may lead to suspension of second-class authorization. PS Form 3526 October 1999 (Facsimile).

The colossal death toll and wounded are but a small part of the tragedy. Consider the devastating famine and catastrophic hunger the people in Gaza are facing because Israel prevents food and drinkable water, in addition to medicine, fuel, the internet and electricity from entering Gaza.

This Israeli airtight blockade is against international humanitarian laws and norms. Israel is being tried in the International Court of Justice, the highest court in the world, for breaking these laws.

AET’s 2024 Choir of Angels

The following are individuals, organizations, companies and foundations whose help between Jan. 1, 2024 and March 16, 2024 is making possible activities of the tax‐exempt AET Library Endowment (federal ID #52‐1460362) and the American Educational Trust, publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. Some Angels will help us co‐sponsor the next IsraelLobbyCon. Others are donating to our “Capital Building Fund,” which will help us expand the Middle East Books and More bookstore. We are deeply honored by your confidence and profoundly grateful for your generosity.

HUMMERS

($100 or more)

Akram & Lubna Karam, Charlotte, NC

Kurt Berggren, Ann Arbor, MI

Preston Enright, Denver, CO

Hossam & Skina Fadel, Augusta, GA

Megan Gately, Millbury, MA

Eugene Khorey, Homestead, PA

Erna Lund, Seattle, WA

Nidal Mahayni, Richmond, VA

Lucinda Mahmoud, Oceanside, CA

John Matthews, West Newton, MA

W. Eugene Notz, Charleston, SC

Walter & Halina Sasak, Northborough, MA

Jawad & Jihad Saymeh, Charlotte, NC

William Thiessen, Bemidji, MN*

Bill Waddell, San Diego, CA

Nancy Wein, Richmonders For Peace In Israel-Palestine, N. Chesterfield, VA

ACCOMPANISTS

($250 or more)

Khaled & Nariman Alkoor, Charlotte, NC

Gwendolyn McEwen, Bellingham, WA

Hertha L. Poje, New York, NY

Barry Preisler, Albany, CA

TENORS & CONTRALTOS

($500 or more)

Diane Adkin, Camas, WA

Andrew Findlay, Alexandria, VA

Zagloul Kadah, Los Gatos, CA

Robert Roeske, Madison, WI

Yasir Shallal, McLean, VA

BARITONES & MEZZO SOPRANOS ($1,000 or more)

Karen Ray Bossmeyer, Louisville, KY

Forrest & Sandi Cioppa, Walnut Creek, CA

Muhammad Kudaimi, Munster, IN

Imad & Joann Tabry, Fort Lauderdale, FL

CHOIRMASTERS ($5,000 or more)

Mary Norton, Austin, TX

Continued from page 45

The entire church united to strengthen, comfort and bless Representative Rashida Tlaib (D

March 6. Events concluded with a moving “Service of Lament, Repentance and a Call to Action” with remarks and prayers offered by a rabbi, Mark Braverman, executive director of Kairos USA, Rev. Christy Close Erskine, Rev. Graylan Hagler and Imam Tarif Shraim at Calvary Baptist Church.

Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) told the crowd, “Palestinians are dying for their right to dignity and self-determination.” She said she shares the names and descriptions of Gazan victims with her colleagues. “I try to end the madness and dehumanization we see in Congress...Some of my colleagues say, ‘Kill them all’ and others try to justify their votes.” She urged attendees to boycott, march, speak out and vote because leaders will move if citizens move. ■

‐MI).

PHOTO COURTESY MICHAEL SPATH

American Educational Trust

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs

1902 18th St., NW

Washington, DC 20009

May 2024

Vol. XLIII, No. 3

PHOTO BY JEHAD ALSHRAFI/ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES

A kite flies atop the tent city set up by thousands of Palestinian families who were forced to leave their homes and seek refuge in Rafah, Gaza near the border of Egypt, on March 8, 2024. Gazans struggle every day to secure food, water and basic needs due to the ongoing Israeli attacks and the lack of aid.