The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs - August/September 2024 - Vol. XLIII No. 5
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On Middle East Affairs
THE U.S. ROLE IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION OF PALESTINE
The Day the West Defined “Success” as a Massacre of 270 Palesinians—Jonathan Cook
12 Daily Life, Shattered Dreams and Hope in Gaza— Young Writers Share Their Stories—Five Views —Refaat Ibrahim, Faress Arafat, Salsabeel AbuLoghod, Dana Besaiso, Shahd Safi
20 Survivor’s Guilt in the Palestinian Diaspora —Diana Safieh
22 Oh, Looks Like Bombing Hospitals is Bad Again —Caitlin Johnstone
30 Congressional Support for Israel’s Genocide Knows No Bounds—Julia Pitner
32 Joint Statement of U.S. Government Officials Who Have Resigned Over U.S. Policy Toward Gaza, Palestine and Israel
44 Why Is Israel Still in the U.N.?—Ian Williams
SPECIAL REPORTS
Why Deceitful Headlines About Gaza Matter Laila Delpuppo Messari
Israel’s Weaponization of Anti-Jewish Racism Begins With the Word “Anti-Semitism” Tom Suárez
Reflections on Julian Assange, the Espionage Act, and the Great Intelligence Hoax Bruce Fein
Biden Administration Blocks International Law with Vetoes and So-Called “Ceasefire” Proposal Sam Husseini
British Election: Little Choice for Palestine Supporters John Gee
Protesters Demand an End to the Sale of Israeli Wine in Manitoba, Canada Candice Bodnaruk
The Moderate Wins in Iran. So What Does It Mean for the U.S.?—Paul R. Pillar
Libya and the U.N.: Nine Envoys in 13 Years and No End in Sight—Mustafa Fetouri
ON THE COVER: In preparation for the ground invasion that followed, Israeli airstrikes and artillery shells destroyed residential buildings and infrastructure, igniting fires in Gaza City, Gaza on the 19th day of Israel’s genocide, on Oct. 25, 2023. Buildings collapsed on entire families and rescuers had no heavy equipment to use to save victims buried in the rubble. Israel’s relentless attacks have continued for nine months. The United States continues to supply billions of dollars and weapons, including bombs, missiles, tank ammunition and vehicles, despite international outrage and protests. (PHOTO BY ALI JADALLAH/ANADOLU VIA GETTY IMAGES)
Other Voices
Ostracizing Israel at the U.N. Should Be a Priority, Moncef Khane, www.aljazeera.com
Israel Is on the U.N. Blacklist of Countries That Harm Children, And Justifiably So, Gideon Levy, Haaretz
The Untold ICC Story: How the Global South Helped Palestine Challenge Western Institutions, Ramzy Baroud, www.ramzybaroud.net
Biden’s Mixed Messages to Israel Are Coming Home To Roost, Khaled Elgindy, responsiblestatecraft.org
Bowman Crushed by GOP-Fueled AIPAC Cash, Eli Clifton, responsiblestatecraft.org
The Israel Lobby Defeated Jamaal Bowman, Philip Weiss, mondoweiss.net OV-6
By the Numbers: U.S. Gaza Pier Project Appears Sunk, Blaise Malley, responsiblestatecraft.org OV-8
DEPARTMENTS
Focus of 49th National ICNA-MAS Convention
55 MUSIC AND ARTS: “The Night Won’t End” Describes Life and Death in Gaza
56 HUMAN RIGHTS: Addressing the Needs of Female Refugees
58 DIPLOMATIC DOINGS: Lakhdar Brahimi Reflects on Diplomatic Career
59 WAGING PEACE: Destroying Healthcare: Israel’s War on Gaza’s Hospitals
63 BOOK TALKS: The Role of Prisons in Iranian Life
(A Supplement to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs available by subscription at $15 per year. To subscribe, call toll-free 1-888-881-5861.)
The Non-Violence Message of The Civil Rights Movement Is Not a Model for Palestinian Liberation, Lawrence Davidson, www.tothepointanalyses.com OV-10
The Mainstream Media Is Setting the Stage for an Israeli War on Lebanon, James North, mondoweiss.net OV-12
Assange Is Free, But Feds’ War On Free Speech Continues, James Bovard, theamericanconservative.com OV-13
As Norway’s Largest Private Pension Fund, We Are Divesting From Caterpillar, Kiran Aziz, www.aljazeera.com OV-14
Iran-Bahrain Talks on Horizon Signal More Sunset on U.S. Hegemony, Graham E. Fuller, responsiblestatecraft.org OV-15
American Educational
Israel Commits
Genocide
The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is beyond words, as Israel is now using starvation as a method of warfare. Since Oct. 7, Israel has intentionally turned into rubble thousands of mosques, churches, homes, restaurants, bakeries, hospitals, universities, roads and other vital infrastructure. Perhaps the Israeli state’s most heinous crime is the systemic obliteration of education, long prized by Palestinians as the one thing no one could take from them. Israel’s physical destruction of universities and schools plus the arrest, detention and killing of both teachers and students adds up to the...
Crime of “Scholasticide”
Publishers’ Page
Children check the destruction at their UNRWA‐run school in Nuseirat in the central Gaza Strip after Israeli airstrikes, on July 9, 2024.
As we went to press, in mid-July, Israeli forces struck four UNRWA schools in four days, killing at least 50 displaced Palestinians sheltering there and injuring dozens more. In fact, in June Israel also bombed schools multiple days in a row. “Since the war began, two thirds of UNRWA schools in Gaza have been hit,” according to UNRWA commissioner-general Philippe Lazzarini, including some inside Israeli military-designated “safe zones.” More than 600,000 children are being deprived of their education, Lazzarini said. Back in April, a U.N. report warned Israel’s “systematic destruction” of the Palestinian education system in the Gaza Strip will have a devasting long-term impact on yet another generation of Palestinians. “When schools are destroyed, so too are hopes and dreams.”
The Soccer Massacre
A horrifying video went viral from the attack on a Khan Yunis school. Displaced youths were playing soccer in a tightly packed school yard when Israel dropped a U.S.-made GBU-39 bomb on their shelter, killing kids and causing terror. As usual, the Israeli military claimed that they were striking “terrorist infrastructure.” Immediately after the massacre,
President Joe Biden released half of a weapons shipment to Israel that he previously suspended. He sent 500-lb bombs—twice the size of those used in the soccer massacre—for Israel to kill more civilians. That’s a violation of both U.S. and international law.
Shrapnel-Spraying Weapon
A report by Chris McGreal published in the Guardian on July 11 raises new alarms from surgeons in Gaza about Israeli-made weapons designed to spray high levels of “fragmentation” shrapnel. The weapon is designed to maximize casualties and is causing horrific injuries to civilians in Gaza and disproportionately harming children. Doctors say many of the deaths, amputations and life-changing wounds to children they have treated came from the firing of missiles and shells—in areas crowded with civilians—packed with additional metal designed to fragment into tiny pieces of shrapnel. Israel has fitted drones, glide bombs and tank rounds with these crippling weapons. Is this war on Gaza simply the Israeli defense marketing strategy for weapons they sell to other lawless states?
Why Does Israel Continue...
Its campaign in Gaza and possibly into Lebanon or even Iran next? The only possible reason we can see is that Israel wants to show Palestinians, the Arab states, Iran and the rest of the international community that if they mess with Israel, this is what
they can do to you. And despite vast public opposition, every U.S. administration and Congress (see pp. 3031) continues to back genocide and scholasticide, as well as what any right- or leftwing Israeli government chooses to do.
There is No Military Solution
Israel cannot bring the hostages home or protect its citizens by pulverizing Gaza. Israel cannot eliminate Hamas—they never could. “The idea that it is possible to destroy Hamas, to make Hamas vanish—that is throwing sand in the eyes of the public,” Israeli army spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari admitted in a June TV interview that infuriated Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. The EU’s foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell told a Munich security conference back in February: “Hamas is an idea and you don’t kill an idea...You have to provide an alternative which is better.” Borrell also said that the situation in the West Bank, home to about 3 million Palestinians as well as hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers is at least as important. “The West Bank is boiling,” and he called on the international community, and particularly the U.S., to stop providing arms to Israel.
Documenting Ethnic Cleansing
As you know, Israel won’t let U.S., international and even Israeli journalists into Gaza. They never counted on the talented Palestinian reporters, photographers and students in Gaza whose work we’ve been publishing online and in the Washington Report throughout this war (see pp. 1219). Please help us stop the sizzling genocide in Gaza and the simmering genocide in the West Bank. Join students and Washington Report readers around the world—and those pouring into Middle East Books and More in person and online— who are protesting, speaking out and writing to support Palestinian students and their parents. Together we can...
Make a Difference Today
Executive Editor: DELINDA C. HANLEY
Managing Editor: DALE SPRUSANSKY
Senior Editor: IDA AUDEH
Other Voices Editor: JANET McMAHON
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Middle East Books and More Asst. Dir.: JACK MCGRATH
Finance & Admin. Dir.: CHARLES R. CARTER
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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. Published by the American Educational Trust (AET), a nonprofit foundation incorporated in Washington, DC by retired U.S. foreign service officers to provide the American public with balanced and accurate information concerning U.S. relations with Middle Eastern states. AET’s Foreign Policy Committee has included former U.S. ambassadors, government officials, and members of Congress, including the late Democratic Sen. J. William Fulbright and Republican Sen. Charles Percy, both former chairmen of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Members of AET’s Board of Directors and advisory committees receive no fees for their services. The new Board of Advisers includes: Anisa Mehdi, John Gareeb, Dr. Najat Khelil Arafat, William Lightfoot, George W. Aldridge and Susan Abulhawa. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs does not take partisan domestic political positions. As a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli dispute, it endorses U.N. Security Council Resolution 242’s land-for-peace formula, supported by nine successive U.S. presidents. In general, it supports Middle East solutions which it judges to be consistent with the charter of the United Nations and traditional American support for human rights, self-determination, and fair play.
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WHO IS REJECTING PEACE?
In her May 27 interview with PBS’ Amna Nawaz, retired Israeli Col. Pnina Baruch stated that Hamas is opposed to peace and that “if it remains in power [there] would never be a peaceful resolution to the conflict.” However, in 2006 Khaled Mashal, the political leader of Hamas, stated that, “if Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders [between Israel and the Palestinian territories], there could be peace and security in the region.” According to “Israel’s Insane War” by Patrick Seale (in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs’ March 2009 issue), Mashal reiterated Hamas’ willingness to accept this solution (which implies acceptance of Israel). And in 2017 Hamas again reconfirmed its willingness to do so. (“Hamas Accepts Palestinian State With 1967 Borders,” Al Jazeera, May 2, 2017.) Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, however, rejected these overtures, claiming Hamas was trying to “fool the world.”
Perhaps it was too much to expect Nawaz to point out Hamas’ peace proposals to Col. Baruch. But it behooves PBS to promptly make its viewers aware of them.
Gregory DeSylva, Rhinebeck, NY
SCHOLAR TARGETED FOR GENOCIDE DETERMINATION
I am outraged over the recent decision by the University of Minnesota to rescind a job offer to Holocaust and genocide scholar Raz Segal. Segal, an Israeli American Jewish scholar, had been offered the position of director of the university’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. This offer was revoked following his characterization of the Israeli assault on Gaza as a “textbook case of genocide” and a subsequent campaign by the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) of Minnesota and the Dakotas.
Segal’s remarks and scholarly stance have sparked significant controversy, with two university board members resigning in protest and the JCRC labeling him an “extremist.” Segal argues that he has been targeted because of his Jewish identity and his refusal to equate Jewish identity
solely with Zionism. He describes the opposition against him as a “hateful campaign of lies and distortions” and condemns the university’s decision as a grave threat to academic freedom and free inquiry.
Segal’s situation highlights a troubling trend in academia, where political pressure can undermine legitimate hiring processes and stifle critical discourse. The rescinding of his job offer reflects a broader suppression of academic freedom, particularly concerning discussions around Israel’s actions in Gaza. This sets a dangerous precedent for the integrity of educational institutions and their commitment to unbiased scholarship.
It is vital for universities to uphold the principles of free inquiry and resist external pressures that seek to dictate academic appointments based on political agendas. The support Segal has received from scholars worldwide underscores the importance of protecting academic freedom and fostering diverse perspectives in higher education.
Jagjit Singh, Los Altos, CA
BUREAUCRATS AND U.S. POLICY
I just finished the June/July 2024 issue of the Washington Report. Dale Sprusansky’s recap of the April 17 Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy annual conference really got me thinking. I took special note of his review of professor Tamara Sonn’s comments. So much so that I goggled her speech. It’s both provocative and, in many ways, accurate. I couldn’t help but notice and admire her citing President Dwight Eisenhower’s cautionary warnings.
Our country talks a good game, but as Sonn noted, “stability” and secure markets trump (big time) our commitments to democracy, social justice and better livelihoods.
Sonn is unfortunately right when she contends that many, if not most, of our international relations professionals are preoccupied with their careers and play along to not harm their advancement up the promotion ladder. You might have
heard this before: the guiding career mantra within the State Department is “kiss up and kick down.” So much for esprit de corps and camaraderie. However, not everyone I worked with during my time in the U.S. government was cynical and self-centered. To the contrary, many former colleagues—especially those in USAID; the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration; the Labor Department; and the Secretary of State’s Office of Global Women’s Issues—genuinely tried to design and carry out policies and programs that benefited one-and-all. They sought to calibrate our national self-interests with the needs of our foreign counterparts.
George Aldridge, Bissen, Luxembourg
MALDIVES APPLAUDED FOR BAN ON ISRAELI TOURISTS
The Maldives, an independent island country in the north-central Indian Ocean, has banned Israeli citizens from visiting the country due to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. (They are discussing how to still welcome Palestinians who have Israeli citizenship.)
The island nation with a population of 524,000 depends heavily on tourism, which provides most of its tax revenue. Their data revealed that around 11,000 Israelis visited their nation last year, which accounts for 0.6 percent of total visitors.
You have to give it to the Maldives; they have more backbone than the rest of the Muslim world combined. Not only is the Maldives beautiful, but it is a country with principles.
Right after the ban was announced, the Telegraph ran a hit piece smearing the Maldives as an unsafe tourist destination, in a deliberate effort to destroy its tourism industry. Mainstream media can smear them all they want, but the rest of the world will not be easily fooled.
Mahmoud El-Yousseph, Westerville, OH
LETTER TO PRESIDENT BIDEN ON GAZA
Dear President Joe Biden, In promulgating your eternal support for Israel, please recall that Israel was founded by two Zionist terrorist groups, the Irgun and the Stern Gang.
KEEP THOSE CARDS AND LETTERS COMING!
Send your letters to the editor to the Washington Report, P.O. Box 53062, Washington, DC 20009 or e-mail <letters@wrmea.org>.
The initial result was the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland, never allowed to return. This, of course, is in contravention of international law. The forceful expulsion of Palestinians for Jewish-only settlements has continued for the last 75 years. Several U.S. presidents, yourself included, have objected to this arrogant violation of international law. Yet, Israel has ignored your pleas and thumbed its nose at you—and you just cower and let them get away with it.
In a letter to the New York Times dated Dec. 4, 1948, Albert Einstein and several other highly respected Jewish notables recognized the fascist state of Israel and warned us against supporting it. Unfortunately, we did not heed their advice.
The U.S. has the power to end this bloody theft of land by restricting aid to Israel, which we give with no strings attached and no questions asked—ten million-plus dollars a day.
The United Nations has warned that Gaza has become uninhabitable, mainly because of the draconian embargo Israel has levied on it for nearly two decades—and you have supported this. Palestine is destitute, divided and has no bargaining power—yet you expect them to come to the bargaining table.
Gaza has attacked Israel in desperation, provoked by the injustice inflicted by its oppressor, Israel. This oppression has been aided and
abetted by the unwavering support of my government. I expect better from my country, “the land of the free.” Israel has become an albatross around our neck and we’re embracing it. It has turned the populace of Arab nations against us, spawned more terrorist groups and fanned the flames of anti-Semitism around the world.
Only you have the power to stop this madness—hopefully, you have not surrendered it to the Israeli lobby.
Forrest J. Cioppa, M.D., Walnut Creek, CA ■
OTHER VOICES is an optional 16-page supplement available only to subscribers of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. For an additional $15 per year (see postcard insert for Washington Report subscription rates), subscribers will receive Other Voices inside each issue of their Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. Back issues of both publications are available. To subscribe, telephone (800) 607-4410, e-mail <circulation@wrmea. org>, or write to P.O. Box 292380, Kettering, OH 45429.
The Day the West Defined “Success” as a Massacre of 270 Palestinians
By Jonathan Cook
Terrified Palestinian children and their parents on July 6, after Israeli forces bombed an UNRWA school, where thousands of refugees shelter in Nuseirat Refugee Camp in the central part of Gaza. The attack killed at least 16 and injured more than 75.
ISRAEL HASN’T JUST CROSSED the Biden administration’s pretend “red lines” in Gaza. With its massacre at Nuseirat refugee camp on June 8, Israel drove a bulldozer through them.
That day, an Israeli military operation to free four Israelis held captive by Hamas since its Oct. 7 attack on Israel resulted in the killing of more than 270 Palestinians, many of them women and children.
The true death toll may never be known. Untold numbers of men, women and children are still under rubble from the bombardment, crushed to death.
Many hundreds more are suffering agonizing injuries—should their wounds not kill them—in a situation where there are almost no
Jonathan Cook is an award‐winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel for 20 years. He returned to the UK in 2021. His books, Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East and Blood and Religion: The Unmask‐ing of the Jewish and Democratic State are available from Middle East Books and More. This article was published on his website’s blog <https://www.jonathan‐cook.net/blog/ >on June 12, 2024.
medical facilities left after Israel’s destruction of hospitals and its mass kidnap of Palestinian medical personnel. Further, there are no drugs to treat the victims, given Israel’s months-long imposition of an aid blockade.
Israelis and American Jewish organizations—so ready to judge Palestinians for cheering attacks on Israel—celebrated the carnage caused in freeing the Israeli captives, who could have returned home months ago had Israel been ready to agree on a ceasefire.
Videos even show Israelis dancing in the street.
According to reports, the bloody Israeli operation in central Gaza may have killed three other captives, one of them possibly an American citizen.
In comments to the Haaretz newspaper, Louis Har, a hostage freed back in February, observed of his own captivity: “Our greatest fear was the IDF’s planes and the concern that they would bomb the building we were in.”
He added: “We weren’t worried that they’d [referring to Hamas] do something to us all of a sudden. We didn’t object to anything. So
PHOTO
I wasn’t afraid they’d kill me.”
The Israeli media reported Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant describing the operation as “one of the most heroic and extraordinary operations I have witnessed over the course of 47 years serving in Israel’s defense establishment.”
The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court is currently seeking an arrest warrant for Gallant, as well as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The charges include efforts to exterminate the people of Gaza through planned starvation.
STATE TERRORISM
Israel has been wrecking the established laws of war with abandon for more than eight months.
At least 38,250 Palestinians are known to have been killed so far in Gaza, though Palestinian officials lost the ability to properly count the dead many weeks ago following Israel’s relentless destruction of the enclave’s institutions and infrastructure.
Israel has additionally engineered a famine that, mostly out of view, is gradually starving Gaza’s population to death.
The International Court of Justice put Israel on trial for genocide back in January. Last month, it ordered an immediate halt to Israel’s attack on Gaza’s southern city of Rafah. Israel has responded to both judgments by intensifying its killing spree.
In a further indication of Israel’s sense of impunity, the hostage rescue operation involved yet another flagrant war crime.
Israel used a humanitarian aid truck— supposedly bringing relief to Gaza’s desperate population—as cover for its military operation. In international law, that is known as the crime of perfidy.
For months, Israel has been blocking aid to Gaza—part of its efforts to starve the population. It has also targeted aid workers, killing more than 250 of them since October. But more specifically, Israel is waging a war on UNRWA, claiming without evidence that the U.N.’s main aid agency in Gaza is implicated in Hamas “terror” operations. It wants the U.N., the international community’s last lifeline in Gaza against Israel’s
wanton savagery, permanently gone.
By hiding its own soldiers in an aid truck, Israel made a mockery of its supposed “terrorism concerns” by doing exactly what it accuses Hamas of.
But Israel’s military action also dragged the aid effort—the only way to end Gaza’s famine—into the center of the battlefield. Now Hamas has every reason to fear that aid workers are not what they seem, that they are really instruments of Israeli state terrorism.
NEFARIOUS MOTIVE
Considering the circumstances, one might have assumed the Biden administration would be quick to condemn Israel’s actions and distance itself from the massacre.
Instead, Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, was keen to take credit for the mass carnage—or what he termed a “daring operation.”
He admitted in an interview that the U.S. had offered assistance in the rescue operation, though he refused to clarify how. Other reports noted a supporting British role, too.
“The United States has been providing support to Israel for several months in its efforts to help identify the locations of hostages in Gaza and to support efforts to try to secure their rescue or recovery,” Sullivan told CNN.
Sullivan’s comments fuelled existing suspicions that such assistance extends far beyond providing intelligence and a steady supply of the bombs Israel has dropped on the tiny Gaza enclave over the past few months—more than the total that hit London, Dresden and Hamburg combined during World War II.
Additionally, footage shows Washington’s floating pier as the backdrop for helicopters involved in the attack.
The pier was ostensibly built off Gaza’s coast at huge cost—some $320 million— and over two months to bypass Israel’s blocking of aid by land.
Observers argued at the time that it was not only an extraordinarily impractical and inefficient way to deliver aid but that there were likely to be hidden, nefarious motives behind its construction.
Its location, at the midpoint of Gaza’s coast, has bolstered Israel’s severing of the enclave into two, creating a land corridor that has effectively become a new border and from which Israel can launch raids into central Gaza.
Those critics appear to have been proven right. The pier has barely functioned as an aid route since the first deliveries arrived in mid-May.
Now the fact that it appears to have been pressed into immediate use as a beachhead for an operation that killed at least 270 Palestinians drags Washington even deeper into complicity with what the International Court of Justice has called a “plausible genocide.”
But like the use of the aid truck, it also means the Biden administration is joining Israel once again—after pulling its funding to UNRWA—in directly discrediting the aid operation in Gaza when it is needed most urgently.
The Pentagon, meanwhile, insisted the pier was not used as part of the hostage rescue operation. “The pier, the equipment, the personnel all supporting that humanitarian effort had nothing to do with the rescue operation,” Pentagon spokesperson Patrick Ryder told reporters. He further described Israel’s use of the beach next to the pier as “incidental.”
“SUCCESSFUL” MASSACRE
As ever, for Western media and politicians—who have stood firmly against a ceasefire that could have brought the suffering of the Israeli captives and their families to an end months ago—Palestinian lives are quite literally worthless.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz thought it appropriate to describe the killing of 270plus Palestinians in the freeing of the four Israelis as an “important sign of hope,” while then-British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak expressed his “huge relief.” The appalling death toll went unmentioned.
Imagine describing in similarly positive terms an operation by Hamas that killed 270 Israelis to liberate a handful of the many hundreds of medical personnel kidnapped from Gaza by Israel in recent
months and known to be held in a torture facility.
The London Times , meanwhile, breezily erased the massacre of Palestinians by characterizing the operation as a “surgical strike.”
Media outlets uniformly hailed the operation as a “success” and “daring,” as though the killing and maiming of around 1,000 Palestinians—and the serial war crimes Israel committed in the process—need not be factored in.
BBC News’ main report about the operation breathlessly focused on the celebrations of the families of the freed captives, treating the massacre of Palestinians as an afterthought. The program stressed that the death toll was “disputed”—though not mentioning that, as ever, it was Israel doing the disputing.
The reality is that the savage “rescue” operation would have been entirely unnecessary had Netanyahu not been so determined to drag his feet on negotiating the captives’ release, and thereby avoid jail on corruption charges, and the U.S. so fully indulgent of his procrastination.
It will also be very difficult to repeat such an operation, as Haaretz’s military correspondent Amos Harel noted. Hamas will learn lessons, guarding the remaining captives even more closely, most likely underground in its tunnels.
The remaining captives’ return will
“probably occur only as part of a deal that will require significant concessions,” he concluded.
LEVERAGING MURDER
Benny Gantz, the politician-general who helped oversee Israel’s eight-month slaughter in Gaza inside Netanyahu’s war cabinet and is widely described as a “moderate” in the West, resigned from the government on June 9.
Although ostensibly the dispute is over how Israel will extricate itself from Gaza over the coming months, the more likely explanation is that Gantz wishes both to distance himself from Netanyahu as the Israeli prime minister faces possible arrest for crimes against humanity and to prepare for elections to take his place.
The Pentagon and the Biden administration see Gantz as their man. Having him out of the government may give them additional leverage over Netanyahu in the run-up to a U.S. presidential election in November in which Donald Trump will be actively trying to cozy up to the Israeli prime minister.
The focus on Israeli politicking—rather than U.S. complicity in the Nuseirat massacre—will doubtless provide a welcome distraction, too, as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken continues to tour the region. He will once again wish to be seen rallying support for a ceasefire plan that is supposed to see the Israeli captives released—
a plan Netanyahu will be determined, once again, to stymie.
Blinken’s efforts are likely to be even more hopeless in the immediate wake of the Biden administration’s all-too-visible involvement in the killing of hundreds of Palestinians.
Washington’s claim to be an “honest broker” looks to everyone—apart from the reliably obedient Western political and media class—as even more derisory than usual.
The real question is whether Blinken’s serial diplomatic failures in ending the slaughter in Gaza are a bug or a feature.
The stark contradiction in Washington’s position toward Gaza was exposed recently during a press conference with State Department spokesman Matthew Miller.
He suggested that the aim of Israel and the U.S. was to persuade Hamas to dissolve itself—presumably by some form of surrender—in return for a ceasefire. The group had an incentive to do so, said Miller, “because they don’t want to see continued conflict, continued Palestinian people dying. They don’t want to see war in Gaza.”
Even the usually compliant Western press corps were taken aback by Miller’s implication that a crime against humanity— the mass killing of Palestinians, such as took place at Nuseirat camp—was viewed in Washington as leverage to be exercised over Hamas.
But more likely, the seeming contradiction was simply symptomatic of the logical entanglements resulting from Washington’s efforts to deflect from the real goal: buying Israel more time to do what it is doing already.
Israel needs to finish pulverizing Gaza, making it permanently uninhabitable, so that the population will be faced with a stark dilemma: remain and die, or leave by any means possible.
The same U.S. “humanitarian pier” that was pressed into service for the massacre may soon be the “humanitarian pier” that serves as the exit through which Gaza’s Palestinians are ethnically cleansed, shipped out of a death zone engineered by Israel.
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Five Views
Daily Life, Shattered Dreams and Hope in Gaza—Young Writers Share Their Stories
(L‐r) Abdullah sits in a restaurant with his family before the Israeli war on Gaza. The 12‐year‐old lights a fire to prepare some food for his family in front of his destroyed home. Abdullah fills and transports water to the tents of the displaced to provide for his family’s needs.
Israel Denies Gaza’s Children the Right to Childhood
By Refaat Ibrahim
IN MANY COUNTRIES, Childhood is a magical realm where the days are filled with boundless play and endless discovery, far removed from the burdens and responsibilities of adulthood. In this enchanted phase of life, parents endeavor to fulfill their children’s every need—material, emotional and psychological—crafting a nurturing haven where young minds and hearts can flourish, shaping their unique identities in the process.
Refaat Ibrahim is a Palestinian writer from Gaza. He studied English language and literature. He is deeply interested in writing articles on political and social issues, and has several published articles.
But not in Gaza, a place that UNICEF has referred to as “the most dangerous place in the world for children.” ABC News reported on June 24 that nearly 15,000 children have been killed in Gaza and at least 21,000 children are missing or separated from their families. Many have lost their parents and have no provider. More painfully, many children have lost all their family members. Others have become the sole providers for their families.
The Israeli aggression against civilians in Gaza has forced many children to work to provide food and drink and help their families survive under the Israeli blockade. Children walk long distances under the scorching sun while carrying weights they can hardly bear. A child may walk all day carrying water bottles or bread or coffee and tea to sell to passersby on the road. At the end of each day, they hope they’ve collected enough money to buy food, so that they don’t have to sleep hungry. The next day, they repeat the same process.
Gaza suffers from high rates of poverty and unemployment, which have doubled due to the blockade and recurrent conflicts. Children work in difficult and dangerous conditions, including work in farms, workshops and street vending. This work negatively impacts their education, mental and physical health and exposes them to numerous risks, including exploitation and abuse.
Twelve-year-old Abdullah Saeed was an outstanding student in elementary school with a grade average of 96. He and his two brothers and three sisters lived in a house filled with love and affection with their parents in eastern Khan Yunis. Abdullah’s life was going perfectly until his childhood took a drastic turn and filled with sorrow and pain due to the Israeli aggression on Gaza. Abdullah’s father, a teacher, was suffering from cancer and needed immediate treatment outside the Gaza Strip. However, the Israeli occupation closed the Gaza crossings and prevented patients from receiving care. He tried unsuccessfully to get a permit to travel for medical reasons. In February 2024 he passed away. Abdullah says, “When I saw how much my father suffered from cancer, I wished to become a doctor. But I haven’t even completed elementary school because of the Israeli aggression on us in Gaza.”
Abdullah and his family have had to relocate five times since the beginning of the Israeli genocidal war on civilians in Gaza, carrying tents, wood and personal belonging, and walking long distances under Israeli bombing and rockets. They started from their home east of Khan Yunis, then fled to the center of Khan Yunis, then joined their sick father in the hospital, then evacuated to Rafah, then back to Al-Mawasi in Khan Yunis again. After his father’s death and the destruction of their home due to Israeli bombing, Abdullah found himself in a difficult situation. He had to work daily in hard labor to support his siblings all the while dealing with displacement. He is often very afraid for his life.
Abdullah returns from work every evening exhausted, eating food that neither fills him up nor provides the essential nutrients a child’s body needs. His memory takes him back to the days before the Israeli aggression on Gaza when he lived comfortably and safely with his family, attended school and achieved top grades. Abdullah dreams of returning to his school to continue his education and living with his family in their home. His current reality is filled with pain, exhaustion and responsibilities impossible for children to bear.
When asked about his hopes for the future, Abdullah said, “I wished my father were alive and could receive the necessary treatment and recover. Then he could return to the school where he worked as a teacher and take me with him to continue my education. My father’s voice teaching math at school was inspiring and encouraged me to learn. I don’t know why the Israeli occupation denied my father the chance to leave Gaza for treatment.”
Abdullah’s story is one of hundreds of tragic stories happening daily in the Gaza Strip due to Israel’s genocidal war on civilians in Gaza. The suffering of children in Gaza worsens with each new aggression. Children in Gaza suffer from multiple crises, including shortages of food, water and medicine, along with serious psychological and health impacts. The many forms of suffering are known only to those who have been burned by that fire.
Nevertheless, the children of Gaza still have hope and aspirations for a better future despite the difficulties they face as the Israeli war machine continues to kill them as well as their dreams. The children in Gaza need this brutal Israeli aggression to end now. ■
An Angel Whose Wings Were Clipped: Remembering Hind Al-Nuwairi
By Faress Arafat
AFTER MORE THAN 250 days of relentless bloodshed in Gaza, more than 36,000 lives have been lost, and more than 80,000 have been injured. The bombings and massacres continue unabated, claiming dozens of lives every day, including children and women. Each day brings new stories of losses. I wake up to the news of another martyr or injury, shedding tears as my heart aches for what I see and hear. But the news of the martyrdom of my colleague at Al-Shifa Hospital, Hind Al-Nuwairi, affected me more deeply than other losses.
Hind was a real nurse and an angel of mercy. She treated the
Faress Arafat graduated from the Islamic University of Gaza with a bachelor’s degree in nursing in October 2023. He trained with We Are Not Numbers (WANN), a project to amplify the voices of young Palestinian writers. After living in a tent with his family and working in a medical facility in a camp in Rafah, he evacuated to Cairo.
Hind Al‐Nuwairi when she graduated in first place with honors from the College of Nursing. PHOTO
injured and sick as if they were her own family. I learned of her tragic death from my friend and Hind’s brother, Bilal, who is also a nurse.
I reached out to Bilal after I had been forced to leave Al-Shifa Hospital along with everyone else. Bilal and I had been out of touch for a few months by then. I left a message, asking about what had happened to him and how his sister Hind and her unborn child were doing.
For about a week, there was no response from Bilal. Then, suddenly, I received some voice messages from him. In his first message, he asked about me. I could hear the sadness in his voice, as if something was constricting his vocal cords. In his second message, he broke down in tears, unable to utter a complete word.
Bilal told me he lost the most precious thing he had—his support in life, the ones he wished happiness for. He began to recount the story that had shattered his heart. One day in February 2024, after having finished a 24-hour shift at the Gaza European Hospital where he worked as an intensive care unit nurse, he wanted to go to the home in which he and his family had been displaced. But before heading home, he went to the market to buy some cinnamon sticks; his father liked to drink tea mixed with cinnamon.
While walking in the Al-Nuseirat market, Bilal heard a loud explosion. He didn’t know where it came from but felt as if something had gripped his heart. A few minutes later, he saw a neighbor in the market who told him that the explosion was near the house where they were staying and asked him to call to check on his family.
Bilal took the phone and tried to call his father or any family member, but his phone battery had died. He became certain that something bad had happened to his family—that they were either injured or martyred. He used his neighbor’s phone to call his friend, an emergency room nurse at Al-Awda Hospital in Al-Nuseirat. His friend answered, and Bilal quickly asked who was killed, as if he was already sure the bombing was at his family’s house. The nurse replied, “Your father, brother and sister Hind are all martyrs.”
Bilal cried when he recounted his story to the Washington Report. But when his friend gave him the news, Bilal didn’t cry or collapse; time stopped for him. He even lost his hearing and sight for a few seconds, as if he had died and returned to life as a soulless body. Then he ran to Al-Awda Hospital to see his loved ones.
When he arrived, the medical teams were trying to extract the baby from Hind’s womb. She had been nine months pregnant when she was killed. The baby survived, the only family survivor of a bloody massacre—but only for two days.
Bilal told me about his last exchanges with Hind. In retrospect, it was as though she knew that she didn’t have much time. She had told Bilal she was going to the obstetrics and gynecology department to check on her unborn baby, who was due in a few days, and then she would come to visit them. She said she would bring him lots of gifts and his favorite food if she found it, and she would stay up with him and plan for the future. Both his father and Hind wanted Bilal to get engaged.
(L‐r) Bilal, Hind Al‐Nuwairi’s brother, at work and the house where his family was staying.
But that missile was enough to destroy their dreams. After seeing the bloodied bodies of his family in the hospital, Bilal fainted. When he woke up, he began to understand what had happened to him and his family. It wasn’t just them; his uncle’s family of five were killed, and they have not yet been pulled out from under the rubble.
Bilal now relives his memories of happy times with his family and frets about the future. He has lost everything without warning.
Bilal lost his sister; I lost a dear colleague. I remember Hind and her hard work as we worked together in the emergency department before the war began. She would talk about her future plans, how she would raise the child she was carrying, what she would teach him. She treated us like her brothers, giving advice in work and life. I will never forget how hard Hind worked during the war, despite her exhaustion as her pregnancy progressed. She was focused like a laser on her patients. I remember her telling me, “The dying need someone to comfort them, and I will be here for them.” ■
Butterflies of Gaza
By Salsabeel AbuLoghod
IT HAS BEEN HARD to think of butterflies since this genocide began. But I do.
The delicate winged creatures remind me of all my wishes. They hover over my head, flapping their shiny wings and looking for a safe landing on my arm. These butterflies make everything seem possible even in my besieged city of Gaza.
My most ambitious dream is collaborating with the famous South Korean band BTS, who themselves sing of butterflies. I hope one day, I am able to compose songs and perform with them, especially with my favorite member, Kim Taehyung, who is known as V, skyrocketing to success and maybe even working for Disney to create a novel Disney princess inspired by the Korean series and Japanese anime. In Gaza, we let our imagination soar. The siege only strengthens our resolve to achieve and ask for what others may think is impossible. Our faith is our steady guide and keeps the butterflies hopping from one person to the next even amid the rubble.
I had simpler wishes once. I hoped to sample the cuisines of the globe beyond Gaza. I craved basic comforts like finding a quiet corner to sleep in, having a working phone to talk to friends or being online. This war has tried to rob me of all my wishes, the ambitious ones and the ones that we often take for granted.
Before the war, our lives were never complicated. We washed clothes in the washing machine, slept to enchanted dreams, entertained ourselves with TV, played games on the internet, visited relatives or listened to music. The happiness these elicited was immeasurable.
But the wishes during the assaults on Gaza have no connection to any wish I had in the past. Our wish today is just to survive an-
Salsabeel AbuLoghod is a Palestinian writer from Gaza who writes for We Are Not Numbers (WANN). She is committed to telling untold sto‐ries and has published articles at Palestine Chronicle and Deep Dive.
A picture taken on May 29, 2018 along the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip shows a Papilio Machaon butterfly on a thistle stem.
other day. We wait for the trucks of food to arrive to Dowar AlKuwait and Al-Bahar Street, and we hope Israel won’t shoot or bomb us while we wait. We long to see the colors of the vegetables and fruits that line the market stands and the array of sweets that tempt our senses. The food trucks finally reached our shelters recently. They came with cans of food, vegetables and flour at reasonably acceptable prices that, though still high, we can at least afford after seven months of being overcharged and gouged.
We wish to stroll freely on the streets without fear. I wish to sleep to the humming of birds, not drones. My wish is for the Israeli army to leave our land and for us never to be displaced again.
From sunrise to sunset, all I do is think of these butterflies.
I have seen so many Gazans move from the north to the south without their belongings or their money. The men left with barely any clothes on and some, just in their underwear, holding a white flag as they escaped to what they hoped would be safety under the deafening bombs. But their white flags did not save them: the Israeli army shoots Palestinian civilians without mercy, hunting them as though they were animals. The only smell that saturates the air is from the mountains of trash and the toxic chemicals that bombs leave behind. Swarms of mosquitos and flies gather around. Illness strikes when people are at their weakest.
Our wishes carry the hope we live another day and even those wishes are the afterthoughts of nightmares. Each wish follows a nightmare of being maimed and murdered. I can no longer distinguish a wish from a nightmare. Surviving sometimes turns into more of a nightmare than a wish because the state of our survival is dismal. Will we survive but lose our families, our limbs, our past, our country?
PHOTO BY JACK GUEZ/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
The end of this genocide is going to require a miracle replete with magical feats. Magical powers are the stuff of fairytales and an alternate universe after all. The thought makes me uncomfortable, as though I am betraying the butterflies.
But in the direst times, our wishes keep hovering over our heads and won’t leave our side. I see this most in the questions children ask me. They are fearful of going alone to the bathroom when they hear a door slam or a bomb drop and yet they still carry some hope of calm. I wonder how much longer they can continue to hope when the adults are becoming desperate from all the suffering and ugliness around them. They still ask me, “Auntie! When the war will end? When we will eat candies and sweets? When we will play on hammocks? When we will swim in the sea?” I tell them to keep wishing and praying for an end to the horrors.
My greatest wish today is that the dark times end and that quiet returns without the threatening sounds of the drones. I turn to my faith for hope and strength and it makes every wish possible even as I search for God between the rubble in Gaza. If I stop seeing the butterflies, that is when I will die. ■
Haunted By War
By Dana Besaiso
“NOW THAT YOU ARE OUT, you should focus on your future and leave everything else behind.” Everyone I met after evacuating Gaza to Egypt has given me that advice. But how could I forget when vivid scenes of horror are engraved deeply inside my brain?
PSYCHOLOGICALLY UNWELL
On my last night in the Gaza Strip, on Jan. 8, the sky was lit up by Israeli firebombs that paved the way for the F-16s to carpet-bomb
Nuseirat refugee camp. My sister, Lama, and I were wrapped up in one another, reciting the Qur’an and praying that we would still be alive when day breaks.
“Do you think we will die tonight before we get a chance to leave Gaza?” I asked while gazing at the firebombs through the window across from me.
Lama gazed into my eyes. “No, I believe God is so merciful that he will get us out of this horrible night,” she reassured me.
Now that I am out, I keep reliving this scene. Every night, as I look out at the street lights from my window, I see only firebombs.
I am a witness to one of the century’s most horrific genocides. I am a witness to destruction, murder and mutilation. How can I forget all of that and move on with my life? How do you expect me to?
Every time I hear the sound of an airplane taking off, I expect it to be an F-16 missile and take cover. But these planes are friendly; they are flying over me to transport people from one country to another. I am not used to such planes; all the ones I know drop missiles and two-ton bombs on my people.
Everyone around me thinks that we are ultimately free once we are out of the war zone. They are clueless to the mental war we have inside our heads. They don’t know that we fear sleep because nightmares from the war days haunt us. They don’t know that we can still hear the zanana—an armed Israeli drone that constantly buzzes as it conducts surveillance of the Gaza Strip—24/7 even though we are far away from it.
When I watch a video or hear a voice-recorded message from a friend with that sound in the background, my heart starts racing.
THE HEAVINESS OF GAZA
“Start looking for a job opportunity or an internship. You should look for a university to study in since your university was demol-
On Dana Besaiso’s last night in Nuseirat refugee camp, Jan. 8, 2024, she took a photo of the Israeli firebombs landing nearby. She and her sister prayed they would live until dawn.
ished in Gaza,” they say. But how could I? When in my head, I am still there. I have never left Gaza.
A famous proverb goes: “You can take the girl out of Gaza, but you can never take Gaza out of the girl.”
Gaza lives within me; I cannot breathe any air that is not in it. In my eyes, all vast places are small, all green plants are dull, and all happy moments are sad. After all, they are not in Gaza, they were not made in Gaza.
Whenever I meet with my Palestinian friends who evacuated Gaza, we all try to console and cheer each other up saying that the genocide will be over soon. We discuss plans we are making for our future.
But deep down, we all know that we are lying.
We all go to our residences—because they are not home—with that heavy luggage of emotions: whether it is missing home and all of our lifelong belongings that were demolished by Israeli warplanes, checking on old memories of places that were bombed and nowhere to be found anymore, mourning the martyrdom of close friends and family members, or worrying for the remaining family members in Gaza. That heaviness is the constant companion of anyone who evacuated Gaza without their whole family.
Either way, we are still in a much better place than our friends and families who are in Gaza, staying in tents, and resisting the brutal genocide with their words and actions because they are
filled with the utmost belief that they have the right to exist and live peacefully.
FAILURE TO IMPLEMENT HUMAN RIGHTS LAWS IN GAZA
“Human rights are indivisible” is the most important lesson I learned in law school.
“The Universal Declaration of Human Rights articles come as a package deal; you cannot exclude any of the 30 articles from any human being. They are granted to everyone once they are born,” my professor said.
However if you are Palestinian, that package can be ripped apart and separated We surely are not granted the right to life, liberty and security stated in Article 3, but we must fight for it.
Rafeef Ziadah, a Palestinian poet and human rights activist, wrote, “We Teach Life, Sir,” and surely we do. But we do not want to keep on teaching it; we simply want to live it.
We do not want to lose more than 38,000 people, many of whom are children, to prove to the world that we deserve to live.
“I wish I could shrink you into small-sized peas and swallow you inside of me again so I can protect you, so you never know the taste of fear,” my mother would often say to my sisters and me.
I am sorry, mother. Your little girl grew up to witness and smell death all around her. She now no longer believes in human rights laws. She grew up to know the taste of fear. How she wishes you could shrink her and swallow her and keep her safe. To know what it means to be safe. ■
Dana Besaiso is a law student and a writer at We Are Not Numbers (WANN), a project to amplify the voices of young Palestinian writers.
PHOTO BY DANA BEDAISO
Voices From Palestine: Representing Gaza at The Human Rights Defender Program
By Shahd Safi
I WAS BORN in Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip, yet my heart holds a deep connection to Qastina, my grandparents’ Palestinian village, which was ethnically cleansed by Israel in 1948. My family’s displacement led us to Gaza, where we sought refuge, longing for the day we could return.
In 2023, I returned to Gaza just two months after completing my studies in Spain as an Erasmus exchange student, only to be shocked by the cruel reality when the attack took place in October. Life in Gaza had always been hard and exhausting, but somehow I had always managed. Gaza is the world’s largest open-air prison, with limited hours of electricity daily, disease-producing water, high rates of air pollution and cancer, shortages in medicine and basic products, and a high suicide rate, yet surprisingly, an amazing literacy rate of 97 percent—one of the highest in the world. Despite the hardships, Gaza is the home I grew up loving.
The current sustained assault on Gaza has been devastating for my family. My cousin Abeer lost her 7-year-old son, her husband
Shahd Safi, a Palestinian from Gaza, is an Arabic/English translator and teacher, freelance journalist, social media coordinator and human rights advocate.
and most of his entire extended family, leaving her alone with her 5-year-old son. Another cousin’s wife, Reham, also lost her entire family. Some of our family members were injured, and my cousin Saeb was detained, tortured and humiliated by Israeli troops during the attack. Our homes were entirely destroyed, leaving us fully unhoused and facing severe shortages of food, water and medicine.
During this war in Gaza, every daily task became a struggle—from waiting in long lines for basic necessities like flour and water to finding ways to heat water for a simple shower. We endured sleepless nights with warplanes hovering overhead, constantly living in fear and on high alert. As a freelance journalist, I feared for my life in Gaza.
In February, I launched a GoFundMe campaign to cover the exorbitant fees an Egyptian official company makes Palestinians pay to let them evacuate from Gaza to Egypt and escape the genocide. After enduring a genocidal war for 150 days, we finally crossed into Egypt in March. (See June/July 2024, Washington Report, pp. 22-23.) Palestinians in Egypt receive no support from the government. Our remaining funds sustain us in exile, like covering high rents. Despite feeling guilty for leaving, I believe I can advocate more effectively for my people from abroad.
On Feb. 28, I received a letter from the Carter Center’s Human Rights Program, inviting me to participate in the 2024 Human Rights Defenders Forum. As an advocate and journalist covering human rights issues in my community, I accepted the invitation even though I felt guilty as I am now struggling to fully believe in the effectiveness of human rights organizations.
The forum took place in Atlanta, Georgia, where 65 Human Rights Defenders from 40 countries attended. Susan Marx, the director of
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Human Rights Programs at the Carter Center, warmly opened the forum. Each day was meticulously curated, with the first focusing on the erosion of human rights and democratic backsliding, the second scrutinizing the normalization of violence and the third confronting climate change. Breakout sessions and guided tours of the Carter Center premises provided additional engagement.
On the second day of the forum, Susan Marx donned a traditional Palestinian thobe, which I understood to be a sign of solidarity and recognition. The day culminated in a riveting panel discussion titled “Palestinian Voices,” where painful narratives were shared. Dr. Rua Rimawi from the West Bank recounted the tragic loss of her brothers who were shot by Israeli snipers, Nidaa Nassar from the Palestinian community in Israel highlighted the distortion of history in Israeli educational curricula, and I shared my personal experience from Gaza. Moderated by George Zeidan, the panel served as a powerful platform for authentic storytelling and truth-telling.
Despite the irony that Palestinians from diverse backgrounds are unable to gather within Palestine itself due to restrictive Israeli policies, the collective outpouring of pain and resilience deeply resonated with the audience. Witnessing genuine tears and palpable empathy, I yearned to transport each attendee to Palestine, so that each could see the realities obscured by mainstream media. In that moment of shared anguish and collective resolve, I harbored hope that such empathy might catalyze meaningful action where it is most urgently needed.
On May 22, I traveled to Washington, DC, to meet with staffers from the State Department and Capitol Hill, share my story and advocate for a ceasefire in Gaza. Our group included George Zeidan of the Carter Center, Nidaa Nassar from the Baladna Association for Arab Youth (based in Haifa), Sarit Michaeli from B’Tselem and Hassan El-Tayyab of the Friends Committee on National Legislation. Each of them shared insightful perspectives and advocated for Palestinian human rights in different Palestinian territories and within the Palestinian community inside Israel.
While President Joe Biden’s recent ceasefire proposal brings a glimmer of hope, its delayed implementation is concerning. The proposal emphasizes the need to halt violence and provide humanitarian aid, but it lacks sufficient pressure on Israel to stop military operations. Unfortunately, this proposal does not promise an end to U.S. financial and military support to Israel. As a Palestinian from Gaza, I believe a ceasefire must address the root causes of the issue: the blockade on Gaza, settlements, and occupation. It must be enduring. While I hope this proposal leads to tangible changes, I also believe true effectiveness requires the United States to suspend military aid to Israel.
Without a comprehensive approach, lasting peace remains elusive. ■
The Carter Center’s 2024 Human Rights Defenders Forum culminated with a riveting panel discussion featuring (l‐r) Susan Marx and George Zeidan from the Carter Center, the author Shahd Safi, Dr. Rua Rimawi from the West Bank town of Beit Rima and Nidaa Nassar who heads the Haifa‐based Baladna Association for Arab Youth.
Survivor’s Guilt in the Palestinian Diaspora
By Diana Safieh
Children and parents hold a demonstration on Buchanan Street as part of the UK School Strike for Palestine demanding a ceasefire in Gaza on Nov. 24, 2023 in Glasgow, Scotland.
IN JUNE, at a Balfour Project conference in London, Palestinian political analyst Nour Odeh discussed the unique survivor’s guilt felt by Palestinians in the West Bank during Israel’s current war in Gaza. Conditions there are also oppressive, but the violence is not (yet) as widespread as it is in Gaza. This raises a pertinent question for the broader Palestinian diaspora: What is it like for those of us who escaped the camps and curfews entirely? Those who grew up in the leafy suburbs of London or townhouses in New York, who might be of mixed heritage but are 100 percent Palestinian in identity?
Survivor’s guilt is a form of psychological distress experienced by those who escape a traumatic event while others do not. Our traumatic event, the Nakba, is ongoing. And we in the diaspora haven’t
Diana Safieh is a writer and podcaster whose areas of expertise are Palestine, true crime and anything even slightly unusual. She currently works with St John Eye Hospital and the Balfour Project in the UK. She was recently invested as a member of the Order of St. John for her efforts, just like her father, Ambassador Afif Safieh, and great uncle.
escaped it, but we live through a different version of it. Our families are scattered across the globe. We feel othered in our adopted home countries. Those of us who are lucky can return to our homeland on an insulting tourist visa, while others are not even permitted to return for a visit. But most of us in the diaspora grew up with near-total freedom, while others struggle daily to survive in Gaza, and that was purely a result of birth lottery.
The experiences of Palestinian refugees and exiles, scattered across the globe, are marked by a unique interplay of historical displacement, ongoing conflict and cultural identity, all of which contribute to the intensity of survivor’s guilt.
For those whose parents or grandparents fled or were exiled during the 1948 or 1967 wars or any other period, there is an acute awareness that our lives would be very different if we had grown up in our hometowns in Palestine or a camp in Gaza or Lebanon. The only curfew I had was set loosely by my parents, and I broke it often and with little consequence. My movements were not subject to the whims of teenaged armed guards at checkpoints; I did not risk being
PHOTO BY JEFF J MITCHELL/GETTY IMAGES
shot by a soldier for breaking curfew. We grew up with stories of loss and survival, inheriting a sense of duty and emotional burden from our parents. This intergenerational transmission of trauma and guilt shaped our identities and life choices. How does this manifest in our psyche? My undergraduate dissertation focused on national identity among the Palestinian diaspora, and unsurprisingly, it found that our sense of being Palestinian is strong. We identify as Palestinian above all else, regardless of citizenship or having only one Palestinian parent.
We have luxuries and opportunities. We bear the burden of knowing that our compatriots back home do not. This knowledge can lead to an internal conflict where our achievements and comfort feel like undeserved privilege. We live with the reality that their safety and opportunities starkly contrast with ours. They resist simply by living in historic Palestine within Israel’s colonial constraints, and their opportunities are similarly constrained. Clearly they pay a higher price for asserting their Palestinian identity than those of us in the diaspora will ever pay.
Coping with images and stories from back home is challenging. I feel I haven’t slept a full night since Oct. 7; I’ve been obsessed with doom-scrolling on social media sites and catching up on Al Jazeera. The
constant flow of distressing news from Palestine—images of destruction, stories of loss and accounts of human rights abuses—is overwhelming. And I feel guilty mentioning sleeplessness because it’s nothing compared to what people back home are experiencing all the time. The destruction is so severe that almost all of us have experienced a personal loss or have friends who have suffered losses. It’s too much for us to bear, and given that, it’s too painful to imagine what it is like to be in Gaza right now.
Is it easy being an immigrant? Of course not. But is it a Herculean task, as it now is in Gaza, to stay alive, to make sure our families are safe? No. Anyone living away from their home nation faces challenges; the news of the home country, when it is presented at all, is often misrepresented or lacks context. In London, I’ve experienced racism and, ironically, Islamophobia; bigots don’t check facts before expressing their ignorance. It can be unpleasant to contend with this repeatedly.
We in the diaspora are severely disappointed or even angered by the response, or lack thereof, of our adopted home nations. Listening to UK members of Parliament debate whether international humanitarian law should apply to a specific group of people should actually scare everyone. The restrictions on freedom of
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expression being imposed by some governments who are restricting the rights to boycott settlement goods is a violation of civil rights that should be a red flag to every citizen, even if they do not care a dot about Israel/Palestine.
How do we handle this guilt? Some struggle and do nothing, while others, occupied with their own struggles, cannot engage. However, many of us feel compelled to do what we can for those who can’t. Our activism is driven by the belief that our survival obliges us to fight for justice and the rights of those in Palestine. This constructive action is crucial for our own survival. And many of us, at home and abroad, seek comfort in those nonPalestinians offering their solidarity, through kind words, marches and other forms of activism.
I don’t want to end on a pious note, and yet I will. It is one’s duty to take advantage of all the opportunities life presents to you to make the world a more hospitable place for all of us. It is not our privilege that is undeserved, it is the occupation, oppression and what I suspect the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice will confirm, genocide experienced by those back home. We must use our privilege to work toward a day when life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness will be afforded to us all. ■
Oh, Looks Like Bombing Hospitals Is Bad Again
By Caitlin Johnstone Special Report
People walk toward a devastated building at Al‐Shifa Hospital in Gaza City on June 11, 2024. Israeli troops conducted raids in November and March on the medical facility, the largest in the Gaza Strip, which was reduced to rubble according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
A MISSILE STRUCK a children’s hospital in Kyiv on July 8 during the heaviest Russian bombardment on Ukraine in months, which stretched across five regions and reportedly killed some 40 people.
Kyiv and its Western allies are saying the children’s hospital was hit by Russia, while Moscow says the hospital was hit by a Ukrainian air defense missile during Russia’s attack. All that’s clear as of this writing is that the hospital was bombed either as a direct or indirect result of the Russian missile strikes, and that Western leaders are responding very, very differently to this news than they have been to deliberate Israeli attacks on hospitals throughout the Gaza Strip.
“Russia’s missile strikes that today killed dozens of Ukrainian civilians and caused damage and casualties at Kyiv’s largest children’s
Caitlin Johnstone is a reader‐supported independent journalist from Melbourne, Australia. Her political writings can be found on Medium and on <CaitlinJohnstone.com.au>.
hospital are a horrific reminder of Russia’s brutality,” tweeted whoever runs the U.S. president’s Twitter account, adding, “It is critical that the world continues to stand with Ukraine at this important moment and that we not ignore Russian aggression.”
“Attacking innocent children. The most depraved of actions. We stand with Ukraine against Russian aggression our support won’t falter,” tweeted the UK’s new Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
“This is abhorrent. Striking a children’s hospital and the innocent children inside cannot be justified,” tweeted Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, adding, “My heart goes out to the families who are grieving and Canada’s commitment to Ukraine remains as strong as ever.”
“Russia’s missile attacks on several Ukrainian cities, including a Kyiv children’s hospital are abhorrent,” echoed Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong as though responding to some kind of memo. “We condemn the targeting of civilian infrastructure, including hos-
pitals. Australia continues to support the people of Ukraine in the face of Russia’s illegal, immoral war.”
Contrast this firm and unequivocal statement from Wong with her mealy-mouthed, passive-language statement about Israel’s deliberate systematic destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system:
“Hospitals, patients, medical and humanitarian staff must be protected. Australia is deeply concerned by attacks in and around hospitals in Gaza, including an Indonesianfunded hospital in northern Gaza and a Jordanian field hospital.”
And that’s about as strong a criticism as you’ll see from Western officials regarding Israel’s relentless assault on Palestinian hospitals. Most haven’t had anything to say at all.
Since Oct. 7 there have been hundreds of documented Israel Occupation Forces attacks on Gaza’s healthcare system, which according to the U.N. has been mostly destroyed by this onslaught.
Oxford University professor Nick May-
nard has accused the Israel Occupation Forces of “systematically targeting healthcare facilities, healthcare personnel and really dismantling the whole healthcare system” in Gaza after spending time working there during Israel’s bombardment of the enclave.
According to a new report published in The Lancet medical journal, indirect deaths ensuing from Israel’s assault on Gaza by things like disease and inability to access healthcare services will likely wind up being many times greater than the direct deaths caused by mass military violence, saying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths for every one reported official death would wind up putting the grand total death toll at around 186,000. And that’s with an official direct death toll that is definitely a huge undercount.
Where was all the outrage about all this? Where were all the statements from Western officials about how “abhorrent” it is to attack those hospitals? Where were all the Western news media headlines explicitly
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naming Israel as the perpetrator of those attacks, like they’ve been doing with Russia? Nowhere to be found.
This is because Western empire managers do not actually believe that there is anything “abhorrent” or “horrific” about attacking a hospital at least not one which provides services to Palestinians or other populations who are not favored by the Western empire.
This has nothing to do with concern for human lives and wellbeing. They just want to manufacture more consent for continuing their proxy war in Ukraine. ■
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Why Deceitful Headlines About Gaza Matter
By Laila Delpuppo Messari
SINCE OCTOBER 7, misleading headlines about the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza in Western media sources seem designed to minimize the horror unleashed on Palestinians. By failing to mention death tolls, writing in the passive voice, and never using the term genocide, newspapers have employed a slew of strategies to attempt to absolve Israel of its war crimes. The following compilation of egregiously misleading headlines provides a sample of the ways newspapers mischaracterize the events happening on the ground.
NEW YORK TIMES HEADLINES
With 102 Workers Killed, U.N. Agency in Gaza Struggles to Provide Aid, Nov. 16, 2023
The headline does not specify that Israeli bombing is responsible for the deaths of the U.N. workers; the workers seem to have been killed by unknown forces. The headline also fails to capture that the aid provided by UNRWA is essential to Palestinian survival in Gaza. Furthermore, it does not demonstrate that UNRWA struggles to provide aid because of deliberate Israeli impediments and smear campaigns against the agency.
How Gaza Civilians Have Fared After Israel Has Asked Them to Flee, March 19, 2024
Israel did not “ask” Palestinians to flee—it forced them to flee with bombing, ground attacks, destruction of infrastructure and a man-made famine. In many instances it bombed them as they fled using the route Israel provided, and it bombed them again when they arrived at their destination, designated a safe-zone.
Laila Delpuppo Messari, a senior majoring in political science at Yale University, is a summer intern at the Washington Report. She is also an editor and contributing reporter at Yale Daily News
Israel’s Shutdown of Al Jazeera Highlights Long-Running Tensions, May 9, 2024
Referring to Israel’s blatant attack on freedom of the press as a “long-running” tension diminishes the actual act—a deliberate silencing of Arab media. The headline minimizes the seriousness of Israel’s attacks on journalism and journalists (Israel had killed 147 Palestinian journalists in Gaza by May 16), and it diminishes Al Jazeera’s commitment to reporting Israel’s crimes in Palestine.
As Israel Steps Up Attacks, 300,000 Gazans are on the Move, May 11, 2024
This headline is so bad the New York Times had to change it. Israel’s “attacks” have been labeled as a plausible genocide by the International Court of Justice. Saying that Gazans are “on the move” misrepresents the horrors of the situation, using a lighthearted tone to describe a devastating experience of internal displacement that has been ongoing for months. Most Gazans have been displaced several times, ostensibly for their own safety, but the casualty count and the pattern of Israeli bombardment tell another story.
Israeli Airstrike in Rafah Kills Dozens in Tent Camp, Gazan Officials Say, May 26, 2024
Here, again, the failure to mention an actual figure for Palestinians killed by Israeli airstrikes is intended to minimize Israel’s culpability in the ongoing genocide. Israel bombed a refugee camp filled with people it had displaced, killing 35 and injuring many more. The phrase “Gazan officials say” at the end of the headline is intended to sow doubt on the veracity of the statement when in fact, the information released by “Gazan officials” has proven to be more accurate than U.S. and Israeli information.
Israeli Military Rescues 4 Hostages in Military Operations; Gazan Officials Say Scores are Killed, June 8, 2024
The use of the ambiguous term “scores” to denote Palestinian casualties suggests a deliberate attempt to minimize the death toll—274 dead Palestinian civilians, a massive toll for a single incident, and several times the number implied by “scores.” The headline fails to mention that the Israeli military killed them in order to rescue four hostages. Three hostages were also killed in the process, one of whom was a U.S. citizen. U.S. media reports have had little to say about the U.S. hostage killed by the Israeli military who could have been freed in a prisoner exchange.
Anarchy Hinders Gaza Aid Efforts, Despite Daily Combat
Pause, June 19, 2024
Calling what is happening in Gaza “anarchy” instead of a genocide is a deliberate attempt to minimize Israel’s war crimes. What is truly hindering Gaza aid efforts is Israel’s refusal to allow aid to enter, its indiscriminate bombing of civilians who approach aid trucks because they are desperate for food, its targeting of aid workers, its failure to intervene when Israeli civilians block aid trucks and remove aid provisions and the lack of infrastructure in Gaza due to Israel’s purposeful destruction of roads and warehouses.
What to Know About Israel’s Plan to Legalize 5 West Bank Settlements, June 28, 2024
Israel’s settlements in the West Bank are illegal under international law, and no Israeli maneuvers can “legalize” them. The use of the term “legalize” conceals that Israel’s actions actually consist of an illegal annexation of Palestinian territory—essentially stealing Palestinian land. The headline sounds as though these settlements are approved in a vacuum, when in fact 24,300 Israeli housing units have been approved in the West Bank in one year, the largest number since monitoring began in 2017.
CNN HEADLINES
The following headlines come from CNN. Known for being one of the most watched and most trustworthy sources of news in the U.S., its coverage of the ongoing genocide in Gaza uses misleading headlines to minimize Israel’s responsibility in killing more than 186,000 civilians, an estimate of how high the death toll could reach. Many of these cover the same events as the New York Times headlines.
Aid groups grapple with challenging conditions as Gaza experiences communications blackout, Oct. 28, 2023
“Challenging conditions” does not begin to encompass the situation faced by aid groups in Gaza. Furthermore, the headline gives no indication that it was an Israeli-imposed communications blackout, absolving Israel of blame in creating the “challenging conditions” for aid groups.
More than 10,000 killed in Gaza, Hamas-controlled health ministry says, as condemnation of Israel’s campaign grows, Nov. 9, 2023
The headline uses the passive voice, “more than 10,000 killed in Gaza,” without stating who killed the 10,000 people in Gaza. Specifying the numbers come from the “Hamas-controlled health ministry” is an attempt to sow doubt on the number of Palestinians killed. The use of “campaign” to describe events that result in 10,000 civilians dead is an attempt to minimize the violent and brutal nature of Israel’s attacks on Palestinians.
International leaders scramble to put an end to violence in Israel and Gaza, Nov. 10, 2023
This headline implies that there is equal violence in Israel and Gaza, whereas—just over one month into the war—Israel had already launched a full ground invasion in Gaza. By this point, more
than 10,000 Palestinians had been killed by Israel.
U.N. mourns the deaths of more than 100 aid workers in Gaza, the highest number killed in any conflict in its history, Nov. 14, 2023
The headline fails to indicate that Israel killed U.N. aid workers. Failing to mention Israel’s culpability does not adequately represent the ongoing genocide in Gaza, or Israel’s deliberate efforts to impede aid from entering the enclave.
More than 30,000 killed in Gaza since Israel-Hamas war began, health ministry says, Feb. 29, 2024
The headline does not tell readers that the 30,000 dead were Palestinian civilians; the figure could be understood to include Israelis, to imply that both parties are suffering casualties. The addition of “health ministry says” at the end of the headline is an attempt to sow doubt on the credibility of the figures.
104 civilians killed trying to access food aid trucks in Gaza, according to Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, Feb. 29, 2024
The headline fails to specify that the civilians were killed by Israeli soldiers. It also sows doubt on the credibility of the figures by adding “according to Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza” to the end of the headline. Furthermore, the lack of context regarding the ongoing man-made hunger in Gaza further attempts to absolve Israel of its responsibility in the killings.
An Israeli operation rescues four hostages and kills scores of Palestinians. Here’s what we know, June 10, 2024
The Palestinian death toll—274 killed—is not conveyed by the use of “scores” and is not mentioned in the headline. In comparison, the number of rescued hostages is specified. Mentioning the number of dead Palestinians would change the balance of the headline and offer a cost-benefit analysis of the rescue operation. It bears mention that what the headline omits—the killing of three hostages in the same rescue operation—raises questions about why that detail was omitted, considering that one of them was a U.S. citizen and would be of interest to U.S. readers.
He saved the life of Hamas’s leader. Then they murdered his nephew, June 20, 2024
The reference to Hamas as “they” in the second sentence in the headline creates an “us” versus “them,” a good guy versus bad guy, mentality, reinforcing animosity against Palestinians, who have been enduring a genocide by Israel for the past several months.
The headline implies that the man who “saved the life” is a victim of Hamas treachery. In fact, the Hamas leader who is referenced here, Yahya Sinwar, was in prison when the Israeli diagnosed his ailment and saved his life. In doing that, he was acting in accordance with medical ethics; perhaps he should be given credit for doing his job, since so many Israeli doctors are complicit in the torture of Palestinian prisoners. The nephew in question was killed on Oct. 7 in an Israeli kibbutz during a gunfight. It is highly unlikely that he was singled out.■
Looking Beyond the Headlines
By Catherine Baker
MANY MAINSTREAM news organizations and individual reporters have obvious biases in how they cover the events that occurred on Gaza’s border Oct. 7. So how can we learn what really happened that day and is happening now with Israel’s war on Palestine? This question was explored by panelists at a May 19 Voices From the Holy Land online film salon.
Significant atrocities took place that included the murder of civilians including children, acknowledged Nader Hashemi, associate professor and director of the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service (and moderator for the May 19 event).
These atrocities were in themselves sufficient to affect world opinion, he said; this raises the question of why Israel and the U.S. high-
lighted—and the media helped promote—distorted or fabricated evidence, such as the now-debunked reports of beheaded babies and children put in ovens. “Why was it so necessary to focus on these atrocities that have now been proven to be false?”
The answer is that such propaganda has enabled Israel to mobilize public opinion behind its policies; portraying the war as a battle between good and evil has helped the U.S. justify its support of Israel’s response, according to Mouin Rabbani, co-editor of Jadaliyya, an independent e-zine produced by the Arab Studies Institute.
“There is a long history of this,” he said, providing as example the false World War I-era reports of Belgian babies pitchforked by German soldiers.
The atrocity stories “also helped the Israeli security establishment divert attention from its own failures and the damage that was directly inflicted on its own forces on October 7.” (Israeli military reports determined that Israeli helicopters fired on vehicles
A picture taken during a media tour organized by the Israeli military shows the charred interior of a building in the kibbutz Nir Oz along the border with the Gaza Strip on Oct. 19, 2023, following the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas. The media helped promote now‐debunked reports of beheaded babies, children put in ovens and mass rapes.
Catherine Baker, a Maryland‐based writer and editor, is a mem‐ber of the Voices From the Holy Land Steering Committee.
with Israeli captives and the Nova rave attendees, as well as kibbutz residents.)
Diana Buttu, a human rights lawyer with the Institute for Middle East Understanding, noted that atrocity stories help dehumanize Palestinians, which is a necessary prerequisite to maintaining a brutal military regime, imprisoning thousands of people, and conducting ethnic cleansing and genocide.
The allegations of Hamas using systematic sexual violence as a weapon of war have not been substantiated. Israel has prevented any independent investigation from proceeding. Materials captured from Hamas sources have revealed no such plans. Electronic Intifada analysts have reviewed the various iterations of that story and noted the absence of a single credible victim (or witness, for that matter)—that is hard to reconcile with attacks that were allegedly “systematic” and “widespread.”
“Is this the first armed conflict in human history in which there has been zero incidents of sexual violence?” asked Rabbani. “I would say that is exceptionally unlikely. More importantly, that’s not the issue. The issue is Israel’s contention, that on Oct. 7 there was mass, organized, systematic sexual violence against Israeli women, perpetrated by the militant organizations that launched their offensive into southern Israel, as a premeditated weapon of war. And for that the evidence is zero, and I presume will remain zero.”
According to Rabbani, the systematic rape story not only dehumanizes the enemy, but also delegitimizes any critic of Israel’s genocidal campaign (“so you’re defending rapists!”).
Meanwhile, said Buttu, the media has not been reporting on the many documented cases of sexual violence against Palestinian women in Israeli prisons that have in part been fueled by the widely publicized allegations of sexual violence against Israeli women on Oct. 7.
Rabbani advised readers to take note of timing: when atrocity stories are reported and how they are mobilized to divert attention from other news. “These atrocity stories tend to appear at critical political junctures,”
he said. For example, the New York Times published a major analysis of the alleged systematic rapes right before Israel’s invasion of Al-Shifa Hospital; Israel’s allegations that Hamas militants were posing as workers for United Nations Relief and Works Agency surfaced as the world awaited a ruling by the International Court of Justice on South Africa’s request.
The panelists offered several tips for interpreting the news.
“Treat any official statement by any government with skepticism—in other words, unproven unless and until substantiated,” advised Rabbani.
Buttu concurred. She cautioned that government officials are trained to “spin” by anticipating questions and repeatedly rehearsing their planned responses; some mainstream journalists essentially serve as their stenographers. For these reasons, she said, it’s important to look beyond what they are saying.
She added that it is the individual’s responsibility to search for the context of reported events and to demand context from journalists. This is important because “the reporting that we see today is the product of years, if not decades, of attempts to try to quash and crush any knowledge of context” and to instead present dissociated facts (such as body counts) or vague explanations (such as “the situation is a clash of religions”).
Rabbani suggested looking at a broad variety of sources (e.g., mainstream, independent, alternative; print and digital; outlets from a variety of countries, not just U.S., Palestine and Israel). He also recommended reading further than the headlines and first paragraphs, because sometimes the most useful and accurate information is buried near the end.
A key challenge to learning what’s really happening is that reporting typically includes the voices of the Israeli and U.S. governments but not a Palestinian governmental voice, noted Adam Horowitz, Mondoweiss executive editor. He therefore advised news consumers to seek out the voices of people with lived experience in Gaza; this is particularly important because
the Western media has intentionally been kept out of Gaza since Oct. 7. As an example, he noted that certain Israeli claims that humanitarian aid is getting through have been refuted by the people who would have been receiving that aid.
Seeking out the voices of people on the ground is also important for learning what is going on within Israel itself, he added, noting that the Israeli government’s narrative of what happened in the kibbutzes in southern Israel on Oct. 7 differs from the narrative of the people who were actually there. Some of those interviews were suppressed by mainstream media.
Another tip for discerning media consumers: Attend to what independent human rights organizations are reporting. Hashemi explained that when Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations Human Rights Council, local human rights groups such as Al Haq and B’Tselem, and journalists with track records of independent reporting consistently describe a particular set of events, that can serve as a starting point to measure information reported by other sources.
The panelists discussed the exposés of both CNN and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that have revealed how journalists are pressured by higher ups in their organizations and by the Zionist lobby to adhere to a pro-Israeli viewpoint. Buttu maintained that it is incumbent on people who oppose this bias to demand fairer coverage, including coverage of topics that mainstream media has mostly ignored. Examples include the Nakba, Israeli leadership’s unwillingness to concede that Palestinians deserve equal rights, Hamas’ point of view, and the international law violations that Israel has committed, especially its numerous attacks on hospitals. People should also push back against media use of sanitizing terminology, such as referring to illegal settlements in East Jerusalem as “Jewish neighborhoods.”
A recording of the salon, which was cosponsored by Pax Christi USA and Jewish Voice for Peace-DC Metro, can be found at the VFHL website: <https://www.voices fromtheholyland.org/salonrecordings>. ■
Israel’s Weaponization of Anti-Jewish Racism Begins with the Word “Anti-Semitism”
By Tom Suárez
RAISE THE ISSUE of Palestine, and six syllables—anti-Semitism— are never far away. Yet like so much of the terminology entwined in the subject, these six overworked 19th-century syllables silently perform pro-Israel propaganda independent of the serious concept they allegedly represent. It is of course hardly in silence that Israel uses rumblings of “anti-Semitism” to smear Palestinian aspirations for liberation, cranking up the volume whenever control of the “narrative” risks slipping from the state’s grip. Since October 7, as Israel commits genocide in Gaza in full view of the world, the word “anti-Semitism” has been in unprecedented demand. Politicians betray their country and repress their public in fear of the word, as the presidents of the most esteemed universities are hauled to Congress to cower before it and its associated messianic psycho-babble. It is wielded
Tom Suárez, author of Palestine Hijacked: How Zionism Forged an Apartheid State from River to Sea , available from Middle East Books & More, is a Juilliard ‐trained violinist and a former faculty member of Palestine’s National Conservatory of Music.
so farcically that even London is now said to be unsafe for Jews as a result of the “pro-Palestinian” crowd.
At the core of this weaponization of anti-Semitism is the racist lie that the struggle for Palestinian liberation is somehow tainted with (or indeed has anything whatsoever to do with) hatred of Jews—a lie itself dependent on the equally racist invention at the heart of the entire Zionist enterprise: that Zionism and Israel have, intrinsically, something to do with Jews as Jews.
Yet the media uncritically repeat the farcical. British Jews want “to flee the UK as anti-Semitism soars,” a March headline in the The Standard warns, and indeed “‘make plans to flee capital’ amid huge anti-Semitism wave,” in the words of a Standard headline. These are but a sampling of articles warning of such rampant anti-Jewish hate that Jews fear for their lives—heightened hyperbole of a decades-long legacy of the political exploitation of anti-Jewish racism by pro-Zionist organizations such as the Campaign Against AntiSemitism, the Community Security Trust, the Board of Deputies and
A person holds a placard stating anti‐Semitism is a label used to silence truth and justify evil at the Nakba 76 March for Palestine in central London, UK on May 18, 2024. A quarter million protesters marched to oppose the Gaza genocide and call for a ceasefire in Gaza.
the (U.S.) Anti-Defamation League.
Does anyone remember any of these organizations announcing a decline, or even a levelling off, of anti-Semitism? No. It is so farcical that several years ago, the Daily Mail reported that “Jews feel as threatened as they did in the Holocaust, experts say”— an obscene insult to the Nazis’ victims for Israel’s benefit—and there has been no let-up since.
Yet the media continue to parrot one new alarm after the other without betraying the slightest curiosity or demanding evidence.
While it is commonly understood that this weaponization requires turning the meaning of anti-Jewish bigotry on its head—most infamously as codified in the pseudo-definition of the so-called International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)—the role of the word anti-Semitism itself is not considered, when it is in fact at the heart of the success in this weaponization.
The Standard published an article warning Londoners to flee on March 6, 2024.
anti-Semitism, its dishonesty—and indeed its own (to use its word) anti-Semitism— would be laid bare.
The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism is official policy of the U.S. State Department, among other institutions and governments in the West, according this genocide-defending “definition” of anti-Semitism formidable power. Pre-IHRA, smears of antiSemitism were potent but remained smears; IHRA performs the magic of raising the smears to perceived “fact” with semilegal status.
But that degree of magic would not be possible were it claiming to define, directly, racism against Jews—rather than that indistinct substitute for it, the word “anti-Semitism,” a blurry, malleable interlocutor separating us from the concept it is supposed to represent. “Anti-Semitism” condemns without needing to explain itself.
If IHRA (for example) instead claimed to explain what it means to be bigoted against Jews as Jews, rather than what constitutes
We must stop using it. We must go directly to the same generic language used to denote racism against any other “group”: anti-Jewish bigotry /racism /prejudice /discrimination.
And so when calls for equality from the river-to-sea (etc.) are met with charges of anti-Semitism, the response should not repeat the manipulative word, but instead throw the onus back to where it belongs: condemn the accuser of anti-Jewish racism for claiming that equality is anti-Jewish.
Nor is its malleability its only propaganda asset to Israel. “Anti-Semitism” is of course nonsensical in its use of the term “Semitic” (which simply refers to a language group), and while illogical etymology is not rare and is usually harmless, in this case it contributes to the Zionist claim of anti-Jewish hatred as a disease unto itself, distinct from racism against any other group.
Similarly, the use of a dedicated term for bigotry against Jews, as opposed to big-
otry against any other group, feeds into the notion of Jewish exceptionalism—and thus understood by Western societies well-trained by Zionist propaganda, as Israeli exceptionalism.
The Zionists did not invent the word “anti-Semitism”— that inglorious prize goes to another anti-Jewish bigot, one Wilhelm Marr, who in 1879 proposed the term for “science-based” opposition to Jews (i.e., biological, as opposed to religious). But it has served Zionism well, safeguarding Israeli impunity by casting anti-Jewish bigotry not just as something distinct from all other bigotry, but as a phenomenon that can be molded and manipulated as Zionism requires. Israel has since its self-declaration of statehood weaponized anti-Jewish bigotry to keep the Palestinians in shackles. Shattering the shackles means defanging this powerful weapon, and defanging this weapon means refusing to parrot the hasbara word “anti-Semitism.” ■
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Congressional Support for Israel’s Genocide Knows No Bounds
IT’S THAT TIME OF YEAR—when Congress negotiates next year’s budget, enacts election year legislation, and takes into consideration the influence of campaign donations—but this year it’s happening amidst public and international outrage and protest against Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people.
BOOSTING U.S. MILITARY AID TO ISRAEL
As the International Court of Justice (ICJ) weighs charges of genocide against Israel and the International Criminal Court (ICC) decides whether to issue arrest warrants for war crimes against Israel and its leadership, Congress enacted legislation to provide a further $26 billion in aid to Israel in April, including $5 billion to bolster air defenses, as well as “bundled” weapons shipments.
In May, as the civilian death toll in Gaza surpassed 34,000 (of which 14,500 were children), the Biden administration told Con-
gress that it plans to send a $1 billion package of military aid to Israel, despite massive civil protests and the United States’ own red line regarding Rafah. The package includes about $700 million for tank ammunition, $500 million in tactical vehicles and $60 million in mortar rounds. It is still not clear if this is from existing appropriations or new funding that will show up in the FY25 budget, which is being discussed.
As per the FY National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) passed out of the House on June 14, in addition to the $3 billion provided to Israel at the beginning of every calendar year, the FY25 NDAA includes Israeli Cooperative Programs ($300 million); Iron Dome ($110 million); Arrow 3 Upper Tier Systems ($50 million); and Short Range Ballistic Missiles ($40 million).
CONGRESS ACTS ENERGETICALLY TO DO AIPAC’S BIDDING
In May, President Biden ordered a pause on a shipment of specific weapons, including 1,800 U.S.-made 2,000-pound (907 kilogram) bombs, over concerns that they
By Julia Pitner
would be deployed by Israel in Rafah. A further weapons shipment, including dozens of Boeing F-15 fighter jets, was delayed by a hold issued by Rep. Gregory Meeks (DNY), the senior Democrat on the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, who requested information on Israel’s planned use for the jets.
The Republicans in the House immediately attacked the administration for withholding anything from Israel; Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu aired his anger in a public video. On May 14, Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA), together with 119 Republican cosponsors, introduced H.R. 8369, which specifies that “no federal funds may be used to withhold, halt, reverse or cancel the delivery of defense articles or defense services to Israel.” Dangerously, it also states that no funds may be used to “pay the salary of any Department of Defense (DOD) or Department of State employee who acts to limit defense deliveries to Israel.” The bill passed out of the House by 224–187 with 3 Republicans voting nay and 16 Democrats voting yea. The Biden administration issued a statement opposing the bill while the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) immediately thanked the House for the bill’s passage. On May 15, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) together with 23 Republican cosponsors introduced S. 4337, their version of the same bill. It was referred to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Similar to the legislative attacks on free speech noted in the last issue of the Washington Report, these bills are an unprecedented attack on the administration’s legal obligation to conduct arms transfers in line with U.S. and international law. In addition, the legislation disregards fundamental principles of U.S. law that require congressional review and State Department oversight on arms exports and security assistance, and it threatens U.S. government personnel who follow the law.
Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) used the FY25 budget drafting to supplement the legisla-
The U.S. Capitol building ahead of the U.S. House of Representatives vote on legislation providing $95 billion in security assistance to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, in Washington, DC, on April 20, 2024. Legislators aren’t listening to their constituents.
PHOTO BY CELAL
Julia Pitner is director of programs and operations at the Museum of the Palestinian People in Washington, DC.
tion proposed to support Israel. He submitted an amendment to the State Foreign Operations and Related Programs budget that will prohibit the “use of funds to administer or enforce National Security Memorandum 20, which directs the Department of State to seek assurances from partners involved in conflict and receiving U.S. military grant assistance that they would abide by U.S. and international law.” The amendment passed 216 to 197 and was put into H.R 8070, FY25 NDAA. Ogles also submitted an amendment that recommends that the U.S. Army and the Defense Security Cooperation Agency “should not participate in the Eurosatory exhibition or any international defense exposition that restricts or threatens to restrict the full participation of Israeli-owned companies.” Both amendments were passed en bloc with a voice vote.
Perhaps because of the growing U.S. complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza, Congress felt the need to bring out the weapon available to them, sanctions, to stop the International Criminal Court, the ICJ and the U.N. bodies calling for accountability for Israel.
H.R. 8282 (Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act), introduced in the House on May 7 by Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) and 20 Republican cosponsors, and its Senate companion introduced on June 5 by Sen. Tom Cotton and 9 Republican cosponsors, both aim “To impose sanctions with respect to the International Criminal Court engaged in any effort to investigate, arrest, detain or prosecute any protected person of the United States and its allies.” H.R. 8282 was brought to the House floor June 4 without any committee hearings and passed by a roll call vote of 247-155—with all Republicans voting “Yes” (except for 2 voting “present”: Warren Davidson, R-OH and Thomas Massie, R-KY). They were joined by 42 Democrats voting yes.
The Biden administration immediately opposed both bills, saying specifically that H.R. 8282 would impose mandatory sanctions and visa restrictions on any foreign person determined to aid, materially assist or provide financial support for efforts by the ICC to undertake certain investigations and prosecutions, among others, saying that there were more “effective ways to defend Israel and promote international justice and accountability.”
The ACLU joined the administration in opposing the bill, while AIPAC celebrated its passage out of the House. After all, the Israeli government had explicitly asked AIPAC to work on this in a May 20, 2024 post by Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz.
On June 26, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) and cosponsors Reps. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), Mike Lawler (R-NY) and Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), introduced H.Res. 1323, “Rejecting the United Nations decision to place the Israel Defense Force on a list of child’s rights abusers.” It was referred to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
To make it easier for Congress to profess ignorance about the number of children that Israel killed in Gaza (15,821 as of July 8), Rep. Moskowitz put forth an amendment to H.R. 8080 FY25 NDAA that prohibits funds being made available for the State Department to cite statistics obtained from the Gaza Health Ministry even though these numbers are typically verified by the U.N. and are used by the Israeli government. The amendment passed 269–144, with 62 Democrats joining Republicans to adopt the amendment.
DON’T WORRY, THE STUDENT PROTESTORS AND ENCAMPMENTS HAVE NOT BEEN FORGOTTEN
On June 28, Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) and 7 Republican cosponsors introduced H.R. 8883 (No Tax Dollars for College Encampments Act), “To amend the Higher Education Act of 1965 to require institutions of higher education to disclose campus policies relating to responding to certain incidents of civil disturbance, and for other purposes.” It was referred to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
H.R. 8903 (Uproot Rioting International Students Engaged in Radical Subversion Act) was introduced on June 28 by Rep. August Pfluger (R-TX) and 7 Republican cosponsors, “To direct the Secretary of State to revoke the visa of any alien admitted to the United States under section 101(a)(15)(F) of the Immigration and Nationality Act who has been convicted of assault on a police officer or an offense related to rioting.” It was referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary.
Introduced on July 2 by Rep. Drew Ferguson (R-GA) and 9 Republican cosponsors, H.R. 8913 (Protecting American Students Act) proposes “to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to exclude certain
students from the calculation to determine if certain private colleges and universities are subject to the excise tax on net investment income, and for other purposes.” In a press release, it was described as combatting “the rising anti-Semitic behavior on college campuses.” It was referred to the House Committee on Ways and Means.
The same day, H.R. 8914 (University Accountability Act) was introduced by Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) and 12 Republican cosponsors. The University Accountability Act would require colleges and universities that meet the penalty criteria to pay a fine of either 5 percent of the school’s aggregate administrative compensation as reported on the school’s Form 990, or $100,000, whichever is greater. After three civil rights violations, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) would be required to review the college or university’s tax-exempt status for possible revocation. If enacted, Columbia University, which has been at the epicenter of anti-Israel protests and alleged anti-Semitic attacks against Jews on campus, would be fined $1.9 million. The bill was referred to the House Committee on Ways and Means.
On July 2, Rep. Tom Emmer (R-MN) sent a letter to the new president of the University of Minnesota, Rebecca Cunningham, seeking clarity on her plans to protect Jewish students in the upcoming academic year. Emmer, the U.S. House of Representatives majority whip, wrote that the university allowed itself to be overrun by “radical, pro-Hamas activists” and is “on record endorsing a concept that has been used to justify terrorism and the anti-Semitic view that Israel should not exist.”
A PIECE OF GOOD NEWS?
On June 21, H.Res. 1314 and S.Res. 743 were introduced by Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) and 58 cosponsors in the House and Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) and 22 cosponsors in the Senate, “Reaffirming the importance of the United States promoting the safety, health and well-being of refugees and displaced persons in the United States and around the world.” The text notes that roughly 75 percent of Gaza is internally displaced. H.Res. 1314 was referred to the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the House Judiciary Committee; S.Res. 743 was referred to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. ■
Joint Statement of U.S. Government Officials Who Have Resigned Over U.S. Policy Toward Gaza, Palestine and Israel
Palestinian children stand next to empty or unexploded U.S.‐manufactured ammunition and the remnants of rockets which were found in the region after the Israeli army’s withdrawal from Khan Yunis, Gaza on June 4, 2024. The Israeli army used numerous U.S.‐made munitions during its Gaza ground attacks in recent months.
WE ARE FORMER U.S. government officials who resigned from our respective positions over the last nine months due to our grave concerns with current U.S. policy toward the crisis in Gaza, and U.S. policies and practices toward Palestine and Israel more broadly. We are subject matter experts representing the interagency, and are a multifaith and multiethnic community of professionals and patriots dedicated to the service of the United States of America, its people and its values. Whether in the civil service, foreign service, armed forces, or as political appointees, each of
This Joint Statement was posted July 6, 2024 on Counterpunch.org, AntiWar.com, and other online publications.
us has sworn an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and as our nation celebrates its Independence Day, each of us is reminded that we resigned from government not to terminate that oath but to continue to abide by it; not to end our commitment to service, but to extend it.
Alone, we each made the somber and difficult decision to resign based on the individual circumstances we encountered at different times during these past nine months as we performed our specific jobs. But today we stand united in a shared belief that it is our collective responsibility to speak up.
The administration’s policy in Gaza is a failure and a threat to U.S. national security. America’s diplomatic cover for, and continuous
flow of arms to, Israel has ensured our undeniable complicity in the killings and forced starvation of a besieged Palestinian population in Gaza. This is not only morally reprehensible and in clear violation of international humanitarian law and U.S. laws, but it has also put a target on America’s back. This intransigent policy risks U.S. national security and the lives of our service members and diplomats as has already been made evident with the killing of three U.S. service members in Jordan in January and the evacuations of diplomatic facilities in the Middle East, and also poses a security risk for American citizens at home and abroad. Despite this, the administration’s choices have continued to threaten U.S. interests throughout the region. Our nation’s political and economic interests across the region have also been significantly harmed, while U.S. credibility has been deeply undermined worldwide at a time we need it most, when the world is characterized by a new era of strategic competition.
Critically, this failed policy has not achieved its stated objectives—it has not made Israelis any safer, it has emboldened extremists while it has been devastating for the Palestinian people, ensuring a vicious cycle of poverty and hopelessness, with all the implications of that cycle, for generations to come. As a group of dedicated Americans in service of our country, we insist that there is another way. In this statement, we describe the current crisis, explain what we have seen, and address the Biden administration with policy proposals that we, based on our extensive experience in government, believe must be adopted, including to ensure that catastrophic policy failure like this can never happen again. Finally, but with the deepest devotion, we address the thousands of honorable individuals still in government who are struggling on a daily basis with difficult moral and personal choices.
THE CURRENT CRISIS
U.S. policy choices have begotten a disaster. First and foremost is the catastrophic and rapidly escalating humanitarian crisis that the Israeli government has
created for the Palestinian people, for whom the missteps of the ink of American bureaucracy has been paid in the blood of innocent men, women and children. To date, over 37,000 Palestinians have been killed, the vast majority of civilian and humanitarian infrastructure has been destroyed, thousands of innocent people remain missing under the rubble, and millions continue to face a manufactured famine due to Israel’s arbitrary restrictions on food, water, medicine and other critical humanitarian goods. Yet, rather than hold the government of Israel responsible for its role in arbitrarily impeding humanitarian assistance, the U.S. has cut off funding to the single largest provider of humanitarian assistance in Gaza: UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinians.
Second, we note with further concern and sadness that U.S. policy for many years, but particularly since October 2023, has not only contributed to immense humanitarian harm, but has failed when measured against its own declared intent: to contribute to the peace and safety of all in the Middle East, and particularly that of Israel. Rather than using our immense leverage to establish guardrails that can guide Israel toward a lasting and just peace, we have facilitated its self-destructive actions that have deepened its political quagmire and contributed to its enduring global isolation; there is no regional settlement, no agreement with autocratic regimes, no diplomatic step short of the resolution of the Palestinian right to self-determination that can provide Israel with real security.
Third, U.S. policies in this regard have been deeply damaging not only for U.S relations in the region, but for our global credibility, the credibility of U.S. values, and the credibility of the West—a particularly perilous state of affairs in the context of this era of strategic competition. Not only have we inflicted deep and lasting damage to our relations across the region and destabilized the Middle East, but our policies toward Gaza have led us to double down on our support to brittle regional autocracies as a hedge against public opinion. Meanwhile, on the global stage, who does
not see us as hypocrites when the United States condemns Russian war crimes while unconditionally arming and excusing Israel’s? Who does not now laugh when Secretary Blinken describes the “rules based international order” while simultaneously undermining it in favor of Israel?—a tragedy after the decades Americans have spent building that order.
HOW DID IT GO WRONG?
Each of us has had our own experience of the cascading failures of process, leadership and decision-making that have characterized this administration’s intransigent response to this continuing calamity. Taken together, these paint a picture of an overlapping and systemic set of problems in this administration’s policy approach, and a series of warnings that have gone unheeded:
In our collective experience, we have seen for years the silencing of concerns about Israel’s human rights record and the failure of the Oslo process and broader U.S. policy. We have seen debate silenced in government; facts distorted; laws sidestepped and willfully ignored, even violated; and lawyers working overtime to avoid faithfully implementing the law. We have seen America, in a process turned on its head, rush to arm Israel even as civilians are massacred with U.S. arms, and efforts to share intelligence with Israel that have contributed to this catastrophe. We have seen peaceful protests met with rancid accusations of anti-Semitism and with violence, while an administration that previously fought for free speech on college campuses stood by as it was silenced. We have seen unconditional U.S. support for Israeli military operations in Gaza make it impossible to advocate for human rights in the Middle East and lead regional advocates to turn their backs on our diplomats. We have seen a U.S. government that dehumanizes both Palestinians and Jews, making the former victims of its weapons and the latter scapegoats for its war machine. We have seen an administration that is willing to lie to Congress, and a Congress that punishes the truth.
Both our individual and common experiences demonstrate an administration that has prioritized politics over just and fair policymaking; profit over national security; falsehoods over facts; directives over debate; ideology over experience; and special interest over the equal enforcement of the law. The impact of these injustices has resulted in tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian lives taken, reflecting a clear picture to the world of whose lives matter, and whose lives simply do not to United States policy makers. As members of the United States government, each of us witnessed this abrogation of American values, leading us to resign.
WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
*A fundamental principle, and the first step in correcting U.S. policy, is for the government of the United States to faithfully execute the law. It is abundantly clear that the administration is currently willfully violating multiple U.S. laws and attempting to deny or distort facts, use loopholes, or manipulate processes to ensure a continuous flow of lethal weapons to Israel. As practically every credible and independent international human rights organization has identified, there have been clear gross violations of human rights by units of the Israeli security forces, dating back well before 2023, that should compel ineligibility determinations under the Leahy Laws. As multiple credible humanitarian aid organizations have identified, Israel has also, and continues to, arbitrarily obstruct U.S.-funded humanitarian assistance, which should trigger a suspension of security assistance under Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act. A government that acts above, or around, the laws set by elected legislatures is not a government that is faithful to the Constitution, or to its commitments to the people of these United States.
*Secondly, we believe the U.S. government should use all necessary and available leverage to bring the conflict to an immediate close and to achieve the release of all hostages, be they Israelis kidnapped on October 7th, or the thousands of Pales-
tinians, many of them children, sitting uncharged in Israeli administrative detention.
*Third, we believe the United States should commit the funding and the support needed to ensure an immediate expansion of humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza, and the reconstruction of that territory—a moral obligation given that the harm and destruction to-date has largely been dealt by American weapons.
*Fourth, we believe the United States should immediately announce that the policy of the United States will be to support self-determination for the Palestinian people, and an end to military occupation and settlements, including in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
*Fifth, we believe there is an urgent need for change in the organizational cultures and structures that have enabled the current U.S. approach. This includes the strengthening of oversight and accountability mechanisms within the Executive Branch, greater transparency regarding arms transfers and legal deliberations, an end to the silencing and sidelining of critical voices, and statutory change via the legislative process; we commit to working with the Executive and Legislative branches to detail and pursue such reforms.
*Finally, we believe freedom of speech is under threat in this country, and we abjure political pressure on colleges and universities in particular that have led to a militarized police response to peaceful protests, and we call upon the U.S. government, including the Departments of Education and Justice, to take any and all necessary steps to protect free speech and nonviolent protest.
OUR MESSAGE TO OUR FORMER COLLEAGUES
Your voice matters. We write to you with hope that you will use your positions to amplify calls for peace and hold your respective institution accountable to the violence unfolding in Palestine. We thank those of you who are working day in and day out to press for just and equitable policies that protect all lives. We recognize the systemic obstacles you face, both as you perform your work and as you consider
leaving it. We particularly embrace those of you representing America’s diversity who feel that your voices have been disempowered, ignored and tokenized. We are with you, and we know that a better way is possible, but only when we are all brave enough to challenge institutions and outdated forces that attempt to silence us. We encourage you to keep pushing. In our experience, no decision point is too minor to challenge, so while you are in government service, use your voice, write letters to leaders in your agencies, and bring up your disagreements with your team. Speaking out has a snowball effect, inspiring others to use their voice. There is strength in numbers, and we urge you to not be complicit. We encourage you to consult with your Inspectors General, with your legal advisers, with appropriate members of Congress, and via other protected channels, to question the veracity and/or legality of specific actions or policies. There are resources, and you have advocates, including all of us, who can support you in speaking your truth.
We close with wisdom from Dr. Martin Luther King in his message about the Vietnam War that resonates today: “the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak…for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.” May we all have the moral courage to speak and push for a better world, for a better America.
The message is signed by all twelve of us who have publicly resigned. Many of you are already in contact with many of them; I would encourage you to particularly reach out for comment to the newest resignees, namely Maryam Hassanein who resigned today, SMSgt Mohammed Abu Hashem who resigned from the U.S. Air Force after a U.S. munition killed his aunt in Gaza, and Maj Riley Livermore whose resignation from the Air Force went public on June 18th. In addition, with her signature on this letter, Anna Del Castillo makes public her resignation from the White House over this issue (which took place in April). The complete list of signatories is as follows.
Continued on page 43
Israel-India Military Collaboration Flourishes Under Hindutva, But Began Decades Back
By Pieter Friedrich
“WHEN MODI COMES IN, he looks at Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and says, ‘This is the guy I want to emulate,’” said journalist Azad Essa about India’s newly re-elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi at a June 5, 2024 event hosted at The People’s Forum in Manhattan.
Essa—author of Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel—continued: “Modi says, ‘This is the kind of country that I want to create. I want a Hindu nationalist, ethno-nationalist state. It’s militaristic, it’s influential, and it’s not going to be pushed around by anyone else. If we have security threats, we are going to deal with it like Israel deals with security threats.’ So that’s a fundamental shift [in India’s relationship to Israel].”
Pieter Friedrich is a U.S.‐based independent journalist and author specializing in analysis of current and historical affairs in South Asia, with a particular focus on the issue of India’s Hindu nationalist movement and its influence on sociopolitical events in the U.S.
It was standing room only at “Ballots, Bulldozers, and Bombs,” a panel co-sponsored by Jewish Currents magazine and Middle East Eye to discuss the history and symbiotic ethno-nationalist underpinnings of the Israel-India alliance.
“The main inspiration for this event, on my end, was Jewish Currents news editor Aparna Gopalan’s fantastic reporting on the ideological exchange between the Hindutva movement and the Zionist movement,” the magazine’s director of community engagement, Solomon Brager, told the Washington Report. “Understanding these relationships is really helpful when you’re trying to parse what’s happening both in Palestine and in terms of transnational ideological and material scaffolding for state violence.”
Brager counted at least 120 attendees at the two-hour event, which featured Essa as well as attorney Suchitra Vijayan and researcher Raja Abdulhaq. Moderated by Gopalan, the panel delved into the reason for Modi and Netanyahu’s mutual affinity,
Security personnel question commuters at a check‐point before the arrival of India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Srinagar, the largest city and summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir, on June 20, 2024. The previous day, Indian police killed two suspected militants in the disputed territory.
the decades of sometimes secret interactions between India and Israel, and the performative nature of India’s past support for Palestine.
FOR ISRAEL, INDIA’S SUPPORT PROVES ISRAELI MODEL IS “SUCCESSFUL”
“We are gathering at a time of horrors,” said Gopalan at the outset. Acknowledging the ongoing genocide in Gaza, she explained that it is being carried on “not only in collaboration with Western countries, but also with postcolonial powers, such as India.”
Gopalan noted how India has provided bombs used on Gaza, sent workers to replace Palestinian laborers in Israel and provided diplomatic cover to Israel on the world stage.
“In exchange, India has enjoyed continued access to Israeli weapons and surveillance technology, which it has deployed against its own people,” said Gopalan. “India plans to go further. In late 2023, Indian army generals were reportedly studying Israel’s assault on Gaza to quickly draw lessons ‘relevant to our own context.’”
“Israel, as a client state, sees itself as a place that exports these strategies to the world,” said Raja Abdulhaq, co-founder of the Quds News Network. Describing how Israel benefits from its growing alignment with India, he explained, “To them, when you’re having a state like India buying 40 percent of your weapons (the weapons that you’re using on Palestinians), you’re using it as a proof of concept that the weapons, tactics and strategies are a success. That, as a settler-colonial project in the 21st century, they are very successful.”
INDIA’S PAST “CALCULATED APPROACH” TO SUPPORTING PALESTINE
Essa unpacked some of the history of the fluctuating relationship between the two countries since their near-contemporary establishments in the late 1940s. “When India became a state in 1947, it adopted a ‘realist’ approach to its political or international relations,” said Essa.
India refused to recognize Israel until 1952 and didn’t establish full diplomatic relations until 1992. Yet, Essa argued, it was a reluctance based more on pragmatism than principle. India weighed the consequences of recognition against its oil dependence on the Arab world and considered how supporting the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine might undermine its own opposition to the partition of the Indian subcontinent.
It was a “calculated approach” in which even factors like India’s occupation of Kashmir led it to choose closer alignment with the Arab world rather than Israel in hopes of pre-empting broader Muslim solidarity with the Kashmiri cause. Thus, Essa claimed, “India had a pro-Palestine position, but it was very much in their interests to do so.”
INDIA’S MILITARY RELATIONSHIP WITH ISRAEL BEGAN 60 YEARS AGO
From the 1960s through the 1980s, however, India began clandestinely soliciting arms imports from Israel, establishing intelligence ties, and even sending troops to Israel to receive training, which they later used to commit atrocities in Punjab, India.
“In the 1960s, this is when the military relationship began,” said Essa. “It’s my favorite story, actually,” he said as he explained how India first solicited weapons from Israeli Prime Minister David BenGurion during the 1962 Sino-Indian War. Ben-Gurion agreed to supply armaments, and Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru requested the weapons be sent “in unmarked ships.”
“That gives you the sense of this kind of hypocrisy and double standards of this Indian government,” said Essa. “They didn’t want to be seen as being close to Israel in any way.”
This was the beginning of a relationship that, he said, was “kept under the radar in many ways.” India again got Israeli arms in 1965, 1971 and 1999 for its wars with Pakistan, while an Indian army official traveled to Israel to study Israeli Defense Force tactics during the June 1967 War.
“The stories that we hear about India in the 1970s are that India became very close to Yasser Arafat, who called Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ‘my sister,’” Essa continued. “India was one of the first countries outside the Arab world that recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization. India signed on to U.N. Resolution 3379 that equated Zionism and racism in 1975.”
Yet, he added, “There was this outward performance regarding Palestine, and at the same time, Indira Gandhi set up ties between the Research and Analysis Wing (which is the foreign intelligence agency of India) and Mossad from her office. It was Indira Gandhi who sent her Indian commandos to be trained by Israeli commandos who then committed the crazy massacre in Amritsar.” He was referring to Operation Bluestar, a 10-day military operation in June 1984, in which thousands of Sikhs were killed.
ISRAEL BENEFITS FROM CAMARADERIE WITH INDIA’S ETHNO-NATIONALISM
The Israel-India alliance continued to bud throughout the 1990s and 2000s, but it burgeoned with Modi’s ascent to power.
“Now you’re getting to the moment where most stories about the alliance begin, which is with the rise of Hindu nationalism in India and the kind of dropping of the pretense of Palestine solidarity, and also the changing of the global order such that being close with Palestine is no longer in the interests of India,” said Gopalan.
After Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took power in 2014, Abdulhaq argued, Israel found new camaraderie, “from an ideological perspective,” in the idea that “Zionism is not isolated as the only ethno-racist ideology that exists and that commits genocide against the natives of that land.”
“India today, with Hindutva, is using similar language against the natives of Kashmir and some Muslim Indians within the modern nation-state that we know today as India,” said Abdulhaq. “So Israel is ben-
efitting now that you can have an ethnoracist ideology [in India], and Israel is not the only one that has that.”
INDIA REPLICATES ISRAEL’S “GEOGRAPHIES OF OPPRESSION” IN KASHMIR
Vijayan, author of Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India, noted: “We came to this conversation a little late. We should have been having this conversation about Hindu nationalism and rightwing extremism a decade before. Hindutva and Hindu nationalism got currency as soon as Modi came to power, but the roots and the foundational ways in which the society was being remade started long before.”
She pointed to her experience in both Palestine and Kashmir before Modi’s advent. “My first time in the West Bank, in the occupied territories, was in 2009,” said Vijayan. “When I came to Kashmir later, in 2013, by that time, I was traveling from Srinagar to Baramulla, I could see the simi-
larities in the geographies of oppression. You could see the geographies of occupation. The terrain [of oppression] that was so familiar in the West Bank in 2009, by 2013 when I was in Kashmir was already being replicated.”
When the BJP finally scrapped Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status in 2019 (a move described by Al Jazeera and The Christian Science Monitor, among many others, as “annexation”), Israel stood fully in support of India.
IS ISRAEL LOOKING TO INDIA TO HEDGE ITS ALLIANCE WITH AMERICA?
Israel’s current war on Gaza has increased U.S. solidarity with Gaza and is impacting national U.S. politics to such an extent that, in the words of Politico, the “Uncommitted” movement served “as President Joe Biden’s most powerful rival in the 2024 primaries.” Significant political winds at the U.S. grassroots level are shifting toward Palestine.
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“I remember coming to my first proPalestinian protest in New York and there were five people,” said Vijayan. “I never thought Columbia University would have law students with keffiyehs walking around. I think that is a moment, a possibility, that has now opened up. For eight months, we have had students marching.”
Especially considering the present moment of increased American solidarity with the Palestinian cause, Abdulhaq suggested Israel may be considering that attitude shift when calculating its foreign relations with India.
“No matter how much Israel is dependent on the West, and specifically America, they would love to be independent,” said Abdulhaq. “They would love to have more power than is given to them or they’re allowed by sthe U.S. As we know, America can cut off the financial aid and military aid to Israel and Israel will be limited. To build another relationship with another potential superpower that is on the rise is a huge success for Israel.” ■
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Reflections on Julian Assange, the Espionage Act, and the Great Intelligence Hoax
By Bruce Fein
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange embraces his wife Stella Assange as he arrives at Canberra Airport on June 26, 2024 in Canberra, Australia. Assange returned to his native Australia as a free man, after attending the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands in Saipan. Following his guilty plea to a felony charge under the Espionage Act, Assange was sentenced to time served, allowing him to wal k free after years of incarceration.
ON JUNE 26, 2024, WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange pled guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act and was sentenced to time served, i.e., five years in detention defending against extradition to the United States from Great Britain. Assange immediately returned to his home country Australia with no restrictions on free speech.
The Espionage Act charge alleged that Assange conspired to disclose “information relating to the national defense” with “reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” Despite the vast volumes of military and diplomatic secrets published by WikiLeaks over many years, the United States was unable to identify at sentencing or other platforms even one disclosure that was “used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.”
Bruce Fein was associate deputy attorney general under President Reagan and author of American Empire Before The Fall . He is currently an international and constitutional lawyer <www.law officesofbrucefein.com>.
Thereby hangs a tale of stupendous government disinformation to deceive the American people into accepting limitless surveillance power.
The omission of harm at Assange’s sentencing was predictable. The United States has never been able to demonstrate particularized concrete harm caused by the publication of national defense information—even in camera to a judge.
The famous 1971 Pentagon Papers case is exemplary. Daniel Ellsberg leaked the 47 top secret volumes of the Pentagon Papers revealing monumental government lies about the Vietnam War to the New York Times and the Washington Post. The government sued to enjoin the latter from continuing to publish the classified documents in New York Times v. United States The United States Supreme Court adamantly refused. Justice Potter Stewart elaborated that an injunction would require proof that publication would “surely result in direct, immediate and irreparable damage to our Nation or its people.” That proof was not forthcoming.
Indeed, United States Solicitor General Erwin Griswold, former Dean of Harvard Law School, lamented that he ever defended the national security hallucinations of the United States in a February 15, 1989 op-ed in the Washington Post (“Secrets Not Worth Keeping”). Dean Griswold was a crusty conservative recruited by the Nixon administration. His political orientation gives special weight to his likening national defense information as a synonym for political blunders or embarrassments:
I have never seen any trace of a threat to the national security from the publication. Indeed, I have never seen it even suggested that there was such an actual threat. Sen. Mike Gravel’s (D-AK) edition of the papers is now almost completely forgotten, and I doubt if there is more than a handful of persons who have ever undertaken to examine the Pentagon Papers in any detail—either with respect to national security or with respect to the policies of the country relating to Vietnam. It quickly becomes apparent to any person who has considerable experience with classified material that there is massive overclassification and that the principal concern of the classifiers is not with national security, but rather with governmental embarrassment of one sort or another.
As with Assange, the government has never been able to show that specific harm resulted from the disclosures made by Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden or Massachusetts Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira. Eugene Debs was convicted and sentenced to prison under the Espionage Act for uttering, among other things, the following commendable words opposing the pointless hecatombs of World War I: “The working class have never yet had a voice in declaring war. If war is right, let it be declared by the people—you, who have your lives to lose.”
The United States Supreme Court sustained Debs’s conviction over a free speech defense in an opinion penned by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in Debs v. United States. Holmes soon repented his blunder in Abrams v. United States. Debs would have been exonerated under current First Amendment jurisprudence.
He was a presidential candidate in 1920 while imprisoned. He attracted nearly one million votes running as a Socialist Party candidate. Debs’s supporters subconsciously understood the stupendous government lie in representing that World War I was fought to make the world safe for democracy. In fact, the war exponentially expanded the British and French racist empires while the U.S. was denying women and blacks the franchise and tolerating serial black lynching.
The feebleness of the government’s espionage case against Assange is self-evident. It waited until 2019 under the Trump administration to indict him after years of massive WikiLeaks disclosures. Publications that republished WikiLeaks information like the New York Times and Washington Post have never been charged although newspapers are not exempt from the Espionage Act.
The suggestion that the government is concealing information showing WikiLeaks has endangered the national security to protect sources and methods is fatuous. The government is notorious for declassifying or leaking classified information to publicize alleged intelligence successes or to demonize enemies.
Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, for example, leaked the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame to syndicated columnist Robert Novak to discredit Doubting Thomases that Iraq’s Saddam Hussain possessed weapons of mass destruction, a delusion that occasioned the U.S. war of aggression in 2003. The catastrophic trillion-dollar misadventure that made Iran a regional hegemon continues to this very day.
Some suggested Assange’s free speech defense would have faltered because he
was an Australian and WikiLeaks publications originated outside the United States. The Supreme Court of the United States declared in Agency for International Development v. Alliance for Open Society International, Inc. II (2020) that foreign organizations lack the same free speech rights as their domestic counterparts. True enough.
But Assange could have asserted the First Amendment rights of his American audience to receive information about what their government is doing to defeat his Espionage prosecution. In Lamont v. Postmaster General, the Supreme Court recognized a First Amendment right of American citizens to receive “communist political propaganda” from Cuba. The Court further explained in Powers v. Ohio that a defendant may assert the constitutional rights of third parties if there is a “close relation” with them and there is “some hindrance” to the third parties’ ability to protect their own interests. Assange’s free speech interests in revealing to Americans what their government was doing aligned perfectly with the latter’s interests in transparency to hold their government politically accountable. Further, American citizens would confront more than “some hinderance” in defending their rights to receive WikiLeaks information in a criminal prosecution of Assange because they would not be a party to the proceedings.
If the First Amendment does not travel abroad, moreover, the government could suppress all foreign criticism no matter how truthful and informative to U.S. citizens. It could criminally punish any speech originated by a foreigner in a foreign country that failed to praise the United States as the world’s “indispensable nation” that scrupulously honors the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the laws of war. In other words, the U.S. could criminally punish foreigners for failing to become its propaganda organs to deceive the American people. It is inconceivable that such a law would pass First Amendment muster.
Assange, WikiLeaks and the Espionage Act provoke deeper questions about the intelligence community itself and the value of spying. The Espionage Act postulates without a crumb of evidence that classified or national defense information is invaluable in fortifying the United States from foreign danger or in anticipating material developments abroad and adapting our foreign policy accordingly. In other words, the intelligence community with its vast access to secrets and resources is clairvoyant and saves the United States from national security blunders, ambuscades or drive by shootings.
There may be greater intelligence hoaxes, but if there are, they do not readily come to mind. The hoax endures, like Nostradamus’s prophecies or astrology notwithstanding chronic forecasting error. The most gifted intelligence gurus riveted on the Soviet Union like former CIA Director Robert Gates or former National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, for instance, all missed by a country mile the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Empire. In the intelligence forecasting world, there is no scientific certainty of the type that ordinary people rely upon to plan their affairs (like the force of gravity). The opposite story peddled by the intelligence community for power and money is fiction like the power of the Wizard of Oz.
The hoax serves a psychological craving, like a placebo. Humans prefer certainty no matter how illusional to indeterminacy, no matter how justified. A nation feels safer if it spies on adversaries even if national security is diminished by false confidence or the risk of provoking blowback.
An American is less likely to die of an international terrorist attack than by a falling vending machine. Yet the American people, through their representatives in Congress and the White House, eagerly spend trillions of dollars to prevent
another 9/11 terrorist abomination with tools that have not aborted even one international terrorist attack in the United States. The notorious Richard Reid (the shoe bomber) and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (the Christmas bomber) were foiled by airplane passengers, not by the intelligence community.
Transparency should be the coin of the realm, except for military deployments in times of actual or imminent war. The Espionage Act should be narrowed accordingly. All history teaches that the alarming evils of secrecy of the type exposed by the Church Committee in 1975 (set up to investigate abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency and the Internal Revenue Service) are far worse for self-government and the rule of law than the theoretical loss of candor or compromise associated with transparency. ■
Biden Administration Blocks International Law with Vetoes and So-Called
“Ceasefire” Proposal
By Sam Husseini
SINCE OCTOBER, the U.S. government has used its diplomatic and other powers to ensure the continuation of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
One mechanism for this was vetoing several U.N. Security Council resolutions for a ceasefire in Gaza. The first of these vetoes was on Oct. 18. Then there was another on Dec. 8.
Following that, on Dec. 12, the General Assembly voted for a ceasefire by an overwhelming 153 countries voting for, 23 abstaining
Sam Husseini is an independent journalist whose writings can be found at husseini.substack.com. He’s the founder of VotePact.org.
and 10 countries voting against. The problem with that resolution is that it had no teeth, which it could have had.
As a result of South Africa’s Genocide Convention case against Israel, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered Israel to stop all genocidal actions on Jan. 26, 2024. The U.S. vetoed a resolution which referenced the ICJ orders on Feb. 20.
On March 25, a U.S. abstention finally allowed a ceasefire resolution to pass. Sort of. It called for a Ramadan ceasefire, but half the holy month had already passed. And then the U.S. government repeatedly lied to undermine the resolution, falsely claiming it was “nonbinding.”
Displaced Palestinians are forced to evacuate east Khan Yunis after the Israeli occupation army issued a new evacuation order f or parts of Khan Yunis and Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip on July 2, 2024.
South Africa repeatedly went back to the ICJ for more orders. On May 24, the ICJ ordered Israel to halt its offensive against Rafah, which the Court ruled had started on May 7. The Biden administration had claimed during this period that it was opposed to an Israeli invasion of Rafah but took no action to stop it, continually claiming that the invasion was not under way.
The ICJ can issue orders, but it can’t implement them; they should be implemented by the equivalent of a sheriff. In this context, that’s the United Nations Security Council (UNSC).
On May 28, Reuters reported that Algeria was proposing UNSC action that referenced the ICJ orders to stop the attack on Rafah. The U.S. government apparently stalled that and then President Joe Biden’s May 31 statement about an alleged “ceasefire” plan tried to derail it completely. The UNSC adopted the so-called U.S. “ceasefire” resolution on June 10. This resolution completely ignored the ICJ and its orders. Instead it claimed Israel had accepted the plan and backed the U.S. government’s alleged new process.
Further, Biden claimed the proposal was Israel’s, though Netanyahu would quickly distance himself from it.
Biden later boasted during the CNN “debate” on June 27 with presumptive Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump that the UNSC backed his proposal, claiming that Israel was for it and Hamas was the lone holdout. Trump accurately said that Israel was the one refusing a peaceful outcome, but thought it was a good thing: “let them finish the job,” he said before criticizing Biden for having allegedly “become like a Palestinian.” The following day, Biden said that even though he wasn’t able to debate as well as he used to, “I know how to tell the truth.”
In a nutshell, the Biden administration hijacked the rhetoric of “ceasefire” to obstruct the ICJ orders and international law.
Still, there is a path forward if other counties are willing to take a stand, as international law professors have pointed out. John Quigley notes that “the U.N. General Assembly can use Uniting for Peace to get
around the U.S. veto.” They sort of did so with the 153 countries voting for a ceasefire resolution in December 2023.
That resolution has no teeth, but it could. Professor Francis Boyle has argued that such a resolution could “Suspend Israel from participation in its activities, as the General Assembly did to the former criminal apartheid regime in South Africa and to the genocidal Yugoslavia; Set up an International Criminal Tribunal for Israel in order to prosecute its highest level civilian and military officials for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide; Recommend economic sanctions against Israel; Recommend U.N. members sever diplomatic relations with Israel; Admit Palestine as a full-fledged U.N. member state.”
U.N. whistleblower Craig Mokhiber, who headed the New York office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, agrees: “You could have seen a resolution with teeth” even “the deployment of a protection force.”
This was actually done in 1956 in the Suez Crisis. When Israel, Britain and France invaded Gaza and Egypt, the U.S. and USSR and most other governments overcame the British and French veto at the UNSC by passing a Uniting for Peace resolution at the General Assembly. That created the first U.N. peacekeeping force, the United Nations Emergency Force ensured the withdrawal of the invading armies.
U.S. and Israeli government machinations are not the only problem. Other countries have clearly been reluctant to put their shoulder to the wheel and utilize all the legal options available to them. The General Assembly could use Uniting for Peace to curb Israel. ■
Joint Statement
Continued from page 34
Signed, this week of July 4, 2024:
SMSgt Mohammed Abu Hashem
First Sergeant
316th Civil Engineer Squadron
U.S. Department of the Air Force
Anna Del Castillo
Former Political Appointee & Deputy Director
Office of Management & Administration
The White House
Lily Greenberg Call
Former Political Appointee
Special Assistant to the Chief of Staff Office of the Secretary
U.S. Department of the Interior
Stacy Gilbert
Former Senior Civil-Military Advisor Bureau of Population, Refugees, & Migration
U.S. Department of State
Tariq Habash
Former Policy Advisor & Political Appointee
Office of Planning, Evaluation & Policy Development
U.S. Department of Education
Maryam Hassanein
Former Special Assistant Office of the Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management
U.S. Department of the Interior
Maj Riley Livermore
Former Futures Flight Commander
413th Flight Test Squadron
U.S. Department of the Air Force
Maj Harrison Mann
Former Army Officer and Executive Officer
Middle East/Africa Regional Center Defense Intelligence Agency
Josh Paul
Former Director in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs
U.S. Department of State
Hala Rharrit
Former Diplomat and State Department
Spokesperson for the Middle East & North Africa
U.S. Department of State
Annelle Sheline
Former Foreign Affairs Officer
Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights & Labor
U.S. Department of State
Alexander Smith
Senior Advisor
Global Health Bureau
U.S. Agency for International Development ■
Why Is Israel Still in the U.N.?
United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese speaks at a press conference during a session of the U.N. Human Rights Council, in Geneva, on March 27, 2024. Albanese who concluded Israel was committing acts of genocide in the Gaza Strip received broad support at the U.N., with countries speaking up to back her and her report.
ACROSS THE WORLD, uber-Zionists and anti-Zionists alike ask: Why is Israel still in the U.N.? Israelis wonder why they should stay in an organization that roundly attacks them every session—and adds extra sessions and special conferences to put the boot in and even sets up special bodies to chastise the scofflaw state. Non-Zionists and anti-Zionists wonder why the U.N. tolerates a member state that ignores and violates every resolution pertaining to it.
There is indeed a strange attraction between Israel and the United Nations both of which are by-products of World War II and the Nazi atrocities. In the 1950s Israel enjoyed an initial honeymoon period during which Israeli leaders disguised themselves as cozy European social democrats. In those early days smooth-talking shysters like Abba Eban still successfully wooed other members with his plummymouthed Cambridge accent, but that was in another era and many permanent representatives ago. But since the 1960s when the newly decolonized delegates finally took their U.N. seats, the General Assembly has always been a “tough crowd” for Israeli representatives.
When a thick-skinned liar and a deadpan stand-up like Israel’s ambassador to the U.N. Gilad Erdan berates the delegates as antiSemites, as he did last month, he is not trying to charm them, but rather playing to the Likud (or worse) gallery, ready for when Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu meets his long overdue political
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).
United Nations Report
By Ian Williams
demise and Erdan can parlay his way to the prime minister’s position. It is fitting, since Netanyahu pointed the way for Erdan, kick-starting his career by excoriating the U.N. and its members when he was permanent representative, to the applause of American donors.
Abba Eban had indeed been a major architect of the U.N.-Israel relationship, a human resources pioneer of what we now take for granted since emigrants from the original apartheid state occupy their seeming niche as the public face of Israel.
Indeed there is more to this. Until former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair changed the policy, British delegates had regularly voted against U.S. vetoes in the U.N. Security Council. However, since then the “Old British Commonwealth” countries—Australia, Canada, the UK and the South African battalion of diplomats in Israel—have all shamefully voted with a unity not seen since they were called to protect apartheid South Africa. For these purposes the old Commonwealth seems to have been the subject of a reverse takeover by Washington, forgiving the 1776 misunderstanding.
Born in proto-apartheid South Africa, Eban had been in the British army until just before Israeli independence and was blazing a trail for all those Israeli spokespersons speaking South African English and recycling racial supremacism. As a British officer Eban snobbishly avoided the Boer-tinged accent but left a far more potent legacy: his suave Cambridge accent covered for the false promises he made while helping craft and passing the partition Resolution 181 and Israel’s admission to the U.N., claiming a role in the Jesuitical (or Talmudic) exegesis of Resolution 242. While the rest of the world interpreted the resolution as calling for Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories, Israeli lawyers talked about some occupied territories while busily settling and colonizing the lot.
Erdan might profess outrage about the U.N. as an institution, but he is not worried that it will take meaningful action against Israel. “Factually, no country has severed ties with Israel, the Abraham Accords have not been canceled, and even the Saudi crown prince has not taken normalization with Israel off the table. The point is that not only in Israel do politics influence players’ statements but in every country. One must understand that even friendly countries find themselves caught between two sides. Canada, for example, lost a seat on the Security Council a few years ago for supporting us at the U.N. That’s politics at its ugliest.”
It was in fact politics at its most effective. Unless they were readers of the Washington Report and similar publications, not many Canadians are aware that Ottawa lost its Security Council seat on account
PHOTO BY FABRICE
of Israel, just as not many Brits know that the UK lost its seat on the International Court of Justice because of its groveling to the U.S.
The new British government is going to continue that supine attitude foretelling the battles in the Democratic Party. Spurious Zionist allegations of anti-Semitism did not stop Jeremy Corbyn from becoming a member of Parliament, despite being disowned and vilified by the Labour Party that he had previously led.
U.N. WATCH: MASS PRODUCTION OF FIG LEAVES
Part of the ideological apparatus of Zionism is the mass manufacture of factoids. War planes used to scatter chaff to confuse the radar—and Israel uses pseudo NGOs to do this. One memorable example of this was the U.N. Watch complaint to the U.N.’s (somewhat ineffective) investigative body Office of Internal Oversight Services that the outstanding and forthright Human Rights Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, was being funded by Hamas. Israel received a standard, formulaic acknowledgment of receipt of the complaint: “we have received your letter of…which is receiving attention.” U.N. Watch published the letter, spinning it as “evidence” that Albanese was under investigation by the U.N. Israel’s supporters crave international recognition and affection from the U.N. even when they are most disdainful of the organization. They are still crowing about the dubious support by Pramila Patten, the secretary general’s special representative on sexual violence, whose report included the following claims: “a total of 33 meetings with Israeli national institutions, including relevant line ministries, as well as the Israeli security forces. It visited the Israeli National Center of Forensic Medicine, the Shura military base, the morgue to which the bodies of victims were transferred, as well as four locations affected by the 7 October attacks, in relation to which reports of sexual violence had emerged. The mission team reviewed over 5,000 photographic images and approximately 50 hours of footage of the attacks, in a concerted effort to identify
any potential instances or indications of conflict-related sexual violence.” And “despite concerted efforts to encourage them to come forward, the mission team was not able to interview any of these survivors/victims.” Despite this, “the mission team found that there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred in multiple locations during the 7 October attacks, including rape and gangrape in at least three locations.”
Under Israeli escort throughout, they made no entry into Gaza, no alleged victim was actually interviewed, and no Gazans were questioned in the making of this report, which has since been partially walked back.
Remember the context. Casualty figures for Israeli bombings are dismissed as “Hamas” numbers even when backed by U.N. and NGO staff on the ground and largely substantiated by video footage. (As this issue of Washington Report was going to press, medical experts writing in The Lancet reported that the death toll could be as high as 186,000 when indirect deaths— caused by shortages of medical care, food, water and shelter—are counted.) The White House press staff draw the allegations of massacres and war crimes to the attention of Israel for comment and investigation.
One can compare the misleading headlines generated by Patten’s report (which were contradicted by the actual text, which acknowledged the absence of any evidence of key claims) with the findings of Albanese’s team, which generated much less publicity. “[Israeli] Security personnel publicly and shamelessly share photos on social media platforms that violate the privacy and intimate sphere of Palestinian women, aimed at mocking, shaming and humiliating them,” the Special Committee said in an end of mission statement. “Multiple stakeholders reported a stark increase in sexual harassment, sexual abuse, the threat of rape, and rape itself, including with foreign objects, against men, women, and even children, and intimidation through the use of dogs by Israeli security forces.”
The latest hasbara magic has been to “disappear” the famine. The U.N. and agen-
cies warned of a famine in Gaza when Israel blocked the borders, and pressure piled on Netanyahu. Like murderers claiming virtue because someone stopped them shooting, Israeli supporters shouted Eureka! when the Famine Prevention Committee reported that Gaza had not quite reached famine level and conveniently ignored the recommendation in this sentence: “However, the situation in Gaza remains catastrophic and there is a high and sustained risk of Famine across the whole Gaza Strip. But whether a Famine classification is confirmed or not does not in any manner change the fact that extreme human suffering is without a doubt currently ongoing in the Gaza Strip, and does not change the immediate humanitarian imperative to address this civilian suffering by enabling complete, safe, unhindered, and sustained humanitarian access into and throughout the Gaza Strip, including through ceasing hostilities.”
Reuters reported on July 9 that at least 33 children have died of malnutrition since the war on Gaza began; their skeletal photos are not hard to find on the internet. The time has come for Gilad Erdan to be declared persona non grata as the General Assembly approaches. If Israel denies entry to U.N. representatives who try to visit Gaza and the Occupied Territories, then it is only fair to reciprocate. Considering Israel’s routine violation of every resolution passed against it, such a measure is fully within its power and is long overdue. ■
British Election: Little Choice for Palestine Supporters
By John Gee
CONTRARY TO EXPECTATIONS that he’d call a general election in the fall, British premier Rishi Sunak announced that elections would take place on July 4. His Conservative Party has seen its support plummet in successive opinion polls, and matters did not improve for it as the election campaign unfolded. As expected, the Labour Party achieved a decisive victory.
For anyone who upholds Palestinian rights, there was little difference between the two main parties in the election. Both supported Israel’s attack on Gaza in its first months. Neither takes a stand for Palestinian self-determination.
Dr. Sara Husseini, director of the British Palestinian Committee, told The New Arab website: “There has been no discernible difference between Conservative and Labour positions on Palestine, which have been characterized by a disregard for Palestinian life, the undermining of international law, and indifference to the sentiment of the British voting public. Both share responsibility for the unfolding genocide in Palestine.”
Labour leader Keir Starmer has stated that he is a Zionist. On Oct. 11, 2023, shortly after the beginning of the latest phase of the Palestine conflict, he said in an interview on Leading Britain’s Conversations (LBC) radio that Israel had the right to cut off power and water to the Gaza Strip, a statement that he quickly denied following a critical outcry. The Labour leadership has gagged debate on the war inside the party and forbidden party organizations from supporting demonstrations calling for an immediate end to the war and respect for Palestinian rights. The absence of Labour Party banners at marches hundreds of thousands strong has been notable.
Some have regarded these moves as part of the process of Labour occupying the “center ground” and earning electability, disregarding the fact that support for Palestinian rights in Britain is now mainstream among the public: most people are more sympathetic to the Palestinians than to Israel, and there are majorities in favor of ending arms sales to Israel and recognizing Palestinian statehood.
An exodus by thousands of members and dozens of local councillors and a loss of public support, reflected in a less successful performance than expected in local elections on May 2, have contributed toward a gradual shuffling of the party’s official position, so
John Gee is a free ‐ lance journalist based in Singapore and the author of Unequal Conflict: The Palestinians and Israel.
(L) A pro‐Palestinian protester holds a placard stating “Sunak Supports Genocide” during a visit from Britain’s Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader Rishi Sunak to Cannock College, in central England for a campaign event, on May 24, 2024. (R) A demonstrator holds a sign critical of the Leader of the Opposition Sir Keir Starmer during a rally outside Downing Street on Oct. 14, 2023 in London.
PHOTO BY MARK
PHOTO BY HENRY NICHOLLS/POOL/AFP
that in its election manifesto it calls for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and describes Palestinian statehood as “an inalienable right of the Palestinian people.” However, Labour’s changed ceasefire stand was clearly enforced by strong public opinion, and its position on Palestinian statehood is slippery: surely the right to self-determination is fundamental to all nations, and statehood is only part of how that right might be expressed. Self-determination is often taken to mean, automatically, constituting an independent state, but it could be expressed in other ways. A people might choose to share a multi-national state, have autonomy within a larger state, or even (improbably) decide that they do not wish to have any constitutionally defined rights as a nation at all. In the Palestinian case, an additional element in the matter of self-determination is the right of return. The basic point is that self-determination means a people making their own choices, not anyone else deciding it for them. Labour speaks of recognizing Palestinian statehood in the context of a “peace process” that does not exist, which is the same position taken by the outgoing Conservative foreign secretary, David Cameron.
Meanwhile, the anti-Palestinian, pro-Israeli offensive inside the party continued. Faiza Shaheen, who had declared her proPalestinian views and who had expected to stand as Labour candidate for the Chingford and Woodford Green constituency, was deselected at short notice on flimsy pretexts (including that in 2014, she retweeted a list of companies targeted in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign) and replaced with a Starmerite. Luke Akehurst, head of the “We Believe in Israel” lobby group, has been selected as candidate for the safe Labour seat of North Durham. Akehurst’s anti-Muslim, antiPalestinian views are a matter of record and he was also accused of anti-Semitism after stating that non-Zionist Jews have abandoned their Jewish identity— deliberately conflating Jewish identity with obligatory support for Israel.
The Starmer leadership sees sustaining support in Muslim communities that previously overwhelmingly voted Labour
as a problem, which is an important factor in its shift toward a more critical position on Israel’s killing of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and denying humanitarian aid to Gaza. (The word “genocide” is clearly beyond the pale.) In the midst of the election campaign, it was reported that Labour volunteers were being steered toward seats held by the Labour Party in which there were large Muslim populations. (See “Labour sends activists to 13 seats where it fears losing Muslim voters over Gaza,” by Chaminda Jayanetti, published on June 16 in The Guardian.)
One feature of the televised debates between party leaders in the UK has been the absence of discussion on Palestine. Maybe there’s no possibility of point scoring when the differences in policy between the biggest parties is negligible. During the last debate between Sunak and Starmer, sounds of protest could be heard outside. They came from Palestine supporters.
The great majority of people who make a choice between the two biggest parties will likely base their decision on attitudes toward issues other than Palestine, such as the future of the National Health Service or the economy. Nevertheless, some refuse to hold their noses and vote for “the lesser of two evils,” regardless of a candidate’s position on Palestine. Pro-Palestinian groups have circulated lists of questions to put to candidates about their stand on Palestine.
Some data on the voting records of MPs in the outgoing parliament has been compiled and publicized for voters to use, though resource limitations constrain its circulation.
Many people who see Palestine as a priority will vote for the local candidate with
the best position. There are still some Labour candidates who do support Palestine as well as ex-Labour candidates, including former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. The Green Party has taken a more pro-Palestinian stand than Labour, and in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, nationalist parties are pro-Palestinian options. In addition, some independents are standing with explicitly pro-Palestinian platforms. Labour can still expect to win, but it could fail to win some seats that it expected to fall into its hands and may see its majority trimmed elsewhere.
ANTI-BOYCOTT MOVE FAILS
One result of the calling of a British general election on July 4 was that proposed legislation that was still going through the process of discussion and amendment fell—essentially, whatever stage it was at, it would neither be passed nor carried over to the next Parliament. Among the casualties was the Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill, which would have banned politically motivated boycotts by public bodies, unless approved by the government (see Washington Report, May 2024). It had been designed to counter the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign in support of the Palestinian people’s rights.
The bill had encountered increasing public opposition from those supportive of the Palestinians and people concerned with democratic rights (often the same people). This ought to mean that an incoming government would feel it prudent not to attempt to introduce a similar measure. ■
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Protesters Demand an End to the Sale of Israeli Wine in Manitoba, Canada
By Candice Bodnaruk
ACTIVISTS HAVE
LAUNCHED a boycott campaign in Winnipeg demanding Manitoba Liquor Marts remove Israeli wines from their store shelves.
In Manitoba, liquor stores are crown corporations and liquor is sold primarily in government-run liquor stores. A provincial Minister of Liquor and Lotteries oversees the sales. Earlier this year, organizers wrote the provincial minister responsible for liquor and lotteries as well as the president of Manitoba Liquor and Lotteries Corporation to request that they remove Product of Israel wines from their store shelves. The protesters have yet to receive a reply from government leaders about their demand.
The protesters argue that there needs to be more accountability from the recently elected New Democratic government. Premier Wab Kinew has spoken twice in support of a ceasefire in Gaza yet is silent on Israeli wine sales in provincial liquor marts.
Four varieties of Israeli wines are sold in Manitoba. Most recently activists picketed outside the Osborne Village Liquor Mart and distributed leaflets to passersby. Most people in the neighborhood were receptive to the protesters’ message and were unaware that Product of Israel wines were sold in Manitoba. The Liquor Mart also sells the wines online.
Israeli wine in Manitoba comes from the Galil Mountain Winery, which is located just outside the northern Israeli settlement of
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.
Yiron, near the Lebanese border. Yiron was created on May 20, 1949 by former members of the Palmach’s Yiftach Brigade and the Freedom Pioneer (Dror Ha-Chalutz) Movement. The settlement now sits on the former land of the Saliha, a Palestinian village that was destroyed in the 1948 Nakba Supporters of the boycott have noted that Manitoba Liquor and Lotteries removed Russian products from its stores in 2022 after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s announcement of Canadian sanctions due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Most Canadian provinces, including Ontario, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island and Quebec also pulled Russian wine from their store shelves. In Manitoba, the products were pulled at the direction of the provincial Minister for Liquor and Lotteries to show support for Ukraine and the products were placed into storage. Russian Standard Vodka and Baltika 7 Premium Lager were the two products pulled in Manitoba, while in British Columbia the deputy premier at the time said the province was going further and ending its importation of Russian liquor products altogether.
Proponents of removing Israeli wine from Manitoba shelves argue that nothing similar has been done in regard to Israel. Protesters believe it is a double standard that Israeli products remain on store shelves and want a federal embargo on Israeli wine. Canada is Israel’s fourth largest overseas market for wine and in 2023 imported $2.53M in Israeli beverages, spirits and vinegar. Provinces make their own decisions about liquor sales but take their cue from the federal government.
Activists have also been placing boycott stickers on Israeli wine
Protesters outside the Osborne Village Liquor Mart at the end of May call for a boycott of wine produced in an illegal Israeli settlement.
in the liquor stores and have a petition, addressed to Premier Wab Kinew and liquor and lottery minister Glen Simard, with close to 400 signatories on an online petition <http://www.change.org/NoWine FromGenocide>.
PUBLISHERS FOR PALESTINE: AN ACT OF LITERARY RESISTANCE
Literary workers are supporting Gaza and raising awareness about corporate complicity in the publishing industry through Publishers for Palestine, a global publishing collective to promote and share the work of Palestinian writers and to ensure their voices are not silenced. Collective members spoke with the Washington Report recently to discuss their work and show how publishing can be an act of solidarity with Palestine.
The collective aims to be a source of “literary resistance” by amplifying the voices of Palestinian poets who are inspiring millions around the world—in particular Refaat Alareer, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in December 2023. Since Oct. 7, Publishers for Palestine has organized a “Read Palestine Week,” Nov. 29-Dec. 5, complete with a reading list, and an event called “Read for Refaat, in January 2024, reading his poetry in public; and has launched a Poems for Palestine chapbook. In May they hosted a week of action for Nakba, “Exist, Resist, Return,” and in June the group held “No Pride Without Palestine: A Virtual Reading to Support Life for Gaza.”
The group strategizes with other Palestine liberation organizations in other bookrelated fields and co-presents workshops with them. Publishers for Palestine follows the guidelines of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel in their work.
Publishers for Palestine consists of more than 400 member publishers in 50 countries, including Winnipeg-based Fernwood Publishing and Arbeiter Ring Publishing, as well as publishers elsewhere in Canada, Australia, India, Indonesia, Türkiye, Poland, Spain, the U.S. and the UK. Publishers for Palestine is unequivo-
The free booklet of poetry, artwork and resources for action is available to download for dissemina‐tion. <https://publishersforpalestine.org/2024/ 02/13/poems‐for‐palestine‐chapbook‐launch>.
cal in its support for Palestine and especially concerned about the silencing of Palestinian voices.
In early November 2023, the organization published a statement on Gaza and invited publishers from around the world to sign on in support.
The statement urged people across various publishing industries to call for an end to the genocide against all Palestinian people in Gaza, the West Bank, historic Palestine and in the diaspora; to hold Israel and its allies accountable for war crimes; to uphold BDS; and to support the demands of the Palestinian people to freedom, resistance and return.
Publishers for Palestine has called on the publishing industry to become a genuine site of learning and freedom of speech. It released a statement demanding that Palestinian voices not be silenced from future international book fairs and festivals.
In terms of their own work, the collective sees “Taking up those voices and helping them reach as broad an audience as possible” to be an extension of the work of lit-
erary resistance. They point to events such as the Palestine Festival of Literature as a way of harnessing language to bring “concrete manifestations” of Palestinian resistance to a broader audience.
Another of the collective’s goals is to track the censorship and silencing of Palestinian voices in the literary mainstream and work to ensure that Palestinian voices are not silenced from future international book fairs and festivals.
Publishers for Palestine has a censorship tracking tool on its website so that anyone in the literary field can report issues anonymously.
“Everyone, whether they publish or write fiction, non-fiction, poetry, or any combination, are facing the same levels of censure,” members said.
Publishers for Palestine argue that it is a myth that the publishing world is inherently “humane” and that books are rooted in nurturing the humanity and well-being of all people.
Collective members shared the example of large banking and investment firms which are deeply invested in publishing and also fund major literary festivals and prizes.
“Among such entities, we need to examine which interests, including large banking and investment firms, have stakes in areas such as Israeli weapons manufacturing,” the collective said.
Reactions from the publishing world to the Publishers for Palestine statement were generally positive, yet collective members found responses from more profit-oriented publishers were “mixed.” They explained that while some publishers did sign their statement on Palestine, others insisted that “politics” or “international politics” is beyond the scope of the industry.
Many of the publishers involved in Publishers for Palestine are activist presses, past publishers of books by Palestinian authors or have been involved in Palestinian solidarity work outside of publishing.
“People of conscience in all industries need to work collectively within their own landscapes to end the genocide and the occupation of Palestine,” collective members concluded. ■
The Moderate Wins in Iran. So What Does It Mean for the U.S.?
By Paul R. Pillar
POLITICAL MODERATION has won a victory in Iran.
Cardiac surgeon and former health minister Masoud Pezeshkian defeated stalwart conservative Saeed Jalili in a presidential runoff election, by a margin of 16.3 million votes to 13.5 million votes.
Paul R. Pillar is non‐resident senior fellow at the Center for Security Studies of Georgetown University and a non ‐ resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is also an associate fellow of the Geneva Center for Security Policy. He retired in 2005 from a 28‐year career in the U.S. intelligence community. This article was published in Responsible Statecraft . Reprinted with permission.
Much of Pezeshkian’s platform centered on domestic issues such as loosening strictures regarding female dress. But he also called for engagement with the West in the interest of loosening sanctions against Iran—a contrast with Jalili’s message of self-reliance.
Pezeshkian was the only moderate reformist among the six candidates whom the hardliner-dominated Guardian Council had permitted to run in this election. Speculation will continue over why the council even allowed Pezeshkian to run. Probably it did so to stimulate voter turnout and thereby make the election appear more legitimate than it otherwise would have.
Pezeshkian did attract enough voters who stayed home in the first round—with a 50 percent turnout in the runoff, after only 40 per-
Newly elected Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian visits the shrine of the Islamic Republic’s founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Tehran, Iran on July 6, 2024. Pezeshkian addressed the public after his visit, promising to reach out to the West and ease enforcement on the country’s mandatory headscarf law after years of sanctions and protests have gripped the Islamic Republic.
PHOTO BY
cent voted two weeks before—to offset the supporters of other conservative candidates who endorsed Jalili.
Foreign observers downplay the importance of Iranian presidential elections by observing that the most powerful figure in Iran is not the president but rather the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. True, but the choice of president is nevertheless significant.
The Iranian president is a power center in his own right and has influence over a wide range of policy areas. The ideological orientations of past Iranian presidents, which have ranged from hardliner to reformist, have made visible differences in Tehran’s foreign policy.
Simple downplaying also ignores some of Khamenei’s own choices. The most significant product of engagement between the West and Iran in recent years—the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), a.k.a. the Iran nuclear deal— was, on the Iranian end, largely the work of former reformist president Hassan Rouhani and his foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif. But Khamenei went along with what Rouhani and Zarif were doing, even though he later attempted to dissociate himself from the project when the United States reneged on the agreement.
Khamenei has the same interest in improving Iran’s economy with sanctions relief, and because of this the JCPOA was negotiated on his watch.
The ball for any future engagement is now in the West’s court and especially that of the United States. In deciding how to hit this ball, policymakers in Washington should take advantage of one of the clearest track records of success and failure that makers of foreign policy ever get. In the three years (2015-2018) that the JCPOA was in effect, it met its nonproliferation goal of closing all possible paths to a possible Iranian nuclear weapon, with Iran observing the strict limits on its nuclear program laid out in the agreement.
By contrast, since former President Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA in May 2018, the alternative U.S. policy of “maximum pressure” against Iran has failed in all respects. Freed from the JCPOA
limits, Tehran has accelerated its nuclear program to the point that it could be just days or a few weeks away from making enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon if it chose to do so.
The piling on of sanctions and declaration of economic warfare against Iran did not make Iranian regional policies any more peaceful and probably had the opposite effect. And the discrediting by the U.S. of reformists’ diplomatic efforts increased the power of hardliners in Tehran, with the election to the presidency of Ebrahim Raisi (whose death in a helicopter crash on May 19 occasioned the just-completed election of a new president).
For whoever will be in office in Washington, the main political hurdle that must be overcome for any new serious engagement with Iran is the customary mantra—rooted in four-decades-old history, the influence of Israel, and force of habit—that Iran is supposedly the prime mover of instability in the Middle East and deserves isolation and punishment.
Careful attention to politics in Iran and the reasons it took the direction it did with Pezeshkian’s election—including especially the thirst among Iranians for economic improvement and consequently the need for sanctions relief—will be needed to help overcome this hurdle.
The nuclear issue is an obvious first priority for renewed engagement, especially given the state the Iranian nuclear program has reached since Trump’s blunder of reneging on the JCPOA. But other issues relating to regional conflict and instability also need to be addressed. This will be challenging as long as Israel continues its assault on the Gaza Strip, given the tensions that have radiated out from that situation and its implications for such topics as Iran’s relations with Hezbollah and Hamas. Negotiations between the United States and Iran would, however, be congruent with recent efforts by Persian Gulf states to reduce tensions among themselves. These include the restoration of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran and a recent move in the same direction by Bahrain and Iran. Not spoiling these fa-
vorable regional atmospherics is all the more reason for the United States to avoid adopting a security agreement with Saudi Arabia that would be read by many, not least of all the Iranians, as part of an antiIran military alliance.
Any new engagement between the United States and Iran would not suffer on the Iranian end from the same long learning curve that Raisi’s team exhibited after coming into office in 2021. The principal influence on Pezeshkian regarding foreign policy appears to be Zarif, who as foreign minister had extensive dealings with U.S. interlocutors during negotiation of the JCPOA.
U.S. President Joe Biden had earlier stated his intention to restore compliance with the JCPOA, but he missed an opportunity to do so through executive action when he first became president. Once in office, he instead talked about negotiating a new deal, Iran countered by making its own new demands, and no agreement was reached.
Given President Biden’s political and other challenges he faces during the final six months of his term, it may be unrealistic to expect much new action on policy toward Iran during this period.
Recent past history suggests that constructive engagement with Iran would be more likely with a Democrat rather than Republican Donald Trump in the White House beginning in January 2025. But it cannot be ruled out that Trump as president may see an opportunity to score political points through negotiation. Somewhat similar to what he did with the North American Free Trade Agreement during his first term, he might claim to strike a “better deal” with Iran than President Barack Obama did and better than the lack of a deal during the Biden administration.
Much of Iranian policy in the Middle East has been reactive, with destructive tit-fortats in response to what other states have done to Iran. In the wake of Pezeshkian’s unexpected election, the United States now has an opportunity to react in a constructive way and advance the cause of greater stability in the Middle East. ■
Libya and the U.N.: Nine Envoys in 13 Years and No End in Sight
By Mustafa Fetouri
Belgassem Haftar (a son of Libyan politician and military officer Khalifa Haftar), the director general of Eastern Libya’s Development and Reconstruction Fund, meets with interim United Nations special envoy for Libya Stephanie Koury in Benghazi on June 6, 2024, to discuss reconstruction and development projects in eastern cities which were heavily devastated by last year's massive flooding. Libya is still struggling to recover from years of war.
LAST APRIL the United Nations’ envoy to Libya resigned after some 18 months in the job. Abdoulaye Bathily, a former Senegalese minister with a Francophone background, academic credentials and an aristocratic streak, cited the irreconcilable differences among his Libyan interlocutors as the main reason for his departure. He was the ninth envoy in the past 13 years sent by the U.N. to solve Libya’s maze of reconciliation—a top U.N. priority in the fractured country. Bathily said there is no “room for a solution in the future.”
His deputy, U.N. diplomat Stephanie Koury, took over and in less than two months, on June 19, she dashed to the U.N. Security Council to update the 15-member body, partly responsible for the Libyan mess, on what she has been doing since taking over.
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, and has published three books in Arabic. His email is mustafa fetouri@hotmail.com and Twitter: @MFetouri.
Koury has more than 30 years of experience supporting political processes, peace talks and mediation in conflict and postconflict settings, including in the Middle East; she has worked more than 15 years with the United Nations in Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. Koury told the council that the “status quo is not sustainable” and that Libyans agree on the need to “advance the political process.” What her 1,488-word statement did not say is how to advance the process and what initiatives, if any, she is proposing.
Essentially Koury said too much about nothing. What she described as an unsustainable status quo has been sustained for the last decade while Libyans have been calling to progress the political process since their country first became an open pit for foreign meddlers, usually represented by local proxies, who have been holding the country back since 2011. These are hard facts the U.N. knows only too well, but what the organization seems not to know is how to end this predicament and help Libya salvage itself.
If one is to go by Bathily’s verdict, the U.N., as an impartial mediator, is done with Libya because no room is left for any U.N.initiated political maneuver to bridge the manufactured differences between the country’s top “five key stake holders.” According to Bathily, the Libyan politicians are a “selfish” bunch trying to “maintain the status quo through delaying tactics” at the expense of the Libyan people. During his 18-month stint, Bathily spent most of his time outside Libya, talking to any media outlet wishing to listen to him as long as it was not a Libyan outlet.
Now Koury inherits the entire legacy with the main problem unchanged for more than a decade. Libya experts believe Koury does not have much to offer and her job will be an uphill struggle in a somewhat difficult environment. Domestically she still has to deal with the same group of interlocutors who already forced her predecessor to leave. Internationally, the U.S., a major player in Libya, hardly talks to Russia, another big meddler. Moreover, Washington is in election season mode, putting all “cold” crises on hold. Libya has long been a cold case— and a textbook case of international failure.
THE FIVE DEVILS HOLDING LIBYA BACK
Holding Libya back are five key “institutional” (Bathily’s description) stakeholders, referred to by Libyans as the five devils: the Tripoli-based Government of National Unity, the Higher Council of State, the Presidential Council, the Parliament in eastern Libya and Khalifa Haftar, the real power-holder despite the Parliament’s appointed government. Adding the eastern government to the group of stakeholders increases the problem exponentially.
Last year Bathily proposed that the five stakeholders meet, iron out their endless differences and pave the way for both presidential and legislative elections. They are expected to agree to election laws and their implementations, for both president and parliament, agree to fair and open elections and to make sure that everybody plays by the rules and, most important, accept the outcome of the vote. It would also be nice
if they could form an election-purposed government to organize the voting process and then disband.
This proposal has already been rejected. Is Koury to start anew, which will be time consuming and open to endless delays? Is she going to revive Bathily’s proposal and maybe sweeten it to the liking of all the devils? That’s hard to envision. Each of the five devils put forward conditions they require just to be at the same table with the others, let alone to discuss anything. Meeting each of the five’s demands will make the entire initiative useless.
This “roadmap” came about after almost everything else had been tried and failed. Since 2014 the current split in the country has become more serious and threatens Libya’s very existence as a unified state. Against this background it is hard to see what Koury could propose to satisfy powerhungry politicians and their foreign backers to allow Libyans to vote for their representatives and president.
Many Libya watchers have long been accusing the U.N. of managing the Libyan crisis instead of solving the problem once and for all. Many think the U.N. Security Council veto-wielding members, particularly the U.S. and Russia (and even France to a degree) still do not want any solution in Libya unless their individual—and conflicting—interests are guaranteed.
DO NOT BLAME THE U.N.
It is wrong to blame failure in Libya on the U.N. alone. Since 2014 Libyan politicians have been doing their best to derail any initiative to facilitate elections because they know only too well that the ballot box will trigger their political demise. While they disagree over almost everything, they implicitly agree about two things: keep squandering Libya’s wealth while rejecting elections. All five devils, as institutions, have long since lost any legitimacy they might have had. The parliament was elected in 2014 while the High Council of State was voted in 2012. (The current council is actually the expired parliament under a new name.) When its members refused to accept the 2014 results, they were given the new
name when the Libyan Political Agreement was signed on Dec. 17 2015, in Skhirat, Morocco. The idea was to include as many trouble makers as possible to pacify them until elections take place. However when people voted for the new parliament in 2014, most former legislators, who lost, rejected the new parliament, thus creating the new split.
While the U.N. might, partially, be blamed for the mess in Libya, the clear fact is very simple: Libyan politicians do not want any elections and will keep doing what they are good at: delaying the vote for as long as possible.
While the Security Council can be blamed for the way it has handled the Libya disaster, its biggest failure has been passing the notorious Resolution 1973, in March 2011, allowing all U.N. member states to use all “necessary measures” to protect Libyans allegedly being killed by their own government. From then on many countries including the U.S., France and the UK never stopped meddling in the country’s internal affairs. It was only a matter of time before Russia, which abstained from voting on Resolution 1973, joined the conflict, first through its mercenary group, Wagner, and now directly. A host of regional countries also meddle in Libyan politics, including Qatar, Egypt, United Arab Emirates and of course Türkiye, which in 2019 blackmailed the Tripoli government into signing a security deal allowing it to deploy troops and supporting Syrian mercenaries in Libya.
GEOPOLITICS IS ANOTHER HURDLE
Now Libya has become more of a cold battlefield between the West and Moscow, further intensified by the latter’s invasion of Ukraine. Russia has been busy consolidating its foothold in eastern Libya thanks to General Khalifa Haftar. Moscow appears to be intending to use Libya as a strategic springboard to further expand its interests in Africa, particularly in the Sahel region. France, the former colonial power in the region, has been forced to leave and Russia is being welcomed in. This is likely only to prolong U.N. efforts in Libya—and yield negligible results. ■
MUSLIM AMERICAN ACTIVISM
Gaza, 2024 Election Focus of 49th National ICNA-MAS Convention
The Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) and Muslim American Society (MAS) hosted their yearly convention over the Memorial Day weekend at the Baltimore Convention Center in Maryland. This was the 49th gathering and more than 30,000 Muslims from around the world attended. They listened to more than 100 speakers, participated in workshops and shopped. The Washington Report and Middle East Books and More booth was among the 500 vendors in the bazaar. While many of the workshops focused on Islamic principles, family, youth, interfaith and social justice issues, others urged political and humanitarian engagement.
This writer couldn’t resist slipping away from our booth to attend the workshop “Beyond Voter Registration: Unlocking American Muslim Political Power.” Community leader Dr. Esam Omeish, a Libyan American surgeon, recalled how in the 1980s and ’90s, many Muslim American immigrants believed taking part in the political process was haram (forbidden). Soon the community was convinced to push for voter registration, get out the vote drives and to donate to favored candidates. However, aside from a few photo ops with candidates to put in their living rooms, Muslim donors still had no say in influencing an agenda. That was until the 2000 campaign, when George W. Bush made an effort to court Muslim voters, promising to end the use of secret evidence and racial profiling. “Now all leaders of Muslim organizations know they have to take it to the next level and get a space at the table,” Omeish said. That means running for office or working as staff at the county, state and national levels.
Robert McCaw, director of government affairs at the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) agreed. “It is crucial for our community to unlock our power. There are more than 2.2 million registered Muslim voters in this country. Now there are 250 elected Muslim officials in local, state, federal
and judicial seats. This demonstrates that our neighbors trust Muslims to represent them…There is no such thing as a Black, Hispanic issue that isn’t also a Muslim issue,” so coalition building is vital, McCaw said. “We have 2,700 mosques in the U.S. as well as countless Muslim charities, nonprofits, community centers and schools. Muslim Americans give billions in foreign aid,” McCaw said, urging Muslims to also donate to Emgage PAC, the Muslim American bipartisan political action committee, and support JETPAC, which trains American Muslims who wish to run for elected office.
If Muslims have a presence, a seat at the table, they can help direct our government’s foreign policy and ensure our tax dollars provide “equitable aid, not bombs,” McCaw said. He urged listeners to check out CAIR’s Congressional Scorecard, to see where elected officials stand on issues they care about. Activists can organize forums to encourage candidates to engage with the community, help phone bank in the mosque and provide transportation to the polls. Then it is also vital to show how many Muslim voters turned out. “That’s political capital.”
Dr. Zahid Bukhari, executive director of the Center for Islam and Public Policy, emphasized that coalition building, nonviolent direct action and organizing in this digital age are all essential. American Muslims can join national networks to fight suppression, police violence and surveillance,
hunger, homelessness and Islamophobia. The Muslim community can’t just get busy every four years, the speakers agreed. They need to organize and cultivate their talents because America is better when everyone has representation.
Gaza: The Soul of Our Soul
Every space with speakers discussing Gaza was full, with hundreds of listeners left waiting in the hall hoping to attend “Gaza: The Soul of Our Soul.” On Sunday night, thousands of listeners filled the main hall to hear award-winning Palestinian author and social activist Laila El-Haddad’s talk, “My Family is Being Killed on My Dime,” and Sami Hamdi, editor in chief of the International Interest, describe “The Myth of Western Humanity.” Speakers described the massive scale of Israel’s intentional destruction of Gaza since Oct. 7—dropping 65,000 tons of explosives, equivalent to three atomic bombs on the enclave and using starvation as an instrument of war. They pointed out the U.S. is not a bystander in this war, as it has sent Israel more than $14 billion of weapons. “Israel’s war on Gaza could not continue without the U.S. support for this genocide going on right before our eyes,” El-Haddad said, and we have the power to stop it immediately by calling for a ceasefire.
More than a hundred members of ElHaddad’s extended family have been killed, she said, and she doesn’t have the
A huge crowd gathered to hear Laila El‐Haddad talk about the genocide in Gaza at the ICNA‐MAS Convention in Baltimore, MD, on May 26, 2024.
“luxury to grieve.” She admitted it was “healing to address my own community” at ICNA instead of having to “justify our humanity to media and our government over and over. Here, I don’t need to explain how I feel.” She invited Palestinian Americans from Gaza who have lost family members to share their stories on the stage. Those vignettes and photos of the deceased depicted brave, funny, irreplaceable and deeply loved personalities. UNRWA’s Hani Almadhoun said he got the call he’d been dreading the day after Thanksgiving. Israel had destroyed his family home during what was supposed to be a truce. It took a week to get their bodies out. Basim Elkarra, executive director of CAIR Sacramento, said his son asked him to draw their family tree so he could figure out who was martyred. He told him, “Everyone from Gaza is our family.”
El-Haddad urged Americans to “seek out your neighbor [from Gaza]. Check on them. We are not OK.” Gaza was not OK before Oct. 7, because nearly every family had already lost relatives and suffered for 18 years under the Israeli blockade. She concluded, “Don’t stop talking. Use your voice to overcome the propaganda” in U.S. media. “If we don’t tell our stories, it will be their narrative.”
casualty rates, which seem to double from one day to the next. But to really understand the savagery of what has been allowed to unfold in Gaza for the past nine months, you have to hear Gazans talk about their lives before and after October 7.
(The only report on the conference I could find online was from the “propaganda machine” Middle East Media Research Institute [MEMRI], which finds the worst possible quotes from the Muslim world and disseminates them as widely as possible. MEMRI warned that Basim Elkarra said, “the Muslim community is uniting…we will teach them a lesson, and we will tell them in November, we will remember. And right here looking at all this audience right here, wallahi [I swear], if we all work together and reunite, we will teach these folks a lesson at the ballot box.”)—
Delinda C. Hanley
MUSIC & ARTS
“The Night Won’t End” Describes Life and Death in Gaza
Anyone who follows the news from Gaza is quickly numbed by the mind-boggling
A newly released documentary produced by Al Jazeera’s flagship investigative series Fault Lines, “The Night Won’t End: Biden’s War on Gaza,” does just that. It focuses on three families who have experienced horror beyond comprehension, yet manage to describe what must surely be the worst moments in their lives with admirable composure. The documentary does a deep dive into the lives of the Salem family in Gaza City, which has lost about 100 members; the Ghaf family, attacked in what Israel sadistically calls a “safe zone”; and the family of Hind Rajab, the 6-year-old girl whose phone calls to the Red Crescent pleading for rescue were taped and have since gone viral. They are unfortunately representative of Gaza families: displaced several times, survivors of massacres, bracing themselves for the next strike they know is inevitable. One of the disconcerting things about the documentary is the viewer’s awareness that many of the people interviewed for the documentary are very possibly no longer alive. Israel has long stopped pretending that it targets just militants—it goes for the maximum kill.
To tell these stories, the Al Jazeera team worked closely with Gaza journalists, who can be described without hyperbole as heroic. They labor every day to tell stories that otherwise would not be told, since Israel does not allow foreign journalists to enter the Gaza Strip. They do this work while facing the same threats as every other Gazan—homelessness, hunger, fear for the safety of their family and burying loved ones when their luck runs out—plus the additional risk that comes with being a member of a group targeted by Israel.
Those interviewed in the documentary include Josh Paul, who resigned from the State Department to protest the weapons flow to Israel; Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen (D), who has raised questions about U.S. arms use in Gaza (but voted to send $26 billion in emergency aid to Israel in April); and Dr. Agnès Callamard, the secretary general of Amnesty International, who admits that Gaza upended the system of international law, which was developed precisely to make impossible what is happening in Gaza.
But, above all, the film allows survivors to tell their stories. The documentary begins with one of the interviewees talking about her life before the war. We see videos she stored on her cell phone of her kids playing on the beach; it is clear that the beach figured prominently in their daily life. Later in the film, a survivor of a massacre of 10
People walk between sewage and the rubble of destroyed buildings in Khan Yunis, Gaza, on July 1, 2024.
Helen Zughaib discusses her artwork in front of a packed audience in Washington, DC, on June 20, 2024.
family members shows photographs of his brothers and cousins—all of them handsome young men in their prime, confidently smiling at the camera. It is hard to reconcile these smiling men with the demeaning details of their casual execution, relayed by that same brother, who survived only because he fainted and the Israeli executioners thought he was dead.
The details hurt the heart and make this documentary hard to watch during one sitting. Wissam Hamada, the mother of Hind Rajab, describes her decision to return with her family back to the north where her mother is; her mother had advised her to write her name on her limbs and to do the same for her children so that they could be identified if they were killed. Children in Gaza have been known to write their own wills; death lurks everywhere, impossible for children to miss.
The documentary deconstructs the final hours of Hind, who was traveling with relatives when their car was hit. Hearing her voice pleading for a rescue is profoundly disconcerting. The first responders who took her call were clearly shaken by the kind of experience that training manuals do not cover. We hear them try to calm, distract and reassure the frantic little girl, even while they work desperately behind the scenes to get permission from the Israelis to send
an ambulance to rescue her. It has become standard Israeli practice to give permission for an evacuation along specific roads and then to target the route. The rescuers are killed, and so is Hind, a little girl who spent her last hours surrounded by the corpses of her loved ones, who could see the tanks nearby as night fell.
This superbly conceptualized and presented documentary deserves a wide audience, because what is happening in Gaza has implications for everyone in the world. Gaza is any place a state actor is allowed to bomb with impunity, when all red lines are removed. Everyone needs to understand the horrors to which people should never be subjected, why Gaza must never be allowed to become a precedent.
The documentary is available on YouTube at <https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ECFpW5zoFXA&t=1027s>.
Ida Audeh
Helen Zughaib’s Art Dignifies Refugees
“Democracy in the Crossfire: Art, Identity and Resilience” is the exhibit running until Sept. 1, 2024, at IA&A at Hillyer (International Arts & Artists’ contemporary art center), behind the Phillips Collection, in Washington, DC. An overflow audience attended a conversation on June 20, with
Lebanese American artist Helen Zughaib about her part of the exhibit, “Borders + Barriers: Pattern of Resilience.” Popular curator Dagmar Painter asked Zughaib to discuss the sources and meanings of her paintings and installations.
Painter and Zughaib transformed the middle gallery into a detention center. The word “refugee” is displayed on the ceiling, and a sign saying “border no entry” is on the emergency-exit door. Lining one wall are tiny painted children’s sneakers, “running from danger toward their dreams.” Zughaib’s exhibit combines her signature intricate patterned paintings with blackand-white photographs of Syrian refugees in Türkiye and Haitians stopped at the U.S. border.
“As an Arab American I feel the pull of East and West in myself,” Zughaib said. When the uprisings in the Arab world spread and the war in Syria began, causing so many deaths and refugees, Zughaib said she decided to use the beauty of color and patterns to express her heaviness, along with hope and optimism. “You don’t want people to look away from painful images,” she explained. You want to seduce people, to make them want to look at your art. Then they read the artist statement or the caption and really understand your message, Zughaib observed.
When people see a sign saying, “Look up,” they notice the word “Refugee” on the ceiling. Zughaib wanted to express her belief that while people may look down on refugees, “they should be admiring their resilience. They were doctors or farmers. They had a life. They have dignity. Right now, they are refugees but it’s not their identity.” Zughaib’s intricate “Wall of Resilience” depicts all the things—including the beautiful culture—refugees bring to a place. —Delinda C. Hanley
HUMAN RIGHTS
Addressing the Needs of Female Refugees
To commemorate World Refugee Day, the Wilson Center hosted a virtual conversation on the gendered impacts of
forced displacement in the Middle East and North Africa on June 18. The event featured a keynote speech by Lindsay Jenkins, senior adviser in the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration at the State Department. It was then followed by a panel discussion featuring Yara Asi, assistant professor at the University of Central Florida; Lina Sergie Attar, founder and CEO of the Karam Foundation; Reva Dhingra, policy and planning adviser at the International Rescue Committee (IRC); and Sola Mahfouz, global fellow at the Wilson Center and co-author of Defiant Dreams
Jenkins began by outlining the sobering data on displacement globally, noting that “117 million people were forcibly displaced by conflict, violence, persecution and other human rights abuses last year; half of those are women and girls.” She focused on how domestic laws impact those fleeing conflict, noting that the Middle East and North Africa is home to over half of the countries in the world that deny women equal nationality rights. This exacerbates statelessness, as women become unable to pass citizenship to their children, which hinders the ability of families to access assistance and cross borders together amid a crisis.
Asi detailed the forced displacement crisis in Palestine, specifically the situation of women. She emphasized that women are often charged with most caregiving duties, “so when we see in Gaza today the level of famine, the level of destruction, the lack of access to services, we can assume that this is being felt extremely acutely by women and especially mothers.” The health impacts have been brutal, and rates of malnutrition have been significant. Pregnant and nursing mothers have been “unable to produce milk; their bodies are under so much mental and physical stress that they are literally unable to care for their children.”
Speaking from her experience as an Afghan refugee, Mahfouz emphasized how “the narrative of being a refugee is so dehumanized” and often omits that “before you [became] a refugee you had a life, you had dreams, you had hopes.”
Refugees, mostly women and children, wait for a World Food Program distribution point to open at a temporary camp in Adre, Chad, on April 22, 2024. Chad is home to approximately 900,000 Sudanese refugees who have fled the war in Sudan, 88 percent of whom are women and children.
She added that “a lot of the countries that we want to immigrate to are responsible for our displacement,” highlighting the moral imperative of countries to accept refugees from areas they had a hand in destabilizing.
Attar, a Syrian American who works with Syrian refugees in Türkiye, talked about the aftermath of the devastating February 2023 earthquake. Many of the impacted households in Syrian refugee communities in Türkiye are female-led, where the father is either absent or unable to provide for the family. In such households, children are often taken out of school and become involved in either child labor or child marriages. Attar explained that her challenge leading the Karam Foundation is understanding how to support refugee families in the shortterm, providing necessities and basic support, but at the same time investing in their futures and “making sure the children and the youth are going to school, are able to reach their full potential.” Attar said her organization’s efforts have paid off. “Within a few years…we have children that we found in child labor who now attend university,” she pointed out.
Dhingra noted that female refugees face greater economic marginalization, fi-
nancial exclusion and mobility restrictions, as well as higher risks of intimate partner violence. For instance, women in South Sudan are 42 percent more likely to experience intimate partner violence, and displaced Syrian women in Lebanon are at a disproportionate risk of genderbased violence (GBV). In Gaza, more than 1 million Palestinian women and girls are facing catastrophic health and sanitary conditions.
Climate change is intensifying the existing drivers of migration and acting as a threat multiplier, Dhingra added. Women are particularly likely to have their livelihoods threatened by climate change because of their presence in the agricultural sector. Often, they must travel longer distances for water, including getting water at night, which increases the risk of GBV.
When asked what steps should be taken to translate the experiences of refugees into policy solutions, Asi asserted that the focus should be on preventing crises rather than responding to them. Dhingra agreed, but also highlighted that the failure to resolve protracted crises drains resources and harms lives. In fact, 85 percent of humanitarian spending goes to people living in
DAN
crises that have lasted five or more years. Asi concluded with a plea to focus less on militarized solutions to crises. “We are still stuck in this militaristic mindset that there are military solutions to what are really political problems, thus causing massive refugee crises that then have to be responded to,” she said.
Laila Delpuppo Messari
DIPLOMATIC DOINGS
Lakhdar Brahimi Reflects on Diplomatic Career
Lakhdar Brahimi, a former Algerian freedom fighter and senior United Nations diplomat who mediated conflicts from South Africa to Afghanistan, discussed his career at an event hosted by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) on May 21. Speaking with acting USIP president George Moose, the 90-year-old negotiator reflected on his career and offered his perspective on Israel’s devastation of Gaza. Brahimi is a co-founder of The Elders, along with former President Jimmy Carter, Nelson Mandela and other global leaders working for peace, justice, human rights and a sustainable planet.
Brahimi’s storied career spans 58 years, during which he served as an ambassador, foreign minister, under-secretary-general of the United Nations and U.N. special envoy to South Africa, Haiti, Afghanistan (twice), Iraq and Syria. As the Arab League’s special envoy for Lebanon from 1989 to 1991, Brahimi oversaw the passage of the Taif Agreement, which ended Lebanon’s 15-year civil war.
The diplomat’s lifelong foray into international politics began in 1956, when he left college in Paris to join the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) and represented the anti-colonial insurgency in Indonesia. After Algeria achieved independence from France, Brahimi became a career ambassador and forged ties with other national liberation movements, including the African National Congress (ANC). Several decades later, Brahimi served as the United Nations special envoy to South Africa, where he
oversaw the 1994 election that swept ANC leader Nelson Mandela to the presidency.
Amid the Taliban’s first seizure of power in 1997, the U.N. appointed Brahimi as special envoy to Afghanistan. “In that period, the international community as a whole, including the humanitarians, practically refused to talk to the Taliban,” Brahimi recalled. The need for communication became evident when the Taliban killed nine diplomats in an Iranian consulate and took more than 100 Iranians hostage in the summer of 1998. In response, “The Iranians massed 200,000 soldiers [on their border] and were planning to invade Afghanistan,” he explained.
Following an appeal by Iran’s thenPresident Mohammad Khatami, “[U.N. Secretary-General] Kofi Annan told me to go there, and I saw Muhammad Omar, the leader of the Taliban. We took quite some time, effort, and so on, but we managed… to get the bodies of the nine Iranians [returned] and all the hostages [released].”
Brahimi pondered how history would have unfolded if more governments engaged with Omar prior to the 9/11 attacks. “Talking to people is not bad, and it can be extremely useful,” he emphasized.
After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Brahimi returned to Kabul to help “put
together the beginning of a republic,” but “things started to deteriorate in 2004 and went on deteriorating” as Washington’s focus pivoted from Afghanistan to Iraq. Although he rued the Bush administration’s rejection of diplomacy in the lead-up to the Iraq war, Brahimi nonetheless became the U.N. envoy to Iraq in 2004 at Washington’s request. He resigned after six months, denouncing the head of the U.S. occupation, Paul Bremer, as “the dictator of Iraq.”
Given his role in Algeria’s liberation struggle, Brahimi’s position on Palestine is consistent. Prior to Oct. 7, many leaders in the U.S. and elsewhere merely thought of the Palestinians “as a nuisance” that could be managed by Israel, he noted. While acknowledging that “there were some horrible things that happened” during Hamas’ attack, Brahimi asserted that “what has also happened is that Palestinians took the fight inside Israeli territory and have defeated, for one day, the Israeli army.” The Oct. 7 attack “changed things throughout the world, not only for the Palestinians,” he argued, “so now I think that people are starting to accept that the nuisance is not going to go away, that the nuisance are people who have rights and they are not going to give up those rights.”
Lakhdar Brahimi (r) shaking hands with Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in Cairo upon being named Algerian ambassador to Egypt, in April 1963.
Brahimi pointed to the international community’s overwhelming support for Palestinian statehood as evidence of a global paradigm shift. He reminded the audience that the U.S. cast the sole veto against Algeria’s resolution to recognize Palestinian statehood in the U.N. Security Council and was one of nine nations to oppose it in the General Assembly. Brahimi emphasized the importance of diplomatic recognition, as “if the U.N. accepts the state as a member, then you will have the state of Israel occupying the state of Palestine,” which provides more leverage for the U.N. to broker a resolution.
The diplomat is hopeful that Palestine will one day be fully recognized as a state. “It will not be done in one month or one year, or even perhaps five years, but it can be done, and I think it will be done if the most important countries in the United Nations really live up to their responsibility,” he said.
Jack McGrath
WAGING PEACE
Destroying Healthcare: Israel’s War on Gaza’s Hospitals
What is the significance of Israel’s destruction of the healthcare infrastructure in Gaza? What does it portend for the rest of humanity? These questions were the focus of the Voices From the Holy Land online film salon on April 21, co-sponsored by We Are Not Numbers and the Arab American Institute.
Moderator Christos Giannou asked his fellow surgeons, two of the three panelists, about their experiences in Gaza. Giannou, who worked for the Palestine Red Crescent Society, was the sole surgeon at the hospital in Lebanon’s Shatila refugee camp in 1982 when Israel facilitated a massacre of 3,500 unarmed Palestinians and Lebanese civilians.
Clyde Farris, an orthopedic surgeon in Oregon and a volunteer with Doctors Without Borders, recalled his experience in Gaza during the 2018 Great March of Return. “During that protest, Al-Shifa Hospital was badly undersupplied” due to the ongoing blockade of Gaza, he said. Israeli
snipers injured 36,100 Palestinian protesters—and killed 223—at the overwhelmingly peaceful protests. “All I can think of was the terrified young men coming in by ambulance on Friday evenings,” recalled Farris. “They were just hoping that they’d keep their legs. We operated on 20 of them, but we ran out of the external fixation devices after that.” Those devices are “basically just an interim measure to stabilize the fracture.”
“The difference between other wars in which I have served and the Gaza war today is the difference between a flood and a tsunami,” said Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a surgeon and clinical lead for the Operational Trauma Initiative at the World Health Organization’s Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean. “I was in Gaza’s Al-Ahli Hospital on Oct. 17, 2023, when it was targeted by Israel. The hospital was full of internally displaced families, and the missile landed in the middle of them. You step out of the operating room after the ceiling falls. You see people who are literally either dismembered, decapitated or literally exsanguinating [bleeding out] in front of you from the shrapnel. Not only are you unable to deal with this, you’re also unable to deal with the sheer numbers. You’re unable to function because, every day, even less of the health system is there.” (Israel insists a mislaunched Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket impacted the hospital. Investigations
by independent groups have not been able to reach a clear conclusion, given their inability to access all relevant data. Israel has openly targeted more than 30 hospitals in Gaza since the Al-Ahli Hospital incident.)
The harm extends beyond lack of care for the war-injured, sick and chronically ill. “Consider shelter. If there’s no place to live, you are prone to have more diseases and the spread of epidemics and communicable diseases. That is happening right now in Gaza,” said panelist Eileen Shields-West, chair of The SEED Foundation.
Giannou offered background and definitions to provide context. Jus ad bellum refers to the conditions under which a state may go to war. In contrast, jus in bello is the legal construct delimiting how combatants behave during war. “Jus in bello, or humanitarian law, is largely defined by the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and additional protocols from 1977,” he explained. “Medical activities are protected under law, which involves medical personnel, medical institutions, hospitals, dispensaries, ambulances and such. A combatant who is wounded has the right to be in a hospital. That does not compromise the medical neutrality of that hospital. It’s not some sort of surreptitious attempt to hide the combatant.”
Evidence is mounting that Israel has violated these laws. The week before the
Relatives gather around the body of a Palestinian boy who was killed by an Israeli strike on the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, on June 18, 2024.
salon, evidence was being unearthed of a massacre of medical staff and patients at Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical complex.
“The United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany—these are not third parties,” insisted Abu-Sittah. “These are genocidal partners with Israel in a genocidal war that is being waged against the indigenous brown population of Palestine. And the aim is to wipe them out, and do it in a way that teaches everybody else to behave themselves.”
Abu-Sittah warned that Israel’s tactics could easily be normalized and repeated by other belligerents. “It starts with the fact that it’s okay to kill 14,500 children in under six months, with the brilliant idea that actually starving a population is critical to winning the war,” he said. From there, “military academies will teach the destruction of health systems as an intrinsic component of the conduct of war. All of this means that what we’re watching in Gaza is how the wars are going to be conducted the rest of the 21st century.”
A recording of the salon can be found at the VFHL website: <voicesfromtheholyland.org/salonrecordings>.
Steven Sellers Lapham
People’s Conference for Palestine Draws Thousands
Thousands traveled from across the country and the world to attend the People’s Conference for Palestine at the spacious Huntington Place convention center in Detroit, MI from May 24-26. The Memorial Day weekend event was action-packed, with programming running from the morning until late at night. Attendees participated in plenaries, breakout sessions and cultural programming on a range of topics, including confronting Zionism in education, the media’s coverage of Palestine and the 2024 U.S. elections. Between sessions, participates perused a massive vendor fair, which included the Washington Report and Middle East Books and More, as well as alternative news outlets, artists, Palestinian food vendors and advocacy organizations. The vendor fair provided a dynamic space for activists to meet, strate-
gize and expand their knowledge of the many organizations and coalitions working in solidarity with Palestinians.
The event was organized by 15 organizations, including The People’s Forum, National Students for Justice in Palestine and the Palestinian Youth Movement. The crowd, while diverse, skewed young. Many participants had just returned from encampments at their universities and arrived in Detroit with a palpable sense of invigoration from their achievements on campuses across the country this spring. Indeed, the student movement was a theme woven into most of the discussions held over the weekend.
Conference organizers did a magnificent job of molding the convention center into a Palestinian space. The vendor hall was adorned with a massive Palestinian flag and a map of Palestine, which caught the eyes of passersby using the waterfront venue as a resting place for their walk along the scenic Detroit River, which separates the city from Windsor, Canada.
Each room in the facility was renamed for a Palestinian martyr. The main hall was named after Walid Daqqa, a Palestinian citizen of Israel who died of cancer in an Israeli prison this April after 38 years of imprisonment on charges of overseeing a resistance operation that resulted in the killing of an Israeli soldier. Daqqa denied the charges. A highlight of the
event was the appearance of his wife, Sana’, and 4-year-old daughter, Milad, who was conceived after Walid successfully smuggled his sperm out of prison. The mother and daughter paraded around the packed auditorium to massive applause and ceremony.
The Daqqas were lucky to attend, as many conference speakers were denied U.S. visas or harassed by authorities while attempting to enter the country. “They think that this fazes us…that borders matter to us as a people,” emcee Mohammed Nabulsi, a member of the Palestinian Youth Movement, said at the opening plenary. “No border, no government, no entity will ever get in the way of our liberation.”
Rep. Rashida Tliab (D-MI) received a massive hometown welcome as she eviscerated U.S. policy toward Israel. “The United States is the primary investor and funder of genocide. We’re literally co-conspirators. It’s shameful,” she said. Tlaib noted that massive support for Israel is also a theft from the poor in the U.S., including the homeless, seniors and children. “Every single bullet, every single gun, every single bomb that we send is a sacrifice of our own schools here at home, many of which, when I go into the schools, have garbage bags over their drinking fountains because they don’t have clean water,” she said.
The congresswoman concluded her speech by emphasizing that the power
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D‐MI) speaks at the People’s Conference for Palestine in Detroit, MI, on May 25, 2024.
and persistence of the people has always been the impetus for change in this country. “We’re gonna march, and we’re gonna move Congress and we’re gonna move the White House, because they have no other option,” she said. “We’re not going anywhere.”
This sentiment was echoed by conference organizers in their closing statement: “We will be here, in the streets, on our campuses, in our classrooms, in our workplaces, every day until Zionism is defeated and until the total liberation and return of our people.”—
Dale Sprusansky
USS Liberty Survivors Honor Their Shipmates
Every year, USS Liberty survivors, relatives and friends gather in Section 34 at Arlington National Cemetery to remember their 34 shipmates who were killed in an Israeli attack on their ship. The USS Liberty, a Naval technical research ship, was deliberately attacked by Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats in international waters off the Sinai Peninsula on June 8, 1967. The U.S. government has spent the past 57 years enabling an Israeli coverup of the assault.
Pointing to his grave up the hill, USS Liberty survivor Ernie Gallo thanked their Captain William McGonagle saying, “Without him those of us survivors who are here today probably wouldn’t be here. And that includes all my shipmates who did what they had to do that day to stay afloat and care for our wounded. Six of my fellow shipmates are buried here. Thirty-four shipmates gave up their lives for America. It doesn’t get any easier to come here to remember them. We’ll never forget them.” Survivors recognized every man killed that day, read their name, rang a bell in the Navy tradition and added a rose beside the grave marker to commemorate the 34 heroes.
—Delinda C. Hanley
Ralph Nader Radio Hour
Spotlights Genocide in Gaza and the Magazine and Bookstore Fighting to End It
Delinda Hanley, executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson
for
the
on their homeland. Proceeds of the sales supported the Center for Arab American Philanthropy’s Gaza Scholarship Initiative for Displaced Students. Falafel Inc supplied delicious food, and the bookstore offered free lemonade and cookies. Passersby lingered on the sidewalk or in the bookstore to talk about Gaza and to look for meaningful gifts among the vast array of used books, jewelry, art, embroidery, stained glass and pottery.
of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft were guests on the June 29, 2024, Ralph Nader Radio Hour. While Nader, the political activist, presidential candidate, author, lecturer and attorney noted for pioneering consumer protection laws, needs no introduction to Washington Report readers, they may not be familiar with his weekly radio show, <ralphnaderradiohour.com/p/an-undertaker-in-gaza>.
Hanley spoke about the 42-year-old magazine and its popular bookstore,
Middle East Books and More, which more and more readers are discovering during this ongoing genocide in Gaza. Wilkerson widened the discussion to include the war in Ukraine and contend that “the Pentagon runs America.”
A flood of emails from around the country requesting sample copies of the magazine, new subscriptions and orders to the bookstore ensued. So many radio show listeners had never heard of the magazine. After hearing that it was launched by retired
USS Liberty survivors and their supporters gather to remember those killed by Israel’s June 1967 assault on the ship, at Arlington National Cemetery, on June 8, 2024.
Middle East Books and More hosted an Eid Al‐Adha and Father’s Day sale to help raise funds
Palestinian students from Gaza living in limbo in
U.S. during Israel’s assault
diplomats trying desperately to change U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, as well as the forces that have tried to silence those efforts, they wanted to know more.
Like Nader, listeners were deeply moved by Abubaker Abed’s article, “Abu Jawad’s
Heart Breaks Daily as He Buries the People Killed by Israel,” published by Al Jazeera and reprinted in the “Other Voices” supplement of the Washington Report, compiled by Janet McMahon. Abu Jawad, an undertaker in Deir el-Balah, Gaza, says he’s
buried more than 17,000 people since Oct. 7, including 67 family members. At the end of the article, Abu Jawad says, “Despite the scale of loss and horror I see every day, I can’t stop and never will. Stop this genocide! We want a peaceful life. I want to leave and go home safely every day, not battling starvation and war at the same time.” That article was written in February, so we can’t imagine how many more people he’s buried, or if he is still alive.
Please listen to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour and send a link to your friends.
—Muna Howard
Assessing Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions
At the Arms Control Association’s annual conference in Washington, DC on June 7, an expert panel discussed ongoing efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. Reuters reporter Arshad Mohammed moderated the discussion, which included Kelsey Davenport, the director of nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association; Sharon Squassoni, international affairs professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School; and Negar Mortazavi, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy.
Iran is now enriching uranium at 60 percent, a level that puts it on the precipice of being able to produce a nuclear weapon. Tehran could likely build a weapon in “as little as six months,” Davenport said. However, Mortazavi argued that Iran will not move toward weaponization of its program, citing the Supreme Leader’s fatwa against nuclear weapons. “Current U.S. intelligence assessments support” that conclusion, Davenport concurred.
Amir Saeed Iravani, Iran’s ambassador to the U.N., stated in a June letter that his country’s nuclear program is “peaceful,” asserting that “Iran has constantly demonstrated its rejection of nuclear weapons and its commitment to the NPT [Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty].”
While inspectors frequent some of Iran’s facilities in adherence to the Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) access is limited, which “increases the risk—or speculation of risk—that Iran may
Abu Jawad buries a 14‐year‐old child shot by an Israeli sniper in Khan Yunis, Gaza.
On June 29, 2024, All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, CA held a fundraiser titled “Help Save the Children of Gaza,” with proceeds benefiting Kinder USA, which provides direct aid to Gaza. Pictured above at the event, (l‐r) Dr. Sameer Khan, Randy Heyn‐Lamb of All Saints Church, Dr. Riad Abdelkarim of Kinder USA and Dr. Laila Al ‐Marayati of Kinder USA.
be diverting materials to some type of illicit program,” Davenport noted. Inspectors do not have access to some key facilities, such as the ones Iran uses to make its centrifuges. These gaps give space to provocateurs, such as Israel (which possesses nuclear weapons and is not a signatory to the NPT), to speculate and fearmonger about Iran’s program.
It would be “very challenging” for Iran to successfully develop a covert program to build nuclear weapons without detection by the U.S. or Israel at some point in the process, Davenport said. A more plausible concern is a combination of overt and covert operations, such as moving materials and enriching them at an illicit site, she said. However, Iran is satisfied with its threshold status and is unlikely to produce weapons unless the security situation worsens, such as a direct attack by Israel or the U.S. on Iran, or a “significant degradation” of Iran’s partners such as Hezbollah, Davenport contended.
The show of strength between Israel and Iran earlier this year did not change “the thinking or the policy in Tehran,” according to Mortazavi. “Tehran wants to enjoy being in sort of this threshold state, not breaking into an actual weapons program,” but keeping the door open to use weaponization as leverage for sanction relief against the U.S. If security conditions change, Iran could reverse course and actively pursue
weaponization, Davenport cautioned. She suggested that short-term de-escalation remains feasible, noting that last year Iran was willing to release five Americans it held captive in exchange for the U.S. unfreezing $6 billion of its assets.
Nuclear diplomacy must be paired with regional security diplomacy to ensure that “no [additional] state in the region ever gets to the point where it is going to think it needs nuclear weapons,” Davenport said. Diplomacy, Mortazavi agreed, is “the only path forward.”
The risk of weaponization could be mitigated by a deal that limits Iran’s capabilities, but the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program is far too developed to be quelled by force or diplomacy, Davenport asserted. Even with a nuclear agreement akin to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which the U.S. unilaterally pulled out of under the Trump administration, “Iran is likely to be closer to a bomb than in the past,” since it has advanced its different enriched stockpiles and centrifuges that were once limited by the JCOPA, quickening the timeframe toward weaponization, she said.
BOOK TALKS
The Role of Prisons in Iranian Life
The Rethinking Iran Initiative at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University held a webinar on April 16 featuring Dartmouth University assistant professor Golnar Nikpour for a discussion on her new book, The Incarcerated Modern: Prisons and Public Life in Iran.
Most of the scholarship surrounding the carceral system in Iran focuses primarily on political prisoners, despite the fact that the majority of people incarcerated in Iran are jailed on common law charges, primarily low-level drug offenses. Nikpour’s work expands the discussion beyond political persecution to explore the making and invention of the carceral state in Iran.
The first modern jails only began to appear in Iran around the 1910s and 1920s, but Iran is now one of the most carceral states in the world per capita. The official number of prisoners in Iran, which is underreported, stands at 250,000. The dis-
The U.S. should offer Iran “tangible” benefits in exchange for increased monitoring and access, Davenport contended. Even before it fell apart, the JCPOA was a “very transactional approach,” to nonproliferation arrangements, Davenport said. While the U.S. lifted some sanctions on Iran under the agreement, it failed to ensure that Iran benefited from sanction relief, giving the U.S. a “credibility deficit.” This credibility deficit has only grown since the Trump administration, making the solidification of any nuclear deal difficult. Sahara Sajjadi
Women sit on a bench overlooking Tehran, Iran, on June 30, 2024.
course surrounding the carceral system has evolved and shifted with the different changes of Iranian government, but the prominence and adherence to the carceral system has continually increased throughout Iranian history, regardless of what regime has been in power. The Pahlavi monarchs and the Islamic Republic have both subscribed to the idea that prisons are the most logical form of punishment and are crucial to improving Iranian society.
During her remarks, Nikpour challenged ideas of Iranian exceptionalism, particularly the Western perception that Iran uses political violence in a unique way that does not exist in the West. She said, “typically in the Euro-American scholarly or broader public discourse on Iran there’s this idea that in so far as it is an authoritarian state and uses political violence, it does so in an exceptional or particularly historically unique way, and I think that’s a dangerous argument, particularly if we take seriously the idea that we would like to see a more just or more free Iran.” She argued that to achieve a more just and free Iran, it’s important to understand why and how the carceral system became what it is both in Iran and globally. While she addressed the globality of the carceral state, she did not ignore the particularities of the Iranian context. For example, because Iranian prisons were built by the sovereign state rather than by colonizers (as is the pattern in many nations in the Global South) the discussion on the carceral system in Iran does not include the added colonial dimension.
The whole public is impacted by carcerality, especially as laws are centralized and policing is expanded, Nikpour emphasized. “As people in [the] modern carceral state, whether we live in the U.S., in Iran or another carceral state, we all understand implicitly, even if we’re not thinking about it all the time, that we could be arrested at any given time and that if we comport ourselves in a particular way, we can get arrested immediately,” she noted. Some populations are more vulnerable than others; in the U.S. vulnerability is impacted by a racial dimension, similarly in Iran, certain forms of gendered dress make women more vulnerable to policing.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, there began to be a realization in the judiciary branch and upper echelons of government that Iranian prisons were too full. This especially came to light in the 1990s with the spread of HIV/AIDS in the Iranian prison system. In response, the government increased public health measures in prisons, but the crisis of overcrowded prisons remained. High-level officials, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, sought to reduce the number of people in jail, decreasing sentences for low-level offenses and even for mid- to high-level offenses as well. They also instituted bail reform, easing the need for prisoners to be jailed before bail was paid. These reforms led to a plateauing of the number of people incarcerated for the first time since the beginning of the prison system in Iran.
Nikpour argued, however, that fewer people in jail does not equate to decarceralization. She explained that even though the number of Iranians in jail has decreased, “we cannot think of this as something that is decreasing the reach of the carceral state because…the mechanisms by which…the government reduces the number of people in prison is precisely carceral methods.” Systems such as ankle monitors and biometric surveillance reduce jail time, but still facilitate state intrusion into people’s lives, she noted. Though Nikpour observed that abolitionism is not present in
Iran with the same language, logic or prominence as in the U.S., there is an understanding that a new model is needed to replace the country’s widespread carceral system.—Laila Delpuppo Messari
Confronting Iran’s History of Slavery
The Rethinking Iran Initiative at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) hosted an online event on April 12 that discussed the history and legacy of anti-Black racism, erasure and enslavement in modern Iran.
Dr. Beeta Baghoolizadeh, the author of the recently released The Color Black: Enslavement and Erasure in Iran, commenced her talk by exploring Iran’s 1977 “Art of Black Africa” exhibition, organized by Queen Farah Pahlavi during the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah. The exhibit was billed as a significant cultural moment in Iranian-African relations. “In the [event’s] catalog, they really stress the importance of this exhibition being the first time Iran and Africa had met at this crossroads, how a bridge had been built to transverse oceans and deserts that had separated Iran and Africa,” Baghoolizadeh explained.
However, Baghoolizadeh noted the catalog’s complete erasure of slavery in Iran, which formally lasted until the early 20th century. Ironically, enslaved East Africans had once served the royal family at the exhibit’s precise location, the palace of Baghi Firdaws in Tehran. “This is just a very easy example of how they’re rewriting, erasing and replacing these histories, the history of Black Iranians, East Africans in Iran and the history of enslavement,” she said.
Baghoolizadeh’s book focuses on the enslavement of East Africans in Iran, particularly those forced by elite families to work in urban environments as nannies, wet nurses, cooks and other household roles. “I look at enslavement within domestic spheres in urban centers, especially the capital and other major cities, because those forms of enslavement informed the racialization and the anti-Blackness that became pervasive in Iran on a national scale,” Baghoolizadeh said.
The first step toward abolition in Iran came in 1848, when Mohammad Shah
Qajar issued a decree banning the import of enslaved people via the Persian Gulf. The Iranian parliament eventually formally banned all enslavement in 1929.
Almost a hundred years after slavery was outlawed, many Iranians still downplay or deny this aspect of their country’s history. Baghoolizadeh devotes the second half of her book to exploring this phenomenon, which she describes as the “forced invisibility” of slavery.
In particular, she explains how photographs from the era of slavery are used to rewrite history. She noted that many have argued that pictures of Iranians posing with their slaves is evidence that “slavery in Iran was not bad” or even that there “was not slavery at all, that they were part of the family.” The reality, of course, is that these slaves were not equal members of the families holding them as property.
Baghoolizadeh said her book, while written for a broad audience, also seeks to challenge her peers to critically engage with the issues of slavery and racism in the region. “In part, it is for an academic audience, for our colleagues to really think about what sort of erasures they’re amplifying in their work when they’re not addressing Blackness, when they’re tiptoeing around the question of enslavement, which has been a sort of trigger in Middle East Studies,” Baghoolizadeh explained. “In particular, the study of history has been bifurcated between people who are openly Islamophobic versus people who want to shield the Middle East from attacks of racism.” Academia “does not need to feed in to either of these binaries,” she said.
In his recently released book, Battle Ground: Ten Conflicts that Explain the New Middle East, author Christopher Phillips offers a unique view into the international relations of the Middle East. The region is frequently characterized in a rather simplified way, Phillips, a professor of international relations at Queen Mary University of London, told Gönül Tol of the
East Institute at a May 15 event in Washington, DC.
To provide a more complex understanding of the area, Phillips organized his book into separate chapters on Syria, Libya, Yemen, Palestine, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Kurdistan, the Gulf and, a little farther afield, the Horn of Africa. “The logic of the book is that you can look at any one of the individual chapters and read them on their own and understand them,” he said, or “you could also read all 10 in turn, or even a few of them, and get a broader holistic picture of what’s going on in the region.”
One aspect of the international relations of the region that has changed over the past 15 years, Phillips claimed, is the role of the United States. While the U.S. was once perceived as the dominant power in the Middle East, it is now viewed as reluctant to become overextended in the region.
Nonetheless, Phillips noted that the U.S. has not by any means fully withdrawn from the region, citing its military bases in the Gulf, its lingering troop presence in Syria and in Iraq, and the large amount of military support it sends to Israel. Also, while recent presidents have tried to “pivot away from the Middle East…to Asia,” he noted that each time, “something has sucked them back into the Middle East,” whether
it was the Arab Spring, the rise of ISIS or now the October 7 crisis and Israel’s assault on Gaza.
Amid the talk of Washington’s decreased interest in the region, Russia, in a military sense, and China, from an economic point of view, have expanded their Middle East footprint. Traditional U.S. allies in the region have used Washington’s unease with this new reality to their advantage, leveraging their relations with the two countries to draw concessions from the U.S. It’s their way of saying to the U.S., “you’re not the only game in town anymore,” Phillips said. At the same time, “they do not want the U.S. to disarm and leave the region,” he added.
China has an economic-driven foreign policy and wants to play a diplomatic—not a military—role in the region, Phillips said, noting its recent successful effort to ease relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia. “China’s foreign policy…outside of its immediate environment…is to use economics as a tool of diplomacy,” he said. Beijing also sees it as strategically beneficial that the U.S. still exerts so much military capital in the Middle East, he added.
As for other players in the region, Phillips classified Iran as an “interventionist” power, particularly following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Türkiye is also far more willing to become involved in the region than it previously was, he added.
Meanwhile, the UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which previously tended to be more inward looking, have all become more involved in regional affairs. “So, you now have a lot of regional powers playing major roles in the region, and, interestingly, they are competing with one another.”
Longer-term, Phillips cited climate change as the greatest risk facing the region. Being one of the most water-poor regions in the world and one of the most population-dense areas of the world “is not a good combination,” he stressed. “And you are seeing the negative impact of climate change, particularly in Iraq and Jordan,” where it is “having an effect on politics and leading to a sort of mass migration to the cities, leading to more unrest.”
Elaine Pasquini
Middle
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
Deluge: Gaza and Israel From Crisis to Cataclysm
Edited by Jamie Stern-Weiner, OR Books, 2024, paperback, 336 pp. MEB $21.95
Reviewed by Ida Audeh
Putting together a collection of essays about an ongoing war is a challenging task—the situation is dynamic, and one risks making assertions that are proven wrong when the dust settles. Wisely, volume editor Jamie Stern-Weiner defined the focus of Deluge narrowly: the book is designed to provide “proper historical context” and “a preliminary assessment of the many different aspects of the war.” The contributors are academics, think tank analysts, politicians and journalists; a timeline of key dates and a recommended reading list help readers understand the history of Gaza and its “relations” with Israel.
Historical context is sorely needed to dispel the tendency of Western media to pretend that history in Gaza began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Palestinian militants broke out of the concentration camp that is the Gaza Strip and wiped out Israel’s southern command, taking back to Gaza some 250 prisoners to exchange for thousands of Palestinians being held and tortured in Israeli jails. The four chapters in Part I (“Context”) examine the political and economic policies that Israel imposed on Gaza. In Chapter 2, Sara Roy labels these policies “econocide,” defined as “the wholesale destruction of an economy and its constituent parts, particularly a clearly defined economic identity and an organized and functioning economic community.”
One of the goals was to make the Strip
Ida Audeh is senior editor of the Washington Report
dependent on humanitarian aid—aid that, when blocked, results in famine, as is now evident. (By June 2024, at least 32 children had died of malnutrition.) With no political or diplomatic options available (outlined in Chapter 3), Gazans in 2018 launched a sustained protest effort, the Friday marches in Gaza along the border with Israel dubbed the Great March of Return (described in Chapter 4). Over the course of 21 months, Israel killed 223 unarmed Palestinians, including journalists and medics, two groups that have been deliberately targeted by Israel in this war.
Part II (“Cataclysm”) hones in on the war itself. Israel’s targeting of civilians, the subject of Chapter 5, has been evident in every war Israel has waged on Gaza, as the author demonstrates. In the current war Israel has the added aims of making Gaza uninhabitable, eliminating Hamas and using high civilian casualties to put pressure on the group. So far it has achieved only the first aim decisively.
References to civilian casualties in Gaza remain abstract until Chapter 6, written by Gazan journalist Ahmed Alnaouq. For people reading about the war from a
distance, each town in Gaza is an abstract battleground, but for Gazans it is a hometown, with favorite haunts and landmarks that Israel delighted in obliterating. Alnaouq lists his dead in one airstrike: his father, his three sisters, his two brothers and his 14 nieces and nephews. Such losses are not uncommon.
In the early days of the war, some analysts posited that Hamas acted on October 7 because the U.S. and Israel were moving on expanding the Abraham Accords to Saudi Arabia and the group feared becoming irrelevant. Neither Khaled Hroub (Chapter 7), who has written books on the organization, or Mouin Rabbani (Chapter 9), co-editor of Jadaliyya, give weight to that hypothesis. Ending the siege and blockade on Gaza was certainly high on the list, as was translating Hamas’ military victories into political wins, a feat it was not able to achieve in past wars. Hamas has said consistently that it wants to end the occupation decisively and to end the threat to Jerusalem. Under the guidance of Yahya Sinwar, improved relations between Hamas and the countries making up the “Axis of Resistance” made those goals plausible. Future books on this genocide will undoubtedly devote more space to the roles of Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Yemen’s Ansarallah (Houthis) in transforming the war into one with regional and even international significance.
Chapter 8 describes events in the West Bank since October 7, but one does not get a feel for the severity of the crisis there. Early on, it became clear that the West Bank is another front of the Gaza war and is nothing less than Israel’s promise of Nakba 2.0. Ethnic cleansing is underway, as are mass arrests and executions of unarmed residents, including children. Armed resistance has been constant in towns in the north and particularly in Jenin refugee camp, Nablus, Tubas and Tulkarem. Palestinians everywhere, including in Israel and East Jerusalem, are fair game for rabid settlers who know their power in the government and are on the prowl. When West Bank events are seen in conjunction with the war in Gaza, it becomes clear that a war of liberation (for Palestinians) or final conquest (for Israelis)
is underway. (It is unfortunate that a chapter was not devoted to assessing the mood in Israel; judging by the evacuation of northern settlements and those in the “Gaza envelope,” coupled with the mass exodus of Israelis early in the war, one senses that the public, for all its bluster, has little confidence that the government can resolve the situation.)
The three chapters in the last part of the book (“Solidarities”) describe official and popular responses in the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe during the first two months of the war.
Deluge helps readers understand this genocide within the history of Israel’s repeated attacks on Gaza and its colonization of Palestine for more than seven decades now. Nine months into the war, Gaza has become this century’s Stalingrad. Future generations will talk about Gaza as a place of horrific suffering and legendary determination that galvanized people everywhere to fight for a better world.
Israel’s Black Panthers: The Radicals Who Punctured a Nation’s Founding Myth
By Asaf Elia-Shalev,
University of California Press, 2024, hardcover, 344 pp. MEB $26.95
Reviewed by Matthew Vickers
From their humble origins in Oakland, CA, the Black Panthers developed a sophisticated political organization linked to decolonial movements in South Africa, Palestine and Cuba. As symbols of global revolution, it is no surprise that organizations from Britain to India directly invoked the iconography of the Panthers. However, the Panthers also found admirers in an unexpected corner of the world: Israel.
Israel’s Black Panthers explores the lives and trials of young Moroccan Jews in Jerusalem who altered the course of Israel’s politics, society and collective memory. Asaf Elia-Shalev, a senior reporter with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency,
Matthew
constructs a fascinating narrative of the organization through a wealth of sources, including newspaper clippings, interviews, declassified documents and historical archives. The story of the Panthers in Israel, as described by Elia-Shalev, is complex and defies a straightforward interpretation from standard Zionist or Palestinian perspectives.
In the preface, Elia-Shalev says the book’s purpose “is to provide readers with a unique vantage point on Israeli history. The narrative avoids the typical tropes and ideological cliches regarding Zionist triumphalism. And, to the extent the story represents an indictment of Israel, it does not reproduce the most common critique, which tends to come from a Palestinian perspective.”
Despite being published through an academic press, Israel’s Black Panthers reads more like a novel than a scholarly account of the group. With a healthy balance of narrative and historical context, EliaShalev brilliantly interweaves the story of the Panthers into the context of Israeli society.
The book presents a compelling history of Mizrahi Israelis and their experience with Zionism, from harsh initial rejection to an uncomfortable assimilation that characterizes the present moment. Elia-Shalev shows the role inter-Jewish racial discrimination played in Israel’s founding. Mizrahi Jews, like other Arabs, were victims of Orientalist stereotypes and presented as having a “dual loyalty” to other Arabs. Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, saw Mizrahi migration as a threat to the “Europeanness” of a future Jewish state, an attitude that was shared by early leaders
of Israel. Upon arrival to Israel, Mizrahi Jews were placed in transit camps or development towns and exposed to harsh and subpar living conditions. Aryeh Gelblum, a journalist with Haaretz, illustrated the everyday racism in Israeli society toward these Jews from the Middle East and North Africa: “Among the Africans living in the camps, you will find filth, card games played for money, drinking for the sake of getting intoxicated and prostitution.”
At the nucleus of the Black Panthers were young Moroccan Jews in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Musrara. Leaving behind often professional, middleclass backgrounds in their French-ruled homeland, they faced institutional and societal discrimination from their European Ashkenazi counterparts. Musrara’s residents were subjected to inferior housing, schooling and employment, with its youth forced to endure criminalization and brutality from Israeli police.
By 1971, the Panthers’ political vision and organizing exposed the foundational myths of the Zionist state. The selfproclaimed socialist and pioneering spirit espoused by the hegemonic forces of Labor Zionism was rendered moot by the Panthers’ head-on confrontations with the state. Capturing the immediate attention of Prime Minister Golda Meir (who famously described the Panthers as “not nice boys” on television), the police and even the international press, the Panthers shattered the myth that Israel was a democratic and equalitarian society for all Jews.
Nonetheless, the book notes the myriad contradictions that uncomfortably informed much of the Panthers’ dynamic existence. Unlike their American counterparts, the Israeli Panthers were far more informed by traditional Jewish values and religiosity, as shown in their own version of the Haggadah composed for their Passover celebration. The Panthers also had an awkward relationship with Zionism, at times declaring themselves to be the “true Zionists,” only to be later explicitly anti-occupation and in favor of Palestinian liberation.
The Panthers’ leadership was often paralyzed into personality battles that erupted over the organization’s responsibilities. One faction led by Saadia
Vickers is a summer intern at the Washington Report. He is an undergraduate student at Occidental College, where he is majoring in diplomacy and world affairs.
Marciano envisioned a militant protest organization, while others wanted to sustain a community organizing model led by Reuven Abergel. Such splits are eerily reminiscent of the divide between the U.S. Panthers’ Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver. These disputes punctured the viability of the organization, eventually leading to splits, disillusionment and resignations from the general membership.
For example, in the 1973 elections, the Panthers split into two political parties; the divide weakened the Panthers’ vote share overall, with both parties failing to capture enough votes to break the 16,000 votes required to enter the Knesset.
Simultaneously honest yet sober—with often humorous and clever prose—the book shows an extraordinary attention to detail and brings to life its characters and the mood of Israeli society. Israel’s Black Panthers should be enjoyed by anyone interested in the New Left, Mizrahi studies, Israeli society and critical histories of Zionism.
The Revolution of 1936-1939 in Palestine: Background, Details and Analysis
By Ghassan Kanafani, 1804 Books, 2023, paperback, 101 pp. MEB $20
Reviewed by Alex Bustos
Ghassan Kanafani’s The Revolution of 1936-1939 in Palestine is a detailed and rich study of the Palestinian uprising against the British Mandate in Palestine and the underlying factors behind the popular mobilization. This new edition, published in 2023 with an added introduction and afterword, presents Kanafani’s seminal essay to a new generation of readers, detailing the revolution in Palestine and how its outcome shaped the subsequent course of Palestinian history.
Kanafani argues that it is impossible to understand the revolution without examining the role of renowned Syrian preacher Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, whose killing by the British in 1935 galvanized Palestinian society into resistance. He also emphasizes the social and economic impacts of Zionist
colonization, noting the upheaval it caused by suddenly transforming an agrarian Arab economy into a Jewish industrial one in which the indigenous Palestinians were systematically excluded. Kanafani shows how this process, enabled by British policies, had devastating impacts on Palestinians and made rebellion inevitable.
Kanafani also outlines the role of intellectuals in Palestine during this period and the spread of a new revolutionary consciousness through art forms such as popular poetry. While packed with statistical analysis, Kanafani conveys the organic grassroots nature of the revolt and how it reflected the popular sentiments of vast swaths of Palestinian society.
Kanafani additionally assesses the revolution’s opponents and detractors, ultimately concluding that the Palestinian uprising was crushed by both internal and external forces.
The Palestinian leadership, on the one hand, was incapable of resisting the British-Zionist alliance and jealous of any perceived popular challenge to its own standing, Kanafani notes. He provides a particularly damning assessment of Palestine’s ruling families and notables, especially Hajj Mohammed Amin al-Husseini and Ragheb al-Nashashibi.
Kanafani also highlights the deleterious role of neighboring Arab regimes, especially Transjordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt and Iraq. Themselves colonial states under the thumb of European powers, he describes how they pressured the Palestinian leadership to call off the general strike and then urged them to ne-
gotiate with the British. He notes that the Arab masses remained broadly supportive of the revolution, despite the position of their rulers.
The author’s assessment of the Palestinian and Arab leaders is instructive, especially as Palestinians and their Arab allies arguably face similar obstacles today. Indeed, despite being written decades ago, this slim book feels more relevant today than ever, especially amidst Israel’s ongoing genocidal war against Palestinians. Written during another revolutionary moment, in the late 1960s, this study reads like a true people’s history by one of Palestine’s most celebrated writers and political figures.
Kanafani’s own assassination by Israel in 1972 and the attempted subsequent demonization of him and his works by Israel’s supporters indicate just how significant his words and impact remain. It is no surprise then that this newly published work has been seen across student encampments in both the U.S. and UK, being read by student protesters who are learning the lessons gleaned from Kanafani’s analysis while engaging in their activism.
This new edition of his study of 1936-39 is a welcome contribution to the growing literature on Palestine and should be read widely for its sobering analysis and the important lessons it holds for today.
Checkbook Zionism: Philanthropy and Power in the Israel-Diaspora Relationship
By Eric Fleisch, Rutgers University Press, 2024, paperback, 250 pp. MEB $40
Reviewed by Steve France
The future of Israel as a Jewish state depends on it keeping the historically overwhelming support of American Jews. That support still stands at about 80 percent today, in the estimate of Peter Beinart, a close student of the subject. But as protests against the Gaza genocide have found their most compelling expression on U.S. college campuses, the prominence of Jewish students among
Steve France is an activist and writer affiliated with Episcopal Peace Fellowship, Palestine-Israel Network.
Alex Bustos is assistant director at Palestine Deep Dive.
the protesters has exposed a rift between the Jewish establishment and emerging young leaders.
So, it seems a ripe moment to look closer at the nature of relations between American and Israeli Jews. In his new book, Checkbook Zionism, professor Eric Fleisch, who teaches Jewish Studies at Penn State, examines a key issue: the power of Jewish American donors to influence the state of Israel. He shows that American Jews have never seriously used the leverage of their financial largesse to influence Israel’s actions.
This docility has given Israel a free hand. Indeed, “blank check Zionism” seems to describe the attitude of Jewish Americans whose donations, Fleisch says, “in large measure” built Israel during its early years. In those days, the United Jewish Appeal in the U.S. sent upwards of 80 percent of collected donations to a single umbrella organization, the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in Israel. Donors were not able to direct how their funds were specifically used.
Fleisch recounts a scene from a classic 1964 Israeli fictional film, “Sallah Shabati,” that shows donors’ lack of agency—and the near contempt in which Israelis held them: a JNF official puts up a sign that says, “Simon Birnbaum Forest” in front of some newly planted trees just before a chauffeured American couple drives up. He tells them, “Mr. and Mrs. Birnbaum, this is your forest.” Impressed, they snap a photo and leave. The sign is then replaced by one reading “Mrs. Pearl Sonnenschein Forest,” just in time for the Sonnenscheins to happily see what their donations sup-
What Does Israel Fear from Palestine? by Raja Shehadeh, Other Press, 2024, paperback, 128 pp. MEB $15.99. When apartheid in South Africa collapsed in 1994, dismantled by internal activism and global pressure, why did Israel continue to pursue its own apartheid policies against Palestinians? In keeping with its history of antagonism, the Israeli state accelerated the establishment of settlements as extreme right-wing voices gained prominence in its government, with little international backlash. Condensing this complex history into a lucid essay, Raja Shehadeh, one of Palestine’s leading writers, examines the many lost opportunities to promote a lasting peace and equality between Israelis and Palestinians. Will the current genocide in Gaza finally mark a shift in the world’s response? With graceful, haunting prose, Shehadeh offers insights into a defining conflict that, he argues, could yet be resolved.
My Brother, My Land: A Story from Palestine by Sami Hermez, Redwood Press, 2024, hardcover, 328 pp. MEB $28. In 1967, Sireen Sawalha’s mother, with her young children, walked back to Palestine against the traffic of exile. My Brother, My Land is the story of Sireen’s family in the decades that followed and their lives in the Palestinian village of Kufr Ra’i. From Sireen’s early life growing up in the shadow of the 1967 war and her family’s work as farmers caring for their land, to the involvement of her brother Iyad in armed resistance in the first and second intifadas, Sami Hermez crafts a rich story of intertwining voices, mixing genres of oral history, memoir and creative nonfiction. Through the lives of the Sawalha family, and the story of Iyad’s involvement with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hermez confronts readers with the politics and complexities of armed resistance and the ethical tensions and contradictions that arise, as well as with the dispossession and suffocation of people living under occupation. Whether this story leaves readers discomforted, angry or empowered, they will certainly emerge with a deeper understanding of Palestinian life.
Daughter, Son, Assassin: A Novel by Steven Salaita, Common Notions, 2024, paperback, 208 pp. MEB $18.95. This is the debut novel of the much acclaimed—and maligned—academic Steven Salaita. Fred is lost, confused and almost certainly about to die. As he traces his steps back from the desert where he has been dropped by soldiers of a repressive Arab Gulf regime, his nine-year-old daughter, Nancy, is doing the same from 6,000 miles away in a quiet neighborhood in the suburbs of Washington, DC. With his disappearance, she and her mother are forced to leave their comfortable house for a new life in Virginia. Abandoned by their friends and desperate for answers, Nancy and her mother must acclimate to the strange world of suburban anonymity. As Nancy grows into adulthood, she pieces together what happened to her father and devises a bold plan to avenge his disappearance. Unraveling an international web of deceit in order to find her father will take time and patience; and becoming a cold-blooded assassin takes commitment to a life at odds with everything she knows.
posedly accomplished.
Fleisch points out that the Israeli official could have explained what the donations really procured, but the scene illustrates Israeli aversion to taking direction from Jewish donors who live in the diaspora—and American donors’ reluctance to question how their gestures of faith in the Jewish state are valued. Moreover, one might note, the purpose of most of the tree plantings in the early years was to hide the ruins of Palestinian villages emptied and leveled by Israel.
Like much else in Israel’s support system, Fleisch argues that donor behavior is based on sentimentality, willful ignorance and herd thinking. That could ultimately leave their financial support vulnerable to an eventual dose of reality in the form of exposure to the facts of Israeli apartheid and genocide, along with growing outrage against U.S. complicity. So far, the post-October 7 hasbara efforts of Israel and its supporters seem to have shielded most dedicated donors from facing the facts, but this blindness may not last much longer.
Fleisch, however, largely ignores such a potential threat to continued Jewish philanthropic funding of Israel. Instead, he tracks the long process that some JNF donors pursued beginning in the 1980s to gain some say in how their gifts were used. One surmises that the reforms were motivated more by a desire to conform to best philanthropic practices, rather than by any deeper sense of Israel’s need to change its policies toward Palestinians. Fleisch quotes one “major giver” as faulting the JNF as “corrupt and inefficient as anything I’ve seen. But I don’t want to stop giving, so I look the other way”—a view the donor said was widely shared.
Over time, donors were brought closer to the decision-making process, but not exceptionally close. An Israeli journalist is quoted as saying American donors were made “insiders without inside information.” Most were flattered to be “consulted,” Fleisch says, but remained passive because they “didn’t want any real responsibilities.”
The JNF’s share of donations eventually dropped to barely 10 percent of American Jewish pro-Israel giving, as Israeli NGOs developed direct relationships with
donors and U.S. fundraising organizations who provided donors with more information and feedback opportunities. The checks might now have a note on the purpose line, so to speak, but the bottom line is they’ve essentially remained blank checks. To be on the safe side, however, right-wing Israeli politicians have begun imposing special restrictions and oversight on the sliver of donations aimed at Palestinian concerns or needs.
The fictional Birnbaums and Sonnenscheins represent what Fleisch terms the classic “rich uncle” (and aunt) model of American donors in the early years of the Israeli state: generous but uninformed, incurious, and “non-ideological” devotees of Israel. He sees a divergence between Israeli and American opinions on how much contemporary donors resemble their “donate-and-run” predecessors: While Americans reject the analogy, most Israelis say their American donors haven’t changed much—and that’s how the Israelis like it, except for a few of them who resent the implication that Israel is still a “poor nephew” in need of assistance.
The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism
By Marjorie N. Feld, New York University Press, 2024, hardcover, 288 pp. MEB $30 Reviewed by Allan C. Brownfeld
In The Threshold of Dissent, Marjorie N. Feld, professor of history at Babson College, shows that today’s vocal debates among Jewish Americans over Israel and Zionism are simply the latest chapter in a history that stretches to the 19th century. She brings alive the dissenters of the past who have often been forgotten— and now seem increasingly prophetic.
Throughout much of the 20th century, the organized American Jewish community projected a unified position in support of both Israel and Zionism. This public display of unanimity was, in fact, “a manufactured consensus, as Jewish leaders increasingly discounted and marginalized dissent,” Feld notes. “They often punished those who criticized Israel…or who openly rejected Zionism.”
Despite the Israel lobby’s narrative,
“American Jews have contested their community’s Zionist commitments since before the founding of the state of Israel in 1948,” Feld observes. In particular, she points to the establishment of the American Council for Judaism in 1942, when “a group of Reform rabbis…rejected the Zionism that Reform movement leaders were beginning to embrace. The Council was founded as an anti-Zionist organization… they wanted Jewish belonging to be about religion, not the politics of state-building.”
Classical Zionism, Feld points out, “was grounded in the idea that diaspora Jews lived in exile, awaiting their return to the true Jewish homeland of Israel. Diasporic Jewish life would eventually diminish and disappear, it was argued, leaving the authentic Jewish experience to be had in Israel alone.”
The Pittsburgh Platform, a statement of principles adopted by a group of Reform rabbis in 1885, pushed back against this notion. “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine… nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state,” the document said.
In 1919, in response to Britain’s Balfour Declaration calling for a Jewish “homeland” in Palestine, a petition was presented to President Woodrow Wilson criticizing Zionist efforts to segregate Jews. It underlined the principle of equal rights for all citizens of any state “irrespective of creed” and rejected Jewish nationalism. Among those signing this petition were Rep. Julius Kahn (R-CA), former U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Henry Morgenthau, Sr. and New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs. The petition’s sig-
natories argued that they spoke for a majority of Jews born in the U.S. Feld highlights other prominent Jewish critics of Zionism, such as Yiddish-language journalist William Zukerman, who started the English-language Jewish Newsletter. “Zukerman disputed the central role of Israel in Jewish life, insisting that Jews should remain loyal to their nation of origin, where he believed their own Jewish future would and should lie,” she writes.
Organized resistance to the likes of Zukerman was fierce. Feld points to the fact that, “in the 1950s Zionist Jewish leaders in the U.S. joined with Israeli diplomats to limit public discourse and deny funding and access to American Jews such as Zukerman.” The attacks on Jewish critics of Zionism became brutal. In 1951, Shlomo Katz, editor of the Labor Zionist journal Jewish Frontier, attacked Zukerman by suggesting a link between him and the kapos (Jewish prisoners who supervised forced labor in Nazi concentration camps). Feld concludes by warning that policing criticism of Israel within the Jewish community has “ultimately weakened Jewish communal life” and detracted from Jewish efforts to promote social justice. “If mainstream Jewish communal organizations continue to hold fast to unqualified support for Israel…will young American Jews continue to look at American Jewish life and find it wanting?” she asks. “And, finally, how might future historians assess the impact of this forced consensus on the safety of Jews and all others?”
Ongoing events in Gaza and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank have alienated large numbers of Jewish Americans, particularly young people. Those who challenged Zionism decades ago are looking increasingly prophetic. New groups—such as Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow—are challenging the Zionist establishment. It is possible that a new era lies before us. ■
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.
Their Borders, Our World: Building New Solidarities with Palestine edited by Mahdi Sabbagh, Haymarket Books, 2024, paperback, 208 pp. MEB $24.95. The Palestine Festival of Literature, or PalFest, was created in 2008 as “a cultural initiative committed to the creation of language and ideas for combating colonialism in the 21st century.” The annual event brings authors from around the world to convene with readers, artists, writers and activists in cities across Palestine for cross-pollination of radical art, ideas and literature. These efforts resulted in Their Borders, Our World, an anthology thoughtfully arranged and introduced by PalFest cocurator Mahdi Sabbagh. Contributors include Yasmin El-Rifae, Jehan Bseiso, Keller Easterling, Dina Omar, Tareq Baconi, Samia Henni, Omer Shah, Kareem Rabie, Ellen Van Neerven, Omar Robert Hamilton and Mabel O. Wilson. Each piece grapples with important questions: How do we confront the need to take inevitable and often difficult political stances? How do we make sense of the destruction, uprooting and pain that we witness? And given our seemingly impossible reality, how is mutuality constructed?
When Only God Can See: The Faith of Muslim Political Prisoners by Walaa Quisay and Asim Qureshi, Pluto Press, 2024, paperback, 256 pp. MEB $22.95. Delving into the extraordinary experiences of Muslim political prisoners held in Egypt and under U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay, this groundbreaking book explores the intricate interplay between their religious beliefs and modes of resistance in the face of adversity. Highlighting the experiences of these prisoners, faith is revealed to be not only a personal spiritual connection to God, but also a means of contestation against prison and state authorities, reflecting more significant societal struggles. Written by Walaa Quisay, who has worked closely with prisoners in Egypt, and Asim Qureshi, with years of experience supporting detainees at Guantanamo Bay, the authors’ deep connections with prisoner communities and their emphasis on the power of resistance shine through. By capturing how faith is practiced and modified behind bars, When Only God Can See offers a compelling and original exploration of the intersection between faith, incarceration and resistance.
Nuclear Flashpoint: The War Over Kashmir by Farhan M. Chak, Pluto Press, 2023, paperback, 240 pp. MEB $25.95. The territory of Jammu and Kashmir is one of the most politically contested and heavily militarized spaces on the planet. It has long been presented as an “internal dispute,” mainly by India, in attempts to sustain power through settler colonialism. In this context, Kashmiri voices are rarely heard. In Nuclear Flashpoint, Farhan M. Chak reveals how the history, culture and will of the people of Kashmir have been deliberately obscured to suit ideological agendas. He explores six unique time frames in Kashmiri history—from ancient Kashmir, through the British Raj, to the present day. Asking “who is a Kashmiri?” Chak shines a light on the long cycle of revolt that continues in resistance movements today, and asks us to reconsider Kashmir’s ongoing quest for independence.
Other People’s Mail
Compiled by Jack McGrath
THE TULSA MASSACRE AND GAZA
To The Frederick News-Post, May 25, 2024
As I watch the plight of the Palestinians, I am reminded of the Tulsa Massacre, one of the great stains on the American soul. Tulsa could only happen because of societal racism.
We knew then that the inhabitants of a segregated community in Oklahoma did nothing to deserve having their entire neighborhood leveled and wealth stolen, but society at large ignored it.
Now, we watch an entire state that’s been vilified for decades being starved and turned to rubble, the population reduced to appalling living conditions. Palestinians had few freedoms before this action, so this also feels more like the type of crackdown that can happen in a prison run by a sick warden.
Just as we did 100 years ago, humanity is turning its head and pretending we don’t see. College youths are trying to remind us that we should care, but instead we are stifling what they are saying because it makes us feel guilty.
Do we want the responsibility to continue giving weapons to countries that use them for harm? Is it time to let the U.N. be the adult in the room? Allow the U.N. to put Binyamin Netanyahu in prison and to give the Palestinians a homeland that they deserve just as much as the Jewish people do. It will require a great deal of work and resources, but if people are given a decent place to live and dignity, and love, instead of hatred, we can have real accountability and global healing.
John Carrera, Frederick, MD
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN
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THE POWER IS WITH ISRAEL, BUT THE TRUTH IS WITH PALESTINE
To the Pagosa Daily Post, June 25, 2024 Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), chairwoman of the House GOP, has asserted: “Israel is indeed a miracle, an outpost of freedom, of Western values, of civilization, a striking example of human potential.” Yet human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Israel’s B’Tselem consider Israel to be an apartheid regime.
According to Human Rights Watch: “We reached this determination based on our documentation of an overarching government policy to maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians coupled with grave abuses committed against Palestinians living in the occupied territory, including East Jerusalem.” There is little discussion of this in the halls of Congress or in the mainstream media. In fact, because Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) has been outspoken in the defense of Palestinian rights, he faced a massively financed [and successful] primary challenge.
As philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche observed: “All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.”
Terry Hanson, Milwaukee, WI
BIPARTISAN SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL’S GENOCIDE
To Eugene Weekly, May 23, 2024 Rep. Val Hoyle (D-OR) recently emailed me an “April 2024 Congressional Update” in which she stated, “on Saturday, April 20th, we held a historic Saturday session of Congress…I voted for three foreign aid
SECRETARY OF STATE ANTONY BLINKEN
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packages [totaling $95 billion] to support the United States’ role and responsibility… to address the immediate and long-term security of the U.S. and our allies.”
Since when did the immediate and longterm security of the U.S. depend on openly aiding and abetting a genocide committed by an “ally” and condemned by the global majority? On funding a (losing) proxy war against Russia using Ukrainians as cannon fodder? On crossing red lines with China over Taiwan? On cutting off U.S. funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees?
Hoyle is a textbook example of how there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to Congress funding wars and open genocide, which not only put the vital security interests of Americans at risk but inflict (literally) unspeakable horrors across the world.
Trisha Driscoll, Eugene, OR
NETANYAHU’S SPEECH TO CONGRESS
To the New Hampshire Union Leader, July 5, 2024
Under Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel has killed at least 36,000 Palestinians, destroyed more than 70 percent of civilian infrastructure and dropped more bombs on Gaza than were dropped on Germany during World War II.
Yet, U.S. leaders invited Netanyahu to give a joint address to Congress on July 24. This is shameful. Netanyahu is the leader of the operation to ethnically cleanse Palestinians.
I grieve at his bombing of refugee camps, schools and hospitals, blocking desperately needed food, water and med-
icine. Right now children are dying of starvation. This is a man-made famine. It is on my conscience that my tax dollars are starving children, killing livestock, destroying orchards. None of this makes Israel any safer. How does shooting a child make Israel safer? How does bombing people sheltering on the hot beach in plastic tents make Israel safer? How does denying the population medicine make Israel safer? A leader who uses these tactics has no place in our Congress. This is the cruelest action I have seen in my 82 years of life. Do not give Israel any more of my tax dollars.
Janet Simmon, Laconia, NH
A JEWISH PERSPECTIVE FROM AN ENCAMPMENT
To the Chicago Tribune, May 16, 2024 I want to thank Ahmed Ali Akbar and the Chicago Tribune for the reporting on the University of Chicago encampment. Specifically, as a Jewish student who was part of Northwestern University’s encampment, I think it is incredibly important to highlight these stories of Jewish life existing in the encampments while we fight for justice informed by the lessons of our faith. Many people try to shift the focus off of the ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip by claiming that these encampments are antiSemitic, and they insult us by saying that those of us who stand for justice alongside people of different races and religions are fake Jews or traitors.
However, the encampment I took part in was the most meaningful experience I’ve ever had as a Jew. I feel reinvigorated in my faith, especially after spending Passover, having a seder and observing shabbat and havdalah at the encampment, and so on. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more proud to be Jewish as I have been openly celebrating my faith in this community committed to the idea that “never again” means “never again for anyone.”
The article also captures the solidarity— not just coexistence but real, tangible community, built by students of different backgrounds while under attack from supporters of an apartheid state that dictates this is impossible. We ate, learned from, sup-
ported and helped each other survive and stay safe. The only people who challenged my ability to practice Judaism or made me unsafe were Zionist counterprotesters. When they left, it was Muslim and Jewish students who cared for one another and lived together “in the tents.”
In my life, I have not had a more supportive, justice-oriented and empowering place to be Jewish. As a Tribune reader and antiZionist Jew, I’d love to see more articles from Akbar and other writers willing to tell these stories.
Dan Murrieta, Evanston, IL
IMAGINE BEING IN GAZA
To The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 21, 2024
I am in total disagreement with the recent letter that mentions the “palpable anti-Semitism” that was unleashed by Hamas’ retaliatory attack on Oct. 7. Yes, retaliatory. Hamas was responding to years of settler violence and Israel’s decades of systematic oppression of the Palestinian people. Also, it was hoping that taking prisoners would result in a prisoner exchange, which is its usual practice.
The letter followed Tuesday’s Inquirer article about 60 families in Gaza who have had at least 25 family members killed. Would the letter writer better understand the “rage and hatred” if these were her own family members indiscriminately murdered among the incessant bombings of Palestinian civilians? Perhaps if she was Palestinian, she would better understand and feel the same way.
Judy Rubin, Philadelphia, PA
WHAT WILL IT TAKE FOR U.S. TO STOP SUPPORTING ISRAEL?
To the Sentinel & Enterprise, June 11, 2024
When Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, I said to myself, “What were they thinking? Don’t they know that the Israel Defense Forces will avenge those 1,200 deaths tenfold?” I was right in principle, but wrong about the math.
The death toll in Gaza is now in excess of 36,000 children, women and men, mostly civilians. That’s 30 Palestinians killed for every Israeli life taken on Oct. 7.
Another 77,000 Palestinians have been wounded. And the number of casualties continues to mount.
It was in the news recently that the bombs that killed dozens of refugees in Rafah were made in the U.S. This should come as no surprise to Americans. Israel receives more military aid from the U.S. than any other country, to the tune of $3.8 billion a year–and that was before the billions in “emergency aid” recently passed into law.
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu called the bombing a “tragic accident.” Baloney! The killing of tens of thousands of civilians is no “accident.”
My millennial son recently asked me to share graphic images of the victims of the bombing in Gaza with others of my babyboomer generation, in the hope it would sway opinion over support for Israel. Is that what it would take for us to assume responsibility for the use of our tax dollars?
I am no anti-Semite. I support the rights of all people, including Israelis and Palestinians, to live in peace and security. Murder is morally wrong, whoever the perpetrator. It is time for the U.S. to stop funding Israel’s war!
Keith Penniman, Ashburnham,
MA
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August/September 2024
Vol. XLIII, No. 5
A young Iranian girl casting her mother’s ballot at a mosque being used as a polling station, during the second round of Iran’s early presidential elections, in downtown Tehran, Iran, on July 5, 2024. Iranians elected moderate cardiac surgeon Masoud Pezeshkian as their new president.
