Two Decades in Office, Erdogan’s AKP Comes Full

Talking Turkey Two Decades in Office, Erdogan’s AKP Comes Full Circle By Jonathan Gorvett

People queue outside a currency exchange shop on Sakarya Street in Ankara on Dec. 20, 2021, as Turkey’s troubled lira nosedived after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan cited Muslim teachings to justify not raising interest rates to stabilize the currency. Erdogan pushed the central bank to sharply lower borrowing costs despite soaring inflation.

AFTER MONTHS of financial turmoil and the collapse of the ruling coalition government—by then beset by allegations of corruption and cronyism—there was once a time when Turks voted for change, ousting their former rulers in a landslide election.

Voting in that election took place against a background of rampant inflation—at just under 40 percent—while the currency, the Turkish lira, had lost a third of its value against the dollar in the financial chaos of the previous year. Austerity measures, introduced to combat that crisis, had cut incomes, curtailed job opportunities and left many struggling to make ends meet.

The victors of that election, however, promised that they would deliver prosperity, be the “guarantor of secularism” and go full speed ahead for European Union membership. At least, that is what the victorious Recep Tayyip Erdogan, leader of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), said back then, after triumphing at the polls in November 2002.

Now, 20 years later, there is a distinct feeling of déjà vu when considering Turkey’s current woes.

Inflation is now once again officially just under 40 percent, while the Turkish lira lost 44 percent of its value against the dollar last year. The level of poverty has recently been increasing—at least for many, as income inequality has also grown. As for corruption, Transparency International’s Corruption Index for the country rose from 32 points in 2002 to 40 in 2020.

In terms of the old government’s main challengers, the most popular candidate to run against Erdogan nowadays, is the secularist Ekrem Imamoglu, of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), who is also mayor of Istanbul—Erdogan’s old job in the early 1990s. The CHP also wants to revitalize the country’s moribund EU membership bid.

“Both in terms of the economy and the political culture,” Erdem Aydin, from consultancy RDM Advisory, told the Washington Report, “we’ve come full circle.” Yet, how this will play out in the short term remains highly uncertain, with over a year to go before parliamentary and presidential elections.

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

Meanwhile, there is increasing concern in opposition circles that, with his popularity flagging, an increasingly autocratic President Erdogan may well mount a major crack down before anyone gets a chance to vote.

GOOD TIMES AND THE BAD

Whatever the similarities, in many respects, the Turkey of today is quite different from that of 2002.

The economy has grown significantly— from a GDP of $240.253 billion in 2002 to $719.955 billion in 2020. This has reflected in Gross National Income (GNI) per person, which rose from $3,590 in 2002 to $9,050 in 2020. Major cities, such as Istanbul and Ankara, have been transformed by new infrastructure and housing.

The country has also projected economic power abroad, and pursued an increasingly independent foreign policy, sending troops to Syria and Libya while also spreading influence in Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia.

Yet, a closer look at the trends also reveals another pattern—and one that is far less impressive. Economically speaking, while the numbers are up when comparing 2002 and 2020, within the last few years, those same numbers have been heading steadily downward.

In GDP, for instance, while the 2020 figure is higher than that of 2002, it is lower than that of 2013, when it was $957.783 billion. The same is also true of GNI per person, which peaked at $12,630 in 2014.

For the last few years, standards of living have therefore been getting measurably worse for most Turks. A January 2021 survey, by two trade unions, showed that 7 out of every 10 people were in debt, while the number of those in poverty had gone up 8.4 percent between 2017 and 2019 alone.

More recent numbers suggest around 20 percent of Turks are now living below the official poverty line, with the 2019 figure having been around 15 percent, according to the World Bank.

NUMBERS AND PRICES

This financial squeeze has been getting worse, too.

New Year’s day saw major price hikes in energy, some food, alcoholic beverages and transport. That was after major price hikes in a wide range of commodities, caused largely by the devaluing lira, during 2021. That devaluation made many imports more expensive, with many Turkish export businesses also dependent on imports that are used to manufacture their products.

A January Metropoll poll found that price rises may therefore be far higher than the official 36 percent rate, with around 90 percent of Istanbul respondents saying they believed the true rate was over 50 percent, with two-thirds thinking it over 100 percent.

President Erdogan’s unorthodox economic policies have been widely blamed for this, too, with these also now threatening public finances.

In an effort to shore up the lira in late December 2021, the government guaranteed lira deposits in Turkish banks against depreciation. The move resulted in a huge, overnight surge in the currency’s value.

Yet, the surge was short lived, and if the lira keeps declining—in early January, it was still on a downward slope—Turkey’s treasury could end up with a very large bill.

Meanwhile, the independence of state economic and financial institutions is now largely non-existent, with the central bank following Erdogan’s policy demands and the state banks funding them.

“What we have in Turkey,” Murat Somer, from Koc University in Istanbul, told the Washington Report, “is more of a governance crisis than an economic one. We have seen checks and balances and bureaucratic autonomy suspended, so policy decisions have purely political goals in mind.”

POLLS THREATENED

With the economy in trouble and his—and the AKP’s—popularity declining, presidential and parliamentary elections scheduled for June 2023 now pose a major challenge for Erdogan.

The concern is that his answer to this may be more repression of the opposition rather than a new approach to the economy. With Imamoglu consistently polling ahead of Erdogan recently, as a potential presidential candidate, the Justice Ministry has launched an investigation into the mayor’s Istanbul Municipality, with Erdogan accusing it of becoming an “apparatus for terrorist organizations” on Jan. 12. He then also accused Ankara Municipality—also headed by a CHP mayor—of the same thing.

Meanwhile, a case to shut down the country’s third largest party, the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic (HDP), is also progressing, along with moves to remove parliamentary immunity from many of its deputies.

After January’s street protests against price hikes in Kazakhstan, Erdogan warned against the opposition staging any such thing in Turkey, saying that they would be met with force.

So far, though, the opposition has refused to be baited into providing an excuse for a violent crackdown. “Solutions do not only lie in what the government will do,” says Somer, “but in what opposition parties will do and not do.”

The CHP is now in an unusual alliance with the right wing IYI Party, the Islamist Saadet and a range of smaller center-right groups. If this holds together, Turkey could be in for a major political change next year, two-decades after the current government promised—and largely failed to deliver— many of the same things.

“They had their chance to carry the country forward,” says Aydin. “But instead, they just chose the easy way.” ■

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Tima Shomali Discusses Her Groundbreaking Netflix Show

On Jan. 11, the Middle East Institute held its “Creators’ Corner” series—which offers a platform for Arab artists and creators— with Jordanian actress, director and writer Tima Shomali. The actress has become one of Jordan’s most prominent performers in recent years thanks to her well-received role in the popular YouTube comedy “Female Show.” She also directed the new Netflix show “AlRawabi School for Girls,” one of the first shows produced for Netflix written in Arabic.

Shomali spoke primarily about the process leading to her latest show’s inception, from its very beginnings as an idea, to her research collecting stories across Jordan for its multiple plots.

This Netflix project was long in the making and stemmed originally from Shomali’s own adolescence. Throughout her career, she felt that she could not relate to most television offerings and wanted to create a program that better represents Jordanian women. As Shomali noted, “the way we tell the story matters,” especially when dealing with themes such as gender dynamics and adolescence.

“AlRawabi School for Girls” centers around four students at a fictional, elite Jordanian high school, which, at first glance, appears to be perfect and glamorous. However, corruption, bullying and intimidation begin to break its pristine image. Deciding on an elite setting was an intentional decision for Shomali, as she wanted to break stereotypes attached to certain classes while demonstrating that many social issues including sexism, patriarchy and violence are present across all of Amman’s segments.

During the discussion, Shomali spoke extensively on one of the show’s main social foci: bullying. Unlike her own high school days, Shomali noted that now “you are bullied everywhere,” including on social media outlets. Moreover, as the show portrays, these girls cannot go to their teachers or parents for help due to the “dialogue gap between family” and the stigma around mental illness.

One of the show’s most controversial plot lines includes the murder of one of its main characters in an honor killing, at the hands of her brother. While Shomali depicted this crime against women on the show, she also wanted to highlight the factors that brought the character’s brother to the point of murder. She explained, “he is a human who loves his sister,” but he is also a victim of society and ultimately succumbs to patriarchal norms.

The discussion concluded with Shomali sharing some of the challenges directors and script writers face. “We are in a time when everything changes so fast” and our collective attention spans have become so short, she noted. Therefore, script writers must keep with the times and find ways to attract viewers. Moreover, she emphasized that scriptwriters must read a lot, research, study film and take online courses. They must figure out what stories they want to tell

and what questions they want to pose. For women, it might be even harder to gain recognition and—in Shomali’s experience—female directors have to work even harder than their male counterparts. —Janna Aladdin MUSLIM AMERICAN ACTIVISM CAIR-Kansas Calls for Removal of Racist Language from Land Deeds The Kansas chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIRKansas) is calling upon the state’s Democratic Governor, Laura Kelly, to issue an executive order mandating the removal of insulting, degrading and racist language from property records across the state. The organization has taken particular issue with the small eastern Kansas town of Roeland Park, which has repugnant discriminatory language in its property records. Discrimination in property contracts, homeowner association documents and other official real estate instruments is reflective of the Jim Crow era, when developers and municipalities enforced racial segregation and discrimination in housing to keep neighborhoods, towns and cities White. One document in Roeland Park states that properties, “shall never be conveyed, devised, leased, rented, used, owned or occupied by anyone of Negro blood.” A similar document from the Buena Vista Heights neighborhood of the city goes even further by targeting anyone “more-than oneTima Shomali attends the world premiere of the Netflix original series "Jinn," which she directed, on June 12, fourth of the Semitic race, blood, 2019 in Amman, Jordan. origin or extraction.” It specifies “Armenians, Jews, Hebrews, Turks, Persians, Syrians and Arabians” as having uncouth genetics. Thankfully, such racially restrictive covenants were prohibited when Congress passed the 1968 Civil Rights Act. The act was further amended by the Fair Housing Amendments Act in 1988. Nevertheless, the hateful and racist language of a bygone era, while unenforceable, is

JUAN NAHARRO GIMENEZ/GETTY IMAGES FOR NETFLIX

STAFF PHOTO P. PASQUINI

A view of the Buena Vista Heights neighborhood in Roeland Park, Kansas, where buyers and sellers of real estate may not be aware of racially restrictive covenants included in their property deeds.

still present across the country in many older property records.

CAIR’s call for an executive order from the governor would allow for a quick remedy to this stain, by bypassing the myriad statewide municipal legal complexities and allowing the state’s Register of Deeds offices to redact such language in one sweeping action. To date, more than 21 states have enacted anti-covenant legislation.

If Governor Kelly fails to issue such an executive order, it will then fall to the state legislature to introduce a bill calling for the removal of the offensive language. Resorting to the legislative process for resolution, however, would hinder immediate changes due to the complexity of the legislative process. CAIR-Kansas Board Chairman Moussa Elbayoumy told the Washington Report that the preferential solution would be the universal removal process via executive order.

“It is unacceptable that racist, discriminatory language continues to be present in property documents,” Elbayoumy said. “Governor Kelly should immediately issue an executive order allowing for the swift removal of such content from property documents in Roeland Park and statewide. Doing so would be a step toward ensuring equal housing opportunities for all citizens.” Kansas State Representative Rui Xu, whose district includes the city of Roeland Park, told the Washington Report, “A lot of the cities in my district still have these on the books and I’m fully in support of whatever we can do to get them off.”

Governor Kelly did not respond to an email inquiry from the Washington Report for comment. —Phil Pasquini

HUMAN RIGHTS

Understanding Violence Against Women in Egypt

The Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy (TIMEP) held a virtual panel discussion on Dec. 9, 2021 titled, “Violence Against Women in Egypt: Between Policy and Practice.”

According to Nada Nashat, advocacy coordinator at the Center for Egyptian Women’s Legal Assistance, one of the major issues facing Egyptian women is the 101-year-old personal status law, which governs family issues. The law, she said, reveals exactly how the country views women: as subservient to men, “not as citizens, people with full power.”

Nashat pointed to the issue of divorce as one poignant example of how the law is unfair to women. Under the Islamic personal status law (there is a separate personal status law for Christians), a man can say to a woman, “you are divorced,” and just like that the couple is religiously divorced. The civil law then gives the man one month to formally document the divorce. Under this system, the woman is entitled to post-divorce compensation, but the process often takes years to settle in court.

“A man, if he wants to divorce his wife, it takes him only 15 minutes to do it legally, 15 minutes at the marriage registrar and done, the marriage is over,” Nashat explained. “But for a woman, it takes her three to four years [of legal proceedings] if she wants to get her post-divorce financial rights.” Furthermore, if a divorced mother wants to retain custody of her children, she must remain unmarried and devote herself solely to her job as a mother.

GEHAD HAMDY/PICTURE ALLIANCE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Should a woman seek to initiate a divorce, she must undergo a lengthy legal process, since only men have the prerogative to divorce their wives via verbal decree.

The personal status law also allows a husband to view his wife as an entity with no sexual rights, someone who must only satisfy his sexual desires, which is why there are no articles that criminalize marital rape. Sexual violence, as long as it is within the framework of marriage, is thus legally and socially acceptable.

There is currently a new draft personal status law being considered by the Egyptian parliament. Women’s rights organization have looked favorably on some of its provisions, but have generally spoken out against the proposed legislation largely due to its language allowing men to exercise guardianship rights over women in a number of areas. In a March 2021 statement, the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies described the proposed revised law as being “replete with restrictions or negations of women’s rights.”

Lobna Darwish, head of the gender and women’s rights department at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, focused on violence against women in the public sphere, specifically the issue of sexual harassment. For many decades, there were no laws against sexual harassment, and harassment was socially referred to as mu‘akasa (flirting).

Over the past few years, the trend of using the term “sexual harassment” has taken hold due to increasing outrage surrounding incidents of mass harassment against women, particularly on holidays. “The law did not have a proper description for sexual harassment until the proper description was introduced in the penal code in 2016,” Darwish noted.

However, this new law was not subject to sufficient social debate, as it was issued and passed in only four days, without the input of women or groups involved in women’s issues. Although it criminalizes harassment, it remains difficult for women to file complaints, especially due to the social stigma surrounding the issue. Some staff at police departments, Darwish pointed out, leak information about victims, despite a law prohibiting the disclosure of victims’ identities. Information such as the victim’s phone number and address is also often leaked to the perpetrator’s family, who then track and threaten the woman. Those who leak this information almost always go unpunished.

Habiba Abdelaal, a nonresident fellow at TIMEP, also emphasized the number of challenges facing those who file complaints, which often cause them to withdraw their accusations. She posed this poignant rhetorical question: “You know how many women are willing to report sexual assault or harassment and go through this draining process of having to tell their stories over and over in front of male officers who are smiling at their cases, or even making fun of them or even blaming them?” Even when a report is written, it’s often filed “under theft or robbery or whatever, but not under sexual assault,” she added.

The panel discussion coincided with the recent case of 17-year-old Basant Khaled, who committed suicide after fake photos of her were published and two individuals subjected her to digital blackmail. The incident sparked massive social debate in Egypt. Before Khaled’s suicide, she received little support from her surrounding community. Rather, she was bullied by one of her teachers, and nothing was done to take the necessary steps to protect her. No action was taken until it was too late, after her death, which is typically what happens with women’s issues: steps taken in reaction, but without any proactive solutions. —Mona Ali Activists Bemoan Guantanamo’s 20th Anniversary

Twenty years after the opening of the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, activists are still calling for its closure. On Jan. 11, a small group gathered in Lafayette Square across from the White House asking President Joe Biden to uphold his campaign promise to close the infamous prison and torture site. Several activists wore orange prisoner jumpsuits with black hoods and carried signs calling for the shutdown of the facility.

“These people, not accused of terrorism, are alleged to have participated in a fight against us two decades ago in Afghanistan,” said Thomas Wilner, a Washington, DC-based attorney who has represented a number of the detainees. “The only justification for holding people without charges or trial in that way is if there is still ongoing conflict.”

The Third Geneva Convention of 1949 states, “Prisoners of war shall be released and repatriated without delay after the cessation of active hostilities.” Since the last American soldier left Afghanistan on August 30, 2021, “there is no longer any legal justification for holding these

STAFF PHOTO PHIL PASQUINI

people—none,” Wilner argued. “These people should go home. We could stop this tomorrow.”

Presently, 39 men—the majority of whom have never been charged with a crime— remain incarcerated within the 45-squaremile U.S. Naval base. Eighteen have been cleared for release, but without a definitive release date, they remain incarcerated indefinitely. One obstacle to release is finding a country—either a detainee’s home country or a third one—with both the willingness and the required security guarantees to accept a discharged prisoner.

Since taking office, President Biden has released only one inmate, 56-year-old Abdul Latif Nasser, a Moroccan who was never charged with a crime.

To close the rally, the names of the remaining 39 detainees were read aloud. —Elaine Pasquini

WAGING PEACE

Palestinians Vying to Share Their Narrative

Palestine Deep Dive held its first-ever inperson event on Nov. 15, 2021 at the Knickerbocker Club in New York City. Titled “Distant Voices No More? Giving Rise to a New Generation of Palestinian Journalists,” the meeting highlighted the importance of expanding Palestinian representation in the media.

Mohammed El-Kurd, Palestine correspondent for The Nation, explained how he has used social media to put a global spotlight on Israel’s ongoing efforts to forcibly remove Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. “The news cycle is informed by social media,” he noted. “By penetrating social media, we were able to penetrate the news cycle and force Palestine to the center of the news.”

El-Kurd’s successful online efforts have made him, as well as his sister, Muna, the faces of the resistance against ethnic cleansing in Sheikh Jarrah. He said this notoriety is a blessing since it gives him a platform to defend his community, but it’s also an onerous burden.

“There are not many Palestinians in the public eye, so what I say is kind of representative of Palestinians,” El-Kurd said. The reality, he explained, is that while he is wellequipped to discuss Sheikh Jarrah, he is not an expert on all that happens in Palestine. Him being the “voice of Palestine” is thus more a reflection of the dearth of Palestinian voices in the mainstream media, he said.

El-Kurd hopes powerful voices from Gaza, the West Bank and elsewhere in Palestine will also gain access to the media. “I think the next phase in this is to empower other Palestinians, because we exist across disparate geographies, disparate legal statuses,” he said. “We are facing this dispossession differently—if you’re not getting demolished, you’re getting bombed, if you’re not getting bombed, you’re getting evicted, if you’re not getting evicted, your residency is getting revoked—and you need people who are able to narrate that with authority.”

Not only do media organizations need more Palestinian voices, they also need to listen to them, El-Kurd emphasized. He expressed exasperation that mainstream outlets only recently began acknowledging the reality of Israel’s apartheid polices after it was noted by groups such as Human Rights Watch. “These organizations reached these miraculous epiphanies decades after Palestinians had already articulated them,” El-Kurd said.

Having made his way around the media recently, El-Kurd noted that his personal witness is often treated with skepticism. “At worst, you’re ‘angry’ if you go on TV and say your opinion, and at best you’re ‘passionate,’ but they never consider that you’re a reliable narrator,” he noted. “I am facing oppression, and I should not be the defendant in a conversation when I’m speaking about my oppression.”

Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi pointed out that, from the beginning, Zionists have placed an emphasis on being “discursive, telling a story.” This has allowed the movement to ingratiate itself with the mainstream media. “Before he became the first prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion was in New York City working for four years during World War I, building up the financial and the propaganda basis of the Zionist movement’s success in the United States,” he noted.

Palestinians must learn from this and begin to insist on planting their own story in the media, Khalidi said. “What we never had was the permission to narrate,” he noted, adding that this is beginning to change with the rise of El-Kurd and other younger Palestinians.

Khalidi offered two pieces of advice to the next generation, though he also cheekily warned them “not to listen to old people.”

The first is to learn and understand history, which makes it easier to confront and uproot the arguments made by Zionists and their supporters. “They say the exact same things,” he noted. “I’ve been listening to the same lines since I was 12.”

COURTESY PALESTINE DEEP DIVE

Mohammed El‐Kurd asks media organizations to listen to—and trust—what Palestinians have to say about their own oppression.

The second piece of advice will likely be harder for some to accept, Khalidi acknowledged. “In order to win, you don’t divide up your own ranks,” he said. Instead, “you divide the ranks of the enemy. That means that sometimes you ally yourself with people with whom you are not a hundred percent in agreement with. Sometimes you accept difference and disagreement in your own ranks.”

Breaking down and changing the status quo “requires having allies who you sometimes don’t agree with fully, and that’s a very hard lesson to learn,” he added.

Pam Bailey, the founder of We Are Not Numbers, an organization dedicated to helping Palestinians share their stories with the world, said many young people she’s interacted with in Gaza tend to doubt the world cares about what they have to say.

“The first step is to let them know they have a truth that’s worth listening to,” she explained. Her organization “finds these budding writers who maybe didn’t know they were writers, didn’t know they were storytellers, didn’t know they had a voice.”

While the media tends to only report on Palestine during times of war, Bailey said she encourages her writers to share their everyday narratives, since their lives should not be defined by war.

Bailey encouraged the world not to relegate Palestinians to war pawns. “Please don’t pay attention only during a war, only when there’s loss of lives or legs,” she implored. “We should be sustaining this attention every day.” —Dale Sprusansky Administrative Detention: The Case of Hisham Abu Hawash

Following a four-month hunger strike, countless appeals from Palestinian human rights groups and global public outcry, Israeli courts in January agreed to end the arbitrary administrative detention of Palestinian prisoner Hisham Abu Hawash on Feb. 26. While this was a welcome decision, Abu Hawash now faces considerable health issues, and many other Palestinians continue to languish in Israeli custody without ever having faced trial or received an official sentence.

American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) presented a webinar on Abu Hawash’s case, and on the broader Israeli practice of administrative detention, on Jan. 14.

Yumna Patel, Palestine news director for Mondoweiss, started the conversation with some context on what exactly administrative detention is and provided the basic details of Abu Hawash’s case.

Israeli forces raided Abu Hawash’s home in the middle of the night in October 2020, placing him under arrest and then under administrative detention, initially with an order of six months. However, his detention was extended, as is the case with most Palestinian prisoners. Further still, the Israeli Supreme Court refused to listen to any of Abu Hawash’s appeals until he served at least two years in administrative detention. When it became obvious that the courts could not provide legal redress for Abu Hawash, he began his hunger strike, garnering him media attention and support. As Patel explained, prisoners facing administrative detention often view hunger strikes as their only means of resistance.

Palestinian freelance journalist Shatha Hammad spoke in Arabic (translated by Sikander Rahman) during the webinar and offered a historical perspective on administrative detention in Israel, which originates from a 1945 British Mandate ruling. As of 2021, the number of Palestinian detainees under administrative detention has gone up, reaching 500 prisoners. The prisoners have engaged in mass protests in recent months, but as Hammad noted, their efforts can only gain traction with continued support from the outside world.

Both Hammad and Patel pointed out that administrative detention violates international law. For example, Article 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states that no one can be arbitrarily arrested. Palestinian detainees are also denied the right to a public court, as administrative detention cases are handled in closed courts with only the detainee’s lawyer present.

After learning about Abu Hawash’s case, some might wonder what they can do on behalf of Palestinian prisoners. Part of Abu Hawash’s successful hunger strike was the outcry it generated over social media, as well as the broader changing tides surrounding pro-Palestine solidarity in the U.S.

Patel noted that in the past several decades, the ability of groups and individuals to question Israeli actions has grown, even though activists still face an abundance of backlash. There is a “total world of difference in terms of what we are seeing, in terms of solidarity worldwide and pro-Palestine action and activism on university campuses” compared to just a decade ago, she said. Hammad, too,

Palestinians gather outside the house of prisoner Hisham Abu Hawash, on Jan. 4, 2022 in the West Bank village of Dura. Abu Hawash, held under Israeli administrative detention since October 2020, agreed to end his months‐long hunger strike in early January, in ex‐change for Israel agreeing release him from prison in late February.

stressed the importance of ongoing solidarity, awareness and participation in an economic, cultural and political boycott of Israel. As she exclaimed toward the end of her discussion, Palestinian protesters are fighting not just for their rights but for the “rights of all occupied people around the globe.” —Mariam Marwan Israel Makes Another Push to Join Visa Waiver Program

Israel has recently renewed its efforts to be added to the United States Visa Waiver Program, which would allow its citizens to enter the U.S. for up to 90 days without the need to apply for a visa.

On Jan. 18, Americans for Peace Now hosted a webinar to discuss why Palestinian-American activists oppose Israel’s admittance to the program. The event featured Dr. Hanna Hanania, a dentist and activist, and comedian and actress Maysoon Zayid.

Palestinian-Americans oppose Israel joining the program on the grounds that they suffer extreme discrimination, humiliation and trauma when trying to visit Palestine. Hanania, who was born in Palestine, has a Palestinian passport which means he and his whole family are not permitted to use the Tel Aviv airport and must instead travel first to Jordan and then cross into the West Bank via a heavily trafficked bridge staffed by the Israeli border control. This process often takes several days and can leave travelers stranded overnight. Even after making it to the West Bank, these Americans are banned from accessing Jerusalem and other parts of Israel (historic Palestine), meaning they are precluded from visiting family members, beaches and holy sites.

Because Zayid, who was born in New Jersey, does not have a Palestinian passport she is allowed to fly into Tel Aviv but suffers a different kind of abuse and uncertainty. She explained how airport security singles out Palestinians, Muslims and even Sephardi Jews with “Muslim sounding names,” detains them arbitrarily, denies them access to the country after they have landed, and even holds them in jail for several days. She said she is often not allowed to travel on flights departing Tel Aviv with any carry-on luggage (such as electronics, books or medicine) except for her passport and a credit card.

Zayid and Hanania insist that these practices are discriminatory and not about security. For instance, non-Palestinian American citizens traveling to West Bank settlements are not denied access to Tel Aviv or Jerusalem and do not face similar discrimination and abuse. Zayid, who is a well-known celebrity, said she is proof that the border policies are not about security. “It’s 100 percent clear that I am not a security threat” she explained. Yet, “they have literally been stripping me since I’m five years old. I remember being five years old and having to take off my pantyhose and having cerebral palsy and not being able to put them back on.”

Hanania described how even those who are not politically active are targeted by Israeli border agents. “PalestinianAmericans who have never been there, who are not involved in the issue and so on, seem to be harassed the most…in a way telling them ‘don’t come back again,’” he said.

Fear of humiliation, discrimination and of being denied access to Palestine keeps many Palestinian-Americans from speaking out against Israel and organizing in the United States. Zayid explained that she doesn’t use her platform to be vocal about the BDS movement, “because I want to visit my father’s grave.”

As the event wrapped up, the moderator pointed out that Israel is a sovereign nation that is allowed to decide its own entry practices. Zayid acknowledged this reality as it pertains to access to the Tel Aviv airport, but added that discriminatory practices against its own citizens should not be ignored by Washington. “If they do that, then the United States of America should not reward them with the Visa Waiver Program. If your citizens are being abused by a government that chooses to have supremacist, bigoted, hateful practices... America should not be supporting that, allowing that, or turning their back to what is happening to their own citizens.”

The event ended on a note of hope. Although Zayid is convinced Israel will eventually be added to the Visa Waiver Program, Palestinians have been gaining more recognition in the media. She spoke about how Palestinian-American superstars, like Bella and Gigi Hadid, have been using their enormous platforms to speak out and bring these issues to new and younger audiences who are better at organizing and are less afraid. Zayid also added, “The conversation is louder now because we’ve made incredible, incredible connections with the Black community in the United States, the Indigenous communities worldwide who have suffered similar genocides and displacements,” as well as an influx of support from both American churches and American Jews. —Elisabeth Johnson

SCREENSHOT YOUTUBE

Maysoon Zayid, joined by her cat, expresses outrage at Israeli policies that target Palestinian‐Americans attempting to visit their ancestral land.

In response to Israel escalating its demolition of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, some 200 human rights supporters protested outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC on Jan. 23. The Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) sponsored the rally in solidarity with sit-ins held across North America.

In the early morning hours of Jan. 19, Israeli forces cut electricity to the Salhiya family home in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. They then fired teargas as they broke into the home, beating and arresting several of the 18 family members, including 9-year-old Ayah. The home, targeted by settlers for years, was demolished by the Israeli government. The occupying soldiers also fired rubber bullets at journalists and prevented ambulances from entering the area.

On the same day, Israeli forces also demolished the home of Saleh Erqeiq in occupied Hebron. Twelve villages near Hebron are slated for demolition so that Israel can construct a firing range and training ground for its military.

Between 2004 and 2020, Israel destroyed more than 1,000 Palestinian homes, leaving thousands—half of them minors— homeless, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

Calling on Congress to withhold its annual $3.8 billion in unconditional military aid to Israel, speakers at the rally implored President Joe Biden to pressure Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to immediately stop the illegal military operations.

“Despite decades of displacement and dispossession the Palestinian story has proven to be one of perseverance against occupation, apartheid and colonization,” one PYM member, who wished to remain anonymous, told the crowd. “We call out any and all U.S. organizations funding the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the guise of charity who must be held accountable for concealing their crimes. Silence is complicity and we will not be silent.” —Elaine Pasquini

STAFF PHOTO PHIL PASQUINI

Protesters gather outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC on Jan. 23, 2022 to protest the continual demolition of Palestinian homes.

Palestinians Continue to Suffer in Lebanese Refugee Camps

In 1948, some 110,000 Palestinians fled to Lebanon after being violently forced from their homes by Jewish militants seeking to create the State of Israel. With Israel still refusing to allow these displaced individuals to return home, they remain trapped in Lebanon’s poverty-ridden refugee camps. On Jan. 25, the Balfour Project, a UKbased organization which stands for peace, justice and equal rights in Israel and Palestine, held a webinar with two members of Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) to discuss the plight of Palestinians in Lebanon.

“Today, there are around 450,000 Palestinian refugees registered in Lebanon with UNRWA [the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East], living in 12 official camps,” noted Rohan Talbot, the London-based ad-

PHOTO SAMIR TWAIR

A Palestinian contingent participates in the “Car Caravan for Social Justice” in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Los Angeles, CA on Jan. 17, 2022.The event was hosted by the Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice.

vocacy and campaign manager for MAP.

“The history of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon is marked by repeated tragedy, conflict, discrimination and marginalization,” he said. Under Lebanese law, Palestinian refugees are classified as “foreigners” and face severe institutionalized discrimination and exclusion from many key aspects of social, political and economic life. This designation prevents them from accessing many public services and from owning or inheriting property or moving around freely, among other restrictions. They are barred from working in 39 key professions, Talbot noted, such as law, engineering and most health care jobs.

“This situation resigns most Palestinian refugees to very insecure and poorly paid labor, high rates of poverty and unemployment—with severe implications for their humanitarian welfare and their right to health,” Talbot lamented.

Despite being in Lebanon for over 70 years, more than half of Palestinian refugees continue to live in dire overcrowded conditions in the camps with substandard housing, Wafa Dakwar, program manager in Beirut for MAP and a Palestinian refugee herself, explained. “The buildings are old and risk collapse at any time, with inadequate infrastructure, poor water quality and non-existent waste management,” she said. In addition, there are no safe places for the many children in the camps to play.

Evidence suggests that functional disability among Palestinian refugees is twice as high as that for the Lebanese population, Dakwar reported. Communicable diseases are also common among refugees due to the poor housing conditions and lack of proper sanitation in the camps. “This is especially desperate with the COVID-19 crisis where physical distancing and isolation are almost impossible in this context,” she noted.

Mental health is also an issue. A 2015 study by the American University of Beirut revealed that over half of the Palestinian refugees surveyed reported poor mental health, Dakwar said.

Lebanon’s severe economic crisis over the last two years has led to rising prices, spiraling inflation, soaring unemployment rates, infrequent electrical services, food insecurity and fuel shortages across the country. These issues make life even more difficult for refugees, Dakwar noted. “The most vulnerable communities, including Palestinian refugees, are at risk of further marginalization in the absence of an effective protection scheme,” she said.

MAP is supporting the Palestine Red Crescent Society hospitals by providing them with the medical supplies and personal protective equipment they need to provide hospital care for the most vulnerable. The group also provides food parcels for pregnant women, the elderly and the poorest families, Dakwar said.

For this crisis to ultimately be solved, the right of Palestinians to return to the lands they were forced from during the 1948 Nakba must be acknowledged, Talbot stressed. “The right of return is a legal right, not just for Palestinians, but for all refugees,” he said. “This issue is not going away.” —Elaine Pasquini The Evolution and Endurance of Stereotypes About Iranians

The National Iranian American Council (NIAC) held a webinar on Jan. 18 to discuss a recent report published by the organization titled, “Othering Iran: How Dehumanization of Iranians Undermines Rights at Home.”

Panelists noted that Iranians tend to be depicted in several damaging but also sometimes contradictory ways.

Historian John Ghazvinian, director of the Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania, noted the enduring portrayal of Iranians as conniving and untrustworthy. This Orientalist depiction, seen in popular films and books (such as The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Isfahan), characterizes Iranians as “unctuous, slippery, unreliable carpet traders,” he noted. Yet, this portrayal is often coupled with depictions of Iranians as mystical, intriguing and exotic. Such fabricated portrayals exemplify the completely “alien” ways Orientalist thinking depicts Iranians and others in the Middle East, Ghazvinian said.

These mythical representations are not limited to popular media, NIAC senior research fellow Assal Rad said. As just one example, she noted that in 2013 Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman told Congress that “deception is a part of [Iran's] DNA.” Sher-

PHOTO BY JASON LAVERIS/FILMMAGIC

The stars of the reality television show “Shahs of Sunset” pose for a picture at an event in Carson, CA on May 11, 2013. Neda Maghbouleh argues that the now‐canceled show, which followed the hyper‐Westernized lives of a group of Iranian‐Americans, served as an unhelpful counterweight to the common depiction of Iranians as religious extremists.

man later expressed regret over the statement in 2018.

Such remarks show how stereotypes about Iranians impact not just the culture, but also U.S. foreign policy. “Dehumanizing Iranians, demonizing the entire country of Iran, its people…has affected our own community, our loved ones in Iran and U.S. policy,” Rad said. “In the world of foreign policy we don’t as much discuss the role of prejudice or bias,” she added, arguing that the relationship between bigotry and policy ought to be examined to a greater extent.

Neda Maghbouleh, a sociology professor at the University of Toronto, expressed concern at the extreme ways Iranians are often depicted in the West. On the one hand is the post-1979 Islamic Revolution conception of Iranians as terrorists with a radical religious agenda. This presents Iranians as an “other” that can’t be trusted to assimilate or accept Western values, she said.

On the other extreme, some cultural outlets have propagated hyper-Westernized images of Iranians, she noted, spreading the idea that proper assimilation requires indulging the culture. The former reality television show “Shahs of Sunset” is the ultimate example of this, Maghbouleh said, as it followed a group of Iranian-Americans who were ensconced in the dramatic world of “money, sex and booze.”

Niaz Kasravi, director of the Avalon Institute for Applied Research, noted the tendency of some Iranian-Americans to rebuff stereotypes by noting positive aspects of their community, such as their high level of education. This strategy of depicting the community as the “model” minority group is ultimately dangerous, she argued, because it implies that discrimination is legitimate unless a group can conjure up data to rebuff prejudicial thinking.

Moderator Yara Elmjouie, a video producer with AJ+, concluded the discussion on a positive note, celebrating the recent trend of Iranian-American actors being cast in roles that have nothing to do with their heritage. These performers simply being asked to play everyday Americans introduces a uniting “human element” to the screen, he said. “We are human beings, ordinary folks just like everyone else, slotting ourselves within the diverse tapestry of American society.”

The full report, written by Rad, can be found at: <niacouncil.org/news/otheringiran>. —Dale Sprusansky On Jan. 13, the Gulf International Forum held a virtual panel discussion entitled “Regional Recalibration: Where Do Gulf States Stand?” which featured the following guests: Dr. Lina Khatib, director of the Middle East and North Africa Program at Chatham House; Alex Vatanka, director of the Middle East Institute’s Iran Program; and Dr. Ali Bakir, a research assistant and professor at Qatar University’s Ibn Khaldon Center for Humanities and Social Sciences.

The panel discussion focused on recent diplomatic efforts around the Gulf, and whether these talks signal a regional desire to put aside conflicts and seek de-escalation. This diplomatic trend can be seen in recent dialogues between Saudi Arabia and Iran (hosted by Iraq), Turkish rapprochement with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the UAE’s attempt to bring Syria back within the Arab fold and the end of the rift between Qatar and its neighbors.

In this context, Dr. Lina Khatib noted that the Biden administration seems less interested in the Middle East, as threats from China and Russia have taken precedence. Khatib termed this as “U.S. disengagement” from the region. Some argue that the decline of U.S. involvement in the Middle East has prompted regional actors to become more proactive, but Khatib disagrees with this notion. As she sees it, the rise of powerful regional actors, such as the Gulf nations, came about organically as a result of their adoption of pragmatic policies based on self-interest.

Dr. Ali Bakir focused on Turkey’s trends, in light of the regional “de-escalation moment.” Ankara, which has relied upon hard power in recent years, has recently started meeting at the negotiation table as part of its “shift back to [an] economic-oriented agenda,” he said. This can be seen in its re-normalization of relations with Egypt and the UAE. It is expected that EmiratiTurkish relations will continue to warm, especially in light of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s February visit to the UAE.

While there have been attempts at rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and

Turkey since 2020, progress is slow. Bakir explained this is likely a function of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman having some ill-will toward Erdogan due to Turkey’s prominent role in exposing the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Saudi Arabia’s Istanbul Consulate. However, Erdogan’s visit to Saudi Arabia in February is expected to be “crucial in terms of determining whether the two countries will be able to take relations to the next level,” Bakir said.

With regards to Turkish-Iranian relations, Ankara has many reservations about Iran’s role in Iraq and Syria. Tehran likewise has concerns about Turkey’s waxing influence in the Gulf, Caucasus and Central Asia. If Iran is able to conclude a nuclear deal with the U.S., this would be a “game changer” in terms of relations between Ankara and Tehran, Bakir argued, as it would likely expand Iranian influence in Iraq and Syria and increase the likelihood of disputes between Iran and Turkey.

Alex Vatanka cautioned observers not to put too much stock in the recent change in civil power in Tehran: “Iran watchers have been saying all along, ‘don’t pay too much attention to [new President Ebrahim] Raisi; he isn’t the decision maker.’” Coming from a judicial background, Raisi does not possess any experience in foreign policy and is extremely loyal to the clerical regime. Thus, according to Vatanka, “the idea that Raisi would come in and Iran would take a turn to the right or to the left hasn’t happened, and it will not happen.”

To understand Iranian foreign policy, one must look toward Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Vatanka expects a “limited deal” to be reached with the U.S., but believes Iran will avoid a broader deal, as it does not wish to discuss issues such as its missile program or Middle East agenda. The 82-year-old Khamenei also wishes to prepare his successor as an extension of himself, but entering into a broader deal would hinder that plan.

Even though the main focus of the panel discussion was on de-escalation, it is debatable whether the region is seeing an ease in tensions, especially in light of the intensification of Houthi attacks against the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Given the multiple powers involved in the region, their clashing interests and the presence of non-state actors, one is allowed to be weary at pronouncements of an impending détente. —Mona Ali

CEM OZDEL/ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu (l) and Crown Prince of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi Mohammed bin Zayed (r) hold a meeting in Abu Dhabi, on Dec. 15, 2021.

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Middle East Books Review

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The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a MultibillionDollar Institution

By Lila Corwin Berman, Princeton University Press, 2020, hardcover, 280 pp. MEB $35

Reviewed by Walter L. Hixson

This original and important study traces the rise and influence of the multi-billion dollar “American Jewish philanthropic complex.” The author, a history professor at Temple University, analyzes the evolution of the financial and political complex, which became “thoroughly embedded in the American state.”

As Berman, who is Jewish, notes, Jewish financial power has been under-studied and its influence “grossly underestimated,” in large part because scholars have allowed “fears about anti-Semitism to guide them away from the topic.” Berman’s deeply researched and well-organized academic study thus fills an important gap in the historical literature as it sheds light on the evolution and growing influence of Jewish philanthropy.

Berman’s exhaustive research illuminates the critical role played by locally organized but increasingly nationally connected Jewish federations and their alignment with American state capitalism. In successive chapters the study analyzes the steady growth of the philanthropic complex since World War II, including chapters on regulation, taxation, politics, finance and Jewish identity. Berman’s research explains the roles of Jewish elites such as Norman Sugarman, a Cleveland-born tax attorney, and Max Fisher, an oil executive and politically connected “master fundraiser” from Detroit. The rise of the philanthropic complex culminated in the 1980s, as the unfolding of the “Reagan Revolution” enabled Jewish philanthropies to exploit “incredibly significant and favorable tax policies” to generate massive wealth and cement their position within the American state. The Jewish philanthropic complex “mirrored the structure of America itself, in its wildly uneven distribution of capital and its dependence on a very few and empowered private entities.” By the late 20th century the complex, fueled by the “astronomical growth in philanthropic assets,” exercised unprecedented influence over state policy. Homing in on the rise and accumulation of wealth by Jewish philanthropic organizations, Berman’s study focuses more on the financial than the overtly political nature of the complex. She avoids the term “lobby” and pays scant attention to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and other lobby entities, while emphasizing that over time Jewish wealth and power became concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Berman thus chronicles the accumulation of wealth by Jewish philanthropies more fully than she chronicles its usage in politics and foreign policy.

Beyond question, the Jewish philanthropic complex supported the rise of American funding and support for Israel—and for like-minded political candidates. Berman notes that the Boston-born super rich casino mogul Sheldon Adelson provided massive funding for Birthright, a movement that emerged in the 1990s to give every Jewish young person a free 10-day trip to Israel. Birthright, as Berman points out, was “tied closely to advocating Jewish and American support for Israel.” By that time the Jewish federations, which had previously concentrated on domestic fundraising, leaving raising money for Israel to United Jewish Appeal, began to directly fund Israel and its U.S. lobby.

Berman’s book makes an important contribution by demonstrating the process by which the philanthropies accumulated wealth. The book reflects critically on the centralization of power in increasingly few hands, as embodied not only by the philanthropic complex but by the American state. Readers will leave this carefully researched book better informed about the accumulation of wealth and power on the part of American Jewish elites and philanthropies.

Contributing editor Walter L. Hixson is the author of Architects of Repression: How Israel and Its Lobby Put Racism, Violence and Injustice at the Center of US Middle East Policy (available from Middle East Books and More), along with several other books and journal articles. He has been a professor of history for 36 years, achieving the rank of distinguished professor.

Dateline Jerusalem: Journalism’s Toughest Assignment

By John Lyons, Monash University Publishing, 2022, paperback, 96 pp. MEB $20

Reviewed by Dale Sprusansky

The Israel lobby is without question the most powerful foreign policy lobby in the United States. However, its influence does not solely exist in congressional districts from Key West to Hilo. As Australian journalist John Lyons highlights in his new book, Dateline Jerusalem: Journalism’s Toughest

Assignment, the lobby is alive, active and effective across the Western world, and Australia is no exception. Having spent six years as a foreign correspondent based in Jerusalem for The Australian and decades more in Australian journalism, Lyons has come face-to-face with the Israel lobby on many occasions. Now he’s ready to tell all. To Americans who have followed the influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and other U.S.-based

pro-Israel groups, the revelations in Dateline Jerusalem will hardly be shocking. However, Lyons provides an invaluable service by confirming in detail what we have long known via scattered anecdotes and off-the-record accounts: The Israel lobby works diligently to prevent Western readers from consuming negative (but factual) reporting about Israel.

A pocket-sized book with fewer than 100 pages of text, Dateline Jerusalem is less a thorough investigation of Australia’s Israel lobby as it is an accumulation of one journalist’s seemingly endless encounters with his country’s brazen pro-Israel lobby. As Lyons makes clear, any journalist, columnist or editor on the continent who broaches the topic of Israel in a critical way knows they will be met with a barrage of public and behindthe-scenes criticism by the Melbournebased Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), among other pro-Israel groups. This criticism is not just in the form of letters to the editor objecting to the presentation of facts. Rather, it mostly manifests as hostile accusations of bias and anti-Semitism, resulting in editors receiving a deluge of angry emails, calls and other communications—not to mention in-person scoldings by Israel lobby representatives and even Israeli Embassy officials. The result, Lyons notes, is predictable: Newsrooms inevitably decide it’s not worth the hassle to provoke the powerful lobby and they ultimately scaleback their critical coverage of Israel.

However, Lyons notes the lobby does more than carry sticks. It regularly tries to win over newsrooms by taking journalists (and politicians) on propaganda junkets to tour Israel. Foreign reporters based in Israel are also swiftly and regularly contacted by Israeli government handlers tasked with encouraging them to write puff pieces, or at least tone down any critical coverage of Israel’s actions. Ironically, Lyons notes that the Israeli press does not face these same pressures and freely and frequently discusses issues considered beyond the pale for foreign reporters to note, such as the ongoing occupation of the West Bank, the unfettered violence of Jewish settlers and the regular detention and abuse of Palestinian children by the Israeli military.

Between the newsrooms that have given into lobby censorship and coercion, and those naturally predisposed to side with Israel (such as outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp), the reality is that Australians receive very little honest coverage about the situation in Israel and Palestine. It’s likely for this reason that, in the midst of recounting his Israel lobby encounters, Lyons deftly intertwines facts about the “conflict” that Western citizens rarely see in their media, such as the illegality of Jewishonly settlements under international law, the growing international consensus of Israeli apartheid and the regular demolition of Palestinian homes by Israeli authorities.

Such context serves as a refresher for the reader well initiated on this topic, but importantly makes the book imminently approachable and informative to readers new to the issue. Indeed, interspersing historical facts and present realities in between narratives of lobby intimidation and coercion

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delivers a double whammy to readers: Not only do they learn of human rights violations being committed by Israel, they also discover the pernicious reason they have never heard about these offenses. Any person of goodwill who cares about human dignity and values free speech will be jarred by the revelations in this book.

At some points the neophyte reader of Dateline Jerusalem may be inclined to question Lyons’ account. Is he misquoting or selectively quoting people? Can things really be this debased, this bad? Lyons acknowledges the narrative he shares is shocking, that the interests of a small country on the other side of the planet so palpably taint the integrity of the Australian media landscape. It’s this disturbing reality and his belief that “Australians deserve better” that convinced him to write this book.

Readable in just one sitting, Dateline Jerusalem is a valuable reference for students of the Israel lobby. Perhaps more critically, it is an eye-opening exposé on the corruption of power that every Western citizen ought to read.

My First and Only Love: A Novel

By Sahar Khalifeh, Translated by Aida Bamia, The American University in Cairo Press, 2021, paperback, 394 pp. MEB $20

Reviewed by Delinda C. Hanley

A deep, burning sense of injustice can inspire a writer to compose Pulitzer Prize-winning work and produce enduring classics. Novelist Toni Morrison’s Beloved and other fiction were inspired by true stories depicting the injustice of racism and slavery. Francis McCourt’s memoir, Angela's Ashes, describes growing up in terrible poverty during the Great Depression in Limerick, Ireland. Non-Arabic readers have to wait far too long for translations of great works by important writers from the Middle East, who also describe unrelenting injustice and pen prize-worthy fiction.

Hubbi al-Awal (My First and Only Love), by the popular Palestinian historical novelist Sahar Khalifeh, is well worth the 10-year wait. This is the second book of her trilogy, which begins with Of Noble Origins: A Palestinian Novel. Each book follows members of the highly respected Qahtan family in the years before the creation of Israel in 1948. My First and Only Love continues their story, but it is also a stand-alone page-turner.

As a child, Nidal Qahtan, the main character in the novel and the youngest member of this Palestinian family, watches her relatives confront British and Zionist occupiers. Observing the gradual and increasing illegal Jewish immigration and land appropriation, the Qahtans realize they have been betrayed by the British, a power that “fulfilled their promises to the Jews and reneged on their promises to the Arabs.” Khalifeh’s characters struggle to save their threatened homeland, and carry on with their normal lives. One uncle leads freedom fighters and another uses his pen to fight this battle.

We first meet Nidal in her early 70s, a strong accomplished painter, when she returns to Nablus after years of exile to fix up her family home, reflect on her own life and paint in peace. She introduces her readers to present-day life for Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, enduring curfews, raids and shortages. Scenes from Nidal’s everyday life entrance readers, as she replants flowers, rebuilds her treasured home, deals with nosy neighbors and reconnects with her “first love,” who is either a former freedom-fighter or Palestine. Either way, Nidal shows us Palestinians are rightfully determined to live their lives on their own land, despite every obstacle, no matter how much time passes.

Khalifeh’s novel deftly moves from the present to the past and back again as a flood of childhood memories transport Nidal and her readers to pre-1948 Palestine. When she rediscovers her childhood paintings as well as her uncle’s poems, photos and memoirs, we get to know her uncles—the resistance fighter and the respected journalist—and her first love. She also recalls some strong-willed women, including her beloved vision-seeing grandmother, and her own not-so-loving mother, a misunderstood nurse.

Khalifeh’s novel effortlessly provides some little-known history lessons for Western readers who may be unaware that Palestinians belatedly organized to fight off Jewish settlers determined to take their land and resources and drive them into the sea. Palestinian freedom fighters were vastly under-fire-powered as the British give weapons and air support to the Jews to help pave the way for the future Israeli state. One haunting scene follows her uncle’s trip to Syria with a beloved Palestinian leader who begs for weapons from the Arab League and his exiled fellow Palestinians. Their traitorous refusal dooms the resistance and their heroic leader.

Like Nidal, Khalifeh was born in Nablus in 1941 and experienced the occupation firsthand. She writes, “Whether this occupation is British or Israeli, it is all the same, the same atrocities, the same cruelty, and the same rebellions and revolutions.” Khalifeh helps readers understand the terrible injustice endured by Palestinians. Like famous Irish and Black writers before her, Khalifeh captures her people’s losses and the tragedy of occupation.

This book’s skillful translator, Aida Bamia, professor emeritus from the University of Florida, also from Nablus, helps Khalifeh’s stories come to life for English-readers. Not surprisingly, Bamia also translated Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz’s works into English.

In an interview with Tugrul Mende for ArabLit Khalifeh said, “I tried to capture our past which leads to our present. I am a committed writer or maybe I am an obsessed writer. I am obsessed by occupation because I live it. I witness the atrocities of occupation. I witness and live through those atrocities and still am living them. My characters represent what I experience, what I feel, what I think and believe. My characters, in a way, are me. I am them, whether in this novel or the previous ones or after.”

After reading My First and Only Love, this reviewer can’t wait to read all her previous and future novels and watch her receive a well-deserved international literary prize.

God’s Property: Islam, Charity, and the Modern State

By Nada Moumtaz, Oakland: University of California Press, 2021, paperback, 304 pp. MEB $35

Reviewed by Janna Aladdin

What is a waqf? For readers without a background in Islamic legal history or studies, the term is often translated into “charitable endowment,” to denote a donated asset imbued with religious and pious intent. Historically, a waqf was usually an endowed school, mosque or landed property, however, it takes on

Janna Aladdin, assistant director of Mid‐dle East Books and More, is earning her Ph.D. in History and Comparative Litera‐ture and Society at Columbia University.

Power Born of Dreams: My Story is Palestine by Mohammad Sabaaneh, Street Noise Books, 2021, paper-

back, 128 pp. MEB $15. This graphic novel by Mohammad Sabaaneh, a Palestinian cartoonist and a former political prisoner, reflects on what freedom looks like from inside an Israeli prison. A bird perches on the cell window and offers a deal: “You bring the pencil, and I will bring the stories.” Those stories concern intergenerational Palestinian trauma from ongoing settler-colonialism. Sabaaneh helps us see that the prison is much larger than a building, far wider than a cell; it stretches through towns and villages, past military checkpoints and borders. But hope and solidarity can stretch farther, deeper, once strength is drawn from stories and power is born of dreams.

Becoming Palestine: Toward an Archival Imagination of the Future by Gil Z. Hochberg, Duke University

Press, 2021, paperback, 208 pp. MEB $25. In Becoming Palestine, Gil Z. Hochberg examines how contemporary Palestinian artists, filmmakers, dancers and activists are using archives to radically imagine Palestine’s future. She shows how artists such as Jumana Manna, Kamal Aljafari, Larissa Sansour, Farah Saleh, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme approach archival film and cinematic footage, as well as archaeology and musical tradition not to unearth hidden knowledge, but to imagine a Palestinian future. By urging readers to think about archives as a break from history rather than as history’s repository, Hochberg presents a fundamental reconceptualization of the archive’s liberatory potential.

Beirut 2020: Diary of the Collapse by Charif Majdalani, Other Press, 2021, paperback, 192 pp. MEB

$14. At the start of the summer of 2020, in a Lebanon ruined by economic crisis and political corruption, with an exhausted Beirut rising up for true democracy, amid a world paralyzed by the coronavirus, Charif Majdalani set about writing a journal. He intended to bear witness to this terrible, confusing time, and perhaps help himself to endure it more easily by putting it into words. Using small, everyday interactions—with fellow restaurant patrons, repairmen, the father of his wife’s patient, a young Syrian refugee—as openings to address elarger systemic problems, he explains how events in Lebanon’s recent history led to this point. Then, on Aug. 4, the explosion of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate in the port of Beirut devastated the city and the country. Majdalani’s chronicle suddenly became a record of the catastrophe and the massive public outcry that followed. In the midst of the senseless chaos and grief, however, he continues to find cause for hope in the kindness and resilience of those determined to stay and rebuild.

many guises including laptops, iPhones, chocolate shops and malls today. Given its longstanding history and the many forms it may take, this seemingly straightforward legal construct has occupied scholars of Islamic law, historians, state officials and everyday Muslims alike.

Anthropologist Nada Moumtaz takes up precisely this question in her recent monograph, God’s Property: Islam, Charity, and the Modern State, as she follows the waqf within an evolving Islamic tradition from Ottoman Lebanon into the modern period.

Throughout the monograph’s introduction, five chapters and conclusion, Moumtaz weaves together an intricate story in which the waqf moves as one way to get closer to God, to a means of evading merchant debt, to a more contemporary method of keeping property within a family. Moumtaz draws on the method of historical anthropology to trace the “grammar” of waqf, that is, Moumtaz does not claim to offer a single definition of waqf, but rather, focuses on its “meaning in use—at specific moments…” while keeping such concepts firmly grounded in an impressive understanding of the Islamic legal tradition.

Thus, Moumtaz’s methodology involved both conducting ethnographies and reading archival materials including shari’a (Islamic legal) court records. Chapter one, for example, begins in 19th century Ottoman Lebanon and intervenes in debates on capitalism, Islamic law and secularization by arguing that the practice of waqf—that is, recording property as inalienable and with a set beneficiary— bound religion to economy, rather than separated them.

At the same time, as chapter three demonstrates, establishing waqf allowed some form of protection from debt foreclosure, which raised the question: is the waqf truly a waqf without pious intent? At the heart of the debate were such questions as: how could the modern state access a believer’s true intention, or their interiority; how can society and state define public utility?

As Moumtaz demonstrates, when the Ottoman state decided to take responsibility over public utility, their endeavors “coupled with the state’s duty to preserve these individual acts done according to the shari’a, created deadlocks that resulted in endless lawsuits.”

Further, the establishment of the French colonial mandate over Lebanon codified the state’s alleged role to maintain the public benefit, thereby subjecting all waqfs to the administration and dictates of the modern state under the banner of personal status. Yet far from ushering a secular legal regime, the state’s management of the waqf pulled the state and religion even closer together, allowing the state to define the very boundary between the secular and religious.

In chapters four and five, the process of maintaining and defining a waqf became even more complicated during the reconstruction of downtown Beirut during the early 1990s, following the Lebanese civil war. At that time, certain development groups, including Solidere, sought to take ownership of—and eventually build over—certain waqf establishments. What was unique about these sets of debate, however, were two contesting ideas of “public” around the reconstruction of Beirut; on the one hand waqfs were meant for the public benefit (of all), and on the other, some argued waqf meant to protect the benefit of the “(religious) community.” This debate became even more pressing during the latest and ongoing Lebanese revolution, which calls for— among other demands—an end to sectarian rule, and many protesters have called to “tax the waqf” (due to its contemporary association with certain religious establishments) as a gesture to hold certain religious classes accountable to the public.

In God’s Property, Moumtaz draws an extensive picture of how concepts can change over time, acquire new meaning and practices. Although not many waqfs exist in Beirut today, the process of defining a waqf still remains pressing and draws many people into ongoing political, social, and religious debates. The monograph will surely be of note to those interested in the history of Lebanon, Islamic studies and the anthropology of Islam.

BOOK TALKS

Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror and the Muslim Experience Since 9/11

By Maha Hilal, Broadleaf Books, 2022, paperback, 336 pp. MEB $30

Report by Elaine Pasquini

Two decades after former U.S. President George W. Bush launched the “war on terror,” Islamophobia continues to threaten Muslims in the U.S. and abroad. In her new book, Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror and the Muslim Experience Since 9/11, Dr. Maha Hilal explores how the official U.S. narrative following 9/11 led to the creation of an extensive national security apparatus and the normalization of American violence across the world.

On Dec. 2, 2021, the author spoke with Khury Petersen-Smith of Washington, DC’s Institute for Policy Studies about the book and her work as co-director of the Justice for Muslims Collective, a group dedicated to closing the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay.

“My desire to write about this topic stemmed from what I saw as a lack of understanding of the real measurable ways

Elaine Pasquini, a recipient of the Fairness & Integrity in Media Award from the Council on American‐Islamic Relations, is a correspon‐dent for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs magazine, Nuze.ink online news service and Pakistan Link newspaper .

Islamophobia was entering into policy and discourse and how that was impacting Muslims,” she stated. “To me this book is about how we understand the war on terror, specifically through the lens of Islamophobia, and what we can do to...intervene in such problematic and destructive policies.”

False moral equivalencies frequently come into play in discussions about U.S. actions, Hilal pointed out. When the bombings of hospitals, weddings and neighborhoods by the U.S. come to light, the government’s narrative is often that it was “unfortunate, but there is no comparison between what Americans do, what the American military does, and what terrorists do,” she noted. “Whenever there is [state] violence, the phrase is always ‘this is not us,’ even with evidence to the contrary.”

Hilal pointed to the United States’ 20year military presence in Afghanistan as one example. This occupation basically required Afghans to choose between the United States or the Taliban, she explained, “as if they had to be limited to those two options of violence.” The U.S., she added, never “had the right to impose this dichotomy on them.”

Downplaying the violence of the United States, which has bombed Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and myriad others, is a disturbing pathology that downplays Muslim victimhood, Hilal stated. “How much will it matter to you whether it is the United States or a terrorist group…if your family is wiped off the face of the earth?” she asked. “Those who are not considered human…can’t be victims. But if you treat people as humans, then conceivably you would try to redress the injustice and take accountability.”

The United States’ legitimization of its aggressive polices does not happen in a vacuum, Hilal warned. Rather, Washington’s actions serve as a model for “other equally violent countries” to follow. Israel, for example, has “taken this blueprint and ran with it,” she said.

On a positive note, Hilal has observed a growing desire, especially among young Muslims, to reject the status quo. “I think there is a lot more resistance toward the state,” she said. “I think that is very promising.” ■

The Annotated Arabian Nights: Tales from 1001 Nights by Paulo Lemos Horta and Yasmine Seale, Liveright, 2021, hardcover, 816 pp. MEB $45.

A cornerstone of world literature and a monument to the power of storytelling, The Arabian Nights has inspired countless authors, from Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe to Naguib Mahfouz, Clarice Lispector and Angela Carter. Now, in this lavishly designed and illustrated edition of The Annotated Arabian Nights, the acclaimed literary historian Paulo Lemos Horta and the brilliant poet and translator Yasmine Seale present a splendid new selection of tales from the Nights, featuring treasured originals as well as later additions, including the Hanna Diyab stories. For too long, the English-speaking world has relied on dated translations by Richard Burton, Edward Lane and other 19th-century adventurers. Seale’s distinctly contemporary and lyrical translations strip away the deliberate exoticism of Orientalist renderings while reclaiming the vitality and delight of the stories.

In the Country of Others: A Novel by Leila Slimani,

Penguin Books, 2021, hardcover, 320 pp. MEB $25. In her first new novel since The Perfect Nanny, Leila Slimani draws on her own family’s inspiring story for the first volume in a planned trilogy about race, resilience and women’s empowerment. Mathilde, a spirited French woman, falls in love with Amine, a Moroccan soldier in the French army during World War II. After the war, the couple settles in rural Morocco, trying to run Amine’s family farm. Mathilde goes from being a farmer’s wife to offering medical services to the rural population. As tensions mount between the Moroccans and the French colonists, Amine and Mathilde find themselves caught in the crossfire. All of them live in the country of others and with this novel, Leila Slimani issues the first salvo in their emancipation.

Yara’s Spring by Jamal Saeed and Sharon McKay, Annick Press, 2020, paperback, 264 pp. Ages 10-14

MEB $9.95. Growing up in East Aleppo, Yara’s childhood has long been shadowed by the coming revolution. But when the Arab Spring finally arrives at Yara’s doorstep, it is worse than even her Nana imagined: sudden, violent and deadly. When rescuers dig Yara out from under the rubble that was once her family’s home, she emerges to a changed world. Her parents and Nana are gone, and her brother, Saad, can’t speak—struck silent by everything he’s seen. Now, with her friend Shireen and Shireen’s charismatic brother, Ali, Yara must try to find a way to safety. With danger around every corner, Yara is pushed to her limits as she discovers how far she’ll go for her loved ones—and for a chance for freedom. Crafted through the focused lens of Jamal Saeed’s own experiences in Syria and brought to life by acclaimed author Sharon E. McKay, Yara’s Spring is a story of coming of age against all odds and the many kinds of love that bloom even in the face of war.

Other People’s Mail

Compiled by Dale Sprusansky

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS 1600 PENNSYLVANIA AVE. NW WASHINGTON, DC 20500 COMMENT LINE: (202) 456-1111 WWW.WHITEHOUSE.GOV/CONTACT SECRETARY OF STATE ANTONY BLINKEN U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE 2201 C ST. NW WASHINGTON, DC 20520 PHONE: (202) 647-6575 VISIT WWW.STATE.GOV TO E-MAIL

ANY MEMBER: U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES WASHINGTON, DC 20515 (202) 225-3121 ANY SENATOR: U.S. SENATE WASHINGTON, DC 20510 (202) 224-3121

DESMOND TUTU’S LEGACY ON PALESTINE

To The Washington Post, Jan. 2, 2022

Regarding Redi Tlhabi’s Dec. 28 op-ed, “We must honor Tutu’s global struggle for justice”:

South African Redi Tlhabi referred to Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s commitment to ending the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.

In 2008, I went to Boston with one of my daughters, a peace studies major, to hear Tutu address a FOSNA/Sabeel Conference on the theme “The Apartheid Paradigm: How Does It Apply to PalestineIsrael?” Frankly, I went more to see this amazing man than to hear the content of his speech. The speakers were informative and painted a devastating picture of what occupation looks like and feels like. I was hooked on supporting Palestinian rights after I heard Archbishop Tutu state that the situation for the Palestinians was worse in many ways than the situation had been in South Africa during the apartheid years.

The United States and Britain finally joined the effort to boycott and isolate South Africa to force an end to its system of apartheid. We’ve waited long enough to be convinced that the Palestinian situation is equally devastating to a people.

Courtney Petersen, Washington, DC DON’T ABANDON PALESTINIAN CHRISTIANS

To The Salt Lake Tribune, Dec. 26, 2021 Consider the irony if Jesus were born today in Bethlehem and his parents wanted to take him to Jerusalem to visit a holy site—they would likely be barred from doing so. First, they would be living in a condition of Israeli occupation, required to apply for a permit, face a 24-foot-high barrier wall, and go through numerous checkpoints along the way. The same would be true for any Palestinian Christian. (Maybe in some ways not so different from 2,000 years ago, when it was the Jews who were subject to the domination of Rome.)

Today, Palestinian Christians feel abandoned by Christians in America—a sort of modern day “because there was no room for them in the inn.” South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu put it clearly: “It is unconscionable that Bethlehem should be allowed to die slowly from strangulation. Bethlehem’s residents increasingly are fleeing Israel’s confining walls, and soon the city, home to the oldest Christian community in the world (from some 90 percent of population in 1950 to 10 percent in 2020) will have little left of its Christian history but the cold stones of empty churches.”

Warren S. Wright, St. George, UT ISRAELI AMBASSADOR ACCUSES IRISH JEWS OF ANTI-SEMITISM

To The Irish Times, Dec. 21, 2021

The Israeli ambassador to Ireland (Letters, Dec. 18) argues that criticizing the State of Israel is a form of “modern anti-Semitism.”

The opinion piece she is responding to was written by two members of the Jewish community in Ireland who say they are shocked by the price ordinary Palestinians are made to pay to enable Israel to exist as a Jewish state (“Anti-Semitism must not be elevated over other racism,” Opinion & Analysis, Dec. 16).

I am pretty sure that the authors of the piece, Sue Pentel and Jacob Woolf, have no intention of holding Israel to a moral code which is unexpected of any other nation.

However, at a time when a former Israeli army general decides which members of Gaza’s tiny Christian community can travel to spend Christmas in Bethlehem, they surely have a right to question why Israeli state policies have such a devastating impact on the lives of Palestinians.

The 45-mile journey from Gaza to Bethlehem should be relatively easy with modern transportation, instead whether they can travel or not is decided by the commander of a brigade which has been linked to a massacre in Gaza in July 2014.

People in Gaza have been mostly living under a blockade since 2007.

The ambassador’s own letter highlights how dangerous it would be for freedom of speech advocates if Ireland adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism.

Jewish Voice for Just Peace Ireland was set up to highlight that anti-Semitism is just as abhorrent as any other form of racism, but also to show that not all Jewish people support the illegal occupation of Palestine.

Were Ireland to adopt the IHRA definition, the two Jewish writers could be accused of anti-Semitism, when all they are seeking is equality and justice for the people of Palestine.

Ciaran Tierney, Rahoon, Galway, Ireland CELEBRATING A FREE SPEECH VICTORY IN TEXAS

To the Austin American-Statesman, Feb. 3, 2022

Eureka! A victory for free speech on the Israel-Palestine conundrum: The Jan. 28 Southern District Court of Texas decision supporting Houston businessman Rasmy Hassouna’s refusal to sign an anti-BDS loyalty oath as a prerequisite for a government contract determined that Texas’ antiBDS law violated Hassouna’s First Amendment rights.

Those sympathetic to Zionism have every right to defend Israel, but as the ruling made clear, they should not have the right to enact legislation or prescribe oaths prohibiting pro-Palestinian speech.

George Aldridge, Belton, TX THERE’S ALWAYS MONEY FOR MORE WEAPONS

To the Post Bulletin, Jan. 1, 2022

Congress just passed a $778 billion military budget (the National Defense Authorization Act or NDAA) for year 2022 with bipartisan support by a vote of 36370 in the House and 88-11 in the Senate, a $37 billion increase over 2021. The NDAA includes at least $10 billion for new and bigger nuclear weapons. This was approved despite what happened in Af ghan istan; despite increasing evidence of the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children, from U.S. air strikes in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen and despite the toll on U.S. soldiers with combat deaths and injuries, suicides, PTSD and moral injury.

In contrast, the Senate so far has not passed the Build Back Better (BBB) legislation at a cost of $175 billion annually for 10 years, compared to the $778 billion in one year for the military. BBB continues the child tax credit that lifts millions of children out of poverty, reduces drug costs for seniors, starts to address climate change and more.

More weapons and more war will not address the pressing needs of a surging pandemic, climate change and poverty in the midst of extreme wealth.

“Peace on Earth” the angels sang at Jesus’ birth. This huge military budget will not lead to the peace on earth that is so desperately needed.

Rich Van Dellen, Rochester, MN

U.S. RESPONSIBILITY FOR DEAD YEMENI CHILDREN

To the Anchorage Daily News, Jan. 24, 2022

When I returned home after Vietnam combat, we were called “baby killers.” If there is combat in civilian areas, babies are going to be killed.

In Yemen, no one is safe from murder. The U.S. has stopped direct support for aggressive missions by the Saudis. However, American companies continue to supply equipment, intelligence and maintenance to the Saudi military. Our country continues to be complicit in the murders and starvation of babies, children, women and men who want nothing more than to live and care for their families.

Corporate responsibility for anything other than maximum profit is non-existent. U.S. companies trade the lives of Yemenis for profit. Yes, America has become a nation of baby killers. As of October 2021, the United Nations reported that more than 10,000 children and 233,000 Yemenis have been murdered or maimed by Saudiled forces.

In 2019, a bipartisan Yemen War Powers Resolution was passed by Congress. This resolution was vetoed. A new resolution is needed to bar all U.S. support for the Saudi-led war.

As a veteran who knows firsthand the harm delivered by war, I call upon Congress to support a new Yemen War Powers Resolution to end the killing in Yemen.

Roy Wilson, Homer, AK U.S. MUST LEAD ON AFGHAN AID

To The Mercury News, Jan. 3, 2022

Kudos for publishing Sean Callahan’s appeal to address the catastrophic food shortages now threatening the majority of Afghanistan’s people (“The future of Afghanistan lies in our hands,” Page A13, Jan. 2).

After two years of extreme drought causing widespread crop failures, 23 million Afghans face hunger and outright starvation. Despite dire warnings from the U.N. and the World Food Program, our mainstream media have ignored this looming disaster, preferring to focus exclusively on reports of human rights violations by the Taliban. Meanwhile, our government has refused to permit the release of $9.5 billion in Afghanistan’s reserves desperately needed to pay the salaries of public sector workers. This has hamstrung Afghan efforts to prevent mass starvation.

It is unconscionable to use the suffering of millions of helpless people to gain leverage on the Taliban. We must immediately release Afghanistan’s reserves to its government and take the lead in restoring humanitarian aid to its people.

Michael Dunlap, Oakland, CA GIVE MORE OPPORTUNITIES TO AFGHAN REFUGEES

To The New York Times, Dec. 31, 2021

Farah Stockman points out real advantages of private sponsorship for Afghan refugees. But ultimately, personal, neighborhood or broader community support can go only so far. Afghan doctors, lawyers, accountants and teachers without U.S. credentials are forced to take jobs well below their skills. Less educated arrivals get consigned to low-wage jobs.

Just as the U.S. has helped millions of Americans recover from the trauma of war through a chance to go to school under the G.I. Bill, Congress should consider a G.I. Bill for the Afghans who fought and worked alongside Americans during 20 years of war. Access to community colleges and public universities would go a long way toward helping them rebuild their lives and reimagine their futures. It would speed integration into their new country and enhance their ability to contribute to it.

Desaix Myers, Arlington, VA.

The writer, a U.S. Agency for International Development retiree, is helping to resettle Afghans. GITMO MUST BE CLOSED

To the Portland Press Herald, Jan. 23, 2022

Jan. 11 marked the 20th year since the day when, in 2002, the Guantanamo Bay detention camp was opened by the United States. In this “military prison,” located within the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, people are subjected to torture and abuse, and they’re held indefinitely. And without charge, without trial!

To be held in prison without trial and without charge? This is a travesty of justice. It marks a sordid chapter in American history. It’s an abuse of human rights. It’s shameful.

We must shut down Guantanamo Bay for the sake of the 39 men still held there. And for the sake of our own honor as citizens of the United States.

Yes—let us shut down the Guantanamo Bay facility!

Elaine G. McGillicuddy, Portland, ME ■

By Nathaniel Bailey and Delinda Hanley

Baktash Abtin, 48, an Iranian poet and filmmaker, who had been jailed on security charges, died in a hospital after contracting COVID-19 on Jan. 8, 2022 in Tehran. Abtin, who was serving a six-year sentence for “anti-government propaganda,” died shortly after PEN America and 18 other rights groups voiced concern over his treatment in a letter to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In October 2021, PEN America awarded Abtin, a board member of the Iranian Writers’ Association, and two other jailed Iranian writers the 2021 PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award.

Abtin published books of poetry and the history and sociology of his country and directed films. After involvement with the publication of a book describing the history of the Iranian Writers Association, Abtin was charged on May 15, 2019, with “illegal assembly and collusion against national security” and “spreading propaganda against the state” and was sentenced to a total of six years imprisonment.

Majid Al Futtaim, 87, an Emirati billionaire businessman who helped build modern Dubai, died on Dec. 17, 2021 in Dubai. He founded the Majid Al Futtaim Group, a real estate and retail conglomerate. Al Futtaim built his first mall in 1995, bringing the Western-style consumer experience of blending shopping with dining, leisure and entertainment to the Gulf. A decade later, he opened the Mall of the Emirates at the height of the Gulf region’s economic boom. The Al Futtaim Group operates shopping malls, retail and leisure establishments in 13 countries across the Middle East and North Africa. His work earned him a spot on the Forbes top 10 richest Arabs list in 2021 with a net worth of $3.6 billion.

Omar Abdalmajeed As’ad, 80, a successful Palestinian-American Milwaukee grocer, was beaten, bound, gagged, blindfolded and tossed to the ground on an icy night by Israel Defense Forces in Jiljilya, in the Ramallah District, on Jan. 12, 2022. The brutality he suffered resulted in a fatal heart attack. The soldiers left him on the ground without treating him or even reporting the incident.

Since returning from the United States 11 years ago to retire in Jiljilya, Omar and his wife, Mahani, had been unable to leave their village to visit their children and grandchildren back in the States. According to Haaretz, “their old ID cards had been confiscated due to their prolonged absence; even if they had somehow traveled abroad with their U.S. passports, they would not have been allowed to return...Their new ID

cards they had waited for all these years arrived—but Omar was no longer alive.”

According to an inquiry, overseen by the head of Israel’s Central Command, As’ad’s death was the result of a “moral failure’” and poor decision-making by the soldiers who detained him. The commander of the Netzah Yehuda battalion, responsible for his detention, was reprimanded, and the two platoon commanders who beat him were removed from their commanding roles for two years.

Edward G. Brooking, Jr., 95, died Aug. 29, 2021 of complications from melanoma and Lyme disease in Wilmington, DE. Brooking served in the U.S. Army Air Corps in Europe in WW II. Trained as a lawyer, he worked for the U.S. government in various capacities, and served as an officer and director of a number of corporations, including Fanny Farmer Candy Shops.

Brooking traveled extensively in the Middle East and had incredible recall of his experiences. Many of those memories included his numerous travels with Albert J. Meyer, who taught economics and Middle Eastern studies at Harvard from 1955 until 1983. Brooking’s world-wide journeys continued with another close friend from Harvard, John Goelet. He is remembered by the Washington Report as their favorite raconteur. We valued his storytelling, sense of humor, advice, encouragement and strong support. Ed Brooking is survived by his wife, Ruth, and children Elizabeth, Anne and Frederic Brooking.

Henry C. Clifford, 83, a distinguished advocate for peace in Palestine and Israel, died in Essex, CT, on Dec. 2, 2021, after suffering from a stroke earlier in the year. Clifford was the chairman of the Committee for Peace in Israel and Palestine. In 2012, using $25,000 of his own money, Clifford placed billboard ads in 50 Metro-North train stations in Westchester County, in suburban New York, Connecticut and Boston. He also placed the billboards in major subway stations throughout downtown Washington, DC during AIPAC’s annual meeting, in May 2013, to educate commuters.

His ad showed four simple, factual maps, illustrating the gradual expropriation of Palestinian lands from 1946 to 2010. (See Washington Report’s Sept. 2012 publisher’s page.) His billboards included the simple text: “4.7 Million Palestinians are Classified by the U.N. as Refugees.” In response to the inevitable charges of anti-Semitism, Clifford told FoxNews.com, “If the facts are inflammatory, then they are inflammatory. There’s always room for discussion of different sides of every story, but there is no room for discussion on fact.” Television, radio stations, newspapers and social media sites discussed Clifford’s billboards.

Clifford was born in Staten Island, NY. After college, he served in the Marine Corps in Korea, and was wounded and held as a POW. After the war, he joined the New York City office of the investment banking firm White, Weld & Co., where he worked for 23 years. After his retirement, he studied history, with a particular focus on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Virginia Kathleen Hilmy (Kate), 90, an educator, died Dec. 27, 2021 in Highland, CA. After Hilmy retired from teaching English in Maryland, she compiled the Other Peoples’ Mail column in the Washington Report from 2004 until 2011. That involved scouring other publications for interesting letters to the editor in order to give our readers ideas for their own letter-writing campaigns.

She and her husband, Salman Hilmy, a former director of the Voice of America Near East, South Asia and Africa division (see “An Iraqi-Born Voice of America,” in the February/March 1994 Washington Report), who died in 2019, were longtime contributors to this magazine. In fact, Salman Hilmy’s story, “‘ID Card’ by Mahmoud Darwish: A Translation and Commentary,” remains one of our most popular articles.

Kate Hilmy attended many anti-war and pro-Palestinian protests, including one on May 17, 2008 to commemorate the ongoing Nakba on the National Mall. This writer recalls walking with her longtime friend (my mother, Donna Curtiss), and examining the huge quilt, each square commemorating a village, the number of Palestinians who lived there, and the date it was destroyed.

Hilmy died soon after spending Christmas surrounded by many of her chldren, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She spent her final days writing thoughtful Christmas cards, received by her many friends around the world, after news of her sudden death.

Asma Khader, 69, an internationally recognized advocate for human rights and one of Jordan’s leading campaigners for the rights of women and girls, died from pancreatic cancer on Dec. 20, 2021 in Amman. Khader was born in 1952 in Zababida, a town in the West Bank, which at the time was under Jordanian control. Khader earned her undergraduate law degree from the University of Damascus in 1977 and established her own legal office in 1984. At the time, she was one of Jordan’s few practicing female lawyers.

After years as an active member of the opposition, Khader joined the Jordanian government and worked for greater rights for women and freedom of the press. In 1998, Khader established and served as the executive director of the Solidarity is Global Institute to provide women in Jordan with legal services and educational programs, and to lead campaigns for legislative and policy reforms.

John Rosevelt McGillion, 78, the owner of Johnny Mac’s House of Spirits in Asbury Park, NJ, died on July 12, 2020. Born to Irish parents he and his family emigrated to the U.S. during WW II, aboard the converted troop ship, Mauritania. McGillion started with a paper route, drove a taxi, served as a paratrooper in Japan and North Carolina, graduated with an accounting degree and opened his first bar in 1968. He owned laundromats, a beeper store, a real estate office and numerous bars in New York. Whenever he was asked what prompted him to open his own businesses he would reply with a chuckle, “Because I was fired from all my other jobs.”

McGillion was known as a philanthropist in Asbury Park and an early investor in its redevelopment. He also loved to travel, visiting 177 countries and, perhaps because of his Irish origins, he was a firm believer in peace and justice in Palestine. We are grateful for McGillion’s generous financial support for the annual Israel lobby conference, cosponsored by this magazine and the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy.

Iraj Pezeshkzad, 95, an Iranian writer and author of the satirical 1973 novel My Uncle Napoleon, died from a stroke on Jan. 12, 2022 in Santa Monica, CA. According to his translator, Pezeshkzad’s novel was “the most popular novel that has ever been written in Iran” and perhaps “the funniest novel in Persian.”

Pezeshkzad was born in Tehran in the late 1920s. He studied in Iran and later in France, where he received a law degree. After returning to Iran he became a judge but, unhappy in the profession, later worked in the Iranian Foreign Ministry under the shah. Pezeshkzad lived in exile in France since shortly after the 1979 revolution that overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and installed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as supreme religious leader of Iran.

Pezeshkzad began his literary career in his 20s translating works by French authors including the satirists Voltaire and Molière and trying his hand at magazine articles and stories of his own. In addition to My Uncle Napoleon, Pezeshkzad’s novel Hafez in Love, translated by Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi and Patricia J. Higgins, was published in English in 2021.

Dr. Sherif R. Zaki, 65, a pathologist and infectious disease detective who helped identify the COVID-19, Ebola, West Nile and Zika viruses and severe acute respiratory syndrome, died from complications from a fall on Nov. 21, 2021 in Atlanta, GA. Dr. Zaki joined the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1988 and became chief of the agency’s infectious diseases pathology branch in the early 1990s. Dr. Zaki’s work was critical to strengthening public health and saving lives and he was considered among the most influential infectious disease pathologists of his generation.

Dr. Zaki was born in Alexandria, Egypt. His father worked for the United Nations’ International Labor Organization and his mother was a teacher. Growing up, Dr. Zaki spent time living in the U.S., the Caribbean, the Middle East and Europe. Dr. Zaki graduated second in his class of 800 from the Alexandria Medical School in Egypt in 1978 and earned a master’s in pathology from Alexandria University. At that time autopsies were not permitted in Egypt for religious reasons, leading Dr. Zaki to do his residency in anatomic pathology at Emory University in Atlanta, where he also received a doctorate in experimental pathology. After finishing his studies, Dr. Zaki went to work at the CDC and became a naturalized American citizen.■

Jonothan Logan, New York, NY Charles Lutz, Richfield, MN Nidal Mahayni, Richmond, VA Dr. Rana Mahmood, Decatur, IL Dr. & Mrs. Aly A. Mahmoud, Oceanside, CA Tahera Mamdani, Fridley, MN Joseph A. Mark, Carmel, CA John Matthews, West Newton, MA Gwendolyn McEwen, Bellingham, WA Bill McGrath, Northfield, MN Janet McMahon, Washington, DC John Mearsheimer, Chicago, IL Susan Kay Metcalfe, Beaverton, OR Curtis Miller, Albuquerque, NM William Nadeau, San Diego, CA Claire Nader, Washington, DC Richard Nau, Longview, WA W. Eugene Notz, Charleston, SC Chalbi Ouahib, Eden Prairie, MN Eleanor Parker, Helena, MT Cindy Percak, Cinnaminson, NJ Jim Plourd, Monterey, CA Carol Rames, Mesa, CA Paul Richards, Salem, OR Nancy Robinson, Arlington, VA James F. Robinson III, San Angelo, TX Fred Rogers & Jenny Hartley, Northfield, MN Ambassador William Rugh, Hingham, MA Ramzy Salem, Monterey Park, CA Izzat & Jawad Saymeh, Charlotte, NC Richard Schreitz, Alexandria, VA Carolynne Schutt, Doylestown, PA William A. Shaheen III, Grosse Ile, MI Aziz Shalaby, Vancouver, WA Zac Sidawi, Costa Mesa, CA Ellen Siegel, Washington, DC Deborah Smith, Durham, NC MaryLou Smith, Chapel Hill, NC Les Sosnowski, Lake Forest, IL Ethel Sotorp, Palm Coast, FL William Stanley, Saluda, NC Viola Stephan, Santa Barbara, CA Karl Striedieck, Port Matilda, PA Mushtaq Syed, Santa Clara, CA Erik Thorp, Warwick, RI Thomas Trueblood, Chapel Hill, NC Letitia Ufford, Hanover, NH Unitarian Universalists for Justice in the Middle East, Cambridge, MA Benjamin Wade, Saratoga, CA Martin & Nancy Wein, N. Chesterfield, VA Hermann & Susan Weinlick, Minneapolis, MN Willard E. White, Phoenix, AZ Richard Wigton, Mechanicsburg, PA Nabil Yakub, McLean, VA Robert & Anne Younes, Potomac, MD Dr. & Mrs. Fathi S. Yousef, Irvine, CA Munir Zacharia, La Mirada, CA Hugh & Yasmin Ziada, Garden Grove, CA Mohammed Ziaullah, Montclair, CA Fred Zuercher, Spring Grove, PA Jeff Abood, Silver Lake, OH Geoffrey Abrams, New York, NY Ali Akbar, Oakland, CA Hani Ali, Athens, Greece Dr. Robert Ashmore, Jr, Mequon, WI Mary Ellen Bennett, Laguna Beach, CA Candice Bodnaruk, Winnipeg, Canada Edward Briody, Jackson Hts., NY Larry Cooper, Plymouth, MI** Dixiane Hallaj, Purcellville, VA Delinda Hanley, Kensington, MD*, #### Angela Harter, North Branford, CT Akram & Lubna Karam, Charlotte, NC Gloria M. Keller, Santa Rosa, CA Michael Ladah, Las Vegas, NV Erna Lund, Seattle, WA Corinne Mudarri, Manchester, MA John Najemy, Albany, NY Mary Neznek, Washington, DC Henry Norr, Berkeley, CA Hertha Poje-Ammoumi, New York, NY John & Peggy Prugh, Tucson, AZ Mazin Qumsiyeh, Largo, FL Paul Richards, Salem, OR Ramzy Salem, Monterey Park, CA Betty Sams, Washington, DC# Irmgard Scherer, Fairfax, VA Bernice Shaheen, Palm Desert, CA*** Mostafa Sherif, Happy Valley, OR Jukaku & Faiziya Tayeb, Shelby Township, MI Vita Wallace & Margaret Cuonzo, New York, NY## Mashood Yunus, New Brighton, MN

TENORS & CONTRALTOS ($500 or more)

Concerned Citizen, McLean, VA Diane Adkin, Camas, WA Mohamed Ahamedkutty, Toronto, Canada Sylvia Anderson De Freitas, Duluth, MN Dr. & Mrs. Roger Bagshaw, Big Sur, CA Majid Batterjee, McLean, VA James Bennett, Fayetteville, AR Ted Chauviere, Austin, TX Patricia Christensen, Poulsbo, WA Forrest & Sandi Cioppa, Moraga, CA Robert & Tanis Diedrichs, Cedar Falls, IA Raymond Gordon, Venice, FL Alfred R. Greve, Holmes, NY Dr. Wasif Hafeez, W. Bloomfield, MI Virgina K. Hilmy, Highland, CA Brigitte Jaensch, Carmichael, CA Dr. Muhammad M. Kudaimi, Munster, IN Alison Lankenau, Tivoli, NY Tom & Tess McAndrew, Oro Valley, AZ Darrel Meyers, Burbank, CA Audrey Olson, St. Paul, MN Bassam Rammaha, Corona, CA Estate of Thomas Shaker, Poughkeepsie, NY**** Darcy Sreebny, Issaquah, WA*, #### David Williams, Golden, CO

BARITONES & MEZZO SOPRANOS ($1,000 or more)

Asha A. Anand, Bethesda, MD Branscomb Family Foundation, La Jolla, CA Joseph Daruty, Newport Beach, CA Gary Richard Feulner, Dubai, UAE Dr. E. R. Fields, Marietta, GA### Ronald & Mary Forthofer, Boulder, CO Dorsey Gardner, Palm Beach, FL Ribhi Hazin, Plymouth, MI Judith Howard, Norwood, MA Ghazy M. Kader, Shoreline, WA Dr. Jane Killgore & Thomas D’Albani, Bemidji, MN# Jack Love, Fort Myers, FL Mr. & Mrs. Hani Marar, Delmar, NY Estate of Jean Elizabeth Mayer,

Bethesda, MD James P. Moran, McLean, VA Anees Mughannam, Petaluma, CA Ralph Nader, Washington, DC Andrea Nobil, Selma Ankist Family Trust, Miami Beach, FL Mary Norton, Austin, TX Richard J. Shaker, Annapolis, MD**** Gretel Smith, Garrett, IN Dr. Imad Tabry, Fort Lauderdale, FL Donn Trautman, Evanston, IL Young Again Foundation, Leland, NC

CHOIRMASTERS ($5,000 or more)

Anonymous, Palo Alto, CA## Dr. & Mrs. Clyde Farris, West Linn, OR *,# John & Henrietta Goelet, Washington, DC Dr. Letitia Lane-Abdallah,

Greensboro, NC William Lightfoot, Vienna, VA Sahar Masud, Mill Valley, CA

* In Memory of Dick and Donna Curtiss ** In Memory of Diane Cooper *** In Memory of Dr. Jack G. Shaheen **** In Memory of Thomas R. Shaker # In Memory of Andrew I. Killgore ## In Memory of Rachelle & Hugh Marshall ###In Memory of Jayne E. Fields ####In Memory of Virginia (Kate) Hilmy

Donations received on or after Jan. 1, 2022 will be listed in the May 2022 Washington Report.