Washington Report on Middle East Affairs - May 2022 - Vol. XLI No. 3

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Table of Contents

Transcending the Israel Lobby At Home and Abroad INTRO/PUBLISHERS’ PAGE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 What’s So Important About the Israel Lobby?—Walter L. Hixson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 KEYNOTE: What, If Any, Policies Have Changed Since the Trump Administration, and New Hope for Palestine’s Future—Dr. Hanan Ashrawi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 The Fight Against Israeli Propaganda in Virginia Textbooks—Jeanne Trabulsi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 The Victorious Battle for the First Amendment Against Virginia’s Anti‐Boycott Bill—Paul Noursi. . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 The Fight Against an Israeli Human Rights Violator—Jeanne Trabulsi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Joint Israel/Lobby Infiltration of Civil Rights Group Exposed—Edward Ahmed Mitchell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 Why I'm Running for Congress—Huwaida Arraf. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 The Widespread Influence of Christian Zionism and Growing Backlash Inside American Churches—Rev. Don Wagner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 KEYNOTE: Democracy and Human Rights in Israel—Gideon Levy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Israel’s Negative, Disproportionate and Widespread Influence on the U.S. National Security State—John Kiriakou . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 The Israel Lobby’s Ongoing Attacks on Freedom of Speech Across the U.S. and Successful Legal Challenges—Radhika Sainath . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Are American News Organizations Getting Better or Worse in Their Middle East Reporting?—Sut Jhally . . . . . . 62 The Impact of Artist Boycotts Targeting Israel, and the Need for Education—Roger Waters. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 “OTHER VOICES” SUPPLEMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Index to Advertisers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 COVER PHOTOS: PHIL PASQUINI May 2022

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American Educational Trust

Publishers’ Page

Executive Editor: Managing Editor: Contributing Editor: Contributing Editor: Other Voices Editor: Middle East Books and More Director: Finance & Admin. Dir.: Assistant Bookstore Dir.: Art Director: Founding Publisher: Founding Exec. Editor:

PHOTO PHIL PASQUINI

Board of Directors:

AFTER A PANDEMIC-INDUCED two-year delay, the American Educational Trust (AET) and the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep) gathered in person to hold the “Transcending the Israel Lobby at Home and Abroad” conference at the National Press Club on March 4, 2022. Speakers and ticket-holders good-naturely endured multiple rescheduling delays until it was safe to meet in person.

We opened up our traditional intimate “speakers’ dinner,” the night before the conference, as a public fund-raising gala and invited speakers and special guests to share their personal stories. Those brief narratives uplifted and energized the room. Palestinian-American comedian/actress Maysoon Zayid concluded the evening with a comedy show, joking that from now on she’d proudly say that Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters opened for her act.

Historian and Washington Report columnist Walter L. Hixson explained why this annual Israel lobby conference is so important: “We are here because we oppose racism, violent repression, disinformation and the investment of even one more dollar to bolster an apartheid regime. Ultimately, we are here because we are on the right side of history.”

As Huwaida Arraf described why she is running for Congress she said, “I’ve fought for human rights for most of my adult life and I believe in putting people at the center of our policy, whether foreign or right here at home.”

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Washington Report on Middle East Affairs

DELINDA C. HANLEY DALE SPRUSANSKY WALTER L. HIXSON JULIA PITNER JANET McMAHON NATHANIEL BAILEY CHARLES R. CARTER JANNA ALADDIN RALPH UWE SCHERER ANDREW I. KILLGORE (1919-2016) RICHARD H. CURTISS (1927-2013) HENRIETTA FANNER JANET McMAHON JANE KILLGORE

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

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Publishers’ Page

The Russian invasion of Ukraine opened a window into why holding this yearly conference is essential. Only a week after the fighting began, it was already apparent that there was a stark contrast between American empathy for Ukrainians resisting Russian occupation versus active U.S. support for Israel’s crimes against Palestinians. One reason is, as Council on American-Islamic Relations deputy director Edward Ahmed Mitchell asserted, “When Muslims are victims of a crime, there is sometimes much less attention than when Muslims are perpetrators of a crime.”

Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy hoped the hypocrisy and double standard “will be exposed about the world-view which allows one occupation and condemns another one...occupation is against international law here and there.

Occupation cannot last here and there.” If the world is coming together to harshly sanction Russia for breaking international law, Levy wondered,“Why can’t we even discuss sanctions over Israel?...It’s almost like discussing this is by itself criminal.” Levy went on to criticize both the Zionist left as well as Zionist right-wingers in Israel.

Rev. Don Wagner took on Christian Zionism, saying, “We’ve been a little too soft, particularly in the Christian quarters, on our critique of Christian Zionism. We’re fearful of criticizing Zionism itself. Times are changing and denominations are really beginning to step up and see the difference.”

Former CIA officer John Kiriakou described the political pressure on Capitol Hill and the White House coming from the Israel lobby. The State Department and CIA are just trying to do their jobs without succumbing to that pressure, he opined.

Radhika Sainath, an attorney with Palestine Legal, reported that “the Israeli government, along with aligned private groups, are devoting significant financial and strategic resources” to quash what she called a sea change in support for Palestinian rights. They are using “meritless lawsuits and legal threats” to try to “make it so difficult to speak out for Palestinian rights that you don’t.” Luckily Palestine Legal is helping students, professors and businesses stand up for their rights and free speech.

Paul Noursi, from the Virginia Coalition for Human Rights (VCHR), described defeating a bill “carving out an exception to the First Amendment in Virginia against Palestinian human rights activists, or anyone who speaks out for Palestinian rights, or criticizes Israel.” The Israeli government and its U.S. lobby are spending tens of millions of dollars to fight the BDS human rights movement. Jeanne Trabulsi, the coordinator of the Education Committee at the VCHR, described how they’ve countered proposed edits to textbooks by a pro-Israel organization called the Institute for Curriculum Services. She suggested joining with Black Americans and others to improve U.S. history textbooks. Noursi, Trabulsi and Grant F. Smith also talked about how the VCHR

Eject Energix Committee is succeeding in combating the Israeli company’s undue influence in state government and access to federal subsidies.

Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, the renowned former Palestinian official spokesperson, argued that “the U.S. has to liberate itself from succumbing constantly to the pressure of Israel and from doing Israel’s bidding and adopting Israel’s agenda.”

Today, “home demolitions are going on at twice the rate in which they were carried out during the Trump period!”

Nonetheless, she shared hope: “We have not been defeated. We are the people who are resilient and who will persist...There is a process of rehumanization taking place. The narrative and cause of Palestine has become central to the global conversation on rights, freedom and human dignity.”

In comparing Ukraine and Palestine, bombing a civilian apartment building or a TV tower or building used by journalists is wrong not only in Ukraine but also in Gaza, CAIR’s Mitchell stated. “We don’t see that same level of outrage.

That’s because again people of color, Muslims have been dehumanized.” Describing the hate group which was caught spying for Israel on his Muslim civil rights organization, he noted, “When you cannot defeat someone’s message, you attack the messenger and you try to undermine the messenger.”

Sut Jhally used his pivotal film, “The Occupation of the American Mind,” to show precisely how Israel and its supporters have framed “a vicious settler colonial program of violence, eviction and occupation into a defensive project of civilization against barbaric Muslim terrorist hordes...You can turn reality on its head.” Like the other speakers, Jhally was confident that the summer of 2021, starting with the evictions of Sheikh Jarrah, as well as the Russian attack on Ukraine, may change that narrative for millions of people.

Roger Waters described how he has responded to the Palestinian civil society’s appeal to the world to establish a cultural picket line. Waters does what he can to persuade others to refrain from performing in Israel. “This isn’t about music. It’s about human rights,” he said. He also summed up the vibe at the end of the day, saying, “When I stand in this room I know I was here and I felt something. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone and that is what gives me hope.”

As the Washington Report turns 40, and continues to cohost Israel lobby conferences with IRmep, we hope to maintain a robust healthy spotlight on the Israel lobby. Because, as one former AIPAC leader, Steve Rosen, who was accused of providing U.S. defense secrets to Israel, admitted, “A lobby is like a night flower: it thrives in the dark and dies in the sun.” We hope attendees and Washington Report readers from around the world will feel connected, as Waters observed, and use this information, because together we can...

Make a Difference Today! ■ May 2022

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TRANSCENDING THE ISRAEL LOBBY AT HOME AND ABROAD

What’s So Important About the Israel Lobby?

Walter L. Hixson

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cial assistance to other reactionary regimes, including some in the Middle East, no state receives remotely the level of financial and political support as the Zionist state. Israel, a tiny and highly developed country of some nine million people, has received $146 billion in U.S. military assistance since 1948. This amount of non-inflation-adjusted dollars exceeds that provided to any other country, and even to whole continents.

The American funding, which today is doled out, no questions asked, at a $3.8 billion annual clip, is provided through an early dispersal arrangement that enables Israel to collect the interest on the money–an arrangement that no other country in the world enjoys. The figures of $3.8 and $146 billion represent, however, only the formal public allocations. By various other means, private contributions as well as deep state and dark money coffers, Israel receives untold billions of additional American dollars. Make no mistake: This American financial largesse, combined with unstinting political support, enables Israeli apartheid and the violent repression of the Palestinian people.

Americans must be confronted with the fact that their dollars are funding horrific human rights violations and war crimes in the Middle East. How can the United States, supposedly a bastion of freedom and democracy, provide so much unquestioned support year after year, decade upon decade, to a militarized police state that routinely violates international law, demeans and marginalizes its own Palestinian population, and regularly dispossesses, incarcerates and kills Palestinian people–men, women and children—in the illegally occupied territories?

The answer to that question brings us to the focal point of this conference, the Israel lobby. In Architects of Repression, my comprehensive history of Israel and the lobby, I analyzed the evolution of the lobby in the context of Israeli national iden-

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs

PHOTO PHIL PASQUINI

Dale Sprusansky: Walter L. Hixson is a contributing editor at the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and a retired professor of history. He has written books on many topics, including settler colonialism, American history, and more recently on the Israel lobby.

It’s been a pleasure having Walter join our staff.

We encountered him as a speaker a couple of years ago at this conference. We loved him so much that we brought him on board. We know his students probably miss him, but he has students here today and we’re very eager to learn from him. So with that, Walter, it’s a pleasure to have you, as always.

Walter L. Hixson: Thank you, Dale. Good morning, everyone. So what motivates the Washington Report and the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep) to sponsor this annual conference? What brings all these great speakers and attendees to the National Press Club? Why are people tuning in today or watching in future weeks and months across the globe? Why do we care so much about the politics of the Middle East? What’s so important about the Israel lobby?

Those of us who are engaged in serious study of Israel and the lobby know the answers to these questions. There are obvious answers and they are bolstered by clear and demonstrable facts—indeed, by a wealth of irrefutable evidence. The truth is that the lopsided U.S. support for Zionism has fueled a long history of ethnic cleansing, indiscriminate violence (both within and beyond Israel’s U.N.-recognized borders), an illegal occupation, a proliferation of illegal settlements, relentless police state repression, the emergence of a full-blown apartheid state, Israeli militarization (from introducing nuclear weapons into the Middle East to worldwide arms trafficking) and, finally, determined efforts to repress free speech and smear critics of Israel’s egregious policies.

While, sadly, the United States does send military and finan-

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Walter L. Hixson: What’s So Important About the Israel Lobby?

tity. Israel, much like the United States, is a congenitally aggressive settler colonial state. Both nations forged their national identities in a context of massive and unrelenting campaigns of ethnic cleansing of their respective indigenous populations.

But the world changed dramatically from the era of 19th century American Manifest Destiny to the aftermath of World War II. In December 1948, in response to the virulent racism and anti-Semitism of the defeated Nazis, the United Nations ushered in a new era as it promulgated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Ironically, the declaration coincided with the Nakba, the massive Zionist cleansing operation in which more than 750,000 indigenous Palestinians were driven from their homes.

Israel thus inaugurated its violent removal policies at the very moment that the global community renounced racialized violence and embraced universal human rights. In the new era, Israel thus had to deny and cover up its indiscriminate violence and removal policies and blame them on the indigenous people who sought to defend or return to their homelands. The Zionists in both Israel and in the United States realized early on that propaganda and disinformation were essential to deflect attention from Israeli aggression and the assault on human rights in Palestine. The burgeoning Israel lobby, as one of its founders put it, would provide “the armor Israel cannot not live without.”

Very quickly Zionists realized that they could capitalize on the horrors of the Nazi genocide to manipulate public opinion and to sway the United States Congress. Congress responded immediately by funding increasing numbers of Jewish refugees to flock to the new Israel and to displace Palestinians. By taking immediate command of the Congress–a command that has never been relinquished–Israel and the U.S. lobby went over the heads of the executive branch–the president and the Department of State. Both on the scene and in Washington, DC, American professional diplomats well understood that U.S. policy was unbalanced and incompatible with promoting political stability in the Near East.

The lobby overcame their opposition by manipulating both major political parties and beating back opposition from the executive branch whenever it materialized. Even a popular president with impeccable national security credentials, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, quickly learned that the president of the United States was no match for the Israel lobby. The lobby rang up victory after victory, establishing the United States as an uncritical and unstinting supporter of Israel at the expense of

Palestinians–thereby ensuring that political instability, repression, warfare and blowback on the American homeland would prevail in the modern Middle East.

In the ensuing years, the Israel lobby expanded across the nation from its base in New York and Washington, DC. Funded primarily by a handful of wealthy and predominantly Orthodox Jews, the lobby stepped up its propaganda and disinformation activities. These included letter-writing campaigns targeting the Congress, as well as the signature lobby practice of providing or withholding campaign funds to political candidates. Local Jewish federations linked hands with the centralized lobby directed by AIPAC and its predecessor organizations, as well as the Congress of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, all in close coordination with the State of Israel.

By the 1980s, after Israel’s aggression had been responsible for three major wars, a blatantly illegitimate occupation of Arab territories and an indiscriminate assault on Lebanon, the lobby accelerated its propaganda efforts. Incredibly favorable new tax cuts further enriched key supporters, who poured money into the lobby while targeting and defeating the few who dared to criticize the Zionist state.

Any critical reporting in the mainstream media was promptly subjected to orchestrated attack, which succeeded in exercising the desired chilling effect.

New think tanks, like the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, ostensibly staffed by academic experts, were and remain today little more than fronts for the Israel lobby. Members and candidates for Congress learned to bow to the lobby and to give Israel everything that it wanted at the expense of Palestinians, as well as of fundamental human rights–yet to the benefit of their own political careers.

Perhaps the best example is Mitch McConnell, who in 1984 narrowly defeated the Democratic incumbent senator in Kentucky. After the election, McConnell went directly to AIPAC and asked what he could do to receive the lobby’s backing in future campaigns. AIPAC insiders assured McConnell that the lobby was bipartisan and would reward its supporters regardless of party affiliation. McConnell went on to become one of the most formidable power brokers in the history of the U.S. Senate. He has been rewarded for his unstinting support of Israel by becoming the all-time leading recipient of lobby funding in American political history.

While exercising control over the Congress, the lobby also promoted what Prof. Norman Finkelstein dubbed “the HoloMay 2022

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PHOTO BY NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

TRANSCENDING THE ISRAEL LOBBY AT HOME AND ABROAD

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R‐KY) speaks at the AIPAC policy conference in Washington, DC, on March 6, 2018. caust Industry” to exploit historic Jewish victimization and to obscure that of Palestinians. In recognizing that the United States is the homeland of Christian Zionism, the lobby systematically cultivated evangelical support, even from those who prophesied the Jews would be exterminated after the second coming. The lobby, you see, has no shame.

As the Israel lobby metastasized, expanding its perennial campaigns of propaganda and disinformation, it assiduously promoted the image of Israel as a besieged innocent. Under this narrative, the modern and progressive little Jewish state merely strove to live and let live, only to be continually rebuffed by the fanatical and terroristic Arabs who thirsted to drive Israel into the sea.

By reducing Palestinians and Arabs to nothing more than a terrorist bomb squad, Israel obscured its own aggression, as well as the racism and terrorism of most of its leaders– men such as Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon and Binyamin Netanyahu. Demonizing Palestinians also facilitated the long term and successful effort to finesse the mythical peace process. The bottom line in so-called negotiations was always to ensure that there would be no Palestinian state. Ironically, Israel is now confronted with the specter of a one-state solution–an outcome most Zionists desperately fear, yet one that in theory could enable the emergence of a multiethnic democracy.

Throughout the so-called peace process, Israelis relentlessly constructed Jewish-only settlements, thereby establishing new facts on the ground while ignoring U.N. condemnation, always 8

with the reassurance that the American special ally would stand by them and, when necessary, exercise its Security Council veto. Today more than 700,000 so-called settlers live within the illegally occupied territories. They can and do destroy Palestinian olive groves, homes and lives at will.

Throughout this history, Israel carried out indiscriminate warfare against neighboring states, including in recent times a series of massacres in the blockaded Gaza Strip. While Israel bombed, maimed, killed and assassinated at will, the lobby continued to assert its outsized influence over American and Middle East policy. Israel’s supposed value as a key U.S. ally in the Middle East was vastly overrated. Its main accomplishment proved to be encouraging American intervention in a series of disastrous forever wars, while fueling horrendous blowback at home and abroad. Today Israel and the lobby are laying the groundwork for yet another war, this time targeting Iran.

For the past 60 years, aside from the current hiatus due to COVID, AIPAC has shamelessly trumpeted its political clout through its annual conference here in Washington, DC. In this truly pathetic display, representatives and senators compete for the opportunity to prostrate themselves before the lobby throng in a hall draped with blue-and-white Israeli flags. The annual procession underscores that AIPAC is beyond question the most powerful lobby representing the interest of a foreign government in American history. In fact, it is one of the most powerful lobbies period, on a level with the gun, pharmaceutical and elderly persons’ lobbies.

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs

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Walter L. Hixson: What’s So Important About the Israel Lobby?

Fast on its feet, the Israel lobby continues to evolve. In recent times, faced with the palpable threat of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, the lobby has responded with smears and coordinated attacks on freedom of speech. Not content with taking away the rights of Palestinians, Israel and the lobby want to take them away from Americans as well. Frivolous lawsuits and groundless assertions of anti-Semitism–assertions that cheapen the very real tragedies of Jewish history and distract from actual anti-Semitic acts–have become the order of the day. There is no depth to which the Israel lobby will not sink. Witness the relentless attack on pro-Palestinian students in the ethical cesspool that is Canary Mission.

These are the reasons why we’re here today: to call attention to the pernicious activities of a lobby that promotes the interest of a foreign country rather than the interest of the American people, much less the moral imperative of support for universal human rights. Many brave Israelis and growing numbers of Americans are determined to oppose apartheid Israel’s ongoing repression, dispossession, violence and incarceration of Palestinians. They insist on a just solution encompassing the dignity and rights of Palestinians.

Of utmost significance, American Jews are turning in increasing numbers against U.S. support for Israel’s brutal occupation policies. A small number of progressives in Congress, notably Representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, endure ugly

smears and a steady stream of death threats to maintain their principled opposition.

Despite irrefutable evidence, some people naively dismiss or deny the power of the Israel lobby. It is as if they think that nothing goes on in that multistoried expanded office building on H Street, its halls filled with an ever-growing propaganda workforce. Do these knee-jerk deniers really believe that nothing comes out of the billions the lobby invests in propaganda, disinformation, lawfare and smear campaigns?

So we are here today to call attention to this deleterious force in American society and to insist that the death, injury and injustice that it sanctions in Israel and Palestine be acknowledged and redressed. We are here today to do the work that should be carried out on a regular basis by academics, journalists and think tanks–the vast majority of which are too unlearned or, more likely, too timid to analyze and report responsibly on the grave injustices, as well as the dramatic misappropriation of taxpayer dollars.

We are here because we recognize, in the words of the immortal Martin Luther King, Jr., that “it is not possible to be in favor of justice for some people and not be in favor of justice for all people.” We are here because we oppose racism, violent repression, disinformation and the investment of even one more dollar to bolster an apartheid regime. Ultimately, we are here because we are on the right side of history. Thank you. ■

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TRANSCENDING THE ISRAEL LOBBY AT HOME AND ABROAD

Keynote: What, If Any, Policies Have Changed Since the Trump Administration, and New Hope for Palestine’s Future Dr. Hanan Ashrawi

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Of course, when we discuss anything these days, we are in the context of what’s been happening in the last week from the eruption of violence between Russia and Ukraine. We are seeing certain shifts and changes that have exposed the fault lines in the global system and the international system, and of course exposed the underlying attitudes and the hypocrisy of the West, with the racism and, not just double standards, but multiple standards. These global fractures will be felt everywhere, particularly in our part of the world.

But that is not our topic, even though we should be discussing this. Our topic, as you said, is: Has anything changed between the Trump legacy and the Biden assumption of power? What has changed in U.S. policy?

Now, as you all know, American policy is a continuum. It has several features that form a continuity of American positions, and among them is the standard approach of strategic alliance, as well as our special ally: We have shared values, the Judeo-Christian traditions, as you know, and of course unlimited economic and military support—some very visible, and some hidden. Israeli security being paramount or, as I keep repeating, sacrosanct. The Qualitative Military Edge (QME) has become a very standard expression. Israel, in the region and even beyond, must maintain its Qualitative Military Edge.

Therefore, the U.S. foots the bill and shares the know-how with Israel. Again, the U.S. gives Israel cover for its impunity and protects it from accountability. Any approach to the region

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs

PHOTO PHIL PASQUINI

Delinda Hanley: Dr. Hanan Ashrawi was the first woman to be elected a member of the Executive Committee to the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 2009. In 1996, Ashrawi was elected, and subsequently re-elected many times, to the Palestinian Legislative Council. In 1996 she also accepted the post of Minister of Higher Education and Research. In 1998, Dr. Ashrawi founded, and continues to serve in, MIFTAH, the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy. In December 2020 she resigned from the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization. She called for the inclusion of more youth, women and other qualified professionals in the Palestinian political system.

Dr. Ashrawi received standing ovations after her in-person remarks at one of our previous Israel lobby conferences, but this time she’ll be joining us virtually from her home in Ramallah.

Hanan Ashrawi: Thank you everybody. It’s wonderful to be with you, albeit virtually. I would also like to thank everybody who made this event possible. They tried their best to get me there in person, but unfortunately visa considerations and delays prevented my coming. But I will be getting a visa soon, I know, so hopefully I will be able to see you in person.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to address you. Among such distinguished speakers and exceptional company, I’m happy to be here. It is a significant event, after all. I participated earlier, as you just said, and I found it to be extremely invigorating and enlightening. So thank you.

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Keynote: What, If Any, Policies Have Changed Since the Trump Administration, and New Hope for Palestine’s Future

A Palestinian boy sits on a cart outside an aid distribution center run by UNRWA, on March 20, 2022 in the Shati refugee camp in Gaza City.

Food prices have surged after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. is always based on what Israeli priorities are and what Israeli interests are.

Of course, traditionally, in the last two or three presidencies before Trump, we have had a discussion of the two-state solution. No matter how flawed, but at least they discussed the two-state solution in the sense that the Palestinians would have the right to sovereignty. But generally, all American positions were based on the Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt in which the Palestinians were granted autonomy or limited self-government or self-rule. So there was no agreement in which there was a recognition of Palestinians’ right to selfdetermination or to sovereignty.

Trump based many of his positions and policies on these principles, but he accelerated and intensified the worst of them while creating certain disruptions and diversions in other areas, and some things that are not as harmful. For example, he exhibited total disdain for international law and international humanitarian law and pursued systemic violations of the law with, again, an assault on multilateralism and the global rule of law which cemented, of course, Israeli impunity and aggression.

As you know, the U.S. left UNESCO and left the Human Rights Council because the Palestinians were admitted to the membership there. The [Trump administration] dismissed the occupation or rendered it invisible and not illegal. The ideological component said that this is a Jewish territory, the

settlements are not illegal. Now you’ll be drinking Pompeo wine from a settlement right next to Ramallah! Near my house, actually.

[The Trump administration] recognized and enforced annexation, primarily the annexation of Jerusalem. This is the most egregious step—not just that they recognized annexation, they moved the [U.S.] Embassy there. We call it a settlement now.

We have an American settlement in Jerusalem! They closed the consulate in Jerusalem, which was opened in 1844 as a diplomatic mission to Palestine. So way before Israel was created, this consulate existed, and it was a diplomatic mission to Palestine. [Trump] closed it down in order to make any representation of the U.S. purely Israeli and within Jerusalem.

And [the Trump administration] recognized the annexation of the Golan Heights, the Syrian Golan Heights. Of course, I don’t think that the Trump settlement will materialize, but I think you still have the sign of Trump Heights or Trump Settlement in the Golan Heights. And of course they closed the Palestinian office in Washington, DC. The second main feature is that they totally abandoned the pretense of the two-state solution, or traditional U.S. policy, to accommodate [former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu. It was a great alliance with Netanyahu. They said openly, there’s no Palestinian sovereignty or recognition. They recognized the Jewish state in the sense that [Israel’s] nationMay 2022

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state law says there is no self-determination for anybody in historical Palestine, which they call Israel, except for the Jews. So they again were party to quite a racist exclusive ideology.

Third, they introduced again the glaring and blatant ideological identification and components [of] fundamentalism: extreme Christian evangelical fundamentalism as represented by Pompeo and Pence; extreme Jewish fundamentalism, Zionism, as expressed by [former U.S. Ambassador] David Friedman and, to a certain extent, [adviser to the president] Jason Greenblatt when he was in office and, of course, extreme Zionism with Jared Kushner and Ivanka [Trump]. In this mix you add racism and white supremacy, populism and all sorts of racist positions like Islamophobia, as well as anti-Semitism.

The U.S., therefore, moved from being an ally of Israel to a partner in crime in the war crimes and crimes against humanity that Israel was committing constantly. It is no longer a question of the influence of the Israel lobbyists, of many different pro-Israeli groups, and the congressional negative intervention. Now, [in the Trump administration] we see Israelis and pro-Israelis in the White House and at the State Department as decision makers. This is quite a difference.

[Fourth], they embraced the partnership with Netanyahu and turned Israel into a Republican issue. Of course, this started

before with Obama and the intervention of Netanyahu in American politics. We’ll discuss this when we look at the JCPOA. But also we see the emergence of a very bizarre phenomenon of the anti-Semitic Zionist, in the sense that I can be as antiSemitic and racist as I want provided I support Israel.

Along with that, there is the dehumanization of the Palestinians. The terrorism charge or the terrorism label reemerged. It was [former Secretary of State Rex] Tillerson, I think, who refused to give us a [terrorism] waiver. As you know, Palestinians are always under probation. They are on good behavior. They have to prove that they deserve their rights.

So the only way that we can have some sort of dialogue or relationship with the U.S. is if we are engaged with Israel in serious meaningful negotiations.

Therefore, the State Department gives a recommendation to the president to waive the terrorism charge, and therefore to continue the dialogue. Of course, Tillerson did not ask for a waiver, and immediately we were not just on probation or good behavior but we failed the test, according to them. Therefore, we don’t deserve our rights. Along with that, of course you have the legislation of the Taylor Force Act [to stop American economic aid to Palestinians until the PA ceases paying stipends to the families of prisoners and martyrs Israel accused of ter-

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Keynote: What, If Any, Policies Have Changed Since the Trump Administration, and New Hope for Palestine’s Future

rorism] and the [Anti-Terrorism Clarification Act], ATCA, and the legal liability and so on. So it was compiling all sorts of obstacles in order to exclude the Palestinians and to continue a process of defunding.

When [the Trump administration] defunded Palestine they, of course, increased Israeli support. It’s not just the $38 billion that the Obama administration promised. The support was, some of it visible and some not. They defunded Palestinian infrastructure, even hospitals in Jerusalem, even scholarships to people and so on, but they tried to maintain some sort of security support.

They defunded UNRWA, which is very serious because they were redefining UNRWA by redefining the Palestinian refugee status. They adopted the extreme-right Israeli definition of Palestinian refugees by saying these refugees are only those who left in 1948, which means that there are only 20,000 or 40,000 Palestinian refugees, not the 5.5 million that UNRWA defines as registered refugees, let alone those who are not registered. So they are also trying to dissolve the refugee issue.

They put pressure on the Arabs and other countries to defund Palestine and not to give the Palestinians any assistance. It worked, because the Arabs have stopped. Until now I think only one country gave some assistance–Algeria.

But the underlying principles of the [Trump] policy were bashing the Palestinians into submission. As part of that, we must accept or internalize the mentality of defeat. This was something that I think Daniel Pipes invented. At one point, it was picked up by Jared Kushner. They said everything would be fine, if only the Palestinians would accept the fact that they are defeated.

They don’t know or understand the Palestinians or who we are. I mean, we may be under occupation, we may be punished daily, we may be under the most oppressive criminal regime, but we are not defeated. We have not been defeated. We are the people who are resilient and who will persist. We will discuss this later.

But Kushner’s economic peace, or the “Prosperity to Peace” [plan] and the Manama, Bahrain conference was precisely a set-up in order to force the Palestinians to exchange their rights, or abandon our rights, in exchange for a few handouts, imaginary handouts. Trump’s notorious ultimate deal or, as it is known, the “deal of the century,” was based on that; That we don’t have to have our rights. That annexation can be legalized.

That Israel’s control can be maintained. That you can bribe the Palestinians with some minuscule support and we will behave.

It seems, obviously of course, they don’t understand history.

They don’t understand the region. They don’t understand Palestinian culture, or identity or spirit.

The final, most important, thing [the Trump administration] did was the regional realignment and polarization through normalization. They attempted to redefine and reorganize the region on the basis of a major rift, or polarization of the SunniShi’i divide.

Of course, it started by nullifying the [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action], JCPOA, because they had to create Iran as

the major enemy. In their attempts at redefining who’s a friend and who’s a foe, who’s an enemy and who’s an ally, they tried to turn Iran into a major regional enemy representing the extreme Shi’i, in their parlance, and that Israel is an ally of the moderate Sunnis. Therefore, this polarization is what has to dominate alliances in the region. Of course, the Palestinians also paid the price.

So through blackmail and bribery they brought several countries to recognition and normalization with Israel. They made peace where there was no war, which is very ironic. In doing that, they created vertical and horizontal rifts in the Arab world, in the region, and destabilized the region. Because what they did was they rendered the Arab regimes at odds with their own people, with their own public, because the Arab people are still supportive of the Palestinian question.

They undermined their standing or credibility, if they had any, and at the same time they created rifts among Arab states by turning the Arab Peace Initiative on its head. As you know, the Arab Peace Initiative talks about recognition or normalization with Israel only after it withdraws from all the Arab territories it occupied and, of course, primarily Palestine. Instead it’s exactly the opposite. It keeps Israel as an occupying power, but gives Arab normalization.

In doing that, they also violated the resolutions of the Arab League and weakened the Arab League as an institution. Regardless of how weak or dysfunctional it was before, now it was even weaker, because they couldn’t have one stand on that most basic unifying principle in the Arab world, which is the Palestinian question.

Now, in doing that, [the Trump administration] also attempted to reposition Israel as a major regional, economic, political, security, military and intelligence power. Re-positioning Israel is part of the Trump ideology, that Israel has to be dominant in the region and that security is paramount. Conversely, weakening the Palestinians and marginalizing the Palestinians, separating it from its Arab context, and at the same time turning the Palestinian cause into an internal or domestic Israeli issue under Israeli control.

The final aspect of this was the Abraham Accords. The choice of the name Abraham Accords created a false shared history, because there is nothing called, you know, the Abrahamic tradition in the region. Israel was not part of the Arab world at any point.

Biden’s Promises, Policies and Priorities Now the question is, did Trump succeed in doing irreversible or irreparable damage, and what can be done? There are many people who looked to Biden and said, here he is. Now Biden is in power and things are going to change. Biden’s promises, policies and priorities have to be assessed in a very candid way.

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Well, the promises are clear. We don’t disagree with them, because he talked about the two-state solution again. On the Palestinian side, the same old formulae— living side by side in peace with Israel.

They also repeated that they opposed unilateral steps, annexation and settlement expansion. Notice [the Biden administration] keeps saying “settlement expansion.” Not settlements or the building of settlements. Although settlements are there, that’s fine, but they shouldn’t expand. Then they talk about restoring the economic and humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian people that Trump stopped, but consistent with U.S. law; there is legislation now by Congress that doesn’t make that possible.

And of course the assistance to the refugees, they said they’d work to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Then they promised to reopen the U.S. Consulate in East Jerusalem, clearly, and work to reopen the PLO mission in Washington, DC. In some cases, they said, reverse Trump’s destructive policy, support IsraeliPalestinian security cooperation, and work with Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding efforts. Notice it’s not peacemaking.

It’s peacebuilding, as though you can build peace under occupation.

For Israel, I don’t go into details. But Israel got the usual pablum of the unbreakable bond and unwavering support for Israel’s security, the increase in funding, opposing [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions], BDS, fighting anti-Semitism and any attempt at delegitimizing Israel, and continue to develop normalization of Israel within the region.

Now, among the Palestinian leadership, there was a tendency to believe the promises to the Palestinian side. Nowadays they’re suffering from a massive disappointment, if you listen to the statements now. “But he promised.” Promised what? I mean, that’s something that’s really ridiculous, because they pinned their hopes on Biden and they believed his promises. They thought, this is a new era, we’re going to be friends and buddies with the U.S. They don’t understand that going back to the status quo ante, which we said was a very dangerous situation, is not going to resolve anything, because it’s a status quo ante that led to Trumpism and led to such dangerous developments in our region.

Now, the actual policies and implementation, of course they must also be looked at in the context of the waning American interest, not just in the region but globally. The declared policy and intention of the U.S. to pivot away from the Middle East, as I said, has started. Remember? It was, I think, Hillary Clinton

“

during the Obama days who said, we have to pivot away from the Middle East, and we cannot make peace. It will burn you, as she said.

They started by demoting the Palestinian question and, of course, they sent us a second-, third-, fourth-degree-level envoy who then met with the Palestinians. They said peace or any political initiative is not a priority. They postponed any engagement and put the peacemaking, so to speak, on the back burner.

They’ve committed many sins of omission, buying Israel time for unilateral actions and for de facto annexation. And, of course, they created a political power vacuum in the region that Israel fills.

Israel usually fills any power vacuum.

The Biden administration thought that they could maintain the status quo by saying, you know, let’s not rock the boat.

Let’s not upset the balanced situation. So we will support the PA and Abu Mazen to remain afloat, and we will try to manage the conflict. And they asked Israel not to destabilize the situation. Then they maintained security cooperation and funded people-to-people programs. Which is, again, another ridiculous concept that Palestinians and Israelis at a certain level can cooperate, can be funded to do some joint projects, and that will solve the problem. You have a settler colonial enterprise, a brutal occupation and ethnic cleansing, but all you need to do is get some Palestinians talking to some Israelis and cooperating, and everything will be fine.

This gives people the excuse not to engage and not to hold themselves to account. Of course, there was the idea that this is a fragile coalition government in Israel and we must protect it.

We cannot put pressure on it and we cannot criticize it. We cannot ask it to do what it cannot do, because then this coalition will collapse. Which is ridiculous. So they gave Israel a free pass for the sake of a very bizarre coalition government in Israel, including the fact that it has its token Palestinian Islamist or, as I say, the Arab in the government, plus the disappearing left-wing parties.

Now, the most dangerous thing is that the Biden administration allowed Israel to set the agenda and the priorities of American policy in the region. They dealt with us only through Israel, [just] what Israel wants. Like the charges of incitement in Palestinian textbooks. Israel says, look at Palestinian textbooks, they are inciting, they have a Palestinian narrative. We should adopt the Israeli narrative and history. So they objected to our history, to our narrative. Therefore, this is incitement.

Not just the Americans, but also the Europeans, dropped everything. They stopped looking at settlements, and extraju-

This gives people the excuse not to engage and not to hold themselves to account.

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dicial executions and house demolitions. No, no. The problem is with Palestinian textbooks. That’s the incitement.

Then they said, oh, look, there’s violence there. They are encouraging violence because they are paying Palestinian prisoners and the families of Palestinian martyrs. This is very racist.

An abhorrent expression of “pay to slay” was used not just by the Israelis, but by American officials even, and Congress members. Then Israel withheld our money and Palestinian customs funds on the basis that this funding of the families of prisoners and martyrs is encouraging terrorism.

We keep reminding everybody that since ‘67, not the creation of Israel, since ‘67 Israel has arrested almost a million Palestinians. If you believe there is any kind of justice in the Israeli judicial or legal or prison system, you are certainly mistaken.

Any Palestinian is guilty by definition and, therefore, we have a responsibility to these prisoners. They are seen as freedom fighters by all Palestinians. They will not be abandoned, nor the families of the martyrs.

[The Biden administration] also asked permission from Israel to reopen the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem that was closed illegally by an executive order, of course by Trump. You can reopen it by an executive order. There is no need to keep asking for permission. The Israelis said we can’t do that because we have a fragile coalition, or that the Palestinians then think that they can have a capital in Jerusalem and so on. In the meantime they are trying to change the character and the history and the culture, the demography, and the geography of Jerusalem.

[The Biden administration] also is asking permission from Israel to rejoin, if Israel doesn’t mind, to rejoin UNESCO and the Human Rights Council, which is again very strange. They also adopted Israel’s policy, and even the strange construct of shrinking the conflict or easing economic conditions, which, again, is a very feeble and false excuse for inaction. It shows that there is no readiness, let alone knowledge, to address the causes of instability and the conflict.

Then there is the dissonance and disconnect between the verbal and the actual. The verbal and actual divide is very, very clear. Very audible. For example, the human rights discourse rings very hollow in our ears in Palestine and the whole region. Not just pertaining to Israel, but pertaining to other violations, including Palestinian leadership violations and Arab leaders’ violations.

But there is this new slogan now which is that the Palestinians and Israelis should enjoy equal measures of freedom, security, prosperity and democracy. I like that. So we need equal measures of freedom. Well, good morning. We are under occupation. We have no freedom whatsoever. What are you proposing to do about it?

Security? We have no security, personal, territorial, historical, cultural, economic, human—in every possible way—and Israel is the culprit. What are you doing about it?

Prosperity. Israel is stealing our land, our resources. Controlling our freedom of movement and so on. What do you want to do about it?

And democracy. Now they have dropped democracy gradually. But if we are to enjoy equal measure, then maybe we should occupy Israel. Maybe we should, you know, steal their resources. I don’t know. For equal measure. But this is, again, a slogan that rings hollow also, because they proceed to do exactly the opposite to maintain and enhance the inequality and the power asymmetry.

They’ve allowed for the most extreme and ruthless escalation and intensification of Israeli violations. Whether the assault on Jerusalem and the continued ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem, or the military attack on Gaza, with horrific destruction and loss of human life, and settler violence. Settlers are on the rampage everywhere in Palestine. The annexation and expansion of settlements. The home demolitions. Home demolitions are going on at twice the rate in which they were carried out during the Trump period!

Israeli Violations Escalating During Biden Administration During Biden, the escalation and intensification of violations are incredible. And, of course, the extrajudicial executions, daily killings of our people with full impunity. Israel, as they say, is taking advantage of the U.S. weakness and indecision. They’re very happy that they think of the Biden administration as weak and indecisive. They’re quite happy to live with timid verbal reprimands with no consequences. This is what’s happening. The rate at which the destruction is taking place and the killings, and so on, is so accelerated. It’s really alarming. They’re creating an irreversible path.

Now, again while paying lip service to the two-state solution, however flawed, as I said, they are allowing Israel to superimpose Greater Israel on all of historical Palestine and destroy any chance of Palestinian statehood. They are too busy elsewhere. Right now they certainly are busy elsewhere. They are going to the U.N. They are condemning the use of the [Russian] veto. They are doing all sorts of things.

They have mobilized people to go to the ICC, for heaven’s sake. They punished us for going to the ICC. So now they are busy elsewhere.

They also, beyond that, went into Israel advocacy. They became agents of Israel in terms of combating and rejecting international legal charges and definitions, like the crimes of apartheid and ethnic cleansing. They are allowing for the [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance], IHRA, definition conflating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.

They are criminalizing BDS while allowing the boycott and punishment of American companies, firms and individuals who dare boycott Israel and the Israeli occupation. They are violating the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens. Not just the freedom of expression, but the right to choose to be ethical investors and consumers. That is a right, a democratic right, for every American citizen.

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Muna El‐Kurd fields questions from the press after her arrest and release, on June 6, 2021, in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, where the eviction of Palestinian families helped fuel the fighting that broke out last year.

They’ve adopted the Israeli labels, of labeling any accountability measures or curbs as delegitimizing Israel, including at the U.N. We still hear the same old language, that the U.N. should stop targeting Israel. Don’t concentrate on Israel, look elsewhere. It’s the same language still being used at the U.N. by their representative there.

They maintained pressure on the Palestinians not to accede to international conventions or join international organizations.

Because the more you suppress Palestinian rights and oppress Palestinians, the more you maintain their vulnerability to Israel, and the more you create a cover for Israel, for its violations and impunity. As you know, the famous 22 international organizations that we were not supposed to join–again, this goes back to pre-Trump and to Obama–it has been picked up again by Biden. We were punished for acceding to the Rome Statute and to the ICC and ICJ. Now both of these are on hold, have been postponed. I’m sure you’ve read that it took them six days to start an investigation at the ICC of Russia and Ukraine. It took us six years just to agree that [the ICC] will open an investigation into Israeli war crimes, which are very clear and obvious and blatant!

[The Biden administration has also] pursued the normalization of Israel’s regional repositioning. They pressed ahead very rapidly. Ambassador Tom Nides is convening meetings between the Arab representatives of normalizing countries with 16

Israel in order to pursue the normalization policies and to recruit other Arab states to normalize, because this is how they think that they are making peace.

They also ended up with the rehabilitation of Israel within the American political system. As you know, Trump took Israel to the extreme right as part of the extreme GOP. Now they are trying to force back a bipartisan consensus on Israel. We see how mainstream Democrats are really excluding and undermining the progressives within their own party in order to maintain the special status of Israel within the Democratic Party.

Also organizations like the Democratic Majority for Israel. And you all know its impact on the DNC, the program under the Biden platform.

They are also readjusting relations with AIPAC and other lobby groups that have gone to the extreme right. Now they are trying to rehabilitate them as well. And there’s this ridiculous embrace. I don’t know if you’ve heard, when Nancy Pelosi was in Israel, and she said that Israel was the greatest political achievement of the 20th century. I don’t know if I want to comment on this. Really I don’t know if it deserves any kind of attention! But what else happened in the 20th century? Were there no great political achievements in the countries? No U.N.? Nothing? No two world wars resulting in agreements?

It’s only Israel that’s the greatest political achievement? This is, again, beyond belief.

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And of course the increase in the budget, in the military budget. You all know how they gave Israel extra, a few hundred million extra, for the Patriot missiles, because Israel has the right to self-defense.

Is There Room for Hope?

Now given all that, is there room for hope? This was the last part of the question I was asked. I mean, it’s not a question of hope or optimism. It’s a question of reading reality, a situation that has been subject to so much injustice and yet so many shifts and changes. But despite all attempts at resuscitating the attitude and the language of the past, the status quo ante which was in itself destructive—based on the Israel lobby and the Israeli propaganda and hasbara—Palestine is part of the future.

We will not be locked back in the past, where we are dismissed, and labeled and maligned. There is a process of rehumanization taking place. The narrative and cause of Palestine has become central to the global conversation on rights, freedom and human dignity. This is very important.

Israel is being exposed and named for what it is, an occupation that’s becoming permanent. A brutal and illegal occupation.

A settler colonial enterprise. An apartheid system and, worse, carrying out a displacement/replacement paradigm, and a rogue state based on an ethno-sectarian nationalism, as an exclusivist and exclusionary system which attempts to erase whole people, their history and their culture.

All this is primarily due to a global network of solidarity, of empathy and identification, that broke the barriers of slander, intimidation, threats, smear campaigns and of course–as ascertained–our common humanity, rights and justice. I know it is still painful. There is still a price to be paid if you come out and speak on behalf of the Palestinians. But there are many courageous people who are standing up, who are speaking out, and who are challenging all attempts at silencing them and labeling them.

There is, of course, a dislodging of the stranglehold of mainstream and right-wing media that have dominated and controlled the verbal space. Social media has been very helpful. Of course, access to information is there. The relationship between knowledge and responsibility led to tremendous activism among minorities, the oppressed, the excluded, the maligned, and, of course, among people of conscience, including academics and progressive Jewish organizations, churches and Congress members who dare to challenge.

Taboos are being broken every day. There is a young generation, not just in Palestine—we can talk about this—but in the U.S. that refuses to be silenced, and that wants to learn the truth, and that refuses to be intimidated. These are our natural allies and partners.

The resilience of the Palestinian people in the face of horrific Israeli violence and injustice, I don’t want to go through all that.

You know it. You know what’s happening. What happened in

Gaza. You know Sheikh Jarrah. You know Silwan. You know the Old City, and Al-Aqsa, and Issawiya, Jabel Mukaber. Everywhere, you know what’s happening. And the face of settler criminality and violence in Sebastia, in Burqa, all around Nablus and Jenin, as you know. And Al-Khalil [Hebron]. Everywhere around Al-Khalil. In Al-Khalil the settlers are wreaking havoc.

All these things are happening, and yet the Palestinian people have resisted. They have stood up. We paid a tremendous price, especially the young people. As you know, daily you hear about young people being killed. But all these things are becoming visible in real time. They are debunking Israeli lies and distortions. You see the young people defying and daring. Of course the most telling image, as you know, is the picture of Ahed Tamimi defying an Israeli soldier being distributed as a young blonde Ukrainian woman challenging a Russian soldier. It went viral. Then people discovered: No, no, no, this is a young Palestinian girl challenging an Israeli occupation soldier.

Yes, [there is now] an emergence of the younger generation of activists in Palestine, connecting in cyberspace, and mobilizing with partners and counterparts in a common language of humanity and defiance. Empathy and solidarity, active solidarity, these are the authentic self-values. Not the JudeoChristian tradition, that is really a manufactured construct, but authentic human progressive self-values that challenge erasure, fragmentation and, as I said, intimidation attempts at silencing any criticism.

What is significant also is the people’s unity. This is a source of real hope in Palestine. Because we saw in May 2021, as you know, during this assault on Jerusalem and Gaza, the Palestinians are everywhere. In the West Bank, including Jerusalem.

In Gaza and ‘48 Palestine. Among refugees and refugee camps. Among exiles everywhere in the world. Among expats.

There was a common language, a common cause, a common identity. They stood up along with their allies and their partners.

They defied and they spoke out. They defended the Palestinian cause and they again legitimized—not that we needed legitimization, but in a sense made public—the Palestinian cause and the Palestinian identity and utterance.

This was very important. That despite all the fragmentation, despite all the factionalism, despite all the geographical divides and rifts and dispersion, the Palestinians have maintained their commitment and their sense of identity and have very clear focus on their rights. Therefore, they gained the respect and support of many like-minded people. That is a new dynamic. Maybe it’s not moving fast enough, but it is moving.

Maybe governments are failing, but the people are beginning to rise up.

This dynamic is both internally and globally evident. There is a reconfiguration of the political, economic and military power map in the world. And of course now we have to see the ramifications of what’s happening in Europe. I’m sure that it will have a ripple effect throughout the world. So there is reason to be confident. There is reason to know that the Palestinians are May 2022

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not going anywhere, are not committing suicide, are not committing amnesia, are not accepting any kind of censorship or oppression. Along with our allies and friends, we will be part of the shaping of the future. Thank you.

Delinda Hanley: Thank you very much. Thank you for your infuriating, yet hopeful, update from Palestine.

Questions & Answers We have run out of time, but can we combine several of the questions together in one quick question? What can we do here in the States? Should we try to insist the Biden administration reopen the consulate in Jerusalem? Should we insist that the [Palestinian mission] reopen here, so that Palestinian ambassadors can speak all around the country the way they used to?

What should we do here?

Hanan Ashrawi: Well, of course, the issue of reopening the consulate in Jerusalem was an issue that was a distinct promise. Biden said he will reopen it, but he’s not doing it because the Israelis are putting pressure, that if you do it, it means that the Palestinians want to have their capital in Jerusalem. If you don’t reopen it, it means that Jerusalem is all Israeli. So it is important in that sense. Politically it is important.

Many people say, well, it’s not going to make any difference.

But it does make a difference to us, because it means that the toxic policies of Trump saying that Jerusalem is united and is the eternal capital of Israel is wrong. Jerusalem is an occupied city, by the way. All of Jerusalem once was Palestinian. As you know, even West Jerusalem was part of the corpus separatum.

But still, East Jerusalem was occupied in 1967. So the thing is, the U.S. has to liberate itself from succumbing constantly to the pressures of Israel and from doing Israel’s bidding and adopting Israel’s agenda. This is very important.

Reopening the Palestinian representative office in Washington, DC is difficult because of the longstanding tradition that we have to prove we are good little boys and girls and that we are on good behavior and so on. It requires certain steps. But in addition, Congress has passed several bills and adopted laws that make it almost impossible to reopen the Palestine mission in Washington, because of things like the Taylor Force Act and ATCA. ATCA exposes any Palestinian official in the U.S. to legal measures by victims of Palestinian “terrorism.” As you know, with so-called terrorism, there were several lawsuits. This is quite a complex situation, a complicated situation. The bills that were adopted under resolutions by Congress make it extremely difficult, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t push for it.

We should stop this whole attitude, this whole policy, of treating Palestinians as subhuman species with no rights, and accepting Israeli conditions and placing within several bills and legislation issues that are detrimental to Palestinian rights and to Palestinian-American relations. Okay? So that has to be done.

Delinda Hanley: Thank you so much for speaking to us.

Next time you come here—we usually say next time in Jerusalem, but next time in Washington. Thank you so much.

Hanan Ashrawi: Yeah. Yeah, I will come. I promise. Okay, thank you very much. ■

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Jeanne Trabulsi: The Fight Against Israeli Propaganda in Virginia Textbooks

The Fight Against Israeli Propaganda in Virginia Textbooks Jeanne Trabulsi

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Grant F. Smith: Jeanne Trabulsi calls me on Sundays, and strategizes, and asks me to file FOIAs. I kind of refer to her as my boss at times. She’s an incredible, incredible activist.

I think she’s one of the most effective grassroots organizers I’ve ever met.

So I’m very proud to introduce her. She’s going to be talking about two initiatives of VCHR [the Virginia Coalition for Human Rights], the most important being the—well, I’m not going say which is the most important one. But you’ll know.

She spent her career in education, communications and public relations. So she didn’t come to VCHR without skills.

She’s the coordinator of the Education Committee at the Virginia Coalition for Human Rights. She’s been teaching at university, K-12 levels, for over 14 years. Last night, at the dinner, she introduced us to the Refugee Doll Project. So you really have to check that out. I think we have some of that at the registration desk. But we’re going to now hear from Jeanne on two extremely important topics. Thank you.

Jeanne Trabulsi: Good morning. On behalf of the Education Committee of VCHR, I am pleased to tell you about our work to counter proposed edits of Virginia history textbooks by an organization called ICS, or Institute for Curriculum Services.

Because building background knowledge is the key to learning new information, here’s a brief summary of how we became aware of ICS. In 2018 we saw this webcast notice. It’s an interview of ICS Director [Aliza] Craimer Elias with the president of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. In it we learned that ICS is a nonprofit organization founded in 2005 dedicated to improving the quality of K-12 education on Jews, Judaism and Israel.

In the webcast we learned that ICS has trained more than 6,000 teachers in more than 90 cities, 11 million students in 50 states. Most alarming was the statement made by her when she described working behind the scenes with textbook publishers and claimed that these publishers came to her to write the manuscript before it was published.

So VCHR is of the opinion that ICS is not a true education outfit. It’s a public affairs and advocacy group.

Let’s see the evidence.

Evidence number (1) from their website, ICS operates under the auspices of the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) of San Francisco. It’s financially structured under the 501(c)(3) status of JCRC. The stated purpose of this JCRC is public affairs. In their brochure, it states that it recognizes Israel’s integral role in modern Jewish identity and articulates its commitment to Zionism in the Bay Area’s Jewish community.

Evidence number (2) the Schusterman Family Foundation.

ICS is a grantee of the Schusterman Family Foundation. It’s the group that takes all freshmen congressional representatives to Israel. In sum, VCHR believes that ICS is enmeshed with and funded by Israel affinity groups that drive their pro-Israel advocacy. We believe that this results in biased and inaccurate textbooks and in teacher training.

Let’s look at their tactics. Remember from the previous slide that I said that 6,000 teachers have attended ICS training. From the website, you can see three of many of their training modules, the Arab-Israeli conflict being their signature one. Others are environmental challenges and cooperation, and one is called anti-Semitism, the longest hatred.

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We’ve attended several of these trainings. ICS uses a teaching method that focuses on primary sources, but they are highly selective about what documents they do include in their teaching modules. If you didn’t know the story of the Arab world and Israel, you’d think they’re pretty good. I remember one student remarking that the Israelis have offered peace to the Arabs so many times, what else could the Arabs possibly want?

In addition to teacher training, they proposed edits to history textbooks throughout the nation. And for Virginia’s last review cycle, ICS proposed hundreds of them for 12 textbooks. Here’s an example of one edit found in the world history textbook published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: The original text read “ongoing conflict over Israeli occupied territories.” The words “occupied territories” are crossed out and the proposed ICS change reads, “ongoing conflict over Israeli control over the West Bank and Gaza.” The ICS comments read that the term occupied territories is “politicized and inappropriate” for a public school text.

After they got all their edits together, they sent this with a cover letter to the Virginia Department of Education. But ICS didn’t send the letter. Three JCRCs in Virginia sent the letter.

They are the JCRCs of Tidewater, Richmond and Greater Washington. In it we see that JCRC thanks the Department of Education for making past ICS edits. They state, “In particular, we’d like to thank Pearson and McGraw Hill for the many improvements made to their textbooks based on earlier ICS recommendations.”

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In order for us to manage all these hundreds of edits, we put them in themes. One of the themes was using sanitizing language. You can’t mention settlers, “settlements” become “communities.” The wall becomes a security fence. Also emphasizing Arab culpability for crisis initiation. You know the Arabs really started everything according to ICS. And this one is really problematic for me. They discourage students from conducting open Internet research. They wanted them to use one of their own research [sites]. They relabeled maps and they deleted all references to Palestine. You can call it Mandatory Palestine, but you can never call it Palestine.

We also put these edits [see slide above] in a fact sheet so we could send it out to legislators and to Virginia academicians.

This is the graphic organizer that we used. You see it has three columns. The left-hand column is the theme referencing Palestine only as Mandatory Palestine. In the middle column you’ll see the ICS edit. They want to change the word Palestine to Palestinian. The reasoning is there is no state of Palestine, nor has there ever been.

In the right-hand column we have inputted text that states our problem with the edit. Over 70 percent of states of the U.N. have recognized the State of Palestine. So we sent these letters with a fact sheet to all Virginia officials, senators and the publishers.

As I told you, the textbooks themselves, even before the ICS edits, were highly problematic. We knew we had to do something, but we weren’t experts. So we called people who said they’d be willing to help. Some of these people you may know.

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Jeanne Trabulsi: The Fight Against Israeli Propaganda in Virginia Textbooks

There’s Peter Mandaville who was a senior policy adviser for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; of course, Larry Wilkerson, chief of staff for Colin Powell; and of course Dr. William Quandt, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter; and Noura Erakat and others. So we feel very heartened that they would support us.

They were just astounded. They had no idea this was going on. It sort of made sense because when freshmen come to their classes in college, they know nothing about the Middle East. They know that there’s a kind of a desert area, that there are two peoples, one Palestinian and one Israeli. The students think that the Palestinians are trying to take away Israeli land.

I mean that’s how ignorant they are because of the textbooks that they have encountered in high school.

So we asked these academicians to look at these five textbooks, and they did. We sent them digital copies of the textbooks, and we gave them a graphic organizer to fill out. Here you’ll see [see slide above]—you put the problematic passage on the top—from Hamas launched frequent rocket attacks on Israel and the Israeli military responded with airstrikes. Then on the bottom the scholar writes, in fact, Israeli attacks on Gaza were massive resulting in thousands of casualties.

We took all these edits and we sent them to the Department of Education and to the publishers. To our knowledge, no ICS edits were incorporated in the Virginia textbooks for this cycle.

So this is what we did, we of course had a press release.

We testified before state education legislative agencies. I tes-

tified before the money committees telling them not to spend $78 million on Virginia textbooks that are so faulty. We appeared in webinars and podcasts.

For those of you in other states who are doing this, I feel it’s important to reach out to other groups about textbook accuracy such as the African American History Education Commission.

That’s what we did and we have developed a relationship with them because the Virginia textbooks do not tell an inclusive story, do not tell the whole story of African Americans in Virginia either.

We’ve also reached out to the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine. You may have heard that two of their scholars have opposed two Pearson textbooks. Apparently, the teachers’ union in Britain were so strong, they forced Pearson to withdraw those two textbooks.

Where do we go from here? We are starting to collect high quality instructional materials on the Middle East. Virginia is kind of moving away from textbooks. They’re finding that teachers are spending an inordinate amount of time, you know, doing their own searching. We are also working on co-hosting a teacher training institute in the summer of 2023. It will be at Shenandoah University in Winchester.

My two cents on how you can ensure accurate textbooks for your state—please find out when are the cycles of your textbook reviews, when are the cycles of your standards for learning, how is your Department of Education organized, who heads the Social Studies Office, find allied organizations and push back. Thank you. ■ May 2022

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The Victorious Battle for the First Amendment Against Virginia’s Anti-Boycott Bill Paul Noursi

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hibit “participation in a boycott of Israel, its instrumentalities, or any of its territories while engaged in commercial activities pursuant to the terms of the contract.” Those same provisions are passed on to “every subcontract or purchase order of more than $10,000.” So the provisions would have been binding on all subcontractors and vendors.

This is clearly unconstitutional. It punishes. It selects businesses that do business with the state government based on their political views. So we felt like we had to oppose it. It was important to oppose. And I did mention there were previous attempts to do the same thing.

So there have been three previous direct legislative attempts to do something like this. There’s been one indirect attempt, and there appears to be a fifth attempt brewing out of the state governor’s office right now that we’re tracking. And I’ll tell you a little bit about each of these.

But these attempts, they’re basically being propagated all over the country. They’ve passed in I think over 30 states already. They’re unconstitutional. So when they’ve been challenged in courts, they’ve been defeated. But, you know, who wants to go to court? It shouldn’t be passed in the first place.

There are two varieties of these attempts to suppress advocacy for Palestinian rights. One is like HB 1161. It just punishes people and organizations that participate in BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions).

The other method they use is to brand criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic. They’ve tried both in Virginia. They’re still trying both. So I’ll tell you a little bit about that. The previous attempts started all the way back in 2016. And that’s when the Virginia Coalition for Human Rights originally started. It was to oppose that original attempt, which was at the time called House Bill

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs

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Grant F. Smith: We’re going to get started with our next speaker, Paul Noursi, who is co-president of the Virginia Coalition for Human Rights.

Along with the other president who is also a magnificent leader of that organization, Nancy Wein, they are two of the most effective leaders of an organization that is winning, winning, winning. And he’s going to talk a little bit about that.

Paul has been active with the Virginia Coalition for Human Rights since its founding in 2016. He’s active in a lot of other organizations working for peace and justice in the Middle East—Palestinian Christian Alliance for Peace, New Dominion PAC, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the Arab American Democratic Caucus of Virginia. So he is a super-activist who has lived and traveled extensively in the Middle East—Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon.

So, with that, we’re going to move to Paul Noursi.

Paul Noursi: Thanks very much, Grant. Thanks everyone for being here. This is a really great conference. I’m really honored and happy to be here.

So, yeah, in Virginia this year there was another attempt to pass a bill that would basically suppress free speech by carving out an exception to the First Amendment in Virginia against Palestinian human rights activists, or anyone who speaks out for Palestinian rights, or criticizes Israel. Basically it was House Bill 1161, HB 1161. It was called the “Virginia Public Procurement Act.” It required contract provisions prohibiting participation in the boycott of Israel. So it’s carving out an exception for Israel from the First Amendment of our Constitution. They’ve tried this before actually and I’ll talk about that a little bit later.

This bill would have required all public bodies to include in every contract of more than $10,000 certain provisions to pro-

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Paul Noursi: The Victorious Battle for the First Amendment Against Virginia’s Anti‐Boycott Bill

1282. It was pretty much identical to HB 1161. So they just kind of pulled it from the shelf this year and reintroduced it.

But back in 2016, based on our opposition, members of our coalition which at the time wasn’t called Virginia Coalition for Human Rights, but the same group of people, we opposed it.

We went and met with members of the General Assembly and attended committee meetings, etc. Once you shine a light on it, it becomes very obvious that it’s unconstitutional. A lot of General Assembly members would have voted for it without really knowing what it is. Just you know, oh yeah, I know that guy. He’s introducing a bill. He voted for my bill. I’ll vote for his.

And they don’t even really pay attention to it.

So once you shine attention on it and you show that it’s unconstitutional, people start—General Assembly members start—having second thoughts. Because of that, in 2016 they amended the bill two or three times. It ultimately devolved into just creating basically a blacklist of companies and people that are involved in boycotts and divestment. Even that failed ultimately, but that’s what it devolved into.

An important point to note is when they amended it to be basically a blacklist, they assigned the blacklist to be kept by an organization which many of us didn’t know even existed within state government called the Virginia Israel Advisory Board.

Needless to say, like Grant mentioned, based on that we ended up following up and finding out a lot more about that. Jeanne will talk a little more about their activities later.

Back in 2016 there was actually—in addition to a bill, there was a resolution. Now, a resolution isn’t a law. It’s kind of a statement of the sense of the Assembly. So that same year there was a resolution, HJ 177. It was “expressing the sense of the General Assembly in condemning the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement.” This was basically a deceitful diatribe of hatred against the peaceful BDS human rights movement. It was just a statement and had no legal impact, but it did pass.

In 2017 there was a bill called HB 2261 introduced. That bill would have redefined anti-Semitism to include criticism of Israel using the IHRA [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance] definition which is a very questionable definition of antiSemitism. Of course, anti-Semitism is a bad thing. We all oppose anti-Semitism. It’s illegal in Virginia. So if that bill had passed and anti-Semitism was defined to include criticism of Israel, then legitimate political criticism would have become illegal. So we opposed it.

By the way, also the ACLU, American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, published letters opposing HB 1282 in 2016 and HB 2261 in 2017. So that leads me to the current year. There is HB 1161 which has been defeated. And I’ll tell you a little bit more about how we defeated it. But also there is a current executive order issued on our new Republican governor’s first day in office. He issued Executive Order Number 8, “establishing the commission to combat anti-Semitism.”

In that executive order, it stipulates that they should use the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. So it doesn’t bode well. It’s

just a commission at this point. We’re hoping that it won’t go off the cliff in the wrong direction attacking free speech, but it’s not a good start to start with that definition. So we’ll be watching it very closely and opposing it if it attempts to insert any antifree speech measures into state law.

Who’s Behind Anti‐Free Speech Legislation?

Who backs this kind of legislation? Well, starting in 2009 the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy was the original Israeli government ministry responsible for leading their international campaign against the BDS human rights movement and it had a budget of tens of millions of dollars a day from way back then. So that was 2009. By 2014 there were already legislatures all over this country and various state legislatures basically trying to suppress BDS. In Virginia, in 2016 through 2018, HB 1282, HJ 177 and HB 2261, which I just told you about, were all strongly supported by the Virginia Israel Advisory Board and the Jewish Community Relations Councils of Virginia. We suspect there was also support from national groups like AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee], but we don’t have direct evidence of that.

HB 1161 this year was introduced by delegate John McGuire, who is a delegate aspiring to go to Congress, who attended the pro-Trump rally on January 6, 2021 but denies participating in the subsequent attack on Capitol Hill. We have not seen any indication that the JCRCs lobbied in support of HB 1161. So I suspect that Delegate McGuire just pulled it off the shelf to attract AIPAC-affiliated contributions to his political war chest.

Executive Order Number 8, on the other hand, the combating anti-Semitism commission using the IHRA definition, appears to be strongly supported by the JCRCs and again also possibly AIPAC and AIPAC-affiliates. At any rate, all of these attempts are clearly unconstitutional and antithetical to human rights.

That’s why we’re opposing them and lobbying against them.

I’ll just take a few minutes to talk about how we opposed them. First, it was important to keep track of the bills that come up in the General Assembly. It’s not easy to keep track of them.

In Virginia there’s a very useful tool called Lobbyist-in-a-Box. It’s actually on the General Assembly website. You could sign up and it will give you alerts for keywords and things like that.

So we track that and we were able to discover it as soon as it was introduced. Then we researched it. This was very easy research. It was very clear to us that it was almost exactly the same as the bill that had been introduced in 2016. So it wasn’t hard to figure out that it was unconstitutional. All the same arguments that we leveraged in 2016 were applicable again this year.

After that we developed clear talking points and the one sheet position paper from the Virginia Coalition for Human Rights. We also reached out to the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia. They published a letter which they distributed May 2022

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to all the members of the committee in the General Assembly that was going to first hear the bill. We also got a letter from Palestine Legal. They had seven other groups including the Center for Constitutional Rights, ADC [the American-Arab AntiDiscrimination Committee], and others co-signing. So we generated a lot of publicity and attention to it.

That’s important because again, if nobody knows about it, people will just vote for it without really knowing what it is. Once it was in committee, we monitored the agenda of the committee. It was I think the General Laws Committee in the House of Delegates, and they publish their agenda usually the afternoon before they meet. They met I think every Tuesday and Thursday this year. So Monday afternoon or Wednesday afternoon we looked at their agenda to see if this bill was on the agenda. When it did come up on the agenda, we showed up in force. We had more than ten people. I think we had close to 15 people ready to testify against it.

Now leading up to that before it went to committee, we also got help from the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights and Jewish Voice for Peace. We sent out action alerts. People sent emails. We created our own action alert that people used to write their own emails to their General Assembly members. So we got a lot of attention against this, pointing out that it was wrong and we would want them to vote against it. When it did come up on the agenda of the General Rules Committee, like I said, we were there, probably about 15 of us. In addition to being there to testify in person, we also made comments on the website of the agenda.

This year, by the way, everything was virtual. Well, not everything. Everything was available virtually. So 15 of us might have 24

been there on Zoom and there were three of us that were actually there in person. So altogether we had probably over 15 people ready to testify in person or on Zoom. I think based on that, for whatever reason, when it came up on the agenda, it was “passed by.” So they basically put it aside. I think it was because they saw there were so many people there ready to testify against it, you know. I mean for one thing, they don’t want to waste [time].

If they give each person a minute, that’s 15-20 minutes of a one-hour meeting. They don’t want their meeting to go on forever. It was clearly unconstitutional and, you know, knowing that it’s not a battle they wanted to have. So I think for those reasons, it was just dropped. It was never picked up again this year. So in that way it was defeated.

I’d add one more thing that we’ve been doing every year and I recommend doing this in every state. It is to have a coalition like this that just has a day or two where you go to the General Assembly or by Zoom calls and have meetings and advocate for things that are important. We had already planned that from December really, that we were going to have an advocacy day or days. In this case, two days, Thursday and Friday, where we set up a bunch of meetings. We ended up meeting with 30 members of the General Assembly to let them know that we’re against this bill in this case. And we had those meetings. We were already planning them before we even heard about the bill.

But, anyway, that’s in a nutshell how we defeated it. I think I’ll end here.

Grant F. Smith: Excellent. So he is going to answer questions in a bit. Now back to Jeanne Trabulsi. ■

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Jeanne Trabulsi: The Fight Against an Israeli Human Rights Violator

The Fight Against an Israeli Human Rights Violator Jeanne Trabulsi

Jeanne Trabulsi: Good morning. On behalf of the Eject Energix Committee of VCHR, I am pleased to share the information on this slide. Although we are for renewable energy, we are against the Israeli company Energix Renewable Energies because of its harm to surrounding communities in the occupied territories and in Virginia. In the slide deck, I will describe Energix in Israel and Energix in Virginia, demonstrate Energix’s undue influence in state government, demonstrate Energix’s undue access to federal subsidies and describe our campaign to push back.

But what is Energix Renewable Energies? It’s one of Israel’s largest renewable energy companies, both solar and wind, headquartered in Ramat Gan with an estimated market value of almost $2 billion. Energix has been publicly traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange since May 2011.

Well, why are we against Energix? Because it is a U.N.-designated human rights violator. The middle portion of the slide shows the report issued by the U.N. that designated Energix Renewable Energies as a category G company. That means that Energix used natural resources, in particular water and land, for business purposes in the occupied territory. [See slide p. 26].

Well, how? If you look at the left of your slide, you’ll see that they took land from Palestinians living in the West Bank—the South Hebron Hills—and they developed the Meitarim solar facility located in an illegal settlement industrial zone. The right slide shows the Golan Heights. In 2015 they used the natural resources, land belonging to Syrians living in the Golan Heights and developed a field of wind turbines. In addition, most recently Energix has partnered with the Israel Defense Ministry to build 41 more wind turbines.

What does Energix do in Virginia? There are 22 proposed Energix solar sites in Virginia. We have, as a human rights organization, closely monitored Energix since they have come into Virginia. If you see the sites, they go all the way from the Chesapeake Bay to the Appalachian Plateau. Along the south side, that’s the North Carolina border, and up the Shenandoah Valley. Energix states that it has seven solar facilities that are operating and other projects in various stages of initiation.

Let’s look at Energix’s undue influence in the state legislature. Energix is promoted by the Virginia Israel Advisory Board.

I’ll call it VIAB. It’s a state agency under the General Assembly of Virginia that is funded by Virginia taxpayers. It is the only taxpayer funded state agency dedicated to promoting Israeli business in the United States. Because VIAB has offices in the same building as Virginia legislators, VIAB has access to policymakers that regular Virginia solar businesses do not have.

Our position is that VIAB is an Israeli export promotion authority masquerading as an advisory board.

Here’s an example of the VIAB Energix connection and Energix’s undue influence in the executive branch. You see the picture of former Governor Ralph Northam. Well, he’s on a VIAB-sponsored trade trip to Israel. To his left is Secretary of Commerce Brian Ball. In documents we read that Energix credits VIAB with connecting it with senior leaders in the commonwealth, and credits VIAB with introduction to private and public entities and assisting in the identification of new projects. We believe that this gives Energix an unfair advantage over other Virginia solar companies.

Aviva Frye is another example of undue influence in the executive branch. She served as the head of Energix in the United States while simultaneously serving on the VIAB board. Here you see an email from her and she has signed it “VIAB board.”

She is asking to seek a private meeting with the former first lady, Pamela Northam. The meeting was to talk about Energix, but she signed the email as the southwest coordinator of VIAB. Now we go from undue influence in state government to undue subsidies from state and federal [governments]. You can see the two logos. The first logo is the Virginia Economic Development Partnership. If you could just follow the dates with me, I think we’ll be able to comprehend this a little bit more. In 2019 Energix planned to hire 33 U.S. employees but they needed money. So in 2020 they applied for a subsidy from the Virginia Jobs Investment Program. And here’s the rub. In 2020, the same year, Energix applied for the Payroll Protection Program loans because they claimed they had 152 workers. They received one-third of all federal PPP loans for the Virginia utility scale solar sector. They were telling the state and the federal government two different things.

Another example of undue subsidies from federal sources, Energix’s tax partner is the U.S. investment bank Morgan Stanley. In 2020 Energix couldn’t use their federal tax credits, May 2022

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so they converted them into $48 million in cash through Morgan Stanley.

To sum up, so far, we have seen evidence of how Energix receives undue subsidies and exercises undue influence. Now we pose the question, would Energix’s willingness to hurt communities overseas manifest in Virginia? We think it does. In Virginia, Energix can’t take the land like they can in Palestine. But they can use heavy metal toxic solar panels that 95 percent of the world does not use. Well, why does Energix use these cadmium telluride panels? They use the panels exclusively to lock in the 30 percent federal investment tax credit that we talked about with Morgan Stanley. Energix committed to buy $120 million in cadmium telluride panels in 2019 to lock in a maximum 30 percent federal investment tax credit.

This photo shows the devastation of cadmium telluride solar panels after a tornado shattered Desert Sunlight Solar in the Mojave Desert. Almost 200,000 panels were treated as toxic waste.

Well, what do federal government agencies say about the toxic cadmium telluride? This is the Environmental Protection Agency. They say that cadmium telluride is on the toxic substances control list. Next one is the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It’s on the hazards identification list. They say that cadmium telluride is harmful if swallowed, harmful when there’s skin contact, harmful if inhaled, and harmful to aquatic life. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) considers cadmium telluride hazardous.

Now we go to our pushback. We tried to educate community stakeholders, both county officials and people who live in the surrounding area. It’s basically an education campaign. We 26

presented in front of boards of supervisors about Energix’s violations of human rights.

We also accessed a special map that was made by the Department of Conservation and Recreation. If you just plug in the coordinates of the land, then all this overlapping comes in. If you see the brown area, that will tell you that those solar panels are to be erected on land that is vulnerable, or that has historic antebellum mansions, or that is vulnerable in some other kind of way—there are many Civil War battlefields in Virginia.

So that is another tactic that we used [to explain] why you shouldn’t locate on this land. We warned them of the dangers of the solar panels and especially the need to mandate recycling contracts in the permitting documents. To this date we have never seen a contract for recycling.

All right, [we will show] how we have pushed back. Our victory is really our win in Dinwiddie County. Those are the board of supervisors. They voted five to zero not to let Energix in.

Then the article below it. Energix had to withdraw from Franklin County, because they wanted to put those panels right near Smith Mountain Lake. That did not make those people happy.

You can see that the word has gotten around about these solar panels and their toxicity. In five counties, they will not allow these panels in Virginia. And then you’ll see we’re starting to have lawsuits against Energix and the board of supervisors.

I want to thank the Eject Energix team, some of whom are here today, as well as our partner organizations such as the American Friends Service Committee for their research on Energix and greenwashing. We welcome all Virginians to join our team and anyone can sign our petition. Thank you.

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Questions and Answers: Paul Noursi and Jeanne Trabulsi

Questions and Answers Grant F. Smith: All right. Keep those question cards coming.

Julia, what have we got in terms of Zoom questions coming in?

Julia Pitner: There are several questions about how people can get involved with the work that you’re doing in Virginia, and how they can replicate it in their own states.

Jeanne Trabulsi: I would suggest going to our website and emailing us, and we will get back to you.

Paul Noursi: I’d add that you could also—you know, in your own state, there are organizations already that are probably concerned about Palestinian human rights. This is really a human rights issue. If you can just reach out to those organizations and pull them together, whether it’s Jewish Voice for Peace, or American Muslims for Palestine, or ADC, or whatever, it’s basically a coalition effort. But do reach out to us like Jeanne suggested. We’d be happy to help.

Julia Pitner: I know that there are a lot of other states that have those type of economic, Jewish state relation boards.

Paul Noursi: Yes. Julia Pitner: Do you have an idea about how many?

Paul Noursi: Well, this is the only one that we know of that’s actually in state government. Right? In other states, my understanding is they have chambers of commerce.

Julia Pitner: This is for Jeanne. Why does Energix get federal tax credits for using toxic cadmium telluride? Why are they continuing to get federal tax credits?

Jeanne Trabulsi: Because Grant has done an article on this, I’m going to defer this to him.

Grant F. Smith: So the solar energy tax credit by the federal government is panel neutral. Energix could have gotten the same tax credit for using silicon solar panels. They simply chose to go, again, with the solar panels only five percent of the market uses. So, why did they do that? I think it’s, again, as Jeanne said, an indication that they’re bringing their worst practices in from overseas.

Julia Pitner: And this is for Paul. What states have been successful, like Virginia, in fighting the anti-BDS laws that are percolating?

Paul Noursi: I’m actually not sure. I know we hear about the bad news usually first. So we know places like New York, Governor [Andrew] Cuomo introduced an executive order so there’s one there. We know there’s one in Maryland, same thing. We know there’s one in West Virginia. We know about Texas. That’s notorious. So there are about 10 to 20 states which don’t have such bills.

The executive orders are less permanent. You know, if the governor puts an executive order—so New York now has a

new governor. So people in New York should be approaching the new governor and asking her to rescind the executive order which Governor Cuomo had done. Same in Maryland—well, Maryland will have a new governor next year, I think. So, same thing. But, sorry, I don’t know the exact states which don’t have them.

Julia Pitner: Do you find it more effective to object to those kinds of laws using the First Amendment?

Paul Noursi: Absolutely. That’s the most significant impact on the most people in each state. Right? It’s going to suppress free speech for every single person in that state. If HB 1161 had passed, anybody wanting to do business with the State of Virginia would have been affected. So that’s one thing to point out. It’s a First Amendment issue. You know, the First Amendment is like you can’t get a more basic constitutional right than that. But the other thing that’s also very important that we should point out is that this is an attack on the free speech of human rights activity. BDS is a human rights movement.

So it’s important to point out, and that’s why we call ourselves the Virginia Coalition for Human Rights because, ultimately, the attack on free speech is to silence us so that they can violate human rights with impunity. We don’t want them to do that.

We are going to speak out whether they like it or not, you know, to protect human rights. That’s what it really comes down to, and it would be a mistake to not mention that because it’s not just free speech. Free speech is a very important factor, yes, but it’s also a human rights issue. So I think it’s both of those issues that should be brought up.

Julia Pitner: And you had mentioned in some of your remarks that anti-Semitism is illegal in Virginia. Could you explain that a little bit more?

Paul Noursi: Yeah. I mean like any racism, anti-Semitism is racist. It’s a form of racism. The Virginia Human Rights Law, (Advertisement)

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there is a Human Rights Act which already includes that antiSemitism is considered illegal, as it should be. Our only concern was how it is defined. It can’t be defined in a way to suppress free speech or legitimate criticism of any issue, especially a human rights issue.

Julia Pitner: So there are also several questions about how people can start these kinds of advocacy groups in their own states. How do you replicate some of the work that you’ve done especially with the textbooks and the anti-BDS legislation?

Jeanne Trabulsi: You know I can only tell you what we did.

We started with two people, and then there were three. And then there were four and five. And then Paul said, well, are there any educators here? And there were two. He said, would you mind taking on the education? So that’s how the education committee started. Honestly, I don’t know how the Eject Energix committee started. We’ve been doing it for so long.

Paul Noursi: Yeah. I forget. It was basically a VIAB project.

We were trying to find out what VIAB was up to, and that was one of the things they were up to. It clicked for human rights because not only did VIAB help this Israeli company unfairly, kind of gave them an unfair advantage against American companies and Virginia companies, but Energix was a company that was implicated in human rights violations. So it was exactly the type of thing that we would want to do as supporters of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. That’s what we want to do. We don’t want to give business to companies or people that commit human rights violations.

But, yeah, please look at our website to participate, especially if you live in Virginia. But even if not, contact us. We do have contacts in some other states as well. So it’s <vchr.org.> Grant F. Smith: Thank you.

Julia Pitner: That was very encouraging. Something we can all do in our states throughout this country. Thank you so much. ■

Joint Israel/Lobby Infiltration of Civil Rights Group Exposed Edward Ahmed Mitchell

PHOTO PHIL PASQUINI

Delinda Hanley: Our next speaker is Edward Ahmed Mitchell. He is an attorney and a former journalist who serves as the deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR, the largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States. He is going to discuss lessons from the CAIR espionage incident, “How American Groups Working for Human Rights C a n Ta k e M e a s u r e s Against Joint Israel/Lobby Espionage and Infiltration Operations.”

Mr. Mitchell previously served as the executive director of CAIR Georgia from 2016 to 2020. Before joining CAIR Georgia, Mitchell practiced law as a criminal prosecutor for the city of Atlanta and worked as a freelance journalist for the Atlanta Journal-Con28

stitution. Mitchell received his law degree from Georgetown University Law Center where he won first place in the law school’s annual trial advocacy competition. He served as editor-in-chief of the Georgetown Law Weekly and was elected president of the Muslim Law Student Association.

Please help us welcome Edward Ahmed Mitchell.

Edward Ahmed Mitchell: Good morning everyone. It’s a pleasure to be with all of you. On behalf of our entire civil rights organization, I thank you for hosting this event and inviting us to participate.

I also want to thank you all for the accommodation allowing me to appear virtually. My wife and I are expecting a new addition to our family soon, God willing. So I am staying close

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Edward Ahmed Mitchell: Joint Israel/Lobby Infiltration of Civil Rights Group Exposed

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to home and avoiding crowds. But it’s a pleasure to be with you virtually. I hope to see all of you in person one day soon, God willing.

I’ve been asked today to speak about the issue of surveillance; of infiltration; of the intersection between anti-Muslim bigo t r y, a n t i - P a l e s t i n i a n racism, and how extremists who share both of those ideologies have attempted to target the Muslim community in order to undermine our advocacy for Palestinian human rights. This is an issue that is very important to our community and I think it’s an issue that’s very important to our country. I’m happy to discuss it with you today.

Before I dive in, I want to start by telling you a little bit about CAIR. First and foremost, CAIR is our nation’s largest Muslim civil rights organization. We were founded back in 1994. Our mission is to promote justice, protect civil rights, empower American Muslims and enhance the public’s understanding of Islam.

We’ve been doing that now for almost 30 years.

We are known very much for winning important court cases, defending the right of Muslims to practice their faith, and to engage in free speech. Relevant to all of you, we have defeated multiple anti-boycott laws in multiple states including Georgia and Texas. And we’re continuing that important work.

We also vocally speak out for not only civil rights here at home but human rights overseas. We have been very critical of the Chinese government over its ongoing genocide of Uyghur Muslims. We’ve been critical of the UAE and Saudi Arabia for the war crimes they’re committing in Yemen. We’ve been very critical of Myanmar for the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims. And, of course, we’ve been very critical of the Israeli government for the ongoing occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people.

All of that work together has made us, you could say, enemy number one for anti-Muslim hate groups here in the United States. There is no Muslim group they hate more than CAIR. All you’ve got to do is Google our name and you will find that they obsess over us. We get to, as the kids say, live in their heads rent free, so to speak. We take that as a good sign. The fact that they hate us so much is a sign that we are doing good and important work.

But we also are hated by people around the world who support injustice and oppression. We have had to deal with literally foreign dictators and foreign governments targeting our organization. I’ll give you a few examples. The United Arab Emirates literally put us and numerous other Muslim groups on a list of terrorists.

They designated us as terrorists because we advocated for the right to free speech, the right to protest,

the right to vote during the Arab Spring.

The Bush administration put CAIR and numerous other American Muslim groups on a list of unindicted co-conspirators during a trial back around 2007, 2008. Last year, Chinese hackers launched a massive cyberattack on us in an attempt to take down some of our systems that failed—it was actually very serious—in response to our criticism of what’s being done to Uyghur Muslims.

Here in America of course, as I mentioned, not only antiMuslim hate groups target us, but many groups that are considered mainstream parts of the community—like the AntiDefamation League—are very hostile and very publicly critical of our civil rights work. So I can’t fail to say that when you are out there on the battlefield of civil rights, when you’re advocating for justice for all people, it’s dangerous work.

It attracts a lot of enemies. We expect that. We account for it. We’re used to it. We can deal with it. We’re big boys and big girls. That’s part of the job of being a civil rights attorney.

The NAACP was called anti-American and communist back in the day. We all know what was said about Dr. King and Brother Malcolm and others. Again this is part of the job and we expect it.

One of the things that we also have grown to expect and prepare for is the possibility of infiltration and spying. This was, as you know, done to Black civil rights groups and Black leaders back in the ‘60s, ‘70s and beyond. Infiltrated with informants and undercover agents to spy on their work, to undermine their work. Because when you cannot defeat someone’s message, you attack the messenger and you try to undermine the messenger.

This has especially been done to people who support Palestinian human rights. You all will know that at one point antiapartheid activists here in the United States were spied upon because the Israeli government and the South African apartheid government had a close relationship. It was actually the Anti-Defamation League in California that spied on antiapartheid activists and got sued over it and had to settle a few decades ago.

Of course, American Muslims are no stranger to being targeted and spied upon. It’s happened to numerous Muslim organizations. Perhaps the most famous example of this was when the NYPD launched a systematic campaign of spying on Muslims in New York, on student centers, on mosques and organizations that went on for years in the wake of 9/11 until it was exposed and shut down.

So I feel I have to say that spying is a serious May 2022

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problem. It’s something that we expect and we prepare for. But, name. You may know him. You know, a far-right extremist. Back nonetheless, we were certainly surprised by something that in 1995 he became somewhat infamous for claiming that the happened to our organization over the past few years. That’s Oklahoma City bombing was likely perpetrated by Middle what I’m going to tell you about today.

Easterners. Then over the years he became very well known Some of you may have seen the news. If not, we’re going to and very prominent in right-wing circles, anti-Muslim circles. go into some of the details. But to give you the headline, an He appeared on Fox News quite a bit. He touted himself as anti-Muslim hate group here in the United States working for a so-called terrorism expert. His organization is very hostile the benefit of a foreign government—the Israeli government— to Muslims, very hostile to Palestinians, very supportive of spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in over ten years to inthe Israeli government’s policies. So he just dedicated his filtrate and spy upon American Muslim organizations. Let me time, I mean his organization, to targeting and smearing say it again. An antiAmerican Muslim lead(Advertisement) Muslim hate group here ers and organizations. in the United States, that In around 2015, I beis a registered non-profit lieve, he went on Fox organization, spent over and he said something $100,000 in over ten that was dumb even for years infiltrating and him. He claimed that a spying upon American city in England, [BirmMuslim organizations iningham] was a no-go cluding mosques, civil zone, that the police rights groups and indicould not go there bevidual leaders—all for cause it had been taken the benefit of a foreign over by Muslims. He government. was ridiculed for this. He That is what we had to apologize. British learned and exposed Prime Minister David over the past year, and Cameron called him a that’s what I’m going to complete idiot. talk to you about today.

After that he kind of Then we’re going to talk was pushed out of even about why this is so imconservative circles. portant to be aware of You didn’t see him on and what we can do to Fox anymore. He beprotect our work, our accame kind of a nobody, Playgrounds for Palestine is a project to build playgrounds tivism, our civil rights adbut he was still active for our children. It is a minimal recognition of their right v o c a c y, o u r h u m a n writing his articles and to childhood and creative expression. It is an act of love. rights advocacy from posting things online. these attempts to underWe were aware of him, Playgrounds for Palestine (PfP) is a registered 501(c)3 nonmine our work. obviously tracking him, profit organization, established in 2001. We’re an all-volunThe first thing I want but he seemed to have teer organization (no paid staff) that raises money throughto note is this: In the fall faded away as a serious out the year to construct playgrounds and fund programs of 2020, we at CAIR rethreat to the American for children in Palestine. ceived a very mysteriMuslim community. ous email from someNow that brings us to Selling Organic, Fair Trade Palestinone claiming that they the email we got about ian olive oil is PfP’s principle source of had worked for an antitwo years ago. A former fundraising. This year, PfP launched Muslim hate group IPT member reached AIDA, a private label olive oil from known as the Investigaout to us and said: “I’ve Palestinian farmers. Please come by and tive Project on Terrorism got information you may taste it at our table.

[IPT]. This is a right-wing want, there is a mole in We hope you’ll love it and make it a staple in your pantry. organization founded by your organization.” That’s For more information or to make a donation visit: Steven Emerson. Many all this person said. Now https://playgroundsforpalestine.org • P.O. Box 559 • Yardley, PA 19067 of you may know Mr. of course we didn’t Emerson. Google his know. Is this true? Is it 30

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Edward Ahmed Mitchell: Joint Israel/Lobby Infiltration of Civil Rights Group Exposed

not true? Is this person a crackpot? We didn’t know. So over the following months this person sent us information, a considerable amount of information about the inner workings of IPT and what they have been doing.

What this information showed pretty clearly was that there was indeed likely a mole somewhere within our civil rights organization. That this mole had been providing private conversations, recording conversations, emails, strategy work to IPT, to this antiMuslim hate group. Now, as many of you know, we will later find out that the person doing this was the director of CAIR Columbus, Ohio, Romin Iqbal. We found that out months later. Obviously, after a long investigation, he was confronted. He admitted it and he was terminated.

Now that by itself is disturbing enough.

But that is not the end of the story because we also learned from this whistleblower that IPT, this organization, this hate group is not only targeting CAIR. They were targeting the broader Muslim community. They were targeting mosques. They were targeting interfaith organizations. They were targeting Muslim leaders. They were using paid spies to do it. They were paying their staff and external spies a considerable amount of money to spy on the Muslim community, to record private conversations among Muslim leaders, to go to events undercover and record those things with hidden cameras—cameras in purses and other ridiculous things— and then turn that over to IPT. Even more disturbing, we learned what they were doing with some of this information. Let me show you a few examples. Again their first target, the main target was us. It was CAIR. They hate CAIR because of our advocacy for not only Palestinian rights but against Islamophobia. Here is just one email.

This is a conversation that Romin Iqbal passed along to IPT. As you all know, government officials often appear before Congress to answer questions. Civil rights groups, advocacy groups, will often encourage members of Congress to ask questions of those government officials. Perfectly normal work.

So of course CAIR did that at a hearing. Mr. Iqbal then informed IPT that, hey, look, CAIR gave some suggested questions to Representative Keith Ellison to ask of the FBI director.

This is one example of information he was sharing. Anything about our national work, our strategic work was what Romin Iqbal wanted to get a hold of and wanted to pass along. Especially anything related to our interactions with the government and to our advocacy for human rights, in particular Palestine.

This is another email in which you can see Steven Emerson saying to his own staff, “Romin is covering this event. A Hill

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Day, a Capitol Hill Day in New York. Romin is covering this for us, so be prepared for an avalanche of incoming tapes during that period.”

So this was how they were targeting us internally. But again not just us. They were also going after external Muslim leaders and organizations. Let’s talk about that now. One of the most disturbing examples we have, many of you recall the controversy over Park 51. So back in 2010 anti-Muslim hate groups rallied opposition to the expansion of a Muslim community center located several blocks away from the World Trade Center site.

What we found out through this whistleblower is that IPT managed to infiltrate one, if not more, national Muslim strategy calls about how to address that controversy. They recorded that conversation, produced a massive transcript of it, and turned it over to IPT. Park 51, Sister Daisy Khan, one of the leaders of that project, believes that that infiltration allowed antiMuslim hate groups to predict their moves and undermine their moves and eventually cause serious harm to that project.

This is just the first page of a very long transcript that IPT created of that conversation. You can see here that nearly all major Muslim organizations—CAIR, MPAC [the Muslim Public Affairs Council], Zaytuna College, the Islamic Society of North America, the Institute for Social Policy Understanding and other Muslim organizations—were recorded on this call.

It’s important to note that what IPT was doing, paying people to spy, was not only unethical. It was in some cases illegal. As you all know, to record someone without permission in numerous states is against the law. Yet IPT was systematically doing that to Muslim leaders and organizations across the country.

Now we also learned some other things I’m not going into.

IPT, we learned, is very abusive to their staff. This is the subject line that Mr. Emerson sent to his staff: “To all the effing idiots who work for me.” He was very upset because his people had apparently missed recording some Arab Spring event being held at Georgetown University.

Here’s another email where he is cursing at his staff and threatening to fire people because they missed coverage of an event held by the Muslim Alliance in North America [MANA].

That’s an African American Muslim group based in New York.

That’s also disturbing, but not the end of the story. We also learned that IPT was collaborating, and working with, and providing assistance to the Israeli government.

Let’s show you a few emails we have here. So as you can see here, the title of this email, Mr. Emerson allegedly forwards

It’s important to note that what IPT was doing, paying people to spy...was in some cases illegal.

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an email from the Office of Prime Minister Netanyahu to his own staff. The title of this is “Urgent Research Request From Netanyahu Office.” It reads, “This is an urgent high priority request from the Office of PM Netanyahu. Who can work on this right now? This is urgent. Steve.”

Mr. Emerson, according to these emails, was allegedly in touch with multiple Israeli intelligence officials, including Ido Mizrahi, who identifies himself in these emails as a senior intelligence official working in Netanyahu’s office. As well as General Yossi Kuperwasser, a former Israeli general, who also worked in Israeli intelligence. And in these emails you can see numerous conversations. At one point the Israeli government asked IPT: Do you have any information connecting Students for Justice in Palestine, the American college student group, to Hamas?

Again they are reaching out to an American non-profit organization asking this organization, this hate group that’s spying on Muslims, for information about SJP. College students. American college students. And again you can see in these emails—and this is online, by the way, you can read any of this. So, again, what this indicated to us is that not only was Mr. Emerson targeting American Muslims and spreading Islamophobia. He was at the same time actively collaborating with and working with a foreign government.

Now the next thing I want to note here is—oh, if you go and read some of these in detail online, you’ll also see Mr. Emerson mentioning his travels to Tel Aviv and meeting with these intelligence officials in person. So God knows whatever else they were saying to each other that we don’t know about yet.

Now I want to note that we were able to find this out, all this out, because a brave whistleblower within IPT decided to come forward and tell us what was going on. In addition to that, after we gathered a lot of this information, we were able to identify another spy. Not in our organization. In the broader Muslim community. That person voluntarily came forward before anyone confronted him, and confessed, and offered to help and provide us extensive information. Through him we were able to learn that IPT was paying money to spies to do this work. We were also able to learn more about IPT’s motivations.

I’m going to show you now just two quotes from each of these whistleblowers. They have full statements we posted online, but I’m just going to show you a few quotes that talk about motive. So this is the whistleblower who worked within IPT. This is what they sent us. This is a direct quote from them in their

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public statement: “I came to realize that IPT’s main concern was not protecting our nation from legitimate threats but protecting a foreign government, Israel, from legitimate criticism.

We were essentially being used as an Israel lobbying organization. Demonizing people who simply have opinions we may not agree with has become a sport; yet, I was doing it as part of my job.”

Now this person I want to say—we’re not identifying their names publicly, but they have spoken obviously to some reporters. But I want to say that they are incredibly brave. They are a testament to the human capacity to change, to recognize that we’ve done something wrong, and then to do the right thing.

This person spent years targeting American Muslims, trying to undermine the fight for Palestinian human rights. They came around. They realized what they were doing was wrong. They stepped up and they did the right thing to try to make things right.

That’s why we, as Muslims I would say, we always try to make sure that we give people a chance to do the right thing. We always try to make sure that we recognize our opponents. Even our enemies are human beings and they all have the capacity, the ability to change for the better. So I just want to say, about this individual, we are so appreciative of their doing the right thing. Of recognizing that the Muslim community is a part of America and does not deserve to be treated this way. And recognizing that Palestinian human rights matter.

I want to share a quote from another individual. This is the second person.

This is a Muslim who spied on the community. He was paid about $3,000 a month, give or take, for four years to spy on our community, in particular, Black Muslims and Representative Keith Ellison. IPT compiled like a 60-page dossier on Keith Ellison. They were obsessed, I mean obsessed with anything this man thought or said about Palestinian human rights and about American policy toward Palestine.

In fact, we learned that at one point they infiltrated and secretly recorded a private fundraiser that Mr. Ellison spoke at in which he was critical of American foreign policy in the Middle East towards Israel and Palestine. IPT took that audio recording, held on to it, and then leaked it when Keith Ellison was running for chairman of the Democratic National Committee. At that point the ADL attacked him. Other organizations attacked him and that harmed his campaign for DNC chair.

I will now read to you a quote from the person who did that recording—another spy for IPT who again recognized what

...as Muslims, I would say, we always try to make sure that we give people a chance to do the right thing.

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Edward Ahmed Mitchell: Joint Israel/Lobby Infiltration of Civil Rights Group Exposed

Muslim American women show their support for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders during his campaign rally on May 24, 2016 in Riverside, CA. they did was wrong and quit and confessed: “Looking back on those times, it’s now clear to me that Emerson’s main goal in spying on Muslims was to protect the Israeli government; essentially, to ensure there would never be a ‘Muslim AIPAC’ to challenge U.S. support for Israel.” Emerson’s goal was to make sure that the Muslim community would never become powerful enough to change American foreign policy in the Middle East in a more humanitarian and just way, a fairer way, changing American foreign policy towards Israel and Palestine. He said that was IPT’s main goal in targeting Muslims. Yes, they’re antiMuslim. Yes, they’re Islamophobic. But the main reason they put so much time and energy into doing all this was to undermine Muslims, swamp us dealing with bigotry, so we can’t improve American foreign policy in the Middle East.

Again that wasn’t the end of the story. Disturbing enough, but again not the end of the story. The last piece of this puzzle is that IPT, again, was using and spending a considerable amount of money to pay the spies and their staff to do this work. Where did they get this money from? Well, we just released a report just a few months ago that was a follow-up to a report released in 2017. The report is called “Islamophobia in the Mainstream.”

This report looks at mainstream charitable foundations that are giving money to anti-Muslim hate groups. What we do is we look at the list of prominent anti-Muslim hate groups. We then check to see where they are getting their donations from.

We also look at foundations, the biggest foundations in America and look to see who they are giving money to. Then we check and cross check to see where we’re seeing a match here.

So in 2017 we released a report showing that about $150 million had been funneled from mainstream charities, foundations, to antiMuslim hate groups. We exposed that. We spoke out against it.

Then we did a follow-up report, again, just a few months ago that showed the number dropped by almost $50 million. A $50 million reduction in the amount of money going from charitable foundations to anti-Muslim hate groups. But still a massive amount of money, $105 million give or take. And this is just of the 50 largest charitable organizations in the United States that we surveyed.

One of those anti-Muslim hate groups that got a lot of money from mainstream foundations was IPT. We also know from public reporting, thanks to the work of journalists, that what IPT has done in some cases is take money from the non-profit and transfer it allegedly to SAE Productions which is a for-profit company run by Steven Emerson. It’s SAE Productions that is then used to pay the spy. That was used to pay one of the spies they had in the Muslim community. We know that because that spy gave us his tax form literally showing money coming from SAE Productions.

So what kind of money did IPT get? Through a donor-advised fund run by Fidelity Charitable gift fund, IPT got $67,240 in 2017.

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Why I’m Running for Congress Huwaida Arraf

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give us that freedom and opportunity. We didn’t have a lot growing up, but we weren’t in want of anything. And I had what I believe was one of the most valuable things a person, a child, could have, and that is the belief that they could be or do anything.

I remember we used to go back to Palestine when I was young. I was so proud to be an American.

I would show off. I would brag to my cousins that I’m an American. I had my little flag, and I would tell them how one day I was going to be the president of the greatest country ever. And then I had a rude awakening. At the age of five, I was in Beit Sahour at my favorite aunt’s house, and excited, excited to be going to visit the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and wanting my aunt to come with us. And she just kept saying she couldn’t go. Only 15 minutes away. But of course at the age of five, I didn’t know why she couldn’t go. And I was saying, please, you have to come, it’s so great. And then she said it’s because of Reagan and your America that I can’t go.

I was stunned, like shattered, standing there with tears in my eyes. What do you mean my America? As I grew older, I came to realize that, yes, the country that I was so proud of, the country that stands for freedom, democracy, human rights, shining a light on to the world—that is not what our policies do. Not just in Palestine, but in so many countries and right here at home.

When I graduated from college, I decided to go over to Palestine because I knew that I had an opportunity because of what my parents were able to do. But so many people and so many Palestinians don’t have the same. I wanted to give back in any way that I could. I felt I had a responsibility, and I went over to Palestine to originally work for a U.S.-based organization that was supposed to deal in conflict resolution.

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Delinda Hanley: We twisted Huwaida Arraf’s arm to give you a couple of minutes of her time.

She has spoken at previous conferences. We didn’t know she was available this time. Sometimes she has a baby in her arms or other things going on. But this time she is coming alone to tell you what she is up to. She is running for office and we’ll let her tell us all why.

Huwaida Arraf: Hi, good afternoon, everyone.

It is, as usual, a great honor and pleasure to be here with such committed activists. On top of everything else that you do in your daily lives, you are active on human rights issues, and specifically one of the most defining justice issues of our day. So, it is my honor to be amongst you and an extra honor to be asked to share a few words.

So, I am a longtime Palestinian human rights activist. I’m a civil rights attorney and now I am running for U.S. Congress [in Michigan’s 10th Congressional District]. I am a proud daughter of Palestinian immigrants, who made their way to this country when my mom was nine months pregnant with me. And now I’m the oldest of five children. They left behind everything that they knew in Palestine. They weren’t kicked out. My father’s village is still there, inside ‘48. So he’s a citizen of the State of Israel but of course, as you all know, not equal at all. We’re a demographic threat to the State of Israel.

And then my mom is from the West Bank town of Beit Sahour, which is under Israeli military occupation. And the situation today in all of occupied Palestine is as bad as it has ever been. But back then, my parents decided to leave because they knew that their future children—the baby, me, in my mom’s belly—would not have a chance to know freedom and opportunity if they had stayed.

My father found a union job in Michigan working with General Motors. He worked hard every single day of his life to

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Huwaida Arraf: Why I’m Running for Congress

Marching for Peace and Justice And then the Palestinian Intifada broke out—the Second Intifada in 2000. And if some of you remember, thousands of Palestinians were taking to the streets in protest, largely unarmed men, women and children. I was marching with them, marching with them to say, yes, we want peace but there’s got to be justice first. There’s got to be an end to the colonization first. We had been in the peace process for over seven years, and Israel had expanded its colonization, its theft of our land, while the world tells us to wait. We’re done with this façade.

We want our freedom. Marching in the streets and the Israeli military, one of the most powerful militaries in the world, just coming at us with full force and opening fire in what the world was saying is Palestinian violence. [The world said] we walked away from the negotiating table and just showed Israel trying to control Palestinian violence.

Well, within one month, 127 Palestinians were shot dead mainly from bullet wounds to the chest and head area, according to Israeli journalist Amira Hass. So it wasn’t that the Israelis were just trying to control, you know, Palestinian riots, if you want to call them riots. No, they were shooting to kill. And so after a month of these protests—these men, women, children marching in the streets—that died down. It wasn’t because Palestinians were afraid to sacrifice or no longer willing to die for their freedom. No, it was because of what was happening and they realized the larger scale. Not only were we being shot dead in the streets, but nobody was holding Israel accountable.

Certainly the mainstream media wasn’t reporting on it the way they’re reporting on Ukraine today. And it was the Palestinians’ fault for jumping in front of Israeli bullets and walking away from the peace table; Yasser Arafat going back to his terrorist roots; Palestinians showing that they just want to throw the Jews into the sea. All of that that we hear over and over and over again in a way to dehumanize Palestinians.

But that was the situation. What do I do? [I was] young, naive, just graduated from college, I needed to be able to do something. I ended up co-founding the International Solidarity Movement, which many of you know. [It was] a way to globalize the Palestinian struggle for freedom, to tell the world, to help tell the world what Palestinians are struggling for, to help change the way the mainstream media was reporting, to report word of mouth, to try to provide some protective accompaniment. And some of you know that we had a couple of our members also killed, our international volunteers, for daring to do that.

One of the most important things I think that international solidarity did was to provide Palestinians with a sense of hope that they weren’t alone. That somebody, maybe not the mainstream media, maybe not the governments, but somebody cared. And somebody who could travel would go back to try to spread the word about what was happening. Now there are thousands upon thousands of ISM volunteers around the world doing work in their own home countries, BDS campaigns, occupying Elbit,

to change the policies of the governments that are allowing Israel to sustain its crimes in Palestine.

I’m not standing in front of Israeli soldiers anymore. I’m not on the boat sailing to Gaza anymore, as we did, to try to challenge Israel’s navy enclosure. I’m now living back in the district where I was raised, raising my own two young kids because Israel doesn’t allow my husband to get into Palestine. Actually, [Grant F. Smith] mentioned last night that my husband [Adam Shapiro] was one of the first speakers that IRmep had at their first [Capitol Hill Forum].

If I’m going to just digress a little bit, in 2002, Israel had reinvaded all Palestinian cities. And my husband and I and other ISM volunteers were scrambling to try to help ambulances, and to try to block the military. We put internationals in Yasser Arafat’s compound. We put internationals in the Church of the Nativity to try to stop the violence by drawing more international attention to what was happening. And Adam got an invitation to come speak in Washington.

We weren’t married then; we were scheduled to be married.

And he was telling me he got this invitation [from IRmep’s Grant F. Smith] to come speak on Capitol Hill. And I said, “go. You have to tell people what’s happening.” We didn’t really have social media back then. And we knew the mainstream media wasn’t reporting. Right? I’m like, “you have to go and tell them what’s happening.” And he pulled me aside and he said, “I don’t want to go.” I was like, “you have to go. Why, what?” We were literally scheduled to be married the next month. He said, “because I don’t believe that you’re going to follow me.” “I am not going to stand you up at the altar, just go and do what you have to do, and I’ll be there.”

But you know what, two weeks before I was scheduled to get married, I was arrested for helping to get volunteers into the Church of the Nativity. And I wouldn’t leave because Israel wanted to deport me, and I refused. So I was arrested, and I started thinking, ah, shoot, I might actually stand him up at the altar. Anyway, that worked itself out.

So we are raising our kids now back in Michigan. I was working as a civil rights attorney in Detroit. And like so many people, I had to leave the workforce to help homeschool our kids. And when it came time for me to think about going back to work, I was looking at the state of our country. Sure, I could go back to the courtroom and fight for people’s civil rights but when the laws being legislated are rolling our civil rights back instead of expanding them, there’s got to be something more that I could do.

The woman currently representing us in Congress is horrible and has not failed to vote against every single piece of legislation that could help working families in our district. In addition, she is constantly very divisive in all of her statements. So I thought, we need more good people in Congress, making laws, people that care about people, and so I’m going to challenge her.

And what makes me qualified to challenge her? I’ve never run for office before. I spent a long time fighting for Palestinian human rights. But also around me, my neighbors in Macomb, Michigan, there are human rights violations being committed May 2022

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COURTESY HUWAIDAFORCONGRESS.COM

every single day. It’s not the I do believe that up against same that I saw in Palestine those forces that will come in for sure. But just two weeks with their millions to smear and ago, my kids and I did a “Walk slander me and the work that for Warmth” because so many I’ve done, up against that, we of our neighbors can’t afford to have an army here and around heat their homes in Michigan the country. And if you stand winters. with me, I am prepared. I am When you have to decide prepared, and I believe that we between putting food on the can win. table and heating your home, When I was running origiyou are not free. When you nally, when I declared that I send your kids to school and was running against my current don’t know if they’re going to representative, the district was be coming home because legvery Republican. All right, so islators are too afraid to pass they needed somebody like me gun safety laws, you are not who was energetic and who free. When you have to ration would be able to raise money your medications, when you and go challenge this Republiare afraid to go to the hospital can, but they didn’t really think because you can’t afford the that I would win. So it was, hospital bill, you are not free. Huwaida Arraf (r) poses with her husband, Adam Shapiro (l), and sure, big support for me. It their two children.

So my qualification to run for doesn’t matter that I was PalesCongress is that I have fought for human rights for most of my tinian. Right? But then redistricting happened and I got drawn adult life and I believe in putting people at the center of our into a district that’s 50-50. Right? And there’s no sitting incumpolicy, whether foreign or right here at home. That’s what we bent. So much more likely that I could actually win. need to be doing. And that’s what we are not doing.

Now I’m hearing, oh, we don’t know if this district is ready for We have a small number of legislators that do, do that, that someone like you. And they expected that I would agree and aren’t beholden to the big corporations, the big money, and the drop out of the race. And I said, in 2022 we’re not talking about special interests that pour millions and millions of dollars to electability politics. Don’t tell me that you support diversity and control the way that this country is run and what interests we because I’m a woman of color, or a progressive woman of color, elevate, and what interests we trample on.

I can’t win this district. Or if you think that I can’t win this district It’s not easy. Yes, I’m prepared for the attacks. They are because of my past work on Palestinian rights, you should also going to come. They are going to say what they usually say, be ashamed of yourself because it is the timidity, the fear, and that Palestinians are terrorists. One of the hardest parts is that the corruption that is in this party in the first place that is allowit takes so much money. And it’s going to take so much more ing what is happening in Palestine. And so whether it’s because to fight this. All I hear every single day is how much did you I’m a woman of color, or that I’ve done Palestinian rights acraise? How much call time are you doing? tivism, neither one of them are the reason why I am going to That’s not what running for office should be. I should be out drop out of this race and why an older white man is more qualthere. Instead of spending four and six hours on the phone ified to run for this seat than I am. asking people for money, I should be out there talking to the But it is going to be tough, but I’m telling you that I’m ready people that I want to represent. That is the messed up state of for it. And I just hope you’ll stand with me. Let me end by just our campaign finance system, which controls not only how cansaying the time is ripe. We’ve made so much progress. didates run. When you actually get into office, what legislation We’ve made progress because of all of the things that orgathat’s put forth, how it’s voted on, it’s controlled by who is writing nizations like the Washington Report and so many others the big checks. We all know that. This is nothing new. Right? have done, and the work that you have done for so long, for Well, let me tell you what else I’m facing. I mean, people are years and decades. So in a way my run for Congress is saying oh, it’s brave, that you’re running for Congress and standing on the shoulders of you who are here. being that I am Palestinian, and that I do expect these attacks I feel honored to be a part of the work that’s being done this to come. Just two weeks ago, I had a long conversation with a way. And I feel hopeful as to what we can do. I think that not longtime member of the [Democratic] Party. And he was saying only have we been laying the groundwork, but we have set it are you sure? They are going to drag your name through the up so someone like me today can not only run for Congress, mud. They are going to ruin everything that you’ve worked for. but we can show them that someone like me can run for ConI said I’m ready for these attacks. The time has certainly come. gress and can win. That is what we’re going to do together.

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Rev. Don Wagner: The Widespread Influence of Christian Zionism and Growing Backlash Inside American Churches

So thank you for the years of hard work. I know it hasn’t been easy. It might not get easier. But things are opening up. So watch my election or my campaign, my race. Please if you’re not following yet, Google Huwaidaforcongress.com, you will

see me running for Michigan’s 10th Congressional District. I look forward to staying engaged with you and hopefully, in the future, to making you proud as the next Palestinian American member of Congress. Thank you. ■

The Widespread Influence of Christian Zionism and Growing Backlash Inside American Churches Rev. Don Wagner

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Dale Sprusansky: Don Wagner is the recently retired director of Friends of Sabeel North America.

Prior to that, he was a professor of Middle East Studies at North Park University where he was also the director of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

He is also a former director of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign. He is an ordained Presbyterian minister who has served churches in New Jersey and Evanston, IL. He is the co-author of five books. He has one coming out called, Glory to God in the Lowest: Journeys to an Unholy Land, which you can pre-order today or buy online at our bookstore MiddleEast Books.com.

He will be discussing the widespread influence of Christian Zionism and growing backlash inside American churches. We discussed this topic one other time at our conference with Thomas Getman and it’s one of our most popular YouTube videos. I’m sure Don is worthy to follow that talk. So welcome, Don. Don Wagner: Thank you, Dale. Thank you to the whole staff and all of you. Let me begin with a little vignette I got from our friend Mary Neznek about two hours ago. She follows the Christian Zionism issue. I haven’t seen this because I haven’t been following the news. B u t o n We d n e s d a y, March 2nd, Pat Roberts o n , a n u n b e l i e v a b l e Christian Zionist, made another prediction. He said God is using [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to prepare the way for Armageddon, the final

battle when the forces of the anti-Christ—maybe he’s alluding to Putin as the anti-Christ, I don’t know—will come and attack Israel to bring on the second coming of Jesus in the final battle of history.

I grew up with that. Seriously, as a young kid, that’s what my mom believed to her dying day at the age of 95. “Say, Don, why are you working on justice for Palestine? It’s not going to happen.

They’ve been fighting since Cain and Abel. It’ll never end until Jesus returns.” So there’s a little summary of Christian Zionism that I had passed down. I pulled out of that when I was about 13. I just couldn’t understand the violence and the dual narrative of violence that it supported. I had a little bit of insight and left it.

But then, when I went to a seminary, I got another type of Christian Zionism, one that’s rarely discussed: mainline liberal Protestant and Catholic Christian Zionism, a post-Holocaust version that elevates Israel as an exceptional power that we must support as God’s agent. It was an answer to the Holocaust, which we can all believe and agree to, but now it elevates Israel and creates an exceptionalism. I call it the Christian Zionism hiding in plain sight in our churches and in the Democratic Party. It’s the kind of Christian Zionism that forces progressives to be good on every issue except this, Palestine.

Our friend and Jewish liberation theologian, Marc Ellis, called it the “ecumenical deal.” Let’s have dialogue and wonderful dinMay 2022

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ners. We’ll get together and work on racism and every other issue, but check Palestine at the door. It’s complicated, leave that to us. You Christians shouldn’t be involved in it because we are on the front lines.

I want to start with a little bit of a historical overview, a historical context on the rise of two Zionisms, and then we’ll move to the other issues.

I used to give my students an exercise when I was teaching about the Israel-Palestine struggle. I don’t use the word “conflict” anymore because it assumes parity. I use “struggle.” It’s a political struggle. On the first day of classes I would give them this exercise: Where, when and why did the Palestine-Israel struggle begin? Now what would you say? Where does it begin? The students would often start with 1967, the 1967 war.

But if you start there, and some textbooks do, you don’t get what happened in the Nakba. You’ll miss the genocide of 1948 and 1949. You’d miss it. Or you go back a little further to the Balfour Declaration. A lot of students would say that. That’s closer, but I go back earlier.

The Beginning of the Struggle I said the struggle begins not in Palestine where Muslim, Jews and Christians basically were living together in peace up until the British Mandate and the influx of Zionism and settlers. It begins in Europe. It begins in the 1840 to 1900 period when the lethal history of mostly Christian anti-Semitism was filling Eastern Europe and Russian and Ukrainian cities with pogroms. That’s where it begins. That was when Jewish leaders began to articulate the need for a homeland because we’ll never be safe in Europe.

The great Jewish physician of Odessa, Dr. [Leo] Pinsker, was an assimilationist as most Jews in Europe were. He decided, no, we’ve got to fit in. He was a leader of that movement in Odessa. Then his house was attacked and burned by violent Christian mobs. A pogrom. He realized overnight, no longer can we be secure. As a physician, he used the analysis Judeophobia. It was a medical analysis of a condition, of hatred and fear of the Jews. Thus, the attacks and blaming the Jews.

So Pinsker was what the great Dr. Arthur Hertzberg calls a precursor. He prepared the way for the Zionist movement. He wasn’t actually an articulator of a political plan, but he called for a homeland. So he prepared the way for Theodor Herzl and others. Now, Herzl comes and begins official Zionism in 1897 with the World Zionist Congress—that’s the official launch of the political ideology of Zionism. Christian Zionism had been percolating for 400 years, mostly in Europe.

When I did my earlier research and writing, I figured that all these early speakers who were calling for support for the Jews and a homeland were Christian Zionists. I’ve decided to change that. So now I would say that these early forerunners—like John Nelson Darby, Lord Shaftesbury and many others—they are precursors because their movements were religious on behalf of the Jews calling for some kind of a homeland. A so38

lution. But they did not have a political plan until about 1888.

Along came Reverend William Hechler. Reverend Hechler was an old Christian Zionist. He was the chaplain to the British army in Vienna. Hechler had been dreaming and hoping for a Jewish movement to come along and save the Jewish people.

His origins, he was a restorationist. He believed that the Christian duty was to convert the Jews and encourage them to move to Palestine or somewhere to hasten the return of Jesus.

He kind of switched overnight when he met Herzl in Vienna.

He saw him as a great prophet, and Hechler became active in political Zionism for the rest of his life. He became a very close friend of Herzl. He arranged for meetings with a German Kaiser where Herzl asked for land in Palestine. He arranged for a meeting with the Ottoman leadership. They all rejected and turned him down. But Herzl valued that friendship and Hechler was one of the only Gentiles with the family on Herzl’s deathbed. Herzl told him, you are the father of Christian Zionism. This was before the Zionist movement. So Hechler is one.

The other one, who was kind of a precursor turned into a Christian Zionist, is a guy from my home area in Chicago, William E. Blackstone. Blackstone was kind of an end-time theology guy. He believed in the rapture, like Pat Robertson, that at the end Israel would come under fire from the anti-Christ and its hordes coming down from the north. Now, conveniently, Born Again Christians would be removed. You know what that’s called? The rapture. I bought into that for a while. So it’s so convenient for Born Again Christians. They won’t go through the final battle and all the hassles.

So overnight Blackstone believed this isn’t enough. He organized the first Zionist lobby in 1891. A petition drive from coast to coast. It was financed by John D. Rockefeller; Charles Scribner, the publisher; J.P. Morgan. He had about a dozen or more U.S. congressmen and senators and the chief justice of the Supreme Court on the petition appealing to the president, Benjamin Harrison at that time, to create a Jewish state in Palestine because of the pogroms and the suffering of Jews in Europe.

Before Herzl at the first World Zionist Congress, the Christian Zionists had a lobby in 1891. That is the beginning of Christian Zionism. So I define Christian Zionism as a political movement calling for support for Israel guaranteed by foreign powers. Because God gave all of the land to the Jewish people, Christians must therefore provide religious and spiritual, economic and political support. This is the basis of fundamentalist Christian Zionism.

Most of the fundamentalists call themselves evangelicals.

Evangelicalism is a movement of about 110 million Christians in the United States. Many evangelicals reject Christian Zionism.

Christian Zionism is in the fundamentalist right-wing of the movement, so that’s why it’s important to use “fundamentalism.”

Almost all the secular and religious media [portray all evangelicals as Christian Zionists]. This kind of plays into their favor because they can say, oh, we represent 110 million Christians. No. You might represent at best about 18 million. That’s a lot.

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Rev. Don Wagner: The Widespread Influence of Christian Zionism and Growing Backlash Inside American Churches

Followers of American Pastor John Hagee chant slogans in support of Israel as they wave Israeli and U.S. flags during a rally in downtown Jerusalem on April 7, 2008.

So the movement of Reverend John Hagee of Christian Zionism, Christians United for Israel [CUFI], has now become more numerically powerful than the pro-Israel Jewish lobby, AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee], and the others.

They have worked hand in glove together. David Brog, who came right out of AIPAC, was the director of CUFI and did all the hard wiring of the movement with the pro-Israel lobby for years.

He has just declared he’s going to run for Congress in Nevada.

So they got new people, but Hagee’s movement and other Christian Zionist movements is what really was used by the Trump administration and quietly by [former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu to push for the move of the U.S. Embassy and basically the annexation of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. They lobbied heavily and pushed that through. Trump admitted it himself, when he was in Wisconsin fundraising during his election campaign—“we did it for the evangelicals” (better yet, fundamentalists). So, that’s an admission of how that played out.

How to Criticize Christian Zionism Now let me use a little bit of judicial focus here. As I go into more of a critique of Zionism, Christian Zionism. I try to follow what Ilan Pappé recommended—that we need to be very precise and careful with our language. I’m not here criticizing the Jewish religion or the Jewish people. Pappé said denying

Israel’s existence is impossible and unrealistic. However, evaluating Israel ethically, morally and politically is not only possible but at present it is urgent as never before. We’ve been a little too soft, particularly in the Christian quarters, on our critique of Christian Zionism. We’re fearful of criticizing Zionism itself.

Times are changing and denominations are really beginning to step up and see the difference.

So let me move now to part three. I want to talk a little bit about liberal mainline Christian Zionism. As I said, when I was in seminary at Princeton I was politicized. I came from a conservative Republican family, a fundamentalist Zionist background. Even though I had left some of that, the views lingered. So I went into Holocaust studies a great deal. As I was working on post-Holocaust theology, I was really standing with the Jewish people against anti-Semitism—and still will, we must do that. I, however, caught this elevation of Israel as God’s chosen people in a different way. There is a fellow I was reading called Reinhold Niebuhr, a great liberal theologian. President Barack Obama said he is his favorite ethical theologian and philosopher.

Niebuhr organized a lobby during World War II that lobbied for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. It was very successful, putting pressure on the Truman administration.

Niebuhr, however, had a blind spot. Another progressive who was good on every issue—on race, human rights, everything else. But when it came to Palestine, it was really a blank tablet.

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Dale Sprusansky (r) urges the audience to order Glory to God in the Lowest: Journeys to an Unholy Land.

He was told when he was lobbying that there was a genocide going on in Palestine with the Israeli militias and the new army annihilating Palestinians and forcing them to leave. Niebuhr said this will be necessary for Israel to become a state. He excused it. That was how far he went in his blindness to Palestinian justice.

Now many of our liberal congressmen and senators, maybe even the president, have been influenced by that liberal kind of post-Holocaust theology that places Israel above the norms of international law and standards. So this is a liberal Christian Zionism, I say hiding in plain sight. It’s in our culture. It runs deep; The city on a hill, that we are blessed as a nation to bless Israel and elevate Israel. This, however, is beginning to change.

Let me shift a little bit to that. As I’ve changed my analysis, I’ve turned to two sources of critique in the past five years. One is settler colonial analysis and the second is liberation theology.

My book will deal with the liberation theology. Let me just mention a few things about settler colonialism. Most of you are probably familiar with this. Traditional colonialism basically will come as the British did in India and occupy, take the resources, control, abuse the population. But they generally leave. They’re either forced out or they become bankrupt and they exit.

Settler colonialism is different. Settler colonialism comes and the occupier stays. Their endgame, their goal, is to replace the indigenous population with their own settlers. This is what the United States eventually turned to become, a settler colonial regime. Look what we’ve done to our indigenous population.

It’s criminal. This is what Israel now has done.

Now, there are several different types of Zionism. When I taught this, I identified six. But the revisionist form of Zionism, 40

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the more militant, is modeled after a settler colonial ideology.

This is the Zionism of the [Menachem] Begins, Netanyahus and now [Naftali] Bennett, [Yair] Lapid, [Avigdor] Lieberman and the rest. It’s also merged with an even more militant messianic type of Zionism, where they believe the land has been given to them by God. They can no longer argue on international law for them to have a right to the land, so they pull out the divine argument. It is a replace and displace movement, using any means necessary.

Just look at the Nakba. What’s going on now is a slow genocide of settler colonialism in Sheikh Jarrah, Silwan, across the West Bank. Tent of Nations, a wonderful project that many of us support, is constantly threatened to lose their land even though they have the deed going back to, I think, 1914. The settlers and the government of Israel want that 100 acres of property high on the hill. So, settler colonialism is designed to replace and displace.

Patrick Wolfe, an Australian, was the one who pushed this issue and said settler colonialism should be a separate and identifiable field of study. Now it is. Here’s how he summarized it as applied to Israel: “Settler colonialism destroys to replace.”

As Theodore Herzl, founding father of Zionism, observed in his allegorical manifesto novel—listen to this quote: “If I wish to substitute a new building for an old one, I must demolish before I construct.” I must demolish the people and what was there in Palestine before I construct the new Jewish state. That’s the ideology in a nutshell.

Now let me turn to the final part.

In the fall of 2019, after 100 years of Zionist settler colonization’s attempts to kill, occupy and murder the Palestinians,

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Rev. Don Wagner: The Widespread Influence of Christian Zionism and Growing Backlash Inside American Churches

Palestinians were still over 50 percent of the population in historic Palestine. If you add the refugees, much more. However, the Christian population has shrunk. In 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza and the Golan, the Christians in the West Bank were 13 percent. Do you know what they are today? It slipped under one percent. They’re disappearing not because of militant Islam, as Israel and the Christian Zionists would have us believe. It’s the occupation, the brutality, the settler colonialism that’s destroying their lives and their future.

In July 2020, a group of Christians met in Jerusalem as Netanyahu was about to issue the annexation executive order for all of the West Bank, until he got significant pushback from Europe and held back. As Sheikh Jarrah was losing homes, Silwan the same, a group of Christian leaders met and they issued what’s called a “cry for hope.” They said it’s beyond urgent. It was a cry to the global—not just churches—but the global progressive Jewish and Muslim community. Come and stand with us. Accelerate your work. It isn’t enough just to pass resolutions. We need action, an aggressive action now.

So here are some of the things that they focused on. I’ll just mention these. This went out globally to the churches around the world.

1: Urgent resolutions, inter-denominations, calling for legislative action, organizing, boycotts and the rest.

2: Theological analysis on the misuse of the Bible. Pastor Mitri Raheb said, “We in Palestine are occupied by the Israeli military and by the Bible.” The Bible is abused and misused to force another people into suffrage.

3: Solidarity with Palestinians. Letting us [Palestinians] set the agenda and listening and standing with us on what we need now, and using all the tools of non-violent action, especially BDS. This is a call from the churches. As a Presbyterian, we worked for 10 years to get BDS passed. Finally in 2014, after strong pressure and argument, we passed it in Detroit. Jewish Voice for Peace and American Muslims for Palestine were standing with us to celebrate. Now several other denominations are doing that. So BDS. But now it has to also move to sanctions, as it did in South Africa.

4: Stand against anti-Semitism. Stand with Jews and fight anti-Semitism at all costs at all times. We must do that to be consistent. While I’m on this one, did you notice how anti-Semitic Christian Zionism is? One model, the restorationists, say let’s convert the Jews and move them to Palestine because we don’t want them living in our neighborhood. The other one, let’s also convert the Jews and give them a state or a homeland.

This was Darby and Blackstone and the rest. Lord Balfour, who was a Zionist Christian, he opposed the Jewish immigration bill in the parliament, I think it was 1901, because he didn’t want Jews in his neighborhood. But we’ll send them to Palestine. So these movements are inherently racist and anti-Semitic. We need to stand against anti-Semitism in all forms.

5: Come and see, come and stand with us. See the real situation on the ground and then go home, and go to work, and

get busy. By the way, several denominations are now working very hard since July of 2020 to push new resolutions. The United Church of Christ had one of the strongest last year. Now the Episcopal Church is following. It’s go and do likewise. We Presbyterians now have to catch up with the others.

Here are the others: Declare Christian Zionism a heresy. It is a heresy. It takes a portion of the truth, it turns it upside down and empties it and then fills it with racist anti-biblical content.

So this is what Christian Zionism and Zionism are. They are ideologies that are idolatrous of the State of Israel, absolutely idolatrous, and that is [a violation of] the First Commandment.

They also are racist and we need to call them to account for the lack of humanity and accountability. We are all equal before God—imago dei [created in the image of God].

There’s a term called status confessionis. It is a theological term. Dietrich Bonhoeffer used this idea when he was critiquing, as a German under Nazism, that the National Socialist ideology that the German church had adopted is racist and out of our confessional tradition and must be rejected. The South African Christians saw this and applied it to apartheid. The World Alliance of Reformed Churches had their international meeting in Ottawa, Canada in 1982. Allan Boesak and some of the ministers walked out when communion was served saying, we can’t take communion in white churches in South Africa, so we’re not going to take it here until you change and declare apartheid a heresy. We need to do the same thing now on Christian Zionism. It is a heresy, an abomination to the Christian message of Jesus.

We need to work to close the tax loopholes that Zionist and Christian Zionist organizations have. CUFI, Christians United for Israel, is raising money for settlements. The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews raises money from Christian evangelicals primarily, and annually gives a million to two dollars to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces and is working on settlements. It is all tax-exempt money, exploiting the IRS [Internal Revenue Service]. This needs legislative action. Albeit long and hard, but it has to be done.

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A great film, by the way, “’Til Kingdom Come,” done by an Israeli filmmaker, Maya Zinshtein. It was scheduled to air in Chicago on PBS a few months ago. At the last minute it was pulled and never aired. One of the things it does, it shows the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews handing a check over to the IDF for a million dollars. So it’s clear. There’s the evidence.

Next, decolonize Palestine. Decolonize Palestine through global grassroots advocacy work. And it’s coming up. It’s emerging with Black Lives Matter, American Muslims for Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace and many others. A solidarity movement is coming up at the grassroots. We can’t access power at the top level with [President Joe] Biden, [Secretary of State Antony] Blinken and the boys. But the grassroots movement, if we get mobilized, elect more people like Huwaida Arraf and put pressure on the rest of the Democrats and Republicans to change their policies in Palestine, the grassroots is our hope.

Our hope is the next generation and it’s rising. It’s coming.

Well, let me close with this. Advocacy, hard work, is really going to be the key. Organizing.

Let me close with this quote from my friend Mark Braverman, a great theologian and Jewish writer, talking about Zionism and our need to critique it—and Christian Zionism. He writes, “We must acknowledge that Zionism was a mistake.” I would add, and Christian Zionism. “An understandable but catastrophic wrong turn in our quest for safety and dignity. Until then, until we reject it, we will continue to build a state on top of a lie and a crime. Until then Palestinians will continue to resist by steadfastly refusing to relinquish their identity, their way of life, their connection to their homeland. Occupied, harassed, imprisoned, blockaded, bombarded, starved, betrayed by their political leaders, but proud, unbowed, refusing to disappear. Jews must recognize, and Christians, that our stories today are not what was done to us, but what we will now do for justice for the sake of others.”

Let’s rise to be part of this new wave of change, to transform Palestine from the occupation and Israel from settler colonialism. It’s something we all have a stake in and must do. Thank you.

Dale Sprusansky: All right. Thank you so much for that enlightening and also impassioned speech. Just once again a reminder. His book can be pre-ordered at MiddleEastBooks.com.

If that speech isn’t going to make you want to buy it, I don’t know what will.

Questions and Answers So, Don, I think before we get some questions from the audience, I guess I’ll just start with a question. If you could maybe talk a little bit more about your own path out of Christian Zionism and what that means for how other people can help lead people out of that strain of thinking.

Don Wagner: Yeah. Well, that’s what the story in that book is. It was my pandemic project. I couldn’t go anywhere, so [my wife] Linda and I just hunkered down and I wrote a book.

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It’s my story out of two Christian Zionisms, where I was shaped by my family to buy into this end-time theology as a kid. After a while it just didn’t make sense and I was able to think a little bit more critically. But these Christian Zionisms are a worldview. It gives you a narrative to interpret the world. It’s fear-based. It’s not love-based. It’s not love your neighbor as yourself. It’s a fear-based narrative. After a while I just couldn’t stomach it anymore.

I was about 13 when I asked a pastor: I don’t understand why, in the Book of Joshua, they virtually commit genocide against the original inhabitants. Isn’t that in direct conflict with the Hebrew prophets and Jesus? And his words to me basically said, just accept the Bible as it’s written. I said I can’t accept this. This is not the word of God. Then the post-Holocaust version was a little bit more difficult because it’s more subtle. With the whole issue of anti-Semitism and connecting it with Israel, it was more difficult for me. The way that breakthrough came, I mentioned it briefly last night. I had moved down to my last church in Evanston, IL. I was the youngest guy on the staff in a big downtown church and we did a series on the Middle East “conflict.” Then we called it “conflict.” Now “struggle,” of course. And I was very much wedded to the Zionist narrative. We decided in the course that we’ll divide it. We’ll bring in a speaker on Zionism and the defense of Israel. Then we’ll have a speaker on the pro-Palestine issue.

So I brought in the [Israeli] Consul General of Chicago. He gave a passionate defense of Israel. I was thrilled. Good job.

My partner, who was organizing it, happened to be a layman who was a fundraiser at Northwestern University. He went and settled Palestinians in 1949 and 1950 in tents with the United Nations. So he brought in Dr. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod who was at that time chair of political science at Northwestern University.

That was the first time I heard the story of the Nakba by someone who went through it, who lost their home, was forced out of Jaffa and settled in tents in Ramallah. It jarred my narrative.

It opened it a little bit, but not completely.

Then I went to the office the next morning and my phone rang. It was a Jewish leader from Skokie, which is right next door to Evanston, saying, “you have brought in Abu-Lughod.

He is a member of the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization], a friend of [Yasser] Arafat and a terrorist. You are dignifying terrorism. If this series is not canceled, we’re going to march on your church during the Sunday morning service.”

I’d only been there two weeks. So I headed down and told my boss, the senior pastor, about this. He said, “jeez, Wagner, you’ve only been here two weeks and we’ve got big problems already.” But it was hot air. Nothing happened. I began then, once my narrative was jarred, to study. I met with Dr. AbuLughod and other Palestinians and, long story short, gradually not only was my narrative changed, I went and saw it for a month firsthand and came back and felt, I want to go to work on this cause full time. And I did.

Dale Sprusansky: What biblical scripture can be used to respond to Christian Zionism?

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Rev. Don Wagner: The Widespread Influence of Christian Zionism and Growing Backlash Inside American Churches

Don Wagner: Okay. Well, first I’d recommend that you get Walter Brueggemann’s book, Chosen? or anything by Dr. Gary Burge. Gary is an evangelical. He used to teach at Wheaton and he is a biblical scholar. So he’s analyzed all these texts.

I’ll just say a couple things. The Israel of the Bible is conflated with the modern state. They ain’t the same, folks. There are four references to who Israel is in the Bible and none of them talk about an independent Jewish state in the future. So that’s one thing. Second, the narrative of the scriptures is about loving

God and loving your neighbor as yourself. It’s based on fundamental equality.

We are called to be in solidarity with the poor, the oppressed, the hurting. Not to elevate a state as a tribal state above others with military solutions, but we’re to be in the trenches with those who are suffering and struggling. Right now it’s the Palestinians. And to call for Jewish progressives and Muslims, so we work together, and fight racism because it’s a very racist project. ■

Keynote: Democracy and Human Rights in Israel Gideon Levy

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Delinda Hanley: Gideon Levy’s keynote will focus on the nature of democracy and human rights in Israel. Gideon Levy is a columnist for the Israeli daily Haaretz, which he joined in 1982. He is widely considered the dean of Israeli journalism, as well as the most hated man in Israel, because treating the Palestinians as victims and the crimes perpetrated against them as crimes is considered treasonous. I have watched film clips of Levy’s visits to family funeral tents of Palestinians killed by Israeli sharpshooters. His empathy and humanity is palpable.

Levy’s columns are widely read and discussed around the world. We, at the Washington Report, find it challenging to select which ones to reprint in our magazine and the “Other Voices” insert. His book, The Punishment of Gaza, was published in 2010.

Thank you for traveling so far once again to speak at our conference.

Gideon Levy: Thank you so much. I think, after such an introduction, the best thing I can do is shut up. It is so exciting to be back here and to see the devotion and the good spirit and the readiness to continue the struggle, which is rather frustrating, we must say, which is rather long and it’s not in its best

point right now. But maybe there is some hope and I’ll try to talk about it today.

We can’t start this conversation without referring to what’s going on in Ukraine. Every war has its comic relief, and even this war has its comic relief. It was I think on the second day of the war when the foreign minister of Israel, Yair Lapid, condemned the violation of the international order. You must admit that this guy has some kind of sense of humor because, otherwise, what did he mean exactly by violation of the international order?

Can an Israeli minister speak or even condemn any kind of violation of the international order? What about the tons of butter on your head?

But it passed and Israel has a very brave declaration. Again, we are in this phase in which Israelis don’t see themselves. I think maybe the Israeli society is the society with the highest rate of denial, self-denial. But the war in Ukraine exposed some side, some aspects of Israel which all of a sudden, because it is such a dramatic phenomenon, you saw it naked. Above all we saw the Israeli nationalism, and may I say racism, in the way that Israel had dealt with this war.

The first stage was—and there is a difference between the official Israel and the public opinion—official Israel kept silent May 2022

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A Palestinian prepares to throw a Molotov cocktail at Israeli forces during clashes in Shuafat, neighboring the Israeli settlement of Ramat Shlomo, in Israeli annexed East Jerusalem on May 14, 2021. for many days because, you know, we want to fly over Syria and bomb Syria. We need the Russians and we can’t bother them. That was based on one of the main moral accusations of Israel toward the world: Why did you keep silent?

Israel made a fortune by manipulating the guilt feelings of the world because it kept silent. What do you think, that in other times—in the ’30s, in the ’40s—there were no other countries who had some kind of interests which forced them or made them keep silent? What do you think, that countries who fought against or stood against didn’t pay a price? It’s only about interests? Now, Israelis saw it and I think the citizens in this case, and only in this case, were more sensitive than the government because they realized what a shame.

How can we keep silent?

Then came the huge rescue operation of Israel which exposed another aspect of Israel, the racist one. There is no country in the world that did so much—I’m almost sure. I didn’t check it, but I’m almost sure no country in the world did so much to rescue its own citizens from Ukraine. Foreign ministry operations, buses—but only the Israelis.

Then there was also an operation, it’s still going on, to rescue Jews. But at the same time, at least until this very moment, things are changing now, but until this very moment there is no state that closes its gates to all the others like Israel. And here you have it again. How can Israel close its gates? Now they ask for 10,000 shekels, which is around $3,000, deposit from each refugee to pay cash in the airport and he has to commit himself to leave within a month.

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This is a state that was built on accusation, on blaming the world for being silent in the ‘30s, for not doing enough, for closing its gates, praising Sweden and Denmark and condemning all the others who didn’t let anyone in.

My father, who left the Sudetendeutsche, he was half a year in a refugee boat in the sea. He couldn’t get to Palestine. The Brits didn’t let them in. There were 600 people on a boat, on a very small boat. Finally they were taken to a detention center in Beirut. And only after half a year they made it to Palestine.

How can we, the sons, the grandsons of those people, close our gates?

But this is not the end of the story. How will the Israelis now see the Ukrainian resistance? They see all those Molotov bottles being prepared and they salute them. Wow. What a brave people. Look at them standing in front of tanks and throwing those Molotov bottles. In the very same day [Palestinian] youngsters are shot dead, not less than shot dead, for throwing a Molotov bottle or even holding a Molotov bottle.

How can they bridge this contradiction? You are praising the Ukrainians for their moral and courageous position and behavior. Very, very same method, moral cause to fight against an occupier for your freedom, for your human rights, for implementing international law. The very same one is being shot by you and nobody cares. Everyone justifies.

I guess 90 percent of the Israelis would say that anyone who throws a Molotov bottle at a tank or at a military vehicle should be shot dead. Nobody is there to try to show the contradiction, to try to show the denial. It all brings us unfortunately, and it’s

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Keynote: Gideon Levy: Democracy and Human Rights in Israel

Civilians make Molotov cocktails and train amid Russian attacks in Lviv, Ukraine on March 8, 2022. not easy for me to say so, but it all brings us again and again to the same point. And the point is the belief in Jewish supremacy.

This is the core of Zionism. This feeling of chosen people is still very deep rooted in Israel. The consequence is that everything which refers to any other country in the world does not refer to Israel. That we are a special case. That international law should be implemented everywhere, but we are a different case. That a Molotov bottle against a Jewish soldier is not like a Molotov bottle against a Russian soldier because we are different, because we are chosen, because of this damned Jewish supremacy.

And when people speak about this current government, that Hanan Ashrawi spoke about this morning, that everyone is so nervous about keeping this government, which is made up of so many parties, together. Such a big ideological gap between them and we just want to keep them together. I claim that the differences are minor. Basically almost all Israeli parties believe in this Jewish supremacy, believe in Zionism. The consequences are—I can’t even describe how destructive they are when you live in this way of thinking. When everything gets back to this again and again, Jewish life matters more. There is nothing as cheap as Palestinian life.

You know in the last two days, three days, almost every day there was a young Palestinian killed for nothing. But really for nothing. Not that there was some kind of threat, but really for nothing, not even a Molotov bottle, obviously day after day and nobody cares. So, on one hand, the war in Ukraine exposed in my view the real nature of Israel, the real nature of us Israelis.

It’s not only the state. It’s each of us because we all believe in it even if we don’t admit it. We get it with the milk of our mothers.

We are different. We are better. They are worse. They are not human beings like us. They were born to kill and they want to kill us.

The very same arguments serve the Russia propaganda and the Israeli propaganda. They deny a Ukrainian people. Israel denies the Palestinian people, or at least part of the Israelis deny a Palestinian people. They are just Bedouins who came from the desert. Who are they at all? Just for 500 years here.

We are, obviously, here for 2,000 years.

So, on one hand, it exposed this nature of Israel. But I think the war in Ukraine might be, and I’m very careful here, might be also a source of hope exactly for what you are fighting for.

Because it might be that Israel’s silence, the fact that Israel did not stand together with the West in the beginning, it might have a positive outcome.

You hear the first voices even in this country. I just heard yesterday the interview of Christiane Amanpour with the former [U.S.] Minister of Defense, [William] Cohen. It was very clear mainly what Christiane said but also by his answer. This is an ally? Here we spend all this money. Here we support, automatically, every resolution in the United Nations; we put a veto just to defend Israel automatically and blindly. Then when we need their voice once, they turn their back to us. It might be something that will get some kind of momentum. That people in this country will start to ask themselves, what’s going on here? It didn’t happen until now, but it might.

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At the same time, maybe the world will also wake up and realize that there is no difference between the Russian occupation of Ukraine and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. There is one difference, in terms of time. This is an occupation of ten days now, or one week. And this is an occupation of 50 years.

Or if you want, 70 years. Or if you want, 100 years. But both are occupations. Maybe this will be a wakeup call for the world.

Maybe also this hypocrisy and double standard that Israel adopted will somehow also be exposed about the world—which allows one occupation and condemns another one.

It was already mentioned that the International Criminal Court (ICC) is already on the road to investigate crimes of war in Ukraine after one week. How long have we waited for this court to wake up and to investigate the much more simple and obvious crimes of war, daily crimes of war which are taking place in a very routine reality for over 50 years? So maybe the world will also say, no, no, we have another occupation to deal with.

It’s not only the Russian occupation. This combination of Israel betraying, in a way, the West, together with the realization that occupation is wrong here and there. Occupation is against international law here and there. Occupation cannot last here and there.

A Temporary Occupation or Apartheid State?

Now the real turning point should be, for us, the moment that each of us realize that the Israeli occupation is not a temporary phenomenon. I think that most of the people, if not all of them, understand that the occupation is there to stay. And Israel never had the slightest intention to put an end to it. All the efforts were only to mislead the West and to maintain the occupation. All this longest peace process in history, which never led to anywhere, was never aimed to lead to anywhere. All those efforts were only in order to mislead you and enable the occupation to grow, including Oslo.

So, even Oslo was a trap. We can argue if it was a planned trap or just came out as a trap, but it was a trap. All the other efforts to put an end to the occupation never aimed really to bring an end to the occupation. Because there was never a government in Israel, never ever—including Nobel Prize peace winners—none of them really meant to put an end to the occupation.

They meant to make the occupation easier, more comfortable, and above all more viable. We all believed in it and we all fell into this trap. But now it’s over. This masquerade, I believe, is over.

Nobody can claim it is temporary. There are no signs whatsoever that Israel is planning to put an end to the occupation.

Catrin [Ormestad] always criticizes me that I don’t leave any room for hope. I must say here there may be another source of hope because many things in history were totally unexpected. So maybe we don’t see what’s coming up soon. Maybe there is great hope that the occupation is just about to end.

Like, we didn’t see the fall of the German wall. We didn’t see 46

and nobody saw the fall of Soviet Russia. Nobody saw the end of the apartheid system in South Africa.

But if you look at it in a logical way, in a reasonable way, you must realize that there are no signs that the occupation is about to end, ever. This is a turning point because the moment we realize that the occupation is part of Israel, we must realize the consequences. The consequences are that Israel is an apartheid state. You cannot define it any other way but this.

Because as long as the occupation was temporary, Israel could claim we are a democracy. The Israeli Arabs, as we called them, who are Israeli citizens, can vote for the parliament and can be doctors and everything. This is not apartheid. And we have this dark backyard where things are not so nice, but it’s just until we’ll find the solution.

You [Israel] admitted that you have no intention, you admitted that the occupied territories are part of Israel. We don’t have to talk anymore about the one-state solution, or the one state, because the one state exists now, for over 50 years. It’s one state with many regimes, with two sets of laws, regulations and regimes for Jews and for Palestinians. How else can you call it if not apartheid? I mean really it looks like apartheid. It talks like apartheid. It moves like apartheid. How else can you define a system in which at least in part of the territory there is a very clear separation—legal, in budgets, in rights, in everything?

When you go to the territories, as I do now for over 30 years every week—unfortunately not to Gaza because we Israelis are not allowed to go to Gaza by our government. No Israeli journalist cares about not going to Gaza. It’s much more heroic to go to Ukraine, to Kyiv, and to be on Facebook or on Instagram with photos from Lviv. Gaza is not interesting.

But if you go to the occupied territories, you see it in a very physical way. You see one village next to the other. One village has all the resources, unlimited quantity of water, electricity, everything, and the village nearby has even no electricity or no water. And the year is 2022. Whole villages without electricity and water. The village next to them, the settlement, which was built on their own private land, has everything. Please tell me what you can call it if not apartheid? One village can participate in the political game and vote and be elected, and their neighbors cannot vote and cannot be elected? What can you call it if not apartheid?

Or even, what can you call the only people in the world who are not citizens of any state in the world? Do you know other people in the world who have no citizenship, have no country like the Palestinians? Part of the Palestinians in the occupied territories, part of them, some small part have Jordanian passports. The others don’t have any citizenship. This is not temporary. This is apartheid and this cannot go on by hoping that one day it will change, because it will not change. Why will it not change? Because Israelis couldn’t care less about it. Because the world couldn’t care less about it. Because the world supports it and Israel lives in peace with it.

I guess some of you know Israelis and have met Israelis.

When an Israeli says that the Israeli army is the most moral

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Keynote: Gideon Levy: Democracy and Human Rights in Israel

army in the world, they truly believe in it. Try to tell an Israeli that maybe the IDF is the second moral army in the world. Try. You’re an anti-Semite. How dare you? How dare you? We built this field hospital in Nepal when there were floods there. What other army is so human? The belief that we are so good and the army is so moral is very deeply rooted. When you believe in it, there is no problem with the occupation.

The Israeli society, as I said, protects itself by denial and by two or three more mechanisms which enable us to feel so good about ourselves and not be troubled at all from the occupation.

One is the chosen people. Because if we are the chosen people, so there’s no problem. We have the moral right to do whatever we want. We are the chosen people. The second one is obviously the Holocaust. As the late [Israeli Prime Minister] Golda Meir phrased it once, after the Holocaust, the Jews have the right to do whatever they want. Fair enough. This enabled us to continue with the occupation.

Finally, it is the process of dehumanization and demonization of the Palestinians, which serves so well the denial. Because if they are not human beings like us, if they don’t like their children like we do, if they don’t care so much about death and life, if they are so cruel, as we are being told, if they are so barbarian and brutal, if they can do those horrible things, then there is no problem in occupying them. Then it is even justified. Then it shouldn’t bother us. There is no moral problem because it’s not about human rights. They are not human beings, so how can we speak about human rights?

We’re dealing with, you know, those Muslims. You have them here. Those barbarians who don’t like their children, who don’t

love them. Ask any Israeli if the Palestinians love their children like the Israelis love their children and you will get a lecture.

What I saw in the last 35, 40 years of parents devoted to their children I will never see in any other people—what Palestinian fathers and mothers are doing to protect their children, to educate their children in unbelievable conditions. Unbelievable conditions. People who really devote their life.

The father of Maria. Maria was a 7-year-old child in Gaza when her father bought a secondhand car. They went for their first ride, the whole family. Maria was sitting on the lap of her grandmother in the backseat singing a song. The whole family was in such good spirits. They were all in this old Peugeot because it was the first time they had a car. The missile hit the car in Gaza, in the main street of Gaza. You know Israel is never aiming at civilian targets. Almost the whole family was killed.

Hamdi, the father, was injured. His little son, he was three then, was saved alive. And Maria was dying. She was in the hospital.

She was totally paralyzed. Then, this devoted father, Hamdi, decided that he is going to dedicate his life only for one purpose— to save Maria. We helped him in a very rare and unbelievable way. We helped him to transfer Maria to an Israeli hospital.

Maria is now 18 and paralyzed from [her neck] down but does everything. She is a miracle. She has all kinds of electronic devices. She paints with her mouth. She operates her wheelchair with her chin. She’s amazing. She’s pretty. She’s fantastic. And this father Hamdi, now 16 years [later], he’s working here day and night. He doesn’t do anything else except take care of Maria, this miracle girl. She’s so intelligent. She speaks Hebrew and Arabic. I can’t describe to you what it May 2022

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TRANSCENDING THE ISRAEL LOBBY AT HOME AND ABROAD

A Palestinian child cries, Aug. 28, 2021, during the funeral of his friend, Omar Abu Al‐Yenel, who was injured during confrontations with the Israeli army on the eastern border of Gaza City. means to see her, to meet her and to see her paintings. What paintings she paints now with her mouth. Then the Israelis will tell you that the Palestinians don’t love their children.

The main topic that I was asked to speak about was obviously the Israeli society and this is what I’m trying to do. But the secret is how come that we live so many years with those sins, with those crimes, one hour away from our homes. I guess all of you know that we are not dealing with Guantanamo far away; we are dealing with our immediate backyard. How can it be that the Israeli society continues to live in peace? Not only to live in peace, to live in this self-content.

You don’t know how proud Israelis are of their country and their democracy. I mean there is one enemy, Netanyahu, who tries to destroy the famous Israeli democracy. But except for him, we’re all such democrats, such a spirit of freedom, equality. Every slogan. We are the lighthouse of the world. How come that so many Israelis, intelligent Israelis, believe in it?

Here I claim that there are so many mechanisms which are used to make us not look at the truth, not look at the reality, to create for ourselves an alternative reality which has nothing to do with real life, with the reality half an hour away from our home, one hour away from our home. As long as this will not change, nothing will change. Because as long as Israelis are not bothered by the occupation, don’t pay any price for the occupation and are not punished for the occupation, the occupation will stay there because there’s no reason for the Israelis to do anything about it. What’s wrong?

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This secret, how a relatively normal society—I don’t think Israelis are any worse than any other people in the world. They are for sure not better, but I don’t see them much worse than others. But something enables them to stand behind those ongoing horrible crimes that none of them have even the idea of what is being done on their behalf, in their name. Most of the Israelis have no idea. Okay, they have their sons who are soldiers there. It’s a small minority who serve there. Those who served there are also so brainwashed that they don’t speak out and they don’t tell their parents. But most of the Israelis just close their eyes. How is it possible?

So there are a few answers. The first agent is obviously the Israeli media, the biggest collaborator with the occupation. It is the biggest collaborator with the occupation not because of ideology, not only because of commercial reasons, which is much worse. No censorship. Only self-censorship which is much worse because nobody would fight against it. The Israeli media is covering the occupation, covering it up for decades systematically.

It’s quite a courageous media. They do investigations about prime ministers, presidents and ministers. Very professional, very liberal, very free until it comes again to the Jewish supremacy, until it comes to covering the Israeli occupation. Then it’s the biggest betrayal of any media in the world, any free media in the world. For me, it’s much worse if it is a free media because it is our free choice to mislead our viewers and readers. But the Israeli media enables all this by not reporting and by reporting in a very twisted way.

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Keynote: Gideon Levy: Democracy and Human Rights in Israel

It is always a senior [official] in Hamas who was assassinated. You know Hamas is a very special organization. They’re only seniors. Everyone is a senior in Hamas. Once I found that—and this is not a joke—they killed a child of seven [years] in the Second Intifada and they claimed he was senior in Hamas. Seriously. They didn’t bother about his age. But Israeli media gives it its face, gives all the services to this machinery of the army, of the secret services, of the government to inform us in such a false way.

The second [mechanism] responsible for the denial is unfortunately the Israeli left. And I say it with a lot of pain because I come from there. I was brought up there. You know, nobody’s perfect, so I worked for years with [former Prime Minister] Shimon Peres. I really came from there, from the Zionist left as we call it. The Zionist left is the real enemy of freedom, of fighting the occupation in Israel much more than the right-wingers. First of all, they are the founding fathers of the settlement project.

Who started it? Netanyahu? [Menachem] Begin? [Ariel] Sharon?

No, no, no, no, no. [It was] Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin. Nobel Peace Prize winners. Peacemakers. They are responsible.

Shimon Peres is responsible for many more settlements than Binyamin Netanyahu. So they are the founding fathers.

But that’s not enough. They also enable us Israelis to feel so good about ourselves because they always launder any crime.

Any crime goes through this laundry. And we have this prestigious world famous Supreme Court, this castle of liberalism, open-mindedness, and freedom—part of the Zionist left. Most of this establishment is based on liberals and leftists. And the Supreme Court enables any crime of war, from the settlements to the tortures, everything goes through the Supreme Court.

Everything is washed there and is accepted. If the Supreme Court says that there is no torturing or the settlements are legal, so who are we to say or to think differently?

So we owe a lot to the Israeli left, the Zionist left, which is the majority—almost all the Israeli left are Zionist—for maintaining this long period of crimes and occupation. Because if the left supports it, maybe it’s good. Maybe this is not so bad.

The International Community’s Role The last mechanism, which obviously should be maybe the first one, is the international community. That’s the reason why we are gathered here today. If it wasn’t for the international community, then the occupation wouldn’t last for one day. Imagine, Israel, being disconnected from SWIFT. I know it makes you laugh, but imagine yourself. Do you think that the occupation will last after 10 hours or 20 hours? That’s the only question.

Again, the war in Ukraine might give ideas. I know it sounds quite far-fetched, but maybe it will give some ideas. Because, unlike with Russia, Israel is so much more fragile in any pressure, and the Israeli people are not very devoted, they couldn’t care less about the settlements. If they will have to pay a price for it, let’s see what happens.

I once wrote an article under the title that Austrian Airlines will bring peace. Because it was during one of those operations in Gaza that Western airlines stopped flying to Tel Aviv and the first one was Austrian. I guessed that if this lasted more than one week, Israelis would freak out so much that after two weeks they would return, even Tel Aviv, to the Palestinians—just let us fly again.

But the international community cannot break out of its responsibility. I don’t want to put everything on the international community, but it for sure has the most immediate key to put an end to all this because Israel will not survive without the support of the international community. When I speak about the international community, it’s obviously the West. And when I speak about the West, it’s obviously this country.

Therefore, people like me have so much hope in organizations like this, in people like you, and what’s going on in the Democratic Party here. I hope it will last. I hope it will become something more meaningful and stronger, above all stronger.

I’m very encouraged by what happens on the campuses, students and others who start to see the truth and stand up. Questions are being asked, questions that were never asked before.

Like, where does our tax money go exactly? Is Israel really the right place? Do we really want to continue to support this country? Out of all 200 states in the world, this is the state that needs our support in such crazy, crazy, crazy sums? Are we sure that that’s the right use of our money?

Those questions are being raised now. They were never raised before. Maybe Ukraine and the sanctions over Russia will be another push to start to shake this ship, this very, very heavy ship which insists on going only in one direction. And, yes, we have to change direction.

We fought for so many years for the two-state solution. It is the most reasonable solution. It is maybe the most just solution.

But the only problem is that this train left the station a long time ago and we’d better realize it. Continuing to speak about the two-state solution plays exactly into the hands of the occupation. Let’s speak about the two-state solution. We have a solution. It’s now on the shelf. And one day we’ll take it.

No, no. It’s not there. We will make another peace process.

America will say it’s in favor of the two-state solution. Even Netanyahu would repeat he is for the two-state solution. Then we’ll go for another 50 years of occupation. We have the solution.

But not now. Because, you know, the security needs of Israel.

Because it’s not proper now for Israel to make changes. Maybe one day. Not now. When? We’ll see.

So this masquerade also must come to its end. There is no two-state solution. With 700,000 settlers, let’s face it and let’s be courageous enough to admit that nobody is going to evacuate 700,000 settlers. Without evacuation, there is no viable Palestinian state. It can be all kinds of other creatures. As Netanyahu called it, a state-minus. Let’s see Israel as a stateminus. But it’s even not a state, what they offer. It’s even not a state; what can be achieved when you have 700,000 settlers, most of them violent, aggressive, very bad neighbors, and above all not the real owners of the land?

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So we have to realize with all the pain because admitting that the two-state solution is not viable anymore has many consequences. The first consequence obviously is an end of Zionism.

For Israelis, this will be a very painful process because Zionism is the real religion of Israel. The army is our god and Zionism is our religion. It will be very, very hard—if possible at all—to separate from this ideology which is much more than ideology.

You can’t be in Israel and be non-Zionist. I’m not sure, maybe only in Soviet Russia there was one ideology which was allowed and no other ideology was allowed. In Israel that’s the case. You can’t be not Zionist. I mean nobody will put you in jail right now, but go away. If you are not a Zionist, you are a traitor. But we have to separate from Zionism because we face a problem, which we never thought about. It’s not one people in this land. There are two peoples.

I mean for many years Israelis didn’t see it. It was a land without people for a people without land. But they are there. What can we do? And they deserve equal rights. Exactly the same.

The only solution to put an end to it will be one person, one vote, one state, one democratic state.

We have to separate from the idea of a Jewish state. You can’t have it all, dear Israelis. You have to decide. You want a Jewish state? Be my guest. Not that I know what does it mean to be a Jewish state. Is Israel then a Jewish state? I don’t know what it means. But in any case, you can’t have it all. You want a Jewish state? Great. Evacuate all the occupied territories and you’ll have a very clear Jewish majority. Then you can talk about the Jewish state.

But this is not what Israelis want. They want both. They want to eat the cake and to keep it complete, and it doesn’t work.

There must be someone to tell Israel, make a choice. Okay.

You have to choose. The world has to come to Israel and ask— you want a Jewish state or you want a democracy? You can’t have both. Impossible.

But there is no one to tell Israel because all those billions of dollars, which the United States is sending to Israel, are not enough for the U.S. to put on some kind of conditions. I think I said it here in the past and I’ll repeat it here again. In many ways, when you look at the relationship between the United States and Israel, you can hardly tell who is the superpower between the two.

Where does it come from, that the U.S. cannot speak out and cannot criticize Israel? Because Israel found the secret. If you criticize me, you’re an anti-Semite. And that’s the whole secret.

It’s your responsibility not to get paralyzed by this.

How come Israel, which gets so much from the United States, is still dictating to the U.S.? The Israeli prime minister can come to the Congress and speak against an elected popular president and everything is fine? And this president supplies Israel with more weapons than any other president before him after this intervention. How? What is the secret? That’s really for you to find out because I’m not American. You should do the work, but it must come to a certain end.

The last word will be about the sanctions. Again, sanctions are in the air. Russia is suffering enormous sanctions. I’m not 50

an economic expert but I understand those sanctions. If they are implemented over time, they can destroy Russia. Why can’t we even discuss sanctions over Israel? You know it’s never even been discussed.

Sanctions and Israel are two different entities which are never mentioned. Like, by the way, Palestinians and security. Have you ever heard someone speaking about security for the Palestinians?

Even the Palestinians don’t speak about security because they know this is exclusively Jewish. Security can go only with Israel.

It can never go with any other people, for sure the Palestinians.

So sanctions must come into the discourse, into the international discourse. I don’t think it will happen in one day. I don’t think it will be accepted by all the countries. But something must start.

Why is it moral to boycott the sweatshops in Southeast Asia and not to buy their products? It’s everyone’s choice. But those who take this measure, nobody will say that they are not moral or committing a crime. It’s a very moral position. You don’t want to support something which in your values is not moral. Why is it not immoral to boycott butcheries? I stand for animals’ rights and I don’t want to consume the product of the most cruel industry on earth. Is it not moral? Is it criminal? Sure it’s moral and not criminal. You can say it. You can fight for it. You can struggle for it. Immoral regimes, you don’t want to buy their products.

What does this have to do with crimes, with laws and with anti-Semitism? Why can’t I say, as long as Israel is perceived by me as an immoral place, which totally ignores all the resolutions of the international community, I don’t want to buy any of their products? What is wrong about it? It became wrong.

The West, under again all kinds of Israeli manipulations, bought the trick, fell into the trap. The world is criminalizing any kind of—very soon maybe I will not be able to say it even here—to call for boycott or to call for support of BDS, which is right now the only game in town. Let’s be honest, it’s the only game in town. It’s not yet very influential because it still is just beginning, but right now it’s the only game in town.

Struggle for Democracy From the River to the Sea The only thing that we should struggle now for, the only thing we should fight for, from my view, is to fight for democracy between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Let’s leave the struggle over the settlements. I do it with a lot of pain, but it’s a lost cause. They won. Let’s put aside all the rest and let’s concentrate on one thing, democracy. It is so simple. So basic.

Democracy means equality. There is no democracy for part of a country or for part of its people. Either we are democratic or we are not. This should be, in my view, again, I’m ready to argue it—we should concentrate, from now, on this. Israel, either you are a democracy and then your name is not only Israel, obviously. Then you will be part of us, the West.

You are not a democracy? Then the consequences must be very, very clear. Like, the world does here and there when it’s

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Keynote: Gideon Levy: Democracy and Human Rights in Israel

convenient to the world, with other countries. Let’s hope that one day—maybe not our times, but we have to start somewhere—let’s hope that one day it will be real, a democracy. It is possible. Don’t buy those who will tell you that it’s impossible.

I know so.

I mean I’m visiting Palestinian homes now for over 35 years on a weekly basis. Many times on a daily basis. I know the grassroots. I’m not talking to politicians. The Palestinian people are willing to live with the Israelis under basic equality and dignity, obviously. Israelis less. Israelis much less. The problem will be with Israel, not with Palestine. But we have to start somewhere. If we don’t start, we will not call the bluff. The bluff is that Israel is a democracy. Thank you very much.

Questions and Answers Julia Pitner: There are a lot of questions. Israel and its lobby are pouring a lot of money into the United States to fight the three apartheid reports that were released. What is Israel afraid of?

Gideon Levy: They are afraid. They are rightly afraid because once the bluff will be called, then everything might collapse. These three reports already about apartheid were hardly mentioned in Israel, in Israeli media. Only Haaretz really covered it, as it should be. You know, those are anti-Semitic organizations. Every Israeli knows that Amnesty [International] is famous for its anti-Semitic positions. And by this, you kill the reports because there’s this expression in Hebrew—the whole world is against us.

That’s the way that Israelis think, the whole world is just against us. Everyone is an anti-Semite. And if this is the case, we shouldn’t bother because in any case the world is against us. Then you say, remember the Oslo times where the world hugged Israel and we were proud to be Israeli? No, no, no, no.

This was nothing. Then you ask, but the world is financing Israel and supporting Israel in the U.N. and everywhere. No, no, no. The world is against us. So if it’s against us, we have no problem with the world or we have such a problem that we can’t do anything about it. Those reports were totally covered up and didn’t create any discussion, except in Haaretz.

The money that Israel—I don’t think it’s so much the money, it is more the talent. I mean Israel learned how to paralyze the West.

Julia Pitner: Do you think organizations like J Street help to push the conversation or put pressure on the State of Israel?

Are they helping or harming human rights issues and efforts in Palestine and Israel?

Gideon Levy: I’m much more confident to talk about the brothers of J Street in Israel, namely the Zionist left. And you heard what I think about the Zionist left…About J Street, on one hand, maybe it’s better than nothing. Maybe it is one step forward and then will come another. For sure it’s not enough. Obviously.

I mean, as long as you are Zionist, you cannot really go farther than this. You have to separate from Zionism, there’s no other way, and they’re far from doing this. So is it misleading, like the Zionist left, or is it a step forward? It’s more for you to judge.

Julia Pitner: There are two questions. One, why was Israel so slow to say anything about Russia and Ukraine? Then the other is, should there be some kind of a strategy for the United States, for activists in this room? I mean, you know, what should be the strategy now?

Gideon Levy: Yeah. Thank you. For the first question, Israel was slow with Russia because Israel was scared of Russia.

The unbelievable phenomenon is that Israel was not scared of the United States who supplies Israel. It is more scared of Russia, who just lets Israel bomb Syria. All the rest we are okay with Russia. We don’t need anything from Russia. We don’t get our gas from Russia. We don’t get any money from Russia.

The Jews are well there. But in any case, we are scared of Russia and we are not scared of the United States.

This is the pure truth, again, which was exposed really in a most naked way in this conflict. That Israel cares more about Russia than about the United States. Israel feels that the United States is in its pockets. In many ways it’s true. Time will show if this will change. But right now I totally understand the Israeli decision makers ignoring American requests. So, maximum, America will condemn us. We can live with it.

Now what should be the strategy? You know more about strategy especially in this country, what will be effective and what not? I will try to suggest two things. One is to concentrate on one concept. I think we should change the discourse and start to speak about democracy between the river and the sea.

Equal rights. We ask exactly what we asked from South Africa. We are going to use the same means that we used in South Africa because we are totally convinced that there is no difference. I mean there are differences but finally, it’s the same regime. We did something about South Africa. We want to do the same now here.

So focusing on the one-state solution I think can be very fruitful because it also offers some kind of vision and some kind of hope. It’s not just condemning and saying the occupation is brutal and the Palestinians are suffering. This doesn’t lead us anywhere. We have been trying it for 50 years; it didn’t touch too many people. The Palestinians suffered. None of us can imagine ourselves what it means to live under the Israeli iron boots? Yeah, none of us can even imagine what it means to be a young person or an old person living under occupation in routine times.

The second thing that we should understand is that [the occupation] will not end through niceties. The West has been trying niceties with Israel for over 50 years now, to be careful with this, to understand the sentiments, to understand the needs, to understand the traumas, to understand the heritage.

All the time just this soft attitude of how we will try to convince Israel with niceties, with offering carrots and more carrots, and do this and we will do this. No. We tried it. It didn’t lead us anywhere. The only way to make it happen is by punishing Israel.

There is no other way. It’s not that I’m in favor of it, but there is no other way.

Thank you so much. You are so kind. Thank you. ■ May 2022

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John Kiriakou: Israel’s Negative, Disproportionate and Widespread Influence on the U.S. National Security State

Israel’s Negative, Disproportionate and Widespread Influence on the U.S. National Security State John Kiriakou

PHOTO PHIL PASQUINI

Grant F. Smith: John Kiriakou is an author, journalist, former CIA officer specializing in the Middle East.

He was the first U.S. government official to confirm in December 2007 that waterboarding and other forms of torture were used overseas to interrogate prisoners. He’s also the first CIA officer to be convicted for passing classified information to a reporter.

He served a 30-month prison sentence for that.

You can hear his voice on 105.5 FM in Washington, DC. Drive around and listen to him for four hours every day. His book, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror, is a classic. Get the audio or print book. It’s phenomenal.

We’ve asked him to talk about a few points he witnessed within the CIA. According to him, in his own words, there was a great deal of respect for Palestinians. But we’re asking him, is that respect open or suppressed? He received many warnings regarding covert Israeli intelligence maneuvers in the U.S. So we’re asking him, oh, really? That sounds interesting. What were those? And he’s been noted for refusing to undertake the CIA’s enhanced interrogation training—waterboarding, sleep deprivation—that was used on terrorist suspects.

So we’d like to know what he makes about reports that the CIA justified and adopted some techniques based on Israel.

We’ve asked him a few questions including the good guy/bad guy motif that we’re hearing once again and whether the U.S. could be sucked into a war with Iran. Please welcome John Kiriakou.

John Kiriakou: Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you so much. I’m very happy to be here. I really am. What a wonderful organization.

A great event. It’s not a normal thing really in Washington that you’re able to get together with a group of like-minded individuals and speak freely.

It’s very nice.

I’d like to do this in two parts if I may. I want to talk first a little bit about my background at the CIA and the way the CIA views human rights, which is going to seem odd, I think, to most of you. Then I’d like to answer these specific questions that we were just talking about.

First of all, I joined the CIA in January of 1990. I was recruited into the CIA by my graduate school adviser who was not really a grad school adviser so much as he was undercover as a grad school adviser. He recruited me into the CIA. I spent the first seven-and-a-half years of my career working on and in the Middle East, almost exclusively on Iraq. I worked for a while on Kuwait. I went into Kuwait with the Marines on Liberation Day in 1991. Very exciting.

But it got monotonous after a little while writing papers that you knew nobody was going to read. We all thought we were so important, but nobody paid any attention. So I decided to do something more exciting and more rewarding. I got involved in counterterrorism operations. As it turned out, I was the only person in the entire CIA who spoke both Greek and Arabic.

So they sent me to Athens to work on Arab—it’s quaint now— Arab communist terrorist groups.

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You remember the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Abu Nidal? They were all old men by the time I got there; it became nonsensical. But, anyway, it was a lot of fun, and I got to sort of learn the tradecraft. Then I went back to headquarters in 2000 after ten years mostly in the field. Then September 11th hit. September 11th changed literally everything at the CIA.

“The CIA Underwent Something Called a Cull” When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, he was inaugurated, of course, in January of 1993. The CIA underwent something called a cull. We were ordered to go through the files of literally every recruited asset we had in the world. If those assets had any human rights problems in their past, we were ordered to cut ties with them, to fire them. A lot of us laughed when we heard that because can you imagine the CIA saying, oops, you were involved in a human rights abuse five years ago, we can’t have anything to do with you. But by God they actually did. Bill Clinton was serious at the time about human rights. We culled a third, fully a third of the recruited assets that the CIA had around the world. That only lasted about seven years. Then George W. Bush became president, September 11th happened, and everything changed overnight.

I’m going to go back to 1990, my very first day at the CIA. We had a senior FBI agent come to talk to the new hire class.

One of the things that he said has stuck in my mind all of these 32-plus years. We were talking about counterintelligence and the FBI’s role in counterintelligence. That is trying to spot spies who were spying on us, whether they’re moles, which is unusual, or intelligence officers of a foreign country.

Well, most embassies here in Washington have what are called declared officers. Those are foreign intelligence officers who are here and they are formally known to the FBI and the CIA as intelligence officers. So they’re here to exchange paper, and liaise, and meet with their CIA and FBI counterparts, and then go back to their embassies and write a report and send it back to their capitals.

This FBI agent told us at the time that the Israeli Embassy was unusual. Now, remember this was 32 years ago. So the information is very old, but just to give you an idea of what we were looking at. The Israeli Embassy had two declared officers, one from Shin Bet and one from Mossad. And it had 187 undeclared officers, that the FBI had been able to identify, spread out all across America in academia, in the defense contracting industry. We’ve all seen “The Americans.” Right? The Israelis do the same thing, just like we do the same thing.

But we were told that very first day that I was at the agency that we have no international friends. Not really. I mean you can argue now of the Five Eyes, the British, the Australians, New Zealanders, the Canadians. Not the Israelis. The Israelis were a country, a service that we had to be leery of. In some 54

cases, we had to fear. I thought that was probably an overstatement at the time.

After I had been at the CIA for three years, I decided I wanted to go overseas. There was a program that the State Department ran called the Analyst Overseas Program where they’ll take CIA analysts and transfer them to the State Department.

So you’re a legitimate State Department Foreign Service Officer and you go overseas, and you work for two years in an embassy, and then come back and you transfer back to the CIA. So I thought, well, do I want to go to Jerusalem or do I want to go somewhere else? I decided to go to Bahrain—two of the happiest years in my life.

The guy that I sat next to for those three years, he went to Jerusalem along with his wife. Now, because they had been to Israel before, the CIA decided to declare them as a courtesy and to say, look, we have these two people, this married couple, they’re not spies, they’re analysts. One of them isn’t even really an analyst. He’s going to go to graduate school while his wife is doing the analysis. We just want you to know that they’re here as a courtesy, on assignment to the State Department.

What the Israelis did over the next two years was to carry out a campaign of harassment. The reason I bring this up is because it’s quite common. I’m telling you this story because this is just a normal thing that happens to Americans, especially to American CIA officers working and living in Israel.

They went to a party one night and they came home. It was a party at the ambassador’s residence in Tel Aviv. They came home and all of their living room furniture had been rearranged, all of it. So the message was we can come into your house any time we want and there’s nothing you can do about it. Okay.

That’s aggravating a little bit, but no damage done.

The next time they went out, they came home and someone had defecated in all of the toilets in their house. They had a four-bedroom house, a four-bathroom house. People had gone to the bathroom in all four of the toilets and left it unflushed. So another not very nice message that we can harass you any time we want.

The third time it happened, they came home and their dog was yelping and laying on the floor of the kitchen. Someone had cut its tail off and then wrapped it in gauze and tape. The fourth time it happened to them, they had done their Christmas shopping. They had a tree up in the living room. They had gone to the ambassador’s Christmas party. When they came back all of the presents were gone. All of them, a thousand dollars’ worth of Christmas presents.

Now this kind of thing happens all the time. So the ambassador has to go to the Israelis and say, look, cut it out. Leave my people alone. And they say okay, okay. Then they’ll back off for a little while and then they start up again.

I have a friend who was the senior CIA person in-country [in Israel]. He went to work one day and the ambassador said to him the craziest thing happened last night. He said, I was in the car and my driver was driving me home. I had a blowout

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John Kiriakou: Israel’s Negative, Disproportionate and Widespread Influence on the U.S. National Security State

Artist Steve Powers' installation “Waterboard Thrill Ride” is seen at the Coney Island arcade in New York on Aug. 14, 2008. After a dollar bill is fed into a machine, the creation features robots performing the controversial CIA interrogation technique used on detainees. and we had to pull the car over to the side of the road. It turned out that two tires on the right side had blown out. Well, they had been shot out.

Have any of you ever—I mean all of us had blown a tire.

Have you ever blown two at the same time just minding your business driving down the highway? Well, sure enough these two men pulled up, [the ambassador said]. They were so friendly and so warm. They got out and they helped us change the one tire. Then they stayed there until the tow truck came to help us tow the car to get the second tire replaced.

But then the ambassador’s briefcase was missing and in the briefcase were personnel files because he was writing endof-year performance evaluations. Well, that way the friendly guys who stopped to help change the tire can determine who’s getting a performance evaluation from the ambassador and who’s not. Because the ones who aren’t are CIA officers, right?

Because it’s the Foreign Service people who were working for the ambassador.

So we don’t do things like this to the Israelis ever. We also don’t spy on the Israelis ever because of the political pressure that would put the CIA under on Capitol Hill.

All the years that I worked at the CIA and being an analyst working on Iraq, an enemy country at the time, I was declared to—my God—more foreign intelligence services than I can even remember. It was dozens, dozens of them. I only spoke to the Israelis once in the 15 years that I was there. I had only been on the job about six months and I was told by my boss you’re going to brief the Israelis this afternoon. I said okay. And

he said we don’t meet with them here in the building. We can’t trust them to come into the building, so we’re going to meet them out. There’s a special place where we meet them because they kept trying to bring bugs into the building. Right?

Oh, we’ll give you this gift. Well, the gift weighs twice what it should because it’s full of batteries and a listening device. You can’t bring that in here.

So I went to brief the Israelis. Now, because I was the junior most analyst at the time—and it was like seven or eight of us that were there—I was the last one to speak. So we went around the table. It was the Mossad person and the Shin Bet person and they’re writing down every word that the analysts were saying. Finally they came to me and because I was not undercover, I was an overt employee at the time, I used my real name. I said my name is John Kiriakou. The Shin Bet officer says to me, spell it. So I spelled it for him. He looks up and he says, you are Jewish? I said I am not recruitable, and he stopped. Afterwards my boss said, yeah, you’re not going to brief the Israelis anymore. And so I didn’t. I never spoke to them again.

Now, once I got overseas, again, I was declared to so many services. I was working in counterterrorism and that’s where you really want there to be lots and lots of cooperation. So we would get calls from this country, and that country, and the other country and we rarely said no. Well, I can tell you from firsthand experience, when it came time to work with the Palestinians, I’m hard pressed to think of a group of people who were more committed to counterterrorism, to peace. I mean it was reveMay 2022

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latory for me. It was a group of people who wanted to do the right thing. They wanted good relations. They wanted progress for their people. They wanted to have a role in the international community and it was a joy to work with them.

You know, that was between 1998 and 2000. And I thought, wow, that was really great. I wonder if that was an anomaly.

Then I went to Pakistan in 2002 as the chief of counterterrorism operations. It got to the point where the Palestinians would come to the embassy and they would just wave them in, come on in, because they belonged there. We were partners. We were a team.

CIA and State Department vs White House and Capitol Hill That was the case at the CIA and it was also the case at the State Department. There was a note that I wrote to myself to be sure to explain the dichotomy, that it was exactly the opposite at the White House and on Capitol Hill because we didn’t have to answer to voters at the CIA. Right? I don’t care what AIPAC says about me if I’m at the CIA. I don’t care. I have a job to do and I was bound to do it.

The State Department was the same way. And the State Department was often criticized for something called clientitis. You hear this a lot at the State Department, that people go to Israel and they serve for a couple of years. Then they come out really disliking the Israelis and really loving Palestinians. Then they say, okay, well, then you need to go to Berlin for a couple years to cool off. We can’t have all these Arab lovers. Well, it turns out that the whole State Department loves Arabs. It’s just a completely different world. It’s hard to describe.Then you go to the White House, especially to the National Security Council, to work with those people who have these fancy titles of senior assistant to the president for such and such affairs and assistant to the president. You say this is the way things should be in our policy on, you know, the Levant or the Maghreb or whatever it is. And they don’t want to hear it because you like Arabs too much.

Well, with that said, we all just accepted it. Frankly, we all believed that we were right and the White House was wrong.

Capitol Hill, forget it. It’s a lost cause. On Capitol Hill, when we were summoned to give briefings, we would get in the car with somebody from the Office of Congressional Affairs and they would always tell us before we walk into the House or Senate office buildings: Remember, say as little as you can possibly get away with and try not to answer the questions. Yeah, that’s what we would do. Just don’t answer the questions. You can talk, and talk, and talk and not really say anything. Then those senators and congressmen just get up and walk away anyway.

So it never made any difference.

I want to answer these questions in the little time that I have left. One is about Chas Freeman. Why in my view was Chas Freeman not able to bring his immense talent to office [as head of the National Intelligence Council] during the Obama adminis56

tration? I worked for Chas Freeman in Riyadh when he was the American ambassador to Saudi Arabia. I was blessed over the course of my career with working with some of the most brilliant diplomatic minds anybody could encounter. He was one of them.

He’s a giant in diplomacy, and an honest giant. The easy answer to this question is AIPAC simply would not allow him to assume this position. This is a guy who had been ambassador to Saudi Arabia, [the main interpreter for President Richard Nixon during his 1972 visit] to China. He was the [Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs].

He’s published extensively. He’s a brilliant author, a historian.

President Barack Obama [nominated him] as [head of the National Intelligence Council]. And the Israelis said, oh, no, you don’t.

He’s pro-Palestinian. And that fight lasted for [a month] as he waited for confirmation. Finally, on Capitol Hill, senators told the White House there’s no way we’re going to confirm him. If the Israelis say no, he’s not getting the job. And he didn’t. He didn’t.

Now in different groups that we have around town we’ve honored him in other ways. His health is quite poor right now. But he was wronged by his country. He was wronged just because he believed in a level playing field, something that I got to see a lot of here in Washington over the years.

I’ve been noted for refusing to undertake the CIA’s enhanced interrogation training on terrorist suspects. I called it a torture program. I had just returned from Pakistan where I had led this raid that resulted in the capture of Abu Zubaydah, who’s in the news today because he lost his final case at the Supreme Court yesterday.

I was asked if I wanted to be trained in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques. I had never heard the term before and so I asked what it meant. My colleague said very excitedly, we’re going to start getting rough with these guys. And I said, well, what does that mean? He explained it to me. I said that sounds like a torture program. Are you crazy? And he said, no, it’s not a torture program, the president said we could do it and the Justice Department approved it. I said, I don’t know, man, that sounds like a torture program. I don’t think I want to have anything to do with it. I said I have a moral and ethical problem with it.

So I’m embarrassed to tell you that of the 14 people who were asked, I was the only one who said no. And these were people that I traveled with. Our wives were friends and our kids played together. They were normal people to me. It was a shock that they could turn it off and become monsters when they had to. Murderers in cold blood.

This final question is did we learn this from the Israelis? Of course we did. We saw what the Israelis were getting away with in these prisons that they had in the West Bank and in Gaza.

Nobody raised any objection at all. So we thought, well, if the Israelis can do it, we can do it. The president said we could and the Justice Department said we could, and so we did.

Now of course we have to take the CIA’s word for it. They say they’re not doing it anymore. We don’t know. And my time is up. So thank you so much for this opportunity. It was wonderful. Thank you. ■

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The Israel Lobby’s Ongoing Attacks on Freedom of Speech Across the U.S. and Successful Legal Challenges

The Israel Lobby’s Ongoing Attacks on Freedom of Speech Across the U.S. and Successful Legal Challenges Radhika Sainath

PHOTO PHIL PASQUINI

Dale Sprusansky: So our next speaker here today is Radhika Sainath who is a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal. Her writing has appeared in The Nation, the Huffington Post and numerous other publications. She’s also currently working on her first novel, which is set in Palestine during the Second Intifada. So be on the lookout for that.

Of course, as you all know and you will hear today, Palestine Legal is really an essential organization. One of the handful of organizations that does work to help students, of all people, who get targeted by the Israel lobby and don’t have the resources to defend themselves—but they do have the will to fight. And they [Palestine Legal] are the ones who help them through the legal process. So with that being said, welcome to the stage. It’s a pleasure to have you here today.

Radhika Sainath: Well, so Palestine Legal, we started about nine years ago. I’ve been working there for eight of those nine years. We’re legal defense for the movement for Palestinian rights in the United States. If an activist or pretty much anyone is censored or punished or has a legal question or is threatened because of their support for Palestinian rights, Palestine Legal is there. We have your back. That is what we do.

We have about a staff of ten people. Locations are in New York—I’m based in our New York City office—Chicago and the Bay Area. What we do is we document incidents of suppression.

We track legislation, anti-boycott legislation for example, and we provide people who need legal support with lawyers in all 50 states.

Before I get into the discussion about the suppression and the censorship—it’s kind of a downer topic I realize—I thought I’d zoom out a little bit and talk about why we’re here in the first place. That’s because there is this growing movement for Palestinian rights in the United States. I mean personally I think there’s been a sea change in just my lifetime as far as support for Palestinian rights.

The younger generation, the millennials, Gen Z, they know where it’s at.

The people on college campuses—there’s 200 Students for Justice in Palestine chapters now across the United States, Jewish Voice for Peace chapters, and other groups that don’t have Palestine in their name—are speaking out for Palestinian rights. They’re organizing protests. They’re organizing events. They’re putting up mock apartheid walls. They’re handing out flyers. They are teaching their fellow students what’s happening over there about the decades-long history of occupation, colonization and apartheid of the Palestinian people.

Because of this growing tide and change, what we’ve seen at Palestine Legal is efforts by Israel advocacy groups to try to censor speech supporting Palestinian rights and just end the discussion and end the debate. When we started nine years ago, you know, we were there for everyone in the United States. But what we found out was that about 80 percent of the people that came to us were students or scholars, and mainly students. We were like, oh, this is bizarre. Why are only students contacting us?

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Then I think what we realized was that the opposition gets that that’s where change happens. Right? Whether it was the Vietnam anti-war movement, the anti-South African apartheid movement, you name it, college students were there pushing their governments for change, for justice. So that’s where most of our work has been focused. Since 2014 we’ve documented, we’ve responded to over 2,000 incidents of suppression. That’s just really the tip of the iceberg. When I say responded to, I mean that’s literally what you have called me to tell me and report to me.

So there’s a whole lot that’s happening there that people don’t talk about necessarily because for some people it’s just, you’re so used to it. You’re not necessarily going to call us to document it. For some people, you don’t know about us. It’s really just when people come to us, if they have a legal question or something happens, we document it.

So that’s really just the tip of the iceberg.

We just recently released our 2021 end-of-year report, and we saw a 30 percent rise in incidents looking to suppress speech supporting Palestinian rights. Our numbers are also up from pre-COVID as well.

So in 2015 Palestine Legal, along with the Center for Constitutional Rights, published a seminal report called the “Palestine Exception to Free Speech.”

At the time we thought we were so smart coining this phrase. Now I think it’s just really used everywhere. Everyone knows it, the Palestine exception to free speech. You don’t even have to say the free speech part of it. You can just say the Palestine exception and people understand what you’re talking about. That’s where advocates are censored, punished, questioned and falsely accused, again for taking a principled stance for Palestinian rights.

Why is this happening? Other speakers have talked about it today. It’s not just happening in a vacuum. No, the Israeli government, along with aligned private groups, are devoting significant financial and strategic resources to quash this growing movement. From 2016 to 2019 the Israeli government allotted over $100 million just to fight the boycott movement for Palestinian rights, for example.

But I wanted to step back and also talk to you a little bit about some of the trends that we saw in 2021. You’re the first to hear about this. We just came out with this report last week. It was really exciting to see, you know, the record solidarity for Palestinian rights that we saw in the United States in the past year. I’m sure many of you here were out in the streets protesting Israel’s bombing of Gaza and protesting the evictions in Sheikh Jarrah.

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So that was really, really incredible to see that. At Palestine Legal, our phones were ringing off the hook. In May, the number of requests that were coming in from people was just incredible.

I’m going to talk to you a little bit about some of the trends that we saw in 2021. I probably won’t go into too much detail in all of them since I want to save time for questions and answers, but these are some of the trends that we’ve seen.

The first was really how people’s jobs were targeted. This came as a real surprise to us because again, as I mentioned, most of the people generally in our history who come to us have been students or scholars.

What we saw starting in May of last year was what I’m going to call regular people punished for speaking out for Palestinian rights. We saw, for example, farmers, makeup artists, journalists, writers, therapists, doctors, teachers. I mean you name it. They were getting fired for speaking out for Palestinian rights. They were being pulled into meetings with their bosses. They were told to delete tweets.

They were quite shocked because these were people who saw that their businesses and that their employers were taking stances for Black lives in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. That they were making statements against anti-Asian hate after the Atlanta hate crimes targeting Asians last year. So they thought to themselves. Many of them were like, oh, you know, I’m going to say something for Palestinian rights on social media. Or, oh, you know, my office put out statements on how to help your Black clientele after George Floyd’s murder. I’m Palestinian, I’m going to say, you know, if you have Palestinian clients coming in, they might need extra support in this time and this is why.

Then, when they did these things, they were called in and told that’s anti-Semitic, you can’t say that, please remove the social media, or you’re fired.

I think many of you know the Emily Wilder story which got a lot of media attention and was pretty egregious, right, where Emily Wilder was fired from her job at the Associated Press in Arizona for her activism in college while she was at Stanford a few years before that. What made this even more appalling was that it happened after Israel had bombed AP’s building in Gaza. But, yeah, the young Republicans at Stanford and with allied groups, right wing groups, published her activism and she never got her job back despite the significant outcry.

Another case which I’m sure you have not heard of is over in Tennessee where a head farmer at this luxury resort called

They were getting fired for speaking out for Palestinian rights.

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Blackberry Farm—which I think the rooms go for like between seven [hundred] and a thousand dollars a night, a farm-to-table type place—urged followers to please help bring peace to Palestine and had some hashtags including End the Occupation an End Zionism. He was fired from his post of seven years because of this, because people complained.

I should say that the stories I’m sharing, I’m sharing with you because people have said it’s okay to share these stories or you can share part of these stories. People come to us confidentially.

We’re attorneys. If they want us to keep their stories confidential, we do. This story, I mean there’s more facts that I can’t share with you unfortunately, but it’s just so appalling what happened to this farmer, Michael Washburn, again, for something very simple that you would think most people would agree with.

Hundreds of People Censored for Social Media Posts Censorship in social media, this could be a whole other talk.

Indeed I have been on panels covering this. So 7amleh and Access Now documented how hundreds of people were censored for their social media posts. Dozens of people actually came to us and we referred them to these groups who were documenting and fighting back against the social media censorship. Mohammed El-Kurd also talked about it. Leaks by Facebook later revealed that employees were aware of Facebook censorship of posts by Palestinians, including El-Kurd.

So, censorship in journals and cultural spaces. This is something that most people don’t expect because you expect journals with the title Scientific American to be scientific and unbiased. But last year we saw that medical workers posted an article on Scientific American and got approved. They were talking about how Israel is denying Palestinians essential care.

They pledged to engage in BDS. After complaints, the journal took down the article after two weeks. It was published for two weeks. Changed the name and said it fell out of scope. But appallingly the medics’ names were still up there and they faced a barrage of online harassment.

Over in Philadelphia, the Free Library of Philadelphia, which is kind of this space that values diversity and freedom of speech and all of these good things, librarians posted about Palestine, including a recorded talk on a children’s book by a Palestinian American author. And the library took down the post after Israel advocacy organizations complained. So, even children’s books

by Palestinians about Palestinian culture are censored. This is not the only one. P is for Palestine faced censorship attempts a few years ago. We’ve had other people confidentially come to us who are writers as well, including children’s book authors, who were censored.

Over at universities, we are still seeing censorship. I want to share this story because it takes place right here in DC. How many people here in the audience—is there anyone who went to GW or is currently at George Washington University? Okay.

A handful of people. You know, my office filed a discrimination complaint with the Office for Human Rights in November.

To tell you a little bit about the story, there’s this wonderful office at George Washington University called the Office of Advocacy and Support. It provides trauma support services to students and workers, and it interprets the term trauma very broadly. In the past it advertised its services on Instagram.

That’s where the students are at. They’ve said, in the wake of Breonna Taylor’s murder, they were there for Black students.

Even after the January 6th Capitol riots and attack, they were there for students. They’ve been there for students again reeling, Asian students reeling after the hate crime in Atlanta.

Again, you name it, they were there for the students.

Last May, our hero client Nada Elbasha, who is Palestinian American, and her colleagues noticed that a lot of GW students appeared to be really impacted by what was happening in Palestine with Israel’s attacks. They saw this on social media and they discussed it. There was some back and forth and they said, you know, we should provide a virtual trauma support circle to Palestinian students—it’s open to everyone—like we do for other students.

So they tried to do this in early June and then they posted it on Instagram. Within 24 hours they got a call first from the director of Hillel at GW to take it down. Then later, at the highest levels of GW, there was this emergency meeting. Representatives from the board of trustees were allegedly there amongst other people. They were told to cancel the event and post an apology. To this date this event has not been reinstated.

What happened is that GW has now, well, two of the three staff members at this office have left. GW has taken away most of their duties. In the past they used to be able to contact professors. For example, if you were a student who was traumatized by something, this office would email professors and say, oh, hey, this student needs an extension on their exam. Now they are not allowed to contact professors. They’re not allowed to hold any virtual processing spaces. They kind of feel like they’re not allowed to do anything and they’re being punished.

So we filed a complaint. This violates DC’s Human Rights Act which says that even private universities cannot discriminate on the basis of national origin and 20 other protected characteristics. We’re waiting for a response right now. This was just a couple of months ago. But I will say one of the things that we pointed out was that what GW is doing with this office, which we’ve heard from students has been really incredibly supportive for all different kinds of students, is really reminiscent of what some segregated cities did where they refused to integrate pools and instead closed pools completely so that no one could go to swimming pools rather than integrate them.

So it is really appalling because I think this is sort of indicative of a trend that we’re seeing right now. Mostly people are talking about speech, right, people who are supporting speech for Palestinian rights, anyone really, if you’re Palestinian or not, gets pressured to be censored. But here it’s really not even about speech. Right? It’s really denial of services. It’s saying May 2022

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that Palestinians just can’t even get support or have a space to have a conversation about how they’re feeling. So this is a whole other level.

GW is not the first place that we’ve seen this at. We’ve seen this in other schools as well. We’re really looking at the unique harm that Palestinians themselves have faced for identifying publicly as Palestinian and talking about their stories.

We filed another complaint last year against Florida State University as well, with the Department of Education. It was the first case of apparently anti-Palestinian discrimination under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. That is still pending as well.

You know, there are so many cases of school censorship. I’m not going to go through all of them today because that would go well into the evening, but I want to just bring up two cases that are listed here. One is Fordham University, which is a private Jesuit school in New York City, banned SJP. They actually banned SJP in 2016 and we sued together with the Center for Constitutional Rights and co-counsel Alan Levine.

It was a little bit of a tricky lawsuit because it’s a private school and under the First Amendment, states and governments can’t censor speech on the basis of discrimination. So public schools have to obey the First Amendment. And in some states, like California, you have the California Constitution that says that private schools also have to follow free speech principles. But over in New York we don’t have that and so we sued under a really obscure legal provision. We won in state court, in the lower court. Well, yeah, we won for a little bit I should say before you—yeah, hold your applause. So we won and the judge actually had this amazing 20-page decision where she got it. She was like, this is about Israel. I can see what happened here. This makes no sense.

Unfortunately, Fordham appealed and the Appeals Court threw out the lawsuit and not on the principles. They actually just said, oh, well, this lawsuit took so long, all of the students that tried to form the Students for Justice in Palestine club have graduated. So you don’t have standing, which is a legal principle. Like, they’re not there. So the new students, why don’t they just form a new club?

It was just a pretty ridiculous decision because, if the courts are going to take four years to get a decision, you’re never going to have students that can be there long enough to see out a lawsuit. But anyways, you know, we tried to appeal to New York’s highest court. They only agree to about one out of ten appeals and they did not agree to ours. So immediately, within a week I believe it was, Fordham just banned SJP. What was appalling was that, you know, the students had 60

been—between those two decisions—the students had been organizing for a year and a half, talking to people, holding little discussion groups and cultural nights. Nothing illegal. The Zionist Organization of America and a number of other Israel advocacy groups filed briefs, amicus friend of the court briefs in the case saying you can’t allow SJP to be a student club.

They’re going to disrupt your events. They are going to disrupt your school. They both support terrorists and get money from terrorists. I mean, you name it. The accusations were there.

Those briefs by Israel advocacy groups, none of that has happened to say the least. But unfortunately the students are not an approved club. I will move on.

So other tactics that we’ve seen over the years. Legislation. Paul [Noursi] covered this earlier quite in depth, so I won’t.

But you know since 2014, 32 states have adopted anti-boycott laws or antiPalestinian laws. I mean obviously that number looks really bad. It is bad, but it should be noted that over 233 such bills have been introduced. The first bills that were introduced were absurd.

I mean this was early 2014, in the wake of the American Studies Association’s historic academic boycott resolution. The first bills that we saw come in were just egregious. They called for a full defunding of public universities for allowing professors to travel to conferences. I mean it was just so boldly on the face unconstitutional that they never really got very far.

Really I should say we’re movement lawyers at Palestine Legal, so we take the lead from the movement. Really, what it comes down to, we feel it’s the work of activists and organizers that really make the difference in pushing back. You heard some of those conversations earlier this morning.

So anti-boycott legislation, there are three types. There’s also attempts to redefine anti-Semitism as well. I will just say you should check out our website. We have a really great map of all the different bills. They’re interactive. But I just wanted to give you an idea on what’s been happening last year as far as the numbers. Yes, during Delta, during Omicron, during everyone’s kids being at home with them, driving them crazy while they’re trying to work. What were our legislators doing? Oh, introducing at least 20 bills in 2021, but you know, only four of those passed. So this is still happening.

Of course we saw that after Ben & Jerry’s decision to not sell ice cream in the West Bank, yeah, a number of states have said that they were going to divest from Unilever, the parent company, which is just appalling and hypocritical. An Israeli organization that’s the distributor for Ben & Jerry’s in the West Bank just sued in New Jersey. So I haven’t read it yet. It apparently was just yesterday that this lawsuit happened. Just crazy.

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So it goes without saying that boycotts are protected First Amendment activity, they’re political speech. There’s a 1982 Supreme Court case that makes this really crystal clear. That is why all, you know, no court has sustained one of these laws.

There have been a number of lawsuits challenging these laws.

Of course, boycotts are a time-honored tactic for social justice.

They’ve been used throughout the years in many different social justice campaigns.

The other thing that we’ve been seeing for a while are meritless lawsuits and legal threats. So this one is pretty nutty because this was actually a talk on how people who speak out for Palestinian rights are censored.

What happened, a group called Americans for Peace and Tolerance brought a lawsuit or was behind a lawsuit against UMass, trying to get an injunction so that this talk would not take place. So when it was advertised, they pretty much said this is so dangerous, this is so anti-Semitic it’s going to be a threat to Jewish students on campus.

They had four anonymous plaintiffs file this lawsuit. Judge, you’ve got to stop this right away. You know, the judge let it go on. Two thousand people came.

This is a group of people that are not scared off by lawsuits or lawsuit threats.

But you can imagine often you have talks at public universities organized by undergrads, or teachers that don’t have tenure yet, or are speakers that are just community members that aren’t as high profile as Roger Waters or Linda Sarsour, and how difficult it makes it to have these conversations. These Israel advocacy groups have been really clear that this is their MO. They don’t care if they lose. That, you know, the point is just to make it so difficult to speak out for Palestinian rights that you don’t.

Then lastly, my last couple of minutes, this one is from a few years ago but I really wanted to share it because I think it’s a really great example of the double standard when it comes to Palestinian rights, especially when it comes to courses. Anyone here went to UC Berkeley? Oh, my gosh, only one person. Oh, two. Two, okay. I did too, so that’s three. But okay. So it’s considered a liberal school, for those of you who don’t know. I think you know that. Birthplace of the student movement for free speech. There’s a free speech cafe.

They have these courses at Berkeley called DeCal, Democratizing Cal. There are these one-unit courses, that undergrads can take a course on how to teach the course. And it’s really exciting. Students teach on a whole bunch of different topics.

Our client, Paul Hadweh, who’s Palestinian, decided he wanted to teach this course called Palestine: A Settler Colonial Analy-

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sis. So he took his one-unit course beforehand and he set up his syllabus. He was really thoughtful about it. He had an amazing reading list of speakers. Again, this is one unit. So he had a mix of famous Palestinian scholars, Israeli scholars. Even testimony from Israeli soldiers were there. The U.N. Goldstone Report was part of the reading list.

What happened? Forty-three Israeli advocacy groups called for censorship. They wrote the chancellor. They said this is political indoctrination. This meets our government’s criteria for anti-Semitism. It’s intended to indoctrinate students. It’s filled with anti-Israel bias. It delegitimizes Israel. Extreme anti-Zionist. On and on and on. The chancellor wrote a response letter saying that, you know, the course espouses a single political viewpoint and/or appears to offer a forum for political organizing. And it talked about Jewish students as well.

Now, at the same time, you can—I don’t know if the 2016 course list is still on there, but at the time you could look at all the courses. Right? And these were the courses not deemed political or one sided. As you can imagine, the CopWatch talk did not have any pro-police perspectives. The human trafficking course, nothing there that was prohuman trafficking. Helping the Navajo rebuild, no pro-colonization perspectives whatsoever.

It was pretty obvious we, Palestine Legal, we wrote to the university. We said this was a violation of the First Amendment. Other people wrote as well. What was pretty awful though is that the student, a really sweet kid, UC Berkeley did not even have the courtesy to call him before they canceled his course. He had to hear about it from, I believe it was a cousin or a friend who was watching in Israel, I believe it’s Channel 10, and saw the news and called him in the morning and said there’s reporting on that your course wants to throw Jews into the sea. And, yeah, it was just awful.

So you know at the end of the day, yes, we fought back. He got to teach his course. But it was suspended for about a week before that happened. It was so stressful for the student. He didn’t get sleep. It was awful. He got threats. No 20-year-old should go through that just for being smart and wanting to teach about his country in an actually very scholarly way.

That’s a little bit of an overview of Palestine Legal, but I just want to end by saying—I always feel like it’s a little bit of a downer ending but, you know, don’t be chilled. Keep speaking up. Keep doing what you’re doing. And if you need legal help, give us a call. ■

Of course, boycotts are a time-honored tactic for social justice.

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Are American News Organizations Getting Better or Worse in Their Middle East Reporting?

Sut Jhally

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I also learned a great deal about what puts pressure on university presidents. I’ve been teaching at UMass for a while and there’s been lots of complaints about me from the kind of lunatic right, from the Zionist right, from CAMERA, etc. The university president kind of loves that. He was like, oh, I can protect you against CAMERA. But the moment, the moment the pressure came from donors, the moment the pressure came from donors, he caved. So it taught me a lot that the pressure is not just this right-wing pressure. It’s pressure from people that really matter. It’s pressure, as always, with money.

That was just provoked by what Radhika said about our event.

Again, I’m in the unenviable position of speaking at the last session which means almost everything I wanted to talk about has been talked about already. It means I have to follow people like Gideon Levy, like Hanan Ashrawi. It’s not enviable. But hopefully there’ll be a few things I can say that might be interesting.

The Chinese philosopher Confucius was once asked what he would do if he were ever to rule the state. Someone asked him what would you do if you were in charge? And he answered, he would rectify the language. Rectify the language. That is he would control the categories through which people perceive the world.

As we are a symbolic and storytelling species, something always stands between us and our understanding of the world.

That something is language, stories and culture. If you can control the categories of thought, then you don’t need soldiers and police on street corners to control the population. You can control them in their own heads through their own imaginations.

As Gore Vidal—where I got this story from about Confucius—wrote, “as societies grow decadent, the language grows

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs

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Dale Sprusansky: Sut Jhally is a retired professor of communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the founder and executive director of the Media Education Foundation. He is the producer of over 40 documentaries and the author of six books and numerous scholarly and popular articles.

Many of you have probably seen his 2016 film, “The Occupation of the American Mind.” That film was narrated by Roger Waters and focuses on pro-Israel public relations efforts within the United States and how the Israeli government, the U.S. government and the pro-Israel lobby are working to influence American media coverage of Israel.

Today he will be discussing whether American news organizations are getting better or worse in the quality, balance and accuracy of their Middle East reporting. Thank you so much.

Sut Jhally: Actually, just a follow up to Radhika’s presentation, she mentioned this panel that I organized at UMass with Roger [Waters], with Marc Lamont Hill, Linda Sarsour and Dave Zirin. And there was a lawsuit against it.

When you organize these events, I really think it’s up to people who have some protection to take the lead on this. This should not be up to students. Students should not be on the frontlines of these things. They are the most vulnerable. The people who should be taking the risk, you know, there might be some risk, but like in a university it should be tenured professors.

In fact, when that happened to us, I was on the frontline. I got in touch with Roger, Marc, Linda and David Zirin and within 15 minutes they had all agreed to put their names on a lawsuit or to fight this. So those of us who have some power in these kinds of institutions, I think we need to use it.

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decadent, too.” Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate action. You liberate a city by destroying it. I’m sure that’s what Russian propaganda is doing right now in terms of how it is reporting Ukraine.

Words are used to confuse so that, by election time, people will solemnly vote against their own interest. This rectification of the language is of course the central insight of American public relations.

Ivy Lee, the first major proponent of what came to be known as the industry of public relations, once declared there is no such thing as the truth. He said, “the effort to state an absolute fact is simply an attempt to give you my interpretation of the facts.” Because something always stands between us and our perception of reality, so it is always up for grabs.

Similarly Edward Bernays, who has been credited with creating the modern public relations industry, was very open that rational elites had to keep the emotional and unruly rabble under control by use of propaganda.

The Israel lobby has learned the lesson of Confucius very well and has put it into practice in a way that should be taught in public relations schools. They have managed to turn reality on its head. They’ve been successful in framing a vicious settler colonial program of violence, eviction and occupation into a defensive project of civilization against barbaric Muslim terrorist hordes. As I said, it should be taught in PR schools. You can turn reality on its head.

Now, it wasn’t always like this. It’s always good to take a little bit of a historical perspective, especially if you look back to American media up until the early 1980s when there was some form of what could be called journalism actually existing in the U.S. That no longer is the case. But when there was some form of journalism that existed, coverage of Israel occasionally turned very critical, especially during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the bombing of Beirut, and the ensuing massacres of civilians at the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.

[Start of video clips from “The Occupation of the American Mind.” The clips show newsmen describing Israeli jets bombing Lebanon. As the story played out on American television, Israel could no longer justify its attack on an Arab capital, 50 miles from its border. A different narrative began to emerge, one that presented Israel as the aggressor, no longer the gallant little underdog fighting for survival.]

Sut Jhally: Such coverage is unthinkable today. Nothing, no coverage of the various attacks on Gaza came close to this level of critique. I mean, this is actually close to what the main-

stream media is now doing with Ukraine because the victims are the right kind of victims.

From Israel’s perspective, the answer to this negative coverage was not of course a change in policy but a change in the rectification of the language. There was a change in the definitions and the categories of thought.

One of the lessons of Confucius [pertaining to] public relations is that reality does not pour into people’s heads. That our perception of reality goes through the categories of language that reflect the categories of those humans who can control that process. That is what cultural power is about, it’s to control those categories. So occupy people in their own imaginations.

After 1982 and after this coverage, they devised appropriate strategies. In 1984, a conference was organized in Jerusalem by supporters of the Zionist enterprise.

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[Another clip from “The Occupation of the American Mind,” describing Israel’s need for a more effective information program after the 1982 war in Lebanon and a conference sponsored by the American Jewish Congress to devise a formal public relations strategy known in Hebrew as hasbara. News doesn’t just jump into a camera, a conference delegate said.

It’s directed. It’s managed. It’s made accessible.

The clips say the conference was chaired by U.S. advertising executive Carl Spielvogel, the legendary ad man who created the highly acclaimed Miller Lite beer ads in the 1970s. Sut Jhally, interviewed in the film: “His job with Israel would require the same kind of rebranding, only in the opposite direction, to help soften the image of a country that’s come to be seen as a bully.”]

Sut Jhally: So there’s nothing accidental about this hasbara, or propaganda. It’s not thought of casually. When Israel has committed yet another atrocity against the Palestinian people, the frame and language we hear in the mainstream media is the result of intensive research about what words work the best.

Nothing accidental about it. We should be clear that the talking points that circulate in the corporate media have been tested out with focus groups.

[Clips from “The Occupation of the American Mind” describe the well-funded public relations organizations that have emerged in the U.S. to help Israel justify its policies, especially the occupation and settlements, on security grounds. One of these groups was the Israel Project. In 2009, the Israel Project turned to conservative pollster and rebranding expert Frank Luntz, who, according to a clip from “The Colbert Report,” reframed the estate tax as the death tax and health care reform as government takeover of health care. The Israel Project hired

him to determine which talking points used by Israeli and U.S. officials had been most effective in maintaining American sympathy for Israel. Luntz wrote up his recommendations in a 2009 report called “The Global Language Dictionary.” Luntz pointed out that the occupation and settlements are a problem, but if you bring up the danger of terrorism, you win back the support.

The key, Luntz says, is to claim that the fight is over ideology, not land; about terror, not territory.]

Sut Jhally: In fact, it’s these three words, terror not territory, that we need to understand how Israeli propaganda works. Territory is about history. I once had a student tell me that the most radical class I taught was where I went over the actual history using maps of the conflict. Once you know the facts, it’s very clear what the just and moral position should be, especially if you’re neutral within this. That is why the history is made out to be so complex that only experts can speak.

The reality, of course, is that the so-called Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the simplest and most straightforward in the modern world to explain—if you just tell the story of territory, if you just tell the history, if you stick essentially to the facts. So Luntz says, this is his advice, he says, avoid history. Avoid facts.

Focus instead on terrorism.

In the same report, Luntz goes on to outline strategies for how to deal with horrific civilian casualties that will inevitably make their way before the eyes of the American public.

[Start of clip from “The Occupation of the American Mind,” in which Jhally says Israel can saturate the media with its spokespeople, but there’s still the problem of massive Palestinian casualties showing up on television screens. You can’t make those images go away. An Israeli official actually said, in the war of pictures we lose. So you need to correct, explain, or balance it in other ways. Here again the (Advertisement) Luntz document says in order to spin the brutal reality of Palestinian casualties the proIsraeli spokespeople should express empathy for the innocent victims.

Once you’ve done that, Palestinian Medical Relief Society, a grassroots Luntz says, you also have to get people to empathize with community-based Palestinian health organization, founded in Israelis by describing what 1979 by Palestinian doctors, needs your support today. life is like for them, living in Visit www.pmrs.ps to see our work in action. constant fear of Hamas rocket attacks. So again and Visit www.friendsofpmrs.org to support our work and donate. again, we hear the focustested phrase that the rockets Mail your U.S. Tax-Deductible check to our American Foundation: are raining down on Israel....

Clips show newspeople and Friends of PMRS, Inc leaders repeating the phrase “Hamas rockets raining down PO Box 450554 • Atlanta, GA 31145 on Israel.” Any advertising executive will tell you the For more information call: (404) 441-2702 or e-mail: fabuakel@gmail.com essence of propaganda is

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repetition. Then the Israelis ask the American people what would you do?]

Sut Jhally: The story never starts with the violence of the occupation. The story always starts with Hamas rockets. In fact, if Hamas did not exist, Israel would have to invent it. It really matters where history starts, where the story starts. If it starts with the violence of the occupation, then what the Palestinians are engaged in is legitimate resistance. If however it starts with Hamas rockets, then what the Palestinians are doing is terrorism.

One of those stories, it works much better for Israel than the other one. The function of PR is to put this story, that the responsibility for the violence lies with the Palestinians, to put those ideas and your words into someone else’s mouth so that it does not appear as your speech.

That is the essence of public relations.

It is how it is different from advertising.

Advertising is visible and it’s clear who is speaking. The best PR is invisible because you’ve got someone else, in this case hapless and hopeless American journalists, to mouth your words. I’m not even sure they know what they’re doing.

[Start of clip from “The Occupation of the American Mind,” that describes reporting that gives way more priority and weight to the official Israeli perspective than to the Palestinian one. Look at how American media covered Israel’s 2014 attack on Gaza. A keyword search of all the major networks showed that over the course of the 51-day assault, Israel’s ongoing military siege and blockade of Gaza were barely mentioned compared to the thousands of times Hamas rocket attacks on Israel were mentioned. And those words about Hamas rockets were put in the mouths of other people, especially the mouths of supposedly objective media commentators. Then it doesn’t seem like propaganda at all. It just seems like news.]

Sut Jhally: Because it’s coming out of the words, out of the mouths of supposedly objective journalists, it just appears to be journalism, it just appears to be news. That is how PR works.

The best PR, you get someone else to say your words.

Let me turn now to the current [time]. The latest Israeli attacks on Gaza in the summer of 2021 indicates, in fact, that there might be something new that is happening now outside the world of corporate broadcast media. The Israeli bombardment of Gaza and the events of Sheikh Jarrah elicited reactions we had not seen before.

While the bulk of the coverage, especially on TV, followed the usual pattern of blaming Palestinians for the violence, there were really for the first time significant alternative voices being heard that were pro-Palestinian. A new generation of Palestinian American voices have put themselves into a position where the mainstream media feels as though they have to invite them on for another perspective.

“

For example, The New York Times had an op-ed from Yousef Munayyer and CNN’s Christiane Amanpour had Noura Erakat on as a guest where Noura argued for the legitimate right of Palestinians, including Hamas, to resist the colonial oppression.

And Professor Rashid Khalidi, the most kind of eminent historian of the Palestinian quest for emancipation, has been an important voice in the public domain.

Something changed. When I watched the media coverage pretty closely, something started to change at least on the margins. There are a lot of reasons for this, I think, including the decades-long work of websites like the Electronic Intifada and Phil Weiss’ work with Mondoweiss, as well as the activists associated with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement who have carried on doing their work even though they are under constant threat.

There are also the new powerful voices of elected Palestinian American officials such as Rashida Tlaib. There is now debate within the Democratic Party, which didn’t exist before. Actually, I think the person who deserves a lot of credit for this is Bernie Sanders who, in 2016 at one of the primary debates, actually mentioned Palestine and Palestine human rights in the debate in Brooklyn.

As Radhika [Sainath] said, there are hundreds of campus organizations. There are hundreds of students, hundreds of SJP chapters around the country. I think, increasingly, the visible links between the Black Lives Matter movement and the quest for Palestinian emancipation has been very, very important, especially for younger generations.

In fact, it’s really interesting to see how liberal Zionists get themselves into knots on the one hand trying to support Black Lives Matter, which almost everyone does, and at the same time trying to deny that Palestinian human rights has anything to do with those same movements. So a lot of things I think actually are changing.

There are also the widespread unprecedented reports from B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International that all used the A word. All used apartheid. Make no mistake, Israeli officials are scared stiff about this, especially in terms of what will happen internationally. At the start of this year, 2022, even before the Amnesty report, Yair Lapid, Israel’s foreign minister, said, “we think that in the coming year there will be debate that is unprecedented in its venom and in its radioactivity around the words Israel is an apartheid state. It will be a tangible threat.”

That’s the words of someone who is scared about what is happening. I mean, as Gideon [Levy] said, there may not be a lot of discussion about this within Israel. It may be ignored, but it’s not ignored around the rest of the world. It’s going to, I think, change the debate.

The best PR, you get someone else to say your words.

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Social Media Frees the Message From Corporate Control But the major change, I think, has been in the use of social media. Although, again as Radhika mentioned, there’s been significant censorship in this as well. But for the most part, social media has been freed from the usual close corporate controls and it’s managed to tell another story. Millions of people have been able to share images and videos that define the situation in a different way.

Actresses like Viola Davis, like Emma Watson, have used their significant social media presence to allow different narratives into the frame. And social media has succeeded in giving a face to an increasingly racist and rabid Zionism that I don’t think was possible before.

There was the viral video that went out of the Zionist occupier of one of the Sheikh Jarrah houses, that actually showed what Zionism looks like. This is what Zionism sounds like. Actually, mostly what it sounds like is right-wing Americans from Brooklyn occupying the land. Right? They gave a voice to that.

[Start of clip] Palestinian woman to a settler: Yaakov, you know this is not your house.

Yaakov Fauci: Yes. But if I go, you don’t go back. So what’s the problem? Why are you yelling at me? I didn’t do this. I didn’t do this.

Palestinian woman: But you— Yaakov Fauci: You think you can yell at me? But I didn’t do this.

Palestinian woman: You are stealing my house.

Yaakov Fauci: And if I don’t steal it, someone else is going to steal it.

[End of video clip] Sut Jhally: People who knew nothing about house occupations, people who knew nothing about Zionism, now suddenly had images. They suddenly had stories and they suddenly had a face that they could put to it. I imagine most of you have seen that video before. It went viral on social media, so I think something is shifting.

I think public opinion is shifting. And perhaps most surprisingly, there’s even been a breakthrough on Fox News where Geraldo Rivera—I know it’s such a shock—where Geraldo Rivera astonished everyone by merely stating the stark reality of what was happening in Gaza. And I want you to look at the faces of the other people who are on the screen when you see this clip.

[Start of Fox News video clip in which Geraldo Rivera is sympathetic to Rashida Tlaib’s argument that it’s outrageous that the U.S. gave Israel hundreds of millions of dollars worth of weapons without insisting on a ceasefire. “Tlaib is right, that makes us complicit in an ongoing crime against humanity,” Rivera concludes.]

Sut Jhally: That’s on Fox News and it’s being delivered by 66

someone who knows how television works. Someone who knows you don’t stop talking, someone who knows exactly how to speak in soundbites. So even Fox News now, I wouldn’t say it’s starting to shift, but there are breakthroughs here and there.

And public opinion I think is starting to shift, especially generationally. I think the reason for this, one of the reasons for why this shift is happening, is that people are more educated about the context.

I don’t think it was an accident that what happened in the summer of 2021 was connected to the events of Sheikh Jarrah.

Suddenly the Hamas rockets, which is normally where the story starts, suddenly for millions of people that was not where the story started. The story started in the evictions in Sheikh Jarrah.

Suddenly the context starts to change.

That’s the great worry that Frank Luntz talked about, when the discussion shifts to territory, when the focus shifts to occupation, when the focus shifts to evictions, when the focus shifts to house demolitions, then public opinion shifts also. It’s always tough to say what’s going to happen in the future, but I think it’s going to be very difficult to get the genie back in the bottle, especially for younger generations.

For a long time the propaganda of the Israel lobby had the characteristics of a Gordian knot. You know what a Gordian knot is? Something that is so powerful and tightly intertwined that it seems impossible to unravel. But we have to remember there are two parts of the lesson of Confucius. One is the importance of rectifying the language. The other is that there is nothing natural about this rectification. That the categories of language do not fall fully formed from heaven, but are created by human beings and, therefore, they can be changed. Therefore, they can be struggled over. Therefore, new categories of resistance can be carved out.

The categories of culture are a site of contestation. They’re a place where struggle can take place. The Gordian knot of Israeli propaganda will not be cut through with one cut. I know that’s what Alexander the Great did or supposedly did. That’s not going to happen with this. If that is what Israeli propaganda is, we will have to pick at the threads one at a time until they fray and break.

I believe we are at the beginning of this process. There’s no guarantee that we will be successful. Politics is not about guarantees. And even if you can shift public opinion, which I think is starting to happen, there is no guarantee that elites will enact policy that works in its own interest. If that was the case, then we would have universal health care now which is powerful, which is supported by most people. We would have real movement on climate change. We’d have more money spent on education.

There’s no guarantee that changes in public opinion will lead to changes in policy, but it is a prerequisite. As I said, there is never a guarantee in politics. But I’ve been more hopeful in the last few years than I have been before. I think that, even though there is no guarantee, I think, at least we are now in the game.

Thank you. ■

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Roger Waters: The Impact of Artist Boycotts Targeting Israel, and the Need for Education

The Impact of Artist Boycotts Targeting Israel, and the Need for Education Roger Waters

But this has been ringing in my ears listening to all the speakers who have stood up here today and also last night saying, until you see it with your own eyes, you cannot believe how appalling it is. I can feel my heart beginning to beat in my chest even at the memory from 15 years ago, or however long it was ago, of the primal disdain in the eyes of those 18-year-old Israeli border guards. And that’s for somebody who’s flashing one of these, a British passport, at them. A visitor to the country. So what it must be like for the occu-

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Dale Sprusansky: We’re going to welcome our final speaker here on the stage to close us out today. That will be Roger Waters. As you know, a musician with the legendary rock band Pink Floyd. He has obviously been instrumental in gaining more attention for this issue and numerous other issues. He will talk about how he has asked other artists to stand up for human rights and refrain from performing in Israel.

We are so delighted to have you here today.

Roger Waters: Wow, you’re still here. I love that.

Well, obviously you would be because everything has been extremely interesting. Well, speaking from personal experience, I need a bloody microscope to see what the positive effect has been [of my activism], because by and large they completely ignore me—my colleagues in the music industry. I’ve got one or two short anecdotes here, which I’ll share with you because they’re somewhat light-hearted in comparison with all the very important subjects that have been touched on by the other speakers here today.

But they nevertheless shed some light on my relationship with this problem, which only goes back to 2006, when I was invited to do a gig in Hayarkon Stadium in Tel Aviv.

I won’t go through the whole story because I’m sure most of you have heard it before. Suffice it to say, I canceled the gig and moved it somewhere else—but still in Israel. Then I revisited in 2007 and was looked after by Allegra Pacheco, who was working for UNRWA [the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East] at the time, and drove all over the occupied territories—except Gaza where I couldn’t go to, but most of the rest of it—and saw what was happening.

pied people, I have no idea at all.

All right, I’m going to refer now to these notes. I’m going to start on what I think is a very positive note. This is a little something that I wrote on Christmas 2017. It’s a letter that I wrote to—this is one positive thing about a fellow artist. She’s a New Zealander.

She’s a young lady. She’s called Lorde. She makes pop records.

So I wrote a letter to her and to Ahed Tamimi who we all know about obviously, because we’ve watched her grow up. We’ve seen her since she was about five years old shaking her fist and hanging on to the knee of some Israeli soldier and screaming at him. She became a great heroine of all of ours, I know, at that time. We’ve slowly watched her grow up into a young woman.

Anyway, “Dear Lorde and Ahed Tamimi.”

Oh, by the way, last night somebody—who was it? Matthew Hoh is his name. He’s standing for Congress for the Green Party in North Carolina. He sent me a movie that he and our great friend Ray McGovern, another ex-CIA analyst, had made recently in the Tamimi’s home village where they filmed themselves being set upon by extremely violent settlers. It’s well worth going on to YouTube and finding it. You’ll find it I think May 2022

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Roger Waters shared his correspondence with icons (l‐r) New Zealand singer‐songwriter Lorde, Palestinian resistance activist Ahed Tamimi and American singer‐songwriter Madonna. under Matthew Hoh. So if you’re watching this, Ray, I love you brother. See you soon.

All right [reading the letter to Lorde and Ahed Tamimi].

“Christmas 2017 will be remembered for two young women.

You, Lorde, will be remembered for your measured and principled stand in support of Palestinian rights. Thank you for shining your light into a dark place. And, for 16-year-old Ahed Tamimi, she will be remembered because she slapped a heavily armed soldier, one of the army that has brutally occupied her people’s land for the last 70 years. The soldier was lounging against the wall in her family’s yard two days after one of his units had shot her unarmed younger cousin in the head with a rubber coated bullet. Her cousin is in a medically induced coma. She is in prison. I write to you both with great admiration.

Love and respect, Roger Waters.”

Now it gets a bit grimy, but don’t worry. Yeah, I pulled these at random. I’ve got a pile of these, about that thick, at home.

Because over the years, I have written hundreds of letters to musicians imploring them not to cross the picket line, not to go and do gigs for Shuki Weiss in Tel Aviv or anywhere else, and at the festivals that happen every summer, and so on and so forth. Lorde was one of the few precious close to my heart exceptions to the general rule.

Anyway, here we go.

This piece of paper is called “My Mum and Doing The Right Thing.” It must have been whenever they had Eurovision there [in Israel] because it’s a bit about that. All right. Here we go: “Madonna, having accepted Eurovision’s invitation to perform in Tel Aviv at the Eurovision Song Contest finals in May, raises yet again fundamentally important ethical and political ques68

tions for each and every one of us to contemplate. In Paris, in 1948, the then fledgling United Nations drafted and subsequently adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which enshrined in international law [the rights] of all our brothers and sisters all over the world…So the question each one of us should ask ourselves is this: Do I agree with the United Nations’ declaration? If your answer to this question is yes, then a second question arises: Am I prepared to stand behind my support for human rights and act upon it? Will I help my brothers and sisters in their struggle for human rights or will I cross over and walk by on the other side?

In the context of the current conversation about the location of the Eurovision finals and the participation of Madonna and the other performers, the brothers and sisters in question are the people of Palestine who live under a deeply repressive apartheid regime of occupation and enjoy neither the right to life nor the right to self-determination.”

And then I go on to talk about BDS: “Back in 2005, Palestinian civil society appealed to the rest of the world for help and, among other things, established a cultural picket line asking artists to refrain from [performing in Israel]....Since that time....[I have] responded to the call and done what I can to persuade others to do the same. Some of my fellow musicians have recently performed in Israel and they say they are doing it to build bridges and further the cause of peace.”

They’re also getting a few quid, I don’t mind telling you. I didn’t write that down, but the Israelis do pay itinerant musicians inordinately well.

“To perform in Israel is a lucrative gig. But to do so serves to normalize the occupation, the apartheid, the ethnic cleansing, the in-

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carceration of children, the routine slaughter of unarmed protesters.

By the way, because I support human rights and criticize the Israeli government for its violations, I’m routinely accused of being anti-Semitic. That accusation is of course a smokescreen intended to divert attention and to discredit me by the smear of being labeled anti-Semitic. I should point out that I support the fight for human rights for all oppressed peoples everywhere. The religion of the oppressor is neither here nor there.

If I support the Rohingyas and deplore the Myanmar persecution of them, it doesn’t make me anti-Buddhist.

We Cannot Afford to Regress to the Dark Ages It is my belief that the future of Homo sapiens, the future of our human race, will largely depend upon our ability to develop our capacity to empathize with others and not our capacity to oppress and control them. We cannot afford to regress to the Dark Ages, when might meant right. We are better than that, aren’t we? I suppose I’m calling on everyone involved in what I see as Eurovision’s betrayal of our joint humanity to focus on the capacity to empathize with their Palestinian brothers and sisters, to try to put themselves in that place.

Try to imagine 70 years, generation after generation, waking every morning day by day, hour by hour, to the systematic creeping plunder of your people’s life. Slowly, slowly every town, every village, every home, every olive tree, every stone, every flower, every smile, every weary mile, every daughter, every son, every memory handed down. Every flinch year by year, every tremble, every tear, every hand, every furrowed brow slowly, slowly trodden down. They who have held their heads high and resisted with great courage, fortitude and grace have asked us—the bleeding hearts and artists—for our help. We, all of us, have in my view, an absolute moral and human obligation as fellow human beings to answer their call.

My mum, in maternal attempts to provide guidance to me in my youth, used to say, ‘Roger, in any given situation there’s nearly always a right thing to do. Just think about it carefully, whatever it may be. By all means, consider all points of view.

Then decide for yourself what the right thing to do is and then just do it.’” That was my mom.

So there we are, and it goes on. I’m just beginning to realize that this isn’t actually a letter to anybody. It’s just me writing something down. But I’ll finish this, and then we’ll get on to something more personal.

“I would urge all the young contestants, in fact all people young and old alike”—so that includes Madonna. Oh, Christ, they went absolutely [crazy]. Accused me of being ageist calling Madonna old. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. “So I’d encourage them to read the Universal Declaration. It’s been translated into 500 languages so anyone can apprise themselves of its 30 articles. If we were all to abide by those articles, we might yet save our beautiful planet home from its imminent destruction.”

[Beginning a new letter.] “Dear Madonna.” (May 16, 2019.)

“So you’re going through with it. Well, there is that new album to sell. I wish I could say I was surprised, but sadly I’m not. This was predictable. Seen from the outside and in my admittedly jaundiced view, your whole career has been the sad victory of style over content.”

I’m sorry. If you’re of a sensitive nature, just go and have a drink in the bar or so and then come back in a minute because this is ugly. All right. Here we go....

“On your decision to sing at Eurovision, you say ‘I’ll never stop playing music to suit someone’s political agenda.’” Now that’s open to all sorts of different interpretations. I think what she meant was that she wouldn’t stop playing music to suit my political agenda. Anyway, I pretended I didn’t understand. “I can’t argue with that statement. Clearly singing for your supper in Tel Aviv next week suits the racist apartheid Israeli government’s agenda down to the last razed olive tree. However, I can’t let, ‘I will always speak out against violations of human rights wherever in the world they may be’ go by.”

She said that. She said that. What did I reply? “Wow, girl, you have some big cojones.” That was how I replied.

“Someone who betrays a friend for money is usually called a Judas. The act of cheating on the golf course is known either as a Clinton or a Trump.” It’s true. I mean I play golf. I know this to be an absolutely true fact. “Someone who pretends to support an action but does the exact opposite is usually called a hypocrite. To immortalize this year’s Eurovision, I propose we drop the word hypocrite from the lexicon and, henceforth, anyone who is proverbially hypocritical should be known as a Madonna.”

I wrote in brackets after that, “with apologies to the Holy Mother.” And I finished my letter, “Very hard to squeeze out any love here. But love, R.” I don’t want to go on and on and on. I know you all want to hear my letter to Shakira, but it’s a bit long, so I won’t. It’s in a similar vein. She did the same thing except she did stand next to [then-Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu and sing the national anthem or something. Anyway, I’ll put that one aside.

Now then this is coming near the end of my prepared remarks, you’ll be glad to hear. Now then, Nick Cave. Somebody mentioned him. Who mentioned Nick Cave? Somebody stood up here. Maybe most of you don’t know who Nick Cave is. He’s a rather louche Australian singer-songwriter, much beloved of teenage girls all over the world. Also he has lots of strongly held opinions about all sorts of things.

Anyway, I mentioned a press conference he did. He also did a long article in The Guardian newspaper. When I was a little boy, it used to be a proper newspaper. It was a little bit left of center, but it was sensible and said things, unlike the crap that it prints all the time these days. Not the least George Monbiot’s disgusting article today. Anyway, I won’t talk about George Monbiot. I have breath for other matters.

So Nick Cave did a press conference. In it basically, what Nick Cave did, was he accused me and a friend of mine in England, another musician called Brian Eno, of being cowardly and May 2022

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PHOTO BY JIM DYSON/GETTY IMAGES

shameful because we support Hang on. Have we got my the BDS movement. And I prop? Yeah. [Begins reading.] thought to myself: What? Me? “So me and this Aussie bloke Anyway, so no wonder he are walking down the road on avoided a conversation with the way to a gig. Just as we anyone from BDS, which he get there, we see these heavily did before going ahead with armed soldiers on the other his shows in Tel Aviv—which side of the road knocking this he did. So I read his press Arab bloke to the ground. conference statements with a Kneeling on him, kicking him in mixture of sorrow, rage and the head, and beating him with disbelief. their rifle butts.

Okay. First disbelief. Nick I cross over to remonstrate thinks this is about censorship with them. The soldiers told of his music. That was what he me to [expletive] off or they’ll accused me of. He said I was arrest me. Are you all right? I trying to censor his music. asked the bloke. A daft quesWhat? tion, really. Can I help? Yes, he [Begins reading letter.] “Nick, says. You are musicians? Yes, with all due respect, your music yes I replied. They have stolen is irrelevant to this issue. So is our land, he says. We are remine. So is Brian Eno’s. So is Roger Waters writes to Nick Cave (above) “This isn’t about music. It’s sisting them. There is a culabout human rights.”

Beethoven’s. This isn’t about tural boycott, please don’t do a music. It’s about human rights. gig here.

This is about children, like the young boys blown to bits while As he was dragged away toward the paddy wagon, he playing soccer on the beach in Gaza. Boys murdered by Israel, tossed a small round metal badge in my direction. I returned boys symbolic of the thousands and thousands of children sacto the other side of the road where the Aussie has been watchrificed in Israel’s ‘mowing of the lawn.’ Israel’s terminology, not ing events unfold. Did you see that, I say. Yeah, bummer, he mine. replies. Come on, we got a gig to do. No, I say. There’s a culWe, hundreds of thousands of us, supporters of BDS and tural boycott. That Arab bloke is a victim and the soldiers are human rights throughout history all over the world, join together perpetrators. We have a moral duty to stand with the victim. in memory of Sharpeville and Wounded Knee and Lidice and Don’t you try and bully me, you shameful cowardly Pommy [exBudapest and Ferguson and Standing Rock and Gaza, and pletive], says the Aussie, and pushes past me into the gig. I reach raise our fists in protest. We hurl our glasses into the fire of down into the dust and retrieve the BDS badge and pin it to my your arrogant unconcern and smash our bracelets on the rock lapel.” [Roger Waters pins a BDS badge to himself on the stage.] of your implacable indifference.

And that’s all she wrote. I will take questions, though, if anyWhat if it was your demolished home, Nick? Your invaded body cares to ask me anything. But it’s getting a bit late, isn’t it? country? Your villages razed to the ground to build stadiums Dale Sprusansky: You mentioned you have a stack of these for the invaders to promote pop concerts on? Your uprooted letters regarding Palestine. You’re active in a lot of issues. How olive trees? Your dead children? Seven million of your brothers do celebrities respond to your outreach on other issues? Is it and sisters living in refugee camps, victims of ethnic cleansing? equally as hostile?

Would your sorrow trump your obsession with concerns about Roger Waters: No. It doesn’t even come close. This is by the censorship of your music? far, you know, this issue is the one that draws the most ire from By the way, on one of the Israeli news sites, I was directed other people. It crossed my mind listening to other speakers to a video of yours on YouTube. Toward the end I picked up on here how important the definitions of words are. As it does obthe following lyric: ‘Let us sit together in the dark until the viously talking to Madonna, because she obviously doesn’t moment comes.’ Nick, the moment came and went brother. You care what the words “human” or “rights” actually mean. You just missed it. If at some point in the future you want to climb know, it’s beyond her. out of the dark, all you have to do is open your eyes. We in But other words, “anti” and “Semite,” clearly people don’t get BDS will be here to welcome you into the light.” what those two words mean together. And even if they did, So in conclusion, I thought this was bloody clever. I wrote they’ve allowed the IHRA [International Holocaust Rememthis for Nick Cave. It says to Nick Cave on here and it’s called brance Alliance], whoever they may be—where did they come “The Road to Damascus.” I went a bit biblical because, you from? They’re not the close descendants of Samuel Johnson. know, people like that. Here we go.

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Roger Waters: The Impact of Artist Boycotts Targeting Israel, and the Need for Education

Roger Waters pins a BDS pin on himself after reading “The Road to Damascus,” written for Nick Cave. of words? We know what anti-Semite means and it does not mean criticizing the State of Israel, you [expletive].

Speaking of rage, what was it? Apartheid. Apartheid.

Apartheid. Apartheid. We’ve been using that word about Israel, most of us now, for about 10 or 15 years. Before that, you couldn’t. You would have been lynched from the nearest tree. But now you can. No conversation about Israel now is possible without using the word apartheid. It’s in every speech, every newspaper article, quite rightly because Israel is an apartheid country.

Not just the occupied territories. The whole shooting match. And when I say shooting match, I use the words advisedly.

Dale Sprusansky: I mean, I guess on that note, do you think these reports of the growing evidence of apartheid will force the hand of some of these people you correspond with to fall on their sword and admit they were wrong?

Roger Waters: Not in any great hurry. There won’t be a great queue of them saying, “Oh, can I borrow your Roman sword?

You know, I’m feeling a bit guilty.” That’s not going to happen.

As Sut Jhally pointed out, to cut through the Gordian knot is going to take a lot of effort and a lot of perseverance and persistence, but also a lot of hurt.

I’m going to say one more thing, and that is this. I was up in Canada a few years ago doing a thing for a few thousand people in an old church. I was talking to a lovely lady from Independent Jewish Voices and another lovely lady from some Muslim organization. They were asking me questions. We did quite a long interview at the end of which they said to me, “Is there anything that gives you hope?”

I was sort of flummoxed. Slightly flummoxed. Then suddenly this image popped into my head. It may sound incongruous, but it’s not. A few years ago I was with a friend of mine in New

York. His name was Étienne Roda-Gil. He wrote the libretto for an opera where I did the music about the French Revolution called “Ça Ira.” We’re walking down the street and my friend Étienne was a very heavy smoker of cigarettes and raging.

Well, he didn’t rage much, but he was an alcoholic of some monumental proportions.

So we stopped on 54th Street when we found a patch of sunlight and a little round table outside a cafe. He ordered a quadruple Famous Grouse and I ordered an espresso. We sat in the sunshine chatting while he smoked four or five Benson & Hedges. (You know what the French are like when they smoke cigarettes. It’s all very Jean-Paul Belmondo, you know.

It’s that look. They stick it in their mouth when they talk and it wobbles up and down. You know what I mean.)

Anyway, so there we were. I triggered something in him, I think. We were talking and I asked him what he felt about something or another. He gave me a really philosophical answer, which I wrote down subsequently and kept in my back pocket.

I wish I could pull it out now because it would be very dramatic.

But the piece of paper is so old and has been folded and unfolded so many times that it’s in a special drawer at home where I keep my precious things. Étienne died within minutes of this encounter. This is what he said. He went [sound of smoking/exhaling/inhaling], “I was here,” [Étienne said]. “I was here. I was here.” He was Catalan actually. Not French. But, “I was here.” And I went, okay. And he went, “I felt something.” Did you get that? “I felt something.

I was here. I felt something and perhaps I was not alone.”

That gave me hope because when I stand in this room, I know I was here and I felt something. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone and that is what gives me hope. ■ May 2022

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Infiltration of Civil Rights Group Exposed Continued from page 33 Keep in mind, for this one year of spying, IPT paid about $3,000 a month over 12 months. Right? So this $67,000 a year could easily cover the amount of money they would have to pay a spy to target the Muslim community.

The Jewish Communal Fund gave $82,000 to IPT also in 2017. You can see the tax form here. The Abstraction Fund, and this is a right-wing anti-Palestinian fund, gave $55,000 to IPT in 2018. The Diana Davis Spencer Foundation, $300,000 to IPT in 2018. That’s just a small sample of the kind of money that is being passed around. So when you ask yourself how is IPT getting the money to spy on the American Muslim community to undermine the community on behalf of a foreign government, this is part of where they are getting that money to target our community.

So now we look at all this together and we wonder again what was the impact of all this? First and foremost it’s important to note that, in all of this spying, the ironic thing is that IPT was not able to find anything harmful about American Muslim organizations or mosques. Ten years of spying and all their nonsense about you’re tied to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and you’re terrorists, all this foolishness, they got nothing because there is nothing. Right? These are all just antiMuslim bigotry. It’s all just hateful things they say because, again, they want to attack the messenger. They want to undermine the messenger.

So they got an inside look at what Muslims are doing for over ten years and they know there is nothing there. Yet why do they keep doing this work? As the whistleblower said, the reason IPT is doing this is because they want to undermine and weaken the American Muslim community so that we cannot speak up for Palestinian human rights. That is the main goal.

Yes, I’m sure they hate Islam. But the thing they really, really hate is that we take our Islamic values and we put it into action by advocating for human rights for all people. Not just Uyghurs.

Not just Rohingya. Not just the Jewish community. Not just Christians. We advocate for all people, and that includes Palestinian human rights. That’s what they hate.

These people are terrified that American Muslims will become politically powerful in this country and use our voices to change American foreign policy into a more humane and just way. That’s what they’re afraid of. They are afraid that we will reorient American foreign policy in a more just and humane direction especially towards Palestinians. And you know what?

They are right to be afraid. That is exactly what we have been doing and it’s exactly what we are going to continue doing. God willing, no matter how much they may hate it, that is our duty in this country—to speak up for justice here and abroad.

The fact that these anti-Muslim hate groups and anti-Palestinian racists have found common cause with each other or share these ideologies in one person and then come after us, 72

again we consider that a good sign. It makes us feel like we’ve got to continue doing this work.

The last thing I’ll say is what do we do to protect ourselves from this. The key thing is that we cannot let this sort of infiltration and spying lead us to become paranoid and lead us to become suspicious of each other. No. We have got to think the best of the people we’re working with. We can’t assume the worst about people. We’ve just got to keep our heads up and keep doing our work.

The one thing these hate groups would love more than anything is to divide us. The anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim crowd has spent years not only attacking our community but trying to divide us. Trying to say to Muslims, look, why don’t you all just be quiet? Just focus on civil rights here at home. Just worry about Islamophobia. Be quiet. Don’t worry about the Palestinians. Just be quiet. And if you do that, we’ll leave you alone.

No deal. We’re not going to do that. Right? But that’s what they want. They want to do that. And if they can’t do that, they want to divide us. Right? They want us being suspicious of each other, turning on each other. Our community is not going to let that happen and the broader human rights community no matter your religion. Whether you’re Muslim, Jewish, Christian, secular, humanist, Buddhist, Hindu. Whatever. If you are in the fight for human rights, don’t let infiltration and spying make you suspicious of the people you are working with.

These things that happened, they happen, but at the end of the day we are all doing good work. We have nothing to hide and, therefore, nothing to be afraid of. We’ve just got to keep doing our work and, God willing, we will win sooner or later.

That’s why they hate us. That’s why they’re doing this. It only emboldens us to keep doing our work.

I want to thank you all for having me today. I will wrap up now and welcome any questions that you may have.

Questions and Answers Delinda Hanley: Thank you. So one question we’ve gotten is where can we see these documents that you flashed before us.

Edward Ahmed Mitchell: Yes, yes. A few places. If you go to <cair.com> and look through our public statements or press release section, you’ll find it there. If you don’t want to search around, you can just Google “CAIR, IPT” and a lot of them will pop up automatically.

Delinda Hanley: I have a question for the audience. Who is the IPT informant here today? Would you raise your hand please?

Edward Ahmed Mitchell: And how much are you being paid?

Delinda Hanley: Never mind. Okay. [Could you provide more details] about IPT and other anti-Muslim hate groups?

Edward Ahmed Mitchell: This is a really important thing I forgot to mention. We also have evidence that IPT was in conversation with/working with certain Republican members of Congress and also working with obviously other anti-Muslim hate groups. The second spy who came forward to confess

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told us that IPT connected him with another anti-Muslim/antiPalestinian hate group. The Middle East Forum which you may know. It was founded by the racist Daniel Pipes. And that IPT connected the spy with Daniel Pipes.

Over 80 Muslim organizations came together to call on the Justice Department to investigate IPT to determine if they had violated any federal laws, whether that’s civil rights laws, criminal laws, tax laws. So there are a lot of unanswered questions.

Obviously, with CAIR, we have various legal options that we are obviously considering and planning. So we may be learning some more information through that route as well. But suffice it to say there’s a lot more to this story that I can’t share with you right now and a lot more we don’t know.

Delinda Hanley: Have you contacted the authorities about Emerson’s communications with the Israeli government? Is that illegal?

Edward Ahmed Mitchell: That’s a good question. So we have contacted the Justice Department. We have made them very aware of all of this, both the Justice Department and the FBI, directly. The communications with the Israeli government by themselves are not necessarily illegal. The federal law regarding when you’re acting as a foreign agent is very specific.

It’s a high standard to meet. You all may know a famous case recently. Rudy Giuliani came under investigation because of his work overseas. He still hasn’t been prosecuted yet. Right?

But he was doing work allegedly for a foreign government.

Michael Flynn also got in trouble for doing some work for a foreign government. So this is a real problem.

If you are acting as a foreign agent and you’re not registered, that is illegal. However, simply conversing with a foreign government by itself is not necessarily illegal. The FBI would have to look and determine if IPT was acting as a foreign agent.

By the way, they should look into this with the same level of seriousness they would have done if it had been any other community targeted. If the Christian community or the Jewish community or anyone else has been targeted in this way by a hate group working with a foreign government, it would be all hands on deck. A full investigation. That’s what needs to happen at the federal level. Then we can get an answer to that question, God willing. I would just say that, if it’s not illegal, it sure is questionable.

It sure is suspicious. It’s something that needs to be looked into.

Julia Pitner: The follow-up question on that is: Why do you feel that there is a double standard when it comes to protecting Muslim groups versus the definition of anti-Semitism that we’ve been hearing about this morning?

Edward Ahmed Mitchell: Well, look, here’s the thing. If you look at what’s happening in America right now in large part because of former President Trump, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, anti-Latino bigotry, various forms of bigotry have been unleashed. We’ve seen horrific hate crimes from the Tree of Life synagogue to El Paso. I mean horrific things have happened over the past several years because of this rise in bigotry.

However, what Muslims have observed is that, when Muslims are victims of a crime, there is sometimes much less at-

tention than when Muslims are perpetrators of a crime. That is if some Muslim extremist or some mentally ill person who simply has a Muslim name does something violent, it’s breaking news. Everyone’s involved. It’s a national emergency. But when a Muslim is a victim of a crime, whether that’s a violent crime or spying or anything else, it doesn’t get the same level of public attention.

Now why is that? I think obviously over the past 20 years Muslims have been dehumanized in the public eye not only through what our government has said and done, not only through what the media has said and done, but things like Hollywood. I mean Arabs, Muslims, Black Muslims, people of color in general, you know our lives are often viewed as less valuable. If you look at what’s happening right now sadly in Ukraine, the Russian government is committing horrific war crimes in Ukraine right now. It’s unacceptable. It should be stopped. And I’m so happy to see the world uniting to support Ukraine.

But did we see the same level of concern and international unity about Uyghurs facing genocide? Did you see American corporations pulling out of China en masse? Did you see the United States and other countries slapping sanctions on China?

What about Syrians who’ve experienced horrific, horrific crimes?

Did we see this sort of international unified condemnation?

And of course, it goes without saying, the Palestinians.

When we saw what the Israeli government did to Gaza last year and what they have done to Palestinians for many years, do we see that same public outcry? Do we see the media recognizing that, yes, bombing a civilian apartment building is wrong not only in Ukraine but also in Gaza? Do we see people recognizing that, yes, bombing a TV tower in Ukraine is wrong? But so is bombing a building that’s used by the Associated Press and other journalists in Gaza.

We don’t see that same level of outrage. That’s because again people of color, Muslims, have been dehumanized. I hope, my hope, God willing, is that as Muslims become and others become more active and more outspoken, appearing not only as journalists, not only as political leaders, not only on film, that you’ll see that start to change.

I think the wind is at our back. I think, with the American public, day by day more of us are recognizing that what is being done to Palestinians with our tax dollars is wrong. It’s illegal. It’s immoral. So we just got to keep raising our voices. Hopefully, that will reduce the extent of this double standard that we see.

Julia Pitner: Why did it take so long to out the spies that you had in your midst?

Edward Ahmed Mitchell: Good question. First of all, there was only one spy within CAIR. There was a second spy who was not part of CAIR. He was a volunteer who kind of got his way into various mosques and organizations in the outside Muslim communities. There was only one infiltrator within CAIR and the reason it took so long is that this person did something very simple. All he would do is use his phone to record conversations secretly and he would forward emails. So there was no, for example, hacking. There was no sort of technological May 2022

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AET’s 2022 Choir of Angels

The following are individuals, organizations, companies and foundations whose help between Jan. 1, 2022 and March 23, 2022 is making possible activities of the tax‐exempt AET Library Endowment (federal ID #52‐1460362) and the American Educational Trust, publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. Some Angels help us co‐sponsor the annual IsraelLobbyCon. Others are donating to our “Capital Building Fund,” which will help us expand the Middle East Books and More bookstore. Thank you all for helping us survive the turmoil caused by the pandemic. We are deeply honored by your confidence and profoundly grateful for your generosity.

HUMMERS ($100 or more) Sami Abed, South Lyon, MI Rizek & Alice Abusharr, Claremont, CA Justine Adair, Waxhaw, NC James Ahlstrom, Stirling, NJ Qamar Ahsan, Flint, MI Catherine Al-Askari, Leonia, NJ Hanaa Al-Wardi, Alhambra, CA Mazen Alsatie, Carmel, IN Nabil & Judy Amarah, Danbury, CT Dr. John Duke Anthony, McLean, VA Sultan Aslam, Plainsboro, NJ Estate of Rajie Cook, Washington Crossing, PA Lewis Elbinger, Mount Shasta, CA Tom Ellis, Albany, NY Jeanne Finley, Albany, NY Anne Ganz, Chilmark, MA Graeme Goodsir, Mechanicsburg, PA Doug Greene, Bowling Green, OH Iftekhar Hai, S. San Francisco, CA Delinda C. Hanley, Kensington, MD* Sameer Hassan, West Palm Beach, FL Gerald Heidel, Bradenton, FL Neil Himber, Youngsville, PA Islamic Center, Detroit, MI Rehan Khan, East Brunswick, NJ Mohayya Khilfeh, Willow Brook, IL Bader Kudsi, San Jose, CA Edward Kuncar, Coral Gables, FL David & Rene Lent, Hanover, NH Marilyn Levin, Ashland, OR Nidal Mahayni, Richmond, VA Lucinda Mahmoud, Oceanside, CA Nabil Matar, Minneapolis, MN

William McAuley, Chicago, IL Bill McGrath, Northfield, MN Hugh McInnish, Huntsville, AL Anisa Mehdi, Maplewood, NJ Tom Mickelson, Cottage Grove, WI Maury Keith Moore, Seattle, WA Moe Muhsin, Honolulu, HI Elizabeth Murray, Escondido, CA Eid Mustafa, Wichita Falls, TX Eleanor Parker, Helena, MT Phillip Portlock, Washington, DC Barry Preisler, Albany, CA John & Peggy Prugh, Tucson, AZ Marjorie Ransom, Washington, DC Paul Richards, Salem, OR John Robinson, Somerville, MA Mohammed Sabbagh, Grand Blanc, MI Aziz Shalaby, Vancouver, WA Carl Shankweiler, Valley View, PA William & Ursula Slavick, Portland, ME Tom Veblen, Washington, DC V. Vitolins, Grosse Pointe Farms, MI

ACCOMPANISTS ($250 or more) Elizabeth Geraldine Burr, Washington, DC Fahd Jajeh, Lake Forest, IL Bilquis Jaweed, West Chester, OH Dr. Jane Killgore & Thomas D’Albani, Bemidji, MN** Amar Masri, Fort Wayne, IN Sara Najjar-Wilson, Reston, VA Irmgard Scherer, Fairfax, VA Joan Seelye, Washington, DC Don Wagner, Orland Hills, IL William Walls, Arlington, VA

breach that our security caught. It was very rudimentary, so there was no real way to catch that.

Once we found out [the CAIR spy’s] name, we obviously launched a full investigation. We brought in an outside investigator who used to work with the intelligence community. They did an amazing job. They had a hundred-page report, forensic report, technological analysis, that left no doubt whatsoever that he was the mole. All that was confirmed and then we took action.

But every organization, I would say, just has to have really strong security procedures in place. You’ve got to have 74

TENORS & CONTRALTOS ($500 or more) Michael Ameri, Calabasas, CA James Bennett, Fayetteville, AR Prof. Juan Cole, Ann Arbor, MI Darrel Meyers, Burbank, CA Abid Shah, Sarasota, FL Bernice Shaheen, Palm Desert, CA*** David Snider, Bolton, MA

BARITONES & MEZZO SOPRANOS ($1,000 or more) Karen Ray Bossmeyer, Louisville, KY Majed Faruki, Albuquerque, NM Ghazy Kader, Shoreline, WA Jack Love, Fort Myers, FL Roberta McInerney, Washington, DC** Imad & Joann Tabry, Fort Lauderdale, FL Donn Trautman, Evanston, IL Prof. Stephen Walt, Brookline, MA

CHOIRMASTERS ($5,000 or more) Dr. Clyde Farris, West Linn, OR*, ** John & Henrietta Goelet, Washington, DC William Lightfoot, Vienna, VA

* In Memory of Dick and Donna Curtiss ** In Memory of Andrew I. Killgore ***In Memory of Dr. Jack G. Shaheen

confidentiality agreements, which we had in place. So these people, if they do this, they know they are risking being sued and facing severe consequences. Financial consequences. And you’ve got to make sure that you’ve got secure systems not only because of spies but because of hacking attempts.

So we’ve got to take this stuff seriously, but again you can’t prevent everything. You can’t catch everything, but we’ve got to make sure we’re doing the best we can to be safe. Be safe, be vigilant, but don’t get worried. That’s our motto. ■

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2022MAYv11.qxp_May 2022 Transcending the Israel Lobby at Home and Abroad 3/31/22 10:44 AM Page 75

May 2022

2022MAYv12.qxp_May 2022 Transcending the Israel Lobby at Home and Abroad 3/31/22 1:41 PM Page 76

American Educational Trust Washington Report on Middle East Affairs P.O. Box 53062 Washington, DC 20009

May 2022 Vol. XLI, No. 3

Men try to collect belongings from residential buildings destroyed by air strikes. One photo was taken on Aug. 10, 2021 in Gaza. (PHOTO BY MOHAMMED ABED/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES). The inset photo was taken on March 27, 2022 in Kyiv, Ukraine. (PHOTO BY ANDRES GUTIERREZ/ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES) Both men’s lives are blown to pieces.