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REMIND WASHINGTON AND MOSCOW: LAW ISN’T A NOW AND THEN THING
DISPLAY UNTIL 7/31/2022
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TELLING THE TRUTH SINCE 1982
On Middle East Affairs Volume XLI, No. 4
June/July 2022
INTERPRETING THE MIDDLE EAST FOR NORTH AMERICANS
✮
INTERPRETING NORTH AMERICA FOR THE MIDDLE EAST
THE U.S. ROLE IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION OF PALESTINE
8 16 18
U.S. Hypocrisy and the War in Ukraine—Walter L. Hixson Remind Washington and Moscow: Law Isn’t a Now and Then Thing for the U.N.—Ian Williams
20 22
The Execution of Shireen Abu Akleh—Five Views— Jonathan Cook, Hanin Majadli, Gideon Levy, Lubna Masarwa, David Rothkopf
Consolidated Appropriations Bill Includes Nearly $5 Billion for Israel—Shirl McArthur
Haim Saban Lays Down Red Lines for Democrats: Don’t “Undermine” Relationship with Israel—Philip Weiss
24
Rewriting UNRWA: The U.S.-Israeli Plan to Cancel Out the Palestinian Right of Return—Ramzy Baroud
26 28 29 32 34 36
American Jews Increasingly Divided Over Israeli Policies—Walter L. Hixson The Safety of Others—Elsa Auerbach, Sara Roy, Eve Spangler The American Council for Judaism at 80 —Allan C. Brownfeld Apartheid in Israel: The Bankruptcy of Zionism —Dr. M. Reza Behnam Israel’s Opposition to Palestinian Nationalism Has Failed Terribly—Daoud Kuttab Only Ninety Minutes For a Miracle—Mohammed Omer
SPECIAL REPORTS
38 40
Egypt is Walking a Tightrope on the Ukraine Crisis —Dr. Mohammad Salami A Brief History of Chaos in Libya—Mustafa Fetouri
42
Escape Bid Highlights Rohingya Desperation —John Gee
44 48
Britain Looks to Israel for Ideas on How to Curb the “Problem” of Asylum Seekers—Jonathan Cook Muslim Women Most Impacted by Quebec’s Secularism Laws—Candice Bodnaruk
ON THE COVER: Israeli police strike Palestinian pallbearers at the funeral for slain journalist Shireen Abu Akleh.
This image is a capture from a video clip circulating on social media. The man in the T-shirt was beaten and kicked to the ground by Israeli police but he kept his eye on the teetering casket, sprang up to help and managed to catch it before it fell. (See stories pp. 8-15.)
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(A Supplement to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs available by subscription at $15 per year. To subscribe, call toll-free 1-888-8815861.)
Other Voices
Compiled by Janet McMahon
What Jewish Israelis Don’t Get About al-Aqsa, Hanin Majadli, Haaretz OV-1 Under Israeli Surveillance: Living in Dystopia, In Palestine, Jalal Abukhater, www.aljazeera.com
OV-2
The Palestinian Perspective On the Terror Attack, Gideon Levy, Haaretz
OV-4
Families in Gaza Still Grieve a Year After Israeli Offensive, Maram Humaid, www.aljazeera.com Palestine’s Widening Geography of Resistance: Why Israel Cannot Defeat the Palestinians, Ramzy Baroud, RamzyBaroud.net
“Mistaken” PayPal E-mail Means CN is Permanently Banned, Joe Lauria, www.consortiumnews.com Sea Border Talks Between Israel and Lebanon on Verge of Imminent Collapse, Nicholas Noe, www.responsiblestatecraft.org
OV-9
OV-10
Iraq’s Farmers Pushed off Land As Drought and Heat Cripple Crops, Middle East Monitor, middleeastmonitor.com OV-12 OV-4 Why Imran Khan’s Coup Theory Is so Popular in Pakistan, Ted Snider, www.responsiblestatecraft.org
OV-13
OV-5
Germany’s Position on Palestine: Twice on the Wrong Side of History? Ilan Pappe, PalestineChronicle.com OV-7
Palestinians: Busts of 4,500-Year-Old Goddess Anat Found in Gaza “Attests the Depth of Ancient Palestinian Civilization,” Juan Cole, www.juancole.com OV-14
After Haaretz Report, AIPAC Changes Course and Endorses Rep. Liz Cheney, Ben Samuels, Haaretz
Timbuktu Manuscripts Placed Online Are Only a Sliver of West Africa’s Ancient Archive, Charles C. Stewart, www.theconversation.com OV-15
OV-8
DEPARTMENTS 5 PUBLISHERS’ PAGE 6 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 52 ARAB AMERICAN ACTIVISM: Celebrating National Arab American Heritage Month 53 MUSIC AND ARTS: Museum Opens Gaza Exhibit and Commemorates the Nakba
61 HUMAN RIGHTS: National Press Club Honors Slain Journalist Shireen Abu Akleh 63 DIPLOMATIC DOINGS: Jordan’s Ambassador on Country’s Refugee Policies
STAFF PHOTO PHIL PASQUINI
54 WAGING PEACE: The U.S. Role in the Moroccan Occupation of Western Sahara
Art and other cultural items on display at the Algerian Embassy in Washington, DC. (See story p. 63). 64 MIDDLE EAST BOOKS REVIEW
72 OTHER PEOPLE’S MAIL
70 THE WORLD LOOKS AT THE MIDDLE EAST—CARTOONS
74 2022 AET CHOIR OF ANGELS 25 INDEX TO ADVERTISERS
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American Educational Trust
Publishers’ Page
Israel’s Playbook
STAFF PHOTO PHIL PASQUINI
the Washington Report. That slow-going, tedious, For decades, close obyet vital report was swept servers of Israel have to the side with the killing watched the country literally of Abu Akleh. This list now get away with the murder of includes Super PACs, thousands of Palestinian which can raise money men, women and children. from individuals, corporaAfter Israel’s assassination tions, unions and other of Al Jazeera journalist groups without any legal Shireen Abu Akleh, we limit on their donation size. watched the typical playIt’s a free-for-all for candibook unfold. First, Israel claimed the beloved Pales- Palestinians of every age in Washington, DC (above) and around the world dates who pledge undying tinian-American was hit by a mourned Shireen Abu Akleh, disproving a quote widely attributed to David Ben‐ support for Israel. (See Philip Weiss’ article on stray bullet fired by a Pales- Gurion, “The old will die and the young will forget.” p.22). We will post those tinian “militant.” After that Double Standard on Human Rights recipients on our Website asap and hope narrative quickly crumbled, Israel preto include a list in the Aug./Sept. issue. tended to be interested in launching a Since our last issue, much has been said As for reporting congressional deeds and joint investigation with the Palestinian Auand written about the obvious comparisons misdeeds, we are sad to tell you... thority. Just like Ukrainians wouldn’t want between the Ukrainian and Palestinian to hand over one of their heroes to plights. Walter L. Hixson (p. 16) and Ian Russia, the Palestinians swiftly refused Williams (p. 18) provide analysis of the apShirl McArthur is Retiring! their occupier’s request. Israel’s lack of pallingly incongruent nature of U.S. foreign For decades McArthur has compiled conseriousness was quickly exposed, as policy and the harm this inconsistence gressional voting records and resolutions they raided Abu Akleh’s home and atcauses both the U.S. and people around to help voters keep track of bills that protacked mourners at her funeral—all with the world. The bottom line question is this: vide goodies for Israel and other resoluthe knowledge the world was closely Is it too much to ask that the lives of tions that affect U.S. foreign policy. (See watching. Ukrainians, Syrians, Palestinians, Iraqis, p. 20 for his last column.) It’s a disheartYemenis, etc. all have the same value? ening task that was tirelessly accomImpotent U.S. plished by a man with a big heart, a sharp A Global Issue eye and a respect for democracy. If the This latest episode in Israel’s violent hismagazine gave out awards or retirement tory shows just how arrogant the country The appalling lack of human rights isn’t watches, McArthur would get the biggest, has become after decades of unwavering just a Middle East issue, of course. John shiniest bling we could come up with. U.S. support. Even though Abu Akleh Gee (p. 42) provides an update on the Shirl, we can’t thank you enough for was a world-renowned journalist and continuing plight faced by the Rohingya, watching each political party, and reportAmerican citizen, the country’s leaders who endure violence and discrimination ing on their use and abuse of power. were not in the least hesitant to carry out both at home in Myanmar and in most of their standard heavy-handed, dehumanthe neighboring countries where they flee, izing tactics against her and her family. especially Bangladesh. Jonathan Cook Stay Tuned! While the U.S. showed a somewhat (p. 44) notes how the UK has taken a We have big plans for the summer and higher level of concern than usual, it appage from Israel in its appalling treatment new interns to help fulfill our goals. Please pears Washington’s half-baked stateof those desperately seeking asylum. don’t wait for our June donation appeal, ments will not lead to carrying out a real Closer to home, Candice Bodnaruk (p. but visit our new stream-lined “subscriber investigation, nor any real repercussions 48) highlights the official bigotry Muslims services” and donation menus on our such as the withdrawal of U.S. aid. Alas, face from the province of Quebec. website <www.wrmea.org>. You’ll be able both sides seem willing to let this run the to give a gift subscription, renew your own news cycle for a few days, until coverage or make a donation. Your generous supMissing PAC Charts... pivots to the latest deranged White man port is essential because, working toWe are chagrined to admit that our list of shooting at a school, house of worship or gether we can... candidates who accepted “pro-Israel Pogrocery store. No investigation. No aclitical Action Committee funds” this year countability. No change. didn’t make it into this June/July issue of Make a Difference Today! JUNE/JULY 2022
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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: Board of Directors:
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. Published by the American Educational Trust (AET), a nonprofit foundation incorporated in Washington, DC by retired U.S. foreign service officers to provide the American public with balanced and accurate information concerning U.S. relations with Middle Eastern states. AET’s Foreign Policy Committee has included former U.S. ambassadors, government officials, and members of Congress, including the late Democratic Sen. J. William Fulbright and Republican Sen. Charles Percy, both former chairmen of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Members of AET’s Board of Directors and advisory committees receive no fees for their services. The new Board of Advisers includes: Anisa Mehdi, John Gareeb, Dr. Najat Khelil Arafat, William Lightfoot and Susan Abulhawa. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs does not take partisan domestic political positions. As a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli dispute, it endorses U.N. Security Council Resolution 242’s land-for-peace formula, supported by nine successive U.S. presidents. In general, it supports Middle East solutions which it judges to be consistent with the charter of the United Nations and traditional American support for human rights, self-determination, and fair play. Material from the Washington Report may be reprinted without charge with attribution to Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. Bylined material must also be attributed to the author. This release does not apply to photographs, cartoons or reprints from other publications. Indexed by ProQuest, Gale, Ebsco Information Services, InfoTrac, LexisNexis, Public Affairs Information Service, Index to Jewish Periodicals, Ethnic News Watch, Periodica Islamica. CONTACT INFORMATION: Washington Report on Middle East Affairs Editorial Office and Bookstore: 1902 18th St. NW, Washington, DC 20009-9062 Phone: (202) 939-6050 • (800) 368-5788 Fax: (202) 265-4574 E-mail: wrmea@wrmea.org bookstore@wrmea.org circulation@wrmea.org advertising@wrmea.org donations@wrmea.org Web sites: http://www.wrmea.org http://www.middleeastbooks.com Subscriptions, sample copies and donations: P.O. Box 292380, Kettering, OH 45429 Phone: (800) 607-4410 • Fax: (937)-890-0221 Printed in the USA
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LetterstotheEditor BACKLASH TO RUSSIA EXPOSES AMERICAN HYPOCRISY Recently, the United Nations General Assembly voted 93 to 24 to suspend Russia from the U.N. Human Rights Council. Fifty-eight nations abstained from the vote. The resolution accused Russia of “gross and systematic violations and abuses of human rights” in Ukraine. President Joe Biden denounced President Vladimir Putin and said he should be charged for war crimes. But is the U.S. so innocent? Why has the United States long opposed the International Criminal Court (ICC), which was created by the Rome Statute? The statute has been ratified by 123 nations, but not the United States, Russia or Ukraine. In 2020, former President Donald Trump even sanctioned senior ICC figures involved in investigating possible U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan. How quickly we have forgotten our government’s offshore black sites where detainees were subjected to the most gruesome medieval torture and then dispatched to Guantanamo Bay, or the “shock and awe” of our invasion of Iraq based on faulty intelligence which resulted in the death of over one million Iraqis and the destruction of much of their country. If Biden is so incensed with Putin’s criminal behavior, shouldn’t he climb down from his lofty perch and adopt a uniform code of ethics in preventing wars? While we rightfully take aim at Putin’s brigade of criminals on the use of cluster munitions—whose only purpose is to create terror blowing up men, women and children into tiny pieces— why have we long used cluster bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan? They were also used extensively in prior wars by the U.S. in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Is it not surprising the United States stubbornly refuses to ratify the treaty banning these hideous weapons? Let’s charter a new beginning by releasing the “forever prisoners” languishing in Guantanamo who have never been charged with a crime, offering them massive
WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS
reparations and sending them back to their countries, saving U.S. taxpayers $13 million per year for each prisoner. Finally, let’s halt shipments of weapons to Saudi Arabia, which is waging a war on poverty-stricken Yemen that goes beyond the pale of extreme cruelty and ruthlessness. Jagjit Singh, Los Altos, CA The insincerity of U.S. foreign policy was recently magnified by a “gaffe” made by former President George W. Bush during a May speech. Bush was outlining the foreign and domestic offenses committed by Russian President Vladimir Putin when he committed the ultimate Freudian slip, condemning “...the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq.” The former president quickly caught his mistake, saying, “I mean Ukraine.” But, he then appeared to mutter, “Iraq, too.” While Bush and the crowd laughed at the mistake, it’s perhaps the closest a recent U.S. president has come to admitting his role in the violation of human rights and international law. As Ian Williams notes in this issue (p. 18), the U.S.’ outrage at the invasion of Ukraine is in many ways undermined by its own acts in violation of international norms, as well as its support for rogue regimes such as the State of Israel.
ISRAEL PUSHING FOR A U.S. WAR WITH IRAN Israel, one of the strongest militaries on the planet (really the first with the U.S. guaranteeing back-up), is going after Iran, a country that originally signed the U.N. non-proliferation agreement (allowing U.N. inspectors in to prove they have no nuclear weapons). This is such a joke. Israel will not allow U.N. inspectors to check out its nuclear weapons and has assassinated many of Iran’s scientists. Israel attacked Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981 and helped push the U.S. to war with the country in 2003. Israel, with the help of Russia and the U.S., is bombing Syria. Israel is also involved in wars in JUNE/JULY 2022
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Libya and Yemen, and of course is who would love to see these KEEP THOSE CARDS AND LETTERS bombing the Gaza Strip repeatideas fulfilled. Such placard COMING! edly. catchphrases stir up violence Send your letters to the editor to the Washington Report, P.O. Box 53062, Washington, DC 20009 If Israel wants the U.S. to put and aid those who want continor e-mail <letters@wrmea.org>. the screws to Iran via further sancued division. tions, and perhaps war, then the Would it be better, then, for proof the popular protest phrase, “From the U.S. will do so. Think about who is in testers to say, chant and proclaim what River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free,” control of the United States’ foreign polthey really mean? “From the River to the which pro-Israeli groups claim is an antiicy and at what a price: our blood and Sea, Palestine and Israel Together will Semitic or even genocidal slogan. Critics our treasure. be Free” might be less inflammatory. of the “river-to-the-sea” catchphrase Barbara Gravesen, Lady Lake, FL Free from the institutionalized war and argue that protesters who use the slohatred, free from the hubris and entitleCANADA MUST STOP SUPPORTING gan are demanding the destruction of Isment, free to find solutions instead of reISRAELI WEAPONS INDUSTRY rael and the cleansing of the entire reiterating the causes over and over and Canada recently signed a $36 million gion, from the Jordan River to the pointing fingers, free to douse the flames contract to buy Hermes StarLiner drones Mediterranean Sea, of its Jewish popuof conflict, free to think about what their from Elbit, an Israeli company that also lation. I would hazard to guess that this slogans are really saying? It is food for manufactures the cluster bombs, bullets is what most people actually believe is thought. and corrosive white phosphorus shells being said. Ken Green, Cooper Landing, AK ■ used to attack both Hamas and civilians Yousef Munayyer (Jewish in Gaza. Currents, June 11, 2021) conThe StarLiner is a civilian version of tends that the slogan is really the armed drones the Israeli military emonly demanding “a state in ploys to surveil and bombard Gaza and which Palestinians can live in West Bank targets. It carries cameras their homeland as free and and sensors instead of Hellfire missiles. equal citizens, neither domiElbit also supplies surveillance technolnated by others nor dominating ogy for the illegal “Separation Wall” and them. When we call for a free produces parts for Israeli tanks and war Palestine from the river to the planes deployed against Palestinians. sea, it is precisely the existing Transport Canada says that the new system of domination that we Canadian drones will be employed to seek to end.” So, rather than a “keep Canadian waters safe, and to call to genocide, the slogan monitor pollution.” Technologically-adshould be considered one for vanced Canada could easily manufacthe unification of Palestine and ture and sell its own drones for this and Israel where all citizens have other important tasks. equal rights and are “free.” Canada’s choice of Israeli drones vioIt is a good explanation, but lates its obligations under the Arms the popular interpretation will Trade Treaty that forbids weapons sales be difficult if not impossible to with nations engaged in human rights overcome. The power of sloOTHER VOICES is an optional 16-page supabuses. It is wrong for Canada to supgans to fan fires of opinion and plement available only to subscribers of the port a foreign company that profits from fuel the human race’s apparent supplying the weapons and technology addiction to conflict cannot be Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. For required to sustain the illegal occupation denied. Slogans are read at an additional $15 per year (see postcard of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, face value, not by people atinsert for Washington Report subscription as well as the Gaza blockade. tempting to determine what rates), subscribers will receive Other Voices Morgan Duchesney, Ottawa, Canada they actually mean. “From the inside each issue of their Washington Report For more on Canada’s relationship River to the Sea” mirrors Ison Middle East Affairs. with Israel’s Elbit Systems, see Candice rael’s call for “From the Sea to Bodnaruk’s column on p. 38 of the Januthe River,” which seems to Back issues of both publications are ary/February 2022 issue of the Washinghave also popped up in the avail able. To subscribe, telephone (800) ton Report. media recently. 607-4410, e-mail <circulation@wrmea. Both statements carry the org>, or write to P.O. Box 292380, KetterTHOUGHTS ON THE SLOGAN “extermination of the other” ing, OH 45429. “FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA” connotations. Without a doubt, I recently read an excellent elucidation each side has their extremists JUNE/JULY 2022
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Five Views
PHOTO COURTESY AL JAZEERA
The Execution of Shireen Abu Akleh
Shireen Abu Akleh (1971‐2022), a trail‐blazing Palestinian‐American reporter for Al Jazeera, was a symbol of a generation of Palestinian women who came of age in 1997. After her execution by an Israeli soldier, many posters now pepper the occupied territory calling her the latest Palestinian martyr.
Shireen Abu Akleh Was Executed to Send a Message to Palestinians By Jonathan Cook
THE EXECUTION of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by an Israeli soldier in the Palestinian city of Jenin, along with Israel’s immediate efforts to muddy the waters about who was responsible and the feeble expressions of concern from Western capitals, brought memories flooding back from 20 years of reporting from the region. Unlike Abu Akleh, I found myself far less often on the front lines in the occupied territories. I was not a war correspondent, and when I ended up close to the action it was invariably by accident—such as when, also in Jenin, my Palestinian taxi turned onto a street only to find ourselves staring down the barrel of an
Jonathan Cook is a journalist now based in the UK and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. This article has been cut for space. Visit <www.jonathan‐cook.net> to read the ar‐ ticle in its entirety. 8
Israeli tank. Judging by the speed and skill with which my driver navigated in reverse, it was not his first time dealing with that kind of roadblock. Abu Akleh reported on far too many killings of Palestinians not to have known the risks she faced as a journalist every time she donned a flak jacket. It was a kind of nerve I did not share. According to a recent report by Reporters Without Borders, at least 144 Palestinian journalists have been wounded by Israeli forces in the occupied territories since 2018. Three, including Abu Akleh, have been killed in the same period. I spent part of my time in the region visiting the scenes of Palestinian deaths, trying to pick through the conflicting Palestinian and Israeli narratives to get a clearer understanding of what had actually happened. Abu Akleh’s killing, and Israel’s response, fit a pattern consistent with what I discovered when carrying out those investigations. It was no surprise, then, to hear Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett immediately blame Palestinians for her death. There was, he said, “a considerable chance that armed Palestinians, who fired wildly, were the ones who brought about the journalist’s unfortunate death.”
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PHOTO BY PHIL PASQUINI
Abu Akleh was a face familiar not only to the Arab world that devours news from Palestine, but to most of the Israeli combat soldiers who “raid”—a euphemism for attack—Palestinian communities such as Jenin. The soldiers who shot at her and the group of Palestinian journalists she was with knew they were firing at members of the media. But there also appears to be evidence suggesting one or more of the soldiers identified her specifically as a target. Palestinians are rightly suspicious that the bullet hole just below the edge of her metal helmet was not a one-in-amillion chance event. It A makeshift memorial for Palestinian‐American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh is seen at a rally to mark the looked like a precision shot Nakba, the “catastrophe,” at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC on May 15, 2022. intended to kill her—the reason why Palestinian officials are calling her death “deliberate.” They were enraged, in particular, by footage from Gaza capFor as long as I can remember, Israel has been trying to find tured by France 2 TV. It showed a father desperately trying to pretexts to shut down Al Jazeera’s coverage, often by banning its shield his 12-year-old son, Muhammad al-Durrah, as they were reporters or denying them press passes. Infamously, last May, it trapped by Israeli gunfire at a road intersection. Muhammad was bombed a tower block in Gaza that housed the station’s offices. killed and his father, Jamal, seriously wounded. Indeed, Abu Akleh was most likely shot precisely because On that occasion too, Israel tried its best to cloud what had she was a high-profile Al Jazeera reporter, known for her fearhappened—and carried on doing so for many years. It variously less reporting of Israeli crimes. Both the army and its soldiers blamed Palestinians for killing Durrah, claimed the scene had bear grudges, and they have lethal weapons with which to setbeen staged, or suggested the boy was actually alive and untle scores. harmed. It did so even over the protests of the French TV crew. Palestinian children were being killed elsewhere in the occu“FRIENDLY FIRE” pied territories, but those deaths were rarely captured so viscerally on film. And when they were, it was usually on the primitive Israel’s suggestion that she was targeted by, or was collateral personal digital cameras of the time. Israel and its apologists cadamage from, Palestinian gunfire should be treated with the dissually dismissed such grainy footage as “Pallywood”—a confladain it deserves. At least with the advantage of modern GPS and tion of Palestinian and Hollywood—to suggest it was faked. satellite imagery, this kind of standard-issue dissembling is beWe will never be able to conclude whether Abu Akleh died becoming easier to rebut. cause of the actions of a hot-headed Israeli soldier, or because The “friendly fire” defense is straight out of the playbook Israel the shooter was given an instruction by senior officers to use an uses whenever it cannot resort to its preferred retrospective ratioexecution as a teaching moment for other Palestinians. But we nalization for killing Palestinians: that they were armed and do not need to know which it is. Because it keeps on happening, “posed an immediate danger to soldiers.” and because Israel keeps on doing nothing to stop it, or to idenThat was a lesson I learned in my first months in the region. I tify and punish those responsible. arrived in 2001 to investigate events during the first days of the Because killing Palestinians—unpredictably, even randomly— Second Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, when Israeli police killed fits perfectly with the goals of an occupying power intent on 13 protesters. Those killings, unlike parallel events taking place in eroding any sense of safety or normality for Palestinians, an octhe occupied territories, targeted members of a large Palestinian cupier determined to terrorize them into departure, bit by bit, minority that lives inside Israel and has a very inferior citizenship. from their homeland. At the outbreak of the Intifada in late 2000, Palestinian citiAbu Akleh was one of a small number of Palestinians from the zens had taken to the streets in unprecedented numbers to occupied territories who have American citizenship. That, and protest the Israeli army’s killing of their compatriots in the occuher fame in the Arab world, are two reasons why officials in pied territories. JUNE/JULY 2022
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that reason, they and those who thought like them had to be taught a lesson. It worked. Soon, the contingent of foreign volunteers—those who had come to Palestine to record Israel’s atrocities and serve, when necessary, as human shields to protect Palestinians from a trigger-happy Israeli army— were gone. Israel denounced the International Solidarity Movement for supporting terrorism, and given the clear threat to their lives, the pool of volunteers gradually dried Family and relatives pray in a church in the Old City during the funeral of Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu up. The executions—whether Akleh, on May 13, 2022 in Jerusalem. Thousands of Palestinians from across religious and political committed by hot-headed backgrounds paid their respects as she was laid to rest in her hometown, Jerusalem. soldiers or approved by the army—served their purpose once again. Israeli police made a point of “raiding” Shireen Abu Washington felt duty-bound to express sadness at her killing and Akleh’s home in occupied East Jerusalem to disrupt the family’s issue a formulaic call for a “thorough investigation.” mourning, demanding that a Palestinian flag be taken down. AnBut Abu Akleh’s U.S. passport was no more able to save her other message sent. from Israeli retribution than that of Rachel Corrie, murdered in Israel is already insisting on access to the forensic evidence— 2003 by an Israeli bulldozer driver as she tried to protect Palesas though a murderer has a right to be the one to investigate his tinian homes in Gaza. Similarly, Tom Hurndall’s British passport own crime. There will be noises about an investigation. Israel will did not stop him from being shot in the head as he tried to protect blame the Palestinian Authority for not cooperating, as it is alPalestinian children in Gaza from Israeli gunfire. Nor did filmready doing. Washington will express tepid concern but do nothmaker James Miller’s British passport prevent an Israeli soldier ing. Behind the scenes, the U.S. will help Israel block any meanfrom executing him in 2003 in Gaza, as he documented Israel’s ingful investigation. assault on the tiny, overcrowded enclave. For the U.S. and Europe, routine statements of “sadness” All were seen as having taken a side by acting as witnesses and calls for investigation are not intended to make sure light and by refusing to remain quiet as Palestinians suffered—and for is shed on what happened. That could only embarrass a strategic ally needed to project Western power into the oil-rich Middle East. 55TH ANNIVERSARY REUNION USS LIBERTY No, these half-hearted declarations from Western capitals are meant to defuse and confuse. They are intended to take the wind Friends, families and surout of any backlash; indicate Western impartiality and save the vivors of the Israeli attack on blushes of complicit Arab regimes; suggest there is a legal the USS Liberty will meet from June 6-9 at the Holiday process that Israel adheres to; and subvert efforts by PalestiniInn in Arlington, VA. They ans and the human rights community to refer these war crimes to will honor USS Liberty crew international bodies, such as the Hague court. and U.S. Congressman Pete The truth is that a decades-long occupation can only survive McCloskey (retired), who are through wanton—sometimes random, sometimes carefully caliworking to establish June 8 brated—acts of terror to keep the subject population fearful and as USS Liberty Rememsubdued. When the occupation is sponsored by the main global brance Day. After Israel insuperpower, there is absolute impunity for those who oversee vestigated their lethal attack they claimed they mistook that reign of terror. the Liberty for an Egyptian ship and a decades-long Abu Akleh is the latest victim. But these executions will concoverup ensued. Survivors demand a Congressional intinue so long as Israel and its soldiers are shielded from acvestigation of the brutal attack that killed 34 Americans and wounded 171. countability. 10
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On May 12, school girls visit the site where veteran Al Jazeera Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot dead by Israeli troops while covering an Israeli army raid on Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank on May 11, 2022.
For Us, Palestinians, Shireen Abu Akleh was a Legend By Hanin Majadli I REMEMBER MYSELF as a girl after the Second Intifada, standing in front of a mirror holding a hairbrush or a remote control and imitating the deep, calm voice with which she ended her reports: Shireen Abu Akleh, Al Jazeera, Palestine. That iconic sign-off, a catchphrase that every Palestinian child or teenager growing up in the shadow of the Second Intifada in the early 2000s associated with the new Al Jazeera reporter, took on a new meaning on May 11: painful, heartbreaking and bleeding. Who would have believed that the woman with this deep, courageous voice would leave us so soon, in such a cruel way. As I read the eulogies, the social media posts and the reactions to her death, I came to know that there is hardly a girl in the Arab world who hasn’t stood before a mirror, a hairbrush or a remote control in her hand, and said those words. Abu Akleh wasn’t just another very professional journalist or a great reporter, she was the voice of my generation. She shaped our political consciousness to a large degree, and over the course of two decades was a notable model for commitment,
Hanin Majadli is a content creator and media adviser. She grew up in Baka al‐Garbiyeh, now lives in Tel Aviv, and is a participant in the Haaretz 21 initiative to promote voices and stories from Israel’s Arab community. This article was published in Haaretz on May 12, 2022. Reprinted with permission JUNE/JULY 2022
professionalism, honesty, humanity and quality. It’s no wonder that she became an icon. Every time there was a military operation, or a war, or an incursion by the Israeli army into the West Bank or the Gaza Strip, her voice became our soundtrack. In the days before the communications revolution and smartphones, she was the lens through which we saw the Second Intifada unfold. In many respects, during those difficult times she was the most important Palestinian personality there was, the one whom the entire world heard and saw day after day and through whom they were exposed to the injustices of the occupation. For me, she was a presence even before I understood what the occupation meant. It was from Al Jazeera and Abu Akleh that I first learned about the refugee camps. She brought us the faces, the people, the shelling—and, most importantly, the truth (everything that wasn’tbroadcast on Israeli television). I even saw the landscapes of the West Bank through her. Today, I particularly recalled her reporting from the Jenin refugee camp—not only because her dispatches from there had made such difficult viewing for a young person, or because it was the place where she met her death, but rather because she made me aware of how kind its inhabitants had been to her. She had been with them for 20 years, and they insisted that her funeral procession leave from the camp. It wasn’t just that she had covered them, but that she had become their voice. Israelis don’t understand the depth of our anger and sadness. For us, the Palestinians, Shireen Abu Akleh was a legend. The entire Palestinian nation, in its homeland that stretches from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, both in exile and in the
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“The matter is being examined.” A month has passed, and this “examination” has yielded nothing, and never will—but the doubts were planted, and they sprouted in the Israeli fields of denial and suppression, where no one actually cares about the fate of a 19-year-old Palestinian girl, and the country’s dead conscience is silenced again. Is there a single crime committed by the military that the right and the establishment will ever accept responsibility for? Just one? Abu Akleh seems to be another story: an internationally known journalist. Just this past A woman is holding words by Palestinian‐American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh during a march Sunday, on May 8, a more organized in Amsterdam, on May 15, 2022. Mourners held vigils and marches around the world. local journalist, Basel al-Adra, was attacked by Israeli soldiers in the South Hebron Hills, and no one cared. And a coudiaspora, in villages, cities and refugee camps, feel a sense of ple days ago, two Israelis who attacked journalists during the collective grief. That is the reason for the many tributes, for the Gaza war last May were sentenced to 22 months in prison. demonstrations everywhere. Shireen Abu Akleh was the voice of What punishment will be meted out to soldiers who killed, if inthe Palestinian who has no voice. Her loss is so egregious and deed they did, Abu Akleh? And what punishment was given to so profound that despite everything that has been written, I canwhoever decided on and carried out the despicable bombing of not adequately put it into words. the Associated Press offices in Gaza during the fighting last I will end with something she said in a video posted on Al year? Has anyone paid for this crime? And what about the 13 Jazeera’s website in October: “I chose journalism to be close journalists who were killed during the Gaza war in 2014? And to people, and I knew that it wouldn’t be easy to change the the medical personnel who were killed during demonstrations at situation. But at least I managed to bring Palestinians’ voices the Gaza border fence, including 21-year-old Razan al-Najjar, to the world.” who was shot dead by soldiers while wearing her white uniform? No one has been punished. Such things will always be covered by a cloud of blind justification and automatic immunity for the military and worship of its soldiers. Even if the smoking Israeli bullet that killed Abu Akleh is found, By Gideon Levy and even if footage is found that shows the face of the shooter, he will be treated by Israelis as a hero who is above all suspicion. THE RELATIVE HORROR expressed over the killing of Shireen It’s tempting to write that if innocent Palestinians must be killed Abu Akleh is justified and necessary. It is also belated and selfby Israeli soldiers, better for them to be well-known and holders righteous. Now you’re appalled? The blood of a famous journalof U.S. passports, like Abu Akleh. At least then the U.S. State ist, no matter how brave and experienced she was—and she Department will voice a little displeasure—but not too much— was—is no redder than the blood of an anonymous high school about the senseless killing of one of its citizens by the soldiers of student who was traveling home in a taxi full of women in this one of its allies. same Jenin a month ago when she was killed by gunfire from At the time of writing, it was still unclear who killed Abu Akleh. Israeli soldiers. This is Israel’s propaganda achievement—sowing doubts, That is how Hanan Khadour was killed. Then, too, the miliwhich Israelis are quick to grab onto as fact and justification, tary spokesman tried to cast doubt on the shooters’ identity: though the world does not believe them and is usually correct. Gideon Levy is an Israeli journalist and author. This article was first When the young Palestinian boy Muhammad al-Durrah was published in Haaretz, May 11, 2022 © Haaretz. Reprinted with per‐ killed in 2000, Israeli propaganda also tried to blur the identity mission
The Killing of Shireen Abu Akleh: So Now You’re Appalled?
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Israeli forces attack Palestinians carrying the coffin of slain Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh out of the morgue of the Saint Joseph Hospital in East Jerusalem on May 13, 2022. Israeli police would not allow her body to be carried on foot.
of his killers; it never proved its claims, and no one bought them. Past experience shows that the soldiers who killed the young woman in a taxi are the same soldiers who might kill a journalist. It’s the same spirit; they are permitted to shoot as they please. Those who weren’t punished for Hanan’s killing continued with Shireen. But the crime begins long before the shooting. The crime starts with the raiding of every town, refugee camp, village and bedroom in the West Bank every night, when necessary but mainly when not necessary. The military correspondents will always say that this was done for the sake of “arresting suspects,” without specifying which suspects and what they’re suspected of, and resistance to these incursions will always be seen as “a breach of order”—the order in which the military can do as it pleases and the Palestinians cannot do anything, certainly not show any resistance. Abu Akleh died a hero, doing her job. She was a braver journalist than all Israeli journalists put together. She went to Jenin, and many other occupied places, where they have rarely if ever visited, and now they must bow their heads in respect and mourning. They also should have stopped spreading the propaganda spread by the military and government regarding the identity of her killers. Until proven otherwise, beyond any shadow of a doubt, the default conclusion must be the Israeli military killed Shireen Abu Akleh. JUNE/JULY 2022
Violence Then Peace: Shireen Abu Akleh Laid to Rest in Jerusalem By Lubna Masarwa, Huthifa Fayyad and Frank Andrews PEOPLE PILED INTO THE YARD outside the Saint Joseph French Hospital in East Jerusalem's Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood on Friday morning, waiting for the body of slain Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh to leave the morgue. Palestinian flags fluttered, despite a last-minute decision from Israeli authorities to ban and confiscate them. Ten or so rows of heavily armed riot police stood at the gates of the hospital. In the days leading up to the funeral in her hometown of Jerusalem, the body of Abu Akleh, shot by an Israeli gunman on Wednesday while she reported on an Israeli military raid, was carried through Jenin, Nablus and Ramallah. In every West Bank city the cortege visited, residents rushed to join the procession and help carry the casket to the next stop. After Muslims finished prayers outside the hospital on Friday, word spread that the police had spoken to Abu Akleh’s family,
Lubna Masarwa, Huthifa Fayyad and Frank Andrews are journalists for Middle East Eye. This article was first published in Middle East Eye on May 13, 2022. Reprinted with permission.
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who are Christians. They didn't want her casket to be carried aloft in a procession, an effort to prevent a mass march along the roughly 2.7km route to a Roman Catholic church in the Old City. The police wanted her body to be transported in a car. Mourners resisted, holding Abu Akleh's casket aloft as they attempted to leave the hospital yard. Israeli police responded with immediate violence. An Al Jazeera stream captured officers beating mourners with truncheons and firing stun grenades into the crowd. Another video captured a bald man in a grey t-shirt being kicked in the torso as he lay on the ground. Stumbling away from the oncoming security forces, towards a group of Palestinians falling over each other to escape the beating, he was kicked again and whacked in the side with a baton. The man kept his eyes on Abu Akleh's casket, though, which was teetering as the men underneath it struggled to hold firm while Israeli forces continued to strike them. Trying to evade the blows, the man, with a terrified look on his face, sprang towards the coffin as it slipped towards the ground and managed to catch the falling end. (See cover) After the sudden overwhelming violence, Abu Akleh's family agreed for her casket to be placed in a vehicle. Police prevented mourners coming near the vehicle, beating back those who approached. As the car left, security forces shut the gate of the hospital, trapping most of the mourners inside the yard of the building. Only once the car had reached the church were they finally allowed out of the compound. A video released by the Israeli authorities showed police officers snatching Palestinian flags off Abu Akleh's hearse as it drove through occupied East Jerusalem.
THE CATHEDRAL AND THE CEMETERY When her casket entered the ornately decorated Cathedral of the Annunciation of the Virgin, there was finally peace. The building was packed with Palestinians of all faiths, among them diplomatic delegations, Shireen Abu Akleh's former Al Jazeera colleagues—including their head of news in his Qatari thobe—and her family. In the Christian quarter outside the church, more and more Palestinian mourners gathered. Among them lurked an unprecedented number of Israeli police officers, in uniform and civilian clothing. Several times, Middle East Eye saw people who were carrying the Palestinian flag or chanting Palestinian slogans—which were both outlawed for the funeral by authorities—being suddenly set upon, beaten and dragged away. After the final prayers in the church, Abu Akleh was brought outside once again. Witnesses described a sea of people all the way to the Mount Zion Cemetery hundreds of meters away, which was to be Abu Akleh's final resting place. It looked as if the casket was moving above the march, not the march moving the casket. 14
Many young people, desperate to get a glimpse of Abu Akleh's coffin before she was interred, climbed over the walls of the cemetery, as Israeli restrictions on Palestinians entering and leaving the Old City meant they were lagging behind. A cross of flowers, carried in front of the coffin by Muslim and Christian crowds, also finally got to the graveyard. Then, in an extraordinary moment, representatives from the Christian denominations in Jerusalem rang church bells in tandem for the first time in the ancient city's history. They rang for more than 30 minutes, mingling with the Islamic religious chant of “God is Great.” Draped—despite the Israeli restrictions—in a Palestinian flag, the coffin of Abu Akleh was finally placed into the ground in a plot alongside her parents. Long after the burial was finished, mourners continued to come forward, putting down flowers and saying prayers.
UNITY The death of the veteran journalist has united Palestinians like few other events in recent history. Israeli restrictions make it extremely difficult for Palestinians to gather in Jerusalem in such large numbers, but this was the biggest Palestinian funeral in decades. Many locals felt it was as big as—if not bigger than—the famous funeral of Palestinian leader Faisal Husseini, who was buried in Jerusalem in 2001; and bigger than Yasser Arafat's 2004 burial in Ramallah. Palestinians from Jerusalem and the cities in the ’48 community came to the funeral, but no one from the West Bank or Gaza was allowed to attend. The different faiths rarely come together as they did on Friday. After taking part in Islamic Friday prayers at the hospital, Palestinian Muslims and Christians joined the procession and prayed side-by-side in the Roman Catholic cathedral for the beloved journalist. “A nation united, raise your hands and raise your voices,” Palestinians had chanted earlier. “Muslims and Christians, raise your voice in union.”
What Binds American White Supremacists and Israel’s Brutal Assault on Palestinians By David Rothkopf AN 18-YEAR-OLD walks into a grocery store in Buffalo, New York and opens fire, killing ten. On the barrel of his gun is written a racist epithet so offensive that most media simply refer to it as the “n-word.” Israeli police brutally assault mourners at the funeral of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. They rip the Palestinian flag off the hearse carrying Abu Akleh’s coffin.
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Two events, worlds apart. What could they possibly have in common? After all, the Buffalo shooter, Payton S. Gendron, was an avowed anti-Semite who feared that Jews and Blacks and people of color were seeking to “replace” whites. Another symbol on his gun, the number 14, evoked a white supremacist credo, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” He was a criminal. According to the Israeli police they were seeking to “facilitate a calm and dignified funeral.” What could their behavior possibly have to do with that of an unhinged racist who perceived those who were different from him as a mortal threat and, as a result, felt justified in turning to violence against them? Gendron has been linked to a 180-page manifesto in which he praised other racist gunman including Robert Gregory Bowers, the man who attacked the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in which 11 people died and six others were wounded. How could he possibly have anything in common with a police force empowered to protect a people he deplored? Yet, the underlying impetus behind both assaults was hatred fueled by fear of the “other.” Yes, both Gendron and the Israeli police acted with reckless disregard for human life or decency. Yes, the police and Gendron were both actively protecting a world view in which people of different races and creeds were seen as lesser, in which denying them basic freedoms, even depriving them of life, has become commonplace. Yes, the white replacement theory espoused by Gendron was promoted by right-wing media like Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. And yes, when Fox star Tucker Carlson was attacked for espousing “white replacement theory,” his defense was to cite the case of Israel: “It is unrealistic and unacceptable to expect the State of Israel to voluntarily subvert its own sovereign existence and nationalist identity and become a vulnerable minority within what was once its own territory.” And as repulsive as Carlson’s comments were, the logic that brought him to cite Israeli views toward Palestinians was akin to American white supremacists' views toward non-Christians and non-whites is easily understood. The racism and hatemongering of right-wing media in both countries is linked directly to political parties in the U.S. and Israel who have tapped into race hatred and fears to fuel their popularity, in the case of the U.S., the GOP, and in particular Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, and in the case of Israel, the coalitions on the right that supported Bibi Netanyahu and now support Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. Indeed, these powerful political movements and their media benefactors, acolytes and amplifiers have worked to institutionalize their intolerance. That is the case whether it is manifested in the U.S. by efforts to disenfranchise voters of color, by a border
David Rothkopf is a podcast host and CEO of The Rothkopf Group. His latest book is Traitor: A History of Betraying America from Benedict Arnold to Donald Trump. This article was first published on May 16, 2022 in Haaretz. Reprinted with permission. JUNE/JULY 2022
wall, or putting children in cages, or if it is manifested in Israel by a system that has, accurately, been condemned as imposing a system of apartheid, of second-class citizenship, limited rights and serial violence against Palestinians. No, Gendron was not working for the state when he committed his crime as the Israeli police were when they brutally and unjustifiably attacked grieving mourners. But his racism was directly linked to a powerful political movement in the U.S.—the same movement that put a gun in his hands—just as was the case for the Israeli police who clubbed pallbearers and denied a decent funeral to a widely respected Palestinian-American citizen who deserved so much better. Of course, it is easy to link these two acts because both were indecent, repulsive, offensive to any standard of morality. And there is a danger in conflating events merely because they occur close to one another in time. It would be a mistake to do so if such analogizing minimized one crime or misrepresented another. That said, it would also be a mistake to fail to see the similarities when the two acts are in fact associated with toxic movements that represent a profound threat to the countries in question, especially when those two countries are as closely associated as the U.S. and Israel. Both acts flowed from irrational hate fueled by ethno-nationalist politicians who have made crimes like these ever more likely, offered the predicate for the attacks (even if the monstrous behavior was very different in nature), and one way or another made available the weapons used in the crimes. (And before you say no one died in the Israeli attack, how many innocent Palestinians have died without justification at the hands of the Israeli police or the military? We do not know exactly whose bullet killed Shireen Abu Akleh yet, but it is too easy to cite other cases. We also know that the investigation into her death is likely to be inconclusive and such crimes will continue, often as a result of an Israeli institutional calculus that regularly values Palestinian lives at a fraction of the worth attributed to that of any Israeli.) I am well aware that some will discount such analysis as being the kind of American Jewish statement critical of Israel or Zionism that is often equated with anti-Semitism by those on the Israeli right. They, like those on the American right, are allergic to dissent and inclined to question the character of their opponents. But if Zionism means supporting the sort of state racism that it was created to escape, then supporting it and turning a blind eye to abuses and the corrupted values behind them is in fact, the real act of anti-Semitism. Just as in the Republican Party in the U.S., many in the right wing of Israel’s government have lost their way and are damaging their country more than their enemies could. And just as in the U.S., the cure is to set aside euphemisms and both-sidesism and excuses and to acknowledge that both our countries are suffering the institutionalization of forms of racism that runs contrary to our espoused values, even if it is hardly contrary to the actual truth of the history in either nation. ■
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History’s Shadows
U.S. Hypocrisy and the War in Ukraine
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By Walter L. Hixson
Media cover a press conference given by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on April 23, 2022 in Kyiv, Ukraine. The Ukrainian presi‐ dent renewed calls for more weapons and other forms of support from allied countries as Ukraine defends itself from Russia’s assault. THERE IS NO DEFENSE for Tsar Vladimir Putin’s blood-drenched assault on neighboring Ukraine. But there is plenty of historical myopia and human rights hypocrisy, if not outright racism, in the U.S. reaction to Russia’s war.
History’s Shadows, a regular column by contributing editor Wal‐ ter L. Hixson, seeks to place various aspects of Middle East poli‐ tics and diplomacy in historical perspective. Hixson is the author of Architects of Repression: How Israel and Its Lobby Put Racism, Violence and Injustice at the Center of US Middle East Policy and Israel’s Armor: The Israel Lobby and the First Gener‐ ation of the Palestine Conflict (available from Middle East Books and More), along with several other books and journal articles. He has been a professor of history for 36 years, achieving the rank of distinguished professor. 16
After the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States failed to seize a historic opportunity to do everything possible to forge closer economic, cultural and political ties with post-communist Russia. Even a new Marshall Plan for Russia might have been in order. Washington chose instead to promote neoliberal economic policies, which enabled oligarchs to amass wealth by plundering Russian resources. At the same time, U.S. security policy centered on the expansion of NATO, which since its creation in 1949 has served as an antiRussian military alliance. In 1997, the legendary diplomat George F. Kennan—the architect of the Cold War containment strategy and the preeminent expert on all things Russian—warned that NATO enlargement would inflame
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“the nationalistic, anti-Western tendencies in Russian opinion...restore the atmosphere of the Cold War to East-West relations” and would be “a strategic blunder of epic proportions.” History has now taught us the bitter lesson that Kennan was right. Since he came to power in 2000, Putin’s rage has been fueled by resentment of the provocative decision to expand NATO eastward incorporating several former Soviet republics and Warsaw Pact allies. Hardly purely defensive in orientation, NATO has engaged in large offensive operations, notably in Libya and especially the former Yugoslavia. Both NATO and the United States—along with their ally Israel—promote militarism through large-scale arms sales and development of all manner of weapons systems. Russia could hardly be indifferent to an array of formerly allied states being armed with nuclear missiles on the same borders through which it was twice invaded in the 20th century. Just imagine the U.S. response if a hostile alliance attempted such a gambit in Canada, Mexico, or the Caribbean (recall the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis). None of this justifies or excuses the brutal Russian invasion or the mendacious claim that Ukraine is part of Russia, but it does help explain the origins of the war and why most Russians support it.
Ultimately only a diplomatic solution— which if pursued more vigorously at the outset might have headed off the horrific war—can resolve the conflict. Meanwhile the military-industrial complex (the term may be hackneyed but the complex is thriving) is happily manufacturing weapons for Ukraine, while the Cold War adversaries arm to the teeth and face off with weapons of mass destruction. This situation is as scary as it is stupid, particularly in an era in which climate change, poverty, disease control and other pressing issues should be the top priorities in world affairs.
MEDIA MYOPIA Compare the saturated American mainstream media (MSM) coverage of the war in Ukraine with the coverage of Middle East conflicts. Just imagine if Israel’s ongoing illegal and brutal repression of Palestine—the assassinations, massacres, illegal settlements, home demolitions, beatings and incarceration, including children—received remotely the type of around-the-clock media coverage and demonization of the aggressor, day after day for weeks on end, as we have seen in the case of the Ukraine war. Well, you indeed need to imagine such coverage because U.S. national security elites and the MSM bow to Israel and its lobby in refusing to report responsibly the
ongoing human rights nightmare in Palestine. What conclusions should we draw when U.S. national security elites and the MSM gloss over the repression and killing of brown-skinned Palestinians, Afghans, Iraqis, Syrians and Yemenis while offering saturation coverage of the victimization of white, European Ukrainians? Western media condemns Putin, and rightfully so, as a war-making dictator who has plundered Russian resources, amassed a vast personal fortune, and is a ruthless autocrat who silences criticism and dispenses with political opponents through repression and murder. Well, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) embodies these very same “qualities,” including waging the endless, blood-drenched war in Yemen, which has produced vastly more casualties than the war in Ukraine yet receives little coverage in the MSM. Meanwhile, MBS remains an American ally whose human rights violations are routinely overlooked. The United States has a long history of bolstering the dictators that it likes and condemning and seeking to overthrow those that it doesn’t. The MSM, and thus most of the public, plays along. A more even-handed, human rights-conscious, and conflict resolution-focused foreign policy would lead to fewer wars and a much safer world. ■
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United Nations Report
Remind Washington and Moscow: Law Isn’t a Now and Then Thing for the U.N. By Ian Williams
PHOTO CREDIT VOLODYMYR TARASOV/ UKRINFORM/FUTURE PUBLISHING VIA GETTY IMAGES
For half a century, the U.S. veto has vitiated the Palestinian cause at the U.N., so it was almost a coming of age for Moscow when the General Assembly vote on Russia’s veto against the Ukraine Security Council Resolution was as badly supported as previous U.S. vetoes on behalf of Israel. However, U.S. diplomats—and media— were making no such odious comparisons as they crowed about Putin’s lack of support. Admittedly the reportage usually added (very) small print to the self-congratulations, that General Assembly resolutions are “not legally binding.” Archivists in the State Department could remind them that the reason for their alleged lack of effect is that for 30 years the U.S. has eroded their standing by declaring them as “not legally binding.” That was, of course, because most such resolutions condemned U.S. vetoes U.N. Secretary‐General António Guterres and President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy protecting Israel. In the U.S. presentations, hold a joint press conference on April 28, 2022, in Kyiv, Ukraine. somehow the General Assembly resolution partitioning mandatory Palestine and setting up a Jewish state was indeed as binding and unalterable as WHETHER THE UNITED NATIONS can survive this “Special Milthe Laws of the Medes and Persians. But then, the Uniting for Peace itary Operation” on a member state is a moot point. The invasion resolutions were legally effective enough to fight the Korean War— of Ukraine is a direct challenge to the whole 1945 world order enuntil Palestine resurrected the procedure and Washington denishrined in the U.N. Charter. And that is not good news for people grated it. like the Palestinians, whose advocates and diplomats have inWashington is not alone in suffocating in the stink of its own voked the “unique legitimacy” of the U.N. and its refusal to authohypocrisy. Russia claims its veto from the U.N. Charter, whose core rize Israel’s acquisition of territory by force. The closest parallel is principle is a ban on “the acquisition of territory by force” accompathe Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, where the U.N.’s response was ennying the principle that all sovereign states are equal. Of course, tirely legal if perhaps ill-advised in subcontracting the details to the veto means that some states are more equal than others, but the klutzes in Washington. the U.N. Charter did not give Russia a permanent seat on the SeNo friend of the Palestinians should wield “What about?” to justify curity Council. That privilege belonged to the U.S.S.R., which was Vladimir Putin’s illegal aggression on Ukraine, let alone the illegal with Ukraine (and Belarus!), a founding member of the U.N. in 1945. and inhumane ways in which he has waged that war. But it is indeed The U.S.S.R. dissolved in 1991, after which Moscow usurped the legitimate to raise the questions in Washington, although the purseat. There was no formal vote on it, but the diplomatic identity theft pose should be to hitch Palestinian issues to the Ukrainian bandwent unchallenged, but not un-noticed, at the time. U.N. diplomats wagon, not to give Putin a “Get-out-of-The-Hague-Free” card in the did discuss it but, like abuse within the family, decided that discretion Superpower monopoly game. was the best path. Even so, albeit 30 years on, it is a useful point to make against U.N. correspondent Ian Williams is the author of UNtold: the Putin’s specious legalism of a “special military operation” against a Real Story of the United Nations in Peace and War (available from Middle East Books and More). state he claims is not really a country. However, it is not practical to 18
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remove Moscow from the Security Council, although Russia’s removal from the Human Rights Council sets an interesting precedent for a challenge to its delegation’s credentials for the General Assembly. Secretariat inactivity apart, U.N. agencies of every description have responded to the war with material help and facilitated the rescue of civilians under siege by Russian forces, but U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has ducked the chance to “name and shame” and has instead been the soul of wriggly circumspection. That might have been acceptable if he were keeping his powder dry ready for a big diplomatic push. A U.N. Secretary-General has a role, indeed a duty, to provide a ladder for preposterous politicians like Putin to climb down from the tree in which they have trapped themselves. Sadly, it took several months to get Guterres to attend to the war in person, without a ladder, and then only after hundreds of former and present U.N. luminaries signed a letter demanding action. When he went to the region, he raised eyebrows—and hackles—by calling on Putin first rather than the obvious victim. The Russians showed their appreciation by rocketing Kyiv within hours of Guterres landing there. Anyone who thinks that was an accident will maintain that the Black Sea flagship Moskva was hit by a stray iceberg. Belatedly Guterres gave the firm U.N. position that “in line with the resolutions passed by the General Assembly, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a violation of its territorial integrity and against the Charter of the United Nations.” He added “There is one thing that is true and obvious, and that no arguments can change: We have not Ukrainian troops in the territory of the Russian Federation, but we have Russian troops in the territory of [Ukraine].” During the war, Russian troops have breached numerous international conventions with attacks on civilians, in voluntary transfers of population, looted cultural property and so on ad infinitum. Whatever you think of Russian military prowess, it is not a People’s War as Mao or Ho Chi Minh preached, and, as far as winning hearts and minds go, the Russophone Ukrainians in the East, who have borne the brunt of the Special Military Operation, have been voJUNE/JULY 2022
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Rescuers carry the body of Radio Liberty producer Vira Hyrych from a damaged apartment building in Kyiv on April 29, 2022, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russian strikes slammed into Kyiv on April 28, as U.N. Secretary‐General António Guterres was visiting. ciferously inveighing against their aspirant liberators—in Russian. One small bright spot was the successful move by Liechtenstein, ironically endorsed by the U.S., to trigger a General Assembly vote whenever a permanent member casts a veto. Almost ironically as he looked around at the ruins Russia had wrought of the U.N. Charter and the post-World War II settlement, Moscow’s representative claimed that “the division of powers between the Assembly and the Council has allowed the United Nations to function effectively for more than 75 years.” This “effectiveness” is indeed news to millions of people from Indochina to the Congo, the Balkans and the Middle East, whose lives have been afflicted by the “scourge of war,” unhindered by the U.N. Charter and the organization it set up to end it forever. Consistently, as a frequent victim of the veto, the Palestine delegation was a cosponsor of the measure, leading to an Israeli delegate to protest that it was against the rules. But then the Israeli delegate compounded her obtusity, trying to reconcile the good vetoes that Washington used with the bad ones that Russia had wielded. “In some cases, the problem has been the text of the resolution before the Security Council, not the veto itself.” Indeed, as she implies, the text of a resolution might well call Israeli actions into question and “in the case of a particular res-
olution in the Security Council that does not promote peace and security, the veto should be cast.” From now on, supporters of Palestine can and should use every occasion of a General Assembly debate on a U.S. veto to relate American statements about Russian frightfulness in Ukraine with Israeli behavior in Gaza. Bombings of civilians, deaths of children, violation of boundaries, defiance of Geneva conventions, annexation of territories acquired by force: you would almost think that Putin had studied the Israeli blueprint, and as Adolph Hitler famously concluded over the Ottomans’ Armenian massacres, “they got away with it.” It is a reciprocal learning process as the barbaric Israeli assassination of Al Jazeera’s Shireen Abu Akleh demonstrates. Who knows though, maybe the White House foreign policy team might also learn from the self-serving expediency and manifest ambivalence of Israel and the Gulf states to U.S. resolutions on Russia and let them know they cannot expect automatic diplomatic and military support. And maybe the U.S. can once again realize that international law is not something you can turn on and off when Israel is involved: that you cannot preach effectively against annexations in Ukraine, while condoning land grabs in the Golan, West Bank and Western Sahara. ■
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Congress Watch
Consolidated Appropriations Bill Includes Nearly $5 Billion for Israel
By Shirl McArthur
PHOTO BY ABIR SULTAN/POOL/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
For Egypt, the bill earmarks the expected $1.3 billion in military aid, but with conditions. The first is to withhold $235 million pending a certification related to democracy and human rights. A second condition withholds $85 million because of Egypt’s treatment of political prisoners. The bill does not earmark funds for the Palestinians, but the accompanying “Joint Explanatory Statement” includes $219 million for the Palestinians. The bill includes the usual conditions and restrictions, especially that no aid should go to any Palestinian government that includes Hamas. Significantly, one non-apSpeaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi sits between Rep. Adam Schiff (r) and U.S. ambassador to Israel Thomas Nides, during a meeting at the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) in Jerusalem propriations-related provision on Feb. 16, 2022, a month before Congress earmarked $4.805 billion for Israel, with no strings attached. in the omnibus incorporated the previously introduced bills, H.R. 2748, sponsored by Rep. Bradley Schneider (D-IL) in April, and S. 1061, sponsored by Sen. ON MARCH 9 AND 10, Congress passed the consolidated “omRob Portman (R-OH) in March 2021, “to encourage the normalizanibus” appropriations bill funding the government through the end tion of relations with Israel.” When the omnibus bill was passed, of FY ’22. President Joe Biden signed it March 15 as PL 117-103. H.R. 2748 had 332 cosponsors and S. 1061 had 72. Funds for most Middle East countries were not earmarked in the bill, but Morocco, Tunisia and Lebanon historically have received MEMBERS OF CONGRESS UPSET OVER POSSIBILITY funds from the economic or military aid accounts. OF NEW IRAN NUCLEAR AGREEMENT As usual, the largest earmarked amounts are for Israel, $4.805 billion! This includes $3.3 billion in military aid, which can be disAfter reports that negotiators for a new Iran nuclear deal made bursed immediately (so Israel can earn interest on it until it’s spent), some progress, five congressional letters were sent and five meaof which $785,300,000 can be spent in Israel with no strings atsures were introduced threatening to block any agreement. tached, $500 million for so-called “Israeli Cooperative Programs,” On Feb. 7, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), with 32 Republican cosigners, and $5 million for “refugees” resettling in Israel. After many failed sent a letter to Biden reminding him that the Iran Nuclear Agreelegislative attempts to pass H.R. 5323, giving Israel an additional ment Review Act of 2015 requires the president to submit any Iran $1 billion, supposedly to replenish the short-range Iron Dome misagreement to Congress for approval. His letter was followed by sile defense system used during the May 2021 fighting between four similar letters, with the Feb. 14 letter initiated by Rep. Mike Israel and Hamas, congressional Zionists managed to get it inGallagher (R-WI), gaining the most support with 163 House Recluded in the omnibus bill. publicans signing. Only one of the five letters, the March 10 letter to Biden initiated by Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), had any Democratic signers, with 12. All the letters, either specifically or implicitly Shirl McArthur is a retired foreign service officer. He lives in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. threaten to try to scuttle any agreement, no matter what it says. 20
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Two measures were introduced to block any Iran agreement by codifying then-President Donald Trump’s executive orders imposing sanctions on Iran. H.R. 7063 was introduced March 11 by Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) and four cosponsors. H.R. 7139 was introduced March 17 by Rep. August Pfluger (R-TX) with seven cosponsors. H.Res. 990 was introduced March 17 by Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) opposing any revival of the Iran deal. It has 65 cosponsors. On March 16, Cruz with 12 cosponsors introduced S. 3857 “to terminate certain waivers of sanctions with respect to Iran issued in connection with the” Iran agreement. The companion House bill, H.R. 7159, was introduced March 18 by Rep. Darrell Issa (RCA), with no cosponsors.
HOUSE PASSES THE “STOP IRANIAN DRONES” BILL On April 27, the House passed, under “suspension of the rules,” H.R. 6089, the “Stop Iranian Drones” bill. Introduced in November by Rep. Michael McCaul (RTX), it would expand the list of weapons covered by sanctions on Iran to include combat drones. When passed, the bill had 77 cosponsors. The Senate companion bill, S. 3421, introduced in December by Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), now has five cosponsors. Bills were introduced in the House and Senate aimed at preventing Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps’ designation as a Foreign Terrorist Organization from being revoked. On March 17, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) with three cosponsors, introduced S. 3871, and on April 1, Perry, with four cosponsors introduced H.R. 7354. On March 17, Issa, with no cosponsors, introduced H.R. 7129 “to prohibit the importation of crude oil from Iran.” And on April 5, Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-MI), with no cosponsors, introduced H.R. 7402 to, among other things, “prevent the International Monetary Fund from providing financial assistance to Iran, [and] to codify prohibitions on Export-Import Bank financing for the government of Iran.”
POSITIVE MEASURES MAKE SCANT PROGRESS H.Res. 751, introduced in October by Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN), “Condemning the JUNE/JULY 2022
repressive designation by the Government of Israel of six prominent Palestinian human rights and civil society groups as terrorist organizations,” still has 11 cosponsors. H.R. 2590, the “Palestinian Children and Families” bill, introduced in April 2021 by McCollum, still has 32 cosponsors. The new two-state solution bill, H.R. 5344, has gained a cosponsor and now has 45. Introduced in September by Rep. Andy Levin (D-MI), it aims “to preserve conditions for, and improve the likelihood of, a twostate solution that secures Israel’s future as a democratic state and a national home for the Jewish people, a viable, democratic Palestinian state, an end to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, and peaceful relations between the two states, and to direct the Department of State and other relevant agencies to take steps to accomplish these ends.” On May 16, Rep. Rashida Tliab (D-MI) made history by introducing H.Res. 1123, “Recognizing the Nakba and Palestinian refugees’ rights.” The resolution has six cosponsors. The diluted “anti-Islamophobia” bill, H.R. 5665, introduced in October by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), “to establish in the Department of State the Office to Monitor and Combat Islamophobia” worldwide, passed by the House in December, is still stuck in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Since her bill was being weakened prior to passage, on Dec. 9, Omar introduced H.R. 6204, a “clean” version of H.R. 5665 that still has 56 cosponsors.
MEASURES OPPOSING A U.S. DIPLOMATIC MISSION IN JERUSALEM GAIN SUPPORT The previously described measures objecting to reopening the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem have gained support. S. 3063, introduced by Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) in October, “to prohibit the use of funds for a U.S. Embassy, Consulate General, Legation, Consular Office or any other diplomatic facility in Jerusalem other than the U.S. Embassy to the State of Israel,” now has 40 cosponsors. The identical H.R. 6004, introduced in November by Rep. David Kustoff (R-TN), now has 124 Republican cosponsors.
A n e w, p o o r l y d r a f t e d m e a s u r e , S.Con.Res. 34, was introduced March 22 by Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) with 11 cosponsors. It would “express the sense of Congress in opposition to the establishment of a new Palestinian (sic) consulate or diplomatic mission in Jerusalem.” (Note, a new Palestinian mission in Jerusalem has not been proposed or considered.)
NEW ANTI-U.N. BILLS INTRODUCED Of the previously described anti-UNRWA bills introduced “to withhold U.S. contributions to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA)” only H.R. 6155, introduced in December by Rep. Lance Gooden (R-TX), has gained cosponsors. Modestly titled the “No Tax Dollars for the United Nation’s Immigration Invasion,” the bill now has 20 cosponsors. A new bill to withhold funds from UNRWA, S. 3467, was introduced on January 10 by Sen. James Risch (R-ID). It has six cosponsors. It not only attacks UNRWA, but also attacks Palestinian refugees. After the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC) indicated that it would not cancel its investigation of Israel for human rights violations during Israel’s May 2021 conflict with Hamas, Rep. Gregory Steube (R-FL), on March 24, introduced H.R. 7223 and 7224 calling for the abolition of the UNHRC and prohibiting any U.S. contributions to it. H.R. 7223 has three cosponsors and H.R. 7224 has five. And on April 1, Sens. James Lankford (R-OK), Cruz (R-TX), Tom Cotton (R-AR), and Hagerty (R-TN) signed a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken urging that the U.S. withdraw from the UNHRC.
PRO-ISRAEL BILLS HAVE BEEN RELATIVELY QUIET, BUT A NEW ONE WAS INTRODUCED On March 3, Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) again introduced the “Israel Anti-Boycott” bill, H.R. 6940. As with previous versions of the bill, it would attempt to criminalize supporting or calling for boycotts of Israel. Previous versions of the bill have been strongly criticized by the ACLU and other organizations as being blatant violations of free speech rights. It has 55 cosponsors. ■
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Election Watch
PHOTO BY SHAHAR AZRAN/GETTY IMAGES
Haim Saban Lays Down Red Lines for Democrats: Don’t “Undermine” Relationship with Israel By Philip Weiss
Haim Saban speaks onstage at Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF) Western Region Gala at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on Nov. 1, 2018, in Beverly Hills, CA. ON APRIL 26, AIPAC gave a statement about its big spending in Democratic Party primary races that set down the political rules for Democrats discussing Israel. Criticizing Israel is a red line—don’t cross that line. Haim Saban, one of the party’s largest donors, was there to enforce the line, from the top down. Because it really is all about the Benjamins—the money. In a statement that the head of AIPAC’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project (UDP), gave to Jewish Insider, the goal is clear: “We intend to be active in a significant number of races where there is a clear difference between a candidate who supports a strong U.S.-Israel relationship and a candidate that does not or who
Philip Weiss founded and co‐edits Mondoweiss, a news website de‐ voted to covering American foreign policy in the Middle East, chiefly from a progressive Jewish perspective. This article was first posted on <http://mondoweiss.net>, April 27, 2022. Reprinted with permission. 22
may seek to undermine that relationship,” UDP spokesperson Patrick Dorton told the Insider. “Our goal is to help build the broadest bipartisan coalition of candidates who support the U.S.-Israel relationship...Our activist donors, who include one of the largest donors to the Democratic Party, are focused on ensuring that we have a U.S. Congress that, like President Biden, supports a vibrant and robust relationship with our democratic ally, Israel.” That largest activist donor is Haim Saban, who gave $1 million to that super PAC and has said, “I’m a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel.” Saban has been setting the rules for a long time in the Democratic Party establishment. He kept Barack Obama in line on Israel and raised a lot of money for him. Next, he negotiated Hillary Clinton’s stances on Israel in 2015 so that she could keep “Jewish donors.” Clinton came out for Obama’s Iran deal but also issued a statement against the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions campaign targeting
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DMFI helped defeat Nina Turner in a the Squad of progressive Democrats in Israel. Saban warned Clinton’s campaign Cleveland primary last year for an empty Congress is going to grow. staff (per leaked emails), that “thousands” seat. Turner ran again this year and got atAIPAC shares that fear of the Squad with of Israel supporters needed clear signals tacked repeatedly by AIPAC as “anti-Israel” Democratic Majority for Israel, an organion her Israel stance. because she is a Sanders Democrat who zation that began just three years ago, The names of a few dozen high rollers are has offered mild criticisms of Israel. She was when AIPAC had become too close to listed in the AIPAC super PAC’s fundraising roundly defeated in her May primary. Turner Trump’s Republican Party and when the report for the last 3 months—nearly $16 milsays she is “heartbroken by the defamation” first Squad members got elected to Conlion! That’s a lot of money in a hurry. That’s that she is anti-Semitic, adding, “Some of gress. DMFI’s trademark is to pour money why the New York Times called “Jewish those attacks were funded by Republican into a race in an urban district where a prodonors” who prioritize Israel as the “elephant interests and even Trump donors.” gressive candidate of color is being critical in the room” of our foreign policy. Or why a Turner says the attacks are seeking to of Israel so as to support Israel-friendly J Street panel said that the clout of Jewish drive a wedge between the Jewish and candidates. Ritchie Torres is their poster donors in the Democratic Party is “gigantic” Black communities, both of which have child—the Bronx politician who recently and “shocking.” fought White supremacy in the U.S. said, “I try to approach the [Iran] issue not It’s also the reason that Speaker of the So, it’s O.K. in the Democratic Party to from the perspective of an American, but House Nancy Pelosi (who raises a lot of critique White supremacy in the U.S., but from the perspective of an Israeli.” money from Saban) said the Capitol will you get railroaded if you bring crumble and fall before Con(Advertisement) up Jewish supremacy in Israel. gress walks away from Israel. Several apartheid reports from And why in 2016 and 2020 leading human rights organizaagain, the Democratic Party retions have documented that moved any references to occusupremacy—if you mention pation from its platform—with them, then you are smeared Joe Biden personally intervenas an anti-Semite by a fellow ing to remove the word the last Democrat on the House floor, time. Just as President Barack because you “besmirched” Obama personally intervened Israel. to put the words, “Jerusalem is However, the leftwing of the and will remain the capital of Israel lobby isn’t all that helpful Israel,” into the party platform when it comes to Israel policy. in 2012—infuriating the DemoWhile J Street is fighting a good cratic base. fight with AIPAC over AIPAC’s The Democratic base doesn’t support for Trumpist Republithink the Israel relationship is at cans, J Street is reinforcing all important. Democratic voters some of the same red lines on put Israel at 9 on a list of allies. Israel. It says that supporting But this is a battle between the Playgrounds for Palestine is a project to build playgrounds BDS is anti-Semitic, and it reDemocratic establishment and for our children. It is a minimal recognition of their right to childhood and creative expression. It is an act of love. jects the conclusion of countless the base. human rights groups that Israel Haim Saban worked closely Playgrounds for Palestine (PfP) is a registered 501(c)3 nonis an apartheid state. with the late Sheldon Adelson, profit organization, established in 2001. We’re an all-volunteer organization (no paid staff) that raises money throughThis is a battle between the Trump’s biggest donor, when it out the year to construct playgrounds and fund programs Democratic establishment and came to Israel, and is very for children in Palestine. the grassroots. Twice as many friendly with Jared Kushner, Democratic voters want the Trump’s son-in-law and chief Selling Organic, Fair Trade Palestinian olive oil is PfP’s principle source of country to take the Palestinian envoy on the Middle East. But fundraising. This year, PfP launched side as those who want it to take all that is forgiven when you’re AIDA, a private label olive oil from Israel’s side (17.9 to 9.5 percent) talking about a key donor to the Palestinian farmers. Please come by and taste it at our table. according to the University of Democratic Party. Maryland. But their views are As for those congressional We hope you’ll love it and make it a staple in your pantry. not being reflected by the party, candidates who “may seek to For more information or to make a donation visit: https://playgroundsforpalestine.org • P.O. Box 559 • Yardley, PA 19067 because money is the mother’s undermine” the relationship with milk of politics. ■ Israel, AIPAC is concerned that JUNE/JULY 2022
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From the Diaspora
Rewriting UNRWA: The U.S.-Israeli Plan to Cancel Out the Palestinian Right of Return
PHOTO BY AYMAN NOBANI/XINHUA VIA GETTY IMAGES
By Ramzy Baroud
Palestinian refugee students are seen outside a school at Balata refugee camp in the West Bank city of Nablus, March 16, 2022. Palestin‐ ian refugees living in camps scattered throughout the West Bank are facing worsening conditions as humanitarian aid from the United Nations decreased due to insufficient funds. PALESTINIANS ARE justifiably worried that the mandate granted to the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, might be coming to an end. UNRWA’s mission, which has been in effect since 1949, has done more than provide urgent aid and support to millions of refugees. It was also a political platform that protected and preserved the rights of several generations of Palestinians.
Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle. His latest book , co‐edited with Ilan Pappé, is Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out, is available from Middle East Books & More. Dr. Baroud is a non‐resident senior research fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) and the Afro‐Middle East Center (AMEC). His website is <www.ramzybaroud.net>. 24
Although UNRWA was not established as a political or legal platform per se, the context of its mandate was largely political, since Palestinians became refugees as a result of military and political events—the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people by Israel and the latter’s refusal to respect the Right of Return for Palestinians, as enshrined in U.N. resolution 194 (III) of Dec. 11, 1948. “UNRWA has a humanitarian and development mandate to provide assistance and protection to Palestine refugees pending a just and lasting solution to their plight,” the U.N. General Assembly Resolution 302 (IV) of Dec. 8, 1949, read. Alas, neither a “lasting solution” to the plight of the refugees, nor even a political horizon has been achieved. Instead of using this realization as a way to revisit the international community’s failure to bring justice to Pales-
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tine and to hold Israel and its U.S. benefactors accountable, it is UNRWA and, by extension, the refugees that are being punished. In a stern warning on April 24, the head of the political committee at the Palestinian National Council (PNC), Saleh Nasser, said that UNRWA’s mandate might be coming to an end. Nasser referenced a recent statement by the U.N. body’s Commissioner-General, Philippe Lazzarini, about the future of the organization. Lazzarini’s statement, published a day earlier, left room for some interpretation, although it was clear that something fundamental regarding the status, mandate and work of UNRWA is about to change. “We can admit that the current situation is untenable and will inevitably result in the erosion of the quality of the UNRWA services or, worse, to their interruption,” Lazzarini said. Commenting on the statement, Nasser said that this “is a prelude to donors stopping their funding for UNRWA.” The subject of UNRWA’s future is now a priority, not only within the Palestinian but also Arab political discourse. Any attempts at canceling or redefining UNRWA’s mission will pose a serious, if not an unprecedented challenge for Palestinians. UNRWA provides educational, health and other support for 5.6 million Palestinians in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. At an annual budget of $1.6 billion, this support, and the massive network that has been created by the organization, cannot be easily replaced. Equally important is the political nature of the organization. The very existence of UNRWA means that there is a political issue that must be addressed regarding the plight and future of Palestinian refugees. In fact, it is not the mere lack of enthusiasm to finance the organization that has caused the current crisis. It is something bigger, and far more sinister. In June 2018, Jared Kushner, son-inlaw and adviser to former U.S. President Donald Trump, visited Amman, Jordan, where he, according to the U.S. Foreign Policy magazine, tried to persuade JUNE/JULY 2022
Jordan’s King Abdullah to remove the refugee status from 2 million Palestinians currently living in the country. This and other attempts have failed. In September 2018, Washington, under the Trump administration, decided to cease its financial support of UNRWA. As the organization’s main funder, the American decision was devastating, because about 30 percent of UNRWA’s money comes from the U.S. alone. Yet, UNRWA hobbled along by increasing its reliance on the private sector and individual donations. Although the Palestinian leadership celebrated the Biden administration’s decision to resume UNRWA’s funding on April 7, 2021, a little caveat in Washington’s move was largely kept secret. Washington only agreed to fund UNRWA after the latter agreed to sign a two-year plan, known as Framework for Cooperation. In essence, the plan effectively turned UNRWA into a platform for Israel and American policies in Palestine, whereby the U.N. body consented to U.S.—thus Israeli—demands to ensure that no aid would reach any Palestinian refugee who has received military training “as a member of the so-called Palestinian Liberation Army,” other organizations or “has engaged in any act of terrorism.” Moreover, the Framework expects UNRWA to monitor “Palestinian curriculum content.” By entering into an agreement with the U.S. Department of State, “UNRWA has effectively transformed itself from a humanitarian agency that provides assistance and relief to Palestinian refugees, to a security agency furthering the security and political agenda of the U.S., and ultimately Israel,” BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights noted. Palestinian protests, however, did not change the new reality, which effectively altered the entire mandate granted to UNRWA by the international community nearly 73 years ago. Worse, European countries followed suit when, last September, the European parliament advanced an amendment that would condition EU support of UNRWA on the editing and rewriting
of Palestinian school textbooks that, supposedly, “incite violence” against Israel. Instead of focusing solely on shutting down UNRWA immediately, the U.S., Israel and their supporters are working to change the nature of the organization’s mission and to entirely rewrite its original mandate. The agency, that was established to protect the rights of the refugees, is now expected to protect Israeli, American and Western interests in Palestine. Although UNRWA was never an ideal organization, it has indeed succeeded in helping millions of Palestinians throughout the years, while preserving the political nature of their plight. Although the Palestinian Authority, various political factions, Arab governments and others have protested the Israeli-American designs against UNRWA, such protestations are unlikely to make much difference, considering that UNRWA itself is surrendering to these pressures. While Palestinians, Arabs and their allies must continue to fight for UNRWA’s original mission, they must urgently develop alternative plans and platforms that would shield Palestinian refugees and their Right of Return from becoming marginal and, eventually, forgotten. If Palestinian refugees are removed from the list of political priorities concerning the future of a just peace in Palestine, neither justice nor peace can possibly be attained. ■
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Special Report
American Jews Increasingly Divided Over Israeli Policies
By Walter L. Hixson
DURING AND AFTER World War II, American Jews united, created the Israel lobby, and established the foundation for decades of unquestioned U.S. political support and economic assistance for Israel. Today, however, American Jews are “very easily divided” on Middle East policy, Stacy Burdett, a vice president of the Anti-Defamation League, pointed out in an April 5 webinar entitled, “The Changing Pro-Israel Politics on Capitol Hill.” Liberal Jews—firmly aligned with the Democratic Party—comprise a clear majority of the American Jewish population. The growth and assertiveness of liberal Jewish organizations has undermined the historic mission of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to maintain the bipartisan character of the Israel lobby. The effort long championed by AIPAC to maintain a singular, united American Jewish community “is not realistic any longer,” Dan Kalik, an official in the preeminent Jewish liberal organization, J Street, noted in the webinar. While the Israel lobby maintains its iron grip on the U.S. Congress, especially when it comes to securing military assistance to Israel,
Contributing editor Walter L. Hixson is the author of Architects of Repression: How Israel and Its Lobby Put Racism, Violence and Injustice at the Center of US Middle East Policy and Israel’s Armor: The Israel Lobby and the First Generation of the Palestine Conflict (available from Middle East Books and More), along with several other books and journal articles. He was a professor of his‐ tory for 36 years, achieving the rank of distinguished professor.
LIBERAL JEWISH ORGANIZATIONS MUST CONFRONT THEIR CONTRADICTIONS Liberal American Jewish organizations have become increasingly outspoken in criticism of the profusion of illegal Israeli settlements, brutal repression in Jerusalem, undermining of diplomacy with Iran, attacks on free speech and the weaponizing of anti-Semitism. However, the liberal Jewish critique is riddled with contradictions. Liberal Jewish groups remain thoroughly Zionist in their support of a “Jewish state” and advocacy of a two-state solution. This position begs the question of how a viable Palestinian state might be created in view of Israeli apartheid and the ongoing settler takeover of much of the West Bank as well as the ethnic cleansing campaign in East Jerusalem. It also fails to address how marginalized Palestinians living inside Israel’s recognized U.N. borders—20 percent of Israel’s population—could be treated with genuine equality in a state that is somehow both “Jewish” and “democratic.”
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AIPAC is increasingly viewed as the Republican wing of the lobby. Armed with its new PAC that makes direct contributions to candidates, AIPAC confirmed its right-wing orientation by endorsing and financing more than 100 Republican candidates who have refused to affirm the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. The AIPAC support for the “Big Lie” candidates drew a flurry of denunciations, including from liberal Jewish groups. J Street issued a statement declaring, “AIPAC’s support for these candidates endangers American democracy” and was “completely beyond the pale.” AIPAC refused to back down, however, as it dispatched a letter stating that its new PAC would base funding decisions solely on the level to which candidates supported Israel, all other issues aside. While AIPAC veers to the right, liberal Democrats are demonstrating “more alignment on Israel-Palestine than I’ve seen in a long time,” Kalik noted in the April 5 webinar sponsored by another Jewish liberal organization, Americans for Peace Now (APN). J Street, APN and other liberal Jewish groups endorse the two-state solution, call for a halt in settlements, and a commitment to diplomacy to resolve the conflict with Iran, whereas Republicans are increasingly associated with extremism. The dominant Trump-oriented wing shows a consistent “lack of respect for democracy”—both at home and abroad— and is “comfortable with an endless [Israeli] occupation,” Kalik noted, thus alienating some GOP moderates and forging unity among the Jewish Democratic opposition.
The largest liberal organization, J Street, has failed to address the blatant contradiction between its opposition to settlements and repression of Palestinians coupled with its support for the unconditional U.S. funding of Israeli militarism. Routinely bowing to AIPAC, long the powerful anchor of the Israel lobby in Washington, the U.S. Congress doles out $3.8 billion in annual military assistance to Israel with no conditions on Israeli policies, including its routine repression of Palestinians and rampant violations of international law. In a tortured policy statement on its web site, J Street calls for continued U.S. funding at current levels, stating that such funding should not be used for settlements or annexation of occupied territory, yet in the same breath insisting that aid to the Zionist state should not be “conditioned” on Israeli actions. J Street was equally contradictory on the issue of apartheid—rejecting use of the term in response to the designation by Amnesty International and other human rights groups—even as J Street acknowledged Israel’s
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JVP member wearing “another Jew supporting divestment” shirt. Recent polls, as well as the results of the 2020 election, show that Jews are overwhelmingly Democratic and support President Joe Biden at higher levels than the U.S. population. At the same time, however, liberal Democrats in Congress continue to receive AIPAC-generated support and funding for toeing the Israeli line. To cite one example, in Ohio’s 11th district Rep. Shontel Brown exploited lobby support—which means embracing unconditional fund-
ing for Israel—in twice defeating a more progressive Democratic primary opponent, Nina Turner. If liberal Democrats truly want to distinguish themselves from the increasingly right-wing and GOP-orientated AIPAC and its two sister PACs, they must find a way to wean liberal Democrats like Brown and many others from feeding at the AIPAC trough. ■
“ongoing denial of fundamental rights and freedoms to millions of Palestinians in occupied territory.” In a potentially significant breakthrough, one liberal Jewish group, Americans for Peace Now (APN), has become the first Zionist organization to call for conditioning aid to Israel. It has become “abundantly clear,” wrote APN president Hadar Susskind in an April 16 New York Times op-ed, “that continuing to give military aid without conditions neither serves the U.S. policy interests—nor, I would argue, does it serve Israel.” Susskind sharply condemned Israeli policies, citing “the horrifying images coming out of Gaza, East Jerusalem, and inside Israel.”
“unequivocally” opposed to Zionism, which it accurately describes as “a settler colonial movement establishing an apartheid state where Jews have more rights than others.” JVP advocates an immediate end to all military funding to Israel until the occupation and the Gaza blockade have been terminated; Palestinians have secured equal rights; and Palestinian refugees receive the U.N.provisioned (Resolution 194) right of return. While liberal groups verbally condemn efforts to outlaw boycotts and the weaponization of anti-Semitism, JVP has long since gone much further through its unconditional endorsement of the BDS effort. Bolstered by a growing membership and support, JVP has become increasingly engaged through its affiliate JVP Action in direct involvement in funding select congressional campaigns. Not surprisingly, right-wing Jewish groups, notably the Anti-Defamation League, have launched a full-scale attack on JVP as an “extremist” and “radical anti-Israel activist group.” ■
ONE JEWISH GROUP HAS A CONSISTENT VOICE FOR PEACE In contrast with J Street and other liberal groups, Jewish Voice for Peace—by far the most progressive Jewish organization—is
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The Safety of Others By Elsa Auerbach, Sara Roy and Eve Spangler NEO-NAZIS STOOD in formation along the route of Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade, in March 2022. The overt display of White supremacy was yet another horrifying reminder of the rise of fascism in 1930s Germany and of the growing anti-Semitism in the United States today. It demands that we remain steadfast in dismantling anti-Semitism and fighting racism in all its forms. We find it both painful and ironic that major Jewish organizations are labelling us, daughters of Holocaust survivors and refugees, as anti-Semites. They call us anti-Semitic because we are outspoken in our demand that Palestinians be entitled to the same rights we possess, which Israel has long denied them. Organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Al Haq, B’Tselem, Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic and Amnesty International have rigorously documented and analyzed Israeli practices according to the frameworks of international law and concluded that Israel is committing crimes of apartheid against the Palestinian people. Michael Lynk, the recently retired U.N. special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied territories since 1967, affirmed this in his latest report to the U.N. Human Rights Council. But rather than condemning violations of international law and human rights, the leaders of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), AIPAC and the Jewish Federations of North America claim that reports about Israeli apartheid will fuel anti-Semitism. Zionist organizations argue that Jews need a safe haven; as such, Israel must be a Jewish state—a state that enshrines in law the rights of one group of people at the expense of another. As Binyamin Netanyahu said when he was prime minister, “Israel is not a state of all its citizens ...Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people and only it.” This overt supremacy is a form of racism that is incompatible with democracy, and to justify it in the name of Judaism is itself anti-Semitic. It is both an ethical violation of Jewish humanism—any humanism—and a practical danger to Jews everywhere. It is precisely because we are Jews and the children of victims of Nazism that we feel it is our responsibility to challenge the harm being done to Palestinians in our names and in the names of our parents. If Zionists and their supporters always respond by ignoring the contents of reports and attacking the messenger, it is surely because the contents are indisputable. Having done decades of research in Israel and Palestine, we know all too well that the conditions on the
Elsa Auerbach, Ph.D., is Professor Emerita of English at the Univer‐ sity of Massachusetts. Sara M. Roy is a senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. Eve Spangler is an associate professor of sociology at Boston College. This was posted on April 5, 2022 in the London Review of Books Blog. Reprinted with permission of the co‐authors. 28
ground documented by Amnesty and others are painfully accurate: segregation, military rule, restrictions on Palestinians’ right to political participation, dispossession of Palestinian land and property, demolition of homes, uprooting of orchards, restrictions on movement, and the denial of economic and social rights, among other abuses. Amnesty’s report last February confirms that this system of Israeli domination exists in Israel, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. Palestinians, of course, have been saying this for decades. Russia’s devastation of Ukraine has been rightly condemned for its violations of international law. But if international law must apply in Ukraine, why not Palestine? If it is moral and legal to protest against Russian assault, why is it considered anti-Semitic to protest against Israeli assault? If Ukrainians who resist and defend themselves are called heroes, why are Palestinians who resist and defend themselves against occupation and land seizures called terrorists? The point, as Peter Beinart and others have argued, is not to diminish solidarity with Ukrainians, but to extend that solidarity to Palestinians, whose oppression the West subsidizes. What is the way forward? As stated in the 2021 Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism, we reject the notion of Jewish exceptionalism, which argues that anti-Semitism is a unique and incomparable form of hatred. Rather, the fight against anti-Semitism is “inseparable from the overall fight against all forms of racial, ethnic, cultural, religious and gender discrimination.” As such, we must name racism wherever it appears, including inside Israel. The danger to Jews lies not in documenting Israeli transgressions, as the ADL and others would have us believe, but in supporting them. As Brian Klug has put it, “the situation now of Jews in much of the world is dominated...not by policies and actions that are directed against Jewish interests but in the name of those interests; and not by a hostile power (Germany) that occupies the lands where Jews live but by a friendly power (Israel) that occupies territory where others live.” It is incumbent on us to resist any initiative that drives a wedge between Jews and other oppressed groups. We must oppose all attempts to justify Israel’s abusive and discriminatory treatment of Palestinians. We must assert unapologetically that opposing Israeli apartheid is not anti-Semitic; it is anti-racist. It is part of a larger struggle that values inclusion over exclusion, and rejects oppression in all its forms, both domestically and globally. In this way, the struggle against anti-Semitism and other forms of racism is expressed not as the politics of identity but as the politics of identification. Such an expanded embrace of the other is not only essential to combatting anti-Semitism, it is also essential to the survival of Judaism as a system of ethics and morality. Our safety comes from securing the safety of others and fighting injustice wherever it occurs. ■
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Israel and Judaism
The American Council for Judaism at 80
PHOTO BY ANNA MONEYMAKER/GETTY IMAGES
By Allan C. Brownfeld
Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff delivers remarks before a menorah lighting ceremony in celebration of Hanukkah in the East Room of the White House on Dec. 1, 2021 in Washington, DC. Jews in America are an integral part of their nation and do not consider themselves living in exile. THIS YEAR MARKS the 80th anniversary of the American Council for Judaism (ACJ). Since 1942, the Council has advanced the philosophy of Judaism as a religion of universal values, not a nationality, and has maintained that Americans of Jewish faith are American by nationality, and Jews by religion, just as other Americans are Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, etc. The Council has challenged the Zionist philosophy, which holds that Israel is the “homeland” of all Jews, and that all Jews living outside of Israel are in “exile.” In doing so, the Council has contended that its philosophy represents the thinking of the majority of Jewish Americans, a largely silent—but, in recent days, increasingly vocal— majority, which is not represented by the organizations which presume to speak in their name. Clearly, the homeland of American Jews is the United States. The Council’s philosophy is much older than the 80 years in which the organization has been in existence. In 1841, at the dedication of Temple Beth Elohim in Charleston, SC, Rabbi Gustav Poznanski
Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism. JUNE/JULY 2022
declared, “This country is our Palestine, this city our Jerusalem, this house of God our temple.” In 1885, a group of Reform rabbis met in Pittsburgh and adopted a platform which emphasized that Reform Judaism rejected the idea of Jewish “peoplehood” and nationalism in any variety. It stated, “We consider ourselves no longer a nation but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.” In 1898, the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) adopted a resolution disapproving of any attempt to establish a Jewish state. The resolution declared: “Zion was a precious possession of the past…as such it is a holy memory, but it is not our hope of the future. America is our Zion.” The issuance of the Balfour Declaration convinced many Reform rabbis of the necessity to take strong measures to fight Zionism. Rabbi Louis Grossman, the president of the CCAR, reacted to this document by reaffirming the standard Reform viewpoint and by reiterating Reform’s opposition “to the idea that Palestine should be considered the homeland of the Jews,” because Jews in the U.S. were an integral part of the American nation.
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In the wake of growing anti-Semitism in Russia and Eastern Europe at the end of the 19th century and the rise of the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s, many Jews began to look positively upon the idea of creating a Jewish state in Palestine as a refuge for those being persecuted. Jewish organizations in the U.S., which had always opposed Zionism, began to view it more favorably. In February 1942, the CCAR, the Reform rabbinical group, reversed its position and called for a “Jewish army” in Palestine, a direct violation of its 1935 resolution calling for “neutrality” when it came to Zionism. The American Council for Judaism was created in 1942 to maintain the traditional philosophy of a universal Judaism free of nationalism and politicization. In his keynote address to the June 1942 meeting in Atlantic City, Rabbi David Philipson declared that Reform Judaism and Zionism were incompatible: “Reform Judaism is spiritual, Zionism is political. The outlook of Reform Judaism is the world. The outlook of Zionism is a corner of Eastern Asia.” The first pledge of major financial backing was made by Aaron Strauss, a nephew and heir of Levi Strauss of blue jeans fame. Attending this meeting were six former presidents of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the president of Hebrew Union College and a former president of B’nai B’rith. The Council was incorporated in December 1942 and Rabbi Elmer Berger was named executive director. Judah Magnes, chancellor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, wrote a letter endorsing the Council’s statement of principles saying, “It is true that Jewish nationalism tends to confuse people not because it is secular and not religious, but because this nationalism is unhappily chauvinistic and narrow and terroristic in the best style of Eastern European nationalism.” In 1943, Berger participated in a public debate in Richmond, VA with Maurice Samuel, who had published an article attacking the Council at its formation. Berger stated the fundamental position he would champion throughout his life: “I oppose Zionism because I deny that Jews are a nation. We were a nation for perhaps 200 30
years in a history of 4,000 years. Before that we were a group of Semitic tribes whose only tenuous bond of unity was a national deity—a religious unity. After Solomon, we were never better than two nations, frequently at war with one another, disappearing at different times, leaving discernibly different cultures and even religions recorded in the biblical record. Certainly, since the dispersion, we have not been a nation. We have belonged to every nation in the world. We have mixed our blood with all peoples. Jewish nationalism is a fabrication woven from the thinnest kinds of threads and strengthened only in those eras of human history in which reaction has been dominant and anti-Semitism in full cry.”
Jewish nationalism is a fabrication woven from the thinnest kinds of threads
On Dec. 4, 1945, hours after the first meeting with Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, President Harry S. Truman received Lessing Rosenwald, the first president of AJC, in the Oval Office. He called for the admission of both Jewish and non-Jewish displaced persons to Palestine, and urged that, “Palestine shall not be a Muslim, Christian or Jewish state but a country in which people of all faiths can play their full and equal part,” and that the U.S. take the lead in coordinating with the U.N. a cooperative policy of many nations in absorbing Jewish refugees.” Rosenwald testified before the AngloAmerican Committee of Inquiry on Jan. 10, 1946 and urged that large numbers of Jews be admitted into Palestine on the condition that “the claim that Jews possess unlimited national rights to the land, and that the country shall take the form of a racial or theocratic state, were denounced once and for all.” From 1943 to 1948, the Council conducted a public campaign against Zionism. One of the speakers at its 1945 conference was Hans Kohn, a one-time German Zionist associated with the University in Exile in New
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York. He declared, “The Jewish nationalist philosophy has developed entirely under German influence, the German romantic nationalism with the emphasis on blood, race and descent as the most determining factor in human life, its historicizing attempt to connect with a legendary past 2,000 or so years ago, its emphasis on folk as a mythical body, the source of civilization.” The connection between Zionism and the nationalism of Nazi Germany had been made in 1938 when Albert Einstein warned an audience of Zionist activists against the temptation to create a state imbued with “a narrow nationalism within our own ranks against which we have already had to fight strongly, even without a Jewish state.” Another renowned German Jew, the philosopher Martin Buber, spoke out in 1942 against “the aim of the minority to ‘conquer’ territory by means of international maneuvers.” In the midst of hostilities that broke out after Israel unilaterally declared independence, Buber cited with despair, “This sort of ‘Zionism’ blasphemes the name of Zion; it is nothing more than one of the crude forms of nationalism.” In the face of the 1947 partition of Palestine, the Council wished the new state well and declared its determination to resist Zionist efforts to dominate Jewish life in America. Rabbi Berger published an essay that outlined “the challenge to all Americans who are Jews by religion presented by Zionist plans to foster an ‘Israel-centered’ Jewish life in the U.S.” He wrote, “The creation of a sovereign state embodying the principles of Zionism far from relieving American Jews of the urgency of making that choice, makes it more compelling.” Early in 1953, Berger and Rosenwald met in the White House with President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The president accepted their memorandum, which discussed the “confusion of Judaism with the nationalism of Israel,” such as Israel’s “Law of Return,” enacted in 1951, which could be interpreted as granting de facto Israeli citizenship to all the world’s Jews. The new Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, took the memorandum with him on his first trip to the Middle East and echoed many of its points in a radio address at the end of his JUNE/JULY 2022
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trip. Dulles urged that Israel become part of the Near East community and cease to look upon itself as alien to that community. In his biography of Berger, Rabbi Outcast: Elmer Berger and American Jewish Anti-Zionism, Jack Ross shows how Berger worked closely with U.S. government officials to oppose any idea that Israel could speak in the name of the “Jewish people,” rather than its own citizens. He also worked with, among others, Sen. J. William Fulbright (D-AR), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to have Zionist groups register as foreign agents of Israel. He wrote and spoke frequently about the dispossession and mistreatment of Palestine’s indigenous population and about the plight of Palestinian refugees. In his history of the early years of the ACJ, Jews Against Zionism, Professor Thomas Kolsky pointed to the fact that the Council was maintaining the tradition of Reform Judaism’s founders. The warnings which the Council expressed during its early years, he concluded, have been prophetic: “…many of its predictions about the establishment of a Jewish state did come true. As the ACJ had foreseen, the birth of the state created numerous problems—problems the Zionists had minimized. For example, Israel became highly dependent on support from American Jews. Moreover, the creation of the state directly contributed to undermining Jewish
communities in Arab countries and to precipitating protracted conflict between Israel and the Arabs. Indeed, as the Council had often warned, and contrary to Zionist expectations, Israel did not become a normal state. Nor did it become a light to the nations. Ironically, created presumably to free Jews from anti-Semitism and ghetto-like existence as well as provide them with abiding peace, Israel became, in effect, a garrison state, a nation resembling a large territorial ghetto besieged by hostile neighbors…The ominous predictions of the ACJ are still haunting the Zionists.” Jonathan Sarna, a Brandeis University historian and author of the book American Judaism, says that “Everything they (the ACJ) prophesied—dual loyalty, nationalism being evil—has come to pass.” He states that, “It’s certainly the case that if the Holocaust underscored the problems of Jewish life in the Diaspora, recent years have highlighted that Zionism is no panacea.” Samuel Freedman devoted his June 26, 2010 “On Religion” column in The New York Times to the Council. He pointed out that, “…the intense criticism of Israel now growing among a number of American Jews has made the group look significant, even prophetic…The arguments that the Council has levied against Zionism and Israel have shot back into prominence… The rejection of Zionism…goes back to the Torah itself. Until Theodor Herzl created the
modern Zionist movement…the biblical injunction to return to Israel was widely understood as a theological construct rather than a pragmatic instruction…The Reform movement maintained that Judaism is a religion, not a nationality.” Since that was written, it has become increasingly clear that Israel has turned its back on traditional Jewish moral and ethical values. It has denied equal rights to Palestinians who are citizens of Israel and has provided no rights to Palestinians in the illegally occupied territories. While Jewish Americans believe in religious freedom and separation of church and state, Israel is a theocracy with a state-supported ultra-Orthodox religious establishment. Israel’s values and those of the overwhelming majority of American Jews have less and less in common with each passing year. For 80 years, the ACJ has never abandoned its vision of a universal faith of moral and ethical values for men and women of every race and nation which the Prophets preached and in which generations of Jews believed. The Council’s early leaders recognized how narrow nationalism would corrupt the humane Jewish tradition. For the past 80 years, the Council has kept that tradition alive. That more and more men and women, particularly in the younger generation, are returning to that faith at the present time is a vindication of their vision. It seems, indeed, to have been truly prophetic. ■
Help make sure that the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs will be here for the next generation. By remembering the Washington Report in your will, you can: • Make a significant gift without affecting your current cash flow; • Direct your bequest to a vital purpose—educating readers about U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East; • Receive a charitable estate tax deduction & Leave a legacy for future generations. Bequests of any size are honored with membership in the American Educational Trust’s “Choirmasters,” named for angels whose foresight and dedication ensured the future of the Washington Report and Middle East Books and More. For more information visit www.wrmea.org/donate/bequests.pdf, contact us at circulation@wrmea.org, write: American Educational Trust, PO Box 91056 • Long Beach, CA 90809-1056, or telephone our new toll-free circulation number 888-881-5861 • Fax: 714-226-9733 JUNE/JULY 2022
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By Dr. M. Reza Behnam
PHOTO BY HAZEM BADER/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Apartheid in Israel: The Bankruptcy of Zionism
Palestinian women gather to wait near an Israeli checkpoint near Beit A’wa village on the outskirts of Al‐Khalil (Hebron) in the West Bank, after receiving special Israeli permission to harvest their own olive trees on the other side of the wall, on Oct. 13, 2021. FOR MORE THAN SEVEN decades, Israel has been able to silence international criticism as it birthed a state system constructed on the institutionalization of oppression and removal of the Indigenous Palestinian population. All the while, the global community has stood by as Israel perfected its draconian apartheid system and as it continues to violate, with impunity, the very laws the United Nations has instituted to ensure international public order. Major human rights organizations, however, have become less hesitant to call for an end to Israel’s occupation and colonization of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Although Israel’s crimes against humanity and breaches of international law have been chronicled for decades, it took the language of “apartheid” to force the world’s attention. The 1976 U.N. International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid and the 2002 Rome
Dr. M. Reza Behnam is a political scientist specializing in the history, politics and governments of the Middle East. 32
Statute of the International Criminal Court described apartheid as a crime against humanity; and like colonialism, a violation of international law. In 2009, the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa released a document titled, “Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid? A re-assessment of Israel’s practices in the occupied Palestinian territories under international law.” The report confirmed that the three pillars of South African apartheid are being practiced by Israel in the occupied territories. According to the Council, a troika of key features highlight Israeli apartheid: 1) discriminatory laws and policies that afford preferential legal status and material benefits to Jews over non-Jews; 2) strategic fragmentation of Palestinian territories for the purposes of segregation and domination; 3) “security” laws, policies and practices to reinforce and maintain
control over Palestinians. In 2017, the U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) published a report titled, “Israeli Practices Toward the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid.” It was the first time a U.N. body had clearly charged Israel with imposing an apartheid regime on the Palestinians. Additionally, the authors, Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley, emphasized that since the 1970s, the United Nations and world public opinion consider apartheid to be “second only to genocide in the hierarchy of criminality.” Under pressure from the United States and Israel, Secretary General António Guterres denounced the ESCWA’s official report and removed it from the Commission’s website. For years, Palestinian human rights organizations such as Al-Haq as well as Israeli groups B’Tselem and Yesh Din have documented Israeli crimes against Palestinians. They have been largely ignored. In a September 2020 legal opinion, Yesh Din judged that, “…in addition to colonizing the occupied territory,” Israel had gone to great lengths “to cement its domination over the occupied residents and ensure their inferior status.”
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In January 2021, B’Tselem described “a regime of Jewish supremacy” over Palestinians that amounted to apartheid. In that same year, Human Rights Watch in its report, “A Threshold Crossed,” described Israel as an apartheid state guilty of crimes against humanity under international law. The U.K.-headquartered Amnesty International is the latest rights advocate to chronicle Israel’s human rights offenses. In February 2022, Amnesty released a meticulously documented investigation titled, “Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity.” The document, which took more than four years to complete, states unequivocally that Israel is guilty of the international crime of apartheid—a crime against humanity of the greatest magnitude. Amnesty challenged some of the popular notions that Israel has deceptively promulgated. It renders false, for example, the widely accepted Israeli myth that there is a “conflict” between two peoples with equal resources and claims. According to its findings, Israel’s colonization of Palestine should be described for what it really is—a struggle between the colonizer and colonized, the oppressor and the oppressed. The report also discredits the concept of Israel as a beacon of democracy in the Middle East. Attention is paid to the fact that Israel is an exclusionary Jewish state that has created a national political identity based on religious beliefs, and that it “… considers and treats Palestinians as an inferior non-Jewish racial group.” Former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said as much in his March 2019 speech, affirming, Israel is “the national state, not of all its citizens, but only of the Jewish people.” Although the United States is not directly named, Amnesty’s judgments unnerved many in Washington, DC with statements such as, “Apartheid has no place in the world, and states which choose to make allowances for Israel will find themselves on the wrong side of history.” JUNE/JULY 2022
According to international law, states are legally obligated to take action to combat apartheid wherever it is committed and to punish its perpetrators. In addition to their obligations under the 1949 Geneva Conventions, all states are legally bound—under what is known as third state responsibility— to take action against any state that commits serious violations of international law. After Amnesty released its findings in February, it became apparent that the corporate media would give little time or attention to the evidence presented; a silence it has maintained for years. The U.S. news industry prides itself on exposing human rights abusers around the world, but they consistently eschew Israel. They focus instead on the violations of U.S. competitors, like China, or military regimes, such as Myanmar.
Unable to challenge
the evidence, Israel’s supporters attacked the integrity of the organization and its authors. Like the media, the White House, members of Congress and pro-Israel groups made haste to delegitimize Amnesty and its report. President Joe Biden, the self-proclaimed human rights president with a long history of ignoring Israel’s crimes, had little to say other than to reject Amnesty’s claims out of hand. Selective condemnation was on full display during a speech by Secretary of State Antony Blinken on March 21, 2022. In it, he officially declared the crimes against the Rohingya people by the Myanmar military as genocide. Ironically, Blinken stated that he reached the decision based on facts prepared by the State Department and from impartial sources, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Predictably, the findings of both human rights organizations regarding Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people elicited no State De-
partment indictment. There is nothing in Amnesty’s analysis that is untrue. Unable to challenge the evidence, Israel’s supporters attacked the integrity of the organization and its authors. And to hinder debate, they leveled false but obligatory accusations of anti-Semitism. Fourteen human rights organizations based in Israel signed a statement, on Feb. 3, 2022, condemning the vicious attacks on Amnesty and its findings, emphasizing that debate was not only legitimate but absolutely necessary. The group was particularly distressed by the regime’s “…irresponsible allegation of anti-Semitism.” They expressed concern that the struggle against anti-Semitism was being weakened by Israel’s routine use of the accusation for political ends. And that to avoid debate, the allegation had become the “…standard and ongoing practice of successive Israeli governments and their echo chambers overseas.” For decades, Israel has been able to manage perceptions and silence critics. It has developed a successful strategy of falsely equating anti-Zionism with antiSemitism and portraying Judaism and Zionism as synonymous. South African warriors against apartheid, the late President Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, were not immune from allegations of anti-Semitism. In a 2011 interview, Tutu averred that the situation endured by the Palestinians is “in many instances worse” than it had been in South Africa. The latest report on Israel’s human rights violations confirms what others have said. In his March 2022 report, Professor Michael Lynk, who stepped down on May 1 from his post as U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, states, “Israel’s occupation has been conducted in profound defiance of international law and hundreds of United Nations resolutions, with scant pushback from the international community…It insists that the laws of occupation and human rights do not apply to its regime.” Continued on page 47
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From the Diaspora
Israel’s Opposition to Palestinian Nationalism Has Failed Terribly
PHOTO BY AMIR LEVY/GETTY IMAGES
By Daoud Kuttab
A sea of Palestinians carrying their flag attend the funeral of assassinated Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, in Jerusalem on May 13, 2022, despite crude Israeli efforts to deny her a proper national funeral. IF YOU BELIEVE in a zero-sum game, where the enemy must be obliterated and there can be no compromise, then you can understand Israeli behavior. Otherwise, it is hard to fathom how continuing on the offensive against Palestinian nationalism after 70 plus years is still a viable formula. A review of Israeli mistakes in using this zero-sum game approach is plentiful. In its hatred of the PLO in the 1970s and what it stood for, the Israeli occupiers supported the Islamic movement in Gaza. Now they are stuck with Hamas and its rockets as well as its control of Gaza.
Daoud Kuttab is an award‐winning Palestinian journalist and former Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. Follow him on Twitter @daoudkuttab. 34
In the West Bank, Israel’s zero-sum game has been evident with the continuation of the settlement activities, the blocking of Palestinian natural development, especially toward the east and its disastrous policy in Jerusalem. Successive right-wing Israeli governments continued to oppose the creation of a Palestinian state, they blocked any Palestinian development outside major cities and totally banned any Palestinian development in the Jordan Valley, taking the most fertile land for itself. This overreach appeared to have paid off during the Trump era when the administration put up a “peace” plan to encourage the Israeli annexation of much of the Jordan Valley and the rest of Israel’s wish list. While many will take credit for the failure of the so-called Deal of the Century, there is no doubt that the deal was largely
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defeated by the staunch rejection of Palestinians on the ground and the support for this rejection by Jordan and King Abdullah II. The continuation of settlement activities, coupled with the refusal to agree to talks that would end the occupation, meant that successive Israeli governments were in fact committing to a policy of apartheid between the river and the sea. International law, due in large part to the struggle of the people of South Africa, succeeded in codifying apartheid as a war crime, according to international humanitarian law. The apartheid labeling, which was initially started by Palestinian leaders like Mustafa Barghouti and by leading human rights organizations like Al Haq, was later validated by the leading Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem. International human rights organizations later confirmed the term, as defined by international law, as applies to Israel, much to the anger of the Israelis. In Jerusalem, Israeli errors were also very evident. In its attempts to weaken the connection of Palestinians in Jerusalem to their natural leadership, the Israelis thought that erecting a wall closing off Jerusalem and shuttering longstanding Palestinian national organizations in the city would eventually dilute this nationalism and make Jerusalem’s 330,000 Arabs miraculously shift allegiance toward Israel. This was another colossal mistake. A look at what Jerusalemites did when Israel tried to put metal detectors outside the al-Aqsa Mosque or their opposition to encroaching radical Jewish attempts on al-Aqsa Mosque, clearly showed that Palestinians are not becoming lovers of Zion and supportive of the Israelization of their iconic holy city. To make problems worse, Israel totally failed to allow any sense of political empowerment. Having unilaterally annexed Jerusalem to Israel and passing civilian law on the annexed city, the Israelis had to justify their actions as emergencies. Since 2001, Israel has systematically prevented any effort by Palestinians to organize themselves or to establish their own JUNE/JULY 2022
representative institutions. The Israelis had to resort to the 1945 Emergency British Mandate laws to legally justify their anti-democratic actions of depriving Jerusalemites of any political rights. Even clear clauses of the Oslo agreement, which have been the basis of attempting to separate Jerusalem from the rest of the occupied areas, were rejected. The Accords allow Palestinians in Jerusalem to vote in the general elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council and for the presidency. By insisting on this extreme policy in Jerusalem, the Israelis not only denied Palestinians political rights, but they denied themselves any means of engaging with legitimate Palestinian leaders. As a result of the absence of legitimately elected and empowered leaders, only street leadership would fill this vacuum. This was evident, especially this year during Ramadan, on al-Aqsa Mosque and at the Damascus gate, as well as during the funeral of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. Without anyone to talk to, Israeli security resorted to harsh measures to control and force Palestinians in Jerusalem to submit to its will. House demolitions escalated, arrests and orders forbidding access to al-Aqsa Mosque were issued with ease while East Jerusalem neighborhoods continued to suffer from neglect and absence of serious budgets in comparison to what is spent in West Jerusalem or on the encroaching Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem.
The combined Israeli policy in Jerusalem has produced the very opposite results. It created small but much more radical ad hoc groups and strengthened Palestinian nationalism. Of course, Israel is a powerful country with a strong economy, strong army, and support from the Western world. However, even this unquestioning support might be eroding quickly due to the actions Israel is carrying out on the ground. But Palestinians have also not been able to cash in on these continuous Israeli mistakes, due to the division and fragmentation of its leaders and the absence of a mechanism that would allow young blood to be pumped into the leadership. The token powers that the Palestinian Authority was allowed to have contributed to the leadership’s inability to help produce and lead a serious strategy for liberation and an end to the Israeli occupation. Many have been waiting for a spark that could reignite Palestinian efforts for liberation. The assassination of a popular television journalist while on the job and the crude Israeli efforts to deny her a proper national funeral infuriated many. The sea of people who participated in her funeral under the flag of Palestine shattered Israeli efforts and claims about Jerusalem being a united capital of Israel. If anything, the funeral, and Israel’s attempt to denationalize it showed the world that Palestinian nationalism is alive and well. ■
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Gaza on the Ground
Only Ninety Minutes For a Miracle
PHOTO BY ALI JADALLAH/ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES
By Mohammed Omer
A patient suffering from COVID‐19 receives medical treatment, on April 6, 2021, at the European Gaza Hospital in Gaza City, constructed by UNRWA with financing from the European Union. and complete control over Gaza, has 354 hospitals to serve 9.45 million people, or one hospital for every 26,695 residents. Al Najjar hospital serves ten times as many people as an Israeli hospital, with a fraction of the supplies and staff. The odds are not in my brother’s favor. This is the same hospital where I spent sleepless nights when my brother was injured 20 years ago by gunfire. Despite Dr. Zakaria’s diligence in attempting to stop the bleeding, the hospital did not have enough cotton sponges. My brother lost his kneecap. However, the hospital was well stocked with stretchers and coffins donated by friendly states. That is the reality of health care under occupation in Gaza. Coffins, yes. Cotton, no. Not convinced he was dead, I insisted he be taken to Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, which has a cardiac unit. Then I discovered that their cardiology department closes at 2 p.m. each day, and patients arriving after that time have to wait until the next day. “What if there is an emergency?” I asked a medical worker. “Unfortunately, if they don’t make it here after the morning shift arrives, they die.”
WITH SHAKING HANDS and anxious eyes, I watched my phone, reminding myself to blink, to breathe and blink again. The seconds ticked by as hours. Call. Please call. No call. Breathe. Minutes before I had received the news that my younger brother had collapsed in the street. Why is yet unknown. A car passing by drove him to Abu Yousef Al Najjar hospital in Rafah, a short walk from the walled off border with Egypt. Finally, a call. “He is dead. May he rest in peace,” a nurse at the hospital tells me. “Dead?!?” I shout into the phone. My brother is only 36 years old. “Yes. We attempted to revive him with the defibrillator 23 times; there was no reaction,” the nurse explained flatly, adding that with each jolt of electricity, his body jumped. His body jumped with the shock. To me this is a sign of life—yes? There must be something that can be done to save him. “No,” the doctors tell me. “Your brother suffered a serious heart attack.” Granted, this is Gaza, a region of the world under siege since 2007. This single ill-equipped hospital serves more than 270,000 people. For context, the State of Israel, which enforces dominion
THIS IS THE TWILIGHT ZONE
Award‐winning journalist Mohammed Omer reports regularly on the Gaza Strip.
At Nasser hospital, the technology is better. Using my smartphone, I correspond with a friendly medical staffer who was able to copy me on my brother’s critical scans. Immediately, I pass these on to
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a senior Palestinian-American doctor in Chicago. I called and called. Finally, he picked up. On call, he was moving between operations. With a nurse holding the phone on speaker, I franticly ask him: “Doctor, open your WhatsApp now, now!” “What is going on?” he asked. “My brother, heart attack, 36 yea…” I didn’t need to finish the statement. After a few seconds looking at the monitor reports, he replied. “He looks alive, but he’s only got about 90 minutes. He needs to be operated on. Otherwise, it will be very complicated or else…” He’s not dead. The nurse was wrong. This errant pronouncement is not unusual in Gaza, where medical staff are overworked, over-burdened and often limited in time and resources. It’s why I pressed for a second opinion. Now, I have actionable information, and the clock is ticking. I have 90 minutes, an hour and a half, to save my brother’s life.
LIFE OR DEATH
minutes to tell me there is a doctor who can operate on him, or not. Or else, if he dies, my only job will be to name and shame such practices.” The promise of naming and shaming worked. Within 10 minutes the doctor called me back from a supermarket line. An ambulance had been sent to pick up two doctors at their homes and rush them to a different government hospital. Thanking him, I immediately hung up and arranged another ambulance to take my brother to their hospital.
RACING AGAINST TIME Both ambulances arrived at the same time, and within the 90-minute time window. Twenty minutes later, my brother was in the operating theater. In the corridors and waiting room, a steady buzz of relatives, family and friends gathered. Many wept, including my mom, a cancer patient who had been avoiding people due to COVID-19 and her compromised immune system. With her son’s life on the line, she broke her self-isolation rules. No matter his age, her son is still her baby and this is where she needed to be. Another 90 minutes and the doctor emerged from the operating room. Collectively, everyone held their breath.
“He was lucky to survive,” the doctor assured everybody. “This was a miracle.” For my brother, recovery would be its own challenge. He could not speak for several days as he had bitten his tongue during defibrillation. His skin darkened, his body thickened, and his communication skills remain sketchy. The surgeries are not done. He needs two more in a month and two more later on. The delays allow his heart time for recovery. It turned out another young man benefitted from my brother’s surgery. During this time, a 28-year-old man was brought in with a heart attack. He was saved because the doctors were already there and could operate on him at the same time. The Palestinian health system needs investment. It is one of the most hobbled systems in the world, within the purview and control of one of the most advanced health care systems, found just kilometers away in Israel. Yes, as the doctor said of my brother’s case, “This is a miracle. We saw him dead.” Somehow I felt in my bones that my brother would survive. However, what required a miracle in Gaza would have simply been routine most anywhere else in the world. Then again, anywhere else in the world, 36- and 28-year-old men don’t usually have heart attacks, either. That is a topic for another time. ■
How do I get surgeons to operate on my brother in the next hour, when the cardiology surgeons are at home, and no one is there to operate on him? I called the doctor managing that unit. “Listen, you have 10 minutes to tell me there is a doctor who can operate on him. I am told the chance of him dying (Advertisement) in the next 90 minutes is likely,” I said, measuring my emotion and attempting to remain factual. He argued this assessment was not correct. I forwarded the Chicago doctor’s analysis Palestinian Medical Relief Society, a grassroots to him. community-based Palestinian health organization, founded in The managing surgeon in1979 by Palestinian doctors, needs your support today. sisted I still did not have cause to summon a surgeon from his Visit www.pmrs.ps to see our work in action. home, remarking, “If he makes Visit www.friendsofpmrs.org to support our work and donate. it, he is lucky. If not, then his time is up.” Mail your U.S. Tax-Deductible check to our American Foundation: Aghast, I responded, “Ah, w’Allah? Simple as that?” Friends of PMRS, Inc He could have repeated this PO Box 450554 • Atlanta, GA 31145 answer in every language. No way was I accepting it. For more information call: (404) 441-2702 or e-mail: fabuakel@gmail.com “Doctor, you have got 10 JUNE/JULY 2022
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Special Report
PHOTO BY FADEL DAWOD/GETTY IMAGES
Egypt is Walking a Tightrope on the Ukraine Crisis By Dr. Mohammad Salami
A view of a bread bakery on May 7, 2022 in Cairo Governorate, Egypt. In April, the Egyptian government announced fixed prices for unsub‐ sidized bread for the next three months in an effort to fight the increase since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Egypt is the world’s largest importer of wheat and depends on Russia and Ukraine for 80 percent of its wheat supply. THE IMPACT of the Russian invasion of Ukraine has spread beyond Europe. In fact, its economic and political challenges are affecting every country in the world, including Egypt. Along with less bread on the table in Lebanon, Yemen and elsewhere in the Arab world, where millions already struggle to survive, Egypt is facing major challenges to its food security, tourism industry and its need for political neutrality. Egypt is at a crossroads in the choice between Russia and Western-backed Ukraine, and it has seen its best choice as neutrality and the pursuit of a middle ground. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has deep economic and political ties with Moscow and does not want this partnership to be damaged. El-Sisi has had the support of Russian President Vladimir Putin
Mohammad Salami has a Ph.D. in International Relations. He writes as an analyst and columnist in various media outlets. His area of expertise is Middle East issues, especially Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and the GCC countries. 38
since Egypt’s coup in 2013. On the other hand, he owes much to the West for its financial support, so he is trying to be neutral. Instead of condemning one side, Egyptian statements stress ending tensions and urging dialogue instead of war. El-Sisi followed that principle in a March 9 phone call with Putin. For Egypt, neutrality is key to securing its national interests but Westerners do not welcome this position. The G-7 and the European Union ambassadors issued a joint statement on March 1, urging Egypt to join them in supporting Ukraine. The move prompted Egypt to vote in favor of a U.N. General Assembly resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a day later. However, so far Egypt has avoided complying with the sanctions imposed on Moscow, calling them a double whammy for civilians on every side of the war. Egypt is walking gingerly along a narrow path in between the West and Russia that may cause problems for Cairo. It is unclear how Egypt will continue its subtle neutrality policy between the two sides if the crisis escalates.
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ECONOMIC EFFECTS ON EGYPT However, food insecurity is the most important economic impact of the Ukraine crisis on Egypt. Ukraine and Russia supply a quarter of the world’s wheat and about 60 percent of the world’s sunflower oil. This is very important for Egypt because Cairo is known as the largest importer of wheat in the world because bread is the most important element of the calorie supply in the country’s food system. Egypt imports 60 percent of its wheat. Of that, Russia supplies nearly 70 percent of Egypt’s wheat imports while Ukraine supplies more than 10 percent of its imports. With the start of the war, the prices of wheat and other food products increased and caused a huge impact on Egypt, where about a third of the population lives below the poverty line. The crisis in Ukraine increased the cost of a package of bread without subsidies by a quarter, and the price of flour increased by 15 percent. Recent price increases could also nearly double annual state spending on wheat imports to $5.7 billion from about $3 billion, an amount the government could find hard to recoup as the cost of subsidized bread has not changed since the 1980s—although the size of a loaf has shrunk. In Egypt, bread is considered more than a food element and, in fact, it has become a political issue. The per capita consumption of bread is about 130 kilograms (287 pounds) per year, roughly twice the global average. At least 70 percent of Egyptians depend on food subsidies and of the state’s $5.5 billion budget for food subsidies, 57 percent is dedicated to bread. The grim austerity measures that were ushered in during the reform program on the back of the 2016 International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan stripped subsidies away from most products, but not bread. The last time an Egyptian government attempted to tamper with the bread subsidy was in 1977, under President Anwar Sadat. Two days of rioting convinced the government to rescind the austerity measures. The main slogan of the people in January 2011 during the Arab Spring, which led to JUNE/JULY 2022
the fall of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, was “bread, freedom and social justice.” Despite the pending budget and supply pressures, the government does not dare violate the price and supply of bread. In addition, Egypt’s tourism sector is badly affected by the Russian war in Ukraine because Egypt is considered a main destination for millions of Russians and Ukrainians. In 2018, 13 million people visited the country and tourism contributed around 12 percent to the gross domestic product. Tourism also provided around 2.9 million jobs. Tourists from both Russia and Ukraine account for a third of all foreign tourists in peak years. Some 700,000 Russian tourists visited Egypt in 2021, and 125,000 others did so in the first two weeks of 2022. In 2019, 1.6 million Ukrainian tourists visited Egypt, which was an increase of 32 percent from the year before. Given the ongoing war on Ukraine and the global sanctions against Russia, Egypt’s tourist sector is expected to struggle in the coming months, which will add more challenges to Egypt’s reeling economy.
WALKING A POLITICAL TIGHTROPE Egypt has deep political and economic relations with both sides in the Ukraine crisis, and a policy of neutrality is the most difficult strategy for the future. As the crisis contin-
ues, human rights groups and Egypt’s Western allies expect Cairo to condemn war crimes like the one in Mariupol, Ukraine. Cairo is at the height of its relationship with Moscow, with both sides signing a comprehensive partnership agreement in 2018. In addition, Russia supplies weapons to the Egyptian army. Between 2016 and 2020, Russia supplied about 41 percent of Egypt’s weapons. Moscow is also building the Egyptian nuclear power plant, which is scheduled to begin in July 2022 with a $25 billion loan from Russia. Russia’s investments in Egypt by 2021 reached $8 billion and bilateral trade between the two countries is $3.3 billion. Egypt has similar relations with the West. The EU is Egypt’s largest economic partner and accounts for 30 percent of foreign trade. Last year, Egypt’s trade value with the EU and the UK was $26.4 billion, and its investment volume was $16 billion. The U.S.-Egypt trade volume also was $9.1 billion in 2021, and Washington has invested $21.8 billion in Egypt. Any strong stance by Egypt in the Ukraine crisis in favor of one of the parties involved could damage multiple channels. Cairo is currently silent and has chosen a middle position while monitoring the outcome of the war. Cairo may be forced to choose one of the warring parties as future events unfold. ■
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Special Report
A Brief History of Chaos in Libya By Mustafa Fetouri
PHOTO BY HAZEM TURKIA/ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES
and many others celebrated their “victory,” telling Libyans that democracy and economic prosperity was just around the corner. Eleven years later, Libyans have yet to make that turn into the promised future. Even today, the continuous failure of all successive governments in the country over the last decade, have been but a series of chaotic situations with little to show for the eightmonth civil war that engulfed the country eleven years ago. Collectively, Western leaders failed to stabilize Libya in the aftermath of the war they launched leaving it to slide into a chaotic failed state. The Libyan experience is incomparable even to its neighbors, Muslims gather to perform Eid al‐Fitr prayer at Martyrs’ Square in Tripoli, Libya, on May 2, 2022. Tunisia and Egypt, who preceded it as earlier victims of the so-called “Arab Spring.” Despite all the setbacks Tunisia and Egypt are now, NAIVELY, BACK IN 2011, most Western commentators believed at least, stable without the threat of violence as in Libya. that Muammar Qaddafi was the main obstacle to a flourishing Libya. On March 1, Libya’s House of Representatives (HoR) voted in a The oil-rich country has the financial means and human capital ponew government led by Fathi Bashagha, the former minister of intential, they believed, to make quick strides toward democratic and terior. The HoR and High Council of State, a consultative body, economic growth. agreed on a new roadmap aimed at organizing elections within 14 The U.N.’s Security Council Resolution 1973, adopted on March months. However, the incumbent, Prime Minister Abdul Hamid De17, 2011, authorized the use of force against the Qaddafi regime. beibeh, is refusing to hand over power unless it’s to an elected govBetween March 30 and the end of October 2011, an “international ernment. He vowed to follow the United Nations’ brokered roadmap coalition of the willing,” NATO, along with countries like Qatar, the that set an election date on Dec. 24, 2021—an election that did not United Arab Emirates and Jordan, launched thousands of destruchappen. According to the U.N. plan, now pushed aside by Libya’s tive sorties over Libya, creating tremendous destruction and a poHoR, elections must take place by June and Debeibeh wants to do litical vacuum once their campaign ended. Regime change was the that—but it’s an unlikely scenario given the situation on the ground. ultimate goal of the war, even if NATO and friends denied it. Libya ended up fragmented, with two prime ministers. Any hope of Leaders envisioned the new Libya as a stable, peaceful and deelections this year has all but vanished, as well as any positive democratic oasis in North Africa and did not see the need for a plan velopments from renewed U.N. mediation. B—just in case. This lack of forward planning ended with a chaotic, Indeed, Libyans went to the polls twice, first in 2012 and then in unstable and violent Libya, with thousands of its citizens internally 2014, but in both cases the outcome was not an elected inclusive displaced, while thousands more fled abroad. government able to serve its people but an even more fragmented When Qaddafi was murdered on Oct. 20, 2011, the U.S., France, country where the “elected” governments are colluding with elected Mustafa Fetouri is a Libyan academic and freelance journalist. He is legislators, both proxies to different foreign powers, to preserve that a recipient of the EU’s Freedom of the Press prize. He has written ex‐ status quo by never agreeing on anything that might help the country tensively for various media outlets on Libyan and MENA issues. He gain peace. So far, every plan mediated domestically or imposed has published three books in Arabic. His email is mustafa by the U.N.’s mediation mission has failed to deliver a practical setfetouri@hotmail.com and Twitter: @MFetouri. 40
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tlement let alone a comprehensive one in which ballot boxes, not bullets, have the final say. Over the last decade, Libya has had over half a dozen governments or semi-governments but none, so far, have been able to bring back the stability and security Libyans enjoyed before the "Arab Spring" visited them in mid-February 2011. No wonder that the majority of Libyans, today, are nostalgic for Muammar Qaddafi’s years when their lives were in order, even if less free, than they are today. Last year, the U.S. Congress passed the “Libya Stabilization Act,” with the aim of bringing back some form of peace to the country. However, clause one of the act says that any person or entity known to have been acting on behalf of Russia in Libya must be sanctioned while clause 3, interestingly, calls on the U.S. president to sanction anyone found to be misappropriating “Libyan state assets or natural resources.” None of that has been implemented to make any visible positive impact. For example, General Khalifa Haftar, a dual Libyan American citizen supported by Russian mercenaries who has been waging war in different parts of Libya, still enjoys his status as a warlord. Haftar laid siege to the capital Tripoli in 2019 through June 2020, with the explicit blessing of former President Donald Trump and his national security adviser, John Bolton. At the same time Turkey and Qatar, both U.S. allies, continued to play a disruptive role in Libya’s crises and not a single punitive measure has been taken to deter them. This year the White House put out what it called a strategy to implement yet another policy paper, this time within what is known as “The Global Fragility Act (GFA),” part of a broader bill, adopted during the administration of former President Donald Trump in 2019. Again, blessed by the U.S. Congress, GFA aims to end conflicts, in Libya and wherever else they might be, by rooting out their causes. According to the policy paper, “state weakness or failures” only magnify threats to the “American homeland.” It’s better then, to end such conflicts or, at least, contain them away from the JUNE/JULY 2022
U.S. borders. To date, nothing has happened in implementing the act just like its predecessor. If anything, this indicates that U.S. policy makers have a shallow understanding of the essence of the conflicts in Libya or Yemen, for example, given the act’s global outlook. With the Russian war in Ukraine, the entire idea of GFA is unlikely to be the focus of the Biden administration as the Ukrainian war has dominated the attention of all Western powers as well as U.N. institutions. Other “old” conflicts, like Libya, have all but disappeared from Washington’s radar. Notably though, the U.S. ambassador and special envoy to Libya, Richard Norland, is very actively intervening in almost every aspect of Libyan state affairs. Is this part of implementing GFA? No one knows. The ambassador’s Twitter account and local Libyan news headlines, almost daily, carry news of consultations and discussions organized by the ambassador with Libyan officials, including the governor of its central bank and the chairman of the National Oil Corporation. Ambassador Norland usually tells his guests at his embassy compound in Tunisia, where the U.S. Embassy has been since 2014, how to allocate oil revenues and how to prioritize their expenditures in Libya’s annual budget with little regard to the simple idea of state sovereignty—a paramount prerequisite for stability. Ordinary Libyans, usually, react with anger and contempt to such meddling in their country’s internal affairs. In the background, the U.N.’s mediator in Libya, Stephanie Williams, has been struggling to relaunch political talks between different factions to forge the next step forward, with little success so far. If she succeeds, she will need the support of the U.N. Security Council, which is unlikely since Moscow vetoed Resolution 2629, adopted on April 29, to extend the mandate of the U.N.’s Libya mission for another year. The Russians did agree to a three-month extension putting the entire mission in doubt. In light of their war in Ukraine and the world’s condemnation (including from Libya, which voted against Moscow in the U.N. General Assembly last March), the
Russians are likely to become more obnoxious wherever they sense a threat to their interests. With its Wagner Group mercenaries still in Libya, Russia prefers to maintain the status quo there until, at least, its adventure in Ukraine ends. This means the U.N. efforts in Libya are likely to become static, paralyzing the political process and threatening the Libya-wide ceasefire Williams helped negotiate, which is still holding, since its signature in October 2020. The Libyan fiasco is a clear example of how the world order is betrayed by the very powers that claim to maintain it for the sake of freedom, peace and stability. What is going on in Libya today is a testament to the ill-considered policies that destabilize independent sovereign countries and that have become the norm in international relations. Libya now, as it has been for the last 11 years, is an integral part of the geopolitical power struggle giving way to more chaos to follow. Neither elections nor a stable unified government are likely this year. ■
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Special Report
Escape Bid Highlights Rohingya Desperation
PHOTO BY CHAIDEER MAHYUDDIN / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
By John Gee
Nemah Shah was stunned when he saw this photo online, taken on June 25, 2020, showing his 6‐year‐old daughter Nosmin Fatima (bottom l) being carried off a refugee boat in Indonesia as she and her mother Majuma land with other Rohingya migrants in Lhokseumawe in North Aceh Regency. Weeks earlier Shah held a funeral for the wife and daughter he thought had died at sea while trying to sail from Bangladesh to meet him in Malaysia. 528 ROHINGYA REFUGEES broke out of a detention center in north-western Malaysia on April 20, 2022. Most of the escapees were quickly rounded up, but as of April 28, 61 had still not been recaptured. Six, including two children, died after being hit by vehicles while crossing a busy road. The mass breakout drew attention to the conditions in which Rohingya refugees are detained in Malaysia. They are kept in isolation from the local population and not allowed to work to earn money. There is resentment among some Malaysians of what it costs to support them, but human rights organizations in the country have pointed out that there is a ready remedy to that complaint, if only
John Gee is a free‐lance journalist based in Singapore and the author of Unequal Conflict: The Palestinians and Israel. 42
Malaysia would allow the refugees to seek work. Instead, the country recruits workers from abroad to plug gaps in its labor market. The basic problem is that Malaysia does not want the Rohingya to settle and become citizens, so it keeps them in limbo. It is not alone in that. The fact is that no state wants them. The Rohingya are Muslim people who were concentrated in Rakhine state, an area of Myanmar adjacent to Bangladesh. Successive Myanmar regimes treated them as illegal foreign residents and refused them citizenship. They faced discrimination and bouts of violence that resulted in a quarter of a million fleeing to Bangladesh in the early 1990s and a mass expulsion in 2016-2018, leaving a minority of around 600,000 still inside Myanmar. Bangladesh was the first refuge for the great majority of the refugees and 1,300,000 still live there, mainly detained in camps
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close to the Myanmar border. But Bangladesh is a poor country itself, which sees more than 400,000 of its own citizens seeking work abroad every year. It is a major supplier of clothes to wealthier countries, due to its low labor costs. Its aversion to anything that smacks of permanent settlement by the Rohingya in Bangladesh was underlined by a government drive since December 2021 to close down community schools established by Rohingya refugees, even though it would not offer alternative educational facilities or allow refugee children to enroll in local schools. The official reasons for shutting these schools down is that they are unauthorized and the government does not know what is being taught in them. There are schools provided by UNICEF and aid groups for young children, but next to nothing for older ones without the community schools. Bangladesh is seeking the return of the Rohingya refugees to Myanmar, but this is not happening, despite a series of announcements since 2018 on their repatriation. The Myanmar authorities have been slow in approving individuals’ return, and Rohingya refugees in general don’t wish to return without guarantees for their safety and for respect of their most basic rights. Many refugees have transited through Bangladesh and sought work and settlement elsewhere; a few managed to leave Myanmar by other routes. More than 500,000 live in Pakistan, 190,000 in Saudi Arabia and 50,000 in the United Arab Emirates, while 150,000 live in Malaysia. Many had hoped to reach wealthier developed countries, but the barriers to their migration have been insuperable for all but a few: 12,000 live in the USA and 3,000 in Australia.
SOLIDARITY WITH PALESTINIANS “DISAPPEARED” After Archbishop Desmond Tutu died on Dec. 26, 2021, the British liberal newspaper, The Guardian, published an obituary that generally did justice to the memory of an outspoken and lifelong opponent of racism and apartheid in South Africa. However, there was a significant omission: deJUNE/JULY 2022
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Nobel peace laureate Desmond Tutu speaks during a press conference in Gaza City, on May 29, 2008, at the end of a U.N. fact‐finding mission into the 2006 death of 19 civilians in an Israeli artillery attack in Gaza. He deplored as shameful the international community’s silence and complicity regarding the humanitarian situation in Gaza. spite his repeated criticisms of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and his strong support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement as a non-violent means of promoting Palestinian rights, the obituary passed over his stand on Palestine. When a number of readers commented on this on the online version of the obituary, their words were deleted as they were said to “violate The Guardian’s community standards.” Responding to a request from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, 36 prominent figures wrote to the newspaper in protest. Their letter was not published, but the deleted comments were restored and an article by Chris McGreal, The Guardian’s former correspondent in Jerusalem and Johannesburg, on Tutu’s support for the Palestinians (as well as the consequent attacks on him by the likes of Alan Dershowitz) appeared in the paper on Dec. 31. Such treatment of a well-respected figure’s expression of support for Palestinian rights, in their obituaries and later retrospectives, is far from unusual. Nelson Mandela’s solidarity with Palestine went largely unrecorded in most of the media when he died. Stephen Hawking’s support for the academic boycott of Israel was generally not seen as worthy of inclusion in his obituaries.
Selective recollection can also work the other way around. The most obvious case is that of Anwar Sadat, president of Egypt from 1970 until his assassination in 1981. When Sadat was in the news during his early years in Egypt’s highest office, proIsrael writers and spokespeople in the West frequently alluded to his arrest by the British during World War II for his attempting to obtain Axis support. In 1977, Sadat flew to Israel and opened negotiations with Israeli premier Menachem Begin that led to the Camp David Accords, resulting in Egypt recovering the Sinai from Israel, but also implicitly abandoning the Palestinians and enabling Israel to concentrate its military forces against the PLO in Lebanon in 1982. His portrayal as a Nazi sympathizer then seemed to have become a mere footnote of history, if recalled at all. ■
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From Across the Pond
Britain Looks to Israel for Ideas on How to Curb the “Problem” of Asylum Seekers By Jonathan Cook
PHOTO CREDIT JACK GUEZ/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
The British government, by contrast, is being far more brazen. It has trumpeted its similarly abusive treatment of asylum seekers, making a feature of the compulsion. According to reports, the British scheme will deport refugees first, then force them to apply for asylum in Rwanda. If they succeed, they can remain in Rwanda. If they fail, Rwanda can forcibly return them to the place from which they fled. Johnson presumably hopes the policy will play well with British voters, as they tire of the seemingly endless deceptions and bottomless cronyism of his ruling Conservative Party. The British prime minister is among those fined for breaking COVID lockdown rules his own government set. With the mood toward Johnson Eritrean migrants demonstrate against the Israeli government's policy to forcibly deport African refugees and asylum seekers to Uganda and Rwanda, outside the Rwandan Embassy on Jan. 22, 2018 in the Is‐ souring, however, he may have raeli city of Herzliya. Israel forced tens of thousands of African migrants out of the country, threatening been caught off-guard by the to arrest those who stayed. backlash. The archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, condemned BRITAIN ANNOUNCED a new policy in April, to ship asylum seekthe Rwanda plan in an address on Easter Sunday, saying the failers thousands of miles to Rwanda in central Africa, “on a one-way ure to take responsibility for refugees was “the opposite of the ticket.” The move has caused widespread outrage in the UK benature of God.” cause it flagrantly violates Britain’s obligations under the 1951 U.N. Some have dismissed the scheme as the prime minister’s latest Refugee Convention. wheeze to deflect attention from his political troubles. But that would In fact, Boris Johnson’s government has simply copied wholebe to ignore a growing confidence on the British right toward treating sale a program established by Israel eight years ago. The only asylum seekers inhumanely—especially those who are not White. significant difference is that, when Israel introduced the deporThe Conservative Party has been amplifying deep-rooted nativist tation of asylum seekers to Rwanda in 2014, it did so in secret, tendencies in the UK—and drawing inspiration from Israel, which fully aware that it was breaking the Refugee Convention it too has long experience of turning itself into a fortress state. had ratified. In a sign of the continuing need to pay lip service to humanitarian When the policy came to light, Rwanda initially tried to spare concerns, Johnson’s government has publicly dressed up the new Israel’s blushes by denying its involvement. Israel, meanwhile, falsely asylum policy as a move to prevent people-smugglers from endanclaimed the deportations were happening on a voluntary basis. gering the lives of refugees by transporting them in inflatables across the Channel from France. Dozens have died. Jonathan Cook is a journalist based in the UK and a winner of the But Britain’s real motive—barely disguised—is the same one that Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. He is the author of drove Israel to adopt the policy. It wants to wash its hands of its legal Blood and Religion and Israel and the Clash of Civilisations (available from AET’s Middle East Books and More). obligations toward refugees by outsourcing responsibility to far 44
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poorer countries whose services can be easily bought. Britain is trying to make clear that anyone arriving on its shores will face not a warm welcome or British justice but the very oppressive conditions from which they fled in the first place. Johnson is demonstrating that post-Brexit Britain has the freedom to reinvent itself as the most hostile corner of Europe for refugees. Rwanda is an ideal destination, the reason it has attracted the attention of both Israel and the UK. Helped by Western leaders like former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Rwanda has largely succeeded in whitewashing its image with Western publics following the Rwandan genocide of the mid-1990s. But most Africans are aware of Rwanda’s long-term corruption and history of human rights abuses, which have continued since the genocide ended. Despite a simplistic narrative of those events in the West, more recent research suggests it was not just Tutsis who were victims of violence. Tutsi militias under Paul Kagame appear to have waged their own brutal ethnic cleansing operations against Hutus. Kagame has served as Rwanda’s president for more than 20 years. Officially absolved of wrongdoing, however, Kagame and his government have evaded proper scrutiny, leaving them largely free to enrich themselves and crush dissent. Lewis Mudge, Central Africa director of Human Rights Watch, recently observed of Rwanda, “Arbitrary detention, ill-treatment and torture in official and unofficial detention facilities are commonplace, and fair trial standards are flouted in many cases.” Taking asylum seekers off the hands of rich countries is a money-making opportunity for Rwanda’s leaders. Once the refugees land in Kigali, British officials— like their Israeli predecessors—are unlikely to care how they are treated. And as was clear under the Israeli scheme, Rwanda has little interest itself in encouraging the asylum seekers to remain inside its borders. Of the several thousand dispatched by Israel to Rwanda between 2014 and 2017, the vast majority soon left. It was a win-win for everyone but the refugees themselves, many of whom JUNE/JULY 2022
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Migrants arrive at Dover port, England, after being picked up in the channel by the UK’s border force, on April 14, 2022. Migrants have continued to arrive on UK shores by small boats despite the UK government announcing plans to provide asylum seekers with a one‐way ticket to Rwanda. ended up either making a second perilous journey to safety or found themselves back in the very areas from which they had originally fled. Like other governments in the global north, Israel and Britain share a distaste for asylum seekers, preferring to portray them as illegitimate “economic migrants.” In Israel’s case, refugees are chiefly seen as threatening the country’s ethnic purity as a Jewish state. And in the UK, they are viewed as taking jobs and diluting the supposed British values that once made the country a global empire. Both Israel and Britain have been working hard to isolate themselves from the wider region to which they belong. That has made it easier to control their borders and keep out unwelcome visitors. Israel has long viewed itself as an ethnic fortress, its borders protected by soldiers, electronic fences, drones and watchtowers. Britain, meanwhile, has been able to take advantage of its geography, as an island fortress protected by the sea. That view has only deepened with Brexit, the UK’s exit from the European Union. And for that reason, Britain has increasingly looked to Israel for ideas on how to curb the “problem” of asylum seekers. Israel quickly developed what were seen as “deterrence” measures against refugees
fleeing wars and ethnic tensions close by in Sudan and Eritrea. Back in 2010, Israel began work on a 230 km steel barrier across its shared border with Egypt, the only gateway into Israel for African asylum seekers. It took three years to complete, but the fence reduced the flow of refugees from 10,000 a year to barely a trickle. Israel adopted an equally harsh approach to the 55,000 already inside its borders. While European governments have assessed more than 60 percent of Eritrean asylum seekers as genuine, using tough criteria, Israel has accepted only 1.5 percent of claims. Instead, Israel has declared the refugees to be illegal “infiltrators.” Many were forced into Holot, a giant detention camp Israel built for them in the Negev desert, despite repeated rulings from Israeli courts that imprisoning the refugees broke Israel’s own laws as well as international law. Trapped between its desire to be rid of the asylum seekers and the rulings of its courts, Israel secretly agreed to pay Rwanda and Uganda to take them off its hands. The refugees had a choice between imprisonment in Israel or being deported. The world took little notice. But reports in the Israeli media at the time suggested that Kigali may have received arms in return for taking the unwanted asylum seekers—an
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apparent return to Israel’s reported involvement in selling weapons to Rwanda that fuelled the genocide there nearly 30 years ago. Prominent Rwandan dissidents have also found their phones infected with spyware developed by the Israeli firm NSO. Britain is similarly rigging the system to treat asylum seekers as law-breakers. In outlining the policy in April, Johnson told coastguard officials near Dover, “Anyone entering the UK illegally…may now be relocated to Rwanda.” He forgot to mention that, for those fleeing persecution, it is invariably impossible to find a legal route to enter Britain. Britain’s new policy is a reversal of Home Secretary Priti Patel’s recent plan to intercept and turn around boats carrying refugees in the Channel—a maritime equivalent of Israel’s barrier along the Sinai border. Such a policy was always going to be more difficult to enforce than Israel’s electronic fence, and even harder to defend. Blocking the passage of inflatables in the
Channel simply increased the risk of the boats capsizing or sinking. So the UK is now following Israel down the Rwanda path. Patel called it an “incredible” country and said other European states were looking to follow suit with their own refugee populations. Notably, Frontex, the European Union’s border agency, has in recent years been turning to Israel for advice on “border security.” Patel’s fingerprints on the scheme are noteworthy. In 2017, she was called back from an official visit to Africa as international development minister after it came to light she had conducted clandestine meetings— hidden from her own department—with Israeli officials and lobbyists. She was forced to resign. But those ties have never been properly scrutinized. Israeli and Jewish human rights groups have long been shocked by Israel’s continuing abuse of asylum seekers. They highlight that Israel is a nation of refugees who fled European persecution and that the young state of Israel even played a key role
in instigating the 1951 Refugee Convention. How can it willfully turn its back on those fleeing persecution today, they ask. But that is to misunderstand what Israel’s founders were determined to achieve. They helped to draft the Refugee Convention immediately after they had driven many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their historic homeland, turning them into refugees overnight. A Jewish state was always intended as an ethnic fortress, one that could not be shared with the native Palestinian population. Laws against so-called “infiltrators” and against the immigration of non-Jews were among the first passed by Israel’s young parliament. Senior Israeli politicians have called today’s asylum seekers a “cancer.” Their children—like Palestinian children inside Israel—have been barred from schools for Jewish pupils only. Before Israel began imprisoning and deporting asylum seekers, mobs of Israelis attacked anyone looking African in cities such as Tel Aviv.
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Britain and other right-wing populist governments find this model of pulling up the drawbridge deeply appealing. Australia, like Britain, enjoys the geographic advantage of being an island, if a very much larger one that is among the least densely populated places on Earth. Since 2013, Canberra has sent asylum seekers to Papua New Guinea or the tiny atoll-state of Nauru. The first world’s treatment of refugees is already shameful, and the disparity is only going to grow. Developing countries shelter 85 percent of asylum seekers, while Western states host only 15 percent. In Israel, the fraction of the population who are asylum seekers is minuscule. Johnson’s government is currently trying to pass a new immigration bill to make it even harder for refugees to claim asylum— further criminalizing their efforts to flee persecution and the resource wars that have been initiated or fuelled by Western states such as Britain. In a world of resources sharply depleted by Western over-consumption, and faced with a future of shrinking economies, privileged states like the UK
are preparing for the worst. Israel has led the way for more than seven decades in creating the model of a fortress state “defended” by impermeable steel and concrete barriers, detention centers, segregation and intense surveillance. Now that knowledge and experience will prove more invaluable than ever as other states line up to copy it. ■
Apartheid in Israel Continued from page 33
International law is very clear. The acquisition of territory by war or force is forbidden by the 1945 Charter of the United Nations and by the 1949 U.N. Declaration on Rights and Duties of States. Thus, Israel has never had any legal sovereign rights over the Palestinian lands it seized in its 1948 and 1967 wars. Israel maintains its apartheid system because of the “iron clad” support and “eternal friendship” that American politicians express toward it. This sentiment was illustrated in a February 2022 speech before the Israeli Knesset by Nancy Pelosi,
second in the U.S. presidential line of succession and Speaker of the House of Representatives. At the Knesset, Pelosi stated that she has long considered the establishment of Israel to be “the greatest political achievement of the 20th century.” It was obvious from the speaker’s glaring remarks, that the evidence detailed in the Amnesty report mattered little to her. U.S. and Israeli pressure have managed to suppress the many reports that have charged Israel with apartheid. The Israeli regime has sustained its oppressive system and escaped consequences because of the might of the United States. The Palestinians have, therefore, been forced to armed struggle. According to the United Nations, armed struggle is the legitimate right of the colonized against the colonizer; not an act of terrorism as the Israelis claim. Israel’s apartheid practices, racist laws and squatter-colonialism have made Palestinians prisoners in their own land. Israelis will never be at peace until they recognize the bankruptcy of Zionism and the violence it breeds. ■
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Canada Calling
Muslim Women Most Impacted by Quebec’s Secularism Laws
COURTESY THE LOW DOWN TO HULL AND BACK NEWS
By Candice Bodnaruk
Fatemeh Anvari can’t teach third grade because she wears a hijab. IN 2019, THE QUEBEC government passed Bill 21, also known as Quebec’s Religious Symbols law or Laicity of the state, which prohibits people from wearing religious symbols, including the hijab, turban and kippah at work in the public sector. The Quebec Superior Court struck down parts of the law in 2021, but
Candice Bodnaruk has been involved in Palestinian issues for the past 14 years through organizations such as the Cana‐ dian BDS Coalition and Peace Alliance Win‐ nipeg. Her political action started with fem‐ inism and continued with the peace move‐ ment, first with the No War on Iraq Coali‐ tion in 2003 in Winnipeg. 48
most of the discriminatory law remains intact. Quebec’s Bill 21 overrides freedom of religion in the province and has led to the suspension of a Grade 3 teacher from her classroom. Simply because Fatemeh Anvari wears a hijab, the much-loved teacher working at a Chelsea, Quebec public elementary school, was reassigned to administrative duties in December 2021. Anvari’s removal from the classroom has left her students and their parents devastated. Noa Mendelsohn Aviv, equality program director with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA), explained, “There are many people who have been badly harmed
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by this law. Fatemeh is one of them. We feel for her, and we are fighting for her and the many others who have been hurt by a law that has affected Muslim women and denied them the ability to work in their chosen professions.” Quebec used the “Notwithstanding Clause” within Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which is part of Canada’s Constitution, to basically suspend charter rights in the province in order to enact Bill 21. The clause allows provinces, as well as the federal government, to override certain Charter Rights for a period of up to five years. The CCLA, together with the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM) filed an appeal, and the government also filed its appeals. The case has gone up to the Quebec Court of Appeal. “There are many people in Quebec who say this is about trying to be secular, that our aim is secularism. The problem is that true secularism should allow everybody the freedom to do what they choose, that the goal of secularism is to have the state not impose its religious views,” Mendelsohn Aviv said. Shahina Siddiqui, volunteer executive director with Islamic Social Services Manitoba, echoed those same concerns. She told the Washington Report that she is “deeply concerned” about the impact Fatemeh Anvari’s case is having on Muslim girls who are considering the teaching profession in Quebec. “Their future and their confidence in their future has been impacted as well as their freedom of choice,” she said. Siddiqui believes that Muslim women in Canada have become the focus of political, social, religious and racial Islamophobia. She said even before 9/11, women became soft targets for people who want to stomp on, oppress, ridicule and deny human rights. JUNE/JULY 2022
Moreover, Siddiqui said, Bill 21 has created two-tier citizenship in Quebec. “It is discriminatory, against the soul and spirit of the Charter, and makes a mockery of Quebec’s claims to secularism and equality and freedom,” she said. Only the federal government has the power to override the “Nothwithstanding Clause” that Quebec used to enact Bill 21. Siddiqui believes the case will go to the Supreme Court. She maintains that Muslim women are determined to stand up for justice, human rights and the right to choose. “We will not be bullied into submission,” Siddiqui concluded.
MEDIA RESPONSIBILITY NEEDED IN COVERAGE OF REFUGEE CRISES Mohamad Jumaily believes the way the media reports global conflicts must change and he’s taking journalists to task. Jumaily, a Winnipeg restaurant owner and president of the Syrian Assembly of Manitoba, has noticed a marked difference in the news coverage of the war in Ukraine, compared to news reports on Syria, Yemen, and the Middle East in general. Recently he spoke with the Washington Report about why fair news coverage is so essential. “There is a double standard in the media coverage of the Ukrainian refugee crisis,” Jumaily said. While many people know what is going on in Ukraine, the same cannot be said for public awareness of the ongoing conflict in Syria, which started in 2011. That was the year the Syrian Assembly of Manitoba was created, after Syrian refugees began arriving in Winnipeg. According to Jumaily, there are now 6,000 Syrian refugees in Winnipeg. Jumaily said he is pleased that the Canadian government has welcomed so many Syrian refugees, and they deeply empathize with Ukrainians but they also believe all refugees must be treated equally. Media coverage of the Syrian crisis has been unfocused and sparse in the past few years, Jumaily remarked, “and only when there’s a big thing that happened, like the massacre in the city of Idlib.” Yemen is another ongoing conflict that the media rarely JUNE/JULY 2022
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Mohamad Jumaily from the Syrian Assembly of Manitoba poses in his Winnipeg restaurant, Mr. Calzone. talks about. He believes journalists have a responsibility to be fair in their coverage of all humanitarian emergencies. “We need to be focused more when we are talking about humanity,” when we talk about the effect of conflicts on civilians, he said, adding that a refugee is someone who has lost everything, and needs support. In wars, civilians always lose. “I don’t accept injustice anywhere,’’ Jumaily concluded.
THE FREEDOM CONVOY AND WHITE NATIONALISM: WHAT IT MEANS FOR CANADA Late in January 2022, hundreds of semitrucks arrived in the nation’s capital from across Canada, lined Ottawa streets and blocked international border crossings to protest COVID-19 vaccine mandates for truckers. They would remain in that city, and others across Canada, for over three weeks and cause an economic loss estimated in the billions. Local leaders and residents, who had grown used to the thousands of protests in Ottawa every year, soon realized there was something very different about the Freedom Convoy. The protesters said they weren’t going anywhere until they brought down the fed-
eral government, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was arrested, and all health mandates ended. The Freedom Convoy organizers posted their demands online, but when they arrived in Ottawa and began to set up a command center and erect tents, police still appeared oblivious to their longterm plans. During the Freedom Convoy’s almost month-long occupation, Ottawa residents reported countless hate crimes in their city, including displays of homophobia and racism. Protesters displayed swastikas and Confederate flags on Parliament Hill. After protesters took over a downtown shopping center, staff and customers feared for their safety and closed the mall. Ottawa residents wearing face masks were harassed. Many residents also chose to leave the downtown to escape the incessant blaring of truck horns day and night. Yet in the midst of the chaos in Ottawa, some Federal Conservative politicians supported the convoy, going as far as to pose for photographs and go out to dinner with the protesters. Eventually convoy border blockades extended across the country and protesters built encampments in downtown Toronto, Quebec City, Winnipeg and Vancouver.
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Caches of weapons were found at a convoy blockade in Coutts, Alberta, along with links to a White nationalist group. The border blockades, particularly at the Ambassador Bridge, an international U.S.Canada crossing, were also a major threat to Canada’s economy and its trade relationship with the U.S. Finally, in mid-February, a rare move by the federal government brought the Freedom Convoy to an end. Parliament invoked the federal Emergencies Act, which gave the government powers to remove and arrest the protesters on Parliament Hill and at international border crossings, and to search their vehicles and freeze the convoy organizers’ bank accounts. Thousands of additional police officers were brought in from across Canada to deal with the Ottawa protest and when it was all over, 272 people were arrested, and more than 2,600 fined. The Washington Report talked to several experts about the events of last winter. They all agree on one thing: that right-wing extremism and White supremacy is on the rise in Canada and governments need to take action very soon. And experts in extremism and White nationalism are warning that Canada needs to be more vigilant about far-right threats to national security. Fareed Khan, founder of Canadians United Against Hate, spoke to the Washington Report in midst of the occupation of downtown Ottawa in early February. The convoy protest meant organizers had to move the 5th anniversary memorial vigil for the Jan. 29 Quebec Mosque shooting online. “You have some White supremacists and racists and Islamophobes in this crowd and we had no idea whether we would become targets for harassment, intimidation or violence,” he said. Khan said Canadians should be very worried about the security threat posed by White nationalism and right-wing extremism in the convoy movement. Racist and White supremacist groups are exploding across Canada, and at the same time, racist attacks are on rise. Khan cited the 2021 hit and-run attack that killed four members of 50
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Fareed Khan, Founder of Canadians United Against Hate. the Afzaal family in London, Ontario as an example of such racialized violence. He went on to explain that the convoy supporters are similar to those who attacked the U.S. Capitol Building on Jan. 6, 2021. “This is a fascist protest,” he said. Khan also expressed concern about the involvement of former U.S President Donald Trump in the Canadian protest. Trump had previously praised the convoy leaders and criticized GoFundMe for freezing the group’s donations. Protesters also had caches of propane and diesel fuel for their trucks, which, Khan noted, were potential explosives and police did nothing to stop them. He called the police inaction a “racialized response” to the mainly White protest. “If anyone else had done that, if it was Black people, or brown people or Indigenous people who had done that, they would have been on them like a bag of hammers,” he said. Noting that many protesters were set up right outside the prime minister’s office, he said he was baffled that none of them were arrested. Meanwhile, Dr. Barbara Perry, director of the Center on Hate, Bias and Extremism, said, while this “is a uniquely Canadian movement,” the organizers of the Ottawa Occupation learned from the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol Hill events. Perry explained that the two movements have the same goal: to bring about a civil war. “The intent is to overturn the current government with its over reliance on immigration, multiculturalism and diversity,” and
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replace it with a White people-only region. A new Canadian right-wing group, Diagolon, was also present at a Freedom Convoy border blockade in Coutts, Alberta. Perry said that Diagolon should be included on Canada’s Terror Watch List because the organization has a history of violence and one of its goals is to create a White fascist state. She noted that right now there are only five or six White nationalist groups on the list, including The Proud Boys, Three Percenters, Aryan Strikeforce and Atomwaffen Division. Perry also said it’s very important to pursue criminal charges against the convoy’s leaders and to examine the role of social media in the protests. Tamara Lich, a key convoy organizer, and convoy leader Pat King were arrested and are facing trials. The Freedom Convoy raised $4 million in donations through GoFundMe before their account was pulled for violating GoFundMe’s Terms of Service and donations refunded. The group then raised an additional $10 million through GiveSendGo, a Christian fundraising site. According to Kawser Ahmed, adjunct professor with the Political Science Department at the University of Winnipeg, the convoy movement greatly tarnished Canada’s global image as a “peaceable kingdom.” “We have never seen such a thing in our contemporary history—it is a new phenomenon. On one side we have our Charter Rights of freedom of expression and freedom of association, and on the other side what we see is a heavy polarized situation and extreme ideas. It is quite a unique situation for us,” he said. Ahmed stressed that a better discussion is needed, a dialogue, on how to deal with ideas like these in the next couple of years, especially since many of those who supported the Freedom Convoy could be neighbors or friends. He said it is vital for Canada to deal with far-right elements now before they become normalized and accepted. “Because when these groups are legitimate in our mainstream political and social discourse, then it becomes normal. It becomes very normal to speak homophobia, to speak Islamophobia and anti-Semitism,” he said. JUNE/JULY 2022
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Ahmed observed that the groups that demonstrated on Parliament Hill last winter were promoting violence and that Canada needs to take it very seriously. “I have never seen anything like it,” said Ahmed, who is also the executive director of the Conflict and Resilience Research Institute of Canada (CRRIC). He said since Canada already has Hate Crime laws and the Criminal Code of Canada, new laws are not necessarily the answer to deal with an event like the occupation of Ottawa. In the meantime, Ottawa residents and businesses are suing the truckers and organizers in a class action lawsuit for $9.8 million.
CJPME FOUNDATION PROJECT BRINGS WATER TO GAZA NEIGHBORHOOD The availability of safe, affordable drinking water has been a challenge in Gaza for decades. Israel’s water management practices also favor Jewish-Israeli communities over Palestinian communities.
“Nowhere is this felt more strongly than in Gaza,” Tom Woodley, the treasurer and secretary of the Canadian CJPME Foundation, explained. The water crisis in Gaza is not the result of a natural disaster like an earthquake or tsunami, Woodley emphasized, but it’s due to an international political situation that continues to tolerate Israeli apartheid. He said it is essential for Canadians to lobby for Palestinian human rights as well as an end to “Israel’s brutal regime of control.” According to Woodley, 26 percent of illnesses in Gaza are related to consuming contaminated water. He noted that only 10 percent of people in Gaza obtain drinkable water from municipal systems, and most residents end up buying expensive water or traveling to pick up potable water at distribution sites. Woodley hopes a new well will help alleviate some of those hardships for Gazans. “The people of Gaza are very resourceful and are able to find innovative workarounds for damaged infrastructure, but ultimately,
the occupation places a huge toll on the health, well-being and livelihoods of Palestinians in Gaza,” Woodley said. “Gaza’s infrastructure has been underserved for decades because of the Israeli blockade of the territory. [Infrastructure] has been the target of Israeli bombardments, leading to damaged bridges, water systems, electrical grids, sewage systems and more,” he asserted and emphasized that repairing Gaza’s damaged water infrastructure is an urgent initiative. Today, CJPME is working to bring safe drinking water to the Al Zaitoon neighborhood of Gaza City. CJPME estimates its new high-capacity water well will benefit more than 15,000 residents and 500 homes. The project will also supply water to other public spaces, such as the University College of Applied Sciences in Gaza. The school has about 12,000 students and staff. The foundation needs help to raise funds for the $140,000 well. For more information, see the Water for Gaza Project at <www.cjpmefoundation.org/wfg>. ■
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ARAB AMERICAN ACTIVISM
The Arab America Foundation commemorated the contributions of Arab Americans on April 27, at the Middle East Institute (MEI) in Washington, DC. Nearly 250 guests admired artwork in the MEI art gallery until the Faris El-Layl Folkloric Dance Troupe arrived and invited attendees to dance a traditional zaffa wedding march with them into the meeting room. Arab America co-founders, Warren and Dr. Amal David, and chairman of the foundation, Dr. Adel Korkor, welcomed attendees. This year, they noted, President Joe Biden, as well as Congress, the Department of State and more than 40 state governors recognized the month of April as National Arab American Heritage Month. Virginia activist Zeina Ashrawi Hutchison announced a permanent decree designating April to be Arab American Heritage Month in Virginia. Alexandria, VA poet laureate Zeina Azzam recited her deeply moving poem, “I am an Arab American.” Azzam, who writes “in languages that flow in opposite directions,” described the beauty of her Arab American identity: “I am an Arab American because I tend the fig tree as earnestly as the dogwood and the pine. Because cinnamon and anise, cumin and cardamom inhabit my shelves and senses. Because I bake both baklava and blueberry pie for my family....” Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute, described the grassroot efforts it took to honor Arab Americans nationally. She urged listeners to continue to work until the MENA community, (the 3.7 million Americans who trace their roots back to a Middle Eastern or North African country) are accurately counted in the census and other government documents. Cedric Richmond, director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, emphasized the importance of fighting for rights, including the right to uncontaminated water pipes, education and health care. “Equity doesn’t happen by default,” he said, adding, “the arc of the moral universe is 52
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Celebrating National Arab American Heritage Month
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D‐MI) describes legislation she introduced to celebrate Arab American heritage and ensure the community’s needs are properly documented by the government. long, but it bends towards justice because we make it bend.” Next came Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), who joyfully proclaimed, “I am unbelievably, unapologetically Arab!” and described the thrill of introducing H.Res. 1022 on April 1, 2022, which supports the designation of the month of April each year as Arab American Heritage Month. On April 26, she introduced H.R. 7591, the Health Equity and MENA Community Inclusion Act of 2022, to amend the Public Health Service Act to include Middle Easterners and North Africans (MENA) as racial and ethnic minority groups. This legislation would help ensure that the needs of the MENA community are reflected in the federal government’s focus on public health, she said. When people in the MENA community are categorized as “white” or “other,” Tlaib explained, they are invisible, marginalized and their true identity, needs and experience isn’t reflected in the U.S. public health system. After the remarks, volunteers wearing traditional Arab dresses took to the stage, followed by vocalist Nano Raies who sang classic Arab songs. By then the sun had set and guests who’d been fasting, as well as everyone else, enjoyed traditional Arab food served in the courtyard. —Delinda C. Hanley
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Palestine’s “Seed Queen” Connects Cultural and Sustainable Farming Growing Palestine hosted a luncheon featuring Vivien Sansour, the “Seed Queen of Palestine,” on Feb. 27, at the home of board member Samar Hussein Langhorne in Washington, DC. Langhorne described Growing Palestine’s mission to help Palestinian farmers resist buying seeds from Israel and help them plant long-forgotten Palestinian heirloom and native seeds. PalestinianAmerican Sansour hopes traditional cropgrowing methods will push back against the challenges imposed by the Israeli occupation and resulting water and electricity shortages. Sansour’s first in-person talk in two years, due to the pandemic, focused on the Palestinian zahra baladiya (homegrown organic cauliflower varieties), which she is helping save from extinction. She passed out a seed to each listener and urged them to hold it and “feel the energy of your grandmother. Seeds are our ancestors, not a commodity, but a product of communal genius,” she said, explaining that generations of farmers tweaked these seeds to improve their crops. Zahra baladiya is buried in soil for nine months, and when it’s harvested it’s worth the wait, she noted. Sansour said that while she went to Palestine to teach farmers, she instead heard a wealth of stories and learned from them. Every grandmother had a jar of JUNE/JULY 2020 2022
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Growing Palestine hosts a talk by Vivien Sansour, the “Seed Queen of Palestine.” seeds (their own seed library) in her kitchen. Sansour concluded that Palestinian farmers have something to teach drought-stricken Californians and others. To raise funds for Growing Palestine, board member Nora Burgan auctioned a painting by Ayed Arafeh from Dheisheh refugee camp, depicting a vegetable auction, which is held every morning in Jericho. In a daily act of resistance, Palestinian farmers set their own prices for superior produce, and compete with cheaper produce grown with unlimited water by large agribusinesses in Israeli settlements. —Delinda C. Hanley
Kids Cook and Jam to Celebrate Easter/Ramadan During National Arab American Heritage Month In celebration of Easter, Ramadan and Arab American Heritage Month, the Palestine Foundation held a traditional maamoul baking day on April 9 for members of the Mawtini Choir and their families. After more than a year of practicing together remotely, the children’s choir couldn’t wait to jam and cook in person. Parents and grandparents in this Los Angeles County, CA Arab American community are passionate about passing along their music, language, food and holiday cultural traditions.
The Mawtini Choir is a joint children’s project of the Palestine Foundation and SAWA, a Southern California Arab American mothers group. The choir is directed by Sami Asmar with the participation of worldclass music instructors Hasan Minawi, Souhail Kaspar and Nasser Musa. The maamoul baking social event included Lenten food and sweets prepared by participating Christian and Muslim families for iftar, the fast-breaking dinner during Ramadan. The children, aged 4 to 14, made buttery semolina dough and sweet date paste for the cookies. Then, they selected their favorite decorative molds and tweezers and got to work while chatting and giggling, to the delight of watching parents, each recording a video, of course. Following the baking, the children shared their cookie creations, just like families do around the Arab world. Lily Karam, Palestine Foundation president, proclaimed, “these maamoul cookies are the best and most flavorful cookies ever made because they were made by our children.” During the event, California-based Palestinian author of children’s books, Wafa Shami, joined virtually and read her book, Easter in Ramallah, (available from Middle East Books and More) to the attentive and fascinated children. No traditional Arab event is complete without music, and given that this was the Mawtini Choir, there was plenty of talent. The group enjoyed performances from children beaming with smiles and energy as they prepared for the next in-person concert. —Lily Karam and Sami Asmar
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Museum Opens Gaza Exhibit and Commemorates the Nakba
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The Museum of the Palestinian People’s latest exhibition, “Dreams Rising: Palestinian Children in Gaza Imagine a Future Beyond Trauma,” opened on May 14. Curator Ahmed Mansour said the children’s original images reimagine a liberated Gaza and challenge adults everywhere to act now for a just future. With rain forecast, the museum erected
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Visitors enjoy music and art at the Museum of the Palestinian People’s exhibition opening and Nakba commemoration. tents on the sidewalk to protect food, guests and musical equipment. Composer and oud artist Fuad Foty, aka “DC’s Voice of Palestine,” and his 14-year-old daughter Yasmine, played Palestinian music. Foty noted that tents are a poignant symbol of what refugees have to go through, but this year it also symbolized a funeral tent for the murdered journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. Guests shared a moment of silence to remember the latest of too many Palestinian martyrs. Bshara Nassar, founder and director of the museum, introduced his father Daher, a farmer who is a symbol of non-violent resistance in the West Bank. Nassar said it was fitting to honor Nakba Day by having Palestinian children tell their own stories at the museum. Chairman of the board, Farshid Hakimyar, urged the crowd to donate to the museum. Board member Ruba Marshood said she wished the museum had existed when she was a child, to help her answer questions like, Why is your country not on a map? “My country was erased from the map but now I can bring my children to the museum so they can get to know my country and my heart,” Marshood said. Another board member, Mohammed El-Khatib, said volunteering at the museum is the most rewarding thing he’s ever done. “We have a space to anchor us,” he said. —Delinda C. Hanley 54
WAGING PEACE The U.S. Role in the Moroccan Occupation of Western Sahara On April 13, experts addressed the issue of Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara in a webinar co-hosted by the Campaign to End the Occupation of the Western Sahara, the Institute of the Black World 21st Century and the Pan African Unity Dialogue. Bill Fletcher, co-coordinator of the Campaign, moderated the discussion. In 1974, Spain decided to end its control over Western Sahara and allow the native Sahrawis to hold a referendum to determine their future. However, due to legal objections by Morocco and Mauritania, the referendum, slated for 1975, never occurred. The U.S. also apparently played a role in preventing the Western Saharans from choosing between independence and Moroccan rule. Katlyn Thomas, former legal adviser to the U.N. Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) and author of The Emperor’s Clothes: The Naked Truth About Western Sahara, said the entire conflict “might not have occurred had it not been for the meddling of the United States government in 1975.” Based on records received from Freedom of Information Act requests, Thomas discovered that then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger “basically arm-twisted
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Spain to capitulate to Morocco and allow Morocco to take over the territory.” Thomas cited several examples from FOIA documents showing the extent to which the U.S. government “put its hand on the balance of this situation in Morocco’s favor.” While Thomas and her colleagues responsible for legal affairs in MINURSO were working on a referendum of self-determination for the Sahrawis, “the U.S. government behind our backs was doing everything to undermine us,” she explained. Christopher Ross, former U.S. ambassador to Algeria and Syria, was the U.N. secretary-general’s personal envoy for Western Sahara from 2009 to 2017. While his mandate was to facilitate direct negotiations between the parties and ensure the self-determination of the Western Saharan people, “the Moroccans kept insisting that I was there only to become an advocate for their position,” he said. The former diplomat said the U.N. lacks the authority to change the status quo in Western Sahara. Steffan de Mistura, the U.N. secretary-general’s current personal envoy for the region, needs a broader mandate, he emphasized, “or we’re just going to keep spinning our wheels…and the ones who are really paying for this are the 173,600 Western Sahara refugees in the [Algerian] camps.” The Biden administration has demonstrated ambivalence on this issue, as it has refused to rescind President Donald Trump’s 2020 acknowledgment of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara. This acquiescence to the prior administration’s disregard for the international consensus is probably because the Biden White House “feels that facts on the ground in Western Sahara and the passage of time will both favor the Moroccans, so basically they don’t need to do much,” Ross said. Stephen Zunes, professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco and co-author of Western Sahara: War, Nationalism and Conflict Irresolution, pointed out the Biden administration’s hypocrisy in condemning Russian aggression in Ukraine, while not condemning—and even recognizing—Morocco’s illegal annexation of Western Sahara. “What JUNE/JULY 2022
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Supporters of Western Saharan independence demonstrate in front of Spain’s Congress of Deputies in Madrid on March 30, 2022. Days earlier, the Spanish government endorsed a plan for Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara. the Biden administration is doing in effect is recognizing the forcible takeover of one recognized sovereign African state by another,” he stated. This action sets a dangerous precedent and “gives us little credibility to speak out against Russia’s flagrant violations of international legal norms,” Zunes added. If the United States “really believed in international laws…we would oppose Morocco’s invasion and occupation as well.” Zunes stressed the importance of mobilizing global civil society on the Western Sahara issue in order to pressure the U.S. government. “People do care about these kind of things, so the more people know about it, I think the more people will be goaded into action and it will be harder and harder for the U.S. government to defend” its policy, he said. —Elaine Pasquini
where there are large numbers of Palestinian Americans, such as New York, Boston, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area, where he spoke in Oakland on March 24. Shehadeh initiated his remarks by providing a little history, beginning with the mass expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians when the State of Israel was created in 1948. He pointed out that, at that time, only about 5 percent of the population was Jewish, nearly all of whom were not
Zionists. Palestinians who refused to leave became Israeli citizens, but they were and continue to be treated as enemies, he said. Today, Palestinian citizens of Israel—20 percent of the population—are a minority in their homeland. The discrimination they encounter on a daily basis is profound and Shehadeh shared a few examples, including the following: • Separate educational systems for Palestinian and Jewish Israeli children; • Palestinian children being forced to learn modern Zionist history and denied the right to learn about Palestinian history; • A lack of essential infrastructure in some predominantly Palestinian neighborhoods (for example, the lack of a basic water supply and electricity). “I have to listen every day to racist people saying that the fact that I brought children into the world is a demographic [time] bomb for the state,” Shehadeh said. “My [Jewish] neighbor, his children are considered a blessing for the state. And these are the words that they use.” In the Knesset, the vast majority of his colleagues refuse to acknowledge that Shehadeh is Palestinian, routinely call him a terrorist and habitually interrupt and ignore him. “It’s a very hostile environment,” he said. Shehadeh shared that he has also been attacked physically by security forces
Sami Abu Shehadeh is one of only 10 Palestinians in the 120-member Israeli Knesset (parliament). He recently came on a tour of the U.S. to share what it is like to be a Palestinian citizen of Israel, a perspective that is rarely shared. He also came to touch base with Palestinians living in the U.S., intentionally speaking in locations JUNE/JULY 2022
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Palestinian Citizen of Israel Reflects On Being a Member of the Knesset
Palestinian Knesset member Sami Abu Shehadeh (l) speaking in Washington, DC on March 17, 2022, as part of his nationwide tour. WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS
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when he attends demonstrations. Shehadeh ended his talk by clearly stating the Palestinian position. “We say Israel must change and acknowledge the rights of everyone,” he explained. “We want equality. We think that the colonial project should end. We believe in justice and equality for all. A Jewish state cannot be a democracy. It’s an oxymoron. No equality, no democracy.” Rev. Michael Yoshii, who was instrumental in organizing Shehadeh’s talk in Oakland, agreed. “Equal rights for all implies that you can’t have a Jewish state and call it a democracy,” he told the Washington Report. —Katharine Davies Samway
Confronting Superficial Reactions To Reports of Israeli Apartheid
A protester in London holds a sign charging Israel with the crime of apartheid, on May 22, 2021.
With an increasing number of human rights organizations labeling Israel as an apartheid regime, pro-Israel voices are working overtime to discredit this damning charge. On March 30, the Foundation for Middle East Peace held a virtual event to discuss how the growing recognition of Israeli apartheid is altering the public discourse surrounding the country. Peter Beinart, editor-at-large for Jewish Currents, noted that most of the people dismissing reports from groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International offer only superficial rebukes. A lot of critics “are not actually interested in understanding the realities on the ground and the international legal frameworks,” he said. “What they’re interested in doing is giving people a way of not having to engage with those very, very painful and difficult realities.” Knee-jerk dismissals of the apartheid reports are often based on accusations of anti-Semitism and bias, Beinart pointed out. Wielding these rhetorical crutches, critics seek to rouse fear and deflect from the indepth analysis and data contained in the reports. “It turns the entire conversation away from the substantive claims that are made and the lived reality of Palestinians on the ground to the question of Jewish fears about anti-Semitism,” he noted. If those denying the existence of apartheid in Israel were actually worried about hatred and anti-Semitism, Beinart
said they wouldn’t silence an honest discussion about human rights. “The right way to deal with [concerns about anti-Semitism] is not to essentially say, ‘because we have fears of anti-Semitism, we’re going to try to shut down a conversation about the bigotry that Palestinians face on a daily basis,’” he opined. “There’s something actually deeply perverse about that move….The best way to fight anti-Semitism is through a struggle against all forms of bigotry, which has to include anti-Palestinian bigotry.” Maha Nassar, a professor at the University of Arizona, said last summer’s “unity intifada”—which saw Palestinians in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank and the diaspora all rise up against ethnic cleansing and settler violence in Jerusalem—helped bust the myth that Israel is a liberal democracy. While the violence experienced by Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza was par for the course, the harsh repression of Palestinians within Israel revealed their status as second-class citizens. Nassar noted, “It was those very Palestinians inside the Green Line, those who have been told their whole lives, ‘you are part of a liberal democracy’…those youth have come to the realization, ‘no we aren’t, we also suffer under Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid rule, just in different manifestations of it.’” The reality of apartheid must inform and
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transform the approaches that outside actors take to build peace, Nassar insisted. In particular, she criticized the popular people-to-people peace-building framework, which stresses that the key to peace is getting Israelis and Palestinians to know one another. “This approach completely ignores the structures of power and domination inherent in any Israeli-Palestinian encounter,” Nassar observed. “The conflict resolution framework posits the assumption that there are two equal sides—they both need to get to know one another, compromise a bit more, and if they just push a little harder, we can have peace.” Rather than embracing such “peacebuilding” models, Nassar said young Palestinians are focused on naming and challenging structures of Israeli oppression, even if doing so draws strong rebukes from agents of the status quo, such as governments and lobbying groups in the West. —Dale Sprusansky
Is Israel Practicing Apartheid in the Golan Heights? Palestine Deep Dive’s April 6 webinar, “The Golan Heights: Occupation and Annexation Under the Spotlight,” addressed key questions concerning the often overlooked Israeli annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights. Moderator Mark Seddon, a former JUNE/JULY 2022
Al Jazeera correspondent, interviewed Aram Abu Saleh, a Syrian writer and activist born in the Golan Heights. Saleh began by reminding the audience of the largely forgotten Syrian right of return to the Golan Heights, which was seized by Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War and subsequently annexed in 1981. “You hear no one talking about their right of return, their destroyed villages or what happened in ’67,” she noted. Saleh described the seizure of the Golan as Israel’s most comprehensive act of ethnic cleansing, “even bigger than the Palestinian Nakba,” with 130,000 Syrians living in the territory before 1967, but only 13,000 remaining thereafter. (More total Palestinians—an estimated 750,000— were forcibly displaced by the Nakba in 1948, but a higher percentage of Syrians living in the Golan were expelled by Israel in 1967.) Demonstrating the tragic effect of Israel’s ethnic cleansing on the everyday lives of locals, Saleh described the tradition of heading to Quneitra, home of the “shouting hill,” to communicate with forcibly separated loved ones. “It’s basically two hills, one on the Syrian side and one on our side. Our families would come at important ceremonies in the year, on Mother’s Day, on the Day of Syrian Independence, on Eid…we would just use shouting as communication.” Saleh, who is currently studying in Berlin, also shined a light on the violence and trauma caused by landmines, which litter the territory. “We have a lot of people losing their hands or their legs due to accidents with these mines that Israel still refuses to remove,” she said. Responding to a question about the duplicity of the international community, Saleh noted that the active sanctions campaign against Russia stands in sharp contrast to the global silence over the Golan. “They actually have sanctions on Syria, which are starving the Syrian people,” she said. “Our country is being sanctioned while the country occupying us is just freely doing whatever it wants.” While Israel has been able to get away with imposing decades of hardship on the Golan’s native residents, Saleh said a deJUNE/JULY 2022
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Residents of the Golan Heights village of Majdal Shams wave Druze and Syrian flags as they protest the 1981 Israeli annexation of their land, on Feb. 14, 2022. termined resistance remains. “When Israel annexed the Golan, it tried to also force Israeli citizenship on the Syrians remaining there,” she noted. “There was a huge strike which went on for six months in our communities, and the Israeli army actually sieged five villages for six months and blocked food and milk for the children. At the end, they gave up and we still refused to take Israeli citizenship, so we have no right of voting or of participating as an Israeli. On paper we are defined as stateless…because by Israeli law, they also forbid us to be active Syrian citizens.” Asked whether she believes that Israeli practices in the Golan amount to the crime of apartheid, she responded, “Of course, yes, I would say that. It’s obvious in so many aspects and details of life, in extremely basic things like electricity and water. It’s our own water, and also this is the reason that Israel wants to keep the Golan, not only because of its strategic placement, but because it’s basically their whole supply of water, their biggest supply of water. They take our water and they sell it to us for four times more. The settler buys it four times cheaper than we buy it. If that’s not apartheid, I don’t know what it is.” Despite all the injustices, Saleh left viewers with an evocative image of what life in the Golan could be like with genuine security and liberation. “A dream—my first image is all the Syrians coming back to their villages and the Golan being full of people again, just like it was, because it had a lot
of communities. We had Bedouins, we had Sunni, Shi’a. Basically, all of the Syrian mosaic was in the Golan, so my dream is for it to be alive again like that and not empty and full of settlements. That’s what it would look like.” —Omar Aziz
Demystifying and Rethinking Jerusalem’s Quarters On March 16, the Balfour Project, the Bethlehem Cultural Festival and the Educational Bookshop in Jerusalem hosted a book launch via Zoom to celebrate the release of Matthew Teller’s new book, Nine Quarters of Jerusalem: A New Biography of the Old City. In a conversation with Mahmoud Muna of the Educational Bookshop, Teller spoke about his personal relationship with Jerusalem, his motivation for writing the book and shared a few stories about Jerusalem that he uncovered during his research. Teller, a non-practicing Jew from London, first visited Jerusalem when he was 11 years old and has returned repeatedly throughout his life. As a British citizen, a White man and a Jew, he noted that he enjoys the privilege of being able to freely travel to Jerusalem and engage its many communities. Over the course of his travels, Teller came to understand that tourism and politics often overshadow the secular and religious life of the diverse city’s inhabitants. Teller thus wanted to write a book that highlights the idea that “the people matter even more than the stones….We should not be overlooking, and particularly not suppress-
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Nakba Commemoration Held on National Mall
A boy looks at a map in Jerusalem’s Old City, on May 10, 2021. A new book questions the validity of how Western maps typically depict the Old City.
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Teller shared a few stories he collected in the book about communities in Jerusalem that are often overlooked by the outside world. For instance, he discussed the small enduring Indian presence centered around the shrine of an influential Punjabi Sufi known as Baba Farid, who reportedly had a mystical experience while traveling to Jerusalem 800 years ago. Teller also highlighted the Karaite Jews, who are not recognized by most mainstream Jews but run the oldest continuously used synagogue in the city. One community that no longer exists in Jerusalem is the Moroccan Mughrabi Quarter, which was bulldozed overnight in 1967 to make room for the plaza in front of the Western Wall. The Mughrabi Quarter was established in the 12th century. Despite the title of his book, Teller made it clear that his writing does not cover all of the different communities represented in Jerusalem. Rather, his overarching goal is simply to highlight the often-overlooked communities of the city and to let them speak about their city for themselves. Nine Quarters of Jerusalem is The Palestinian community held a rally on the National available from Middle East Books Mall on May 15, 2022 to commemorate the 74th and More. —Elisabeth Johnson anniversary of the Nakba.
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ing, the people who live and work” in Jerusalem, he said. During his extensive travels to Jerusalem, Teller realized that the common practice of dividing the city into four quarters (Muslim, Christian, Jewish and Armenian) is an arbitrary and mythological representation of the city. Not only are there no lines or divisions cordoning off different neighborhoods within the city, the lines shown on maps do not even represent concentrations of cultural, ethnic or religious life. As an example, Muna noted that many churches and mosques are located outside of the quarter affiliated with their religion. Teller explained the history of Jerusalem’s division into quarters. According to medieval Arab sources, there were once anywhere from 18 to 39 distinctly recognized communities in the city. Teller noted that the first maps to label distinct ethnic or religious areas of the city were drawn by Europeans in the 19th century, when groups of Protestant evangelists came trying to convert the population. According to his research, the divisions as we know them today first appeared on a map drawn by the British evangelist George Williams in 1849 and have been acknowledged on Western maps since. In addition to religion, Teller noted that splitting the city into quarters suited the British colonial mentality, as it provided a useful way to easily define and divide the native inhabitants.
On May 15, nearly 2,000 Palestinian supporters gathered at the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall to commemorate the 74th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe), when 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced in 1948 to enable the creation of the State of Israel. At the rally, which occurred four days after the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by an Israeli sniper, many in the crowd carried posters displaying the image of the 51-year-old veteran correspondent for Al Jazeera. Sporting keffiyeh scarfs, waving Palestinian flags and carrying signs reading “Stop the Occupation” and “Justice for Shireen,” protesters and several speakers from the Palestinian Youth Movement denounced the continuing occupation and confiscation of Palestinian land by the Israeli government. Palestinians at the rally also demanded their right to return to their ancestral homeland, a right Israel has continuously denied them since 1948.
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Even though Abu Akleh was “killed by bullets paid for by American taxpayers, there is no outrage whatsoever from this country,” Rev. Graylan Hagler told the crowd. “As we talk about the resistance in Ukraine, let’s talk about war crimes in Israel…and apartheid.” The rally was organized by the Palestinian Youth Movement, American Muslims for Palestine, the U. S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. —Elaine Pasquini
Can the U.S. and Iran Finalize a New Nuclear Deal? The National Iranian American Council held a virtual event on May 10 to assess the obstacles to the U.S. and Iran finalizing a renewed nuclear deal. Negotiations to rejuvenate the multilateral Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), abdicated by the Trump administration, have been ongoing for more than a year. A new deal is all but agreed upon, but Iran’s instance that its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) be removed from the U.S.’ list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) is stalling talks. Tyler Cullis, an attorney specializing in U.S. economic sanctions at Ferrari & Associates, said Iran always believed the IRGC would be removed from the terror list as part of any nuclear deal and is surprised the U.S. is dragging its feet on the matter. As such, Tehran is leery about dropping its request or offering Washington a concession in return. “It’s really hard for Iran to give something up that it thought it was getting,” Cullis commented. The IRGC is the only military of a foreign country designated as a FTO by the U.S., as the list is typically reserved for non-state actors. The Trump administration made the unprecedented move of adding the group to the terrorist list in 2019 as part of its “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran. Ellie Geranmayeh, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said the Biden administration’s reluctance to rescind the designation is largely “a matter of politics, not policy.” The White House seems to be hoping for a way to reconstitute the nuclear deal without incurring JUNE/JULY 2022
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Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi speaks the National Nuclear Technology Day exhibition at the International Conference Center in Tehran, on April 9, 2022. political damage, she noted, even as it faces pushback on the proposed deal from Republicans and even a fair number of hawkish Democrats. “It does seem that President Biden wants to have a zero blowback policy on Iran,” Geranmayeh said, adding that she views such an aspiration as unrealistic. An Iran deal “is going to receive major political blowback for any U.S. president,” she opined. Kelsey Davenport, director of nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association, warned that if the White House keeps dragging its feet on solidifying a new deal, it risks matters much graver than political displeasure, such as Iran solidifying its nuclear weapons capabilities or the breakout of a war. In the absence of a deal, there is the “real risk of an escalatory spiral of actions leading to a broader conflict,” she cautioned. The president, Davenport said, can either bite the political bullet and remove the IRGC’s terror designation, or “he can pay a far higher price for being the president that allowed Iran to come to the brink of a nuclear weapon, or started a war to try and stop that [nuclear breakout].” With Iran advancing its nuclear capabilities, Washington must realize a new deal “is the best opportunity we have to roll back Iran’s nuclear program, to reintroduce intrusive monitoring and verification and to ensure that Iran’s pathways to a nuclear weapon remain verifiably blocked,” Davenport added.
The FTO designation is not the only tool the U.S. has to hinder the IRGC, Davenport noted, as there are currently a plethora of other sanctions applicable to the group. “We have other tools to push back against the IRGC,” she said. “We don’t have another good option to address the nuclear crisis.” While Tehran and Washington are both signaling reluctance to budge on the matter of the IRGC’s FTO status, Geranmayeh said diplomats from the European Union and Qatar are working to find a creative solution. She said possibilities include the U.S. partially lifting the IRGC’s terrorist status, or the U.N. Security Council passing a measure regarding the IRGC that is acceptable to both Tehran and Washington. —Dale Sprusansky
Peace Activists Target Lockheed Martin’s Palo Alto Facility In a generic Palo Alto, CA industrial park sits Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center, where the military contractor does research and development for its space division. It is here where, according to the company’s website, they “create game-changing technologies.” Nobody would argue with that assertion, as the company has many notable accomplishments, such as the development of “foundational technology that fired the first submarine-launched ballistic missile.” More recently, the company was instrumental in the development of the now con-
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overseas and your victims are dots on a screen, with your mouse you take aim like a video game, and you can’t hear their terror-filled screams. Drones, drones in the sky, with the purpose of killing they fly, and their bombs when they hit off the target a bit, many innocent people will die.” —Phil Pasquini
STAFF PHOTO P. PASQUINI
Why Political Parties Aren’t Gaining Traction in Arab World
Activists read a petition imploring Lockheed Martin to transition away from producing military hardware.
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rious for being used in attacks that result in civilian deaths. In one of its more infamous and deadlier moments, one of the company’s 500-pound laser-guided Mk 82 bombs called the GBU-12 Paveway II was used by the Saudi Arabian military in August of 2018 to bomb a school bus in Yemen, killing dozens of children. The demonstration concluded with the Raging Grannies singing a song about how the company’s drones are used by the U.S. Air Force and CIA in their ongoing campaigns around the globe: “Now killing’s a breeze when you’re safe
YASSINE GAIDI/ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES
troversial stealth F-35 joint strike fighter jet, as well as the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), an anti-ballistic missile defense system designed to shoot down short-, medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles. It is precisely because of these developments that activists and pacifists from Code Pink, Pacific Life Community, the San Jose Peace and Justice Center and the Raging Grannies marched to the Advanced Technology Center on April 15 to present a petition signed by 4,100 people urging the company to shift from weapons development and manufacturing to peaceful industries. The petition represents the desires of more than 100 worldwide organizations that have endorsed the #StopLockheedMartin campaign. The group of 20 activists marched from a major intersection in the downtown area to the facility, where they were met by a security detail that barred them from entering the property. Before turning over the petition to a company security official who promised to pass it along, three members of the group read a general statement aloud next to the Lockheed Martin sign. Lockheed Martin has long been known for bloating U.S. defense spending. For the F35 program alone, in 2007 the company selfreported overbilling the government to the tune of $265 million in an “accounting error.” The company’s weapons are also noto-
A decade after massive popular protests swept the Arab world, authoritarianism is still prevalent across the region and political parties have largely failed to create new spaces for civic action. This reality prompted the Wilson Center to host a webinar on May 4 to offer a broad assessment as to why the 2010-2011 Arab Spring and subsequent uprisings have not given birth to powerful political parties in the region. Marina Ottaway, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noted that there is no dearth of political parties across the Arab world. In fact, the past decade has seen an abundance of parties emerge onto the scene in many countries, to the point where she believes “the problem is that there are too many parties.” On the heels of the various uprisings, seemingly endless individuals created their own parties, making it impossible for the citizenry to coalesce behind a shared vision,
Tunisians gather in the capital of Tunis on April 10, 2022 to protest against President Kais Saied’s decision to dissolve parliament. Many fear Tunisia is rapidly losing the democratic gains it accomplished over the past decade.
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HUMAN RIGHTS National Press Club Honors Slain Journalist Shireen Abu Akleh
son Brig. Gen. Ran Kochav told Army Radio that Abu Akleh and her colleague Ali alSamoudi, who was shot in the back and is in stable condition, were “armed with cameras.” Both journalists were wearing helmets and vests clearly identifying them as members of the press when they were shot. To honor Abu Akleh, the National Press Club in Washington, DC observed a minute of silence for her on May 12, after which Ab-
STAFF PHOTO PHIL PASQUINI
The killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by an Israeli sniper on May 11 has outraged journalists and human rights defenders around the world. The 51-year-old veteran correspondent for
Al Jazeera Washington Bureau Chief Abderrahim Foukara (l) and Emily Wilkins of the Na‐ tional Press Club’s Board of Governors hold an event to honor slain Palestinian‐American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, in Washington, DC on May 12, 2022. Al Jazeera was reporting on an early morning Israeli raid in the occupied West Bank town of Jenin when she was fatally shot. Despite Israel’s claim of not targeting the journalist, Israel’s chief military spokesper-
PHOTO COURTESY BILL MCGRATH
Ottaway pointed out. The myriad parties “don’t aggregate the interests of their constituencies,” she said, so “they end up not representing anybody.” The weakness of political parties is often enforced and exploited by the state to preserve the status quo, explained Amr Hamzawy, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center and a former member of the Egyptian parliament. “Arab governments have always made a priority of controlling formal political spaces and not allowing political parties to thrive,” he said. It’s logical that attempts to organize politically following the uprisings struggled, Hamzawy said, as it’s exceedingly difficult for neophyte parties to suddenly fill a decades-long political void. As a multitude of individuals and parties contested over post-uprising life, establishment political, military and business leaders were able to swoop in and undermine the goals of the protesters, he noted. In a way, the overflourishing of new political life helped create an opportunity for the old forces to reemerge, gain control and again clamp down on political organizing. Political parties, however, are not always innocent victims of the state, Hamzawy noted. In some cases, particularly in the 2019 “second wave” uprisings that took place in Iraq and Lebanon, political parties themselves were the target of the people’s ire. This, he explained, is because protesters viewed parties as representative of the corruption, abuse of power and sectarian politics that sent them into the streets. Ottaway stressed that the failure of political parties to gain momentum is not emblematic of a scarcity of political life in the Arab world. Instead, she noted that public mobilizations now tend to happen sporadically, only to flame out due to a lack of backing from institutionalized parties. If they have any hope of capturing the public and stirring real change in the region, Hamzawy said political parties must begin forming coalitions across societal and economic lines. Many parties tend to over represent urban, middle class individuals, he noted, leaving rural and poor citizens to find alternative forms of representation. —Dale Sprusansky
derrahim Foukara, bureau chief of Al Jazeera in Washington, spoke briefly to reporters and friends of the slain journalist. “Al Jazeera is clear in its position that the bullet that killed Shireen Abu Akleh was an
For the past nine years, the Nakba has been observed dur‐ ing mid‐May in Northfield, MN using a procession. As names of destroyed Palestinian vil‐ lages are read, participants insert a small flag into a 4‐by‐8 styrofoam map of Israel/Pales‐ tine. A bell is rung as the name of each village is read through a microphone. The resulting sound attracts curious folks who are walking along the main downtown street. There are a few speeches explaining what happened in 1948, and finally an open‐mic session. The event is organized by Northfielders for Justice in Palestine/Israel. This year’s event took place on Saturday, May 14. WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS
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Israeli bullet,” Foukara pointed out, calling for a “thorough, transparent and fair investigation.” Al Jazeera, the bureau chief said, wants an end to impunity, not just for those involved in the killing of Abu Akleh, but for those involved in the killing or targeting of journalists anywhere. Foukara reiterated the words of U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres that “without press freedom there is no freedom.” Abu Akleh was an “intrepid and amazing human being,” Foukara said. “We will all miss her and hope this will mark a turning point in the long pattern the world has known of killing journalists and of violating press freedom.” —Elaine Pasquini
Tunisia’s Educational System Faces Many Challenges
Children attend Tunisia’s 36th annual International Book Fair, in the capital of Tunis, on Nov. 16, 2021.
On April 26, the Middle East Institute’s North Africa and Sahel Program and the North African Policy Initiative (NAPI) cohosted a panel of young Tunisian professionals to discuss their country’s educational challenges and opportunities. NAPI director Jean-Louis Romanet Perroux, moderator of the lively discussion, noted that education in Tunisia—where 40 percent of the population is under the age of 25—is a heart-felt issue and ranks high in terms of the priorities of Tunisians. Education was a trademark of Tunisia after gaining independence from France. “The large investment in education, reforms and the forward-looking attitude toward education distinguished Tunisia from all the countries in the region,” Perroux noted. However, the quality of the system has declined over the years through neglect and lack of foresight, even though Tunisia continues to spend a large share of its GDP— among the highest in the region—on education, he said. Nourjahen Gala-Ali is a project manager for the NGO Lights, Camera, Learn!, which works with children in underserved regions around the world to create fun and educational content through filmmaking. One aspect of Tunisia’s educational system that needs particular attention is the connection between education and employment, she said.
In 2019—before COVID-19—the country’s official unemployment rate was 15 percent. Currently, it’s almost 17 percent overall, but 36 percent of young people are unemployed and 33 percent of young graduates don’t have jobs. “People told us in order to get a job you need to get a degree first, but people do have degrees and even with that they are not getting employment,” Gala-Ali noted. “Tunisian schools do not prepare you to be employed and do not equip you with the necessary skills that a 21st century employee needs to have.” School infrastructure is one of the shortcomings that needs to be addressed, GalaAli explained. Some schools—even in cities—don’t have water or electricity, while many rural schools don’t have functioning computers or adequate software. Walid Hedidar, an education development specialist currently working in strategic philanthropy and social impact, explained that student dropouts are a disturbing problem for the country. Some 100,000 students drop out of school every year due to poor access to schools, poor infrastructure, excessive repetition of grades and the inability to identify students at risk. “I think this is a repercussion of many years of stagnation of the education system,” Hedidar said. Software engineer Mariem Bchir is co-
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founder of LEAPS Academy, a teacher training start-up based in Tunisia. She emphasized the importance of providinge “soft skills or skills like critical thinking or entrepreneurial thinking” that are applicable to multiple professions. Mehdi Cherif is the co-founder and current coordinator of Fahmologia, a non-profit initiative to promote scientific communication in Tunisia. Educational reforms alone won’t solve the country’s economic issues, he argued, as broader challenges must also be addressed. Presently in Tunisia, he said, many job offerings are related to international companies, and “it means that these businesses could leave and we’re putting ourselves at risk economically of having the rug pulled out from under our feet.” There is also the “brain drain” issue of students and professionals with the financial means going abroad and not returning, he noted. “I would like to see an educational system that is empowered by economic reforms,” Cherif said. “We have to reduce unemployment…inequality of conditions…so that every Tunisian student can explore his or her interest, be it in philosophy, art or medicine, without fearing for their future. We must allow them to contribute as much as they want and as much as they can to society.” —Elaine Pasquini JUNE/JULY 2022
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DIPLOMATIC DOINGS
Dina Kawar, Jordan’s ambassador to the United States, has worked on refugee issues throughout her extensive career, including at the United Nations where she served as her country’s permanent representative from 2014 to 2016. On April 8, the diplomat discussed Jordan’s refugee policies at the Milken Institute School of Public Health in Washington, DC. The Middle East Institute, the AlSaid Foundation, George Washington University’s Arab Student Association and the school’s No Lost Generation organization co-sponsored the talk. Sharing borders with Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Israel and the Palestinian West Bank, Jordan has been in the middle of turmoil and hosted refugees for decades. In addition to 2.3 million Palestinian refugees from the 1948 and 1967 wars, some 1.3 million Syrians and tens of thousands of Iraqis also reside in Jordan, Kawar noted. All together, refugees comprise one-third of the country’s population. The ambassador said her countrymen sympathize with the refugees in their midst. “93 percent of Jordanians surveyed in a recent [U.N.] poll expressed a positive attitude toward refugees,” she pointed out. However, the same poll found that Jordanians are weary of the strain refugees place on their country’s limited natural and financial resources. COVID-19, rising food and fuel prices and international donor fatigue has made supporting refugees via handouts unsustainable, Kawar warned. To assist those striving for self-sufficiency, Jordan has issued 288,000 work permits to refugees. “It not only enhances their own lives, but contributes to the community in which they are living,” she said. Despite the stress refugees place on education, health, water and other services, “we do not force anyone to go home,” Kawar stated. “It is part of our ethics to not force anyone to leave and…no refugee will go back unless and until there is some sort JUNE/JULY 2022
KHALIL MAZRAAWI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Jordan’s Ambassador on Country’s Refugee Policies
Residents of the Zaatari refugee camp, 50 miles north of Amman, on Nov. 19, 2021. of stability and security.” Kawar stressed the importance of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which provides aid to Palestinians in Jordan and elsewhere through health clinics and schools. “It’s been an ongoing struggle to keep UNRWA alive in the sense of funding,” she noted. “We feel that UNRWA has to remain alive until we get into solving and finding a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian issue.” In 2018 the ambassador worked with the U.N. General Assembly to create the Global Compact on Refugees, a framework for building a sustainable solution to integrating and resettling refugees. “One has to be aware that whether you are Ukrainian, Yemeni, Iraqi or Syrian, it’s the same tragedy, it’s the same bad story and something that has to be dealt with,” she said. Education for young refugees is of crucial concern “because once you educate the youth then they find their way in life,” the ambassador said. “I hope there are more efforts from countries that are able to help, especially since there are some amazing refugee talents and young people who want to go and finish their education and contribute.” Unfortunately, education is expensive and this is an issue that warrants the attention of all governments, Kawar said. Despite the efforts of Jordanian officials and international agencies, reports indicate that 80 percent of Syrian refugees in
Jordan—many of them children—live below the poverty line. —Elaine Pasquini
Crowds Enjoy Return of Embassy Open House Tours After a two-year hiatus due to the coronavirus pandemic, crowds of tourists and locals alike experienced the food, culture and history of Washington, DC’s many embassies with the return of Cultural Tourism DC’s Around the World Embassy Tour on May 7. Despite unseasonably cold and rainy weather, throngs lined up early to view the artwork, furnishings and architecture of the diplomatic missions. The highlight for many was the delicious cuisine of the different regions, along with musical performances. At Algeria’s Embassy, musicians entertained the long line of visitors waiting to enter with traditional Chaabi, North African Arabic music. Once inside, guests were treated to plates of couscous with meat and vegetables, facilitating what is known in some circles as “couscous diplomacy.” Ladies and girls visiting Pakistan’s Embassy waited patiently to have delicate henna designs created on their hands by an expert artist. This special art—mehndi in Urdu—has been practiced in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia for over 5,000 years. Some 30 embassies participated in the day-long event, including Egypt, Oman and Iraq. —Elaine Pasquini
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Middle East Books Review All books featured in this section are available from Middle East Books and More, the nation’s preeminent bookstore on the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy. www.MiddleEastBooks.com • (202) 939-6050 ext. 1101
Reaching for the Heights: The Inside Story of a Secret Attempt to Reach a Syrian-Israeli Peace By Frederic C. Hof, United States Institute of Peace Press, 2022, hardcover, 216 pp. MEB $24.95
Reviewed by Walter L. Hixson Efforts to forge a peace agreement between Israel and Syria have long been overshadowed by the extensive history of failed attempts to secure a deal between Israelis and Palestinians. In this revealing insider account, Frederic C. Hof reflects on his ultimately unsuccessful mission of mediation aimed at securing an accord between Israel and Syria during the Obama administration. Hof, a decorated Vietnam veteran turned State Department diplomat, claims that a framework for peace between the two countries was in fact established. The proposed deal entailed securing an agreement to shift Syria’s strategic orientation away from Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas in return for full recovery of the Syrian Golan Heights that Israel seized in the June 1967 Six-Day War. However, negotiations on the proposed accord collapsed in 2011 as the Arab Spring unfolded and Assad began to violently repress his domestic critics.
Contributing editor Walter L. Hixson is the author of Architects of Repression: How Israel and Its Lobby Put Racism, Violence and Injustice at the Center of US Middle East Policy (available from Middle East Books and More), along with several other books and journal articles. He has been a professor of history for 36 years, achieving the rank of distinguished professor. 64
Hof’s book is rich in detail and revealing insider accounts, but it is fundamentally flawed by his pro-Western and pro-Israeli bias. Hof, who worked for the Obama administration from 2009 to 2011, blames the failure to achieve an accord entirely on Assad. He argues that Assad’s brutal response to protests rendered him “unqualified to speak for the Syrian people on matters of war and peace,” thus destroying the prospects of an agreement. Even as he puts the onus entirely on the Syrian leader, Hof acknowledges that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was “not a politician inclined toward taking big political risks.” Netanyahu, in fact, displayed more reluctance than Assad to enter the proposed accord, Hof notes, which in any case the prime minister insisted would have to be approved by an Israeli popular referendum. The reality is that everything in Netanyahu’s and his country’s history made it highly unlikely that Israel would hand back the Syrian territory. Hof worked in close association with the diplomat Dennis Ross and appears to have
imbibed Ross’ suspicion of Arabs and his well-chronicled pro-Israeli bias. There is no question, however, that Hof fervently hoped and genuinely believed that, while IsraelPalestine talks were hopelessly stymied, the prospect of a breakthrough between Israel and Syria was achievable. He chides Obama for failing to make a last-ditch effort to head off Assad’s campaign of domestic repression and to salvage the potential peace accord, yet Hof admits it is unlikely that Obama (who wanted the Assad regime to fall) would have been successful in such an effort. In retrospect, it is difficult to believe that the prospect of a full-blown Syrian-Israeli peace accord entailing the return of annexed territory was more than a pipe dream. Hof should be admired nonetheless for his sincere and tireless efforts to forge an accord. In a region notorious for the failure of diplomacy, Hof was tenacious in his efforts and deeply laments his inability to broker a lasting agreement. Despite its flawed conclusions, Reaching for the Heights is valuable for its richly detailed history of the effort to achieve an Israeli-Syrian peace. In addition to illuminating the roles of Assad and Netanyahu, Hof offers insight into the perspectives of Ross, Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, then-Senator John Kerry and former Senator George Mitchell, who was Obama’s Middle East envoy and Hof’s close friend who chose him for the mediation initiative. Published by the U.S. Institute of Peace, the book opens with a foreword by the bipartisan duo of veteran establishment national security elites Madeleine Albright and Stephen Hadley. The book is comprised of 11 chapters, as well as reprints of key documents. In 2019 President Donald Trump—much to Netanyahu’s delight—recognized the Golan Heights as Israeli territory. In another example of his bias, Hof declares absurdly that the Golan Heights was ultimately a “gift to Israel by the Assad family,” a conclusion that blames Syria, the victim, in defiance of the indisputable reality that Israel seized the Golan in 1967, annexed the territory in 1981 and has illegally occupied the land for the past 55 years. JUNE/JULY 2022
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Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders & Intellectuals Speak Out Edited by Ramzy Baroud and Ilan Pappé, Clarity Press, 2022, paperback, 462 pp. MEB $28
Reviewed by Alex Bustos
Following Israel’s 10-day assault on Gaza in May 2021, Palestinian voices burst onto our screens describing their lived reality. While Western audiences hearing directly from Palestinians en masse —perhaps for the first time ever—was a welcome change, Palestinian commentators still had to fight to define their own struggle in mainstream outlets that rely heavily on a distorted, proIsrael framework. Our Vision for Liberation, edited by Dr. Ramzy Baroud and Professor Ilan Pappé, presents a bold challenge to the discussion on Palestine. This anthology is made up of a diverse range of Palestinian leaders and intellectuals who situate the Palestinian struggle against Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid, while also giving personal accounts of their resistance against this reality. What makes this work unique is its emphasis on overlooked forms of resistance. Adopting a “history from below” approach, we see that resistance has many expressions across different professions and arenas. Including voices from the fields of archaeology, film, journalism, science, cultural tourism and embroidery, Our Vision for Liberation avoids the cliched narratives of
Alex Bustos is assistant director at Palestine Deep Dive. JUNE/JULY 2022
Palestinian resistance belonging only to official political parties or factions. For instance, Samah Jabr’s concept of “liberation psychology” is centered on therapy as a way of helping an embattled population heal, while Hanady Halawani offers women’s educational programs in Jerusalem despite intense Israeli repression. Terry Boullata’s chapter on Palestinian cultural tourism declares, “our heritage has always been the central pillar of our cultural identity and the emblem of our pride.” She asserts that strengthening it “means reviving the past which lives within us and pointing us toward a future that will embed new concepts of Palestine on the global cultural map.” The use of the word “engaged” in the title is no accident. A theme which runs throughout the book is the need to reclaim Palestinian liberation from the failings of the official Palestinian leadership. Rejecting the postOslo framework of “peace,” which hollowed out Palestinian demands and reduced liberation to refer simply to the West Bank and Gaza, Our Vision for Liberation includes key voices from Palestinian authors both inside historic Palestine and from the diaspora. Samaa Abu Sharar writes from the per-
spective of Palestinians in Lebanon, Anuar Majluf Issa tells the story of Palestinians in Chile (the largest Palestinian community outside of the Middle East), Randa AbdelFattah and Samah Sabawi share perspectives from Australia, Dr. Ghada Karmi and Farah Nabulsi from the UK, Dr. Sami Al-Arian from Turkey and Laila Al-Marayati from the United States. Ibrahim G. Aoude analyzes the destructive changes in language following the signing of the Oslo Accords, while Jamal Juma’ laments how Oslo undermined international solidarity and the ways Palestinians resisted with effective grassroots organizing during the Second Intifada. Speaking across multiple geographies and different generations, these contributors offer readers a wide range of Palestinian experiences, even as they collectively share the trauma of dispossession. Importantly, Our Vision for Liberation features voices from ’48 Palestinians—those who live in modern-day Israel. Reem Talhami, Hanin Zoabi, Awad Abdelfattah and Johnny Mansour each give voice to the Palestinians who grew up as unwanted minorities inside a state built upon their dis-
www.MiddleEastBooks.com Nonfiction • Literature • Cookbooks Children’s Books • Arabic Books • Films Greeting Cards • Palestinian Solidarity Items Pottery • Olive Oil • Food Products Monday-Thursday: 12 p.m.-5 p.m. Friday and Saturday: 11 a.m.-7 p.m 1902 18th St. NW • Washington, DC 20009 bookstore@wrmea.org (202) 939-6050 ext. 1 WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS
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possession. Their voices upend official Israeli propaganda about the country being the “only democracy in the Middle East,” and instead lifts up those who know Israel’s brutality only too well from the inside. Including these voices further demonstrates how Palestinian liberation is incomplete without incorporating the entire Palestinian body politic. Despite the Palestinian struggle being one of the most iconic and easily recognizable in the world, many Palestinians have long argued that they are denied the right to speak for themselves and to define their own narrative. Our Vision for Liberation is therefore an important corrective within the growing literature on Palestine.
Apartheid South Africa! Apartheid Israel!: Ticking the Boxes of Occupation and Dispossession By Brian J. Brown, independently published, 2022, paperback, 250 pp. MEB $25
Reviewed by Steve France
South African born, the Rev. Brian J. Brown helped bring down the original apartheid system—goading Christians to keep faith with the teachings of Jesus Christ. Now, Brown says, a similar “moment of truth” has arrived for followers of the Way of Jesus. “The fires of the South African apartheid struggle burn as fiercely in today’s Pales-
Steve France is an activist and writer affil‐ iated with Episcopal Peace Fellowship, Palestine‐Israel Network. 66
tine,” he writes in Apartheid South Africa! Apartheid Israel! And that, he argues, confronts Christians with a “fresh crisis of Gospel integrity.” Of course, few people want to believe there’s apartheid in the Holy Land. That’s why Brown’s book title is as blunt as a man crying “fire!” He builds his case for emergency action by dissecting the similarities and differences between the former apartheid state of South Africa and the ever-harsher racist system in Israel/Palestine today. Complementing the irrefutable findings of the many reports published since 2020 by global human rights groups, Brown’s analysis draws on the long arc of his life under apartheid, and the notable success he and comrades such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Rev. Allan Boesak registered in moving reluctant Western churches to fight against South African apartheid. A White Methodist minister, Brown experienced first-hand what he calls the “denialism” of church leaders—the nuances of hypocrisy and heresy exhibited in evading the truth on the ground, and avoiding the imperative of standing up for justice. Brown powerfully indicts today’s Christian Zionist perversions of the faith, from the apocalyptic imaginings of fundamentalists to the blind eye that many mainstream Christians turn to Israel’s crimes against Palestinians in a misguided gesture of respect for Jews. He makes clear that Christians are not doing Palestinians a favor when they stand against Israel’s apartheid; rather, they are acting against the deadly corruption of their own faith, just as they were in the case of South Africa. The author provides an unusual set of comparisons between the apartheid psychologies of the oppressor group in each society: racial theologies and tribal myths used to justify their positions of supremacy over Blacks or Arabs. Examples include the “Day of the Covenant”—a national holiday that commemorated the 1838 Battle of Blood River, when “God fought for the Boers,” who defeated the Black Zulu nation, which was expected to accept, if not honor, its supposedly God-ordained inferior status. As for facts on the ground, Brown describes 37 instances of systematic “violaWASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS
tions of human rights of Palestinians and of international law.” With meticulous detail, he distinguishes the differences between apartheid in South Africa and apartheid in Israel, although he notes it is the “dispossession of land, nationality, human rights and freedoms” that has driven the liberation struggles in both cases. In the aftermath of victory in South Africa, Brown was moved by Tutu and Nelson Mandela to take up the Palestinian cause. He harkened to Mandela’s belief in the “indivisibility of freedom,” that no one in the world should be oppressed by another—or by the heavy sin of oppressing others. Thus, Mandela often said neither he, nor his people, would really be free as long as the Palestinians weren’t. And so, Brown applied to the Holy Land lessons he learned from the Christian liberation theology of the South African Black Consciousness Movement, preserved in the timeless, urgent language of the 1985 Kairos Document (“Kairos” being a biblical Greek word for the “Moment of Truth”). His message will resonate strongly with many Christians, but Brown fervently believes it applies to everyone. Indeed, his whole point is that identity should never be an excuse for violence, hatred or suspicion of the other. Moreover, he hopes non-Christians will not be put off by his theological language. His book is nothing if not critical of Christians and their churches, who through history so often persecuted others, especially Jews. Such arrogance was what Brown was taught as a child and continued to believe all the way through his studies in an evangelical seminary. The crucial event that liberated him from belief in an exclusive Christianity was his association with the legendary Beyers Naudé, who was a senior leader of the pro-apartheid (White Afrikaans) Dutch Reformed Church—until he turned against apartheid as contrary to the Gospel. After he was defrocked by the DRC, Naudé formed the radically antiapartheid Christian Institute of Southern Africa. Brown became his chief of staff. Brown knows that Christian action against Israel’s apartheid can’t replicate the South African precedent, as Judaism and Islam are the predominant faiths of the land. JUNE/JULY 2022
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However, he says the voice of the awakened church is part of a “convergence of three forces: of human rights, international law and the churches that speak truth to power.” The truth they are speaking is “prophetic,” he says, explaining that the truthful word of God, when spoken, never returns empty. That is his faith.
Yet In the Dark Streets Shining: A Palestinian Story of Hope and Resilience in Bethlehem By Bishara Awad and Mercy Aiken, Cliffrose Press, 2021, paperback, 217 pp. MEB $12
Reviewed by Daoud Kuttab
One of the recurring Israeli excuses for refusing Palestinian refugees the right of return is the contention that they were never violently forced to leave their homes and lands. This theory persists in some Zionist circles, even though the historical record is full of information about the brutal displacement of Palestinians at the hands of Jewish militias in 1948. While an estimated 750,000 Palestinians fled their homes during the first year of the Nakba, it is often forgotten that some refused to abandon their homes under any condition.
Award‐winning Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab is founder and director general of the Community Media Network in Amman, Jordan. His book, Sesame Street, Palestine: Taking Sesame Street to the Children of Palestine, describes the ups and downs of producing a world‐famous program for children enduring Israeli occupation. JUNE/JULY 2022
N E W A R R I VA L S Palestine Across Millennia: A History of Literacy, Learning and Educational Revolutions by Nur Masalha, I.B. Tauris, 2022, paperback, 352 pp. MEB $40. In this magisterial cultural history of the Palestinians, Nur Masalha illuminates the entire history of Palestinian learning with specific reference to writing, education, literary production and intellectual revolutions in the country. The book introduces Palestine’s long cultural heritage to demonstrate that the place is not just a “holy land” for monotheistic religions. Rather, the country evolved to become a major international site of classical education and knowledge production in multiple languages. The cultural saturation of the country is found then, not solely in landmark mosques, churches and synagogues, but in scholarship, historic schools, colleges, famous international libraries and archival centers. This unique book unites these renowned institutions, movements and multiple historical periods for the first time, presenting them as part of a cumulative and incremental intellectual advancement rather than disconnected periods of educational excellence. Hollywood and Israel: A History by Tony Shaw and Giora Goodman, Columbia University Press, 2022, paperback, 368 pp. MEB $35. From Frank Sinatra’s early pro-Zionist rallying to Steven Spielberg’s present-day “peacemaking,” Hollywood has long enjoyed a “special relationship” with Israel. This book offers a groundbreaking account of this relationship, both on and off the screen. Shaw and Goodman investigate the many ways in which Hollywood’s moguls, directors and actors have supported or challenged Israel for more than seven decades. They explore the complex story of Israel’s relationship with American Jewry and illuminate how media and soft power have shaped the Arab-Israeli conflict. Drawing on a vast range of archival sources to demonstrate how show business has played a pivotal role in crafting the U.S.-Israel alliance, the authors probe the influence of Israeli diplomacy on Hollywood’s output and lobbying activities. Bringing the narrative up to the present moment, Shaw and Goodman contend that the Hollywood-Israel relationship might now be at a turning point. Hollywood and Israel shows the world’s entertainment capital is an important player in international affairs. Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy by Stephen Wertheim, Belknap Press, 2022, paperback, 272 pp. MEB $20. For most of its history, the United States avoided making political and military commitments that would entangle it in global power politics. Then, suddenly, it conceived a new role for itself as an armed superpower—and never looked back. In Tomorrow, the World, Stephen Wertheim traces America’s transformation to World War II, right before the attack on Pearl Harbor. As late as 1940, the small coterie formulating U.S. foreign policy wanted British preeminence to continue. Axis conquests swept away their assumptions, leading them to conclude that America should extend its form of law and order across the globe, and back it at gunpoint. No one really favored “isolationism,” a term introduced by advocates of armed supremacy to burnish their cause. We live, Wertheim warns, in the world these men created. A sophisticated and impassioned account that questions the wisdom of U.S. supremacy, Tomorrow, the World reveals the intellectual path that brought us to today’s endless wars. WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS
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Such families also endured tremendous physical costs and personal tragedy. Yet In the Dark Streets Shining is the story of the family of Elias and Huda Awad, as narrated by their son Bishara. In excruciating detail, Bishara relates how his family refused to leave their home in Musrara, just outside the walls of the Old City, in May 1948. Many others, including his two uncles (one of them my father), fled to the Jordanian city of Zarqa. Elias, who was born in Jaffa and the father of seven children, was shot dead shortly after refusing to move, most likely by Jewish snipers. The Musrara neighborhood would eventually become part of Israeli West Jerusalem and the Awads would never have a chance to properly rebury their father, who was quickly buried in their family’s backyard. Bishara relates the days, weeks and months later when they were homeless, living literally on the grace of Palestinian families in Jerusalem. For months, the family was sheltering in a dark room that a local school principal allowed them to use. Bishara’s mother, Huda, used her nursing skills to try and bring some food to the family, but eventually Bishara and the boys were put in an orphanage, Dar al Awlad, and the girls were sent to the Dar al Tifel school, originally established to take in children whose parents were killed in the Deir Yassin massacre. Those early days were so difficult that at one point it took extreme courage on Bishara’s part just to lead a small protest against the orphanage administration to demand the right of eating one egg a month. The protest succeeded for a few months, but the administration eventually reversed course. While growing up as orphans could easily have turned the Awads into angry fighters wanting to avenge their father’s death, the Christian faith of their mother, uncle and grandmother rechanneled their anger into public work, non-violent struggle, spiritual service and a zeal for education. The book chronicles the Awads’ pursuit of education both locally (at St. George’s in Jerusalem) and in the U.S. Bishara eventually returned to Palestine and ran an orphanage school in Beit Jala, which he re68
named Hope School, where eggs were provided regularly to students. He later established the Bethlehem Bible College, along with his youngest brother Rev. Alex Awad. Together, they became leaders of a Palestinian Christian effort to theologically combat Christian Zionism. The book also tells the story of another brother, Mubarak, who returned to Jerusalem to help establish a center for non-violence. Mubarak, referred to by some as the Palestinian Gandhi, was eventually deported by Israel. His non-violent methodology has been partially credited for the launch of the First Intifada, which was initiated as a peaceful uprising. Yet In the Dark Streets Shining also offers the dramatic story of the Israeli reoccupation of Bethlehem during the Second Intifada. Bishara’s son and his pregnant wife were trying to reach a hospital in Jerusalem when Israeli tanks surrounded Bethlehem. The couple eventually made it to safety and their child was born on April 5, 2002. Elias Awad may have been killed in 1948, but a great-granddaughter of his, Layyaar Sami Awad, is now an energetic college student fulfilling the subtitle of the book: “A Palestinian Story of Hope and Resilience in Bethlehem.” The Awads show that the hope of freedom continues to shine, even in the darkest of Palestine’s streets.
Internment: A Novel By Samira Ahmed, Little, Brown and Company, 2020, paperback, 400 pp. MEB $10.99
Reviewed by Delinda C. Hanley From the first page of Internment, this reader felt queasy, right along with the 17year-old Muslim American narrator, Layla Amin, whose neighbors in a small college town are at a book burning. Those books include poetry written by her recently fired professor father, as well as other “banned books, dangerous books.” Set in a horrifying near-future United States, Samira Ahmed’s best-selling novel doesn’t seem far-fetched. Not when daily news reports reveal that parents, school boards or even
Delinda C. Hanley is executive editor of the Washington Report. WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS
governors are initiating book bans and threatening criminal charges against public school librarians and teachers for making certain books available. In fact, schools and libraries have long been the canary in the coal mine in the United States. Back in the Oct./Nov. 1999 issue of the Washington Report, I wrote about phone calls and notes we received from librarians and teachers fighting selfappointed “thought police,” including parents, staff or patrons who purged our magazines from shelves and class discussions about conflict resolution because they “disturbed” readers. Samira Ahmed’s book depicts what can happen when “thought police” are given free rein. Before long, Layla and her family have a lot more than book burnings to worry about. In quick succession, starting two and half years earlier, an Islamophobe who vowed to make America great again was elected president. Nazis marched on DC, a Muslim ban was enacted and U.S. borders were closed to stop chain migration and “illegals.” Muslims like her parents were fired from public sector jobs. Marking “Muslim” as your religion on the census resulted in your name being added to a registry. Like the Japanese Americans during WWII, Muslim American citizens on that registry are rounded up, relocated and locked in internment camps. “I don’t understand how this is happening,” Layla whispers to her parents, her voice barely a scratch, as they pack the one bag they each may carry as they’re forced to leave their home. “How can we be dangerous to the state? A poet, a chiJUNE/JULY 2022
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ropractor and a high school senior?” Her father, a philosopher as well as a poet, explains, “It’s not about danger. It’s about fear. People are willing to trade their freedom, even for a false sense of protection…There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” The Amins and other Muslim families are assigned trailers located in segregated blocks divided by ethnic and cultural backgrounds—Arab, South Asian, Persian, Black, etc. But Layla notes, “each of us, to a person, has the same look: abject fear.” Layla looks around the cavernous auditorium where the director of Camp Mobius is stating the rules to new arrivals, and thinks, “Again, I’m struck by the Americanness of the throngs of people. Every race, dozens of ethnicities, different ways of dressing, and, certainly, widely varying opinions about politics and life and Islam. But I guess that’s the old America. Now we all have one thing in common—a religion that makes us enemies of the state. The state all of us are citizens of, the one most of us were born into.” A spoiler alert isn’t required. This all happens in the first chapter! It’s how our feisty heroine meets this shocking fate that is so inspiring. If the state’s hope was to isolate, divide and conquer Muslims behind fences, razor wire and guns, the Muslim American community rallies to save itself. While the older folks organize daycare, schools, book clubs, vegetable plots and exercise classes, Layla and her new friends become daring revolutionaries. America is represented in books, movies and songs as a melting pot, a mixed salad, a shining city on a hill, Layla thinks, as she is hauled away in handcuffs to a secret site after breaking camp rules. “America is the country where a skinny kid with a funny name can defeat the odds and become president. But America doesn’t seem like any of those things anymore. Maybe it never was.” Ahmed’s book, a New York Times best seller, may be written for ages 12 and up but readers of every age will find it a gripping page-turner. And just maybe it will challenge Americans to speak up and resist when they encounter thought police, hate and ignorance. ■ JUNE/JULY 2022
N E W A R R I VA L S Dancing in the Mosque: An Afghan Mother’s Letter to Her Son by Homeira Qaderi, Harper Perennial, 2022, hardcover, 244 pp. MEB $17.99. In the days before Homeira Qaderi gave birth to her son, Siawash, the road to the hospital in Kabul would often be barricaded because of frequent suicide explosions. With the city and the military on edge, it was not uncommon for an armed soldier to point his gun at a pregnant woman’s bulging stomach, terrified that she was hiding a bomb. Frightened and in pain, she was once forced to make her way on foot. Propelled by the love she held for her soon-to-be-born child, Homeira walked through blood and wreckage to reach the hospital doors. But the joy of her beautiful son’s birth was soon overshadowed by other dangers that would threaten her life. No ordinary woman, Homeira refused to cower under the strictures of a misogynistic social order. Defying the law, she risked her freedom to teach children reading and writing and fought for women’s rights. Devastating in its power, Dancing in the Mosque is a mother’s searing letter to a son she was forced to leave behind. In telling her story Homeira challenges readers to reconsider the meaning of motherhood, sacrifice and survival, asking all to consider the lengths they would go to protect themselves, their family and their dignity. Nour’s Secret Library by Wafa’ Tarnowska and Vali Mintzi, Barefoot Books, 2022, paperback, 32 pp. MEB $10. Forced to take shelter when their Syrian city is plagued with bombings, young Nour and her cousin begin to bravely build a secret underground library. Based on the author’s own life experience and inspired by a true story, Nour’s Secret Library is about the power of books to heal, transport and create safe spaces during difficult times. Each page of this children’s book is full of gorgeous illustrations by Romanian artist Vali Mintzi superimposing the colorful world children construct over black-and-white charcoal depictions of a battered city. This book shows the spirit of the children and communicates that no matter the devastation around them, they will still find a way to dream of a better world. Ever Since I Did Not Die by Ramy Al-Asheq, translated by Isis Nusair, edited by Levi Thompson, Seagull Books, 2021, hardcover, 96 pp. MEB $17. Having grown up in a refugee camp in Damascus, Ramy Al-Asheq was imprisoned and persecuted by the Syrian regime in 2011. He was released from jail, only to be recaptured and imprisoned in Jordan. After escaping, he spent two years in Jordan under a fake name and passport, during which he won a literary fellowship that allowed him to travel to Germany in 2014, where he now lives and writes in exile. Through 17 powerful testimonies, Ever Since I Did Not Die vividly depicts what it means to live through war. Exquisitely weaving the past with the present and fond memories with brutal realities, this volume celebrates resistance through words that refuse to surrender and continue to create beauty amidst destruction— one of the most potent ways to survive in the darkest of hours. WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS
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CWS/CARTOONARTS INTERNATIONAL www.cartoonweb.com
CWS/CARTOONARTS INTERNATIONAL www.cartoonweb.com
THE WORLD LOOKS AT THE MIDDLE EAST
The Irish Times, Dublin, Ireland
CWS/CARTOONARTS INTERNATIONAL www.cartoonweb.com
CWS/CARTOONARTS INTERNATIONAL www.cartoonweb.com
De Volkskrant, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Cartoon Movement, Leiden, Netherlands
WWW.OTHERWORDS.ORG
CWS/CARTOONARTS INTERNATIONAL www.cartoonweb.com
Lianhe Zaobao, Singapore, Singapore
www.Otherwords.org
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WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS
Cartoon Movement, Leiden, Netherlands
JUNE/JULY 2022
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Other People’s Mail
TELL YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS WHAT YOU THINK PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS 1600 PENNSYLVANIA AVE. NW WASHINGTON, DC 20500 COMMENT LINE: (202) 456-1111 WWW.WHITEHOUSE.GOV/CONTACT
Compiled by Dale Sprusansky
ANOTHER REASON TO QUESTION U.S. AID TO ISRAEL To The Mercury News, May 18, 2022 Veteran Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was assassinated while covering a recent Israeli raid on the refugee camp of Jenin. She was wearing body armor and a helmet clearly marked “press.” People on the scene blamed an Israeli sniper for her death. Reporters are unwelcomed at these “skirmishes” because they expose the systematic brutality unleashed on the Palestinians who are struggling for their freedom. Albert Einstein warned us about this in his Dec. 4, 1948, letter to the New York Times. We have ignored his warnings and instead financially support Israel as it violates Palestinian human rights and thumbs its nose at international law. U.S. taxpayers give Israel over $10 million a day. It is high time we evaluate our special relationship with Israel. After all, the Palestinians are fighting for their sovereignty just like the Ukrainians. Forrest Cioppa, Walnut Creek, CA
BLINKEN’S HOLLOW WORDS To The Gainesville Sun, April 13, 2022 On April 8, Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated, “Americans are, once again, grieving with the Israeli people in the wake of another deadly terrorist attack.” The U.S. is closely following developments, he continued, and is in contact “with our Israeli partners, with whom we stand resolutely in the face of senseless terrorism and violence.” The U.S. ambassador to Israel stated that he was, “horrified to see another cowardly terror attack on innocent civilians.” Senseless terrorism and violence? Cow72
ANY MEMBER: U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES WASHINGTON, DC 20515 (202) 225-3121
ardly terrorist attacks? Deaths of innocent lives? Since Sept. 29, 2000, thousands of Palestinian children have been killed by Israelis and 139 Israeli children have been killed by Palestinians, and more than 10,000 adult Palestinians have been killed by Israel compared to a little over 1,000 Israeli adults killed by Palestinians. Israel is stealing Palestinian land by continuing to build illegal (per the U.N. and international community) settlements in the West Bank. Israel continues to force Palestinians living in Jerusalem out of the homes they’ve had for generations. And the U.S. gives Israel over $10 million a day for their military, and Palestine has no military. Secretary Blinken, where’s the outrage and horror over Palestinian lives and their loss of sovereignty? Oh, but then again Palestine isn’t our “partner.” Pam Meyers, Cedar Key, FL
FUNDING ISRAEL WHILE SANCTIONING RUSSIA To The Salt Lake Tribune, March 20, 2022 As we watch, horrified by the violence in Ukraine, I hope we realize that what Ukrainians are suffering today, Palestinians have been suffering for 74 years. Unlike Ukrainians, Palestinians do not have the luxury of taking refuge. Palestinians living in Gaza are sealed in—Israel will not let them out. And in the State of Israel, in occupied East Jerusalem and in the occupied West Bank, Israel has a history of sealing out Palestinians who have fled to avoid war and violence. They are not allowed to return to their homes! Yet, recently our Congress approved billions in military aid to Ukraine and in the same bill quietly slipped another $4.8 billion in military aid to Israel. I suggest those readers who care watch and share
WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS
SECRETARY OF STATE ANTONY BLINKEN U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE 2201 C ST. NW WASHINGTON, DC 20520 PHONE: (202) 647-6575 VISIT WWW.STATE.GOV TO E-MAIL ANY SENATOR: U.S. SENATE WASHINGTON, DC 20510 (202) 224-3121
Amnesty International’s new 14-minute YouTube tutorial on Israel’s system of apartheid. Amnesty’s study finding Israel guilty of apartheid is not the first legal study to draw that conclusion. The first was completed by the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa in 2009. Nor is it the second. The second was the Russell War Crimes Tribunal Hearings on Palestine held in South Africa, 2010. The third was completed by a United Nations committee. (Our country demanded it be withdrawn.) B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, Human Rights Watch and Adalah came to the same conclusion. And now we have another study, this time from Amnesty International, the largest and most well recognized human rights organization in the world! Will we listen and stop funding these crimes? Isn’t there something a bit ludicrous about fussing when Russia does it and funding when Israel does it? Frances ReMillard, Kamas, UT
UKRAINE SHOULD BE A GLOBAL CALL FOR JUSTICE To the Midland Daily News, April 1, 2022 I traveled on a delegation to Palestine/Israel in 2017 with Eyewitness Palestine. Israel is illegally occupying Palestine, causing the biggest refugee crisis in the world, yet the United States does not sanction Israel. On the contrary, the United States sends military aid to Israel. How would Americans feel if, instead of sanctioning Russia for its actions in Ukraine, the U.S. were to offer military aid to Russia? Americans would be rightly outraged. Americans who uphold democracy around the world should be outraged at what Russia is doing in Ukraine. But it is JUNE/JULY 2022
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also important not to limit outrage and only care about taking action in support of those with European heritage. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement seeks to: 1. Grant Palestinian citizens of Israel the same rights as other Israeli citizens. 2. Let Palestinians return to their homes as stipulated in U.N. Resolution 194. 3. End the colonization of Palestine. Let’s show by our actions that justice should not be limited to those with white skin. Let’s show that you can’t get away with occupation anywhere in the world. Let’s show that no matter your race, religion or ethnicity, Americans will stand up for what is right. Emma Johnson, Midland, MI
HOW UKRAINIANS AND PALESTINIANS ARE PORTRAYED To The Register-Guard, March 20, 2022 I would like to share a quote from Mohammed Rafik Mhawesh, a Palestinian writer and journalist based in Gaza City. He says, “We fight our oppressors, and we get branded terrorists. Ukrainians do the same, and they get applauded for their courage.” Margaret Brye, Eugene, OR
TREAT ALL REFUGEES WITH COMPASSION To The New York Times, April 19, 2022 Over the past few years, I have been to Lebanon several times to help provide art therapy for Syrian refugee children. Last month, I was in Ukraine and Poland providing art therapy for Ukrainian children. Young children exposed to the trauma of war are at high risk of developing PTSD. Even if they did not see the violence, they can develop PTSD from what their family members have been through. Art and play therapy help them cope and heal. I have felt conflicted about how different our global response to the refugee crisis in Ukraine, where many of the children have blue eyes and blond hair and identify as Christians, has been. I have provided art therapy for them just as we have for Syrian children in Beirut. Many of my little Picassos in Beirut are now young adults. Because they have brown eyes, olive skin and are Muslim, they did not receive the same level of love and concern from the West. JUNE/JULY 2022
As we care for the Ukrainian mothers and children, please consider also supporting the Syrian children, many of whom have been waiting for more than a decade to find a new home and a brighter future. Howard Dotson, Maple Grove, MN
CHILDREN SUFFERING AT ISRAEL’S HANDS To The Daily Sentinel, April 21, 2022 Thank you for the April 16 article, “An application languishes, a toddler dies.” I have been volunteering with the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF) in Gaza, the West Bank and Palestinian camps in Lebanon since 2011. Unfortunately the story of this toddler is not unusual. Many children do not get adequate medical care because the Israeli government will not provide travel permits to patients and family members to go to Palestinian hospitals outside of Gaza for specialty care or surgery. Even in the West Bank, a permit is required to go to Jerusalem. PCRF has built a pediatric cancer center in Gaza, but diagnosis and treatment are difficult. To get a biopsy specimen to an expert pathologist outside of Gaza the Israeli government requires the specimen itself to have it’s own permit to travel and a courier with a permit to transport it. Cancer diagnoses are delayed for these children. I see families with sick children struggling to get adequate consultation and treatment for complicated, and many times rare, diseases even though subspecialists are only 47 miles away. Even with a permit it is a difficult trip. I have seen old men cry at the border. I have helped a young boy travel to Detroit to get a prosthesis for his leg that was shot off by Israeli snipers. No one in his family could get a permit to go with him. The treatment of Palestinians is inhumane and children die not only of gunshots. These families are just like the families I see here in Grand Junction. Families who want the best care for their children. I thank the Sentinel for increasing awareness of the plight of Palestinian families. Dr. Barbara Zind, Grand Junction, CO
LABELING JEWISH CRITICS OF ISRAEL AS ANTI-SEMITES To The Boston Globe, March 26, 2022 Whenever supporters of Israel such as
Jeff Jacoby (“Make no mistake: Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism,” Ideas, March 20) claim that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, they are endorsing the fallacy that Israel speaks for all Jews. It doesn’t. Every year, more Jewish people justly criticize Israel’s policies against the Palestinian people. We are honoring our own Jewish tradition to seek justice when we speak out against the ongoing confiscation of land, the theft of water, the restriction of movement, and all the other indignities and deprivations that are being inflicted on a subject population. We speak out because we were taught by our parents’ generation that silence is complicity. We will not be silenced by the indiscriminate labeling of our testimony as anti-Semitism. Susan K. Jacoby, Boston, MA
U.S. ACTION ON YEMEN WAR IS NEEDED To The Washington Post, April 20, 2022 The April 16 news article “A Ramadan truce in Yemen offers civilians respite, but no certainty” gave the impression that the United States is a well-meaning observer only marginally involved in this horrific war. Yet for seven years—including after President Joe Biden’s declaration about discontinuing sales of “offensive” weapons— we have provided essential lifelines to the asymmetrically more powerful and bankrolled side, Saudi Arabia, in the form of logistical support, intelligence sharing and parts and maintenance for warplanes. The Biden administration needs to stop its half-gestures and disingenuous pronouncements about its desire for peace in Yemen. At the same time that we unconvincingly act the part of peacemaker, our country knows it has unique leverage to help end this conflict, simply because we are a key player in helping to keep it alive in the first place. Thus, if we were to cease all U.S. support, it would deflate the blockade that is starving the Yemeni civilian population and put genuine pressure on the Saudi-led coalition to participate in goodfaith negotiations toward a settlement. The people of Yemen know the truth; they call this the “U.S.-Saudi war.” They are correct. Carol DiCaprio Herrick, Charlottesville, VA ■
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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 May 14, 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.
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American Educational Trust Washington Report on Middle East Affairs P.O. Box 53062 Washington, DC 20009
June/July 2022 Vol. XLI, No. 4
“History is happening here, when we finally unveil not Palestine Street, not Palestine Boulevard, but Palestine Way, because Palestinians always find a way,” Paterson, NJ Mayor Andre Sayegh announced, as (l‐r) he, City Council Presi‐ dent Maritza Davila and Councilman Alaa Abdelaziz unveiled the new street sign on May 15, 2022. The City Council voted unanimously in April to rename the street to honor the city’s large Palestinian community. PHOTO BY MIDDLE EAST EYE/REEM FARHAT
