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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 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.

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.

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.”

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

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 funding 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 Demo crats 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.”

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 “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.” ■

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 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. ■

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.

Israel and Judaism The American Council for Judaism at 80

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 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.

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.

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 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 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

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. ■

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Apartheid in Israel: The Bankruptcy of Zionism By Dr. M. Reza Behnam

PHOTO BY HAZEM BADER/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

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 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.”

Dr. M. Reza Behnam is a political scientist specializing in the history, politics and governments of the Middle East.

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.”

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 Department 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

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 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

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.

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 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.”

THIS IS THE TWILIGHT ZONE

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

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 RACING AGAINST 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 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 to him.

The managing surgeon insisted I still did not have cause to summon a surgeon from his home, remarking, “If he makes it, he is lucky. If not, then his time is up.”

Aghast, I responded, “Ah, w’Allah? Simple as that?”

He could have repeated this answer in every language. No way was I accepting it.

“Doctor, you have got 10 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. 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. ■

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Special Report 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 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.

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.

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 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 continues, 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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A Brief History of Chaos in Libya

By Mustafa Fetouri

NAIVELY, BACK IN 2011, most Western commentators believed that Muammar Qaddafi was the main obstacle to a flourishing Libya. The oil-rich country has the financial means and human capital potential, they believed, to make quick strides toward democratic and economic growth.

The U.N.’s Security Council Resolution 1973, adopted on March 17, 2011, authorized the use of force against the Qaddafi regime. Between March 30 and the end of October 2011, an “international coalition of the willing,” NATO, along with countries like Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan, launched thousands of destructive sorties over Libya, creating tremendous destruction and a political vacuum once their campaign ended. Regime change was the ultimate goal of the war, even if NATO and friends denied it.

Leaders envisioned the new Libya as a stable, peaceful and democratic oasis in North Africa and did not see the need for a plan B—just in case. This lack of forward planning ended with a chaotic, unstable and violent Libya, with thousands of its citizens internally displaced, while thousands more fled abroad.

When Qaddafi was murdered on Oct. 20, 2011, the U.S., France,

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, at least, stable without the threat of violence as in Libya. On March 1, Libya’s House of Representatives (HoR) voted in a new government led by Fathi Bashagha, the former minister of interior. The HoR and High Council of State, a consultative body, agreed on a new roadmap aimed at organizing elections within 14 months. However, the incumbent, Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Debeibeh, is refusing to hand over power unless it’s to an elected government. He vowed to follow the United Nations’ brokered roadmap that set an election date on Dec. 24, 2021—an election that did not happen. According to the U.N. plan, now pushed aside by Libya’s HoR, elections must take place by June and Debeibeh wants to do that—but it’s an unlikely scenario given the situation on the ground. Libya ended up fragmented, with two prime ministers. Any hope of elections this year has all but vanished, as well as any positive developments from renewed U.N. mediation. Indeed, Libyans went to the polls twice, first in 2012 and then in 2014, but in both cases the outcome was not an elected inclusive government able to serve its people but an even more fragmented country where the “elected” governments are colluding with elected Mustafa Fetouri is a Libyan academic and freelance journalist. He is a recipient of the EU’s Freedom of the Press prize. He has written ex‐tensively for various media outlets on Libyan and MENA issues. He legislators, both proxies to different foreign powers, to preserve that status quo by never agreeing on anything that might help the country has published three books in Arabic. His email is mustafa gain peace. So far, every plan mediated domestically or imposed fetouri@hotmail.com and Twitter: @MFetouri. by the U.N.’s mediation mission has failed to deliver a practical set-

PHOTO BY HAZEM TURKIA/ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES

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 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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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: despite 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. ■

PHOTO BY MOHAMMED ABED/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

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.

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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

BRITAIN ANNOUNCED a new policy in April, to ship asylum seekers thousands of miles to Rwanda in central Africa, “on a one-way ticket.” The move has caused widespread outrage in the UK because it flagrantly violates Britain’s obligations under the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention.

In fact, Boris Johnson’s government has simply copied wholesale a program established by Israel eight years ago. The only significant difference is that, when Israel introduced the deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda in 2014, it did so in secret, fully aware that it was breaking the Refugee Convention it too had ratified.

When the policy came to light, Rwanda initially tried to spare Israel’s blushes by denying its involvement. Israel, meanwhile, falsely claimed the deportations were happening on a voluntary basis.

The British government, by contrast, is being far more brazen. It has trumpeted its similarly abu- sive 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. Eritrean migrants demonstrate against the Israeli government's policy to forcibly deport African refugees With the mood toward Johnson 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 the Rwanda plan in an address on Easter Sunday, saying the failure to take responsibility for refugees was “the opposite of the nature of God.” Some have dismissed the scheme as the prime minister’s latest wheeze to deflect attention from his political troubles. But that would be to ignore a growing confidence on the British right toward treating asylum seekers inhumanely—especially those who are not White. The Conservative Party has been amplifying deep-rooted nativist tendencies in the UK—and drawing inspiration from Israel, which has long experience of turning itself into a fortress state. In a sign of the continuing need to pay lip service to humanitarian concerns, Johnson’s government has publicly dressed up the new asylum policy as a move to prevent people-smugglers from endangering the lives of refugees by transporting them in inflatables across the Channel from France. Dozens have died. But Britain’s real motive—barely disguised—is the same one that drove Israel to adopt the policy. It wants to wash its hands of its legal obligations toward refugees by outsourcing responsibility to far

PHOTO CREDIT JACK GUEZ/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES Jonathan Cook is a journalist based in the UK and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. He is the author of Blood and Religion and Israel and the Clash of Civilisations (available from AET’s Middle East Books and More).

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 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

PHOTO BY DAN KITWOOD/GETTY IMAGES

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.

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. ■

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. ■

Apartheid in Israel

Continued from page 33

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Canada Calling Muslim Women Most Impacted by Quebec’s Secularism Laws

By Candice Bodnaruk

COURTESY THE LOW DOWN TO HULL AND BACK NEWS

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 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 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.

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.

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 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.

STAFF PHOTO C. BODNARUK

Mohamad Jumaily from the Syrian Assembly of Manitoba poses in his Winnipeg restaurant, Mr. Calzone.

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 federal 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.

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 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 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.

PHOTO COURTESY ROBERT MARTINEK

Fareed Khan, Founder of Canadians United Against Hate.

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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