ARAB AMERICAN ACTIVISM

STAFF PHOTO D. HANLEY USS Liberty survivors honor their shipmates buried at Arlington National Cemetery and those others buried around the country, on June 8, 2022.

of those children and grandchildren gathered at the cemetery.

The crew wants to know why President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the Sixth Fleet aircraft racing to their aid to return to their carrier, abandoning the USS Liberty to an additional torpedo attack and saying he didn’t want to embarrass an ally. “That order cost the lives of 25 of our shipmates,” survivor Joe Meadors, U.S. Navy signalman, said. “To this day, the order to abandon us is still being obeyed with a devastating effect on USS Liberty survivors.”

Wayne Stiles was a co-pilot on the first rescue helicopter to reach the USS Liberty the following morning, June 9. (His short interview at the ceremony with the Washington Report, posted on TikTok, was viewed over 12,000 times before this article went to press!) Stiles said there was no place to land on the destroyed ship so his helicopter hovered and brought the wounded up on a hoist cable in order to evacuate them to the USS America. Stiles said he saw blood sloshing back and forth in the forward gun tub, where the Israelis had machinegunned the men who had tried to defend their lightly-armed ship. Stiles admitted it was a shocking day for a little farm boy from Western Connecticut.

Former Congressman Pete McCloskey (R-CA), who served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1967 to 1983, was honored at that evening’s dinner. McCloskey has always believed this story is vital for Americans to hear. He and the Liberty survivors demand an honest, unbiased and open-to-the-public investigation by the Defense Department or Congress. They vow to raise bloody hell again and again to urge their country to remember Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty. —Delinda C. Hanley

Social Media Censorship of Palestinians

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) convention on June 18 started with a panel entitled, “Free Speech for Some, Not All: Silencing Voices Through ‘Content Moderation.’” Panelists included Matthew Feeney, director of the CATO Institute’s Project on Emerging Technologies; Omar Baddar, an independent analyst; and Aisha Jitan, digital communications associate for the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights.

Moderator Abed Ayoub, ADC’s legal director, began by utilizing former President Donald Trump’s ban from Twitter as an example of how social media companies apply content moderation standards, and turned to Feeney for insight into what this move revealed about Twitter’s policies. “My own personal view is that Twitter was in a really tough spot,” Feeney said. “It’s quite something for a private social media company to say to the president of your country, you shouldn’t be allowed.”

While the panelists agreed they don’t miss Trump’s online presence, Baddar noted it is an example of selective censorship. Most disturbing to Baddar is how antiPalestinian censorship often occurs at the request of the Israeli government. This also extends to Americans advocating for Palestinian rights, especially given the prevalence of anti-BDS laws and the expansion of anti-Semitism’s definition to include criticism of the State of Israel.

While Baddar values content moderation, he advocates for a clear approach that safe-

guards the companies’ independence from governments. “One [improvement] would be for the criteria to be transparent and up front and apply consistently to everyone,” he said. “A second would be there should be no room for the government to influence those policies. These are private companies at the end of the day, and we should not have the government telling private companies what speech they should and should not allow, like the Israeli government who is using this for political ends.”

Jitan emphasized that since news outlets often don’t cover Israeli atrocities, social media is Palestinians’ only tool to share their narrative. Without it, Israel would have a green light to commit even worse violent infringements, she reasoned.

Tactics like censoring and shadowbanning Palestinian content, for Jitan, “reinforce a culture of fear. It makes allies afraid to speak about it, because there are real consequences to Zionist attacks.”

Baddar said, “It’s the fact that the Israeli government gets to reject Palestinian content, but the Palestinians cannot reject Israeli content, and a company like Facebook is completely okay with that—that’s what ought to be challenged.”

Jitan wants the focus to be on the material conditions that create the inequitable internet space. “I think it is an issue of looking at these companies and being like, where can we break these systems down? I think these systems are reflections of how power operates in this country and the world, and also a continuation of how power has operated historically.” —Amelia Leaphart Israel’s New Restrictions on Entering the West Bank

For the final panel of the ADC national convention, Jinan Deena, ADC’s national organizer, moderated a discussion on Israel’s new travel restrictions for foreigners entering the occupied West Bank. The restrictions, proposed by Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), would severely limit how long foreigners can stay in the West Bank on a single-entry visa. Originally proposed to go into effect in May, their implementation has been postponed until September.

The regulations make no provisions for those traveling for tourism, to visit family, to conduct journalism or for educational purposes. Worse yet, Palestinians with dual citizenship would be required to disclose the names of family and friends they intend to visit, any property they own or stand to inherit, as well as other personal information. Unsurprisingly, these proposed restrictions would not apply to those visiting Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank.

After receiving a permit to enter the West Bank, the new regulations require Palestinians to enter the territory through the King Hussein Bridge via Jordan. The former president of the American Federation of Ramallah, Dr. Hanna Hanania, described his experiences crossing into Palestine from Jordan. “You just go through an unbelievable experience,” he commented. “In a way that makes you not want to go again.”

The 60-mile journey from Jordan into Palestine is well known for its long wait times, and Hanania emphasized that the journey is designed to discourage Palestinians from returning to their homeland.

Other than the prospect of waiting anywhere between four to twelve hours to enter Palestine from Jordan, Hanania noted that the border guards can unilaterally deny entry into Palestine at any time. So, in addition to the humiliation of being turned away at the border, this bears a potential significant financial burden on travelers.

Deena described her hesitance in returning to Palestine because she simply could not afford to be turned away. “If you are spending all of this money to go to Palestine and then you get denied at the border and get sent back home, that’s a big loss for a lot of people,” she explained. “And is it worth even trying sometimes?”

The U.S. government could step in to protest its citizens’ grievances with the Israeli government, and Chris Habiby, ADC’s legislative and policy coordinator, stressed that representatives from both the Democratic and Republican parties have been willing to listen to these instances of discrimination. Nonetheless, there was a consensus among the panelists that it is unlikely any of these issues will be addressed by a Congress with a proclivity to look past Israeli malfeasance.

Nonetheless, the ambiguity that allows travelers to be denied at the border is only one issue interwoven into the larger arbitrariness of the ordinances. Hanania used the example of quotas, noting that COGAT gives out a maximum of 150 student permits per year, even though a single university in the West Bank will accept over 300 students from Europe.

Jonathan Kuttab, a Palestinian writer sitting on the panel, detailed the history of

PHOTO Z. CLARK-ELSAYED

travel restrictions in Palestine, arguing there has always been an arbitrary and discriminatory process since the creation of COGAT in the 1990s. The significance of the new ordinances is not that they take away any existing rights, but rather that they give a previously unacknowledged practice a legal foundation, he said.

Activist and author Miko Peled, who grew up in Jerusalem, argued that the implementation of the ordinances is an attempt to restrict foreign access into Palestine and illustrates the deep insecurity that Israel has about its identity. According to Peled, “This has to do with this enormous fear, not of physical threat, but the fact is that there is no legitimacy to the entire political entity called the State of Israel, and the world is beginning to notice, so they want to limit access.”

Despite the bleak commentary, the discussion concluded on an optimistic note. Members of the audience emphasized that it is foolish to allow the current situation to stop them from traveling to the West Bank, and Deena affirmed that Israeli restrictions should never stop Palestinians from seeing their loved ones. “We have family there and want to see relatives and reconnect with our country and our land,” she said. —Zakaria Clark-Elsayed Dinner Honors Accomplishments Of Arab Americans

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) concluded its June 18 convention with an energetic gala dinner. The evening celebrated notable Arab Americans for their extraordinary accomplishments and their commitment to the betterment of their community, country and world.

The evening began with the Dr. Raymond Jallow Lifetime Achievement Award being bestowed upon Anton Hajjar, an attorney and vice chair of the United States Postal Service’s Board of Governors. He noted that he began taking his Arab identity seriously after 9/11, when his daughter’s life was threatened at school because of her ethnicity. “My Arab American identity became central to me on that fateful day,” he said.

Dr. Jehan “Gigi” El-Bayoumi, professor of medicine at George Washington University’s School of Medicine and Health Sciences, was awarded the Ralph Johns Civil Rights Award for her commitment to public health. While Americans must speak out about injustices in Palestine and elsewhere across the globe, she implored her audience to also mobilize against grave injustices closer to home. She noted that Washington, DC has the same HIV rate as Namibia and possesses the same infant mortality rate as El Salvador. These facts are often hidden by the extreme disparity in wealth that exists in the city, she said. “Southeast [DC] is very much like apartheid in Palestine,” she opined, with rich people moving in as gentrifying settlers with little regard for those who have long called the area home.

Zeina Azzam, a poet and community activist, received the Hala Salaam Maksoud Leadership Award. She presented her inspiring poem, “I Am An Arab American.” In one poignant line she writes, “I am an Arab American because I grow jasmine in Virginia to conjure the fragrance of my first home/ because melodies of the oud and guitar dwell in my ears.”

The Rose Nader Award was presented to Leila Fadel, the host of Morning Edition at NPR. Fadel said she became interested in journalism as a child when she realized Arab Americans were misrepresented in the media. Arabs are often “depicted as victims or villains, and nowhere in between,” she lamented. “We don’t get to be full humans when it comes to media portrayals.” She said her job is not to advocate, but to let the truth fully enter the light. “Truth is about making everybody be seen, it’s about showing the impact of policies even when it’s not popular and hard to talk about,” she said.

The night concluded with Amnesty International USA receiving the Voice of Courage Award for its recent report chronicling the reality of Israeli apartheid. Paul O’Brien, the organization’s executive director, maintained that simply telling the truth should not be a marker of courage. He also bemoaned the reality that simply “calling on the State of Israel to live up to its human rights obligations” is met with accusations of anti-Semitism. He finished his remarks by calling on the U.S. to own its professed support for human rights. “Equal rights for everyone in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories is the only way to secure a sustainable peace for everyone in the region,” he said. “Fighting for it is the only way to convince the world that an American foreign policy centered on human rights is the best offer out there.” —Dale Sprusansky

Dr. Jehan “Gigi” El‐Bayoumi gives voice to injustices from Washington, DC to Palestine.