Washington Report on Middle East Affairs - October 2022 - Vol. XLI No. 6

On Middle East Affairs IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION OF PALESTINE THE COVER: Displaced Pakistanis on a tractor with their belongings at a makeshift camp after fleeing from their flood-hit homes heavy monsoon rains in Sukkur, Sindh province on Aug. 29, 2022. The death toll from monsoon flooding in Pakistan since June has reached 1,061, according to figures released on Aug. 29, 2022 by the country’s National Disaster Management Authority.

AIPAC’s New Strategy: Spend Millions on Elections, Don’t Mention Israel, Eli Clifton, www.responsiblestatecraft.org OV-1

Israel’s Premature “Victory” Celebration: The Defining War in Gaza Is Yet to Be Fought, Ramzy Baroud, www.ramzybaroud.net OV-2

The Palestinian Misuse, and Zionist Abuse, of the Holocaust, Marwan Bishara, www.aljazeera.com OV-4

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, This Is What’s Really Disgusting, Amira Hass, Haaretz OV-5

In Jerusalem, Biden Signs the Palestinians’ Death Certificate, Gideon Levy, Haaretz OV-6

Land for New U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem Was Owned by Palestinians Before 1948, Files Show, Nir Hasson, Haaretz OV-7

We Praise People as “Good Samaritans,” but There’s a Complex History Behind the Phrase, Terry Giles, www.theconversation.com OV-7

A Tiny Piece of Palestine, Not Quite Forgotten, Nicholas Dot-Pouilliard and Pierre Tonachella, Le Monde diplomatique OV-9

Thanks, Putin, for Outlawing The Jewish Agency in Russia, Carolina Landsmann, Haaretz OV-11

A Gratuitous Insult in Jeddah, John V. Whitbeck, www.counterpunch.org OV-11

The United States Is Building a Coalition of Its Adversaries, Paul R. Pillar, www.responsiblestatecraft.org OV-12

What Ever Happened to the “Rules-based International Order”?, Connor Echols, www.responsiblestatecraft.org OV-13

U.S. Bombs Somalia for the Third Time This Summer, Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, www.responsiblestatecraft.org OV-15

The Street Cleaners of Mogadishu: Doing Somalia’s Riskiest Job, Hamza Mohamed, www.aljazeera.com OV-15

American Educational Trust Publishers’ Page

So Many Crises

In many ways, this was a summer fraught with crises across the broader Middle East. In Iraq, citizens had to deal with devastating heat, alongside a worsening political crisis that led to bloodshed in the streets of Baghdad (see p. 22). Further east, “apocalyptic” floods, the worst in Pakistan’s history, caused a monumental crisis that merged with the nation’s deep economic and political woes (see p. 32). In Tunisia, a small percentage of citizens went to the polls to ratify a controversial new constitution that significantly enhances the power of the country’s increasingly authoritarian leader (see p. 40).

Palestinian Khalil Awawdeh, 41, father of four daughters (above) called off his 172 day hunger strike on Aug. 31, after Israel agreed to his release on Oct. 2. Awawdeh was protesting being held in administrative detention in Israeli jail without charge or trial since his Dec. 27, 2021 arrest. There are currently 670 Palestinians being held in Israeli prisons under administrative detention.

Sadly, But Unsurprisingly....

Another bout of deadly violence shook Gaza in August, as Israel once again unleashed its military on the besieged territory (see p. 10). Israel also feverishly tried to interfere as Europe, the U.S. and Iran finally grew near to a new nuclear deal (see p. 18). We hope that by the time this issue reaches your doorstep a new accord will be finalized, but we know those opposed to the deal will not stop fighting until (and even after) the ink is dry on a new agreement.

Your Three Wishes Granted!

A recent survey sent to Washington Report subscribers showed that you would like to see more diversified coverage of the issues facing the Middle East. We believe this issue delivers on that wish, and we hope you enjoy our reports spanning from Tunisia to Pakistan!

Good News, Too

Readers also told us they don’t want to read only negative and depressing news. While there’s admittedly much to be horrified about in the pages of this issue, there are also uplifting stories to inspire you. We

have an article about a soccer tournament in Maryland held in July to raise support for the West Bank village of Wadi Foquin, which is under constant threat of Israeli demolition (see p. 52). A young man from the village told participants their solidarity, “means the world to us and it gives us hope that one day the world will hear our voice, one day we will gain our dreams.” There’s also a story on a giant music festival held among the ancient ruins of Jerash in Jordan, where performers from across the region showcased their talents (see p. 50). We additionally highlight some of the best podcasts on Palestine you can enjoy during your free time or commute (see p. 48).

Voting Records

While this issue typically contains the voting records of each member of Congress on pertinent Middle East issues, this year we decided to make the records available online to provide more space in the magazine for the abundance of news. You can still see Julia Pitner’s summary of this Congress’ records on p. 14. The full report is available on our website, <www.wrmea.org.> We can also send paper copies via the mail to anyone who is unable to access the report online.

(Call 202-939-6050, ext. 1105 to leave your address or send an email to info@wrmea.org.) While there are many

Make a Difference Today! Publishers’ Page

important issues on the ballot this November, we hope these voting records help you push your local candidates to adopt a human rights-first foreign policy.

Third Wish Depends On You.

OK. We didn’t forget about your third wish. Many of you wrote that you’ve been subscribing for decades and hoped the Washington Report would be around for 40 more years. Thanks to your support, including donations, advice and ideas for articles, we will hang in there. But we really want to do much more....Help us find interns to train who will one day staff news desks and forever change the stories we’re told on the nightly news or in legacy press. You can also help us train future teachers, librarians, talk show hosts, podcasters , think tank employees‚—and yes, even members of Congress. We really need to support local newspapers, libraries, bookstores and schools—all of which are under siege— and call for more inclusive narratives. We’ve got the books and magazines they need to read. One former Google employee is modeling how we can each make a difference wherever we work (see p. 46). Please help us continue to tell these stories. And that requires even a greater commitment from you.

We Need More Talented Staff

We can’t fulfill all our wishes without hiring more doers and shakers—people who will help us reach out beyond our own choir to find new readers, writers, advertisers and grants. Just as we have for the past 40 years, we ask Washington Report supporters to dig deep, donate online or send a check so we can all...

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LetterstotheEditor

A SUGGESTION FOR THE STREET IN FRONT OF ISRAEL’S EMBASSY

In reference to the street in front of Saudi Arabia’s Washington, DC embassy being named after Jamal Khashoggi, the photo caption in the August/September issue’s publishers' page said, “We hope the street in front of the Israeli Embassy will be renamed in memory of Shireen Abu Akleh.” I have a better idea to show our love to the Jewish people: The street in front of the Israeli Embassy should be renamed for the Swedish diplomat Count Folke Bernadotte! Remember, he saved tens of thousands of Jews during World War II, only to be later assassinated in 1948 by a Zionist group in Jerusalem while attempting to mediate peace.

There are streets named after fellow Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg who also saved thousands of Jewish lives during the Holocaust, so why not for Bernadotte?

Yehuda Littmann, Brooklyn, NY

AIPAC GETTING WHAT IT WANTS

Former Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD) has a record of sticking up for the Palestinians, and thus was attacked by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC’s) new political action committee (PAC). As a result, she lost her primary election this summer. It’s a sure sign of losing an election if one backs Palestine.

These are dangerous times. Americans need to speak out against what Israel is doing—both in Palestine and to our nation. We are supporting fascism, totalitarianism, human rights violations, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, racism, annexation of lands, massacres and a kleptocratic Israeli government.

All of this happens with the continued financial support of the United States, ensured by pro-Israel groups making large donations to their preferred candidates for Congress. As far as I’m concerned, we are under occupation due to who is pulling America’s strings in Israel.

Barbara Gravesen, Lady Lake, FL

REP. ANDY LEVIN AND AIPAC’S ELECTORAL REACH

I am deeply disappointed and sad that Rep. Andy Levin (D-MI) lost against Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) in the 11th district Michigan primary. He was a true advocate of the two-state solution and human rights for Palestinians. For this reason, pro-Israel groups spent millions to unseat him.

The defeat of Andy Levin has sent the clear, intimidating message to all elected officials: you criticize Israel, you have crossed the red line and your days are numbered.

Despite being a pro-Israel liberal Zionist, AIPAC’s former president David Victor called Levin, “arguably the most corrosive member of Congress to the U.S.-Israel relationship.”

There is a growing list of names of progressive candidates, including Levin, former Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-GA), Nina Turner (D-OH), Former Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD) and Jessica Cisneros (D-TX) who have lost their primary just because they have not acquiesced to the far-right pro-Israel position.

Progressives like Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Alexandria OcasioCortez (D-NY), Jamaal Bowman (DNY) and many others are nervous about supporting Palestinian issues. If they do, they may risk losing their seats just like Levin and others.

Mega donors like hedge funder billionaire Paul Singer, Home Depot cofounder Bernie Marcus and media mogul Haim Saban have pledged millions to silence any dissent in Congress. This is a serious threat to our democracy. We need to speak out against the corrosive influence of dark money in our democracy and permitting millions of dollars to pour into elections to silence freedom of speech.

This is not democracy, but oligarchy rule. AIPAC has descended into a fullfledged war of McCarthyism on any candidate who speaks against Israel. It’s time for us to speak up! Silent no

more! Challenge Israel’s apar theid system by calling to end U.S. aid. Support the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. Stop saying, “I don’t have time, it’s all politics” or “I don’t know.” We need to act; don’t be complicit or remain silent.

Mohammed Khaku, Allentown, PA

ZIONISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM

Zionists have a new definition of “antiSemite”: anyone who believes that Palestinians are human beings and entitled to basic human rights. Israel and its apologists are desperate to conflate Zionism with Judaism so that anyone who criticizes Israel’s racism and apartheid is automatically guilty of antiSemitism.

This is ironic given that Israel’s behavior over the past 74 years has been the antithesis of everything Judaism stands for. Zionists appear to have forgotten the commandment to love thy neighbor as well as the admonitions against coveting, stealing, lying and murdering. If anything, it is Zionism that is anti-Semitic.

Clyde Farris, West Linn, OR

DISSATISFACTION WITH BIDEN’S TRIP TO THE MIDDLE EAST

On his recent trip to Israel/Palestine, President Joe Biden offered $100 million to Palestinian hospitals. This is in contrast to the billions the U.S. gives Israel each year.

As well as a hospital, Biden also visited the Church of the Nativity, but offered no comfort to Christians who are being harassed by the Israeli government. Biden, being a committed “Zionist,” is apparently not interested in supporting the Christian church there, even though he is a devout Christian.

After Israel, Biden continued his trip with a visit to Saudi Arabia, a country whose leader Biden had previously vowed during his election campaign to treat like a “pariah” for his human rights violations. Yet, the president seems to now be eschewing all of this punitive talk and going hat-in-hand to engage this apparently newly-purified “pariah” state. With actions such as these, I see Biden as perhaps the most pandering

KEEP THOSE CARDS AND LETTERS COMING!

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president we have ever had.

Doris Rausch, Tullahoma TN

CANADA SILENT AS ISRAEL RAIDS HUMAN RIGHTS OFFICES

The recent Israeli raid on Palestinian human rights offices reminded me that Israel employed secret evidence in 2021 to categorize six Palestinian human rights groups as terrorist organizations. This is hardly news, since the Israeli state routinely targets Palestinians who dare advocate for themselves.

Recent apartheid findings by Amnesty International and Israeli human rights groups have angered Israeli leaders and thus worsened conditions for Arab Israelis, occupied Palestinians in the West Bank and, of course, the Gaza Strip. In spite of this, it is worth remembering that the South African apartheid regime crumbled eventually.

While official Canada has remained silent, nine European countries consider these allegations of terrorism devoid of merit. Democracy is not served when any state uses overwhelming power to criminalize its critics.

The use of secret evidence against alleged terrorists and their supporters is not uniquely Israeli. The former Stephen Harper government in Canada quickly de-funded Kairos, a Palestinian Christian advocacy organization accused of anti-Semitism and support for terrorism, despite its ecumenical nature.

Throughout history, the terrorist label has presupposed that “we” (us and our allies) are incapable of terrorism while “they” (anyone who opposes us) rely on it, making

them legitimate targets to attack.

Effective opposition to Canada’s role in Israeli misdeeds is hampered by mainstream media coverage that routinely portrays even peaceful Palestinian resistance as terrorism. Alternately, the Israeli state is automatically presented as an embattled democracy whose noble intentions sometimes go awry.

Canada’s official rejection of accurate criticism of Israeli conduct has little to do with supporting Zionism and everything to do with deference to the U.S. government’s military, financial and diplomatic support for Israel.

Morgan Duchesney, Ottawa, ON ■

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Without Palestine, There is No Arab Unity: Why Normalization With Israel Will Fail

By Ramzy Baroud From the

Relatives mourn at the funeral of four Palestinian cousins from the Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, Jamil Nijm, 4, Jamil Ihab Nijm, 13, Hamed Haidar Nijm, 16 and Muhammed Salah Nijm, 16, who were killed in an Israeli airstrike on Aug. 7, while they sat next to their grandfather’s grave in the Falluja cemetery in the northern Gaza Strip. The strike also killed the boys' friend Nazmi Abukarsh, 16. Ordinary Arabs around the world with access to news like this will not change their opinion of Israel until the occupation ends.

IT SEEMED ALL but a done deal: Israel is finally managing to bend the Arabs to its will, and Palestine is becoming a marginal issue that no longer defines Israel’s relations with Arab countries. Indeed, normalization with Israel is afoot, and the Arabs, so it seems, have been finally tamed.

Not so fast. Many events continue to demonstrate the opposite. Take, for example, the Arab League’s two-day meeting in Cairo

Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle. His latest book, co edited with Ilan Pappé, Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out, is available from Middle East Books & More. Dr. Baroud is a non resident senior research fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is <www.ramzybaroud.net>.

on July 31 to August 1. The meeting was largely dominated by discussions on Palestine and concluded with statements that called on Arab countries to reactivate the Arab boycott of Israel, until the latter abides by international law.

The strongest language came from the League’s Assistant Secretary-General, who called for solidarity with the Palestinian people by boycotting companies that support the Israeli occupation.

The two-day Conference of the Liaison Officers of the Arab Regional Offices on the Boycott of Israel praised the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which has been under intense Western pressure for its unrelenting advocacy of international action against Israel.

PHOTO BY SAMEH RAHMI/NURPHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES

One of the recommendations by Arab officials was to support Arab boycott initiatives in accordance with the Tunis Arab Summit in March 2019, which resolved that “boycott of the Israeli occupation and its colonial regime is one of the effective and legitimate means to resist.”

Though one may rightly cast doubts on the significance of such statements in terms of dissuading Israel from its ongoing colonization schemes in Palestine, at least they demonstrate that in terms of political discourse, the collective Arab position remains unchanged. This was also expressed clearly to U.S. President Joe Biden during his latest visit to the Middle East. Biden may have expected to leave the region with major Arab concessions to Israel—which would be considered a significant political victory for the pro-Israel members of his Democratic Party prior to the defining November midterm elections—but he received none.

What American officials do not understand is that Palestine is a deeply rooted emotional, cultural and spiritual issue for Arabs and Muslims. Neither Biden, nor Donald Trump and Jared Kushner before him, could easily—or possibly—alter that.

Indeed, anyone who is familiar with the history of the centrality of Palestine in the Arab discourse understands that Palestine is not a mere political question that is governed by opportunism, and immediate political or geopolitical interests. Modern Arab history is a testament to the fact that no matter how great U.S.-Western-Israeli pressures and however weak or divided the Arabs are, Palestine will continue to reign supreme as the cause of all Arabs. Political platitudes aside, the Palestinian struggle for freedom remains a recurring theme in Arab poetry, art, sports, religion, and culture in all its manifestations.

This is not an opinion, but a demonstrable fact.

The latest Arab Center Washington DC (ACW) public opinion poll examined the views of 28,288 Arabs in 13 different countries. The majority of the respondents continue to hold the same view as previous generations did: Palestine is an Arab cause and Israel is the main threat. Apply the conclusion to 350 million Arabs across

the region, and that’s a significant result.

The Arab Opinion Index (AOI) of late 2020 is not the first of its kind. In fact, it is the seventh such study to be conducted since 2011. The trend remains stable. All the U.S.-Israeli plots—and bribes—to sideline Palestine and the Palestinians have failed and, despite purported diplomatic “successes,” they will continue to fail.

According to the poll, the vast majority of Arabs—81 percent—oppose U.S. policy toward Palestine; 89 percent and 81 percent believe that Israel and the U.S. respectively are “the largest threat” to their individual countries’ national security. Particularly important is that the majority of Arab respondents insist that the “Palestinian cause concerns all Arabs and not simply the Palestinians.” This includes 89 percent of Saudis and 88 percent of Qataris.

Arabs may disagree on many issues, and they do. They might stand at opposite sides of regional and international conflicts, and they do. They might even go to war against one another and, sadly, they often do. But Palestine remains the exception. Historically, it has been the Arabs’ most compelling case for unity. When governments forget that, and they often do, the Arab streets constantly remind them of why Palestine is not for sale and is not a subject for self-serving compromises.

For Arabs, Palestine is also a personal and intimate subject. Numerous Arab households have framed photos of Arab martyrs who were killed by Israel during previous wars or were killed fighting for Palestine. This means that no amount of normalization or even outright recognition of Israel by an Arab country can wash away Israel’s sordid past or menacing image in the eyes of ordinary Arabs.

A most telling example of this is how Egyptians and Jordanians answered the AOI question “Would you support or oppose diplomatic recognition of Israel by your country?” The interesting thing about this question is that both Cairo and Amman already recognize Israel and have had diplomatic ties with Tel Aviv since 1979 and 1994, respectively. Still, to this day, 93 percent of Jordanians and 85 percent of Egyptians still oppose that recog-

nition as if it never took place.

The argument that Arab public opinion carries no weight in non-democratic societies ignores the fact that every form of government is predicated on some form of legitimacy, if not through a direct vote, then it is through some other means. Considering the degree of involvement that the cause of Palestine carries in every aspect of Arab societies—on the street, in the mosque and church, in universities, sports, civil society organizations and much more—disowning Palestine would be a major delegitimizing factor and a risky political move.

American politicians, who are constantly angling for quick political victories on behalf of Israel in the Middle East do not understand, or simply do not care that marginalizing Palestine and incorporating Israel into the Arab body politic is not simply unethical, but also a major destabilizing factor in an already unstable region.

Historically, such attempts have failed, and often miserably so, as Apartheid Israel remains as hated by those whose governments have normalized relations as much as it is hated by those whose governments have not. Nothing will ever change that, as long as Palestine remains an occupied country. ■

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Lost Lives and Livelihoods: A Father, Daughter and Son

By Mohammed Omer

LONGTIME READERS of the Washington Report will recall my reports in the early 2000s from the Block J area, west of Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip—a densely populated area that has had its share of agony, war and displacement like nowhere else I have seen.

Most families living in the Block J area have been split up since the wall between Egypt and Gaza was built. Families carrying the same surname live on the Egyptian side while others live on the Palestinian side. During calm days, they could shout across the wall to each other in conversations about everything, from what food they cooked, to who was to marry next, and even when Umm Walid will run out of washing detergent.

But not on Saturday, Aug. 6, 2022, at 9:30 p.m., the second of Israel’s three-day “Operation Breaking Dawn,” when the entire camp was turned into a bomb site, with the odors of death, smoke and fire from exploded missiles and burning human flesh. Early sleepers did

not know this would be their last night before their death. This was the end of so many stories, shared memories and hopes for a future.

When an Israeli F-16 missile hit the crowded neighborhood, it killed seven people, and severely wounded scores of others. The missile transformed at least 15 homes into rubble. These are more than statistics—they are children, mothers and fathers.

Navigating through the smoke after the Israeli airstrike, no one knew who was alive or dead.

A bleeding father frantically ran into the remains of his house— Iyyad Hassouneh touched all the pieces of rubble with the hope that he would hear the voice of his missing 14-year-old son Mohammed Hassouneh.

ALIVE OR DEAD?

Ambulance crews worked all night and morning to find many buried family members under the ruins of their bombed homes. They were able to find Hassouneh’s daughter, Saud, and scores of others who were in bed when the missile hit them. His son Mohammed was still missing...

A Palestinian child salvages a toy from the rubble of his home, on Aug. 8, 2022, in the town of Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip. Israeli airstrikes destroyed 18 homes and left 68 others uninhabitable during the latest three days of conflict ahead of an Aug. 7 truce.

Award winning journalist Mohammed Omer reports regularly on the Gaza Strip.

PHOTO BY SAID KHATIB/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

This is the Block J area, one of the most crowded areas in Palestine—where it is said that one can even hear your next-door neighbors’ breathing.

Not so many days before, the Hassouneh family threw a street party to celebrate the success of their daughter, Saud, who had scored a 94 percent grade in her secondary-high school exams.

Saud was her family’s hope to achieve a higher education and a successful career that would help get her family out of the camp.

The family got out of the camp—just not how they had imagined; they’re broken and heartsick, now housed in a tent after losing their home.

Medics finally managed to rescue Mohammed Hassouneh from the rubble in the morning hours. He was alive, unlike his next-door neighbors, including a child and two women, who did not make it.

Mohammed Hassouneh lay next to his sister, Saud, suffering with a traumatic injury. As their injured father, Iyyad Hassouneh, sat next to them, his eyes never left his two children. But it would be the last time he looked at his son. Mohammed Hassouneh was soon pronounced dead.

“Despite the fact that my brother was killed, our house blown up and my dreams stolen, I will get back to work even harder and be a doctor to save lives,” Saud declared, as she wept for her younger brother.

Israel and the Palestinian armed group, Islamic Jihad, declared a truce late on Aug. 7, after three days of heavy Israeli bombardment on the besieged Gaza Strip. At least 48 Palestinians, including 17 children, were killed and at least 360 civilians wounded, of which 151 were children, according to the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner.

U.N. Human Rights Chief Michelle Bachelet, on Aug. 11, expressed alarm at the high number of Palestinians, including children, killed and injured in the occupied Palestinian territory this year, including during those intense hostilities between Israel and the Palestinian armed group the previous weekend, as well as two more killed on Aug. 9, in Israeli “law enforcement operations” in the West Bank.

“Inflicting hurt on any child during the course of conflict is deeply disturbing, and the killing and maiming of so many children this year is unconscionable,” said Bachelet.

An assault like this doesn’t seem to reach mainstream media in the West, unless it’s a headline touting the number of rockets stopped by Israel’s Iron Dome. The names and faces of dead Palestinian children are barely mentioned.

This time Gaza feels the pain more than any time before. A father told me how he has no option left but to scatter his six children among different relatives, so they don’t die altogether in the same place.

In this latest assault on Gaza, 18 housing units were destroyed completely and 68 left uninhabitable, leaving 84 families (450 individuals) internally displaced. In addition, an estimated 1,675 housing units sustained moderate to minor damage, affecting 8,500 individuals.

In the extremely narrow, crowded neighborhood of Block J, the structure of the camp prevents ambulance crews or bulldozers access to the ruins to dig out bodies. Families have allowed their damaged homes to be demolished by fire department rescue teams so that ambulances could reach victims buried under tons of rubble.

Ashraf Al Qeisi allowed rescuers to destroy part of his house to allow in bulldozers to dig out people. “It’s a decision that I would never regret, as long as I am living,” he said, adding, “the lives of my neighbors and their children are worth any home or stone.”

Al Qeisi, who earns $2 a day from selling chocolate-filled pastries from a small trolly in the streets of Rafah refugee camp, concluded, “This is a difficult time for all of us, we want our children to live well and be happy. But they keep dying painfully and horribly.”

During an onslaught like this, street vendors like Al Qeisi can’t work, or else they could be a target. Markets in Gaza are largely shut. The reality is that during every military escalation, Gaza food insecurity increases because farmers are unable to access their lands during the bombardment.

Fifty-year-old Abdelqader Eid is an eggplant and corn farmer who had no possibility to make a living. “I could not reach my land to collect the eggplants,” he said, and by the time he was able to do so, he found that his land had been destroyed by military attacks on the farming lands close to Gaza’s border with Israel. Eid has been unable to water his crops for days, causing him lose the entire farming season and his livelihood.

Although Palestinian officials don’t yet have exact figures on losses and damage in the agriculture sector, the cost this time is doubly hard on those grieving their dead family members.

Grieving people cannot even eat properly with so many crops destroyed—and many believe this, too, was a deliberate act by Israel.

“We did not die, but we did not survive either,” said Layan Al-Qadri who went to check on her friends at Block J and could not recognize the place anymore. ■ (Advertisement)

Israeli Prime Minister Admits Jews Don’t Have Freedom of Worship

By Allan C. Brownfeld

IT HAS BEEN A KEY element of Zionist philosophy that “a full Jewish life” can only be lived in Israel. The campaign to stimulate Jewish emigration to Israel is based, in large part, upon this premise. In reality, that premise is false. In fact, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid declared in July that, “Israel is the only Western country in which Jews don’t have freedom of worship.”

What stimulated this observation was an incident at the Western Wall on June 30. A group of Jewish Americans were celebrating a bar mitzvah at the Kotel’s (Western Wall) egalitarian prayer space. Dozens of haredi (ultra-Orthodox) men and teenage boys entered the scene and aggressively harassed and intimidated the participants. They whistled and shouted at the worshipers, calling the gathered Jews “Nazis,” “animals,” and “Christians,” and tore up their prayer books. One smirking boy was filmed wiping his nose on the ripped pages of the prayer book.

The incident was only the latest in an ongoing series of harassments of non-Orthodox Jews by haredi men opposed to egalitarian prayer at the Western Wall and Israel’s other holy sites. Just prior to the bar mitzvah disruption, the activist group Women of the Wall had been blocked from bringing a Torah to the women’s plaza, as it seeks to do monthly.

Two things set the latest incident apart; its location, at the tiny, peripheral plaza that has been carved out as a safe haven for nonOrthodox Jews who want to pray in a mixed gender setting at Judaism’s holiest site, and that the crudeness was captured on camera. Those details have prompted especially strong and lasting actions and denunciations from Israel’s prime minister, as well as a debate over whether the U.S. State Department should treat harassment of Jews by other Jews as “anti-Semitism.”

Deborah Lipstadt, the Holocaust scholar and newly appointed State Department anti-Semitism monitor, suggested that what took place at the Western Wall was indeed anti-Semitism. “Let us make no mistake, had such a hateful incident happened in any other country, there’d be little hesitation in labeling it anti-Semitic,” wrote Lipstadt.

David Schraub, a law professor at Lewis and Clark College, wrote: “Is it anti-Semitic to attack Jews engaging in Jewish ritual at a Jewish holy site? When you phrase it that way, the answer is clearly yes. The only reason why it wouldn’t be is if you think it gets some sort of exception because of who the attackers are.”

Arie Hasit, an Israeli Masorti (Conservative) rabbi working with the American bar mitzvah celebrant (who somehow managed to continue with his prayers despite the harassment), posted on Facebook in Hebrew that he was “broken” over the haredi youths’ treatment of the bar mitzvah group. “Some people hate me who are willing to hurt me because my Judaism is different from their Judaism,” Hasit posted.

In the U.S., Union for Reform Judaism head Rabbi Rick Jacobs and United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism Rabbi Jacob Blumenthal wrote to Prime Minister Lapid. They declared that “We represent millions of Jews who cannot tolerate such behavior, who are tired of being treated as second-class citizens at the Wall.” They called on Lapid to implement the so-called “Western Wall compromise,” a plan that would expand and make permanent the Kotel’s egalitarian prayer section, known as Ezrat Yisrael. The agreement has languished in the Knesset for years because it is staunchly opposed by the country’s religious right.

The highly publicized harassment of non-Orthodox Jews at the Western Wall did nothing to alter the continuing assaults on religious freedom, and the Israeli government’s continued indifference to the actions. A month after the June 30 incident, another American teenager was harassed during her bat mitzvah on July 29 as haredi Orthodox protesters interrupted non-Orthodox Jewish prayers.

Thousands of black-attired students, both male and female, swarmed a group of about 100 women and a dozen men who accompanied them to the Western Wall, where traditional prayers were to take place at 7 a.m., ahead of the bat mitzvah of Lucia da Silva of Seattle, who came to Israel with her parents and godparents to celebrate the event. Police and ushers hired by the Western Wall Heritage Foundation, the state-funded group that manages the holy site, did not appear to enforce Israel’s law prohibiting the disturbance of prayers, a crime that can carry a penalty of up to three years in jail.

News reports indicate that clutches of girls dressed in black set upon the women, calling them “whores and heretics,” and hollering that they

An ultra Orthodox youth wipes his nose with a page torn from a prayer book at the egalitarian section of the Western Wall on June 30, 2022.

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.

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should “burn in hell.” Some blew whistles to prevent the women from praying out loud. When asked about the commotion, which made any conventional sort of worship impossible, Eden Shimon, deputy head of operations for the Western Wall Foundation, replied, “Get out of my way, sue me.” Loudspeakers situated in the adjacent men’s section, but facing the women’s section, blared prayers intended to drown out the women’s voices.

Attorney Orly Erez-Likhovski, director of the Israel Religious Action Center and incoming chair of Women of the Wall, described the women’s section as “a lawless pit devoid of any government rule.” She said that “they see us as provocateurs,” pointing to the police officers standing near the entrance to the women’s section, “not as citizens exercising their rights.”

Recent months were marked by a significant escalation of the violence directed at women and non-Orthodox Jews praying at the Wall. At least five bar mitzvahs were targeted by violence in the egalitarian southern section of the wall, including that of Seth Mann of Las Vegas, whose mother, Sari Mann, is director of AIPAC in Nevada.

Writing in The Times of Israel, Mann’s father Joel wrote: “The police did little or nothing to stop the disturbance and sometimes violent attacks that occurred. The Israeli police stood there as the haredi teens attacked Jews. It was at this moment that my heart broke. I realized that not even in the State of Israel…am I allowed to pray freely and safely. My son, on his bar mitzvah, is told that he is not Jewish.”

ISRAELI CONTEMPT FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM ALIENATES AMERICAN JEWS

The ultra-Orthodox establishment has a virtual monopoly on religious matters for Israeli Jews, overseeing life-cycle rituals like weddings and burials and using their political influence over matters like immigration. The Law of Return grants citizenship to anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent, while Orthodox law requires one to have a Jewish mother. These different definitions have allowed tens of thousands of people, mostly from the former Soviet Union, to immigrate to Israel, only to suffer from discrimination when seeking religious services from the state. Mixed couples, same-sex couples, and even couples in which one partner is not deemed Jewish enough (they must prove descent from an uninterrupted line of Jewish mothers) do not have a chance to marry in Israel.

The Pew Research Center has identified Israel as one of the countries that place “high restrictions” on the free exercise of religion and there have been limits placed on non-Orthodox Jewish movements, which are unrecognized. Pew ranked Israel fifth globally in terms of “inter-religious tension and violence.”

The Chief Rabbinate strongly opposes both the Reform and Conservative movements, saying they are “uprooting Judaism,” that they cause assimilation and that they have “no connection” to authentic Judaism. A survey of Israeli Jews published in 2016 showed that 72 percent of respondents said

they disagreed with the haredi assertion that Reform Jews are not really Jewish. The survey also showed that a third of Israeli Jews “identify” with progressive (Reform and Conservative) Judaism and almost two thirds agree that Reform Judaism should have equal rights in Israel with Orthodox Judaism.

Israel repeatedly presents itself as a democracy, yet Israeli voters have never voted in favor of the governmental power bestowed upon ultra-Orthodox rabbis. The religious status quo was agreed to by David Ben-Gurion with the Orthodox parties at the time of Israel’s formation in 1948.

Ironically, David Ben-Gurion was an atheist and Theodor Herzl had never practiced Judaism. Herzl sought a Jewish state in which rabbis would have little or no influence. But Israel has turned its back completely on the values of religious freedom advanced by Herzl, the very values embraced by most Jewish Americans.

The theocratic ultra-Orthodox religion embraced by the Israeli state contrasts with the commitment by most American Jews to a separation of church and state and freedom for all varieties of religious expression. Israel’s contempt for such values is alienating more and more Jewish Americans who are coming to understand that Israel’s values are far different from their own.

When even Israel’s prime minister tells us that Jews in Israel have less religious freedom than Jews anyplace else in the Western world, he is proclaiming a reality that more and more American Jews are finally coming to understand. ■

A Brief Overview of the 117th Congress and Middle East Affairs

By Julia Pitner

Senate version to become Public Law 117-103, on March 15, 2022.

The U.S. Senate on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on Aug. 6, 2022, the day before the 117th Congress passed H.R.5376, the Inflation Reduction Act. Congress has introduced both positive and negative legisla tion on the Middle East. Congressional voting records are reported on the Washington Report’s website.

THE 117TH CONGRESS got off to, quite literally, a raucous start in January 2021. Although the major legislative focus and bills passed into law were domestic, driven by the pandemic and economy, the specter of the administration returning to the Iran negotiations created a flurry of letters both for and against, as well as a spate of legislative efforts to narrow the new administration’s diplomatic space. In 2021 alone, members of Congress introduced more than two dozen bills related to Iran. Showcasing one of the few areas of cooperation across the aisle, 13 of the 31 bills introduced in either the House or the Senate had bipartisan support.

The bills spanned a wide range of issues, but the majority focused on Iran’s human rights violations, support for militant proxies and nuclear advances, while nearly all of the bills recommended the enforcement or expansion of U.S. economic sanctions. Much of the language of these bills landed in the FY22 H.R. 2471 Appropriations Bill that was consolidated with the

The number of resolutions and bills against the Iran negotiations did slow for a time. However, when it became known in August that negotiations had once again become serious, four senators—Tim Scott (R-SC) with Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Bill Hagerty (R-TN) and Jacky Rosen (D-NV)—introduced S. 4746, the Solidify Iran Sanctions Act of 2022. This bill would abolish the “sunset” clauses of the 1996 Iran and Libya Sanctions Act, which are set to expire in 2026, and make them “permanent.” As an aside, this legislation is supported by lobbyists for American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

The practical effect of the proposed legislation on U.S. policy would not be much as implementation rests primarily with the president, but rather on keeping the sanctions infrastructure in place indefinitely and therefore readily revived. However, this is one of the obstacles for Iran, which is seeking certain guarantees after the previous U.S. withdrawal.

Iran is not alone in this Congress’ sanction legislation actions. In January 2021, H.R. 261 was introduced by Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) and Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), along with 11 bipartisan cosponsors (growing to 57 by August 2021). Its sister bill S. 1904, introduced in May 2021 by Marco Rubio (R-FL), along with 24 Republican cosponsors in the Senate, “to impose sanctions with respect to foreign support for Palestinian terrorism, and for other purposes,” aka, “the Palestinian International Terrorism Support Prevention Act,” was referred to the Committee on Foreign Affairs and to the Committee on Financial Services. Like the Iran sanctions, much of this language was incorporated into the FY22 Consolidated Appropriations bill.

In fact, most proposed legislation on relations with Middle East countries did not become law until they were incorporated into

PHOTO BY ANNA ROSE LAYDEN/GETTY IMAGES

Julia Pitner is a contributing editor of the Washington Report. She lives in the Washington, DC metropolitan area.

the FY22 Public Law 117-103. The rare exception was H.R. 5323 and S. 2830, the Iron Dome Supplemental Appropriations Act, providing an additional $1 billion to Israel. This funding was the target of procedural motions (mostly by Republican House members) that delayed the needed continuing resolution to keep the U.S. government running. Because of this, it was removed from the regular appropriations. However, in Sept. 2021, it was introduced as a “clean” bill and passed the House 409-9.

The same legislative process on foreign affairs has held true for the second session of the 117th Congress and the FY23 H.R. 7900. However, several bills of note made their way into the amendments process of the House and Senate negotiations in various committees, while others did not but remain in the various committees to which they were referred.

H.R. 7987 and S. 4366, DEFEND Act, made possible by the Abraham Accords (and another poke at Iran), seeks to create a Middle East regional “architecture.” Key provisions of the DEFEND Act, including the Middle East Integrated Air and Missile Defense initiative, have been included in both the House and Senate versions of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), putting a major national security related initiative on track to pass into law without any hearings or scrutiny.

ISRAEL ANTI-BOYCOTT ACT

Another such effort was H.R. 6940, the Israel Anti-Boycott Act introduced by Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY), which attempts to criminalize the BDS movement. Specifically, the bill attempts to federalize various state laws that prohibit government contractors and state officials and employees from a list of specified prohibited actions, including the act of furnishing information to any foreign country or international governmental organization that furthers an imposed boycott.

Under this bill, “a person who violates the prohibitions against such boycotts may be subject to a monetary fine or imprisonment; however, the bill removes imprisonment as a potential penalty for certain violations.” It currently has 59 Republican sponsors.

Although Zeldin’s efforts to incorporate the language into the final appropriations failed, the report accompanying the bill used to indicate intention does include a nod to the bill by leveraging it as a proAbraham Accords/normalization provision, which promotes a U.S. anti-BDS screening of USAID grantees—and includes erasing any differentiation between Israel and settlements.

TARGETING THE UNITED NATIONS

Various organs of the United Nations also continued to come under scrutiny from Congress members in 2022. While the House Appropriations Bill softened its stance toward the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), hinting that the U.S. might rejoin, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) was targeted for defunding, specifically for its International Commission of Inquiry (COI) on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel. The COI was established following the May 2021 conflict with Gaza.

In March of 2022, Rep. Gregory Steube (R-FL) introduced the COI Elimination Act with 106 cosponsors. After the June 7, 2022 report of the COI was issued, the Senate followed suit, when Sen Tim Scott (R-SC) introduced S. 4389, with 6 cosponsors that mirrors the House bill.

The full FY23 Appropriations Committee voted on an amendment presented by Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-PA) that “prohibits the use of funds from supporting the U.N. International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel.” The amendment was adopted by voice vote for the State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs 2023 funding bill before voting to advance the legislation to the full House.

What upset them was the inaugural report of the IOC in June 2022. In accordance with the mandate, their findings stated that “The continued occupation by Israel of Palestinian territory and discrimination against Palestinians are the key root causes of the recurrent tensions, instability and protraction of conflict in the

region.” As Navanethem Pillay, chair of the commission said, “The findings and recommendations relevant to the underlying root causes were overwhelmingly directed toward Israel, which we have taken as an indicator of the asymmetrical nature of the conflict and the reality of one state occupying the other.”

Ironically, Reps. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) and James McGovern (D-MA), together with two cosponsors, introduced H.R. 8372, Protecting Multilateral Institutions from Coercive U.S. Sanctions, which aims “To prohibit the exercise of authorities under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act with respect to the United Nations and related organizations.” It was referred to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

ABU AKLEH INVESTIGATION

On a positive note, in the Senate’s FY23 State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs Final Appropriations Bill and Report, specific language in its report was added stating, the “committee directs the secretary of state to submit a report to the appropriate congressional committees not later than 180 days after the date of enactment of the act on steps taken to facilitate and support an independent, credible and transparent investigation into the shooting death of Palestinian-American citizen and journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, including whether section 620M of the FAA applies to such case. The report shall detail which independent party conducted the investigation and the findings therein.”

So, this answers the question of whether the State Departments statement in July would satisfy congressional requests for investigation. It is also linked in sentiment and language to the protection of journalists and human rights activists’ provision in the H.R. 7900 appropriations bill. Similar to the DEFEND provision, it has a very good chance of becoming public law, but in this case for the better.

The 117th Congress has drafted and introduced both positive and negative legislation; more than appears in these pages. Legislative efforts and voting records linked to them appear in the Washington Report’s Shame and Fame Record online at <www.wrmea.org>.

The Sound of Silence: U.S. Has No Moral Standing to Criticize

By Walter L. Hixson

Mourners at the Aug. 11, 2022 funeral for Saadia Farajallah, mother of eight, in the West Bank city of Hebron. According to the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, the 68 year old Palestinian detainee, arrested on Dec. 18, 2021, died in the Israeli prison Damon due to medical negligence. After she was assaulted by settlers outside the Ibrahimi Mosque, Farajallah was accused of stabbing a 38 year old armed settler, and then brutally beaten by Israeli forces during her arrest. When prisoners heard about her death on July 2, they began knocking on the doors of their cells to express their anger and call for an end to Israel’s policy of deliberate medical neglect for Palestinian political prisoners. As of the end of May 2022, there were 4,700 Palestinian detainees—including 32 women and 170 children—held in Israeli prisons, with 640 treated as administrative detainees, including two women and a child.

History’s Shadows, a regular column by contributing editor Wal ter L. Hixson, seeks to place various aspects of Middle East poli tics and diplomacy in historical perspective. Hixson is the author of Architects of Repression: How Israel and Its Lobby Put Racism, Violence and Injustice at the Center of US Middle East Policy and Israel’s Armor: The Israel Lobby and the First Gener ation of the Palestine Conflict (available from Middle East Books and More), along with several other books and journal articles. He was a professor of history for 36 years, achieving the rank of dis tinguished professor.

Words, like silent raindrops fell —Paul Simon, “The Sound of Silence”

ALAS, TSAR VLADIMIR PUTIN was correct in his assertion that the United States has no moral standing to criticize or condemn other countries for their militarism or their human rights violations. As Putin charged, the United States harbors too many double standards to function as a credible and effective world leader on these issues.

PHOTO BY MAMOUN WAZWAZ/ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES

That reality is unfortunate because the world desperately needs moral leadership (Where, oh where is the next Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr.? Will he or she please stand up!).

From an historical perspective, America’s history of enslavement, Native American removal, and more than a century of bolstering repressive regimes in every region of the world, calls into question its fitness for leadership on human rights. As for militarism, when you heap unprecedented destruction and kill millions of people in a series of senseless wars in Indochina, Iraq and Afghanistan, leadership in the service of a more peaceful world clearly is not your forte.

It would be one thing if these failures of moral leadership were confined to history but, unfortunately, they are not. Many examples of contemporary U.S. foreign policy could be cited, but nothing lays bare the hypocrisy and failure of American leadership more than the ongoing unconditional financial and “moral” support for the murderous, apartheid regime of Israel.

Here we can, at least, give the United States credit for consistency. As the French saying goes, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” Decade after decade since 1948, Washington has paved the way for Israel to wantonly kill and displace masses of indigenous Palestinians while destabilizing an entire region of the world. Regular homicidal assaults on the blockaded Gaza Strip; the relentless displacement of people from their homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem; the killing and arbitrary incarceration that includes children; the ongoing defiance of international law and the United Nations; all of this and many other acts of re-

pression are just business as usual for the self-proclaimed exclusively Jewish, and therefore apartheid, state.

Lying squarely behind these decades of brutal repression, indeed making them possible, has been the United States of America, the supposed champion of freedom and democracy. Washington has not only enabled but has also funded decades of Israeli militarist repression, to the tune of more than $3.8 billion annually today and, overall, billions more than America has provided to any other country in the world. This fact alone—that the United States would fund a tiny yet highly developed country of fewer than 9 million people with more money than provided to

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anyone else, money that is used to kill, maim and repress—is enough on its own to disqualify the U.S. from any legitimate claim to world leadership.

If the nation hopes to reclaim even a share of global responsibility, to work toward a safer and more humane world, it could hardly select a better arena for change than Middle East policy. Bringing an end to unconditional U.S. support for a lethal apartheid regime would send a strong signal that the United States is serious, at long last, about equality, human rights and democracy.

Until the demand for such change takes hold, the United States has no foundation to criticize Russia’s war in Ukraine, which, by the way, Washington helped to provoke by spurring unbridled NATO expansion and has since escalated through weapons sales rather than seeking to mediate or bring the conflict to an end. We should also keep quiet about Chinese repression in Tibet or Xinjiang or the takeover of Hong Kong or the desire to “repatriate” Taiwan. We have no moral standing to condemn North Korea, Myanmar, Iran, the Taliban or Saudi Arabia for their religious and state repression.

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Mind you, all the countries cited above richly deserve moral condemnation and international pressure to reform. The point, however, is that the United States has sacrificed its ability to be taken seriously as an honest broker in efforts to rein in these human rights and militarist transgressors.

Unless and until America’s own militarism and hypocritical human rights policies are meaningfully confronted and changed—starting with a cutoff of funding of the client in Tel Aviv—the only sound we should hear from the United States on these issues is the sound of silence. ■

Two Views

How Israel Exploits the “Iran Threat”

The Iran Threat: Fact or Fiction?

By Dr. M. Reza Behnam

HEGEMONS AND DESPOTS need a fictional enemy to distract their citizens from their failed and oppressive policies. The United States and Israel have fixed upon the Islamic Republic of Iran as that utilitarian enemy. Consequently, the fraudulent “Iran threat narrative” has become their catechism.

Israel cites four factors regarding Iran that cause it angst. First is Israel’s claim that Iran’s nuclear program threatens its national security. Above all, it is important to distinguish between knowing how to produce nuclear weapons, as opposed to an operational

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

program with military dimensions. Addressing the CEO Council of The Wall Street Journal in December 2021, CIA Director William Burns stated that the United States has seen no evidence that Iran has decided to pursue a nuclear weapon.

Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei have both issued legally binding state fatwas against the use of chemical and nuclear weapons, declaring them haram, forbidden by Islamic principles. In a May 26, 2022 interview, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian reiterated Iran’s long-standing policy on nuclear weapons. He said, “…it is not in our beliefs…it has no place in our doctrine, in our defense, or our foreign policy.”

It would be illogical for Iran to launch a nuclear attack on Palestine-Israel. The wrath of the Islamic world would rain down upon it. Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia and al-Quds (Jerusalem) are home to the three holiest Muslim sites. Not only would holy sites be destroyed, Palestinians, whom Iran champions, would also be the victims of such an assault.

Iran’s chief negotiator for the nuclear agreement, Ali Bagheri Kani, attends nuclear deal talks, which resumed after a break of about five months in Vienna, Austria on Aug. 4, 2022.

PHOTO BY ASKIN KIYAGAN/ANADOLU AGENCY

VIA GETTY IMAGES

Iran was one of the first countries to sign the 1968 U.N. Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and has vigorously pursued the establishment of a regional nuclear weapons-free zone. As a signatory, Iran is prohibited from developing, acquiring or using nuclear weapons, but it has the right to manufacture and enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. It has also signed the 1975 Convention on Biological Weapons and the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention.

Israel has never signed or ratified the Biological Weapons Convention and has signed but not ratified the Convention on Chemical Weapons. According to a 2022 report by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, Israel has developed and maintains active chemical and biological weapons programs.

Also, Israel—the only state in the Middle East with nuclear weapons—has the sophisticated systems to deliver the estimated 90 to 400 nuclear weapons it possesses. Furthermore, a 2018 Arms Control Association report states that the country has enough fissile material for 200 nuclear warheads. Unlike Tehran, Tel Aviv has refused binding international agreements and continues to oppose diplomatic efforts to establish a regional nuclearfree zone.

Another reason cited by Israel for its angst is Iran’s robust missile development. While Israel portrays Iran’s missile program as a regional menace, Tehran views missiles as critical to its national security.

Iran has a right to defend itself. The memory of the 1980-1988 war with Iraq, for which the post-revolutionary government was ill-prepared, is long and has shaped Iran’s defensive posture.

Nuclear weapons are a security guarantee that Iran has not sought. Instead, missiles have become the mainstay of the country’s foreign policy. While its neighbors procure state-of-the-art weapons, U.S. sanctions have left Iran with outdated weapons. Lacking a modern air force, it has embraced ballistic missiles to defend its people against attacks. Iran’s arsenal is in no way comparable to the combined military power of the United States and Israel.

A third factor in Israel’s threat narrative is the pervasive trope that its national security is threatened by Iran’s support for what it labels “terrorist” groups. Tehran’s alignment with national liberation movements in Gaza, the occupied West Bank and Lebanon are integral to its defensive security strategy. The Islamic Republic has provided material support to groups it calls the oppressed, like Hezbollah and Hamas, whose anger is directed at the Israeli regime.

Finally, Iran’s so-called regional ambitions are central to Israel’s security angst. Unlike Israel, Iran has never invaded its neighbors nor stolen or occupied their land.

For years, Israel has attacked, invaded and occupied its neighbors: Lebanon in 1982 and 2006; the Syrian Golan Heights in 1967, annexing it in 1981. Israel occupied Southern Lebanon from 1985 until it was driven out by Hezbollah in 2000. Since 2017, Israel has conducted over 400 air strikes in Syria, with an attack in June 2022 that seriously damaged the Damascus International Airport.

In 1981, with impunity, Israel bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak and in 2007, bombed the Syrian nuclear facility at al-

Kibar. It helped the United States carry out the Stuxnet cyberattack on Iranian centrifuges in 2010. And in July 2020 and April 2021, Israel neither confirmed nor denied launching attacks on Iran’s nuclear facility at Natanz. Israel has also neither confirmed nor denied its involvement in the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists.

ISRAEL DICTATES U.S.-IRAN RELATIONS

For decades, Israel has successfully peddled the contrived regional threat story, to such an extent that it has come to dictate U.S.-Iran relations. Considering the deadly array of forces aligned against it, it is Iran, not Israel, that is threatened.

Israel would like nothing better than to take military action against Iran. In addition to sabotaging attempts to revive the 2015 nuclear agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), it has continued to prepare for military strikes as it did during the regime of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

Between 2010 and 2012, Israel came close to attacking Iran at least three times. In his 2018 autobiography, former Defense Minister Ehud Barak revealed that Netanyahu and he had pushed for military operations against Iranian facilities but backed down because of opposition from their own top security officials.

Interestingly, Barak also disclosed that he disagreed with Netanyahu that Iran’s nuclear program posed an existential threat to Israel. He was more concerned about the potential change in the regional balance of power if Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons.

The Israeli regime intensified its “shadow war” against Iran following President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA in 2018. When Naftali Bennett became prime minister three years later, he initiated the “Octopus Doctrine” designed, in his words, to deliver “a death by a thousand cuts” to Iran. Bennett’s strategy was to go after “the head of the octopus” in Iran, not just its allies across the region in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and Iraq. Israel has expanded its targets beyond Iran’s nuclear program to include its drone and missile programs.

As Washington works to weaken the global influence of Russia and China, President Joe Biden has been grooming Israel to assume more of America’s military role in the Middle East. The administration’s objective, according to Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, is to “deepen Israel’s integration into the region.”

On June 26, 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported that a secret, U.S.-initiated meeting was held in Egypt in March. Israeli and senior military officials from around the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, as well as U.S. representatives, assembled to explore ways to combat Iran’s missile and drone “threats.”

At the end of May 2022, the Israeli air force began a monthlong simulation of a wide-scale attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, dubbed “Chariots of Fire.” Reportedly, $1.5 billion has been allocated for a potential attack.

During a Knesset council briefing on June 20, 2022, Defense Minister Benny Gantz confirmed that, under U.S. auspices, Israel has joined a region-wide military partnership, dubbed the “Middle East Air Defense Alliance,” to combat what he described as the

threat from Iran. It is under this agreement that the U.S. through Israel is providing the Iron Dome system to the Gulf countries that are signatories to the Abraham Accords.

Also, Gantz indicated that a permanent liaison officer from the Israeli navy will be assigned to the U.S. Navy’s Mideast-based Fifth Fleet in Bahrain.

Israel has been urging Washington to pursue a military option against Iran. To demonstrate his commitment to that policy, Biden, during his July 2022 trip, signed a pledge to never allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon and to “…use all elements of its national power to ensure that outcome.” Despite that assurance, Israel has stated that they reserve the right to attack Iran regardless of how the current nuclear negotiations are decided.

Rapprochement between Iran and its Arab neighbors would stabilize the region—something Israel dreads. Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi has made improving relations with neighbors a priority of his government. In his August 2021 inaugural speech, he stated, “I extend a hand of friendship and brotherhood to all countries in the region...Foreign intervention in this region resolves no problem; it’s a problem itself.”

The United States, Israel and Arab autocrats are not threatened by Iran’s nuclear program. They are threatened, however, by Iran’s potential to transform the region. The carefully managed “Iran threat” narrative has, as planned, kept the region distracted,

chaotic and vulnerable and has allowed Israel to maintain a monopoly of control in Palestine and the region. ■

Do Not Disturb: Israel is Battling Iran

By Gideon Levy

PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB ISRAEL—it’s busy fighting with Iran. The fight is to prevent Iran’s nuclearization, but no less than that it serves Israel in other realms. And so Israel will keep on fighting, will not stop trying to move heaven and earth, will not give up, even when the chances of success are nil, in the face of the agreement now being formulated.

And so Prime Minister Yair Lapid is acting the same way former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu did, with vociferous and uncompromising opposition to the agreement. On this level as well, there is no difference in their conduct. And that is because over the years the struggle itself has become fruitful for Israel, no less than the declared goal. The first to identify this was of course Netanyahu, the father of the war against the Iranian nuclear project.

Gideon Levy is an Israeli journalist and author. This article was first published in Haaretz, August 27, 2022 © Haaretz. Reprinted with permission.

(L r) Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz, U.S. President Joe Biden, caretaker Prime Minister Yair Lapid, U.S. Defense Attache in Israel Brigadier General Shawn A. Harris and Israeli army Chief of Staff Aviv Kohavi pose in front of an Iron Dome air defense system during a tour at Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv on July 13, 2022.

PHOTO BY MANDEL NGAN/AFP GETTY

This is a war against the acquisition by a country openly threatening Israel with a doomsday weapon, but at the same time it’s also a campaign to lift what Israel considers no less of a threat— global opposition to the occupation.

Since Israel began the fight against the Iranian nuclear program, it has managed to turn the content of global discourse on its head. If before that, every diplomatic encounter dealt with the solution to the conflict, now it’s been pushed aside—with lip service and a photo op at the Palestinian Authority headquarters in Ramallah—and conversation moves to the really important matter: the Iranian nuclear program. Don’t bother Israel right now with international law and with apartheid—can’t you see it’s busy with Iran?

The Iran issue allows Israel to go back to its favorite position— the eternal victim, with an entity seeking its destruction; and when Israel shouts “destruction” who will not come to its defense? When the existence of Israel is threatened by another country, it can’t be bothered with the minutiae of the occupation, the settlers and human rights. And the world gives in easily. In any case it has no particular interest in solving the Palestinian problem, it has more urgent and resolvable issues. And so the conversation about Iran serves almost everyone.

For years it was Palestinian terror that served Israel—of course you can’t trust airplane hijackers and bus bombers. Hamas also played into Israel’s hands: After all, you can’t give in to the local branch of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. Iran rose in the east; a great miracle was wrought.

Iran not only obviated the Palestinian issue; it also helped unify the ranks at home: An external threat and a fearmongering campaign are always good for those who rule, anyone who rules. And there’s no threat like the Iranian one to enrich the defense establishment with more and more funding and magnify its importance. Danger, war.

Iran also allows Israel to continue its starring role on the global stage: The Iranian nuclear project is a global matter, and Israel is playing the leading role, as the prime potential victim. All this is not to say that Iran does not constitute a strategic threat and that Israel is not a potential victim. Of course it is, but Israel knows how to squeeze the most out of every threat.

The most reasonable agreement possible to achieve is now being formulated—and Israel is already sounding the alarm and clamoring, at least to receive proper compensation from the United States. They’re already talking about more military aid in exchange for an agreement that will be good for Israel.

No matter how we present it, Israel benefits. We should supposedly be proud of a policy that benefits Israel and also protects it as much as possible. However, as in every deal, the Iranian deal also comes at the expense of something else. And that something else is the end of the occupation.

Iran certainly didn’t intend this, and neither did Israel, but in recent years nothing has served the Israeli occupation so much and so efficiently as the Iranian threat. Now all that’s left is only to hope that the agreement with Iran doesn’t take the matter off the agenda, perish the thought. Israel needs it like air to breathe. ■ (Advertisement)

A Perpetual War for an Impossible Peace

By Marwan Bishara

ernment buildings, he was targeted by a drone attack in a failed assassination attempt. It backfired.

The decision of the country’s Supreme Court to certify the elections allowed their rival, the populist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose party won the most seats, to build a broad coalition along with predominantly Sunni and Kurdish parties in order to form a majority government. However, the constitution stipulates that the parliament must first elect the president, which requires two-thirds of members to be present, allowing the Iran-backed Coordination Framework to block government formation simply by absenting itself from parliamentary sessions.

THE SCENES OF VIOLENCE and chaos at the heart of Iraq’s capital Baghdad at the end of August were terribly disturbing but hardly surprising. Tensions have been building throughout this bruised nation over the past year; a formidable nation that has been deformed by war and violence over the past two decades and more, with no end in sight.

The immediate crisis began after the October legislative elections. Some of the Iran-backed parties blamed their losses on a “fraudulent election” engineered by “America and its clients.” They tried to paralyze the government and parliament until their demands were met, but when the prime minister ordered security forces to break their siege of the Green Zone that hosts the gov-

Marwan Bishara is an author who writes extensively on global poli tics and is widely regarded as a leading authority on U.S. foreign pol icy, the Middle East and international strategic affairs. He is a senior political analyst at Al Jazeera, which posted this article on Sept. 1, 2022. Copyright Al Jazeera.Reprinted with permission.

After a months-long impasse, the impulsive and angry al-Sadr ordered all of his 73 members to quit in protest and called for the dissolution of parliament and the holding of new elections. However, when the Iran-backed Shi’a coalition led by former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki tried to name a new prime minister in late July, al-Sadr’s supporters stormed parliament, leading to more violent confrontations. The security forces intervened and al-Sadr doubled down on his earlier announcement of quitting politics, putting the country on the path to the unknown.

It may well get worse. In a leaked audio recording that sparked outrage in Iraq, al-Maliki, the leader of the Iran-backed Coordination Framework, warned that the country will descend into “devastating war” if the political project of Muqtada al-Sadr and his potential Kurdish and Sunni coalition partners is not defeated. Al-Maliki is supported by various militias that have reportedly been involved in acts of violence and political assassinations.

Those Iran-backed militias, known as Hashd al-Shaabi—“The Popular Mobilization Forces”—were armed and financed by both Iraq and Iran to fight the so-called Islamic State (ISIL/ISIS). ISIL was destroyed after three years of fighting, but the war has left its ugly marks on Iraq, further bruising its society and devastating its attempts at recovery.

Supporters of Shi’a cleric Muqtada al Sadr gather inside a tent outside the Iraqi parliament building in the Green Zone of the capital Baghdad, on Aug. 16, 2022. They are protesting the nomination of a rival Shi’a leader for the position of prime minister. Two tent cities have sprung up as both blocs set up protest camps, complete with cooked meals and air conditioners against the blistering heat. The war scarred country’s political impasse has dragged on ever since inconclusive October elections.

PHOTO BY AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

ISIL itself had come out of a decade of war and sectarian violence following the U.S. invasion and occupation in 2003, which left the country in utter shambles. The American failure has also enhanced the influence of Iran, its nemesis in Iraq. As the U.S. rushed to exit the country after more than a decade of blunders, Iran doubled down, expanding its influence at the expense of Iraq’s stability and prosperity.

The last two decades of imperial, sectarian and civil wars were preceded by two other decades of regional war and violence. It started with the horrific Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the U.S.-led war to liberate it, followed by crippling sanctions throughout the 1990s. This has systematically drained the country’s manpower and resources, ruined its economy, torn apart its society and sapped the spirit of its people.

It is tiring to merely list these long episodes of war and violence, so you can imagine how incredibly exhausting and dispiriting it must have been for generations of Iraqis to live and die through it.

It is as if Iraq and the rest of this ill-fated region are doomed to live in perpetual violence after a century of Western colonial, imperial and proxy wars. The region has not enjoyed a single year, a single day without conflict and violence ever since.

At the heart of the Iraq and Middle East tragedy is a simple but serious misunderstanding about war in the West and the East alike. It is certainly easier to start a war than to end it, as the saying goes, but a conflict does not actually end when the fighting stops and smug leaders reach new accommodation. The tragedy and the mindset of war live on in the broken and impoverished society left behind.

Fear and violence continue to occupy and harden peoples’ hearts and minds,

bruising their spirits, deforming their values and skewing their loyalties. In Iraq and much of the Middle East, this has meant people—especially the young— finding shelter in their clan, tribe, sect or faith; joining the local militia, gang or shady racket; basically, doing anything to overcome that dreadful feeling of constant fear and insecurity.

Soon enough, new and more violent faultlines are drawn, as societies flounder, and armed militias form political parties, paving the way to more vengeful conflict and violence. It is a perpetual war for an impossible peace, let alone a peace of mind.

These are the true “birth pangs of a new Middle East,” which U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice celebrated in 2006. That was after the U.S. global War on Terror and its invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq began to spill over to other parts of the Middle East, starting with Israel’s aggression first against Palestine and later against Lebanon. Gory and gruesome.

Indeed, Iraq and much of the region— including Syria, Yemen, Libya, Lebanon, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iran and Sudan—

continue to suffer from a variety of wars driven and shaped mostly by violent Western cynicism and rogue Middle Eastern authoritarianism.

It is heart-wrenching to see Iraqis turn against each other again and again, as if politics is war by other means. It is not. If anything, politics is and must be the antidote for war and violence in the region and beyond. ■

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Supporters of Muqtada al Sadr gather for a “selfie” group picture outside the headquarters of the Supreme Judicial Council, Iraq’s highest judicial body, in Baghdad on Aug. 23, 2022. They are demanding the dis solution of parliament and new elections.

PHOTO BY AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Two Views

Afghanistan Pays for Hosting al-Qaeda Leaders—Again

The Assassination of Ayman al-Zawahri

By Jacob G. Hornberger

WHILE U.S. OFFICIALS and their acolytes in the mainstream press have described the U.S. national security establishment’s recent assassination of Ayman al-Zawahri as a great victory for President Joe Biden and the U.S. “global war on terror,” it is important to keep in mind that the assassination was just plain murder on the part of America’s federal killing machine.

Federal officials and their mainstream press have justified al-Zawahri’s killing on two grounds: (1) by claiming that al-Zawahri participated in the 9/11 attacks and (2) by claiming that the killing was simply part of their “global war on terror.”

Both justifications, however, are nothing more than rational-

Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. This article was published in Counterpunch on Aug. 24, 2022. Reprinted with permission.

izations for a state-sponsored murder on the part of the U.S. national security establishment.

Let’s keep in mind something important: terrorism is not an act of war. It is a federal criminal offense. That includes the 9/11 attacks. As acts of terrorism, the 9/11 attacks were federal criminal offenses.

Consider all the federal prosecutions for terrorism that have taken place in U.S. district courts in New York, Virginia, Washington, DC, and elsewhere for many years. There is a simple reason for those prosecutions: Terrorism is a federal criminal offense. If it were an act of war, there never would have been those criminal prosecutions. Instead, there would have simply been prisoner-ofwar camps, like in regular wars. In regular wars, no soldier is criminally prosecuted for murder for killing an enemy soldier. That’s because in war, soldiers are legally entitled to kill the enemy.

In 1993, terrorists set off a bomb in the World Trade Center. The bombing didn’t bring down the towers but it did kill and injure multitudes of people. It was no different in principle from the later attacks on 9/11. When Ramzi Yousef, one of the people who committed the 1993 attack, was later taken into custody, he

The sun sets on lower Manhattan and One World Trade Center in New York City as people walk through the Empty Sky 9/11 Memorial in Liberty State Park on July 19, 2022, in Jersey City, New Jersey.

PHOTO BY GARY HERSHORN/GETTY IMAGES

was not placed in a prisoner-of war-camp. Instead, he was prosecuted in federal district court. Again, that’s because terrorism is a federal criminal offense, not an act of war.

Because the magnitude of the death and damage was so much greater with the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon and the CIA succeeded in perverting and warping America’s founding judicial system. After those attacks, they established a torture and prison camp in Cuba. Why Cuba? Their aim was to establish a Constitution-free zone where they could bring any suspected terrorist in the world and do whatever they wanted to him, without any judicial interference whatsoever. That included such things as torture, indefinite detention, and extrajudicial execution.

The Supreme Court declared that it had jurisdiction over the Cuba center but then, in an act of extreme passivity, permitted the Pentagon and the CIA to establish a dual judicial system, one that would operate alongside the federal judicial system. The Pentagon and the CIA would have the omnipotent authority to decide whether to send terrorism suspects through the federal system or through their kangaroo military tribunal system.

The Gitmo system has always been flagrantly unconstitutional. But the federal judiciary has always been deferential to the Pentagon and the CIA. That’s why there are still prisoners at Gitmo who have been incarcerated and tortured for decades without even the semblance of a trial, in flagrant violation of the right to a speedy trial guaranteed by the Bill of Rights and the right not to be subjected to cruel and unusual punishments.

After the 9/11 attacks, the national-security establishment also claimed that it had the authority to assassinate anyone it considered to be a terrorist. As I document in my new book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, this power of assassination came into existence long before the 9/11 attacks, but by and large, it was kept under wraps and not publicized widely by the CIA and the Pentagon.

Not so after 9/11, however. At that point, assassination became a well-established, widely publicized power of the CIA and the Pentagon. From that point on, they didn’t have to bring suspected terrorists to justice, either in the federal court system or the tribunal system at Gitmo. They could just kill suspected terrorists on sight. That included American citizens.

There was always one great big legal problem, however, with their program of state-sponsored assassination: The Constitution, which not only does not delegate a power of assassination to federal officials but also, through the Fifth Amendment, expressly prohibits the federal taking of life without due process of law—i.e., without formal notice and a trial.

The Constitution, however, proved to be no obstacle to state-sponsored assassinations simply because the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary played their standard deferential and passive role by upholding this omnipotent, totalitarian, dark-side power.

It is worth mentioning that there is no indication that al-Zawahri was participating in any anti-American terrorist operation at the time of his assassination. His killing appears to be noth-

ing more than an extrajudicial act of deadly vengeance in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks more than 20 years ago. It’s also worth mentioning that al-Zawahri was never convicted of participating in the 9/11 attacks. Indeed, as U.S. officials have slowly and reluctantly released their highly secret stash of evidence regarding 9/11 over the years, the great weight and preponderance of that evidence seems to point to Saudi Arabians as the orchestrators of the 9/11 attacks. Of course, the Pentagon and the CIA would have every incentive to protect Saudi Arabia given that it provides much of the oil that funds their massive worldwide military machine.

Our American ancestors brought into existence the greatest judicial system in history. It was a system that admittedly permitted some guilty people to go free, but with the aim of ensuring that innocent people were never punished, killed, tortured or abused. That system worked well for some 150 years. Unfortunately, the Pentagon and the CIA have destroyed it, as we have most recently seen with their extrajudicial murder of accused terrorist Ayman al-Zawahri. ■

U.S. Judge Says 9/11 Victims Not Entitled to Afghan Bank Assets

By Al Jazeera Staff

A UNITED STATES JUDGE has recommended that victims of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks not be allowed to seize billions of dollars of assets belonging to Afghanistan’s central bank to satisfy court judgements they obtained against the Taliban.

After the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021, governments and international institutions froze the country’s central bank assets held abroad, totalling about $10 billion. About $7 billion of that was held in the U.S. and other countries hold about $2 billion.

Western governments have refused to recognize the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan and the money has remained in limbo. Non-recognition of the Taliban government undermines its ownership of the frozen central bank assets.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn in Manhattan said on August 26 that Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB)—the central bank— was immune from jurisdiction. Allowing the seizures of the bank’s assets would effectively acknowledge the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan, something only the U.S. president can do, the judge said.

“The Taliban’s victims have fought for years for justice, accountability, and compensation. They are entitled to no less,” Judge Netburn wrote.

“But the law limits what compensation the court may authorize, and those limits put the DAB’s assets beyond its authority.”

This article was posted on <www.aljazeera.com> on Aug. 27, 2022. Copyright 2022. Al Jazeera Media Network. Reprinted with Permission.

Netburn’s recommendation will be reviewed by U.S. District Judge George Daniels in Manhattan, who also oversees the litigation and can decide whether to accept her recommendation.

DEFEAT FOR CREDITORS

Nearly 3,000 people died on Sept. 11, 2001, when planes were flown into New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon in northern Virginia and a Pennsylvania field.

The decision is a defeat for four groups of creditors that sued a variety of defendants who they held responsible for the September 11 attacks. Lawyers for the creditor groups did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Following the Taliban’s takeover last year, a group of families of about 150 U.S. victims of the September 11 attacks said they were owed some $7 billion from the Afghan assets held by the Federal Reserve of New York.

That sum was awarded by a federal judge in 2012 following a default judgment against an array of defendants—including the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and Iran—who did not show up in court.

At the time of the attacks in 2001, the ruling Taliban had allowed al-Qaeda to operate inside Afghanistan.

The Taliban has repeatedly called on the U.S. and other governments and institutions to release the frozen bank funds, saying they are needed to stabilize Afghanistan’s ravaged economy and prevent a humanitarian crisis.

In an executive order in February, U.S. President Joe Biden ordered $3.5 billion of the bank’s assets to be set aside “for the benefit of the Afghan people,” leaving victims of the September 11 attacks to pursue the remainder in court.

The U.S. government took no position at the time on whether

the creditor groups were entitled to recover funds under the U.S.’ Terrorist Risk Insurance Act of 2002. It did urge judges Netburn and Daniels to view exceptions to sovereign immunity narrowly, citing the risks of interference with the U.S. president’s power to conduct foreign relations and possible challenges to American property located abroad.

Shawn Van Diver, the head of #AfghanEvac, which helps evacuate and resettle Afghans, said he hoped the frozen funds could be used to help the struggling Afghan economy without enriching the Taliban.

“The judge has done the right thing here,” he said.

U.S. sanctions ban doing financial business with the Taliban, but allow humanitarian support for the Afghan people. ■

Afghan children are seen with their mothers in Kabul, Afghanistan on Jan. 16, 2022. Rates of malnutrition are soaring in the country.

A young boy joins members of the local Afghan community and other Londoners to fly kites on Hampstead Heath in London on Aug. 20, 2022, to commemorate one year since the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban.

PHOTO BY SAYED KHODAIBERDI SADAT/ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES

PHOTO BY CARLOS JASSO/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Afghanistan Abandoned by the International Community

By Candice Bodnaruk

REFUGEE ADVOCATES are expressing shock after the Canadian government announced, on July 15, it was ending its Special Immigration Measures program for Afghans that was set up less than a year ago. That program prioritized former employees of the Canadian Armed Forces, the Canadian government, including interpreters, and their families. Today, the government is only halfway to its goal of bringing 40,000 Afghans to resettle in Canada. The closure could mean Afghans, who assisted Canada in its 20-year mission, may face persecution and even death if they are not able to get to Canada.

Candice Bodnaruk has been involved in Palestinian issues for the past 14 years through organizations such as the Canadian BDS Coalition and Peace Alliance Winnipeg. Her political action started with feminism and continued with the peace movement, first with the No War on Iraq Coalition in 2003 in Winnipeg.

Ariana Yaftali, co-founder of the Afghan-Canadian Women’s Association, said she could not believe it when she heard the news.

“While we appreciate all efforts from the Canadian government, the process of resettlement of these Afghans has been really lengthy and people who were promised they’d be rescued are still in Afghanistan,” said Yaftali.

An Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) spokesperson says the program has not actually ended and Afghan refugees are still a priority for Canada. “The government of Canada has not closed the Special Immigration [Measures] program for those who assisted the Government of Canada,” Aidan Strickland said in an emailed statement. Strickland stated that Canada is still firmly committed to resettling at least 40,000 Afghan nationals. She added that since August 2021 more than 17,590 Afghans have arrived in Canada.

Strickland said Afghans who have expressed interest in the pro-

NDP Member of Parliament (MP) Jenny Kwan (masked, front row, third from left) with former Afghan interpreters and their families who assisted the Canadian military in its Afghanistan mission.

PHOTO COURTESY

JENNY

KWAN’S

gram and whose connection to Canada has been verified are then referred to the IRCC by either Global Affairs Canada (GAC) or the Department of National Defense (DND).

“Of 18,000 spots available through our program we have received over 15,000 applications in various stages of processing based on referrals received by GAC and DND. The IRCC also continues to send out invitations and to reply to additional referrals,” Strickland explained.

The IRCC website currently states that Afghan nationals who had an “enduring relationship” with the Government of Canada, such as interpreters, people who worked at the Embassy of Canada to Afghanistan, as well as their family members, are still eligible for the program and that the Government of Canada is committed to welcoming Afghan refugees to Canada.

Yaftali insists the government’s decision leaves Afghans who had worked with the Canadian forces and NGOs, as well as others who worked with international NGOs and NATO, in real danger.

She said now is the time for the government to take immediate action and allow Afghan families who are already in Canada to sponsor their relatives who remain in Afghanistan.

In an emailed statement to the Washington Report, New Democratic Party (NDP) critic Jenny Kwan shared Yaftali’s concerns. Kwan said the IRCC is mired in bureaucratic red tape and that applications for the Special Immigration Measures have gone missing between different government departments with no clear explanation as to why.

“What is clear is that IRCC is in complete chaos,” Kwan wrote, adding that it is astonishing for 2,900 applications referred by the Department of National Defense (DND) to be “lost” between departments. She pointed out that only 900 applications have been confirmed and the whereabouts of the others is not clear.

Kwan said that the federal government’s decision to end the Special Immigration Measures program for Afghans

now means those who assisted Canada may never make it to safety. In addition, women’s organizations that were funded by the Canadian government and worked on advancing women’s rights and democratic rights are also being left behind.

“As one of the vice-chairs of the Special Committee on Afghanistan, I have heard horrific accounts from witnesses of how the Taliban are trying to hunt down Afghans who helped serve on Canadian missions when our veterans were [there]. Now they and their family members are in grave danger,” she said.

Kwan pointed out that applications from former interpreters have also been ignored by the IRCC and DND.

She shared the story of a former Afghan interpreter with the Canadian Forces, who is known only as “Mr. X,” to protect his identity. He received a Certificate of Appreciation from Lieutenant Wayne Eyre for helping translators from the Canadian Operational Mentoring and Liaison Team.

“Canada owes Mr. X a great deal of gratitude,” Kwan said.

Yet when he and his family were threatened by the Taliban, they got no assistance from the Government of Canada. “Mr. X” was eventually forced to flee to Pakistan and leave his family behind in Afghanistan. Last August he applied to resettle in Canada, yet after sending countless urgent messages to the IRCC, he has only received a series of automatically generated email responses.

He last emailed the IRCC in early July 2022 about applying for the Special Immigration Measures program and has yet to receive a direct response.

In the meantime, Yaftali proposes that the government offer special allocations through privately sponsored refugee programs for Afghans, so that families who are in Canada can sponsor their family members through the refugee sponsorship program.

Yaftali said it’s essential Canada remain committed to its promise of bringing those remaining in Afghanistan to safety in Canada as soon as possible, before they face persecution, harassment and even torture by the Taliban. She said it’s clear the

international community has abandoned Afghans and Afghanistan again. “The repercussions of this decision will leave Afghans in the danger zone with no support from the international community, including Canada,” Yaftali concluded.

Kwan said the NDP is urgently calling on the Liberal government to lift the arbitrary cap on the Special Immigration program and to expand and renew the Special Immigration Measures for Afghans, so those who are eligible, but never got a reply, have an opportunity to get to safety in Canada.

VIGIL FOR PALESTINE RETURNS TO FOLKLORAMA CULTURAL FESTIVAL

Folk musicians sang “We Shall Overcome” as people committed to justice and peace for Palestine gathered once again at Folklorama, Winnipeg’s longest running cultural festival, to protest Israel’s recent attack on Gaza.

Organizers of the annual event at the Israel Pavilion also focused on the 8th anniversary of the 2014 51-Day War, the recent murder of journalist Shireen Abu

Akleh, as well as the recent decision by six human rights organizations to call Israel’s actions toward Palestinians apartheid.

It was the first time since 2019 that people held a Palestine solidarity action at Folklorama. The festival was cancelled the two previous years because of COVID-19.

This year organizers had asked Folklorama to suspend the Israeli Pavilion because of increased violence toward Palestinians, pointing out that the Russian Pavilion did not participate in the festival this year because of Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine. The same could not be said for the Israeli Pavilion. Folklorama staff did not address or respond to organizers’ concerns about Israel’s participation this year.

People observed a moment of silence for the 16 children killed in Gaza between August 6-8. Members of Students for Justice in Palestine, a newly formed student group at the University of Manitoba, read out the names of the children.

Participants carried a variety of placards with messages like “Let Gaza Live,” “Free Palestine,” “Folklorama: Tell the Truth About Israel” and “This is YOUR Israel: This is What You’re Celebrating.”

Canada-Palestine Support Network, Independent Jewish Voices-Winnipeg, Peace Alliance Winnipeg, Winnipeg Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid and the local Palestinian community were all involved in organizing this year’s event.

WINNIPEG PROTESTS BRING ATTENTION TO ISRAELI VIOLENCE

People in Winnipeg have been holding public actions about Israel since the winter of 2021. This July 2022, participants gathered outside the city’s largest shopping center carrying placards with slogans like: “Journalist Shireen Abu Akleh Murdered by the Israeli Military May 11, 2022” and “Palestinian Children Face Torture in Israeli Prisons.” The event was an opportunity to engage with passersby who stopped to ask about their work.

Previous demonstrations focused on Canada’s weapons sales to Israel and Canada’s decision to purchase drones from Israeli weapons company Elbit Systems. ■

Students for Justice in Palestine, at the Israel pavilion of Folklorama, Winnipeg’s cultural festival, on Aug. 11, 2022, read the names of Palestinian children killed during Israel’s recent attack.

PHOTOS COURTESY

LARRY SUTHERLAND

Two Views

“Apocalyptic” Floods Ravage Politically Divided Pakistan

Imran Khan’s Uncertain Future

By Zakaria Clark-ElSayed

ON APRIL 10, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan was removed from office through a vote of no confidence. The Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM), a coalition of 14 parties in the country’s National Assembly, removed him on the grounds that rising inflation and poor economic policies destroyed his public support. Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), Khan’s party, initially resisted the vote of no confidence. Khan called for the entire National Assembly to

be dissolved, accusing the opposition of being pressured by foreign influence.

The Pakistani Supreme Court denied his call to dissolve parliament, and 174 of the 342 members of the National Assembly voted in favor of removing Khan from office, surpassing the 50 percent requirement.

It is not unusual for prime ministers in Pakistan to be forced out of office, but usually this happens through impeachments, assassinations or coups. In fact, no prime minister has completed an entire five-year term since the establishment of Pakistan after the 1947 partition. The removal of Khan, a former cricket star, was the first time a prime minister was ousted from office through a vote of no confidence.

Although he was originally popular, Khan’s support had been deteriorating for months prior to his removal. This was particularly

Pakistani former prime minister and leader of the opposition party Imran Khan (front, second from right) waves to supporters during a protest rally against inflation, political destabilization and continued hikes in fuel prices, in Rawalpindi on July 2, 2022.

Zakaria Clark ElSayed is an undergraduate at the University of Cam bridge. He is completing his bachelor’s in religious studies with a focus on Islam and Buddhism.

PHOTO BY FAROOQ NAEEM/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

evident at the end of 2021, when the PTI lost a series of important elections.

Khan, however, remained adamant that his ouster was a conspiracy unrelated to domestic affairs. In 2018, Khan ran on a populist platform opposing corruption and proposing a new foreign policy that would give Pakistan a greater degree of autonomy from foreign influence, particularly from the United States and China. He claims that this foreign policy irked powerful governments who in turn made sure he was removed from office.

“Imran Khan talked about a Muslim bloc, that’s his sin,” former Minister of Parliamentary Affairs Ali Muhammad Khan insisted in a speech after the vote of no confidence. “Imran Khan talked about an independent foreign policy, that’s his sin…the Russia [visit] is just an excuse, the real target has always been Imran Khan.”

The reference to Russia became one of the PTI’s main talking points in their claims of foreign influence. On Feb. 24, hours after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, Imran Khan and Russian President Vladimir Putin met in Moscow. Pakistan’s foreign office detailed that the two leaders discussed Afghanistan, Islamophobia and the finalization of a new gas pipeline in Pakistan. In Khan’s mind, the United States could not handle watching a leader meet with Putin, and this set in motion the events that led to his removal.

A month before the vote of no confidence, on March 7, Khan claimed that a Pakistani diplomat sent a letter detailing a threat toward the Pakistani government made by U.S. diplomat Donald Lu. The United States allegedly planned to bribe and corrupt both the opposition and members of the PTI. No evidence to substantiate this claim has been presented to the public.

Obviously, rising inflation, a historic deprecation of the Pakistani rupee compared to the dollar and unpopular loans from

the International Monetary Fund (IMF) provided the opposition with clear evidence of Imran Khan’s failures. (Khan was said to have jeopardized a vital debt bailout deal with the IMF by cutting fuel and food costs.) It wasn’t as though he was removed because of a scandal or a crime like former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who in 2017 resigned and was subsequently given a 10year prison sentence for corruption while in office. Rather, the opposition was able to produce a united majority opposed to his vision for Pakistan.

This united opposition to his politics solidified Imran Khan’s commitment to a conspiratorial narrative of foreign interference. For those loyal to him, it was never an issue of poor policy making or economic failure. Instead, the narrative was that he had been targeted for his willingness to advance Pakistani interests by standing up to oppressive governments seeking to dictate the direction of the country.

Khan’s belief that foreign pressure forced him out of power was only the latest instance of the PTI claiming a conspiracy against Pakistan. Back in March, following the Peshawar mosque attack, which killed more than 60 people, former Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi alluded to the international “powers” behind the attack and discussed a larger conspiracy to disrupt stability in Pakistan. “Some powers can’t accept this,” he said. “They don’t want to see stability, economic revival and growth and foreign investment in Pakistan.” As it turned out, the Islamic State-Khorasan Province claimed responsibility for the attack, without any reported help from a foreign power.

Since his removal, Khan has been persistent in opposing his successor, Shehbaz Sharif (the brother of Nawaz Sharif), and has continued to claim there is an ongoing conspiracy against his party.

Local residents cross a temporary footbridge, on Aug. 31, 2022, after heavy rains in the Swat Valley in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

PHOTO BY ABDUL MAJEED/AFP VIA

On July 12, days before by-elections for the provincial assembly in Punjab, Khan accused the election commission and the Pakistan Muslim League (the party of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif) of colluding to stifle the PTI.

In fact, the by-elections were a tremendous success for the PTI, fueled by Khan’s constant street rallies and highly publicized jabs at the legitimacy of the current government. The PTI won 15 of the 20 seats and reestablished its majority in the Provincial Assembly that it lost back in April when PTI members defected.

This strong resurgence in PTI support suggests that Khan’s current campaign strategy has worked, and we can expect to see claims of election rigging and foreign interference continue until national elections in 2023, when Khan could potentially return to power.

The downside of this strategy is that the PTI’s attention won’t be on altering the economic and political strategies that caused Khan to be removed from office, but rather on gaining support through questioning the legitimacy of his rivals.

HISTORIC FLOODS ADD TO WOES

The current government is facing serious economic problems, especially after the record monsoon rains that have devastated the country, killing more than 1,100 people, destroying crops and infrastructure, and wrecking one million homes. After three months of incessant rain, much of Pakistan’s farmland is flooded, which means the government will have to deal with food shortages.

The Balochistan province, in Pakistan’s southwest, has been one of the hardest hit areas, leaving many of the 12 million inhabitants without electricity, gas and internet. In addition, air, road and rail connections have been suspended, as much of the transportation infrastructure connecting the region to the rest of the country has

been washed away or rendered unusable. A large amount of the country’s farmland and stored crops were in Balochistan, which will contribute to massive food shortages in the short term and decreased agricultural output in the coming years.

On August 20, when Khan’s aggressive campaigning cast doubt on whether the coalition that removed Khan from power would be able to prevent him from returning, the government charged him with terrorism, saying he’d threatened current officials and a judge at one of the large, boisterous rallies.

As Khan arrived at the anti-terrorism court in Islamabad to obtain “pre-arrest bail,” hundreds of his supporters rushed his motorcade chanting, “Who will save Pakistan?! Imran Khan! Imran Khan!”

Although he has been granted bail until Sept. 7, what will happen after that date is unclear. If convicted, Khan would be barred from running for office, which would drastically alter the identity of the PTI.

The floods have already affected 33 million people and resulted in damages costing billions of dollars, adding to the economic misery that the government initially committed to tackle. After Khan’s removal, the government revoked a petroleum subsidy and raised taxes in several sectors to secure a billion dollar loan from the IMF. The increase in gas prices was largely unpopular, and now the increase in food costs resulting from the floods will only add further pressure on the current government to perform.

Despite the current humanitarian crisis, the Pakistani government has chosen to directly confront Imran Khan’s explosive campaign strategy through the terrorism charges. Over the coming months, the government’s attention will be split between addressing the widespread economic and humanitarian impact of the flood and dealing with the large popular dissent surrounding Imran Khan’s removal.

This aerial photograph, taken on Aug. 31, 2022, shows flood affected people taking refuge in a makeshift camp after heavy monsoon rains in Jaffarabad district of Balochistan province. Army helicopters flew sorties over cut off areas in Pakistan’s mountainous north and rescue parties fanned out across waterlogged plains in the south as misery mounted for millions trapped by the worst floods in the country’s history.

PHOTO BY FIDA HUSSAIN/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

It remains to be seen whether the current governing coalition can save the economy while remaining popular with the public until 2023. Despite his removal from office, Imran Khan remains a popular figure, and his commitment to antiAmerican and anti-globalist rhetoric may indeed be the political platform he needs to return to power.

Ultimately, the Pakistani people will have the final say in the matter. The concern with inflation and poor monetary policy is what led to Khan’s dismissal, and unless the new government can imple ment a new strategy, these same issues will—perhaps ironically—give Khan a resurgence in public support. ■

My Country is Drowning

By Anam Rathor

A THIRD OF MY COUNTRY is under water right now—bridges, roads, schools, and other critical infrastructure. At least 33 million people are displaced—that’s one in every seven Pakistanis. These are 33 million dreams broken, 33 million hopes shattered, and 33 million futures destroyed as a result of the havoc wreaked upon their lands by no fault of their own.

Pakistan accounts for just 0.67 percent of global carbon emissions, yet it has ranked among the most climate-vulnerable countries in the world for the past decade. The country faces warming rates considerably above the global average and more frequent and intense extreme climate events.

Every part of Pakistan has witnessed numerous extreme climate events this year alone. From March to June, the provinces of Sindh, Balochistan and Punjab saw record-breaking heatwaves. In the northern regions of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Gilgit-Baltistan, melting glaciers caused glacial lake outburst floods (GLOF). Now the recent floods triggered by an unprecedented monsoon season have created havoc in all regions of Pakistan, stretching from Gilgit-Baltistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to Sindh, Southern Punjab, and Balochistan.

This climatic catastrophe has wreaked devastation on the most marginalized, with millions still waiting for food, drinking water and shelter, while rescue teams struggle to reach these cut-off communities.

In a country already marred by its colonized past and seized by an economic collapse, the recent floods have exacerbated the devastation, leading to a steep rise in inflation and food scarcity of epic proportions as the floods have destroyed crops and killed livestock. The current climatic crisis is threatening Pakistan’s survival as an agricultural-based economy.

As Pakistan mourns the destruction and devastation caused by the recent extreme climatic events, the industrialized and post-in-

dustrialized countries of the global north responsible for these catastrophes need to be held accountable.

For us to survive and for the Pakistani people to live a dignified life, the climate crisis needs more attention than it is getting right now, especially from rich countries responsible for 90 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. These high emitting countries need to take responsibility, but they also need to be held accountable for the death and destruction that directly result from their action. The blood of the dead is on their hands—the global north, the fossil fuel billionaires.

The same high emitter countries of the global north colonized our land for hundreds of years, killing our ancestors and stealing our resources. Now they have colonized our atmosphere in their pursuit of wealth and development at the expense of our people's lives and environment.

If this is what a 1.1 degrees C increase looks like for Pakistan; I am terrified to imagine what the future holds. The temperature increase may be linear, but the catastrophes are exponential.

As Pakistan faces a catastrophic humanitarian crisis and an unimaginable financial crisis, the country is on the precipice of total economic disaster. It is time that high emitter countries pay for loss and damage. We are not asking for charity or another loan; we need climate reparations.

The death and destruction Pakistan has suffered will not just be another negligible statistic in this for-profit greedy world.

There are plenty of ways we can address the climate crisis, but for now, if you'd like to lend a hand immediately, please donate. ■

Anam Rathor is an avid social, political and climate justice organizer with a demonstrated history of working in the non profit industry. Common Dreams Aug. 31.

Pakistan Armed Forces assist search and rescue operations in flood hit areas of Pakistan on Aug. 27, 2022.

PHOTO BY PAKISTAN ARMED FORCES/ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES

UAE Legal Reforms Fail to Improve the Abysmal Human Rights Record

By Stasa Salacanin

atic restrictions on citizens’ and residents’ civil and political rights.”

HRW has especially focused on two new laws, the crime and punishment law and the cybercrimes law, which came into effect in early 2022.

According to a HRW report, Article 174 of the UAE’s new Federal Crime and Punishment Law imposes sentences of up to life in prison for any one who commits an act against a foreign country that “could harm political relations.”

In addition, it also presumes a death sentence if the court determines that harm did occur.

IN LATE 2021, THE UAE introduced the most extensive legal reforms in the country’s 50-year history, but many human rights organizations claim that legal changes failed to substantially improve the citizens’ and residents’ civil and political rights.

The UAE introduced 40 new laws and updated versions of existing legislation covering wide areas of business, labor, family, personal status, crime, intellectual property and e-commerce. The new legislation reforms were initiated to maintain the country’s position as a leading business hub and to attract foreign direct investments.

Despite progress in some fields, however, the rights groups have criticized the reforms, saying that they are just “consolidating repression.” Human Rights Watch (HRW) has been among the loudest, claiming that reforms “fail to address the longstanding and system-

Stasa Salacanin is a widely published author and analyst focusing on the Middle East and Europe. He produces in depth analysis of the region’s most pertinent issues for regional and international publications including the Al Jazeera Center for Studies, Middle East Monitor, The New Arab, Gulf News, Al Bawaba, Qantara, Inside Arabia and many more.

New legal provisions may directly affect the work of journalists based in the UAE. Article 178 provides a prison sentence (between 3 to 15 years) for anyone who collects “information, data, objects, documents, designs, statistics or anything else for the purpose of handing them over to a foreign country or group or organization or entity,” without first obtaining a license from the authorities. HRW experts claim that such articles may be easily used as a pretext to punish or intimidate anyone who tries to share information with international media outlets, including United Nations human rights experts.

No less repressive is Article 217, which criminalizes publishing or sharing “false or tendentious news, statements or rumors” and spreading “propaganda” that may “disturb public security,” “damage the public interest” or “incite public opinion.” Finally, defamation is also heavily sanctioned under articles 425, 426 and 427 of the penal code, affecting the media freedoms but also private communications via non-public applications such as WhatsApp.

HRW claims that the UAE’s new cybercrimes law, Combatting Rumors and Cybercrime, contains numerous penalties narrowing the possibility of any peaceful criticism aimed at the government and its representatives.

Workers clean the exterior of the Museum of the Future, which opened on Feb. 25, 2022, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The museum envisions what the world could look like in the future, with flying taxis, wind farms and solar energy projects conducted in space. The poetry of Dubai’s ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum wraps the building in Arabic calligraphy. In the background is the Burj Khalifa skyscraper, the tallest building in the world.

PHOTO BY KARIM SAHIB/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Article 20, for example, provides a sentence of up to life in prison for anyone who is using the internet “to advocate the overthrow, change, or usurpation of the system of governance in the state, or obstruct provisions of the constitution or existing law.”

Furthermore, Article 19 provides a prison sentence not exceeding one year or a fine for anyone who manages a website or a social media account that does not comply with media content standards issued by the relevant authorities. Article 22 stipulates prison terms between 3 and 15 years for anyone who provides information to organizations, institutions or agencies that is not authorized for publishing or circulating liable to harm state interests or damage its reputation. Under this provision, the UAE sentenced prominent human rights activist Ahmed Mansoor to 10 years in solitary confinement.

LONGSTANDING PATTERN

Charles Dunne, a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute and former U.S. diplomat, told the Washington Report that new legal provisions continue a longstanding pattern of tightening legal restrictions in the UAE in order to control political behavior. In his words, “the COVID pandemic provided Arab leaders an excuse to further tighten laws against free assembly and certain types of speech ostensibly in the interest of public health and safety, but really in the interests of increasing government authority.”

Dunne observes that under cover of improving economic competitiveness, these new measures would appear to strengthen laws that constrain freedom of expression and freedom of assembly and women’s rights. However, the trend of narrowing freedoms may negatively impact the aim of reforms.

While it is not yet clear whether foreign journalists will be subjected to these measures—and according to Dunne it is certainly possible—this may come with risks, including undermining the image of the UAE as a modern state and a safe place to invest. The UAE has been heavily criticized by Amnesty International after reports that Israel’s Pegasus spyware was used by the

UAE to spy on international journalists, activists and some foreign leaders.

On the other hand, Andrew Gardner, professor of anthropology at the University of Puget Sound, recalls that these issues have not played an outsized role when it comes to attracting investors, as these conditions have been in place throughout the Gulf for decades. Nevertheless, he observes that there is a new set of forces— global public opinion—to which all states must now also be closely attuned. Having this in mind, it is possible that these questions “potentially metastasize into issues of global attention and concern,” he told the Washington Report

MIGRANT RIGHTS ISSUES REMAIN UNSOLVED

The UAE reforms also fail to address the heavily criticized kafala system, which regulates sponsorship of migrant laborers. The UAE greatly relies on a foreign migrant labor force, which accounts for almost 90 percent of its population.

Gardner notes that the UAE has implemented changes to the kafala in the past decade, and some of these reforms have been fairly noteworthy and substantial in nature.

Indeed, public policy expert Reem Saeed, in her 2021 study titled “Human Rights Reforms: Natural Socio-Political Evolution or Positional Strategy?” said that over the past decade the UAE has ratified “nine key International Labor Organization (ILO) conventions related to workers’ rights, including six fundamental conventions, one governance convention and two technical conventions,” and introduced the Wage Protection System (WPS). The UAE also adopted regulations referring to the “banning of confiscating passports, physical abuse and travel rights.”

In practice, however, the situation is quite different. The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) believes that the new reforms fail to meet international standards for workers’ rights. The confederation’s annual Global Rights Index claims that the UAE has had “no guarantee of rights” for workers since 2014, citing a long list of

abuses including the detention and deportation of 700 workers from Africa in June 2021, as well as contract violations and irregularities. The UAE charges workers thousands of dollars in fees, prevents them from changing jobs and engages in wage discrimination based on nationality. According to ITUC’s survey, the conditions in the construction sector remain worrisome as 50 percent of construction workers in Dubai revealed that they “did not receive their wages on time and were denied adequate overtime payments.”

In Gardner’s opinion, Qatar seems to have taken the lead in reconfiguring the kafala, by removing some of its most problematic elements. He thinks that “Qatar has allowed more research concerning the migrant experience and the changes in the policies that guide it than the UAE” and although “this has not fully insulated Qatar from critique, [especially as it prepares for the World Cup], the UAE remains much more closed to scrutiny and evaluation.”

Nevertheless, Dunne seriously doubts that there will be sustained pressure from outside governments to reverse these measures anytime soon; the energy crisis resulting from the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the perceived need for a unified front against Iran are likely to take precedence. ■

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Turkey’s 2023 Elections Cause Tremors in Ankara and Beyond

By Jonathan Gorvett

WHILE TURKEY’S joint presidential and parliamentary elections are not due until June 2023, there is now so much at stake in the looming ballot that political life across the country is already warping visibly toward the hustings.

Indeed, “This is going to be quite an historic election,” Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a pro-Israel American think tank, told the Washington Report.

Many oppositionists see the coming vote as a last chance to halt Turkey’s march into authoritarianism under its controversial and internationally active leader, the veteran President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. For government supporters, however, it is a chance to endorse a president who has achieved much for their country and may be a vital protector at a time of great global uncertainty.

Both domestic and foreign policies are in play in this increasingly bitter struggle. Yet, overshadowing both is the sorry state of the economy, battered by years of rising prices and a devaluing currency. This hard-cash reality is also now feeding into Erdogan’s diplomacy, as he juggles a range of foes and allies in an effort to deliver an economic boost to hard-pressed voters, before they enter the polling booth.

The upcoming elections, therefore, have implications far beyond the country itself, impacting a range of regional issues from Ukraine to Syria, the Kurds to the Caucasus.

ECONOMIC WOES

When Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002, the country had just been through one of its worst financial crises, with a string of bank collapses and rocketing inflation. The AKP’s success was largely based on its ability to promise an end to all that—and to the corruption and cronyism for which the political “old guard” had become widely associated.

A woman watches from her doorway as Apolas Lermi, a Turkish singer, poses in Istanbul, on June 7, 2022. Turkey’s summer festival season is off to a politically charged start that foreshadows the cultural battles brewing in the polarized country in the runup to next year’s election—the toughest of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s two decade rule. Artists fear that the fun is being drained out of Turkey to flatter the conservative Islamic core of Erdogan's eroding support.

PHOTO BY YASIN AKGUL/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

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

The party was hugely successful in this, too, at least at first.

“When the AKP came to power in 2002, Turkey had the same infant mortality rate as pre-war Syria,” says Cagaptay. “Now, the rate is comparable with Spain. Erdogan delivered economic growth, lifted many people out of poverty, improved services and widened access to the economic pie.”

The AKP thus went on to win a dozen elections and referenda over the following two decades. Now, though, it is the AKP which represents that “old guard” to many Turkish voters, while the economy is once again a major problem.

In August 2022, inflation was around 80 percent, year-on-year, while the currency, the Turkish lira, had fallen 25 percent against the U.S. dollar since Jan. 1, 2022.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine and longer-term hikes in energy prices have also impacted the economy badly, as Turkey imports almost all of its oil and gas— much from Russia—and generally priced in U.S. dollars.

Indeed, Erdogan himself has said that the country’s energy import bill for 2022 is expected to be four times what it was in 2021, at around $100 billion. For ordinary Turks, this has meant a major shift downward in standards of living. Official figures for July 2022 showed prices for food and non-alcoholic beverages up 94 percent, year-on-year, while transport costs had shot up 123 percent. Wages have failed to rise at anything like these rates for most people, with real per capita GDP—in decline since 2013—accelerating downward.

Unsurprisingly, this has translated into a decline in support for Erdogan and his current coalition with the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), known as the People’s Alliance (PA).

A July Istanbul Economics survey showed 83 percent of respondents thought the current economic situation was “very bad/bad”— including 68.4 percent of AKP voters—while support for the PA was just 27.8 percent in July, also according to an Istanbul Economics poll. At the same time, support for the opposition coalition—the six-party Nation Alliance (NA) had risen to 33.1 percent.

UNITY IN ADVERSITY

This is no small achievement for Turkey’s opposition, hamstrung as it is by AKP’s control of most of the media, a campaign of intimidation as well as arrests of opposition activists and government critics, and a long-term series of electoral defeats, leaving many exhausted and demoralized.

“The opposition has accomplished a lot,” Murat Somer, professor of political science and international relations at Koc University in Istanbul, told the Washington Report “They have a joint platform that includes parties from the left and right and split-offs from the ruling AKP and MHP.”

The NA’s main two parties are the leftleaning Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the right-wing Iyi (Good) Party, while the coalition also includes former AKP economy minister Ali Babacan’s Democracy and Progress Party (DEVA) and former AKP prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu’s Future Party (GP).

The NA also includes the Islamist Felicity Party (SP), the more conservative wing of the old Virtue Party, from which the then-more-liberal AKP split in 2001, and the Democrat Party, a reformed version of the old True Path Party (DYP), once led by Turkey’s first and only, so far, female prime minister, Tansu Ciller, back in the 1990s.

Keeping these disparate groups together has, indeed, been a major achievement. Yet, while the six have agreed on a joint platform, mainly advocating an end to the current presidential system and a return to parliamentary democracy, they have yet to agree on a joint candidate for president in 2023.

“All of the opposition leaders are more popular than Erdogan in opinion polls,” says Cagaptay, “except for the leader of the CHP—the largest opposition party.”

Uniting behind an unpopular presidential candidate could also be fatal, even if the opposition has widespread support. “There have been years of democratic erosion in Turkey,” says Prof. Somer. “How you recover from this is a global problem for opposition movements—what is the recipe?”

SEEKING A BOOST

A further obstacle to opposition hopes has been the president’s ability to use his international influence at a time of great uncertainty and conflict. This has had economic repercussions, too.

Erdogan’s August meeting in Sochi with Russian President Vladimir Putin secured a transfer of some $20 billion into the Turkish economy, along with agreements to pay for some Russian gas in rubles and boost trade. This was despite current efforts by Turkey’s NATO allies to tighten economic sanctions against Moscow.

At the same time, Russian oligarchs booted out of Western countries have been welcomed in Turkey, while many middleclass Russians have boosted not only Turkish tourism this summer, after a long pandemic downturn, but also Turkish real estate, buying up bolt-holes in Istanbul and on Turkey’s Aegean and Mediterranean coasts.

Erdogan has also been able to do this while maintaining ties to Ukraine. Turkish Bayraktar drones are now being manufactured under license there, for example, while Turkey also played a key role in securing safe passage for Ukrainian grain ships from Odesa.

The Turkish leader has likewise kept ties with the West. In June, Ankara was even able to force concessions from would-be NATO members Finland and Sweden over NATO membership in return for a crackdown on Kurdish oppositionists living in those countries.

“Erdogan is going to frame himself as a global leader who can talk to Putin, to Zelenskyy, and to Biden,” says Cagaptay. “He can present himself as the only leader who can protect Turkey from global insecurity.”

The coming elections, then, will be a tough battle for the opposition to win—despite their current lead and Turkey’s rocketing prices. Yet, “opposition success in Turkey,” says Somer, “could also provide lessons to those in other countries fighting democratic erosion.” Those lessons could have great value, from places such as Hungary, where the authoritarian Viktor Orban was recently reelected, to nations much closer to home.

President Kais Saied Rewrites Constitution, Upending Tunisia’s Political System

By Mustafa Fetouri

IF POWER IS INDEED for the people and by the people then Tunisia’s president may have grounds to legitimize his agenda, according to recent polls. President Kais Saied, whose approval rating stands at 50 percent enjoys that power in the name of the people who voted him in, with over 70 percent of the total registered voters in 2019. Since then, he has been enjoying public support which Tunisia has never seen before. As soon as he took office, he went to work remaking the entire political system as his top priority.

In July 2021, he dismissed the government, suspended the parliament, lifted legislators’ immunity and took over the judiciary. He assumed complete power, based on his interpretation of the country’s constitution, and started running the country by decree, facing little or no legal challenge from his many opponents who lacked his pop-

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 has published three books in Arabic. His email is mustafa fetouri@hotmail.com and Twitter: @MFetouri.

ularity. Earlier in June, President Saied handpicked a committee of experts to draft a new constitution to replace the 2014 document that he had helped to draft before he even dreamt of becoming president.

He did not like what his committee handed him, so he went ahead and edited it himself. The man happens to be a constitutional law professor, who believes democracy is an empty slogan when people cannot find jobs, their government is paralyzed and corruption is out of control. In fact, he is echoing what ordinary Tunisians have been saying for years.

On July 25, he put his edited constitution to a public referendum that was approved by 94 percent of those who bothered to vote. Only one third of some 9.2 million eligible voters turned out to cast their ballots, but that is no problem for the president since the law does not require any threshold. A celebratory Saied joined his supporters in downtown Tunis when exit polls projected victory for him. Enthusiastically he declared that “there will be no turning back....This is a total break with a system forever rejected.”

Tunisian electoral officials work at a vote counting center on July 26, 2022, following the Tunisian constitutional referendum.

PHOTO BY KHALED NASRAOUI/PICTURE ALLIANCE VIA GETTY IMAGES

While he was busy putting together his political agenda, Saied suffered his first pushback. After dismissing 57 judges in June, accusing them of corruption and covering up terror activities, on August 10, the country’s administrative court suspended the dismissal of 50 judges—effectively reinstating them. This was the first time, since July 2021, that there has been a legal challenge to President Saied’s authority in a country known for its relatively fair judiciary. However, it is unlikely to disrupt the president’s plans for Tunisia—the courts will no longer enjoy such power under Saied’s new constitution.

The issue is likely to become a protracted legal battle between the president and the judiciary, particularly, after the Ministry of Justice rejected the court’s decision reinstating the judges. None of the 47 dismissed judges has been able to go back to work. Whatever happens; the matter is unlikely to be settled before the December elections, minimizing any impact it could have on the legitimacy and legality of the polls .

Certainly, the new constitution gives the president too much power. His critics say that what Saied calls a “new constitution for a new republic” is nothing more than a coup aimed at accumulating all powers in his hands while stripping Tunisians of many of the gains they made after the 2011 popular uprising. The Arab Spring (also called the Jasmine revolution) ended the presidential system and created a new parliamentary governance, in which the presidency became a ceremonial post. Indeed, the new constitution creates a powerful presidency with almost no checks on how that power is exercised. Accordingly, the president can appoint and dismiss the government without any parliamentary consultation, present draft laws, draft the state budget, appoint and sack government ministers, and only s/he can propose treaties with other countries.

On top of all that, Saied can appoint judges, strip them of their right to strike and continue to rule by decree until the new parliament is elected. Although the president can only serve two terms, he can extend his term if he thinks the state is in danger—the same justification he used last year to take

over the government. Furthermore, even after the upcoming parliamentary elections, he cannot be removed from office while his decisions on state matters are final.

Every indication points to the fact that the elections planned for Dec. 17, 2022 will go ahead, just as Saied wants, with little opportunity for the opposition to change the current course. In addition, the next elected parliament will have to share power with another chamber of “regions and districts.” This new elected chamber is meant to transfer some power to local governments in a decentralization attempt long supported by Saied.

Does the new constitution make Tunisia the burial place of the so-called Arab Spring, only a decade after its birth there? The president, who never publicly uttered the term “Arab Spring,” does not think so. True, the new constitution keeps fundamental freedoms untouched. Saied’s problem is the political system, which he wants to change, reinforced by his deep conviction that Tunisia needs a strong president.

This belief was strengthened by Tunisia’s political parties, however strong, which have had every opportunity during the last decade to deliver but failed. Instead they mushroomed into political fighting gangs making the parliament a place of senseless bickering and infighting, far from the sacred place it should be.

Many defend Saied’s actions by saying that this is what Tunisians want since political parties and the entire elite failed to gain the public support that could have pressured the president to hold a nationwide consultation on his constitutional amendments. In fact, most political parties opposed President Saied’s course of action from the start but faced with the huge public support he has garnered, they have failed to galvanize similar public momentum to gain any concessions from him.

This indicates that most of the president’s agenda in reverting to the presidential system is indeed a people’s demand. Even Tunisia’s powerful Labor Union left it to its individual members to decide how to vote in July’s constitutional referendum.

Public support for Kais Saied remains strong and his supporters point to the

public’s approval of the new constitution and claim that Saied is an honest man who listens to the common Tunisian, who has nothing to gain from the kind of powers the constitution now gives him. However, they do not seem to consider what could happen when someone else is elected president once Saied is out of power.

The other side of the argument remains the economy. Saied has, so far, delivered very little in terms of tangible results to benefit the common Tunisian. People in the nearly bankrupt country still find it hard to make ends meet. They might reject democracy when it fails to put bread on the table, but they are likely to reject a president when he also fails. Much depends on what kind of parliament will emerge from the coming elections.

What is certain though is that after December 2022 a new Tunisia will appear that bears little resemblance to the one the world watched after the Arab Spring. If Tunisia gave birth to new era of democracy and a multiparty system in 2011, then Saied’s “new republic” is likely to return to the past Habib Bourguiba-style dictatorship, but in the name of the people and with their significant support. That’s just shy of becoming the Arab Spring’s cemetery. ■

A Fondness for New Capitals

TWENTY-EIGHT MILES to the east of Cairo’s center, a new city of concrete and glass, of high-rises and highways, is under construction. It is planned that its 270-square-mile area will provide accommodation for over five million people, but would likely grow further. This as yet unnamed city is planned to be Egypt’s new administrative capital, to which ministries and the presidential offices will move from the congestion of Cairo and major businesses and embassies will be encouraged to follow. Besides modern offices and flats, the city has the Cathedral of the Nativity of Christ, the largest church in Egypt, as well as Egypt’s largest mosque. This is not the only new urban development near Cairo—another can be seen out in the

John Gee is a free lance journalist based in Singapore and the author of Unequal Conflict: The Palestinians and Israel.

By John Gee

desert by visitors to the pyramids at Giza—but it is the most ambitious, and the only one earmarked for government institutions.

Far to the east, in Indonesia, work started at the site of a new capital city in July this year. It already has a name—Nusantara. The idea of creating a new capital for Indonesia has been around for decades. Not only is the present capital, Jakarta, with a population of 30 million and a creaking infrastructure, densely populated, congested and vulnerable to earthquakes, it has also acquired the unenviable description of the fastest sinking city in the world—up to 10 centimeters (4 inches) a year.

Much of Jakarta is already below sea level and prone to regular flooding. Some land along the shore has already been lost to the sea and it is expected that a third of the city will be under water by 2050. The sinking of the city is mostly due to uncontrolled exploita-

Workers at the construction site of the new administrative capital megaproject, some 45 kilometers (28 miles) east of Cairo, in a photo taken on May 20, 2022. The “Iconic Tower” skyscraper, (l), a crowning jewel of President Abdel Fattah el Sisi’s grand urban plans was set to be unveiled on June 30, 2021, the anniversary of mass protests that led to the removal from office of his predecessor, Mohamed Morsi, in July 2013. But the launch was postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic that led to a downturn in the market. China State Construction Engineering Corporation is building the project, which includes 20 high rise buildings and municipal projects.

PHOTO BY AHMED GOMAA/XINHUA VIA GETTY IMAGES

tion of ground water within Jakarta combined with the effects of climate change.

In August 2019, Indonesian President Joko Widodo announced that the site of the new capital would be in East Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo, and that construction would start in 2020, but COVID-19 put this plan on hold. In January this year, parliament gave its go-ahead for the planned new capital with the intended inauguration in August 2024.

Indonesia’s neighbor, Malaysia, retains Kuala Lumpur as its official capital but created a new administrative capital, Putrajaya, to its south, in 2001. The cabinet and government ministries relocated there, but parliament and the king’s palace remain in Kuala Lumpur, which continues to be a lively and diverse city and economic center, apparently little affected by the migration of key government institutions.

Decisions on the location and relocation of capital cities and their institutions generally raise political questions and controversy. In the Indonesian case, the new capital will likely result in an influx of people from the island of Java, currently home to 54 percent of Indonesia’s population, to Borneo. Conservationists worry that, as the city grows, it will encroach upon forested areas and threaten the habitat of orangutans and other forest animals, as well as the marine mammal, dugongs, in a nearby bay. The government has countered by claiming that it intends to reforest land in the region that had been cleared for plantations and mines.

A big new city is planned in Saudi Arabia, although it is intended to be a high-tech showpiece for the kingdom, not a new capital. This is Neom, to be built in a desert area near the head of the Gulf of Aqaba, close to the Jordanian border and the Israeli port of Eilat. Some local citizens are not happy with the plan. The land upon which it is to rise is the traditional home of a tribe known as the

Howeitat, who have a small place in the history of the First World War. Their most formidable leader then was Auda Abu Tayi, who played a major role in the Arab Revolt in the territories now comprising Jordan, including the campaign to capture Aqaba.

In the case of the projected new administrative capital of Egypt, it has been speculated that the government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi wishes to ensure that key governmental institutions are located away from potential sites of demonstrations and popular insurrection, following the experience of the overthrow of the Mubarak regime and the protests that greeted the military coup against his civilian successor. This follows the similar logic behind the establishment of Naypyidaw as Myanmar’s capital in 2005, in place of Yangon, where there was strong opposition to military rule.

New capitals, which generally become prestige projects, can be very costly and demand expenditure that might have been better devoted to development in existing population centers. They don’t solve the problems faced by residents of former capitals, which still require heavy investment in infrastructure and employment creation if they are to be made more livable. Then again, that would be of less concern to any government that has found another home for itself rather than if it had stayed put.

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Construction has begun on a futuristic Saudi Arabian megacity, part of the Neom project, which released conceptual videos showing the city’s high walls enclosing trees and gardens, and features vertically layered communities among work and recreational structures.

SCREENSHOT

BY NPR/NEOM

Remembering the 40th Anniversary of the Sabra Shatila Massacre

By Ellen Siegel and Dr. Swee Chai Ang

FORTY YEARS AGO, during the week of Sept. 12, we were working in a Palestine Red Crescent Society facility, Gaza Hospital, in Sabra Shatila camp in West Beirut. As health care workers, we were trying to heal the wounds and repair the mutilated and destroyed bodies of those injured by Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in June 1982.

We had been working there following the evacuation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), mediated by U.S. Middle East envoy Philip Habib. Crucial to the evacuation agreement was the protection of the civilians left behind after the evacuation of the PLO, and Israel’s undertaking not to invade and occupy Beirut. With the guarantee of protection by the multinational peace-keeping force, thousands of displaced civilian war victims returned to Sabra Shatila

Dr. Swee Chai Ang is founder and patron of British Charity Medical Aid for Palestinians. She is author of From Beirut to Jerusalem: A Woman Surgeon with the Palestinians, updated and republished in 2019 by The Other Press, Kuala Lumpur. Ang was an orthopedic sur geon in Gaza Hospital Sabra Shatila during the 1982 massacre. Ellen Siegel, a Jewish American nurse, is a peace activist who has fo cused her activism on bringing awareness of the situation of the Palestinian refugees in the camps in Lebanon. She volunteered her medical services in 1982 during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. She was working at Gaza Hospital in Sabra Camp during the massacre.

to rebuild their homes and lives.

Unknown to these people who returned hoping to pick up and mend their shattered lives, the multinational peace-keeping force left West Beirut on Sept. 11, 1982. On the evening of Sept. 14, 1982, we became aware that the president-elect of Lebanon had been assassinated. Around the break of dawn on the following day, we heard planes flying low into Beirut. Within hours, sounds of heavy artillery and machine guns could be heard close by. It continued all day and soon the periphery of the camp was hit relentlessly.

We went to an upper floor of the hospital where we watched as flares went off, lighting areas of the camps, followed by gunfire. As hours passed, we hectically received and tended to the thousands of camp residents who fled to us or were brought into the hospital seeking emergency medical care, safety and security. The hospital ran out of food, water, medication—and blood for the wounded.

On Saturday, Sept. 18, along with the other international health care volunteers, we were ordered by the Phalangists (Lebanese Christian militia working under Israeli control) to assemble at the front of the hospital. We were marched, at machine-gun point, down Sabra Street, the main street of the camp—passing dead bodies, passing hundreds of women and children from the camps being

LEFT: Ellen Siegel (l) and Dr. Swee Ang, in Jerusalem prior to testifying before the Kahan Commission, October 1982. RIGHT: The authors (l) Ellen Siegel and Dr. Swee Ang at Beirut's port, awaiting Pope Benedict's visit in 2012.

BOTH PHOTOS COURTESY E. SIEGEL

Google Worker Who Protested Israel Contract Says She Was Forced to Quit

By Michael Arria

Koren’s activism targeted Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract between Google, Amazon Web Services and Israel that helped provide cloud services to the country’s military and government. In October 2021 Koren drafted a public letter criticizing the agreement.

A GOOGLE WORKER who publicly opposed a company contract with the Israeli military has resigned from her position citing retaliation from her employer.

Ariel Koren, a product marketing manager at Google for Education who has worked at the tech company for more than seven years, explained the situation in her Medium post.

“Due to retaliation, a hostile environment and illegal actions by the company, I cannot continue to work at Google and have no choice but to leave the company at the end of this week,” wrote Koren. “Instead of listening to employees who want Google to live up to its ethical principles, Google is aggressively pursuing military contracts and stripping away the voices of its employees through a pattern of silencing and retaliation toward me and many others.”

Michael Arria is the U.S. correspondent for Mondoweiss, where this article was posted on Sept. 1, 2022. His work has appeared in The Ap peal, In These Times and Truthout. He is the author of Medium Blue: The Politics of MSNBC. Follow him on Twitter at @michaelarria.

“We cannot look the other way, as the products we build are used to deny Palestinians their basic rights, force Palestinians out of their homes and attack Palestinians in the Gaza Strip—actions that have prompted war crime investigations by the international criminal court,” it read. “We envision a future where technology brings people together and makes life better for everyone. To build that brighter future, the companies we work for need to stop contracting with any and all militarized organizations in the U.S. and beyond.”

Hundreds of workers at Google and Amazon signed the letter.

Koren said that Google gave her an ultimatum the following month: either relocate to the company’s Brazil office or be fired. The move prompted Koren to file a complaint with Google’s human resources department and an unfair labor practice complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

A petition supporting Koren was circulated at the time and it was signed by more than 25,000 people.

Google has publicly stated that they investigated the complaint and found no evidence of retaliation. Koren says the company’s HR team eventually admitted to her that the demand had been “improper and harmful,” but still refused to acknowledge that it came in response to her activism.

In her Medium post Koren, who is Jewish, also says that Google has “sustained a culture of silencing anti-Zionist Jews and creating toxic and unjust conditions for Palestinian, Arab and Muslim workers.”

Ariel Koren, former director of marketing for Google's educational products department.

PHOTO TWITTER

“Anti-Zionist Jews at Google will not stop speaking out against Israel’s injustices against Palestinians; but we acknowledge our privilege to do so safely while our Palestinian colleagues and friends are not afforded the same privilege to feel safe and be heard,” she wrote. “Our Palestinian colleagues deserve better than this; our Palestinian users deserve better than this. The general public deserves better than this.”

In a YouTube video, <https://jewishdiasporatech.org/voices>, fifteen other Google employees posted testimonials about the company’s treatment of Palestinians, policies of censorship and acts of retaliation. “Working at Google was always my dream job until I learned about Project Nimbus,” reads one testimonial. “I feel like I am making my living off the oppression of my family back home.”

“As a Palestinian, my feelings of marginalization only grew when I began seeing my coworkers issued warnings just for having empathy for Palestinians,” says another employee.

One worker says that they’re now “ashamed” to work for Google as a result of Project Nimbus.

A New York Times article on Koren’s resignation references “Google’s growing reputation for punishing employees who are publicly critical of the company is a notable change for an employer that once nourished an outspoken workplace culture.”

In November 2019, Google fired five workers over organizing. The NLRB filed a complaint against the company saying two of those firings had been illegal and that they had spied on multiple employees.

Koren’s Medium post also calls on readers to take action. She asks people to pressure the company to drop Project Nimbus, join the “No Tech for Apartheid” campaign, and amplify Palestinian voices. “Don’t be complacent or apathetic; take responsibility for your company and how your labor is used,” Koren writes.

For more information google “Ariel Koren quits google.”

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An Israeli soldier uses an unmanned surveillance drone to monitor Palestinians in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron in 2015.

Google marked Israeli legislative elections on March 2, 2020 with a special design. The company is offering advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to the Israeli gov ernment through its controversial “Project Nimbus” contract. The Israeli Finance Ministry an nounced the contract in April 2021 for a $1.2 billion cloud computing system jointly built by Google and Amazon.

PHOTO

PHOTO BY

Podcasts on Palestine: By the Community, For the Community and Anyone Else Who Wants to Listen

By Diana Safieh

HAVE YOU JUMPED on the podcast bandwagon yet? Or are you, like my dad, still struggling to understand the concept? If so, let me explain it to you like I explained it to him. Imagine Netflix, but for radio shows. Podcasts are easily consumable on a phone or computer while commuting, going to the gym, doing housework, so it is no wonder they are one of the fastest growing media around the globe. Every news agency, channel and public figure is committing resources to podcasts.

The best (and worst) thing about podcasts is that anyone with a computer, internet and time can produce one. Of course there are high-budget podcasts with teams of production staff. I doubt former First Lady Michelle Obama or English comedian and actor Russell Brand edited their own podcasts using free audio software in their bedrooms. But anyone with something or nothing to say can start a podcast, and anyone willing to hear them can listen.

At the same time as podcasts are becoming easier to produce and consume, restrictions on movement in the occupied Palestinian territories is increasing, including for journalists, as the recent murder of Shireen Abu Akleh demonstrated. The rise of social media helped us learn about facts on the ground, and now podcasts can be used in much the same way.

So where do you start if you want to get into the wonderful world of English-language podcasts on Palestine?

Diana Safieh hosts We Knew The Moon Podcast, on all things empath, spiritual, witchy, unexplained, creepy and spooky. She is a co founder of The Goddess Temple, Twickenham, which holds guided meditations and workshops, like Tea & Tarot and Make Your Own Smudge Sticks. She hosts a monthly webinar series on the situation in Palestine/Israel for The Balfour Project charity.

Let’s start with Rethinking Palestine, produced by AlShabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, and hosted by senior policy analyst Yara Hawari. It starts with colonial mapping in Palestine, and how every such act results in the further dispossession of Palestinians. Why does it matter that Palestine isn’t on Google Maps? Why do settlements still exist even though they are illegal? Can maps tell lies? Fascinating right off the bat, this podcast is binge-worthy. Listen straight through, or dip in and out of whichever episodes take your fancy, such as ones covering President Joe Biden in the White House, the Palestinian leadership, the apartheid framework, the International Criminal Court or elections.

Let’s move on to Gaza Guy, a podcast by poet and journalist Moe Moussa. This podcast is absolutely by the community for the community, which is the ultimate true beauty of the podcast niche. It is rare to be able to tap in so directly into discourses concerning this region. Moe Moussa interviews poets, comedians, actors, activists and writers from around the world, and asks them their thoughts on Palestinian issues.

A highlight episode to get you hooked is “What is it like to be born as a political statement?” with Palestinian American writer Maram Jafar. She tells a very relatable story of which most Palestinians in the Diaspora have some version. She was asked by a teacher where she is from and then was told that Palestine doesn’t exist. These micro-aggressions are common for us, Palestinians abroad, as opposed to the macro-aggressions our brothers and sisters experience living within Palestine. It’s always less isolating, although frustrating, to hear you’re not the only one.

Recommended podcasts (l r): Al Shabaka’s Rethinking Palestine, The Mondoweiss Podcast, Gaza Guy, author Diana Safieh’s podcasts, +972, IMEU’s This is Palestine, Stories from Palestine and IRmep’s How Israel Made AIPAC.

The next one on the list is The Mondoweiss Podcast, with the aim of recounting untold stories. Many of us, following the situation on the ground from overseas, will be familiar with Mondoweiss as a news resource. This podcast continues their ethos, with a focus on Palestine, Israel and the U.S., and covering politics, literary interests,

Israelis, and confederation as an alternative two-state solution.

But on to my favorite podcast, Stories From Palestine by Kristel. Kristel is a Dutch lady who moved to East Jerusalem with her Palestinian husband about 10 years ago, raises a family there and serves as a tour guide. As the tourism trade suffered during the pandemic,

as the occasional goat and the call to prayer.

My favorite episode is the interview with Palestinian American comedian Amer Zahr. Not only is he super eloquent on the Palestinian issue, but if you need lessons on how to dance, make sure you take them from his “Dance Like an Arab” clip on YouTube.

elections both here and there, apartheid, refugees, human rights and normalization.

The episode that sticks out, though, is with Olivia Katbi Smith, the national organizer of the Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions movement in the USA, on the terrifying collaboration between the rightwing Proud Boys and Zionists in targeting and silencing her.

Another gem of an episode features Professor Michael Lynk, the former U.N. Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories. Speaking on the expansion of the use of the term apartheid, he explains that it seems like the rest of the world is catching up to something we Palestinians have been saying for years.

Next is The +972 Podcast , from the magazine of the same name. Some of the topics are exciting because I had not seen them on any of the other podcasts, such as whether Palestinian citizens of Israel should refrain from voting as a means of protest, Ethiopian

Kristel decided to start the podcast as a virtual tour of Palestine. This podcast takes the form of weekly episodes with interviews and audio tours of different towns and villages Kristel visits in Palestine.

Listening to this podcast is like pulling up a chair in a cafe in the West Bank and making friends and breaking bread with strangers. It is an endearing insight into life in Palestine, good and bad. There are even sounds of home in the background, such

Amer is a dream to listen to on the topic of the Palestinian Diaspora. He tells of how David Ben-Gurion claimed, “the old will die and the young will forget,” and how this is clearly not the case because “we might not live in our homeland, but our homeland lives in us.” The takeaway message from him is that “first and foremost, I am a Palestinian who is trying to make life better for our people,” and I related, because this is our guiding motivation, wherever we are and whatever we do. ■

Palestinian Vocalist Dalal Abu Amneh Performs at the Jerash Festival

By Emilie Pons

PALESTINIAN VOCALIST Dalal Abu Amneh mesmerized the audience that filled the Roman amphitheater on July 30 to attend her concert. It was her first time performing at the Jerash Festival for Culture and Arts, in Jordan, now in its 36th edition. She walked onstage looking like an elegant and charismatic Roman goddess in a shimmering white dress with glittery swirls of gold and silver across the waist and shoulders. The concert was part of her “Ya Sitti” (grandmother) project, which pays tribute to older Palestinian women. Abu Amneh performed folk songs from Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Palestine. Many of her songs were medleys, which are several short songs combined into one.

For Abu Amneh, as for most Palestinian artists, practicing her art

Emilie Pons is a multimedia journalist and producer based in New York City. Her work has been featured on PRI, TRT World, Radio DW, CBC News, AFP and JazzTimes, among others. In addition, she produces the arts and culture podcast of the New York Foreign Press Association.

is always political. “The Palestinian intellectual seeks to defend his land by the means he knows,” says Abu Amneh. “I defend, with my voice and singing, the usurped land. I have the right to demand it as long as I live.”

Abu Amneh invited 100 Jordanian and Palestinian women on stage to create her remarkable chorus. They stood behind the orchestra of the National Conservatory of Amman, wearing traditional long Palestinian and Jordanian thobes, mostly black with intricate red embroidery. Some of the women invited on stage performed what is called mhaha, a form of a capella singing performed at weddings, during which each participant comments on the new bride.

“We have doctors, engineers, a former mayor, academics, and media professionals,” said Abu Amneh, “and they were chosen according to their desire to participate in this exceptional event [where they showed] their overwhelming love and longing for the land of Palestine.” Abu Amneh herself is also a neuroscientist.

Palestinian vocalist Dalal Abu Amneh, her Jordanian and Palestinian chorus, and the orchestra of the National Conservatory of Amman captivate the audience at the Jerash Festival for Culture and Arts, on July 30, 2022.

PHOTO COURTESY

ANAS MOHAMMAD ISMAEL ABUNAWAS

The orchestra was led by maestro George Adad and the show was supervised by Iraqi maestro Mohammed Othman Sidiq, who has lived in Jordan since the early 1990s and is one of Jordan’s most talented composers. He is knowledgeable in both Western classical music and Arabic traditional music and loves to combine the two forms.

The Jerash festival was launched in 1981 and quickly became a major cultural event in the region. “It takes place in this historical city which has so many monuments from the Roman era,” explained Jordanian opera singer Ady Naber. He performed during the opening concert of the festival.

About 1,500 artists and musicians from 18 countries participated in the 10-day event, which also featured 250 artistic, cultural, and craft activities. The festival featured renowned Arab performers from across the Arab world, with musicians from Iraq (Mahmoud Al-Turki), Palestine (Gharya Hob and the Siraj Choir), Jordan (Nayef Al-Zayed, Wissam and Hussam AlLawzi, Ramy Shafiq and Khaled Tawfiq, among others), Saudi Arabia (Majid AlRaslani and Rabeh Saqr), Syria (Faya Younan, the Takat band), Morocco (the Said Berrada Troupe), Lebanon (Ziad Bourji) and Egypt (celebrity Tamer Hosny). The festival attracts an audience from across the Arab region, and especially from the Gulf.

This year, a K-Pop band and a Swedish performer (Kristen Haggard) along with a German DJ were part of the lineup. The opening concert of the festival, which was by invitation only, was conducted by Jordanian composer Tareq Al Nasser, who performed a new piece entitled “Jerasia,” featuring vocalists Ady Naber and Natalie Samaan. Also this year, several Bedouin performances were part of the festival’s program. In 2018, UNESCO designated the Jordanian Bedouin al-Samer dancing, singing and poetry as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity.

I was among the reporters who were bused every day from Amman to Jerash and back. The bus trip was a prelude to the festival: It was one big party, with loud talk-

ing, music, smoking and joking that started the moment we got on the bus and ended only when we were dropped off in Amman hours later. Snacks, coffee, and cigarette stops along the way to Jerash were part of the fun; we were able to stop at a cheese shop that sold delicious Jerash cheese; vendors offered olives and shaninah, which is a mixture of milk and yogurt, sort of like the Turkish ayran

The Roman amphitheaters and regal columns of Jerash put on a fabulous show of their own. The site is spacious enough to hold the five stages used during the festival.

At the festival, the most expensive concerts cost around 15 JD ($21); concerts on the smaller stages were free. Food vendors sold very affordable fast food (for about $1). Security was tight; attendees were checked as they entered the site and also at the entrance of the two main stages.

The Jerash festival allows Jordanians to enjoy performances by prominent artists for free or at an affordable price. It’s an opportunity to get together and celebrate the musical heritages of the region. The popular festival, returning after a two-year COVIDimposed hiatus, attracted 250,000 attendees including ministers, ambassadors, local politicians, residents, and visitors from neighboring countries. It reminds Jordanians that music and culture matter and that all the cultures of the region produce a fantastic diversity of musical styles worth celebrating and treasuring. ■

Sabra Shatila Massacre

Continued from page 44

lined up and held at gun point by soldiers. We heard the chatter of ongoing communication from the militias’ walkie-talkies. Eventually we were turned over to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) forward command post where Israeli soldiers were looking down on the camps with binoculars. We were driven out of the area by IDF vehicles.

From there, Ellen went to the American Embassy to report what she had seen and

heard over the previous few days. Swee walked to the Commodore Hotel to inform the many journalists stationed there of what happened in the camp.

In the days following we learned that thousands of unarmed defenseless people were butchered while we were struggling to save those survivors brought to our hospital for treatment.

Within weeks, Gaza Hospital re-opened and we returned to practice our profession faithfully on those who survived, those who remained. We heard that an Israeli Commission of Inquiry into the massacre was being established in Jerusalem. We asked to go to Jerusalem to bear witness, to testify, to speak for those who could not.

We asked for justice at the Israeli Commission of Inquiry. But we knew that a greater universal justice beyond the Commission of Inquiry must be restored to the Palestinians. The Commission was only investigating the conduct of the Israeli army in the camp massacre. But even that justice has been denied.

Forty years have passed, and many generations later, the painful memories remain. Investigations, interests and questions continue. Israel claimed recently that the archives concerning the communications between the Christian militia blamed for the massacre, the Lebanese authorities and Israel have been lost!

There is still much to learn, and more information needs to come to light. Israel must be held directly responsible for this atrocity. The role and guilt of the U.S. has not yet been fully examined. The failures to allow the voices of the surviving victims of the massacre to be heard and preventing fair investigations to be held continue to obstruct the pursuit of justice.

To the survivors, we want you to know that we will never forget you, the massacre, your loved ones, your martyrs. We keep the memories of your land, your olive trees and orange groves, the keys that you still have to your homes in Palestine in our hearts.

We love you,

Dr Swee Ang, orthopedic surgeon at Gaza Hospital

Nurse Ellen Siegel, at Gaza Hospital. ■

Soccer as Resistance and Hope: A Partnership Between Maryland and Wadi Foquin, Palestine

By Susan Kerin

In 2015, village leaders initiated the construction of their own soccer field in response to the destruction of 1,300 fruit trees on land belonging to one of the Palestinian farmers, which followed a 2014 declaration that 1,000 acres of West Bank land was to be annexed to the State of Israel. A large portion of that land was in Wadi Foquin. The soccer field was built on Palestinian land vulnerable to confiscation, and as construction proceeded, Israel issued a stop work order. But the village proceeded to build it not only as a sign of resistance against land theft but also as a statement that their children deserved the same rights as any children in the world to play.

MORE THAN 100 MARYLAND soccer players met at Bullis Park, Silver Spring in late July to participate in the First Annual Soccer for Palestine tournament. Organized by MD2Palestine, a local grassroots organization, the playing fees and other donations from the tournament were to benefit the West Bank village of Wadi Foquin.

According to Yasmeen Abdelkarim, an MD2Palestine organizer of the fundraising event, “Soccer represents both the resistance and hope of the youth in Wadi Foquin so it became a natural choice for us to use that as an organizing fundraiser to help the village.” Abdelkarim was referring to the difficulties facing Wadi Foquin, not only in the construction of their own soccer field but in keeping their community’s land.

Located in the Bethlehem district of Palestine, the village is surrounded by the illegal settlements of Betar Illit and Hadar Betar. In addition to ongoing land confiscation orders, the village has seen acres of farmland destroyed and has endured sewage intentionally dumped from the settlements onto their crops and groundwater.

The soccer project was developed in partnership with United Methodists, who committed to fundraise for the construction, while also fighting to protect against the illegal land appropriation and settlement encroachment on the small village.

Rev. Michael Yoshii, who serves as the co-chair of the Friends of Wadi Foquin, notes, “Unfortunately, in the past year, there have been accelerated actions on the part of the Israeli authorities to annex more land, demolish olive trees and order demolition of properties belonging to farmers.”

In addition to community development activities, Rev. Yoshii and Friends of Wadi Foquin have done advocacy on Capitol Hill to avert the disastrous erasure of the village and strangulation of life for the community. In October 2021, Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA) and Congressman David Price (D-NC) wrote a letter signed by 20 congressional offices requesting the State Department address the land confiscation in Wadi Foquin. The State Department visited the village in December 2021 and issued a report expressing their concerns. However, just ten days after the State Department visit and during the Christmas holidays, the Israeli military accompanied a bulldozer and demolished 45 olive trees belonging to a family farm. An-

Susan Kerin is chair of Peace Action Montgomery, a chapter of Peace Action, the nation’s largest peace organization.

The First Annual Soccer for Palestine tournament, on July 30, 2022 in Silver Spring, MD, raised $3,500 to help the village of Wadi Foquin.

PHOTO COURTESY

other 30 olive trees were demolished in March and in May 2022, the Israeli military issued a declaration of annexation of 50 dunams (12 acres) in Wadi Foquin to become “state land” for Israel.

Ahead of the July 30 Maryland soccer tournament, the youth soccer team in Wadi Foquin held their own games and, despite the ongoing threats to their very existence, were still able to express hope and appreciation. MD2Palestine activists read a message from Adam, a youth in the village, to the Maryland soccer players. Adam wrote:

“Words can’t describe the feelings that we have when we see things like this tournament. For normal people this may only be a solidarity action, but it means the world to us and it gives us hope that one day the world will hear our voice, one day we will gain our dreams that we are losing everyday due to what we are facing. Everyday there is a new thing we lose to this ugly occupation which takes from us our land and now is taking our spirit.

This activity was the first for most of the kids you see in the pictures. They were very excited and energetic toward what you all are doing because they feel that there is someone who supports them and there is someone who cares for what they are facing. They are children with big dreams but also, they face a very hard life to get to what they want.

From our hearts we send you all our good feelings, our prayers and love from this soccer academy, from Wadi Foquin and Palestine. We send our love to you people in Maryland.”

The 5v5 Maryland soccer teams came from all across the state and represented a diverse group of players with team names like Goal-an Heights, Las Hormigas, Mighty Chondria, UMDOGs and Los Bandoleros. Even the food provided was an act of support and resistance. The lunch was catered by Marcelle Afram, an upcoming chef from the Palestine Diaspora who has opened his own business, Shababi Palestinian Rotisserie Chicken. In describing his role at the event, Afram said, “When the opportunity came up to help with the event, there were no second thoughts. There is, of course, power in numbers, and the more of us from the community who can come together to organize and create spaces of awareness for our cause, the stronger we become.”

As the Maryland soccer teams warmed

up for the games, the plight of Wadi Foquin stayed in their hearts and minds. Ahmad noted that the day was meant to show the youth in Wadi Foquin that “they are not alone.” Kian added, “we have to do more than solidarity. We need to work to liberate Palestine.” And 16year-old Omar’s response to his Wadi Foquin counterparts were just two words, “stay positive.”

A week after the tournament, Friends of Wadi Foquin partnered with MD2Palestine to meet with staff of U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) in the hopes he would add Senate leadership to the advocacy of Reps. Lee and Price.

Whether it’s a soccer tournament or advocacy on Capitol Hill, Rev. Yoshii notes that the goal is the same. Americans are working collectively to ensure “that life will not be denied to the people of this village.” Hannah Shraim, founder and co-chair of MD2Palestine agrees, “In Palestine organizing, we are consistently facing a denial of our humanity. But the one thing that always grounds us is community.”

And for one July afternoon, this collective teamwork, with soccer balls, nets and great love, unified around a besieged Palestinian community and the aspirations and sumud (steadfastness) of their youth. For more photos and information, please visit <md2palestine.com>. ■

The youth soccer team in Wadi Foquin plays in a field surrounded by illegal Israeli settlements. Villagers built the soccer field on Palestinian land vulnerable to confiscation.

PHOTO COURTESY

WAGING PEACE

New U.N. Special Rapporteur Outlines Priorities

Palestine Deep Dive hosted a discussion with Francesca Albanese, the United Nations’ new Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territory, on July 13. An Italian international lawyer, Albanese began her six-year tenure this May.

Asked about Israel’s recent vow to not engage with her, Albanese chastised the country for trying to delegitimize a U.N. official. “It’s unacceptable that a member state doesn’t cooperate with a U.N. independent expert,” she said. “I’ve been mandated by the Human Rights Council, so whatever the perceptions, I should be respected for the role, for the responsibilities I carry.”

She added that Israel has no right to deny her entry into the West Bank to carry out investigations. In recent years, Israel has begun denying U.N. human rights officials entry into the occupied area. “Israel has no sovereignty over the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” she noted. “Which means that if I’m invited by the Palestinian Authority to visit the Occupied Palestinian Territory starting with the West Bank, Israel cannot prevent me or the Commission of Inquiry or the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights [from visiting].”

Albanese’s first report to the U.N. General Assembly will focus on the Palestinian right to self-determination. “International law demands and requests that any people realize first and foremost the right to self-determination,” she explained. “This is critical. Israel’s prolonged occupation is not compatible with the right of self-determination.”

Albanese pointed to Israel’s ongoing forced displacement of Palestinians, a war crime under international law, as just one violation against self-determination. “Forcibly displacing a population under occupation is a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention,” she noted.

The lawyer also emphasized that international institutions, such as the European Union, need to apply pressure on Israel for its violations of human rights. “For example,” she said, “the European Union has a

trade agreement with Israel that has a clause that refers to ‘serious violations of human rights’ as a course for terminating the agreement. I think that threshold has been crossed.”

Albanese emphasized that the West must stop viewing Israel as an exception to international law. “It’s leading to an erosion of the multilateral system and the multilateral order, which doesn’t afford for ‘pick and choose’ when it comes to international law and doesn’t afford for international law to be used more harshly against certain states and more leniently vis-à-vis allies,” she said.

On the micro level, Albanese is using her new office to focus on the situation of Palestinian prisoner Ahmad Manasra. In 2015, Manasra, then 13 years old, and his 15year-old cousin were accused of stabbing two Israelis in the Pisgat Ze’ev settlement in the occupied West Bank. Ahmad was hit by a car soon after and his cousin was shot dead at the scene. An Israeli crowd jeered at him in now-viral footage as he laid motionless, bleeding on the ground.

“His case has been haunting me since the very beginning, since I saw the scenes of this boy,” Albanese said. “No matter what he had done, no child should be treated the way he’s been treated—broken bones, lying on the ground under a barrage of insults, and then fiercely interrogated by an adult, chained to his bed and spoon fed by

someone who is not his mom.”

Medical reports found that Manasra suffers from schizophrenia and human rights experts report that the harsh treatment he continues to endure, including solitary confinement, “may amount to torture.” Appeals for his early release were rejected earlier this year, despite a significant deterioration in his mental health causing him to be hospitalized.

“There have been so many irregularities [in his case] that I cannot go through them, but what I’ve done is to take this case as soon as I came into the job and do everything that is in my power,” Albanese said. “By writing letters, by joining the international advocacy campaign, this is a case that needs to be exposed.”

Albanese emphasized that Manasra’s case exists in the broader context of Israel’s regime of systematic detention and incarceration of Palestinians without trial.

Omar Aziz

Breaking the Silence’s New Report On Inhumanity of Occupation

Joel Carmel is intimately familiar with the techniques through which the Israeli “military regime has been controlling people for decades” in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).

Formerly an Israeli military officer charged with carrying out Israel’s repres-

Palestinians in the Gaza Strip hold signs, flags and pictures of children who were killed in the recent Israeli attacks on the besieged territory, on Aug. 17, 2022.

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sion in the occupied West Bank, Carmel is today a spokesman for Breaking the Silence, an organization of former soldiers who turned against the Israeli state oppression that they witnessed and enforced in the OPT. “We believe the occupation is not good for Israelis or Palestinians and should end,” he explained.

Carmel detailed the techniques used to repress and control Palestinians in an indepth Aug. 11 webinar, “Occupation Bureaucracy—A New Report on Israel’s Civil Administration,” sponsored by Americans for Peace Now (APN). The new report (available on the APN website) is especially revealing on the manipulation of the permit system in which Israel decides whether Palestinians under occupation can work, travel, seek medical treatment and otherwise carry out essential day-to-day activities. The permit system underscores that “there is no democracy” in the OPT, Carmel noted.

The occupation regime cultivates collaborators and informers by granting or withholding the permits required for daily life based on whether the applicant cooperates with the occupation regime by providing the information it wants. The military regime even offers “VIP treatment” to the “top tier who cooperate” while denying basic services to those who refuse to collaborate. The permit system “serves [Israeli] inter-

ests” even as it “tears Palestinian society apart,” Carmel explained.

Through the permit system, as well as other techniques of oppression, occupation authorities “manipulate reality” as they see fit, he said. For example, when Palestinian prisoners embark on a hunger strike, the army withholds permits from their family members—including the right to visit the prisoners until the strike is terminated. Occupation authorities can summarily ban various activities, with the bans applied to families and sometimes whole villages. They brand people “terrorists” merely for throwing stones. “It is very easy to use the reason of security for anything,” Carmel explained. “I had the ability as a low-ranking officer to make decisions…dramatically affecting people’s lives.”

Carmel, who served primarily in the West Bank, noted that even in areas nominally under Palestinian authority such as Areas A and B, the Israeli military exercises the real authority. “It is a myth that Gaza is not still under occupation,” he added, citing Israeli “control of the sea space and air space and electro-magnetic space” around the blockaded Strip. “We keep Gaza on a short leash,” reinforcing the domination through periodic bombardment of the densely populated Palestinian enclave.

Carmel described the “dehumanization process” that young Israeli soldiers go

through in their training before they are sent in to enforce the occupation. The soldiers typically are young and devoid of Arabic so there can be no real understanding or communication with the area residents. They are also well schooled in “state propaganda” in which Palestinians are depicted as enemies and potential terrorists dedicated to the destruction of Israel.

Some soldiers turn against the occupation after witnessing the inhumanity of military repression. For Carmel the moment of awakening was when he went on routine night raids in which Palestinians were aroused from their sleep, had their homes searched and pictures taken, were often beaten and arrested arbitrarily, and sometimes had their home demolished. For Carmel the action of “waking up children in the middle of the night” and seeing the crying and terror on their faces began the process in which he turned against the occupation and later sought to expose it through Breaking the Silence.

By collecting testimonies of soldiers, organizing tours and releasing videos and reports, Breaking the Silence effectively exposes the cruelty and inhumanity of the Israeli occupation from the perspective of the soldiers who are charged with enforcing it.—Walter L. Hixson

Groups Challenge PayPal’s Refusal to Serve Palestine

Despite serving more than 200 countries, PayPal, the largest virtual payment system in the world, does not let Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip use its offerings. Several organizations, including 7amlehThe Arab Center for Social Media Advancement, SumOfUs and MPower Change, have launched a campaign asking the company to change its Palestinian policy. Thus far, the groups’ petition has gained more than 230,000 signatures.

To bring further attention to their campaign, the organizations held a webinar on Aug. 4.

Mona Shtaya, advocacy adviser at 7amleh, noted that the lack of access to PayPal deprives Palestinians of freelance job opportunities, since many companies use the platform for cross-border payments.

A Palestinian child cries after the Israeli army raided and vandalized her home in the Balata refugee camp, in Israeli occupied Nablus, on Aug. 17, 2022.

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This reality is particularly devastating for Gazans, she noted, as they often look for remote work opportunities with foreign organizations due to the high unemployment rate in the besieged territory. “When we don’t have access to PayPal, that means we are prevented from our right to work,” she explained.

Shtaya noted that PayPal has also blocked humanitarian groups from sending aid to Gaza via Venmo, which is owned by

the company. She pointed out the sharp contrast with Ukraine, where the company took swift action to ensure its services were available to send assistance amid the Russian invasion.

PayPal has not been forthright in explaining why it does not serve Palestine, only saying it classifies Palestine as a “high risk” area. Shtaya noted that Palestinian authorities have taken steps in recent years to make sure their financial system complies

with all PayPal regulations, but the service remains unavailable. There is now “no justification” for PayPal to withhold its products from the Palestinian territories, she said.

Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, noted that PayPal unreservedly offers its services to illegal West Bank settlers, who often live right next to Palestinians. PayPal is thus, “probably unwittingly,” advancing Israel’s “two-pronged effort to both isolate the Palestinians and to normalize and weave the settlers into the international community of nations,” she noted.

Friedman stressed that the campaign is not even asking PayPal to take a stance on Israeli settlers or the country’s treatment of Palestinians living between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Rather, it is merely requesting that the company treat all occupants of Israeli-controlled territories equally. “Asking PayPal to provide services to the Palestinians is a very soft ask,” she said. “The hard ask is saying you should be providing services to Palestinians and you shouldn’t be providing them to the settlers.”

Linda Sarsour, co-founder of MPower Change, emphasized that matters of economic justice should not be deprioritized amid the broader political struggles Palestinians face. “This campaign to get PayPal to extend services to the Palestinian people changes the material conditions of the Palestinian people right now,” she said.

Access to PayPal would enhance the lives of freelancers, businesspeople, employees and communities alike, she pointed out. As just one example, she noted that those living abroad wishing to buy large quantities of Palestinian handicrafts, such as pottery, jewelry or embroidery, are often forced to use services such as Western Union that have high fees that stymie business opportunities. Bank wire transfers, meanwhile, are often closely monitored and subject to freezing.—Dale Sprusansky Palestinian Architecture as Resistance, Identity

On July 27, the Balfour Project, a UKbased organization which stands for peace, justice and equal rights in Israel and

An Israeli soldier enforces an order to close Palestinian shops in the West Bank town of Hebron, on Jan. 29, 2022. PayPal’s decision to block Palestinian merchants from using its payment processing services helps reinforce Israeli apartheid, activists argue.

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The Museum of the Palestinian People in Washington, DC held a vigil on Aug. 8, 2022 to remember those killed in Israel’s most recent wave of attacks on the Gaza Strip. Attendees paid special honor to the 16 kids killed by the violence.

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Palestine, held a webinar to explore the nexus between conflict and architecture in Palestine, from the British Mandate period to the present.

Abdalrahman Kittana, assistant professor at Birzeit University and co-founder of the Yalla Project, spoke on architecture and urbanism as acts of resistance since Mandate Palestine. “In the ongoing narrative of Palestinian resistance against the Zionist colonial project, architecture is actually an open signifier, and space is an instrument in this confrontation,” he noted.

Kittana cited the 1917 Balfour Declaration as a decisive moment in modern Palestinian architecture. “Everything in our life became part of this confrontation,” he said. “The British administration and the Zionists used architecture and urbanism as tools of control and colonization.”

For example, in 1918 Jaffa’s old town was redesigned by its British occupiers to accommodate its military and counter any resistance movement by the Palestinian people. “The war for Jaffa signifies a lot about the possibility of architecture and urbanism to erase one community and establish another community,” Kittana noted.

There were originally several Jewish neighborhoods around Jaffa which the planners of Tel Aviv called to be annexed to the borders of the new Jewish city. In trying to break the encirclement of Jewish settlements around Jaffa, the Palestinians

petitioned the Department of Land Settlement to keep certain areas only for Palestinian development, Kittana explained.

Danna Masad, a faculty member in Birzeit University’s design department and co-founder of ShamsArd Design Studio, an eco-architecture firm, discussed the restoration of earth architecture, which is the architectural use of readily available and practical resources from the earth.

In 2012, ShamsArd began repairing buildings in Ramallah using compressed earth, since it allows for greater expanse, stabilization, durability and weather resistance. Such attempts at this type of architecture have been few and far between in modern Palestine.

In Jericho, one of the oldest cities in the world, remnants of ancient mudbrick structures still remain. Many of the early mudbrick homes are abandoned, partially collapsed and unrestored—contributing to the stigma of “earth architecture” being unreliable, Masad said. “There is not a lot of interest or attention being paid to the restoration of earth architecture. There is an urgent need for documenting and research of vernacular earth knowledge.”

In many cities in the West Bank, a law inherited from the British Mandate period and still in effect today requires that buildings be clad in stone. One of the consequences of this is the marring of landscapes by quarries in the West Bank, some of which are owned

and operated by Israelis, despite being prohibited under the 1949 Geneva Conventions. ShamsArd, Masad said, is trying to find alternative building materials that Palestinians have control over and are appropriate for the local environmental, social and political context.

Khaldun Bshara is an architect, restorer, anthropologist and assistant professor in the department of social and behavioral sciences at Birzeit University. Since 1994, he has also worked at the Ramallah-based Riwaq Center for Architectural Conservation, which protects, preserves and restores historic Palestinian properties.

In 2006, Riwaq published a registry documenting 50,320 historic buildings in 422 towns and villages in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. The organization has restored more than 130 community centers since 2001, which have become spaces for social change. Riwaq trains architects, workmen, blacksmiths and carpenters in traditional techniques for the restoration projects.

“It is not a luxury to protect Palestinian heritage,” Bshara said. “It is one of the basic rights to protect heritage because it is this relation between heritage, identify and nation-building that is entrenched in the heritage, so we have to do it.”

Elaine Pasquini

Diaspora Palestinian Doctors Give Back to Their Homeland

The Palestinian American Medical Association (PAMA) hosted a meet and greet on Aug. 25 at the Lebanese Taverna in McLean, VA. Founded in 2013 by Palestinian healthcare professionals practicing in the U.S., the non-profit 501(c)(3) charity is bringing improved healthcare and hope to Palestinians.

PAMA’s new executive director, Marwan Ahmad, welcomed attendees, and showed a brief film before introducing PAMA cofounder, Dr. Yousef Khelfa, who joined via Zoom from Northern California. Dr. Khelfa, an oncologist, earned his medical degree from Al-Quds University Medical School in Jerusalem and he is determined to help others back home obtain medical scholarships and training.

A view of Jaffa from the Mediterranean Sea in 1895.

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Many of PAMA’s board members grew up and went to university in Palestine and understand the needs of that community.

“There is zero tolerance for divisive politics or religion. This is the story of everyone of you,” Dr. Khelfa said to the room full of medical professionals in Virginia. “We have one goal. We won’t forget Palestine. They need our help.”

In addition to providing training opportunities, PAMA hosts medical missions to the occupied territories and sends medical

supplies and devices to hospitals using local vendors.

Dr. Esam Abou Nahlah, a dentist, said he used to talk with his mother—who had diabetes, as well as heart and kidney troubles—in Gaza nearly three hours every day. When she died on Oct. 6, 2020, the world was locked down by COVID and he felt wretched. He decided to send a dialysis machine to Gaza in her memory. Patients like his mother need to spend four hours,

three times a week, hooked up to a dialysis machine and there is a severe shortage. Dr. Nahlah called PAMA and within one hour they agreed to send a Hemodialysis machine to Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. He was kept abreast of that machine’s progress every step of its journey from Germany to Gaza. Within four months Dr. Nahlah received a photo of the first person to use his machine, which is now serving patients like his mother.

All medical professionals (physicians, nurses, pharmacists, dentists, therapists and healthcare technology professionals) in the United States or Palestine who share PAMA’s mission are encouraged to join. Visit <https://palestinian-ama.org/> for more information.—Delinda C. Hanley

Update on Beirut at ACS Reunion

The American Community School (ACS) Beirut held a reunion Aug. 4-7 at the Lord Baltimore Hotel in Baltimore, MD. The school’s triennial reunions are held in different locations across the U.S. and are open to anyone who attended, were faculty/staff, parents or friends of the school.

ACS first opened its doors in 1905 as a school to educate children of faculty teaching at what was to later become the American University of Beirut. It steadily expanded, adding a boarding department which attracted students who lived throughout the Middle East, North Africa and even Uganda and Kenya. A few of us came from the Greek island of Rhodes, where our fathers worked at the Voice of America delivering both Arabic and English programs.

Like schools around the world, COVID disrupted classes at ACS, and in 2020 the senior class had to hold a drivethrough graduation party. The new head of school, Thomas Cangiano, insisted students get back to normal classes that fall—and they did—kind of. ACS held a TEDx-Youth event, a model U.N., numerous community service projects and even hosted political panel discussions between Lebanese candidates running for parliament and students.

ACS has endured numerous conflicts, two world wars, Arab-Israeli wars and a tragic Lebanese civil war (1975-1990). In

Dr. Esam Abou Nahlah shows a photo of the first patient to use a new dialysis machine he bought in memory of his mother.

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Riders participate in the Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA’s) first annual Ride for Palestine, in Berkeley, CA on July 17, 2022. The 11 mile ride raised funds for MECA’s work to protect the lives, rights and well being of children in Palestine and the refugee camps in Lebanon. The post ride celebration included Palestinian food, music and dancing. The Washington Report helped sponsor the event.

PHOTO COURTESY MECA

fact, politics have been a long-time curse for the city once known as the “Paris of the Middle East.” While current ACS students train to be politically savvy future leaders, the ACS alumni association tries to leave politics at the door during reunions.

In the past, there were talks by ACS fathers (including Washington Report founders Richard Curtiss and Ambassador Andrew Killgore) and former teachers (such as ABC News correspondent Bill Blakemore). This year, former vice president of Anera, Philip Davies (class of 1973) narrated a PowerPoint slide show on Lebanon.

There was a moment of silence to mark the second anniversary of the Aug. 4, 2020 massive port explosion that killed 218, wounded 7,000, and left 300,000 people homeless.

In his report to alumni, Cangiano did not discuss politics, but he vividly described its severe effect on ACS. While Beirut was Cangiano’s fourth assignment as head of a school, the challenges caused by COVID, the port explosion and the current economic disaster made for an extraordinarily tumultuous first year. Like every member of his audience, he said he and his family are infatuated by Lebanon, its culture and history—despite its dire current situation. While ACS used to be a school for expats, today 65 percent of its students are Lebanese, he said. Very few are Americans since U.S. embassy employees cannot bring their dependents.

While ACS lost almost all of its American faculty, “we inculcate the best of American values,” Cangiano said. “We make sure our students learn the importance of being a citizen and giving back to their community.”

Students strive to address challenges such as pollution and refugees. While ACS graduates are accepted at top universities around the world, Cangiano’s goal is to have them return to play an important role in Lebanon.

ACS was the first school in Lebanon to open in-person classes after COVID, but it still confronts huge challenges. According to the World Bank, Lebanon is facing one of the world’s worst economic and financial crises in the last 150 years. There is only intermittent electricity and fuel shortages

make it hard to run the school generators. (While ACS has solar panels to harness renewable energy, it still needs electricity to power its grid and recharge its battery storage system.) Some students can’t obtain petrol to get to school. A 93 percent devaluation of the Lebanese pound means ACS employees, not to mention parents, can’t make ends meet.

Despite these huge challenges, ACS still has an outstanding pre-K to 12th grade program, Cangiano assured alumni, and he has great hope for the upcoming school year. He was delighted to hear from a parent who told him that his ACS children question him, speak their mind and challenge their teachers. That doesn’t happen in a lot of other schools in the Middle East.

Delinda C. Hanley

Amid Controversy, Tunisians Approve New Constitution

One year after Tunisian President Kais Saied consolidated power and dismantled democratic institutions, his newly drafted constitution was approved by voters in a controversial July 25 referendum. The new document shifts the government from a parliamentary to a presidential system, giving Saied broad unchecked powers.

On July 27, Washington, DC’s Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED) hosted Monica Marks, professor of Middle East

politics at New York University’s Abu Dhabi campus, and independent researcher and analyst Mohamed-Dhia Hammami to discuss the ramifications of the vote.

Marks noted that many questions surround the referendum vote, including the claim of the Independent High Authority for Elections (ISIE) that 94.6 percent of voters supported the new constitution. To learn the true results would require “a forensic audit that would include a comprehensive analysis of campaigning, preparation, voter awareness, polling and tabulation of results,” Marks said.

Regardless, Marks pointed out that the undemocratic nature of the election has been evident for months. For example, those advocating for a boycott of the referendum were threatened by the government with prosecution. “ISIE made a decision not to even dignify the boycott as a valid section of public opinion that deserved representation in campaigning,” Marks explained. The boycott appeared to have an impact, as voter turnout was a reported 30.5 percent.

According to Marks, Saied has been obsessed with his political vision for upending and reshaping Tunisia’s entire political system since he first took office in 2019. However, she believes his ambition to remake political and civil institutions is at odds with the people’s desire for an economic revival. “We have zero indication that he is thinking about Tunisia’s economy in any way, shape or form,” she said.

The vast majority of the population is not interested in power politics, but instead focused on jobs and providing food for their families, Marks added. “Saied is in a very vulnerable position because he has no choice but to focus on the economic problems that have bedeviled his predecessors, but he is showing absolutely no inclination to do that,” she said.

Hammami expressed doubt Saied has any comprehensive plan to fix the economy. “We know about his ideological orientations…and he is nostalgic toward the 1960s state-led development,” he explained. “But these are general ideas. When it comes to concrete policy solutions he doesn’t have that much to say.”

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Thomas Cangiano, the American Community School Beirut’s headmaster, describes the challenges facing his students and faculty.

Zaki has no idea when or if the ban will be lifted, and is thus forced to live in limbo. “The ban is ruining my life,” he explained. “The only dream I had when I was in my [prison] cell was to travel and live my normal life again.”

Mai El-Sadany, managing director and legal and judicial director at TIMEP, noted there’s little those living with bans on foreign travel can do to remedy their situation. To begin with, she explained, most individuals aren’t notified of their ban until they attempt to go abroad. “Almost all Egyptians banned from travel, be they civil society advocates or not, first learn that they’re actually banned at the airport,” she explained. “They’re not told who issued the ban, why it’s been issued, or for how long it may be in place.”

Hammami was also skeptical that a loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) would solve the country’s deeply-rooted economic problems. “The IMF’s role is not to deal with micro-economic problems,” he said. While IMF involvement may send a greenlight for other donors to get involved, without Tunisia having a clear, comprehensive economic program, “it’s difficult to see the end of the tunnel regarding the economic situation,” he lamented.

Even though Saied appears to have achieved his political goals, Marks said he is not necessarily in a position of secure power. She believes he is weaker today than he was a year ago, as his actions have caused the opposition to become more united.

“I think Kais Saied’s vanity referendum has given them a point of opposition to rally around,” she said. “There is a lot of broad unity insofar as we’ve seen the opposition—the political elite and the civil society elite—really start to congeal more around this idea that Saied is a dictator, and you can see it today. They are calling the referendum illegitimate and the outcome unreliable.”

HUMAN RIGHTS

Egypt’s Use of Indefinite Travel Bans

Much global attention has been placed on the tens of thousands of political prisoners in Egypt, but those facing less severe punishments for challenging the status quo often go unnoticed. On July 28, the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy (TIMEP) and the Freedom Initiative held a virtual event to note Egypt’s use of travel bans to punish human rights proponents.

Patrick Zaki, an Egyptian human rights advocate and a masters student at the University of Bologna, was released from prison in December 2021 after serving 18 months for “spreading false news.” However, he still faces a travel ban that prevents him from returning to Italy to complete his studies and be with his fiancée. “The travel ban is taking a huge toll on my career,” he explained. “If I’m not able to be in Italy by next September, I might lose my chance to resume my studies and lose my scholarship.”

Marks criticized Washington’s mostly supportive stance toward Saied’s leadership, but praised the comments by U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price following the referendum. The United States, Price said, has “noted the widespread concerns among many Tunisians regarding the lack of an inclusive and transparent process and limited scope for genuine public debate during the drafting of the new constitution.”—Elaine Pasquini

The situation does not get any clearer for the individual once they leave the airport. “After you go home, there’s no one path through which to solicit information about the ban,” she noted. Some bans are issued through a judicial order in reference to a legal case, but many are doled out by the mercurial security apparatus and have no paper trail. Those who do seek answers often have to jump through hoops in the notoriously opaque Egyptian state apparatus and often don’t receive satisfactory answers to their inquiry for months or longer, El-Sadany noted. Travel bans are legally supposed to end after three years, but she said they are typically extended indefinitely.

The government’s use of arbitrary bans is a violation of the Egyptian constitution, El-Sadany pointed out. The constitution “clearly states in no unequivocal terms that no citizen may be banned from leaving state territory except with a casual judicial order for a specified period of time in cases specified by the law,” she noted.

Ultimately, El-Sadany believes public advocacy is the best way to reverse travel bans. “It pains me as a lawyer to say that the most effective way to lift these bans is to create a lot of hell and draw a lot of attention to these cases,” she said.

Karim Ennarah, an Egyptian human rights worker released from prison but living with an indefinite travel ban and asset freeze, said that like Zaki his life is largely

Tunisian security forces stand guard outside a polling location in Ben Arous Governorate, Tunisia, on July 25, 2022.

ANIS MILI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

on pause. “I’ve had job offers that were withdrawn because of the complications from not being able to travel and not having a bank account,” he noted. He added that many “international organizations don’t want to hire someone who is implicated in a political anti-terror case.” (Many human rights advocates and political prisoners in Egypt are charged under anti-terrorism laws for their peaceful advocacy.)

James Lynch, founding director of FairSquare Research and Projects, said the world needs to do more to advocate for those living with travel bans. Such restrictions typically “fly under the radar,” despite their devastating impact, he noted. “Because they often come as an alternative to—or after—a prison sentence, they are often seen as a less problematic practice.”

Groups Demand Explanation for UAE’s Arrest of American Lawyer

The U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO) held a press conference on July 28 outside the Department of Justice building in Washington, DC, calling on Attorney General Merrick Garland to address the arrest and detainment of U.S. citizen and Virginia-based human rights lawyer Asim Ghafoor by the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

While connecting through Dubai International Airport on July 14 en route to a wedding in Turkey, Ghafoor was detained under the pretense of having to take a COVID test, after which he was arrested and transported to Abu Dhabi where he was jailed and denied bail. At the time of his arrest, Ghafoor was not informed of the charges filed against him.

According to a report from the Emirates News Agency (WAM), “The Abu Dhabi Money Laundering Court convicted Ghafoor [in absentia] of committing…two crimes of tax evasion and money laundering related to a tax evasion operation in his country, and sentenced him to three years in prison and a fine of three million dirhams ($816,000), with deportation from the UAE.”

In August, a court granted Ghafoor’s release, and he returned home to the U.S. in exchange for paying a $1.4 million fine to the UAE.

The Emiratis claim that they coordinated their investigation of Ghafoor with the U.S. for alleged tax evasion and making suspicious money transfers to the UAE. The U.S. Department of State in a July 18 statement denied any such cooperation.

Ghafoor, who was an attorney for murdered Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, was also the co-founder, along with Khashoggi, of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), a nonprofit organiza-

Allison McManus, research director at the Freedom Initiative, said Washington specifically could do much more to address the topic. “We have a lot of leverage, we have a gigantic military financing package that we give to Egypt every year,” she noted. “That can be better conditioned around not just releases of prisoners but actually freedom for those who are released, including the lifting of travel bans and asset freezes.”

Dale Sprusansky

Activists donning masks representing Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el Sisi (c) and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz (r) hold a protest in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Germany on July 18, 2022, calling for the release of Egyptian blogger and political prisoner Alaa Abd el Fattah.

BERND VON JUTRCZENKA/PICTURE

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(L r) Dr. Zahid Bukhari, Robert McCaw, Oussama Jammal, Nihad Awad and Imam Naeem Baig call on the U.S. government to investigate why American citizen Asim Ghafoor was arrested and detained by the UAE.

tion that promotes democracy, the rule of law and human rights for all the people of the Middle East and North Africa.

At the morning news conference outside the Justice Department, USCMO secretary general Oussama Jammal said the group is demanding more information on the case. “We request an urgent meeting with Attorney General Merrick Garland to clarify amongst other things if, in fact, the U.S. Department of Justice was informed about the case against Asim in 2020.” He also asked, “How many other cases does the UAE have against other Americans that were tried in absentia?”

Later in the day, a second news conference was held on Capitol Hill sponsored by U.S. Rep. Jennifer Wexton (D-VA) and three of her colleagues, who conveyed their outrage that an American citizen was detained abroad without due process.

Just two days after Ghafoor’s arrest, President Joe Biden met with UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Both leaders ignored press questions about Ghafoor.

Phil Pasquini

DIPLOMATIC DOINGS

Pakistan Rallies Support for Kashmir Position

Masood Khan, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, hosted a webinar on Aug. 5 to commemorate the third anniversary of Youm-e-Istehsal (India’s decision to strip the autonomy of the contested Jammu and Kashmir region).

“The events that took place three years ago today cast a shadow over the fate of the Kashmiris and the peace and security of South Asia,” the ambassador stated. “In the past year, the attention to Indian-occupied Jammu and Kashmir has decreased because of the Ukraine crisis and developments in the Asia Pacific region.”

During this time, he noted, civil liberties, parliamentary freedoms and free speech have been denied to more than 10 million Kashmiri citizens. “In crackdowns, political activists and journalists are still being persecuted and incarcer-

ated,” Khan said. “These actions violate international law and relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions.”

Khan called for multilateral diplomacy and a dialogue among representatives of Pakistan, India and Jammu and Kashmir to achieve a “just democratic resolution of the dispute.”

Pakistani Senator Mushahid Hussain said that since Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government took these actions, half a million Kashmiris have lost their jobs, while the economy has suffered a loss of $5.3 billion. He added that four million new domiciles have been given to Indians, mostly non-Muslims, changing the demographics of the region.

The Pakistani Senate just passed a unanimous resolution calling India’s annexation of Jammu and Kashmir “illegal,” Hussain related. “It’s about humanity, it’s about legality and the issues of peace, security and stability in a dangerous part of the world,” he said. “India is very aggressive—almost on a war path—against its own people, especially the Muslim people within India and in Indian-occupied Kashmir.”

Afzal Khan, a member of the UK parliament and a strong voice for Kashmiris, pointed out that this year marks the 75th year since the British partition, making Kashmir the longest unresolved conflict on the agenda of the U.N. “It is imperative that U.N. resolutions on Kashmir are implemented,” he urged. “The whole of Asia is

suffering because of the Kashmir conflict and there is a risk of war as China, India and Pakistan are all nuclear powers.”

Kjell Magne Bondevik, the former prime minister of Norway, affirmed the importance of diplomacy, but accused India of lacking interest in finding a resolution. “It has been more difficult to reach out to the top level of India than it has been in Pakistan where I have been received by all of the political leaders,” he said.

“It is high time and urgent to initiate new political efforts which can pave the way for a ceasefire and for peace,” Bondevik added. “The United Nations should feel a responsibility, and I appeal to my friend Secretary-General António Guterres to take such an initiative.”

Bondevik also called on the Indian government to release Mohammad Yasin Malik, chairman of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, along with thousands of other Kashmiri political prisoners unjustly held by India. An appeal, he said, has been sent to the Indian government through the embassy in Oslo.

Kashmiri American Rizwan Kadir addressed the need to inform Americans about Kashmir. “It is important for our second and third generation of Kashmiris living anywhere in the world to know what the issues are,” he said. “We need to share facts with a wider audience and project the correct narratives,” he added. “The voices of the Kashmiris should be heard.”

Elaine Pasquini

Indian policemen prevent Muslims from participating in a religious procession in Sprinagar, Kashmir, on Aug. 7, 2022.

FAISAL KHAN/ANADOLU VIA GETTY

MUSLIM AMERICAN ACTIVISM

Third Pillar Charities Helps Families With Back-to-School Event

Going back to school is a challenge for many families in Washington, DC’s Ward 7, especially this year due to COVID and inflation. Irene Stevenson, from American Third Pillar Charities, organized amazing volunteers, including officers from the Metropolitan Police Department’s 6th District, to fill 600 brand-new backpacks on Aug. 17. Students picked up their backpacks when they attended the 9th annual backto-school family celebration later that day, at the Marvin Gaye Recreation Center.

Third Pillar, the Boys and Girls Club, YMCA, the Recreation Center, MPD and other organizations provided grocery bags full of food, lots of fun outside activities, barbequed hot dogs and hamburgers, snow cones, popcorn and a DJ.

Third Pillar, a Muslim-American nonprofit, saved 150 loaded backpacks for the YMCA’s after-school program and 75 went to the William Paca Elementary School.

Delinda C. Hanley

American Third Pillar’s Irene Stevenson (front, center) organizes volunteers to fill backpacks.

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Middle East Books Review

they rejected Israeli demands. While he reserves his strongest condemnation for Trump’s plan, the author is unflinching in his cataloguing of the failures of previous U.S. administrations to stop Israel’s continued colonial expansion into the West Bank.

Bishara does not singularly spotlight the failures of the U.S. Critiquing both the East and the broader West, he demonstrates how Palestinians have so often paid the price for the failings and crimes of external actors, hindering their struggle.

Palestine: Matters of Truth and Justice

By Azmi Bishara, Hurst, 2022, paperback, 360 pp. MEB $30

Reviewed by Alex Bustos

Azmi Bishara’s Palestine: Matters of Truth and Justice is a bold and important work on the history of modern Palestine and the Palestinian struggle over the past century. However, unlike other histories of Palestine and Israel, the author’s insistence is that Palestine is a matter of justice. Alongside the historical examination of major events, Bishara analyzes key issues central to the question of Palestine and rebukes some common tropes and misconceptions.

He begins with the 1948 Nakba, or catastrophe, during which two-thirds of the Palestinian people were dispossessed and driven out of their homes to make way for the creation of the State of Israel. The author emphasizes the sheer magnitude of the Nakba in Palestinian history and its enduring legacies today, as it “gradually evolved from a historical event into a new reality” marking “a rupture in modern Palestinian history.”

Bishara also refutes some of the most enduring myths about Israel, drawing on the work of both Palestinian and Israeli scholars who have challenged official Zionist-Israeli narratives. This is especially important for Western readers who, as Bishara points out, are inundated with misinformation about the “conflict.”

As just one example, he notes that many are led to believe that the starting point of the struggle for Palestine was 1967, follow-

ing the Six-Day War and the Israeli takeover of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. Bishara contextualizes the longer arc of the Palestinian struggle and forensically shows that the war of 1967, and later the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, were both “wars of choice” by Israel, not defensive wars as is often claimed.

The book is packed with historical detail and told in a non-linear order, instead focusing on several issues such as the emergence of Zionism; the development of Palestinian national identity under the British Mandate; the role of Arab regimes; the rise and fall of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), making way for the emergence of the Palestinian Authority (PA); and the history of the various U.S. “peace” initiatives, from the 1970 Rogers Plan up until Donald Trump’s 2020 “Deal of the Century.”

In fact, Bishara dedicates a whole chapter to the “Deal of the Century,” excoriating it as “the most abysmal sort of colonialspeak one could possibly find in the present day.” He chastises the initiative for offering “rewards for Palestinians if they met Israel’s subjective standards” and punishments if

Indeed, Palestine: Matters of Truth and Justice stands out in its examination of the so-called “Jewish question” and the “Arab question” vis-à-vis Europe. Drawing attention to European anti-Semitism and the development of Zionism, Bishara argues that Western European support for Israel is in large part an effort by governments to “rid themselves of their guilty consciences by shifting it onto the Arab world.”

Now, Israel’s critics are widely depicted by many in Europe as the new anti-Semites. This, Bishara points out, is occurring amid the growth of anti-Muslim and anti-refugee sentiments in Europe, as well as the continent’s broad support for Israeli violations against Palestinians. He argues the end result is a reality in which Europe “can plausibly deny a connection between the racism/anti-Semitism that led to the Jewish Holocaust of the past” and “the European xenophobia and Islamophobia of the present” as long as it continues support for Israel.

Bishara also holds no punches for the leaders of the Arab world. He argues that despite the centrality of Palestine to many people in the region, Arab regimes “cannot resist the temptation to exploit the Palestinian question as a means to an end.” He thus examines the failures and contradictions of Arab regime support for Palestine over the decades.

Critiquing the roles of Arab regimes, the factional (and opportunistic) Palestinian leadership of the Fatah-led PA and Hamas in Gaza, and the duplicitous role of Western governments, particularly the United States, this book calls for a new strategy with a democratic struggle for justice at the heart of it. Insisting that Palestinians are the victims of Zionist settler colonialism and the apartheid regime which grew out of it, the author calls

Alex Bustos is assistant director at Palestine

for a united global effort to resist this reality.

Palestine: Matters of Truth and Justice is a valuable contribution to this effort. Notwithstanding the scholarly approach, this book is accessible to a wider audience.

The Olive Branch from Palestine: The Palestinian Declaration of Independence and the Path Out of the Current Impasse

By Jerome M. Segal, University of California Press, 2022, hardcover, 316 pp. MEB $30

Reviewed by Walter L. Hixson

lution and ultimate rejection as a pathway to peace by both the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and, of course, by the Israelis. Segal argues that the Declaration advanced the narrative of an independent Palestine and continues to illuminate a path forward in the wake of the failed and indeed chimerical Middle East “peace process.”

During the first generation of the struggle for Palestine, most Palestinians rejected the “right” of Israel to forge a “Jewish state” and hoped to prevent that reality. However, in the wake of their sweeping defeat in the June 1967 war, Palestinians began to move toward a two-state solution. Palestinian resistance in the 1987 First Intifada inspired the drafting of the unilateral Declaration of Independence the following year.

At this point, Segal argues, the PLO made the historic mistake of entering the multilateral and ultimately fruitless “peace process” in order to accommodate American demands, rather than pursuing the unilateral strategy implicit in the Palestinian Declaration of Independence. “It is my view that the Palestinian leadership made a fundamental mistake in the five years separating the 1988 Declaration and the 1993 Oslo

Accords,” Segal explains. “They should have established a government of the State of Palestine, a peace-government that would have replaced the PLO.”

Drawing on personal papers, interviews and a range of Palestinian, Israeli and U.S. documents, Segal presents a history of the Declaration and asserts its continuing relevance for the future. While Israel summarily rejected the independence statement, many Palestinians also opposed the Declaration’s recognition of Palestine as a “land of the three monotheistic faiths”—language that could be viewed as legitimating a Zionist state in Palestine. On the other hand, if the Israelis “had responded in kind” and recognized Palestinian independence, Segal argues “it is quite possible that peace and Palestinian statehood might have been achieved” in the wake of the Declaration.

Segal insists that Palestinian statehood remains the path forward, though many readers may find this vision of a two-state solution as improbable as the defunct peace process. In view of the massive and illegal Jewish settlements in occupied Palestine, the rise of a viable, independent Palestinian state is increasingly viewed as

This study analyzes the pivotal role of the Palestinian Declaration of Independence that was issued in 1988. In many ways it is the story of a path not taken, what might have been, and what could still be in the future.

Segal, a philosopher, policy analyst and author of several previous books, declares he “was the first person to publish a call for such a declaration.” He then assisted Mahmoud Darwish—long considered the national poet of Palestine—in drafting the historic statement.

The Olive Branch from Palestine presents the origins of the Declaration, its evo-

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

unachievable. More practical today, many believe, is a one-state solution that would put an end to Israeli apartheid by mandating equal rights for Palestinians.

Segal makes a strong case for the significance of the Declaration of Independence, which he argues convincingly has been “unappreciated” in narratives of the struggle for Palestine. “The Declaration,” he concludes, “was and remains a remarkable document, a unilateral effort that provides a basis for resolving the conflict.”

Iceland Street in Jerusalem

By Hjálmtýr Heiðdal, self-published, 2022, paperback, 242 pp. MEB $25

Reviewed by Dale Sprusansky

Even those with a deep knowledge of the events surrounding the creation of the State of Israel have something to learn from Hjálmtýr Heiðdal’s Iceland Street in Jerusalem. Like many before him, Heiðdal outlines the key players of the early Zionist movement, paying particular attention to their motivations and the devastating impact of their actions on the Palestinian people.

Where Iceland Street truly stands out, however, is in analyzing Zionism through the prism of the Icelandic government and media. While this approach may initially seem curious, Heiðdal convincingly dem onstrates how the remote country of fewer than 400,000 people played an outsized role in legitimizing and facilitating the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948.

Just three years after becoming an independent republic, Iceland was appointed to the U.N.’s 1947 Ad Hoc Committee on Palestine, charged with recommending a solution to the burgeoning Zionist-Arab conflict. Iceland further cemented its place in history when its U.N. representative, Thor Thors, was the first person to address the General Assembly on Nov. 29, 1947 as the body debated the now infamous U.N. Partition Plan for Palestine. Although Thors was heavily lobbied by Zionists, he told Abba Eban, Israel’s future foreign minister, that his country’s support for a Jewish state was never in doubt.

Heiðdal offers a thorough examination as to why Iceland and many other Western countries so ardently supported Zionism.

Perhaps his most persistent assertion is that many Western leaders “were shaped from childhood by the Bible’s stories about ancient Israel,” inclining them to fetishize the idea of a Jewish return to Zion. Heiðdal indeed provides ample evidence to support his claim that Christian Zionism underlined the thinking of leaders from Iceland and elsewhere.

He also deftly demonstrates how Jewish Zionists exploited simplistic Christian understandings of the Hebrew scriptures to make the case for a new Jewish state in the land of the Bible. Heiðdal points out that most early Zionists were areligious and looked at a whole host of possible locations to establish a Jewish homeland—most notably Uganda. Furthermore, he notes the historical opposition of many religious Jews to a new Jewish state. In doing so, he shows that religion was used cynically and opportunistically to sell the Zionist cause.

And yet, Heiðdal’s noticeable disdain for religion occasionally undermines these points. For instance, his flippant comments about the ahistorical “myths” of the Bible serving as the basis for the Jewish state contradict his nuanced scholarly discourse demonstrating the secular underpinnings of Zionism. Relatedly, the author also tends to delve into religious issues that are not germane to the focus of the book, such as the internal Jewish debate as to what makes one a Jew.

Aside from his exegesis on Christian Zionism, Heiðdal masterfully ties Zionism to the prevalence of nationalistic imperialism among 19th and 20th century Western countries. He shows how Zionist leaders intentionally targeted leaders in the United Kingdom, knowing both the country’s global power and its inclination to support settler colonial nationalistic movements. This, combined with the prevalence of Christian Zionism, intense lobbying efforts, European desires to expand their influence in the East and guilt over the Holocaust all helped to secure Western support for a Jewish homeland, the author argues.

A true strength of the book is Heiðdal’s frequent and adept use of primary sources to solidify his arguments. As just one exam-

ple, he extensively quotes Edwin Montagu, the UK’s Secretary of State for India, who was both an outspoken opponent of the Balfour Declaration and the most prominent Jew in the British government. Giving ample space to Montagu reinforces the author’s contention that many Jews disputed the early Zionists’ proposition that the Jewish people constituted a nation in exile. The comments of Montagu and others are also skillfully used to demonstrate the prescient warnings of early anti-Zionists about the consequences of permitting a settler project in Palestine.

A further highlight of Iceland Street is Heiðdal’s examination of the multiple times Palestinians were lied to and assured that a Jewish national home would not infringe upon their rights. The selected primary sources are particularly powerful in demonstrating that Palestinian rights are typically an afterthought for Western leaders, casually referenced at the end of strong statements in favor of the Zionist state. Indeed, the author notes that even as Iceland has moved away from its strong support for Israel in recent years, its leaders still tend to voice their concerns about Israeli human rights violations alongside their support for the country’s right to self-defense.

The book concludes with Heiðdal devoting several chapters to outlining the contradictions of Israeli “democracy,” spurious charges of anti-Semitism and Israeli violence against Palestinians. These chapters tend to be more rudimentary and can at times get a bit long-winded. Though this can be forgiven when one remembers the book was primarily written for Icelanders, who presumably have much less access to books on this subject in their native language. The book also contains innocent typos here and there, which is again easy to look past since the author self-translated the book after it was first released in Icelandic in 2019.

Minor flaws aside, the book does a brilliant job of providing a new and intriguing angle through which to explore Zionism, while also serving as a highly useful resource for understanding the foundations of the Zionist movement. As such, Iceland Street in Jerusalem is a valuable read for seasoned and new readers on the subject alike.

Dale Sprusansky is managing editor of the Washington Report.

Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical

By Shaul Magid, Princeton University Press, 2021, hardcover, 296 pp. MEB $40 Reviewed by Steve France

On Zionist Literature by Ghassan Kanafani, translated by Mahmoud Najib, Ebb Books, 2022, paperback, 188 pp. MEB $20.

Translated into English for the first time since its publication in Arabic in 1967, legendary Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani’s On Zionist Literature is an incisive analysis of the body of literary fiction written in support of the Zionist colonization of Palestine. Interweaving his literary criticism of works by George Eliot, Arthur Koestler and many others with a historical materialist narrative, Kanafani identifies the political intent and ideology of Zionist literature. Namely, he demonstrates how the myths used to justify the Zionist domination of Palestine first emerged and were repeatedly propagated in popular literary works in order to generate support for Zionism and shape the Western public’s understanding of Israel.

Once Upon a Time in Iraq: History of a Modern Tragedy by James Bluemel and Dr. Renad Mansour, BBC Books, 2021, paperback, 432 pp. MEB $21.95.

It’s sad to say, but this would be a good time to learn about—or refresh your knowledge of—right-wing Rabbi Meir Kahane. The violent visionary was assassinated 32 years ago, but in Israel’s post-Oslo scramble to finally absorb occupied Palestinian territory and ghettoize any remaining Palestinians, Kahane’s message is more cutting-edge than it was even in his lifetime.

Shaul Magid’s study of Kahane’s life and thoughts is an excellent new resource to understand the Kahanist theological brew that extreme religious settlers use to justify their violent persecution of Palestinians. Readers see how Kahane drew on his 13 years of study in the Mir Yeshiva in Brooklyn to convince religious Israelis to discard the spiritual reluctance of some earlier religious Zionists to engage in hands-on violence against “Arabs” who got in the way of Jewish “redemption” of the Land of Israel.

A rough-edged American deeply involved in Israeli politics, Kahane enunciated a robust theology made-to-order for the expulsion or total subjugation of Palestinians, which Magid notes was based on Kahane’s “selective reading of prophetic texts.” Kahane, Magid writes, defined the “Jewish

Steve France is an activist and writer affiliated with Episcopal Peace Fellowship, Palestine Israel Network.

When troops invaded Iraq in 2003 to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime, most people expected an easy victory. Instead, the gamble was a grave mistake and its ramifications continue to reverberate through the lives of millions both in Iraq and the West. In Once Upon a Time in Iraq, award-winning documentary maker James Bluemel collects first-hand testimony from those who lived through the horrors of the invasion. It takes in all sides of the conflict— working class Iraqi families watching their country erupt into civil war; soldiers and journalists on the ground; American families dealing with the grief of losing their son or daughter; parents of a suicide bomber coming to terms with unfathomable events— to create the most in-depth and multi-faceted portrait of the Iraq War to date. Accompanying a major BBC series, James Bluemel’s book is an essential account of a conflict that continues to shape our world, and a startling reminder of the consequences of our past decisions.

Degrade and Destroy: The Inside Story of the War Against the Islamic State, from Barack Obama to Donald Trump by Michael R. Gordon, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022, hardcover, 496 pp. MEB $30.

Degrade and Destroy takes us inside National Security Council meetings at which President Barack Obama grappled with early setbacks in the war against the Islamic State. The book also offers the most detailed account to date of how President Donald Trump granted greater authority over the war to the Pentagon, but in Gordon’s opinion, jeopardized the outcome by rushing to exit. Drawing on his reporting in Iraq and Syria for the Wall Street Journal, Gordon documents the closed-door deliberations of U.S. generals with their Iraqi and Syrian counterparts and describes some of the toughest urban battles since World War II. Among the questions he addresses: How was the war actually fought? What were the key decisions, successes and failures? What was learned? As Americans debate the future of using force abroad, Gordon’s account offers vital insights into how wars are fought against non-state actors, and the enduring lessons we can draw from such wars.

claim to the Land of Israel” as “not a nationalist one, simply because ‘we once lived there,’ not because of a Balfour, a League of Nations or [a] United [Nations]. Not a request or a plea but a proud claim, based on a divine grant.” Violent destruction of the enemies of that “promised land” was a “holy act” in Kahane’s eyes.

Kahane taught religious Israelis to see as “enemies of Israel” even fellow Zionists who were non-religious, or liberal-religious in outlook. Even the iconic founder of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, whose socialist and secular Zionism Magid describes as “a hardfought experiment in Jewish normalization,” was to Kahane no more than a “Hebrewspeaking goyim,” deeply tainted by non-Orthodox thinking. Going still further, he held that “Zionism, a Jewish state and Judaism are incompatible with Western democracy.”

Kahane’s Zionist Judaism was about radical action, not prayer and piety. Profusely citing scripture, he preached that “whoever relents from revenge against Israel’s enemies is giving up on avenging G_d, for whoever attacks the people of Israel is actually attacking the G_d of Israel.” Using the biblical name for Arabs, he identified Palestinians as “the Ishmaelite cancer and desecration of the Land of Israel” and accused

Republics of Myth: National Narratives and the U.S.-Iran Conflict

By Hussein Banai, Malcolm Byrne and John Tirman, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022, hardcover, 432 pp. MEB $29.95

Report by Amelia Leaphart

The Atlantic Council sponsored a virtual event on June 23 to discuss Republics of Myth: National Narratives and the U.S.-Iran Conflict, a new book that assesses U.S.Iran relations since 1979. The authors argue that the prevalence of strongly held— and often conflicting—national myths in both countries help explain the animosity between Tehran and Washington over the past 40-plus years.

“It’s not just national interests that drive behavior, but also national narratives,” said John Tirman, co-author and executive director of the MIT Center for International Studies. “Narratives are stories about a nation,

Israelis of “profan[ing] G_d’s name by their refusal to expel from Eretz Yisrael the Ishmaelites.” Any alleged Jewish sage who said Jews are obligated to treat Arabs mercifully was a rodef (murderer) who “collaborates with the gentile in the killing of Jews.”

Magid, who is a professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth College, traces the evolution of this philosophy back to New York, where Kahane founded the Jewish Defense League in the late 1960s. JDL sought to undercut the liberal Jewish establishment in America, which Kahane viewed as guilty of assimilating to the non-Jewish establishment and undermining the pride of ordinary Jews. JDL fielded street gangs to battle Blacks and others who supposedly were assaulting defenseless Jews. The group also bombed Soviet offices in a campaign to support emigration of Russian Jews to Israel.

When he moved to Israel in 1971, Kahane’s fundamentalist, messianic Judaism became central to his political vision and deepened and darkened his hatred of secular and liberal Jews. By the time of his death in 1990, he was a tremendously controversial figure. Still, the extremist ideology he developed lived on, Magid relates, even after his Kach party was outlawed in 1994, in the wake of the massacre by his disciple

Baruch Goldstein of 29 Muslim men and boys (and the wounding of scores more) in Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque.

As the Oslo peace process has crumbled and Israel has locked in its commitment to apartheid, secular justifications for the Jewish state have become less and less convincing—and Kahane’s star has risen. Last year, the leader of the Jewish Power party, Itamar Ben-Gvir, a follower of Kahane who displays a portrait of Goldstein in his home, entered the Knesset. In the upcoming election, his party is expected to win many more seats.

This slide toward theocracy deeply contradicts the vision of the secular founders of Zionism, such as Theodor Herzl and BenGurion. They aimed to create a society where Jews would be free from the shackles of religion-based tradition, as well as safe from persecution by—or assimilation into— non-Jewish society. Now, Zionism’s impressive triumph—the State of Israel—is propped up by Kahanist fundamentalism. Should the Kahanists gain full control, their ideology will not only dictate total war against the Arabs but also the repression of liberal and secular Israeli Jews. In an ironic twist, the ideal of a Jewish, democratic state might founder on the intra-Jewish divisions that Zionism once seemed to have settled. ■

tier myth,” the centuries-long notion that the earliest Americans tamed and reaped the bounty of a new exotic land filled with native “savages.” He noted that when the U.S. completed its colonization of the West Coast it began to pursue an international frontier to “tame,” hence the American occupation of Cuba and the Philippines, following the Spanish-American War. This mentality has continued to the modern day, inclining the U.S. to become involved in confrontations across the world.

their folklore. They are facts to some extent, history through a particular nationalistic lens, and they’re conveyed through education, news media, art, architecture—all kinds of ways.” These myths and narratives, he explained, “can often be a subtle shaper of political leaders’ behavior and decisions.”

Tirman believes the prime national narrative influencing U.S. behavior is the “fron-

On the Iranian side, Tirman noted that the country’s leadership exalts the martyrdom of Imam Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad who was killed for resisting the rule of a tyrant. “This has become a powerful story for Iranians,” he explained.

“One of the most important things to take away from this is a very deep suspicion of foreigners, foreign influence, of the power of martyrdom and so on.”

Tirman pointed out that U.S. imperialistic

aggression and a strong Iranian sense of national defense are naturally incompatible. “These two national narratives are very much at odds with each other,” he said. “It explains, I think, a lot of the behavior of the countries and their relationship to each other.”

Malcolm Bryne, co-author and deputy director of research at the National Security Archive, noted that the book initially focused on how missed opportunities have defined Iran-U.S. relations in recent decades. A plethora of interviews with policymakers and analysis in both countries confirmed this conclusion, but also illustrated the dominant role of national myths in shaping outcomes. “We essentially moved from the idea of missed opportunities to national narratives as just one interesting and unexplored angle through which to try to understand the mess that this 40-year relationship has become,” Bryne explained.

Hussein Banai, co-author and professor of international studies at Indiana University, noted that even though diplomats, negotiators and high-ranking officials in both countries tend to be highly educated, they are still likely to be guided by national myths. “It became very clear to us that these background narratives were actually exercising tremendous control over these otherwise practically minded [leaders],” he said. “These narratives actually anchored their views more than was even apparent to them.”

Banai cited the 2015 nuclear deal, reached with former Presidents Barack Obama and Hassan Rouhani, as the most noticeable rare example in recent history of leaders from both sides transcending myths and refusing to let an opportunity pass. It was the “exception that proves the rule,” he said.

Byrne noted the irony of myths preventing the progress that leaders in both countries generally want to see. “Every U.S. president, from Jimmy Carter on forward, and every major Iranian leader have at one time or another wanted to reach out to the other side, wanted to find some sort of agreement,” Bryne said. ■

Amelia Leaphart is a student at Sewanee: The University of the South, where she is editor in chief of The Sewanee Purple. She was an intern with the Washington Report this summer.

Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy: The Promise and Betrayal of a People’s Revolution by Willow Berridge, Justin Lynch, Raga Makawi and Alex de Waal, Oxford University Press, 2022, paperback, 280 pp. MEB $35.

Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy tells the story of the Sudanese revolution of 2019 and how it succeeded in bringing down the long-standing rule of President Omar al-Bashir. However, the revolution quickly led to a troubled transitional civilian-led government that failed to meet the aspirations of the country’s revolutionaries and led to greater instability. The authors set the non-violent uprising in its historical context, showing how the protesters drew upon the precedents of earlier civic revolutions and adapted their practices to the specific challenges of the al-Bashir regime. The book also explores how the regime was brought to its knees through its inability to manage the intersecting economic and political crises caused by the 2011 secession of South Sudan and the loss of oil revenue, alongside the uncontrolled expansion of a sprawling security apparatus.

Vintage Humour: The Islamic Wine Poetry of Abu Nuwas by Alex Rowell, Hurst, 2018, hardcover, 224 pp. MEB $35.

Abu Nuwas, the pre-eminent bacchic bard of the classical Arabic canon, was loved and reviled in equal measure for his lyrical celebration of Abbasid Baghdad’s dissolute nightlife. His cutting satires of religion and the clergy, as well as the extraordinary range and virtuosity of his literary talent, only amplified Abu Nuwas’ profile. Vintage Humour contains approximately 120 translations, each replicating the monorhyme scheme of the originals, with commentary where appropriate, a brief history of the poet’s life and times and a glossary of the key themes, motifs and running jokes of the poems themselves. Based on extensive research with both Arabic and English source materials, Vintage Humour is an illuminating collection of interest to both general and informed readers with an interest in Islamic studies, Arabic literature and the history of Iraq and the Middle East.

Middle Eastern Sweets: Desserts, Pastries, Creams & Treats by Salma Hage, Phaidon, 2021, hardcover, 240 pp. MEB $35.

The latest culinary treat from Salma Hage, one of the Middle East’s most-loved home cooks, Middle Eastern Sweets is an indulgent collection of dessert recipes for all tastes and occasions. Whether you start your day with something sweet, finish it with something sweet, or make sure sweets are within reach all day long, you’ll find serious inspiration in these pages. The Middle East’s wide range of cultures, ingredients and influences informs the array of dishes she includes, such as spiced cookies, cream-filled pancakes, aromatic pastries and delicious cakes. Her recipes are refreshingly easy to follow and allow you to enjoy the process of crafting your treat. With natural sweeteners such as dates and honey often used in place of refined sugar; alternative protein sources including nuts and yogurt; and recipes that are naturally gluten-free, vegan, nut-free and dairy-free, this is the ideal book for both everyday treats and festive celebrations.

Leiden, Netherlands

Leiden, Netherlands

San José, Costa Rica

The Khaleej Times, Dubai, UAE Beirut, Lebanon

Other People’s Mail

Compiled by Dale Sprusansky

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS 1600 PENNSYLVANIA AVE. NW WASHINGTON, DC 20500

COMMENT LINE: (202) 456-1111 WWW.WHITEHOUSE.GOV/CONTACT

BIDEN EMBARRASSES HIS COUNTRY ON TRIP TO ISRAEL

To The Capital Times, July 17, 2022 Cowardice and humiliating capitulation to one of the world’s worst human rights abusers and international law breakers were on display at the start of President Joe Biden’s summer tour of Israel.

Biden was warmly received by the leaders of Israel, including Prime Minister Yair Lapid who called the president “a great Zionist and one of the best friends Israel has ever known.” While he could have used the opportunity to chart a new direction with what the international community regards as an apartheid state that systemically and with impunity violates the human rights of Palestinians, the president instead embraced the label and self-identified as a proud Zionist going back to the 1970s.

This follows on the heels of the U.S. State Department’s whitewashed “investigation” into the murder of PalestinianAmerican Shireen Abu Akleh by the Israeli military. Biden could have demanded accountability for her killing, but he didn’t. He did make a point though to tell Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s rapacious former prime minister, “You know I love you.”

Sure he does. The U.S shows that love with our taxpayer-subsidized $3.8 billion we give annually to Israel while we throw a few charity bones to the Palestinians.

Biden went on in an interview to say that military force was an option against Iran if it pursues a nuclear program, an alarmingly conciliatory statement toward Israeli leaders’ warmongering.

Watching the leader of the only country that has dropped nuclear weapons on human beings, the United States, threaten preemptive war without credible evidence that Iranians are using their nuclear capa-

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bilities for weapons of mass destruction (we didn’t learn anything from Iraq) isn’t just embarrassing, it's illegal (see U.N. Article 2, Section 4). It’s also against our own Constitution, which vests the war making powers with Congress.

Leadership is gravely needed here. Biden’s performance is abysmal. Richard McGowan, Madison, WI

WHEN WILL THE GROUND BE “RIPE FOR PEACE”?

To the Chico Enterprise-Record, July 19, 2022

“The ground is not ripe for peace,” our president said during his July visit to Bethlehem. This is to explain why no steps will be taken regarding the Palestinian “issue.”

It advises we remain patient as Israel expands appropriation of the region that the president assures us will one day be the “independent, sovereign, viable and contiguous” state of the Palestinians.

Palestinians watch settlements expand while Israeli leaders will not admit the possibility of a Palestinian state. “Restarting negotiations?” Israel is a powerful and wealthy nuclear state. Palestine is a bordering region which has no army, no autonomy, no great world power backer, no parity of power in negotiations. Palestine does not control Palestine. Israeli forces enter any town, village or household when they wish.

Under the Israeli military law that governs the West Bank (except the settlements), it arrests and imprisons without trial or even charge persons considered to be a threat (this is called “administrative detention”). Israel names local human rights organizations as terrorist organizations without evidence and refuses a neutral investigation of the Israeli killing of a Palestinian-American journalist.

What would make the ground ripe for peace? The “realist” option: the U.S. withholds its $3.8 billion per year in aid unless Israel observes international law. The “idealist” option: if Israelis and Palestinians stood across the field face to face, with equal power and respect, with mutual accountability to international law, searching for what we hope President Biden might mean when he says “the values we share.”

Jim Anderson, Chico, CA

A BINATIONAL STATE IS THE ONLY REMAINING SOLUTION

To The Dallas Morning News, July 25, 2022

President Joe Biden’s commitment to the “two-state solution” for the Israel-Palestine dispute is commendable but undermined by Israel’s settlement policies. It is long overdue for Washington to acknowledge that a territorial compromise along the 1967 border is no longer plausible. Zionist expansion has ensured that the “one-state solution” whereby Palestinians (Christian, Muslim and Druze) in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem are accorded full Israeli citizenship is inevitable. The only other conceivable option would be the creation of a confederation between the Palestinian territories and Jordan.

Zionism always envisioned a democratic Jewish state from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River. Zionists conveniently overlooked the native Arab population. They now have to deal with the consequences of their territorial aggrandizement: a binational Jewish-Arab state.

George W. Aldridge, Arlington, TX

U.S. SUPPORT CONTINUES EVEN AS BOMBS DEVASTATE GAZA

To The Mercury News, Aug. 11, 2022

Re: “Israel and Gaza militants exchange fire.”

Once again Israel has bombed Gaza. This periodic military action is casually referred to as “mowing the lawn.” It is designed to make life so miserable for the Palestinians that they are forced to leave their homeland.

This is the fifth attack on the desperate two million residents of Gaza. Seventy percent of these Palestinian families own homes and farms in greater Israel but have been refused the right of return. Israel has confiscated their lands to build illegal Jewish-only settlements. These violations of international law are unconditionally supported by the U.S. taxpayers to the tune of over $10 million a day.

Ten million dollars a day would go a long way toward improving our health care and educational systems. Spending our tax dollars this way would ensure a brighter future for our children and would not violate international law.

Forrest Cioppa, Walnut Creek, CA

ISRAEL’S TARGETING OF HUMAN RIGHTS ORGANIZATIONS

To The Press Democrat, Aug. 29, 2022

I am outraged at so much unnecessary suffering in our world. How long will the boots of the powerful remain on the necks of innocents? News from Palestine is especially grim. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Israeli organization B’Tselem have reported that Israel is an apartheid state. Six civil society organizations, such as Al-Haq (Arabic for “the truth”) and Defense for Children International-Palestine, which records and reports abuses committed by Israel on Palestinian children, have been officially declared by Israel as terrorist organizations. Their offices were raided, records taken and doors welded shut by Israeli soldiers. Our government, Israel’s biggest supporter with $3.8 billion in tax dollars yearly, is allowing this to continue, making us complicit.

Are we friends of Israel when we support its moral self-destruction or the slow genocide it is committing? The claim is always security, but annihilation of indigenous Palestinians and blatant territorial expansion are the reality.

Please contact your representatives and insist that they work for security and equality for all living in Palestine/Israel.

Therese Mughannam-Walrath, Santa Rosa, CA

U.S. MUST STOP GIVING AID TO ISRAEL

To the Portland Press Herald, July 15, 2022

Talk about irony. Talk about hypocrisy. Talk about being two-faced.

The U.S. correctly supports democracy in Ukraine by opposing Russian aggression and war crimes and providing assistance to the Ukrainian people.

Yet at the same time we send billions to Israel, a country with a higher per capita income than the U.S., and sell it weapons, thanks to the Israel lobby wielding power over our “representatives.” This occurs even as Israel and the cowardly Israel Defense Forces use our money and weapons to kill and injure innocent Palestinians, including women and children—and helps “settlers” injure Palestinians and destroy centuries-old Palestinian olive orchards.

However, the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which opposes Israel’s actions, is gaining influence and will gain more, especially now that Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have correctly named Israel as an apartheid state.

Support for Israel is wrong on many levels, and I ask our representatives to speak out and act against these wrongs.

David Plimpton, Cape Elizabeth, ME

CANADIAN COMPLICITY IN ISRAELI VIOLATIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS

To SaltWire, Aug. 21, 2022

I am responding to a recent letter by Jonathan Usher from North York, Ontario regarding the “Israel practices apartheid” bus ads.

These Metrobus ads only state the findings of several well-recognized human rights organizations—Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Independent Jewish Voices and two Israeli human rights organizations, B’Tselem and Yesh Din. You can be assured that when any of these organizations release a statement, they are comprehensively researched. The fact is, each and every one of these groups have found there is clear and explicit evidence of systemic persecution of Palestinians.

Usher does not refute the mountain of evidence of Israel’s behavior. Instead, he boldly declares that the ads are “anti-Semitic.” This tactic of accusing critics of Israeli state actions of being anti-Jewish seems rather old and tiresome and deflects from the reality that these human rights reports address. Anti-Semitism should in no way be tolerated, but this criticism of Israel should not be smeared as being anti-Semitic.

In 1973, the United Nations released the first international convention condemning the crime of apartheid and institutionalized racial segregation. Using this explicit definition, these human rights organizations can confidently use the term “apartheid” when describing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and within Israel.

They have documented evidence of Israel’s “system of control.” These features include such things as the ID system, everexpanding Israeli settlements, separate roads for Israelis and Palestinians, military checkpoints, marriage law, the massive separation wall, the use of Palestinians for cheap labor and disparities in access to land resources between Palestinians and Israeli settlers.

Canada needs to condemn the violence that apartheid perpetrates on the Palestinian people and demand that the Israeli government immediately stop further settlements on Palestinian land.

Palestinians have long suffered under Israeli rule. Between 1947-1949, some 750,000 Palestinians were forced to flee their home and villages. It is estimated that some 500 Palestinian villages were destroyed by Israeli militias. Today, we have millions of Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza or neighboring countries, hoping one day to return, many with deeds or keys to their properties.

The extent of Israeli crimes against Palestinians is now being investigated by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The government of Canada cannot ignore the findings of these prominent human rights groups. Canada needs to condemn the violence that apartheid perpetrates on the Palestinian people and demand that the Israeli government immediately stop further settlements on Palestinian land.

Carmel Conway, St. John’s, NL ■

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ACCOMPANISTS ($250 or more)

Dr. Mohammed Ahmed, Waterville, OH Larry A. Cooper, Plymouth, MI**** David Dunning, Lake Oswego, OR Steven Feldman, Winston Salem, NC Fahd Jajeh, Lake Forest, IL Bilquis Jaweed, West Chester, OH Nabil Khoury, Bloomfield Hills, MI Dr. Jane Killgore & Thomas D’Albani, Bemidji, MN** Edwin Lindgren, Overland Park, KS Amar Masri, Fort Wayne, IN Sara Najjar-Wilson, Reston, VA Hertha Poje Ammoumi, New York, NY John & Peggy Prugh, Tucson, AZ Irmgard Scherer, Fairfax, VA Joan Seelye, Washington, DC Raymond Totah, Fallbrook, CA Jeanne Trabulsi, Front Royal, VA Don Wagner, Orland Hills, IL William Walls, Arlington, VA

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* In Memory of Dick and Donna Curtiss

** In Memory of Andrew I. Killgore

*** In Memory of Dr. Jack G. Shaheen

**** In Memory of Diane Rose Cooper

# In Memory of John F. Zelaya

Young people practice parkour over the rubble of destroyed homes in the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah, on Aug. 20, 2022. The sport of parkour is popular in Gaza—where Israel provides more obstacle racecourses every time it wages a bombing campaign.

PHOTO BY KHALED OMAR/XINHUA VIA GETTY IMAGES