Washington Report - January/February 2016 - Vol. XXXV, No. 1

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On Middle East Affairs

Volume XXXV, No. 1

Telling the Truth for More Than 30 Years…

Interpreting the Middle East for North Americans

■

January/February 2016

Interpreting North America for the Middle East

THE U.S. ROLE IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION OF PALESTINE

Netanyahu Outlaws Al-Aqsa Protector, Social Charity The Northern Islamic Movement—Jonathan Cook

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Shared Agony in Gaza and Jerusalem —Mohammed Omer

Palestinian Homes Abandoned in Nakba Attest to History of Haifa’s Wadi Salib Neighborhood —William Parry

SPECIAL REPORTS 13

America and France Turn Right—Patrick J. Buchanan

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Terrorism—In Word and Deed—Three Views —John V. Whitbeck, Dr. Basem Saab, Juan Cole

You Ain’t No American, Trump, and You’re Causing Great Harm—Delinda C. Hanley

Arab Americans Call for a National Dialogue, Unity in Fight Against Hate—Delinda C. Hanley and Dale Sprusansky

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The Attacks on Paris—Three Views —Eric S. Margolis, Dan Sanchez, David Porter

Too Little, Too Late? “Responsibility to Protect” in Syria and Iraq—Ian Williams

Pearls on a String: Artists, Patrons and Poets at the Great Islamic Courts—Michael Keating

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Israel’s “Master Plan” for Judaization of Palestine

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No Surprise: Congressional Likudniks Blame

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Continues Apace—Jane Adas

Palestinians for Violence in Israel —Shirl McArthur

Anti-SJP/MSA Posters Found on DC, California Campuses—Suhaib Khan

ABOVE: Scenic animal carpet.

Mughal India, ca. 1625. Wool pile on cotton warp and cotton weft, 416 × 191 cm. RIGHT: Jeweled Gun of Sultan Mahmud I. This ceremonial jeweled musket set includes a dagger, pens and penknives (part of a calligrapher's toolset), a penholder with a reed pen, all conveniently housed within the butt and breech of the musket. See story p. 34.

40 42

Turkish Elections: Four More Years—Jonathan Gorvett

Religious Zealots, Islamophobes Share Similar, Unrepresentative Outlooks—John Gee

ON THE COVER: A Syrian refugee woman and child wait to be processed in Deggendorf, the first registration point for migrants in Germany, after Austria and Germany opened their doors and eased travel restrictions, Sept. 4, 2015. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has proposed banning all Muslim refugees from the U.S. CHRISTOF STACHE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

PHOTO© THE WALTERS ART MUSEUM, BALTIMORE

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Israel Gets a Raise Despite Insults to Obama, 50 Years of Violence to Palestinians —Rachelle Marshall

COURTESY NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON, DC

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(A Supplement to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs available by subscription at $15 per year. To subscribe, call toll-free 1-888-881-5861.)

Other Voices

Compiled by Janet McMahon

The Anger of Palestine’s “Lost” Generation, Killian Redden, www.maannews.com

OV-1

The Occupation Makes Israelis Stupid, Bradley Burston, Haaretz

OV-2

Palestine, Nestled Between Pakistan and Panama, Rami G. Khouri, Agence Global

OV-3

Delinking Terrorism and Islam, Jonathan Marshall, www.consortiumnews.com

Why Is a Mainstream Jewish Charity Funding Pamela Geller?, Eli Clifton, The Forward

OV-9

In Jail or Out, the Campaign for Prisoner of Zion Pollard Is Never Ending, Chemi Shalev, Haaretz

OV-11

OV-4

The Unfinished Business of Ahmed Chalabi, Justin Raimondo, www.antiwar.com

OV-12

The Amateurish Attacks in Paris, Paul R. Pillar, http://nationalinterest.org/blog/paul-pillar

OV-6

King Salman’s Dilemma, Richard Bulliet, Agence Global

OV-13

Who’s Afraid of Islamic State?, John V. Whitbeck, www.counterpunch.org

OV-6

Lebanon’s Untapped Wealth, Bachir El-Khoury, Agence Global

OV-14

This British Teen Hilariously Captures Why Muslims Are Tired of Being Told to Condemn ISIS, Jennifer Williams, www.vox.com

OV-15

Stumbling to War With Russia?, Patrick J. Buchanan, Creators Syndicate, Inc. How Norman Sugarman Became $50B Godfather of Charitable Funds, Lila Corwin Berman, The Forward

DEPARTMENTS 5 Publishers’ Page

6 letters to the editor

44 arab american activism: New Coalition Unites Palestinian Diaspora Community 45 music & arts: San Francisco’s Arab Film Festival Inspires, Educates

50 muslim american activism: CAIR-LA Keynote Speaker Addresses Paris Attack

51 human rights: Dr. Mads Gilbert’s Night in Gaza

52 Waging Peace: Conservative Thinkers Denounce War Hawks, Endorse Restraint

64 diPlomatic doings: Celebrating International Solidarity Day With Palestinians

OV-7

OV-8

67 other PeoPle’s mail

69 the World looks at the

middle east — CARTooNS

70 book revieW:

Congress and the Shaping of the Middle East

—Reviewed by Andrew I. Killgore

71 middle east books and more 72 obituaries

73 2015 aet choir oF angels 74 indeX to advertisers

Books, pottery, handicrafts, soap, olive oil and many other goodies from AET’s Middle East Books and More make wonderful gifts throughout the year!

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American Educational Trust

Publishers’ Page

Radical jihadists and Islamophobes got exactly what they wanted this Christmas: fear in the hearts of ordinary people. The Nov. 13 attacks in Paris and the Dec. 2 San Bernardino shooting rampage have once again put the Western world on edge. ISIS has used images of chaos in France and the U.S. as (false) evidence that its global reach is expanding and that its (blasphemous) caliphate is sustainable. Meanwhile, Islamophobes—led by Republican front-runner Donald Trump— have used these events to stoke feelings of xenophobia and Islamophobia. As much as they profess to despise one another, it is blatantly obvious that ISIS and Islamophobes are in a symbiotic relationship. As the saying goes….

Radicals Reinforce One Another.

The more the West bombs the Muslim world, the easier it is for ISIS to gain new recruits. The more attacks ISIS carries out, the easier it is for Islamophobes to convince Americans that ISIS represents Islam. This in turn makes it easier for ISIS to convince Muslims that the West is seeking to destroy Islam. So around and around we go with more wars, terror and hate. As un-American Islamophobes and the un-Islamic “Islamic State” attempt to draw the world into more hatred and violence…

Wiser Heads Must Prevail.

In order to defeat extremism, people of goodwill must take a stand. Hateful remarks and theories must be strongly countered by those who know better.

Those intent on repeating past mistakes—polls show that most Americans are now receptive to sending U.S. ground troops into Iraq (again) and Syria—must be encouraged instead to find…

Innovative Solutions for the Future.

Banning refugees from entering the U.S. and sending ground troops to Syria have been among the more rash reactions proposed. While the Obama administration has resisted these initiatives, it has voiced support for worrisome changes to the…

Visa Waiver Program.

A bipartisan bill passed by the House of Representatives in early December would require many European citizens of Iraqi, Iranian, Syrian and Sudanese descent to acquire a visa before visiting the U.S. The legislation would place the same requireJANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

PHOTO BY ALLISON SHELLEY/GETTY IMAGES

A Revival of Terror and Prejudice.

lims, and Islam generally, have become so conflated with “the enemy” that for many, there no longer exists a distinction between the two. Clearly the U.S. has a...

Bipartisan Islamophobia Problem.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations' Capitol Hill office received a powdery substance in the mail on Dec. 10. ment on individuals—including humanitarian workers and journalists—who have traveled to Iraq or Syria since March 2011.

The EU has come out against the proposed changes and warned that it could place the same onerous restrictions on Americans traveling to Europe. Despite strong objections from groups such as the National Iranian American Council and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee—ADC president Samer Khalaf has warned that this legislation does “just as much harm as the rhetoric coming from Donald Trump”—the White House apparently remains in favor of these policies.

However, as Washington focuses its attention on the rest of the world, it…

Must Address Domestic Terror.

In the wake of recent attacks—but not including those on African-American churches or Planned Parenthood facilities—American Muslims once again have come under suspicion. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) reports that it recorded more acts of Islamophobia in the week-and-a-half after the Nov. 13 Paris attacks than in any other similar period following 9/11. CAIR's DC and Santa Clara, CA offices were evacuated Dec. 10 after the discovery of suspicious packages. Other examples of hatred are, unfortunately, numerous. In St. Petersburg, Florida, a man left a voicemail at a local mosque threatening to “firebomb you and shoot whoever is there in the head.” A mosque in Pflugerville, Texas was vandalized with feces. A mosque in Meriden, Connecticut was shot at. Someone left a pig’s head at a mosque in Philly, the “City of Brotherly Love.” The stories go on and on. Mus-

While members of the far-right are the most infamous peddlers of anti-Muslim hate, a new poll has found that their rhetoric resonates, at some level, with many Americans. According to a survey released in December by University of Maryland Prof. Shibley Telhami, 46 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of Muslims. Though there is a stark partisan divide—58 percent of Republicans and 31 percent of Democrats expressed negative attitudes toward Muslims—the results are nonetheless frightening. These numbers, coupled with recent incidents of hate, show that we have…

A Lot of Work to Do in 2016.

It’s an election year, and that means misinformation will be bombarding the eyes and ears of Americans from every direction. As always, the Washington Report is committed to helping our readers make informed votes come November. Our upcoming issues will feature reports on how every member of Congress (including those running for president) voted on key Middle East legislation, and how much money candidates received from pro-Israel political action committees. Our March 18 conference, “Israel’s Influence: Good or Bad for America?” (see pp. 11 and 12) will feature timely discussions on how the media, Congress and other critical levers of power mislead voting Americans about Israel, Muslims and the Middle East. In order to keep providing this vital information, however, we need…

The Support of our Readers.

Your past contributions helped us bring this magazine into more homes and libraries, host our highly successful April 2015 “Israel Lobby” conference and expand the presence of our bookstore, Middle East Books and More. But we continue to teeter on the brink—these extra undertakings are very risky. We are looking forward to bigger and better things in 2016, but that cannot happen—nor can the Washington Report survive—without your assistance. But with your generous support, we can continue to...

Make A Difference Today!

WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

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Publisher: Managing Editor: News Editor: Assistant Editor: Middle East Books and More Director: Advertising/Outreach: Communications Dir.:

Finance & Admin. Dir.: Art Director: Executive Editor:

ANDREW I. KILLGORE JANET McMAHON DELINDA C. HANLEY DALE SPRUSANSKY KEVIN A. DAVIS RINA ABD EL RAHMAN SUHAIB KHAN CHARLES R. CARTER RALPH U. SCHERER RICHARD H. CURTISS (1927-2013)

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (ISSN 8755-4917) is published 8 times a year, monthly except Jan./Feb., March/April and June/July combined, at 1902 18th St., NW, Washington, DC 20009-1707. Tel. (202) 939-6050. Subscription prices (United States and possessions): one year, $29; two years, $55; three years, $75. For Canadian and Mexican subscriptions, $35 per year; for other foreign subscriptions, $70 per year.

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Phone: (888) 881-5861 • Fax: (714) 226-9733 Printed in the USA

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LetterstotheEditor

Non-Jews Need Not Apply

The heartbreaking images of the refugees fleeing Syria since 2011 has captured the world’s conscience. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, more than five million Syrians have fled their country to escape from the ongoing conflict. The majority have overwhelmed the neighboring countries of Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt. Other refugees continue to seek asylum in Europe and other countries around the world.

In order to survive, these most unfortunate families—fathers, mothers and children—have left their homes, businesses, work, schools and all belongings to make a dangerous and unpredictable escape to the unknown. Hundreds have died at sea while making this treacherous journey.

Many are Christian and Muslim Palestinian refugees who were ethnically cleansed from their homes in Palestine

by Jewish Zionists to establish the state of Israel in 1948. Ironically, Israel has not accepted any of these refugees, even though it is only a short walk across the border. Paradoxically, the United Nations and international and humanitarian law mandate that the Palestinian refugees all have the right to return to their original homes in Palestine.

Israel aggressively entices Jews to immigrate by offering them stolen Palestinian lands (today there are over 500,000 Jewish colonial settlers living in illegally occupied Jerusalem and the West Bank).

Tragically, after 68 years Israel’s criminal ongoing ethnic cleansing and refusal to allow any Palestinian refugees to return home, one must question where are their conscience, moral values and humanity?

Jacob J. Nammar, San Antonio, TX, author of Born in Jerusalem, Born Palestinian We are proud to say that your book is available from AET’s Middle East Books and More. As Israel has demonstrated time and again, it does not consider itself to be a state of all its citizens—whether current or former—but only those who are Jewish. Its “moral values” are not universal but exclusive to one religious group.

A Lopsided Relationship

It is an absolute travesty that Jonathan Pollard has been released from prison after being convicted of supplying vast

WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

amounts of data to our “ally” Israel. In the 1990s Pollard became a cause célèbre in Israel, whose Jewish citizens regarded him as a patriot. This case raises troubling questions about the government’s stubborn claim that Israel is our great ally. It definitely appears to be a lopsided relationship. What is Israel offering the U.S. in return for receiving unconditional support of $3 billion a year?

According to Karl Polifka, who was deputy director of intelligence at the time Pollard was indicted, Pollard’s spying severely damaged America’s cyber-security, costing the U.S. billions. Some of the data ended up in the Soviet Union.

American intelligence chiefs stated that Pollard was not motivated by a false sense of patriotism but by greed, spending large amounts of money given by Israel on cocaine, alcohol and an expensive life style. The timing of Pollard’s release is also highly suspect, more than likely an attempt to appease Israel’s opposition to the nuclear accord with Iran.

Jagjit Singh, Los Altos, CA Along with Israel’s American acolytes, Pollard has been trying to make “spy” synonymous with “victim,” when it’s more appropriately paired with “traitor.”

Minister Pollard?

Spy for Israel Jonathan Pollard did so much damage to U.S. security and could still do more damage that he should have never been released. He is to stay in the U.S. for five years and then he wants to move to Palestine to settle on stolen lands as part of Israel’s apartheid colonial regime. He divorced his American wife while in prison and married an Israeli wife.

I would not be surprised to see him become an Israeli minister. After all, Israel rewarded those who even killed U.S. citizens (on the USS Liberty, for example).

Yet, Israel continues to infiltrate the U.S. at the highest levels.

Mazin Qumsiyeh, Bethlehem, Palestine Perhaps, since he’s now reportedly been hired by a New York financial firm, Pollard will be named head of the Bank of Israel. He already has stated his intention of renouncing his American citizenship.

Keep on Keeping on

I received the enclosed flyer from the Jerusalem Prayer Group that pro-

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

lte_6-7r_Jan-Feb 2016 Letters to Editor 12/10/15 6:19 PM Page 7

pounded what I believe is either because of this?? We must act Keep Those Cards and Letters Coming! misinformation or a blatant lie. to get their sentences comSend your letters to the editor to the Washington Frustrated, I returned the petition muted; the already seven ravReport, P.O. Box 53062, Washington, DC 20009 with my comment superimposed aging years of incarceration are or e-mail <letters@wrmea.org>. and sent a copy to Secretary of way too many.

State John Kerry, apprising him of Diane Wood, Fort Worth, TX, via which the state of Israel chose to admin- e-mail the flyer and its incorrect statements.

I’m forwarding a copy to you to vent. I ister since 1948; efforts openly intended As attorneys Stephen Downs and see less and less hope that a positive to destroy the Palestinian people while Kathy Manley pointed out in their article, outcome for the Palestinians will ever be the world watched.

“Why All Americans Should Care About Knowing they could be falsely accused the Holy Land Foundation Case” (see realized, not with continued Israeli aggression, a biased press, U.S. support of (which they were), the HLF leaders Jan./Feb. 2013 Washington Report, p. everything Israel does, and flyers like made extensive efforts to ensure that all 17), no American is immune from the of their transactions were open and perversion of justice inflicted on the Holy this blanketing the citizenry.

I used to believe recognition of Israel’s above board. It turns out nothing they did Land Five. continuous abrogation of the Geneva mattered. And so it was that a few weeks Convention and a two-state solution following a meeting with President Nary a Mention would someday be realized. I’m not so George W. Bush and the prime minister Dale Sprusansky, starting on p. 52 of the of Israel, President Bush declared the October Washington Report, reports exsure anymore.

I applaud your perseverance in your HLF “a terrorist organization”; however, tensively on a three-day (Sept. 9-11), quest to alleviate injustice for the Pales- with the millions of tax dollars spent on Defense of Christians conference in tinian people. I love the statement, “Keep the two trials, the HLF was not accused Washington, DC. Are other readers as on keeping on…” Thank you for your of any acts of violence. Their only “crime” disturbed as I that evidently the plight of and their conviction was that some of the Christians in Zionist Israel and illegally continued efforts. contributions to the relief agencies occupied Palestine was not addressed?

Loretta Krause, Little Egg Harbor, NJ As you explain in your letter to Secre- “might” have been associated with What about the steady drip-drip exodus tary of State Kerry, the Jerusalem Prayer Hamas; no proof was offered to substan- of Christians? What about extremist Team “requests citizens to sign the peti- tiate this. Sixty-five years without parole Zionists spitting on priests, defiling Christian edifices, etc.? What about the option supporting a united Jerusalem for Ispressor-Zionist regime’s harassment of rael and stating Jerusalem is the capital and denial of travel and work permits to of Israel.” The flyer, you add, “misrepreChristian clergy, pursuing divide-andsents the U.N.’s division of Jerusalem by conquer tactics among the Palestinian insinuating the city was given to it in total Christian-Muslim faithful, etc.? And—a in 1947.” larger picture—was nary a mention It may be that Americans’ elected and made that, had the cancer of Zionism not appointed representatives know more engulfed and metastasized in the Holy than they dare let on. However, more Land over the past century-plus, the disand more Americans are finding out and cussed Christianophobia in the wider respeaking up themselves, so instead of gion would absolutely be diminished, if informing those in power of the facts— not outright absent from the various popgiving them the benefit of the doubt, in ulations? other words—perhaps the best thing we Notwithstanding the convention’s can do, as you have done, is to let them focus on IS (which was birthed by some know that we know! or all of the above), was not even one of Charity as Terrorism these “defense of Christians” issues exIn response to: “Islam in America: The plored, whether by the panelists or quesHoly Land Foundation: Its Origin and tions from audience members? Sigh....

OTHER VOICES is an optional 16-page supAchievements” (October 2015 WashingRobert H. Stiver, Pearl City, HI plement available only to subscribers of the Washton Report) Alas, they were not. ington Report on Middle East Affairs. For an addiThe basis of the tragedy which has betional $15 per year (see postcard insert for Operational Support fallen the Holy Land Foundation is that lives don’t matter. Across the board, neiEnclosed is my check for $500 to the Washington Report subscription rates), subther the lives of the Palestinians nor the Washington Report for operational exscribers will receive Other Voices inside each issue lives of the Holy Land Foundation empenses. You are, as always, doing a of their Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. ployees and their families mattered. great job. I understand my donation is not Back issues of both publications are available.

What mattered was Israel’s intent to tax-deductible. Best wishes for another To subscribe telephone 1 (888) 881-5861, fax shatter the vast humanitarian relief which year and service to the American people.

(714) 226-9733, e-mail circulation@wrmea. org>, provided hope and saved the lives of so Mary Norton, Austin, TX or write to P.O. Box 91056, Long Beach, CA 90809many. The HLF relief grew so large that Thank you so much for your support over it became threatening to the deliberate the years. We could not have made it this 1056. apartheid and illegal occupation actions far without you and your fellow angels! ❑ JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

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Special Report

Israel Gets a Raise Despite Insults to Obama, 50 Years of Violence to Palestinians

By Rachelle Marshall

MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

opponent, Mitt Romney.

Last winter, as Secretary of State John Kerry was working around the clock in an effort to reach an international agreement with Iran limiting that country’s nuclear capability, Netanyahu repeatedly appeared on American television to denounce the agreement. Finally, in a gross violation of diplomatic protocol, the Israeli prime minister appeared before Congress last March without informing Obama in advance, and urged the lawmakers to turn it down.

Netanyahu’s recently appointed chief of public diplomacy, Ran Baratz, commented on the agreement with Iran by saying, “This is how modern anti-Semitism looks...Obama has pushed us under the wheels of the bus.” Baratz also went after Kerry, saying he hoped “someone in the State Department will wake up and begin to see the world through the eyes of Suha Abu Khdeir (c), whose son Muhammed was abducted and murdered in 2014, stands outside a person whose mental age exceeds 12.”

Netanyahu has learned that such inJerusalem’s district court, Nov. 30, 2015. Two Jewish Israelis were found guilty of Muhammed’s murder, but their sentences were delayed. Their uncle is awaiting a psychological evaluation. sults quickly evaporate in the memory of Washington politicians, regardless of ational pride and respect for international law are no party. Counting on this fact, during his November trip to Washmatch for political expediency when it comes to Amerington Netanyahu spoke before the Center for American ica’s “special relationship” with Israel. This was demonProgress, a pro-Democrat think tank with ties to Mrs. Clinton. strated again in November, when President Barack Obama and “I came here,” he told the group, “because I think it’s vital to Congress agreed to consider $50 billion in military aid to Israel understand how important it is for me that Israel remain an over the next 10 years—a hefty increase of $2 billion a year. issue of bipartisan consensus.” He was roundly applauded.

The additional aid is intended as consolation to Israel for a nuA few members of the organization didn’t buy Netanyahu’s clear agreement with Iran that makes Israel safer. message or approve of inviting him. Joseph Cirincione, presiAs if this were not irrational enough, President Obama weldent of the Ploughshares Fund, said, “Unfortunately the net comed Netanyahu to the White House on Nov. 9 and again reresult will be that he can leave Washington claiming no harm assured him of America’s unwavering support. Republicans was done by his efforts to sabotage the national security stratwho are calling for cuts in domestic spending are promising egy of the president of the United States and that progreseven more money to Israel, and Democratic presidential candisives have forgiven him. But that won’t be true.” date Hillary Clinton has pledged that if elected, Prime Minister Truth, however, is a slippery concept in Netanyahu’s official Binyamin Netanyahu will be her first guest at the White House. statements. While in Washington he said, “We’ll never give up Never before have the leaders of a supposed ally been so our hope for peace. And I remain committed to a vision of handsomely rewarded after insulting the president of the peace of two states for two peoples, a demilitarized PalestinUnited States. In March 2010, on the day Vice President Joe ian state that recognizes the Jewish state.” His words deliberBiden arrived in Jerusalem to deliver Obama’s request for a ately obscured the fact that the Palestinians have long recogsettlement freeze, Israel announced plans for 1,600 more nized the state of Israel but refuse to recognize it as a “Jewish West Bank settlement units. During the 2012 U.S. presidential state.” In any case, two weeks earlier Netanyahu had told a campaign Netanyahu openly supported Obama’s Republican Knesset committee that “we have to control all of the territory for the foreseeable future...I’m asked if we will forever live by the sword—yes.”

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Mill Valley, CA. A member of Jewish Voice for Peace, she writes frequently on the Middle Netanyahu left no doubt of his position when he appointed East. as members of his government only hard-line opponents of

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Palestinian independence. As Palestinians were protesting repeated Israeli incursions onto the site of al-Aqsa mosque, Netanyahu’s deputy prime minister, Tzipi Hotovely, told an interviewer, “It is my dream to see the Israeli flag flying there.” Knowing when a cause is lost, Kerry visited Israel on Nov. 24 but did not even mention the possibility of resuming peace talks. Instead he referred to Israel’s right to defend itself “from attacks in the streets with knives.”

Israel’s intransigence, backed by Washington’s unqualified support, has left Palestinians with no hope of independence but only the prospect of continued military occupation and theft of their land. So it is tragic but not surprising that some young Palestinians are willing to invite death by lashing out randomly at any Israelis they encounter.

Regardless of how much or how little harm they do, the Palestinian attackers A Palestinian boy carries an umbrella as he walks through a flooded street in Gaza City, Nov. 17, are almost certain to be shot to death by 2015.

Israeli forces. As of late November, 16 Israelis had been killed and 110 Palestinians, more than half ing the land for an Israeli settlement. Children in Gaza have of the latter in confrontations with Israeli soldiers. According to the terrifying knowledge that when Israel launches one of its Amnesty International, several of the killings by Israeli forces periodic wars on the territory, Israeli bombers seldom make a “appear to have been extra-judicial executions.” distinction between family homes and military targets.

When two Palestinians were killed during an Israeli raid on The epicenter of this fall’s violence in the West Bank was the Qalandiya refugee camp in mid-November, the confrontaHebron, where a third of recent Palestinian deaths have oction was reported as “the latest in almost two months of viocurred. In the early 1970s a Labor government under Shimon lence.” It would have been more accurate to say that PalestiniPeres allowed a small group of Orthodox Jews to establish an ans have been subject to violence ever since Israel seized the illegal settlement in the midst of the city of 35,000 PalestiniWest Bank and Gaza in 1967. Whether the assaults are carans. Today 400 Israelis live in fortified enclaves inside the city, ried out by Israeli soldiers or settlers, the attackers almost inand hundreds more in settlements that surround the city. variably go unpunished.

“We know that people are being attacked by settlers every One exception was the police officer who beat and kicked 15night now,” said Salam Muharam of Doctors Without Borders in year-old Tariq Abu Khdeir, an American cousin of Muhammed Hebron. Children in Hebron show increasing signs of anxiety Abu Khdeir, who was burned to death by a group of Israeli setand trauma, he said, and many of them suffer from tear gas intlers in 2014. A video taken shortly after the killing showed an halation, since soldiers fire directly into school areas. The solofficer approaching Tariq as he was near his uncle’s house diers also shoot Palestinians who pose no threat, according to watching a protest demonstration, then kicking and punching Muharam: “They shout, ‘He has a knife!’ when there is no knife.” the teenager so badly he had to be hospitalized. On his release Even East Jerusalem, once a cosmopolitan city and the relifrom the hospital Tariq was detained by police for several days. gious center of the three monotheistic faiths, has increasingly The officer’s sentence was 45 days of community service. become the domain of Jewish settlers. Massive cement blocks The killers of Tariq’s cousin Muhammed were found guilty of at the entrance of Arab neighborhoods restrict movement in his murder on Nov. 30, but sentencing was delayed because two and out, and new checkpoints cause interminable delays. An of the offenders were minors at the time of the killing, and a third, Israeli cabinet minister recently called for the destruction of all their 31-year-old uncle who shouted “Finish him off,” is awaiting Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem built without a permit. a psychological evaluation. Muhammed's father, Hussein Abu Since permits are impossible to obtain, this would mean deKhdeir, said he had expected the defense to plead insanity. “We stroying 40 percent of the homes. expected from the start there would be no justice in this case.”

Israeli forces repeatedly invade al-Maqassed hospital in East Palestinians are not secure even inside their own homes, Jerusalem, firing tear gas and rubber bullets. On Oct. 30 soldiers since on any night Israeli soldiers on a punitive raid might forced doctors and nurses to evacuate the neonatal ICU unit, break down their door, drag members of the family out of bed, where the most fragile newborns are treated. The next day the Isand smash furniture and other household goods before dragraelis returned, again firing rubber bullets and tear gas. Three paging away a son or a father. Sometimes they grab a child as tients were injured. Two doctors were taken away for questioning, young as 12 and take him away for interrogation. and nurses were ordered to report to police for questioning.

Thousands of Palestinian children in the West Bank learn Chances are that increasingly harsh measures by Israel, and early on that the home that serves as the center of their family sheer exhaustion on the Palestinians’ part, will eventually end life could be destroyed in a few moments by a bulldozer clearthe current knife attacks. But unless the situation changes, JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

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The West’s Role in the Rise of Militant Extremists

Before there can be any lasting solution to the rise of terrorism, the governments of Europe and the U.S. should examine their own history of domination and exploitation in the region. There seems little doubt of the lasting resentment that exists on the part of many young militants who are aware of Western interventions going back to WW I. These include the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 that divided the Arab kingdoms between Britain and France, Britain’s bombing of Baghdad in 1920 to put down resistance to British occupation, the awarding of more than half of Palestine to the Jewish survivors of the European Holocaust in 1947, the overthrow by the U.S. and Britain of the Mossadegh government in Iran, the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and NATO’s ousting of Col. Muammar Qaddafi of Libya.˛ The bill for these interventions is finally coming due. ISIS was a direct product of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, which was intended to eliminate Saddam Hussain’s weapons of mass destruction and the al-Qaeda forces the Bush administration claimed were in that country. In fact, there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and al-Qaeda emerged in Iraq as a response to the American invasion. The even more brutal ISIS was created by former Iraqi army officers in 2004 while they were being held at Camp Bucca there will be future outbreaks—as usual, more costly to the Palestinians than to the Israelis. Imposing sanctions on Israel and withholding aid would require efforts by the U.S. and the international community that neither has been willing to make.

A small move in that direction was a recent decision by the European Union to require goods made in the territories seized by Israel in 1967 to be labeled “made in settlements.” Israeli officials responded in fury, likening the EU requirement to the Nazi order that Jews wear a yellow star. Yair Lapid, head of the centrist Yesh Atid party, said the move “encourages terror.” In fact, the labeling will apply to only 1 percent of Israel’s $13 billion tariff-free exports to Europe.

Fortunately for Israel, if not for others in the Middle East and Europe, a series of ruthless killings by ISIS forces has turned

military prison after the U.S. disbanded the Iraqi army.

The predominantly Sunni organization gained recruits when the U.S.-backed government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki excluded Sunnis from the government and went back on promises to provide them with jobs. With the rise of ISIS, many former Sunni insurgents became insurgents again, in a larger arena.

Today, with war raging in Syria and fear of terrorism spreading from Africa to Europe, there is an urgent need for U.S. policymakers to acknowledge past mistakes and adopt policies aimed at encouraging economic and social justice and promoting peace. The hopeful news is that diplomats meeting in Vienna in mid-November agreed to set Jan. 1 as the date to start talks between Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and opposition groups, after which a “free and fair” U.N.-supervised election would be held within 18 months.

Yet to be solved is the problem of choosing which opposition groups should be at the table, a problem complicated by the often conflicting national interests of Russia, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, as well as the U.S. Meanwhile, as a young woman told a street interviewer a few years ago, “Maybe if we stop bombing their countries they won’t bomb ours.”

—R.M.

attention away from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while heightening fears of Islamic terrorists. The killing of 130 people in Paris on Nov. 13 galvanized the Western world into action in a way the killing of 41 people in Beirut the previous day and the mass killing of Muslims in Iraq and Syria by ISIS did not.

Some reactions were extreme. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump advocated the use of waterboarding on Muslim prisoners. Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush urged sending U.S. ground troops to Syria to fight ISIS and accepting only Christian refugees from Syria.

Republican governors of 31 states said they would accept no Syrian refugees, and the House passed a bill requiring approval by the secretary of homeland security, the FBI director, and the director of national intelligence to personally

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WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

certify that each individual refugee from Syria and Iraq is not a threat. There were disturbing reminders of America’s turning away of European Jews before WW II. Shabtai Shavit, a former head of Mossad, advocated more sweeping action against ISIS. “With this enemy we have to push aside arguments on law, morality, and comparisons of the rights of security and the individual. That means do what they did in World War II to Dresden,” he said. “They” were the Allied bombers that in one night turned one of the world’s most beautiful cities into smoldering ashes, and left thousands of German civilians dead.

Military experts said afterwards the attack did nothing to shorten the war.

Hillary Clinton and the Republican candidates for president have pledged to expand the use of military force against ISIS, but Brookings analyst J.M. Berger says trying to eradicate ISIS by military means will only inspire thousands of angry young men now manning checkpoints and doing policing for ISIS to turn to terrorism instead. “The result will probably be a wave of terrorism the likes of which the world has never seen,” he said.

Emile Hokayem of the International Institute for Strategic Studies believes that political and social changes are necessary to defeat ISIS. “ISIS thrives on the failures of Middle Eastern governments,” he maintains. Eliminating it as well as other jihadist groups will require “greater accountability, fair justice, better schools, more job prospects.” Hokayem adds that Europe and the U.S. must do more to integrate Muslims into the larger community. Given the current mood, this is for now only a distant possibility. ❑ JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

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Register for the March 18 Conference Examining Israel’s Influence on America “ISRAEL’S INFLUENCE: Good or Bad for America?” is the theme of a daylong conference at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, on March 18, 2016. Expert panelists, along with keynote speakers Rula Jebreal, political commentator and author of the best-selling Miral, and Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy, author of The Punishment of Gaza, will analyze the enormous impact Israel’s influence has on Congress, establishment media, academia and other major American institutions. They will weigh the costs and benefits in terms of foreign aid, covert intelligence, foreign policy, America’s regional and global standing, and unbiased news reporting.

Two days before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)’s annual policy conference in the nation’s capital, speakers at “Israel’s Influence” will discuss whether the policies pushed by AIPAC and other Israel affinity organizations reflect the concerns of Americans and Israelis, or are “all cost and no benefit” to American taxpayers.

The Israel lobby is seeking more than $5 billion of your tax dollars a year—up from the current $3.1 billion—in military aid for the next 10 years. As presidential and congressional candidates are echoing Israeli propaganda and pushing for a war on Islam, it’s especially vital for you to register to attend the “Israel’s Influence” conference, and to help fund scholarships for students, professors and media.

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buchanan_13_Special Report 12/10/15 4:52 PM Page 13

America and France Turn Right

I

“”

n the Nov. 6 first-round of regional elections in France, the clear and stunning winner was the National Front of Marine Le Pen. Her party rolled up 30 percent of the vote, and came in first in 6 of 13 regions. Marine herself won 40 percent of her northeast district.

Despite tremendous and positive publicity from his presidential role in the Charlie Hebdo and Paris massacres and the climate summit, François Hollande's Socialist Party ran third.

What drove the victory of the National Front?

According to The Wall Street Journal's William Horobin, “Ms. Le Pen, who has combined the party's anti-immigration stance with calls for hard-line security measures and tighter control of France's borders, has only bolstered her support in the three weeks since the Paris attacks.”

The rightward shift in French politics is being replicated across Europe, as nations tighten borders and erect new checkpoints against the tsunami of migrants and refugees from Africa and the Middle East.

Angela Merkel and open borders are yesterday in Europe; Marine Le Pen is tomorrow.

And the rightward shift is occurring here as well, propelled by the terrorist atrocity in San Bernardino. On immigration, terrorism, borders, crime and security, Americans are moving to the right.

Donald Trump has taken the toughest stance. He will send illegal immigrants back and make Mexico pay for his wall. He is the least restrained in what he would do to the Islamic State. And his lead nationally has now reached an unprecedented 20 points.

In Iowa, Sen. Ted Cruz is surging. Cruz would “carpet bomb [ISIS] into oblivion,” and try to make the sand around Raqqa “glow in the dark.” He charges Marco Rubio with collaborating with Sen. Chuck Schumer in backing amnesty for illegal immigrants.

In return, Rubio tears into Cruz daily, charging him with being soft on national security for having backed the USA Freedom Act that denies the NSA instant access to all phone and computer records of American citizens.

Like most Republicans, Cruz supported keeping NSA's hands off the metadata of electronic communications of U.S. citizens. But that position seems more suited to the libertarian moment that has passed, not the national security moment we live in today.

Chris Christie says San Bernardino proves his point about keeping refugee wives and even 3-year-old orphans out of New Jersey. As we now know, that female terrorist may have

Special Report

By Patrick J. Buchanan

been the radicalizer.

The Clintons have long been reliable weather vanes of national politics. And Hillary Clinton, too, has begun moving to the right. Sunday, she said she was ready to take “military action” if Iran fails to comply with the slightest provision of President Barack Obama's nuclear agreement.

She wants tech companies to start policing and shutting down Islamist websites that preach hate and may have radicalized the couple that carried out San Bernardino. Clinton added dismissively, “You are going to hear all the familiar complaints: 'freedom of speech.'”

The Dec. 7 Washington Post reported on how Bernie Sanders, yesterday's Socialist sensation, received a tepid response when he spoke to a crowd about income equality, but failed to address the Islamist terrorist atrocity and what he would do about it.

On Dec. 5 The New York Times ran its first front-page editorial in 95 years, demanding new federal gun laws. America's response—a stampede to gun stores to buy firearms for selfdefense.

Outlawing AK-47s and AR15s may seem like common sense to the Times. But Americans do not believe such laws would keep terrorists from getting these weapons. And many realize those cops used semi-automatic rifles to turn the terrorists' SUV into a pile of junk in a single minute— and them into Bonnie and Clyde.

Even the president is signaling a shift to the right.

Sunday, in only his third Oval Office address, Obama said he will intensify bombing in Iraq and Syria. He wants tougher screening of those coming to America. And he concedes that “an extremist ideology has spread among some Muslim communities” and is a “real problem Muslims must confront.”

Tougher on crime, tougher on terrorists, tougher on securing the border—that is the demand of the moment, and probably of 2016.

Americans are coming to realize we cannot prevent all such slaughters as Fort Hood and Virginia Tech, Columbine and Aurora, Tucson and the Navy Yard, Newtown and Umpqua College, and Charleston.

Nor can we prevent all Islamist terrorism if Muslims raised here or living here become radicalized in mosques or by the Internet, and seek revenge and paradise as warriors of ISIS by slaughtering Americans.

Al-Qaeda and ISIS now realize the worldwide publicity gains of Paris and San Bernardino in terrorizing the West. And they will surely seek to replicate those massacres.

And every new atrocity, whether of the work place or Islamist variety, will make cops more popular and guns seem more essential.

New horrors are likely ahead—that will continue America's turn to the right. ❑

You are going to hear all the familiar complaints: ‘freedom of speech’

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of the new book The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority. Copyright © 2015 Creators Syndicate, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Patrick J. Buchanan and Creators Syndicate, Inc. JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

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Three Views

Terrorism—In Word and Deed

“Terrorism”: the Indefinable Word

T

By John V. Whitbeck

he Western world has reacted to the “terrorist” shooting spree in Paris with near-hysteria, immediately intensifying its own lethal violence in the Middle East.

Israel is branding as a wave of “terrorism” the continuing suicidal attacks by hope-deprived Palestinian children armed only with knives and scissors.

In the new “peace process” for Syria, Jordan has accepted the thankless task of deciding which of the many armed groups in Syria are “terrorists” and, as such, are to be excluded from the process and bombed.

And Americans have been fiercely debating whether the latest in a long line of domestic gun rampages, carried out by a Muslim married couple, deserves to be deemed an act of “terrorism,” as President Barack Obama termed it during a subsequent nationally televised speech.

In this context, it may be enlightening to recall the last international effort to define this indefinable word.

At the U.N.’s 60th anniversary summit in September 2005, the 191 member states tried but failed to agree on a convention defining the word “terrorism.” Some commentators actually sounded surprised, even saying that there had been a failure “even” to agree on a definition. No one should have been surprised.

The definition being proposed by then U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan would have defined “terrorism” as “any action intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants, when the purpose of such an act, by its nature or context, is to intimidate a population or to compel a government or an international organization to carry out or to abstain from any act.”

A fair and reasonable definition, surely. Read it again. Think about it. What are the odds that the United States would ever have permitted “terrorism” to be so defined?

For starters, if this proposed definition had been accepted and if George W. Bush and Tony Blair were correct in their repeated assertions that the motivations behind the 9/11 attacks and the 2005 London bombings were “because they hate our freedoms” or some other form of blind, mindless malevolence or sick desire to kill innocent people for the sake of it, then the term “terrorism” could not properly be applied to these events.

To make the label fit, Bush and Blair would have had to admit that the motivations were fundamentally political—to intimidate their populations or governments into carrying out major changes in their Middle East policies.

Furthermore, this proposed definition was not limited to acts

John V. Whitbeck is an international lawyer who has advised the Palestinian negotiating team in negotiations with Israel.

14

by “non-state actors.” It would have applied not only to the low-technology violence of the weak but also to the high-technology violence of the strong, which has always been vastly more destructive and deadly.

If this proposed definition had been accepted, the attacks on the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut and Al-Khobar in 1983 and 1996 and on the USS Cole in Aden harbor in 2000, as well as any and all attacks against American and Israeli military forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine or elsewhere, would clearly not constitute acts of “terrorism.” On the other hand, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki would clearly have constituted “terrorism” on a massive scale. Indeed, in the 21st century, the American and Israeli governments would have been—and would still be—among the world’s leading practitioners of “terrorism.”

If this proposed definition had been accepted, even the United Nations itself would have spent the 12 years between the two wars against Iraq as a “terrorist” organization. How could it be characterized otherwise in light of the “genocidal” sanctions regime against Iraq (so called by two successive coordinators of the U.N.’s “humanitarian” program in Iraq), which, by UNICEF’s own calculation, had killed half a million Iraqi children under the age of five by 1996 yet which, on the insistence of the United States and Britain and in full knowledge of the deadly consequences in the relevant “context,” was maintained until their 2003 invasion? The ostensible “purpose” of these deadly sanctions was clearly to “intimidate a population or compel a government…to carry out or abstain from [an] act”—specifically, to give up the “weapons of mass destruction” which Iraq did not possess.

The word “terrorism” has always been the ultimate subjective epithet, and the popularity and utility of the word for all its users and abusers around the world has been based largely on this subjectivity. Until the world is of one mind as to what constitutes good and evil, right and wrong and justice and injustice, it is inconceivable that the world could agree on a precise and legally binding definition of what actions are always, in all circumstances, under all conditions, on any grounds and regardless of who is doing it to whom, unjustifiable, impermissible and criminal.

However, “terrorism” did not escape unchastised at the 2005 U.N. summit. In what the BBC then trumpeted as a major success, Tony Blair did get the Security Council to adopt unanimously a resolution urging all states to pass laws making “incitement to terrorism” a crime. Since every state remained free to define “terrorism” as it pleased, so as to demonize whatever behavior or ideas its government disliked, while “incitement” is simply a pejorative synonym for “advocacy,” if this resolution proved to be of any relevance at all, it could only have been to provide a cover of international legitimacy for the worldwide trend (even in countries like Britain and America which once enjoyed high standards of civil liberties) toward restricting (indeed, toward criminalizing) freedom of

WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

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ANWAR AMRO/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

the common result of violent conflicts.

Post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression are commonly seen in communities affected by terrorism. Property destruction and displacement may result in poverty.

The term terrorism echoed louder after Sept. 11, 2001 and several other condemned activities like the last one in Paris. However, people living in “developing countries” have been experiencing on a regular basis violent acts long before 2001. In the early ’50s of the 20th century the Iranians elected, in a democratic process, Prof. Mohammad Mossadegh. Mossadegh fought internal corruption and foreign interference by nationalizing the oil industry. In 1953 external intelligence agencies overthrow Mossadegh. The same scenario occurred in Chile when Salvador Allende, a socialist, won the presidential race by 12-year-old Jannat recovers in a hospital from injuries she sustained in twin suicide bombings election. Allende fought to the death the on a busy shopping street in Beirut’s southern suburb of Burj al-Barajneh, a Hezbollah strongCIA-backed coup on Sept. 11, 1973. hold, on Nov. 12. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, which killed more After the violent coup, tens of thousands than 40 people. disappeared and hundreds of thousands speech and toward the totalitarianization of societies. were detained in concentration camps, according to a study Actually, it cannot have been very difficult to achieve unaniby Harvard University. In Southeast Asia the Vietnamese are mous agreement on this resolution. People may not be able to still suffering from the bombarding of their forests with 72 milagree on what “terrorism” is, but, whatever it may be, politilion liters of Agent Orange (Dioxin), a chemical that was procians readily recognize that it is risky to appear less than reshibited by President Franklin Roosevelt during World War II. olute in opposing this ultimate evil, and getting governments to This agent affected millions of people. Malformations and stillagree that they should silence and quash their critics and opbirths affected also the second and third generation of populaponents as they see fit is pushing against an open door. tions sprayed with Dioxin by U.S. warplanes. It also affected The word “terrorism” does not enhance understanding. It stiAmerican pilots who sprayed the substance. fles rational thought and discussion and, all too often, is used For years I have been wondering why there has been all this and abused to excuse one’s own illegal and immoral behavior. emphasis on terrorism over the last decade and a half. This emPerhaps, rather than seeking an international convention phasis made me realize that since the age of 10, I have been agreeing on what the overused word “terrorism” should mean, face to face with terrorism. A few days after Christmas 1968, it would have been more constructive 10 years ago—and the Israelis planted explosives and destroyed six civilian planes would be more constructive today—to seek an international in Beirut International Airport, which is around three kilometers convention obligating governments, government officials and from my home. This was in retaliation for the belief that this airmedia to stop using the word entirely, to focus rationally on port was a base for hijacking Israeli planes. A few years later the nature and causes of violent behavior by both the strong clashes erupted between the Lebanese army and the Palestiniand the weak, and to work toward reducing all forms of violent ans in Lebanon. Since April 1975, Lebanon has witnessed sevbehavior and reversing the accelerating trend toward a more eral wars, and my family was displaced. I survived large explovicious, less free and increasingly fear-infested world. sions that took place 10 meters from places I passed through.

Our home was hit by two heavy artillery shells, killing my paternal uncle. My father witnessed this, after which he developed anxiety. At the American University of Beirut Medical Center

By Dr. Basem Saab (AUBMC), where I was trained in medicine, I saw horrible “All murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers scenes. I cannot forget the scene of a man in his 20s with oneand to the sound of trumpets.” —Voltaire quarter of his head gone and several bullets piercing his chest errorism is defined by the Longman Dictionary of Contemand abdomen. This was in June 1982, when Israel invaded porary English as “the practice of using violence to obtain Lebanon to evict the Palestinian fighters. Shortly after that I witpolitical demands.” nessed tens of bullet-riddled corpses stacked in a truck; these Health encompasses physical, psychological and social were the bodies of Palestinian refugees and poor Lebanese well-being. Terrorized persons suffer from several ailments remassacred in Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila camps. Since the 2006 lated to the aforementioned spheres. Death and disability are war between Lebanon and Israel, I am obsessed with the possibility of food shortages in case another war erupts. On a regular Dr. Basem Saab is program director of family medicine at the Ameribasis I check my stock of food, removing items near their expican University of Beirut. ration date and replace them with newer ones. In addition to the

Reflections on Terrorism

T

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

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fear of another war, I have to withstand the mocking of my wife, who believes in “what will be, will be.” A day before the brutal attack in Paris, the southern suburb of Beirut witnessed a double attack that resulted in more than 240 casualties. More than 40 people were killed in the attack, two of them a nurse and a staff member who worked with me.

The story goes on and on. Hundreds of thousands were killed in a war that is still going on in Iraq in the name of democracy and fighting terrorism. I could sense the fear of Iraqis who fled to Lebanon and attended my clinic. Iraqi university graduates work in gas stations as laborers and others as gardeners to survive. Alcohol and substance abuse are means to soothe the psychosocial trauma of some. Members of a Christian family immigrating to Canada expressed their fear of going out of their home lest they be killed by terrorists: “a situation never thought of during the reign of Saddam Hussain.” The same is taking place in Syria. It looks like a successful movie with several episodes taking place in different countries.

Following the foreign media, I get the feeling that a sector of the population on this planet is terrorist and the other sector is terrorized. I want to say that I have experienced terror not for days but for years, and I am a victim, and so are the overwhelming majority of people I live with.

Can we contain this global issue? It’s not easy. We can try one thing; stop the approach adopted since Sept. 11, 2001 as we know for sure it is catastrophic. Other helpful considerations: • Let the people decide what they want without being dictated to.

• Superpowers need to stop backing corrupt rulers to maintain their supremacy.

• Adhere to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

• Avoid double standards.

• Leaders must be accountable.

Poor management of terrorism will create more barbaric acts that will be difficult to control. It’s time to change the prescription.

The Double Standard for “SelfRadicalized Lone-Wolf Terrorists”

F

By Juan Cole

ederal officials are now investigating the San Bernardino massacre as an “act of terrorism” rather than just workplace violence.

But when Dylann Roof allegedly shot nine persons dead at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC on June 17, 2015, there was strong resistance on the part of officials to speaking of that as terrorism.

Likewise, alleged Planned Parenthood shooter Robert Dear was not called a terrorist by politicians on the right despite his clearly political goals.

What is the difference between these three?

Tashfeen Malik, Roof and Dear became radicals through their own reading and research rather than from having obvious organizational links. All three seem to be, in the official parlance, “lone wolves” who “self-radicalized.”

One part of terrorism is apparently conceived of in official U.S. discourse on these things as organizational. It is early

Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Copyright © 2015 JuanCole.com.

16

days in the investigation of Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, but while Malik may have made a hasty Facebook declaration of loyalty to Da’ish (ISIS, ISIL) commander Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi during her horrid shooting spree, so far it does not appear that there was any element of command and control in either the case of Roof or of Malik/Farook.

Does it matter what the target is? Timothy McVeigh blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City to target the federal government, given his white supremacist ideology. Dear targeted Planned Parenthood in an obvious attempt to change public policy. Since Malik and her husband just shot up a meal for employees at a center for taking care of challenged folks, rather than choosing some more significant target with actual political implications, can their action be seen at the moment as primarily terroristic? Back in the 1990s the phrase “going postal” emerged from a rash of incidents of workplace rage and violence (there were 20 instances of such violence between 1986 and 1997, in which employees shot down more than 40 individuals). They look much more like they went postal than that they were trying to bring down the federal government.

Does organization matter? In counter-terrorism, you always seek to disrupt the enemy’s command and control abilities.

The San Bernardino killers, as things now stand, did not partake of any formal structure within Da’ish that day. Nor does Roof appear to have a strong organizational context in, e.g., the Ku Klux Klan such that anyone gave him an order to kill African Americans in their church. Dear was also a loner.

In fact, a major U.S. newspaper called Dear a “gentle loner.”

Hmmm.

Where persons do not have a witting relationship with a terrorist group, officials refer to them as “self-radicalized.” All three, Dear, Malik and Roof, were obviously self-radicalized (at the least) and developed a vague identification with movements they felt represented their grievances over identity politics.

If Tashfeen Malik, the female shooter, actually swore allegiance via Facebook to Da’ish (ISIS, ISIL) leader Abu Bakr alBaghdadi, then her motives in the shootings were political. But her target was not political. Roof’s target was more obviously political than a facility for treating challenged people—he killed a sitting state senator, which is almost never mentioned by the U.S. press. Dear’s target was also political—he wanted to overturn the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision.

So is a vague organizational affiliation more important in determining whether a killing is terrorism, or is the character of the target more important?

When Roof first went before a judge, the judge observed that Roof’s family were also “victims.” Has any U.S. official said that about the families of Malik and Farook?

How useful is the language of “lone wolves” and “self-radicalization”? Police work and counter-terrorism has to focus on organizations, and you could seldom forestall someone from essentially going postal.

I don’t have answers. I do know that Malik, Dear and Roof engaged in murder and violence because of their ideologies, all (as far as we now know) lacked the element of organizational command and control, and only one of them killed a sitting state senator. Yet Roof was not charged with terrorism.

One of the reasons was that white supremacist organizations, in material support of which he may have acted, are not typically designated “terrorists” by the U.S. government.

Is there a double standard in our public discourse here? ❑

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Special Report

You Ain’t No American, Trump, and You’re Causing Great Harm

I

By Delinda C. Hanley

FAMILY PHOTO

grew up in a Middle East that is unrecognizable from today’s news reports, congressional hearings and candidates’ debates. In elementary school in the 1960s, I bicycled around Mansour, a residential neighborhood in Baghdad, visiting friends—the children of missionaries, professors and doctors—and often getting lost. (Alas, my sense of direction has not improved with age.) There was always a kind Iraqi stranger who was willing to walk me home, reminiscing about his college days in America or talking about a cousin in Detroit.

American warplanes bombed Mansour in 2003, after receiving intelligence that Saddam Hussain and his two sons might have been there.

When our family moved to Damascus we traveled all over Syria, exploring Palmyra, the Krak des Chevaliers, monasteries, the Great Mosque of Aleppo and, of course, the Old City and souq in Delinda and her daughter Kristin visit Kumzar, a village in Oman’s Musandam region only Damascus. Once when my father was accessible by sea, in 1983. escorting a visitor through the souq a liteveryone loved us—we were Americans. tle urchin tugged his sleeve—it was my brother Drew! We That changed when the U.S. backed Israel, delivering were evacuated during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

22,325 tons of tanks, artillery, ammunition and supplies that As I see photos of Syrian refugees running for their lives, I turned the tide in the 1973 Yom Kippur War with Egypt and search for familiar faces—what has happened to our friends? I Syria. When we hitched rides after that war, we claimed we can’t even look at photos of heritage sites that have been were Canadians. The Lebanese are still finding cluster bombs damaged or destroyed during Syria’s civil war. marked “Made in the USA,” provided to Israel in its 2006 attack Streets across the Middle East are named for American heon its neighbor to the north, whose water it covets to this day. roes who built, not bombed, schools and hospitals. There’s a I’m pretty sure American kids don’t hitchhike in the Middle Rue John Kennedy in Beirut, and once upon a time there was East any more. Or maybe they do because somehow Arabs, even a Kennedy street in Tehran. Lebanon also named unlike Americans, differentiate between people and their govstreets in Beirut after beloved American University of Beirut ernments. Amazingly, a lot of people still like us as individuals, presidents like Bayard Dodge or Howard Bliss.

American missionaries, Peace Corps volunteers, teachers, even when our weapons and words are trashing their countries. professors, doctors, diplomats, reporters and business people As a young adult, I spent some time teaching English as a worked their hearts out in the Middle East and made lifelong Peace Corps volunteer in Oman, and staying on for several friends for the United States. Thousands of Arab students more gratifying years working with an American company came to the U.S. on Fulbright scholarships or on their parents’ paving roads, and building pumping stations, desalination and dime. American students took advantage of exchange prowater treatment plants, a hotel and an airport. grams in universities in Beirut, Egypt, Iraq and other countries.

Americans sent aid, not drones, to isolated communities.

We sent students, not military advisers, to far-off lands.

When the only American a Muslim sees is aiming a gun, flying As teenagers living in Beirut before Lebanon’s civil war, we a jet, bombing her neighborhood or denying him a visa, that headed for the souqs in search of second-hand jeans, army undoes generations of work and good will. jackets and navy peacoats—just like other kids go to the mall.

Following the San Bernardino shootings, when Donald We used to hitchhike to the beach in Beirut, trusting that Trump, a front-runner presidential candidate, called for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States Delinda C. Hanley is news editor of the Washington Report, cohe became a poster-boy for a side of America I can’t recogfounded by her retired diplomat father, Richard H. Curtiss.

Continued on p. 19 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

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Special Report

Arab Americans Call for a National Dialogue, Unity in Fight Against Hate

By Delinda Hanley and Dale Sprusansky

PHOTO COURTESY ADC

work together to help protect the national security interests of the United States. “Arab and Muslim Americans are perhaps the greatest allies the government could ask for,” he stated.

Muslims as allies? That’s certainly not the message most Americans get from the mainstream media. Seeking ratings, television networks give constant voice to the likes of Trump, allowing him and like-minded individuals to spread their lies and hate far and wide. “It seems more and more the only voice being heard is that of the fanatics, while the voices of reason are drowned out or pushed to the side,” Khalaf said.

This must change. To spur momentum towards understanding, ADC is calling for a national dialogue to discuss the issues facing our country and the Arab- and Muslim-American communities.

“We need to stand united as one country against the intolerance, bigotry and hate we are seeing in this country,” urged Khalaf.

Mee Moua (l), president of Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC), and Samer The first step is fighting against discriminatory Khalaf, president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC). legislation. Just as after 9/11, Congress has rushed to file legislation that will allegedly enlectoral politics and terrorism are a dangerous mix when hance national security, but in reality will only serve to isolate it comes to the safety and liberty of Arab and Muslim Muslim Americans. “Just recently two bills have gone through Americans. With the 2016 elections less than a year Congress, one was anti-Syrian refugees and the other was a away, opportunistic politicians have used the recent attacks in bill to exempt Syrians and Iraqis from the visa waiver proParis and San Bernardino to defame Muslims and push for gram,” Khalaf noted. “Those bills do just as much harm as the new, discriminatory laws. Islamophobia has, once again, reared rhetoric coming from Donald Trump. Those bills do nothing for its ugly head in the “land of the free.” our national security. What they do is highlight a group of In an effort to confront the recent wave of hateful remarks Americans and say these are the people you have to watch and bigoted legislation, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination out for. That is the sort of rhetoric coming out from ISIL. That’s Committee (ADC) hosted a press conference at the National the way ISIL recruits. They tell Muslims and Arabs that ‘you Press Club in Washington, DC on Dec. 10. cannot live in the West. The West hates you. The West wants ADC President Samer Khalaf slammed the far-right for initito exclude you.’” ating the latest round of anti-Muslim sentiment. “The rhetoric The smart answer to countering radicalization and fanaticoming from the far-right, including presidential candidate cism is not exclusion, surveillance, and continued profiling.

Donald Trump, has painted Arabs and Muslims with a broad The true antidote is inclusiveness, acceptance, understanding, brush,” he charged. “Through the lens of folks like Trump, unity and opportunity for all people. Many studies have shown Arabs and Muslims are all terrorists. Trump has gone so far as that a lack of opportunity often leads to extremism. The U.S. to suggest that the U.S. should not allow Muslims into the government must take action to eliminate poverty, decrease United States, and has advocated for the forced registration of the wage gap, enhance public education and provide better Muslims. His statements advocate for the mass violation of opportunities for all Americans. Treating Muslims across the both constitutional and human rights of Arabs and Muslims, world with respect, and not as security threats and collateral and cannot be tolerated.” damage, will also go a long way toward ensuring a more Dialogue and cooperation, not defamation, will solve the terpeaceful tomorrow. rorist threat, Khalaf stressed. Elected officials must “engage Peace also requires cooperation and coalition-building. For with the Arab and Muslim American community,” he said, and that reason, ADC was joined at its press conference by a diverse coalition of civil rights organizations.

Delinda C. Hanley is news editor and Dale Sprusansky assistant Mee Moua, president and executive director of Asian Amerieditor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. cans Advancing Justice (AAJC), condemned the recent spate

E

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of hateful rhetoric, saying, “This tragedy is no excuse for violence or prejudice.”

She reminded the audience that the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the mass incarceration of more than 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry into internment camps during World War II must not happen ever again. “We will fight to ensure America does not close its doors to those seeking safety, opportunity and freedom,” Moua concluded.

“Now is a time for all of us to come together...Let’s channel our energy toward tackling real problems and solutions so every American is safe.”

Murali Balaji, Ph.D., of the Hindu American Foundation, said, “This isn’t just about the suspicion of and scrutiny toward Muslim Americans, it’s about a growing fear of ‘the Other’—shaped by changing demographics, political rhetoric and a lack of cultural competency.” The disastrous consequences of our rejection of ‘Others,’ including the displacement of Native Americans, violence against Blacks, anti-Semitism, the out grouping of Italian and Irish immigrants and the shameful legacy of Japanese internment, are all legacies of our failure to learn from mistakes of the past.

Andrea Senteno with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund said, “Latinos are unfortunately very familiar with being subjected to immigration policies that are culturally discriminatory, and therefore we stand in solidarity to oppose all forms of unjust discrimination. The Latino community has for a long time fought to improve the United States refugee policies for individuals fleeing extraordinary violence and persecution from much of Central America, so we must oppose these reactionary and misguided responses that object against providing aid and opportunities for Syrian and Iraqi refugees in America.”

A statement by Hilary Shelton, Washington director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), read, “We are a nation of immigrants, which is founded on the premise that all humans are created equal. As such, we have reinforced in every aspect of our shared laws and doctrine that regardless of your race, gender, ethnicity, your point of national origin, or your religious beliefs you are indeed an American.”

Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, warned, “Next week, some of the candidates JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

who’ve denounced Trump are scheduled to attend a conference organized by Frank Gaffney, the same anti-Muslim extremist who Trump cited in his disgraceful statement. We call on those candidates and other leaders scheduled to attend the National Security Action Summit in Nevada to decline.”

Politicians declining invitations from hate groups would be a welcome development. But more importantly, they must find the courage and wisdom to fight against hate groups. Only then will Arab and Muslim Americans no longer be victimized. ❑

Causing Great Harm Continued from page 17

adapted the phrase, “You Ain’t No Muslim, Bruv,” shouted by a witness to a London subway knifing, to castigate Trump: “#You ain’t no American, Bro.” Like mass shooters who attack theaters, schools or office parties, or ISIS thugs choreographing gruesome beheadings, Trump is just trying to get the biggest reaction he can.

Speaking at a ceremony to commemorate the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery, Obama urged Americans “to rise above the cynicism and rise above the fear, to hold fast to our values, to see ourselves in each other, to cherish dignity and opportunity not just for our own children but for somebody else’s child.”

The president said it was important for Americans to “remember that our freedom is bound up with the freedom of others, regardless of what they look like or where they come from or what their last name is or what faith they practice.”

Those words sound more like the United States Muslims and Arabs used to love, a country not on some kind of crazy crusade—a nation blending Americans of every religion, race and ethnicity that we can all be proud of. ❑

nize and a recruiting tool for the socalled Islamic State. His fear-mongering includes warnings that there will be “many more World Trade Centers.” He talks about some kind of religious test for refugees (Muslims will get Fs, and Christians will get As?), and a database to track Muslims in America. He derided President Barack Obama for declining to say we’re at war with Islam.

Finally, another Republican candidate, Help make sure that the Sen. Lindsey Graham will be here for the next generation.

(SC), rebuked Trump on CNN’s “New Day” By remembering the Washington Report in your will, you can: on Dec. 8, calling him • Make a significant gift without affecting your current “a race-baiting, xenocash flow; phobic, religious • Direct your bequest to a vital purpose—educating readers about U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East; bigot.” Graham told • Receive a charitable estate tax deduction & Leave a Alisyn Camerota, “He legacy for future generations. doesn't represent my party. He doesn't represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for...He’s the ISIL man of the year...” Graham said Trump is putting Americans working overseas at risk and undercutting everything we stand for.

Riffing on Trump’s Bequests of any size are honored with membership in the famous slogan, “make American Educational Trust’s “Choirmasters,” named for angels America great again,” whose foresight and dedication ensured the future of the Graham concluded, Washington Report and Middle East Books and More.

“You know how to For more information visit make America great www.wrmea.org/donate/bequests.pdf, contact us at circulation@wrmea.org, write: American Educational Trust, PO again? Tell Donald Box 91056 • Long Beach, CA 90809-1056, or telephone our new Trump to go to hell.” toll-free circulation number 888-881-5861 • Fax: 714-226-9733 Thomas Friedman

Washington Report on Middle

East Affairs

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Three Views

Muslims in Liège, Belgium pray at the funeral of Elif Dogan, 26, a Belgian of Turkish origin who was killed alongside her Belgian companion, Milko Jozic, 47, in the Nov. 13 attack on the Casa Nostra restaurant in Paris.

The City of Light Falls Dark

O

By Eric S. Margolis

n Friday, Nov. 13, Paris, the City of Light, was plunged into darkness and fear.

At least eight young jihadists, allegedly from the so-called Islamic State group, attacked the national sports stadium, where President François Hollande was attending a soccer match with Germany’s foreign minister. They also attacked outdoor cafes, a pizzeria and a rock club.

As of this writing, 130 civilians were killed and dozens wounded. All of the attackers are believed to have died. For the second time in a year, Paris is terror-struck and shaken to its foundation. Pope Francis aptly described the attacks as “homicidal madness.”

What was Islamic State’s objective in attacking all these improbable soft targets? Madness is not a sufficient motive.

Clearly, Islamic State’s 20-somethings were bombing and shooting up targets that youngsters frequented, like a pizzeria or Friday night heavy metal concert. Their objective: to kill as

Eric S. Margolis is an award-winning, internationally syndicated columnist and the author of american Raj: liberation or domination? Resolving the Conflict between the West and the Muslim World (available from AET’s Middle East Books and More). Copyright © 2015 Eric S. Margolis.

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The Attacks on Paris

many people as possible in a pure revenge attack.

Islamic State (IS), a collection of young hooligans, misguided idealists and bitter riff-raff, has warned the West, “we will make you feel what we have felt.” They adopted this slogan from the Chechen independence fighters who resorted to attacks on Russian civilians after Russian forces killed an estimated 100,000 of their people in the 1990s.

Now, it’s Europe’s turn to feel some of the horrors of the wars in the Mideast.

France is a prime target because of its extensive and deepening military interventions in the Muslim world. Some 10,000 French soldiers or airmen and large numbers of intelligence operatives are involved in Syria, Iraq, the Gulf, Libya, Chad, Mali and Ivory Coast.

France props up the authoritarian rulers of Algeria and Morocco.

France is playing a central role in its former colonies, Syria and Lebanon.

Paris appears to have long-range plans for expanding its influence in the Levant, including installing regimes attuned to

French policies.

French warplanes are bombing Syria, and this writer believes French special forces have been in combat in Syria, as they were in Libya when the Western powers combined to overthrow the Qaddafi government.

In short, France has made many enemies for itself across the Mideast. It appears only a matter of time before France’s partners in Mideast intervention, the United States and Britain, become new targets of jihadist violence.

As the Bible says, “nothing new under the sun.” What the 20-something jihadists of IS are doing is trying to replicate the terror caused by the fabled, 12th century AD Sheikh al-Jebel.

Operating from his aerie of Alamut, high in Syria’s mountains, the sheikh dispatched teams of hashish-crazed assassins with poisoned daggers to intimidate all of the Mideast’s rulers, Muslim and Crusaders alike.

The murderous Ismaili cult quickly came to be known as “hashishin,” or “assassins,” the origin of our term. The assassins terrorized the entire Mideast, shaking down its rulers for great amounts of gold. One never knew when or where they would strike. Their first warnings were often pinned to the pillows of intended targets, as happened to the famed Saladin.

The assassin teams would strike with poisoned daggers, then die under torture laughing and calling out to god.

Finally, the great Egyptian Mameluke sultan Baibars and the invading Mongols put paid to the assassins. The survivors fled

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east and today peacefully live in Pakistan’s Hunza Valley under the Agha Khan.

The modern reincarnation of the assassins struck Paris that Friday night. Alarmingly, one or more may have entered Europe as a Syrian refugee. Rightists in Europe are already calling for internment camps for Muslims, though they had nothing whatsoever to do with IS’ teenage lunatics. In fact, IS has put Muslims everywhere in peril as well as besmirching the name of Islam. Europe may seize the Paris attacks as an excuse to bar any further refugees. ❑

Stop Helping ISIS in its War on The “Gray Zone”

W

By Dan Sanchez

hat were Islamist terrorists trying to accomplish when they attacked Paris that Friday, killing 130 French civilians? An increasing number of analysts now agree with Juan Cole’s theory about the extremists’ strategy in France, which he raised after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, writing: “The problem for a terrorist group like al-Qaeda is that its recruitment pool is Muslims, but most Muslims are not interested in terrorism. Most Muslims are not even interested in politics, much less political Islam. France is a country of 66 million, of which about 5 million is of Muslim heritage. But in polling, only a third, less than 2 million, say that they are interested in religion. French Muslims may be the most secular Muslim-heritage population in the world…In Paris, where Muslims tend to be better educated and more religious, the vast majority reject violence and say they are loyal to France.

Al-Qaeda wants to mentally colonize French Muslims, but faces a wall of disinterest. But if it can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination.”

Cole likened this strategy to the early 20th century communist revolutionaries in Austria who would launch attacks for the express purpose of provoking a police crackdown on left-leaning citizens in order to radicalize them. From the perspective of the vanguard of the proletariat: “…the fact that most students and workers don’t want to overthrow the business class is inconvenient, and so it seemed desirable to some of them to “sharpen the contradictions between labor and capital.”

This is the strategy explicitly professed by ISIS (aka Da’ish), the group that almost surely perpetrated the attacks. Also shortly after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, in its official magazine Dabiq, ISIS ran an article titled, “The Extinction of the Grayzone.”

For the authors, the grayzone is the middle ground between extremist, Salafi, terrorist theocrats (i.e., themselves, whom they exclusively regard as the “camp of Islam”) on one side and an imperialist, war-waging, Western “crusader camp” on the other.

In other words, the grayzone is the realm of coexistence, communication, cooperation and commerce among people of different creeds. The grayzone is where civilization resides.

Dan Sanchez is a columnist for <www.antiwar.com>. Copyright © Antiwar.com 2015.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

ISIS hates the grayzone and wants to see it eliminated. As Arab Spring activist Iyad El-Baghdadi put it, ISIS wants to erase all gray areas and make the world as starkly black and white as their flag. So the authors rejoiced in its belief that: “The grayzone is critically endangered, rather on the brink of extinction. Its endangerment began with the blessed operations of Sept. 11, as these operations manifested two camps before the world for mankind to choose between, a camp of Islam…and a camp of kufr — the crusader coalition.”

The authors celebrated that the 9/11 attacks: “…quickly exposed the different deviant ‘Islamic’ movements…as all of them rushed to serve the crusaders led by Bush in the war against Islam. And so, the grayzone began to wither…”

The authors cite Osama bin Laden favorably quoting President George W. Bush after 9/11: “The world today is divided into two camps. Bush spoke the truth when he said, ‘Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.’ Meaning, either you are with the crusade or you are with Islam.”

Four years later, in “Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith,” George Lucas scripted this exchange between Anakin Skywalker (who had just turned to the dark side, becoming Darth Vader) and Obi-Wan Kenobi: Anakin: “If you’re not with me, then you’re my enemy.”

Obi-Wan: “Only a Sith deals in absolutes.”

It is widely thought that Lucas was thinking of President Bush when he wrote those lines. But, as we saw above, it would apply just as well to bin Laden, al-Qaeda and ISIS. The Islamist Sith also deal in absolutes, working to polarize the whole world into an apocalyptic Manichean struggle between two absolute and irreconcilable camps. And of course, they expect their camp to ultimately win and totally eradicate or conquer the enemy camp.

But they are not the only parties who dream of a dualistic Ragnarök. There are Crusader Sith as well, who also deal in absolutes. Again Bush pre-echoed Anakin’s “either/or” line.

And many neocons and right-wing nationalists have embraced Samuel Huntington’s thesis of a necessary “Clash of Civilizations” between the West and Islam. Marco Rubio, that dutiful apprentice of the Neocon Sith, sought to revive that formula in his response to the attacks in Paris.

And as they reveal with their own words, some Crusader Sith unabashedly yearn for terrorist attacks in their own country, similarly hoping that such atrocities will “sharpen the contradictions” between the opposing camps and fill their warmongering ranks with former moderates.

It should be no surprise that leaders in both the Islamic State and the United States seek to polarize the world into enemy camps. After all, war is the health of the State.

And it should also be no surprise that Western states respond to attacks exactly the way the terrorists want them to: by, as Cole put it, being “beastly” toward Muslims, thus radicalizing many of them, and thus “withering the grayzone.”

After 9/11, the West launched beastly wars on one Muslim country after another. The chaos and atrocities of those wars drove many men out of the grayzone and into groups like ISIS. And now after the Paris attacks, the West, and France in particular, are preparing to ramp up the beastliness, which will surely vacate the grayzone still further.

This is happening with foreign policy. The day after the attack,

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France bombed the ISIS-controlled city of was the final year of the Algerian war for Raqqa, and quite likely killing civilians in national independence and peace negotithe process. And both France and the ations were already well underway. Some U.S. have promised to escalate the bomb30,000 or more Algerian men, women and ing of Syria and Iraq. children were organized by the nationalist And it is also happening with domestic FLN to participate in a central city street policy. There is already talk of France â&#x20AC;&#x153;inmarch protesting a newly imposed racist 4HERE S ALOT MORE YOU MIGHT terning potential jihadistsâ&#x20AC;? and dissolving curfew against Muslim residents of the NOT KNOW ABOUT YOUR mosques. And as The New York Times Paris region. The vast majority of demonMUSLIM NEIGHBORS reported, a â&#x20AC;&#x153;darker mood toward Islamâ&#x20AC;? strators, of course, were simply unarmed 6JG /WUNKO .KPM VJG NCTIGUV PGYURCRGT HQT CPF CDQWV has emerged in the country following the mobilized civilians, not militant activists, VJG /WUNKO %QOOWPKV[ KP &% /& CPF 8# #XCKNCDNG CV OQUV /QUSWGU #TCD +PFQ 2CM CPF 2GTUKCP TGUVCWTCPVU CPF attack. and were still officially citizens of France.

ITQEGTKGU KP VJG ITGCVGT 9CUJKPIVQP $CNVKOQTG Since the attack, tribal animus toward In advance, however, Paris police OGVTQRQNKVCP CTGC #XCKNCDNG (TGG Muslims has spiked in both France and chief Maurice Papon, ex-Vichy official 0HONE &AX the U.S. Frightened and angered by the and later responsible for torture and WWW -USLIMLINKPAPER COM attack, ever more people are perceiving summary executions in Algeria, explicitly all of Islam, a religion of one billion people, as one big undifferencouraged police to use every means to destroy the demonentiated menacing herd or enemy camp. And this induces stration and thus weaken the movement behind it. Papon himthem to become more herd-like themselves, and more like a self was implicitly encouraged to do so by his knowledge of radicalized â&#x20AC;&#x153;crusader camp.â&#x20AC;? Such herd-minded indiscriminate secret anti-FLN death squads operating in France and enhatred is what undergirds the beastly policies ISIS is hoping dorsed at the highest level of French government. With this for. And those policies in turn will drive more Muslims into the green light, Paris police (many of whom belonged to the protoextreme Islamist camp, whose future attacks will start the pofascist Secret Army Organization) viciously attacked the Oct. larizing cycle all over again.

17 marchers with batons and guns and threw dozens of bound For the sake of humanity, we need to break the cycle. We or unconscious men into the Seine to drown. Over ten thouneed to stop letting ourselves be manipulated into serving as sand were arrested and taken for further beatings and murISISâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s recruitment force. We need to stop working toward the ders at police stations or special improvised prison camps. fulfillment of their nightmarish monochrome dreams. â?&#x2018; The overall scale of deaths, wounded and disappeared from this Paris attack and massacre, a clear example of state terrorism, is acknowledged by serious observers to be at least comparable to the scale of casualties of this past Nov. 13.

I was a student in Paris that year and remember that press coverage of the massacre was relatively modest, no doubt in part because of internal and government press censorship.

By David Porter Less than four months later, the deaths of nine French antihile describing the tragic civilian massacre in Paris, many fascist protesters after police charges and beatings in another in the French and international media added further fuel demonstration provoked a subsequent general strike and to the inevitable racial backlash in the West by a significant, but presence of half a million in a massive funeral protest at the all too predictable, historical lie. Mainstream newspapers, such Place de la RĂŠpublique. Yet, by contrast, it took some three as Le Figaro in France, the Telegraph in Britain, The New York decades of diligent research, writings and documentaries by Times, The Washington Post and many U.S. journals fed by the small numbers (including especially Jean-Luc Einaudi) to fiAssociated Press; all of the major U.S. TV-radio networks; nally gain the significant public attention that the atrocious media websites such as Time.com, thedailybeast.com, theatevent of October â&#x20AC;&#x2122;61 deserved. lantic.com and vice.com/fr; and even the progressive reporting Now, with media claims that last Fridayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s attack and violence of â&#x20AC;&#x153;Democracy Now!â&#x20AC;? all claimed that Fridayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s events were the were unprecedented in scale since World War II, the brush of worst violence or terrorist attack in a single day in France since amnesia seeks again to wipe clear the historical record of World War II. 1961â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Paris police massacre. The reality and power of media Every journalist, editor and publisher responsible, however institutional racism to shape historical memory is blatant. unintentionally, for this historical erasure exemplifies, no The point here is not to engage in macabre historical comdoubt, but also further encourages racist amnesia in the petition. Rather, the mediaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s easy authoritative forgetting of broader society that this claim represents. The issue is whose the 1961 tragedy and the influence of that neglect and similar history is remembered and why. distortions have real consequences on how todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mass pubOver three decades passed before broader French public conlic frames its consciousness and response. Simplistic historisciousness began slowly to acknowledge and to condemn the cal omissions help fuel the tendency toward simplistic and horrific, deliberate police massacre of immigrant Algerian misguided solutions, as already seen in Hollandeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s and demonstrators marching peacefully in Paris on Oct. 17, 1961. It Sarkozyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s demand for total war and similar outcries from presidential candidates in the U.S. Unfortunately and tragically, it is Fridayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s victims in Paris, David Porter is emeritus professor of political science at SUNY/Empire just as civilians throughout the war zones of the Middle East State College and author of Vision on Fire: Emma Goldman on the and North Africa, who pay the price of deaths and destruction Spanish Revolution and Eyes to the South: French Anarchists and Algeria (both AK Press). He can be reached at <david.porter@esc. from the unconscionable demagogy and policies of mindless edu>. Copyright Š CounterPunch. All rights reserved. politicians, war hawks and religious fanatics on all sides. â?&#x2018;

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The Paris Attacks and the Politics of Memory

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cook_im_24-25_Special Report 12/10/15 6:09 PM Page 24

Special Report

Netanyahu Outlaws Al-Aqsa Protector, Social Charity the Northern Islamic Movement

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Sheikh Raed Salah (c), leader of the Islamic Movement in Israel, arrives to take part in an April 21, 2014 protest by Palestinian citizens of Israel against a recent act of vandalism by extremist Israeli Jews targeting a mosque in the northern Israeli city of Umm al-Fahm.

he decision by the Israeli government to outlaw the country’s main Islamic Movement marks a dangerous turning point in Israel’s relations with its large Palestinian minority, Palestinian leaders in Israel have warned.

The decision, announced on Nov. 17, effectively drives underground a religious, political and social movement representing the views of a sizeable portion of Israel’s 1.6 million Palestinian citizens. They comprise a fifth of the population.

Jamal Zahalka was among the Palestinian Knesset members who called the move a “declaration of war” against the country’s Palestinian minority.

“It is an attack not just on the northern Islamic Movement,” he said, “but on our entire community.”

He and other community leaders have noted that the Islamic Movement does not use or call for violence, and that the ban appeared to be driven by little more than the political agenda of the Israeli right.

“Netanyahu is a leader who needs to create enemies,” Zahalka said. “The U.S. deal [with Iran] deprived him of his Iranian bogeyman. The PA is helping him with security in the West Bank. Gaza is quiet. So he makes an enemy of the country’s Palestinian citizens.

“In the [March] elections he began his ugly incitement by saying we were coming out to vote ‘in droves,’” he added.

“Now he has the Islamic Movement in his sights. But he won’t stop with this.”

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu first raised plans

Jonathan Cook is a journalist based in Nazareth and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. He is the author of Blood and Religion and Israel and the Clash of Civilisations (available from AET’s Middle East Books and More).

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AHMAD GHARABLI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

By Jonathan Cook

two years ago to shut down the northern wing of the Islamic Movement, led by Sheikh Raed Salah.

However, fear of international condemnation, as well as advice from his intelligence services that such a step could not be justified on security grounds, appeared to stay his hand.

Asad Ghanem, a professor of politics at Haifa University, said Netanyahu had chosen his moment carefully to exploit the attacks by Islamic State a few days earlier in Paris, which left more than 130 dead.

“He is making an entirely false comparison between the Islamic Movement and the most violent armed Islamic groups so that he can persuade the Europeans that this is connected to their fight against terror,” he explained.

In declaring the northern Islamic Movement an “illegal organization,” Netanyahu said it “denies [Israel’s] right to exist and calls for the establishment of an Islamic

caliphate in its place.”

In reality, Netanyahu, like his predecessors, has been incensed by the Islamic Movement’s long-running efforts to protect the al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem from steady encroachment by Israel.

For nearly two decades Salah has clashed with Israeli officials by leading a campaign under the slogan “Al-Aqsa is in danger,” warning that Israel is seeking to erode Islamic sovereignty over the mosque area.

He has rallied huge numbers of supporters—Palestinians with the advantage of Israeli citizenship—to get involved at the mosque, at a time when all other Palestinian players, including the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas, have been excluded from Jerusalem.

The rapid rise in the number of Jewish settler groups visiting the compound and gaining an ever greater purchase on the holy esplanade has triggered widespread Palestinian anger.

Netanyahu and other ministers have blamed Salah for the recent wave of Palestinian protests and so-called “lone-wolf” attacks, many of them stabbings. Rather than reverse their policy at al-Aqsa, they have accused him of a terror-like “incitement.”

Zahalka said Netanyahu wanted a scapegoat and had found a convenient one in Salah.

Police raided the movement’s head offices in Umm alFahm, as well as 17 related organizations, many of them Islamic charities and welfare associations in communities such as Nazareth, Jaffa, Kfar Kana, Turan, Beersheva and Rahat.

Computers and documents were seized and the organizations’ bank accounts frozen.

According to Ghanem, the move would signal to Palestinian citizens that the “door is closed to them when it comes to participating in the democratic process.”

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He added: “As well as being politically dangerous, it will also be seen as an assault on Islamic belief. The movement funds and organizes student associations that teach the Qur’an.

They will now be treated as illegal.”

Nothing about the Islamic Movement had changed in the past decade, Ghanem said. “The only thing that changed is the political extremism of Netanyahu and his government.”

Adalah, a legal group for Palestinians in Israel, said the order from the defense minister, Moshe Ya’alon, was based on emergency regulations inherited from the British Mandate period.

The decision threatens anyone who continues to be involved with the organization, or offers it services, with arrest and imprisonment.

Adalah called it “an aggressive, draconian measure” that would “suppress a political movement that represents a large part of the Palestinian public in Israel.”

Salah denounced the ban, saying his movement would continue to operate and defend Jerusalem and the al-Aqsa mosque compound. He added: “I will take every possible legitimate step, in Israel and internationally, to remove the measures taken against the movement.”

A protest tent set up by the Islamic Movement in Umm alFahm drew thousands of supporters, from all the political factions, on its first day.

The Follow-Up Committee, a body representing all the main Palestinian political factions in Israel, ordered a general strike in protest on Nov. 19 that shut down schools and shops.

The Islamic Movement was founded in the 1970s as both a political party and a provider of religious and welfare services.

It split into two factions in the mid-1990s, in the wake of the Oslo accords, with Salah’s so-called northern group refusing to participate in parliamentary elections.

The southern wing, which has three seats in the parliament, is unaffected by the ban.

While the northern wing rejects the idea of a Jewish state, it operates entirely within Israeli law. It directs much of its efforts at religious instruction and good works, including health clinics, kindergartens and sports clubs, to the poorest communities in Israel.

That has made it hugely popular. A recent survey found 57 percent of Israel’s 1.6 million Palestinian citizens believe the movement represents them. A third of Israel’s Palestinian Christians support it too. And it has 10,000 paid-up members, who now risk imprisonment.

Two weeks before the ban, the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz reported that a year-long investigation by Israel’s domestic intelligence service, the Shin Bet, had been unable to find any security grounds for closing the organization.

According to two unnamed government ministers, Yoram Cohen, head of the Shin Bet, told the security cabinet he objected to any move to criminalize the movement’s members. It would do “more harm than good,” he reportedly told them.

Ghanem said the Shin Bet’s view was based on an assessment that allowing the Islamic Movement “ensured its political activities were more open and more mainstream, and would avoid it being forced underground.

“The fact that Netanyahu has taken the opposite view tells us this is a political decision, not a security one.”

Both Zahalka and Ghanem said they feared that Netanyahu would next target Zahalka’s democratic nationalist party, Balad. In October the Israeli prime minister accused it of conspiring with Hamas and Islamic State.

Such a move would inevitably force the other Palestinian factions in the parliament, which formed a Joint List in the last election, to renounce their seats, leaving the minority without parliamentary representation.

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After Netanyahu’s announcement of the ban, government ministers immediately launched a media campaign implying that Salah’s movement had colluded with “terrorism” against Israel.

A document issued by Netanyahu’s office stated that the group was “a sister-movement of the Hamas terrorist organization.

These organizations are secretly and actively cooperating with one another.” No evidence to support the allegation was provided.

The public security minister, Gilad Erdan, went further, stating: “The Islamic Movement, Hamas, ISIS [Islamic State], and the other terror organizations have a common ideological platform that leads to terror attacks in the world and the wave of terror attacks in Israel.”

Ghanem said it was “preposterous” to claim that the Islamic Movement shared common ground with Islamic State.

He also observed that, while the Islamic Movement and Hamas shared a political and religious ideology, Salah’s group forswore violence and militant activity in pursuit of its aims.

Zeki Aghbaria, a spokesman for the northern Islamic Movement, called the government’s characterization of the organization “political incitement.”

“They say today that I suddenly became a criminal,” he said.

“That means they just criminalized any support for the defense of al-Aqsa, or for the Palestinian people, or for equal rights for Palestinian citizens in Israel, or for welfare provision for students and the handicapped.”

The decision effectively puts the Islamic Movement on an equal footing with the Kach movement, a Jewish extremist group banned in the 1990s after one of its members, Baruch Goldstein, gunned down 29 worshippers at Hebron’s Ibrahimi mosque.

Kach members, who still have strong representation in some West Bank settlements, call for violence against Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories and demand their expulsion.

Ayman Odeh, leader of the Joint List faction, which embraces all the Palestinian parties in the Knesset, said of the move to ban the Islamic Movement: “This is indisputably a case of political, anti-democratic persecution that is part of the de-legitimization campaign waged by Netanyahu’s government against the country’s Arab citizens.”

However, the decision won overwhelming support from Israeli Jewish parties, including from the main center-left opposition party, the Zionist Union.

Its leader, Isaac Herzog, criticized Netanyahu for not moving sooner against the Islamic Movement, adding that it was “the first step in defending democracy in Israel.”

The timing of Netanyahu’s announcement takes advantage of the growing climate against Islamic political activism at the local, regional and international levels.

Given the mood in Europe and the United States after the Paris attacks, Netanyahu can probably count on the international community not studying too closely the comparisons between the Islamic Movement, Hamas and Islamic State.

Regionally, the Islamic Movement is exposed. Its sister organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, has been outlawed in neighboring Egypt, while Cairo has joined Israel in isolating Hamas in Gaza.

And locally, the Israeli Jewish public wants someone to blame after weeks of Palestinian attacks, including stabbings, in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Israel.

Intelligence services have admitted they have little idea how to deal with the so-called “lone wolves,” individual Palestinians not affiliated with any political faction, behind most of the attacks.

Salah was due to start an 11-month prison term in December, pending appeal, after an Israeli court found him guilty of incitement over a sermon he delivered in Jerusalem in 2007. It is the latest of several jail terms he has served. ❑

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Gaza on the Ground

Shared Agony in Gaza and Jerusalem

By Mohammed Omer

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the West Bank, we are preoccupied by our own massive problems, inflicted by Israel, and can’t get out to help as a result” says Abdullah Jundia, 43, from Shejayeh, whose home was destroyed by Israel during its heavy military bombardment of Gaza in the summer of 2014.

“We are on the brink of another harsh winter without any basic necessities like baby food, children’s clothes, cooking fuel, heat and electricity, warm bedding and proper housing,” adds Jundia, who must provide for seven children living with him in a rented Gaza City apartment.

“The world must remember that there are 1.8 million displaced, besieged Palestinians trapped here in Gaza—families, elderly, children and babies—who have done nothing wrong. Or are they not important?” he asks.

According to UNRWA, 13,167 refugee families in Gaza remain displaced because of the destruction of or damage to their homes during Israel’s 2014 assault.

Of the more than 13,000 homes Israel destroyed that year, UNRWA has been able to rebuild a grand total of 1, said UNRWA director Bo Schack.

A year following the Cairo reconstruction conference for Gaza, only 35 percent of the $3.5 billion pledged to Gaza on that occasion has been made available, according to the World Bank’s most recent data.

A resident of Khan Younes makes tea for his siblings in their dilapidated home as This is nowhere near enough to begin reconstruction they huddle around a stovetop burner for heat and light. of even the most basic quality of life in Gaza for the nearly 2 million civilians pounded more than a year ago e sit here and watch what is happening in

by Israel’s military might.

Jerusalem—and all we can do is pray for them,” As the situation in Jerusalem and the West Bank worsens, says part-time taxi driver Abu Suliman Redwan, Gazans feel unable to cope with the burden being laid at their 48, of Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip. flooded, cold doorsteps. Even given the obstacles they face, Every morning, he says, he listens to the news and feels however, they are still aware of what is happening to their felpain, knowing that Gaza—besieged now by both Israel and low Palestinians on the other side of the Israeli-Egyptian sepaEgypt—can offer nothing to help. Israel’s “divide-and-conquer” ration fences and closed crossings. They may be divided by strategy seems to be working, Redwan laments, as “we PalesIsrael, but they are not conquered. tinians are all separated, some killed by bullets, others by Redwan says that his family now expects more power cuts, bombs and the loss of hope under ever-tightening borders which are predicted to lengthen during the middle of the coming drying out our livelihood and crushing our lives.” very cold winter, and border closures. The Rafah crossing with In the early weeks of October, Gaza youth took to the streets, Egypt has been largely closed for more than 100 days since it shouting, protesting and demonstrating in reaction to the viowas last opened, and it was open for only 19 days in 2015. lence in Jerusalem, but dozens were killed and many others inIn recent weeks, residents also endured torrential rain, jured by the IDF. “The demonstrations continue, mostly on Friflooding hundreds of homes throughout the Gaza Strip. days, but the children of Gaza are suffocating, too, under the Meanwhile, Sharief Al Nearab, 33, of Rafah says that what economic blockade and punishment from Israel,” says Redwan. is happening in Jerusalem and the West Bank isn’t officially an Gaza now faces one of its coldest winters, and most people Intifada, as no one is leading it. “It is mainly an outburst of feel helpless and unprepared, due to continuing extended human emotion,” he explains, “by so many feeling pain under power blackouts and lack of construction materials. oppression and the daily humiliation and assault on dignity “As much as we hurt in our hearts for our Palestinian people in under Israel’s occupation: queuing at Israeli checkpoints and being harassed and attacked by Israeli settlers. No one can endure that without retaliation and resistance against human Award-winning journalist Mohammed Omer reports from the Gaza Strip, where he maintains the Web site <www.rafahtoday.org>. Folrights abuses by Israel.” low him on Twitter: @MoGaza.

Compounding the situation in Gaza, Israel has imposed an WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

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additional ban—on wood imports—thereby stifling Gaza’s domestic furniture industry.

Ibrahem Al Taher, a carpenter, was shocked to hear of Israel’s latest ban, based on the claim that it could have “dual use” by Palestinian resistance groups.

During its 2014 war on Gaza, Israel bombed and severely damaged 124 carpenters’ workshops and carpentry supply centers.

Al Taher’s only alternative is to use glue to attach pieces of thin plywood (which is allowed in) and make some form of basic furniture. But “this use of glue doesn’t work for all domestic or office furniture products,” he says.

Israeli authorities then decided to allow furniture imports from other Arab markets, as well as from Gaza, into the West Bank.

In practice, however, Israel continues to ban metal carpentry supplies and various paint products from Gaza. “We are not allowed to complete a whole product,” Al Taher says. “Something always has to be missing from the construction and quality.”

Now, because of the high cost of wood materials, the few carpenters still working will cease operation in what’s left of their workshops. “As much as I understand Israel’s concern for its security, they need to have humanity and compassion for our need to feed our dependent children at the end of every day,” says Saleh Mahmoud, another carpenter in Rafah.

Wadah Bseso, deputy chairman of the Wood Industries Union in Gaza, says that Israel’s ban on wood means that 9 percent of the local economy will die, and an estimated 9,000 workers will be laid off from work earning them an essential basic income.

Bseso is puzzled, however, as to why Israel would open export markets for furniture made in Gaza, while inflicting a ban on any wood thicker than 5 cm. Israel’s declaration may sound generous, but its restrictions on materials continue to cripple Gaza’s economy. It is not true generosity, merely token and superficial—for appearances only.

Gaza’s current dire situation is unlikely to improve soon, given the ongoing siege and economic suffocation. Moreover, Gazans know, from frequent experience, that approaching Israel’s barbed and electric separation fences—or even the tight maritime borders— means automatic death. Just ask one of Gaza’s fishermen, who continue to face threats and attacks by Israeli, and now Egyptian, coast guard or navy ships prowling the depleted fishing zones.

Palestine has long enjoyed the craft and trade of fishing, but fishermen continue to suffer hardship under the siege. In November Egyptian troops shot Gaza’s youngest fisherman—16year-old Feras Meqdad—on his family’s fishing boat, close to the border with Egypt. Despite the danger, Gaza fishermen struggle to provide a basic income, necessary for their families’ survival and their own dignity.

It is a huge disappointment for Jundia, whose home in Shejayeh was destroyed, to hear the head of the Union of Palestinian Contractors state that it will take Gaza 20 years to rebuild what has been destroyed by Israel.

“20 years means more generations inflicted with enforced poverty, collective punishment and deprivation, and perhaps more attacks and wars from Israel,” he says. “Gaza lives in a pressure cooker,” he adds, “about to explode, in human desperation at any moment.” ❑

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Special Report

Palestinian Homes Abandoned in Nakba Attest To History of Haifa’s Wadi Salib Neighborhood Story and photos by William Parry

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The Kanafani family’s former home in Wadi Salib.

o anyone familiar with Israel’s policies and practices in occupied Palestine and Israel itself there is little that is striking about its ethnic cleansing of Palestine—apart from how oblivious most Israelis are to it. Despite its simmering, systematic banality and barbarity, most Israelis seem to possess an uncanny knack for denying their history and present alike and simply get on with life.

But in Wadi Salib, a formerly affluent Palestinian neighborhood of Haifa, the wrongs of Israel’s past remain so prominently displayed that it is particularly unsettling. Driving into downtown Haifa from the north along the network of quick roads that lead to the city center, an entire, dilapidated neighborhood of handsome architecture and beautiful features faces the sea, and—to an outsider at least—one cannot but notice the absence that remains in their silent presence.

The city’s old center was all but destroyed in 1949 on instructions by David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, as the fledgling nation sought to rewrite history, says Johnny Mansour, a local authority who has written and spoken extensively about Haifa’s history. Following the Nakba, its Palestinian population plunged from 75,000 to 3,000, many fleeing for safety via the same port that had recently welcomed its new Jewish refugees, who had escaped the horrors of the Holocaust in Europe. A few old places of worship remain in what was the Old City, and beyond it, rising up Mount Carmel, rows of commercial buildings,

William Parry is the author of Against the Wall: The Art of Resistance in Palestine (available from AET’s Middle East Books and More).

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several stone stairwells and the elegant homes of Wadi Salib.

Today, the imposing Justice Building, shaped like a ship, points and juts into Wadi Salib, overshadowing a row of Ottoman buildings that were the headquarters of the governor of Haifa, Mustafa Pasha al Khalil, prior to the British Mandate. Indeed, Haifa District’s government headquarters are built on top of the administrative heart of the Old City, Mansour says.

One former resident, now aged 93, is Abdullatif Kanafani, whose family lived at 15 al Bourj Street, a prominent home overlooking the wadi (valley). He was 22 years old when the family—his mother and father, two brothers and their wives, and his sister—fled the shelling for safety in Acre, north of Haifa. From there, as shelling again closed in on them, the family fled to Lebanon and were never allowed to return home. Their home was seized as “absentee property,” a fate shared by many of the 700,000 Palestinians who were forced to abandon their homes and businesses during the Nakba.

“Like many others, we did not imagine our flight would turn into a diaspora,” Mr. Kanafani said from his Beirut home. “I remember the neighborhood’s every alley, having frolicked in and out of them as a lad.”

In 1949 the new Israeli government used the Palestinian homes in Wadi Salib to house poor Jewish Mizrahi immigrants from North Africa, promising to relocate them after a year or two.

In 1959, amid poverty and over-population, the new residents of Wadi Salib rioted and the Mizrahi population was subsequently divided and resettled in other areas to quell the unrest. Since then, most of the homes and commercial buildings have been boarded up and the windows filled with concrete blocks or blanketed with metal sheets to discourage homeless people from sheltering in them—largely in vain. A few are leased to families as public housing.

Along what is now called Kibbutz Galuyot Street, many former Palestinian buildings are now used for a flea market, with stalls operated predominantly by Jewish Israeli proprietors.

The street level bustles with bargain hunters and vendors haggling over “junque,” while the windows to the floors above— along with their history— remain boarded up.

Hemming in the wadi above and below are busy Graffiti on the wall of an abandoned arteries used by cars and home.

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Clockwise from top left: Israel’s modern Justice Building juts into Wadi Salib; a former Ottoman hamman building now houses an Israeliowned restaurant; many former Palestinian buildings are now used for a flea market in Wadi Salib.

buses to get in and out of the center of Haifa. A new artists’ village and park are being built there, with an old Palestinian home at its heart. The homes and commercial buildings are an unmissable backdrop to daily life.

Like many former, thriving Palestinian neighborhoods throughout Israel, Wadi Salib is slowly being renovated, gen-

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

trified and populated by Jewish Israeli businesses, institutions and law firms, while their former owners live in forced exile, uncompensated. Mr. Kanafani’s home now houses a law firm.

His message to those who have “bought” his home is simple: “How would they feel if they were evicted from their homes?” Mr. Kanafani asked. “It is a terrifying, shattering experience.”

He has no hope for any justice today. “‘Injustice’? When it comes to the rights of the Palestine Arab, injustice is blatantly ignored. Done away with completely. The word does not exist in the Israeli vocabulary.” ❑

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Special Report

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By Jane Adas

LEFT: Jamal Jum’a, coordinator of Ramallah’s Stop the Wall Campaign. RIGHT: Abu Yasser, proprietor of the Sebastia Guest House, points to gouges made by Israeli bulldozers at an archeological site in Sebastia, where John the Baptist was believed to have been buried.

ight to life” has taken on a whole new meaning since participating in CODEPINK’s first Olive Harvest delegation to Palestine in early November. It began in Ramallah, with Stop the Wall coordinator Jamal Jum’a providing context for what is happening today. From the beginning Zionism has viewed Palestinian demographics as the main threat to Israel as a Jewish state. Jum’a paraphrased a statement by Gen. Ariel Sharon [see London Times, 8/24/88]: “You don’t simply bundle people onto trucks and drive them away [as was done in the 1948 Nakba]. I prefer to create positive conditions that will induce people to leave”—in reality, making it impossible for them to live where they are.

To implement this, the “Israel 2020 Master Plan,” proposed as early as 1992, seeks to Judaize the Galilee, Judaize the Negev by concentrating Bedouin in American Indian-style reservations, and Judaize greater Jerusalem by walling off Palestinian neighborhoods in the “Holy Basin” outside the Old City and renaming others. For example, Israeli maps now label the Silwan neighborhood “the City of David.”

Jum’a led the delegation on a walking tour of Bir Nabala, a once prosperous residential suburb of East Jerusalem. In 2006 Israel’s separation barrier reached Bir Nabala, leaving it in the seam zone between the wall and the Green Line, detaching it completely from East Jerusalem. Today it is a ghost

Jane Adas is a free-lance writer based in the New York City metropolitan area.

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town. Bir Nabala lost two-thirds of its businesses and half its population, all of them East Jerusalemites. The main road is lined with empty shops and multistory buildings, dead wedding halls and vegetable markets, even the abandoned villa of the Archbishop of Jerusalem. The road ends at the wall. On the other side is an Israeli industrial park. The wall made life impossible in Bir Nabala in order to improve Israel’s demographic balance.

A fourth element of “Israel 2020” is disengagement from Gaza and the West Bank. In 2005, Israel withdrew its settlers and soldiers from Gaza and blockaded the Strip. In the West Bank, however, Jum’a explained that disengagement is within the territory, between Palestinians and Israeli settlers, via the wall, separate road systems, and checkpoints. The Israeli vision for Palestinians, he added, is “sustainable ghettos.” To that end, industrial zones have been established so that Palestinians can become independent of aid. Jum’a calls this “Do-it-yourself apartheid.”

The delegation visited Sebastia, a history-laden village northwest of Nablus and an example of Israel’s not-so-benign neglect. Our guide was Abu Yasser, proprietor of the Sebastia Guest House in the recently renovated Ottoman alKayed palace. Adjacent to the village is an archeological site dating back to the early Bronze Age with impressive Roman ruins. In addition, early Christians believed Sebastia to be the burial place of John the Baptist and where Salome performed the dance of seven veils. Because of these two at-

WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

STAFF PHOTOS J. ADAS

Israel’s “Master Plan” for Judaization of Palestine Continues Apace

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tractions, according to Abu Yasser, Sebastia was the number one tourist site in the region until Israel began its occupation in 1967.

Since then, he explained, John the Baptist has been relocated elsewhere.

Attesting to its former popularity, a large parking lot stands outside the archeological site. Ours was the only van there.

The lot is ringed with empty restaurants and tourist shops, only one of which was open. This is Area B, under joint Palestinian and Israeli control. A few steps away is the archeological site, under full Israeli control in Area C. Israel is doing nothing to protect the ruins. Nothing is labeled, no security guards, nothing roped off. Yet Israel will not allow Palestinian personnel even to clean the area. In 2014, Israel’s Nature and Parks Authority came to work on the site…with bulldozers.

Letters and appeals to UNESCO stopped what seemed to be a demolition project, but Sebastianites fear the Israelis will come back. It’s as though they’re thinking, if there are no Jewish artifacts and if Palestinians might benefit from tourists drawn to the site, who cares if it’s vandalized? Abu Yasser hopes UNESCO will designate the area a protected World Heritage site because, as he said, “the Roman ruins belong to all the world.”

Our delegation’s host in Palestine was Canaan Fair Trade, the processing and marketing arm of the Palestine Fair Trade Association (PFTA), which today comprises more than 1,700 Palestinian small farmers joined in 52 cooperatives. Dr. Nasser Abufarha, who describes himself as a “social entrepreneur,” established both in 2004. He also has a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology and international development from the University of Wisconsin.

When Abufarha returned to Palestine to conduct research for his dissertation on war and violence, he found a community under siege. Prices for olives were low because local markets were saturated and, with limited access to global markets, Palestinian farmers were abandoning their olive trees.

Because olive trees cannot survive without people nurturing them, Abufarha found this a threat to something very dear: “our cultural inheritance; our identity that connects us with our ancestors.” To help farmers stay on their land, he had the idea to aggregate small-scale farmers in order to compete in the international market.

Beginning with 25 farmers in two collectives, PFTA was able to guarantee a market, double the price of olive oil, and reach fair trade standards. It now exports 700 metric tons of olive oil annually, and is looking to increase almond production. In 2008 Canaan Fair Trade built a state-of-the-art olive processing facility with the capacity for 1,000 tons of olive oil, something Abufarha calls “our bank.” He is proud that PFTA is the only large organization in Palestine that receives no grants and is self-supporting. Mohammed, the manager of PFTA’s House for Fair Trade in Jenin, said, “Exporting Palestinian olive oil is a kind of nonviolent resistance. The political message of each bottle is ‘Palestinians deserve life.’”

Other PFTA programs include women’s cooperatives that produce soap, sun-dried tomatoes, za’atar and maftoul, and Trees for Life, a charitable program that distributes olive and almond trees to farmers who have lost some of their land to the wall or who live near settlements. You can read all about this Palestinian success story at <www.canaanfairtrade.com>, and purchase olive oil and other products as well from AET’s Middle East Books and More. ❑

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United Nations Report

Too Little, Too Late? “Responsibility to Protect” In Syria and Iraq

By Ian Williams

LOUAI BESHARA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

from high altitude.

U.N. Resolution 2249, in the aftermath of the Paris attacks and with growing certainty of ISIS involvement in the downing of the Russian airliner over the Sinai, epitomizes the cynical logjam at the United Nations. The Security Council met on Nov. 20 to pass a resolution that is a masterpiece of imprecision and diplomatic obfuscation. It appears to condone and give a political fig leaf for states taking military action, which governments have used to persuade their publics that what they are doing is legal. But the leaf withers away under closer scrutiny of the kind that international lawyers have given it. Above all, the resolution does not invoke Chapter VII in the U.N. Charter, which is the operative clause that authorizes the use of force.

Resolution 2249 “Calls upon Member States that have the capacity to do so to take all necessary measures, in compliance with international law, in particular Under the eye of Syrian government forces, civilians and rebel fighters wait to begin evacuating with the United Nations Charter, as well the last opposition-held district of Waer in the central city of Homs, Dec. 9, 2015. Under a U.N.as international human rights, refugee brokered cease-fire, some 700 people, including 400 women and children and 300 fighters, were and humanitarian law, on the territory to be evacuated. under the control of ISIL also known as n the face of it, there can rarely have been a more fitDa’ish, in Syria and Iraq, to redouble and coordinate their efting subject for the U.N.’s “Responsibility to Protect” forts to prevent and suppress terrorist acts committed specifithan the conflict in Syria. As a reminder, R2P, as it is cally by ISIL also known as Da’ish as well as ANF, and all known, was adopted as official policy, and effectively incorpoother individuals, groups, undertakings, and entities associated rated into international law, when the heads of state and govwith al-Qaeda, and other terrorist groups, as designated by the ernment of every U.N. member unanimously declared in 2005 United Nations Security Council, and as may further be agreed that “each individual State has the responsibility to protect its by the International Syria Support Group (ISSG) and endorsed populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and by the U.N. Security Council, pursuant to the Statement of the crimes against humanity.” They also agreed that the internaInternational Syria Support Group (ISSG) of 14 November, and tional community should assist states in exercising this responto eradicate the safe haven they have established over signifisibility, and that when a state was “manifestly failing” to protect, cant parts of Iraq and Syria.” It also “Urges Member States to the rest of the world should take collective action in a “timely intensify their efforts to stem the flow of foreign terrorist fighters and decisive manner” through the Security Council and in acto Iraq and Syria and to prevent and suppress the financing of cordance with the U.N. Charter. terrorism, and urges all Member States to continue to fully imAt the end of November, some years into a situation where plement the abovementioned resolutions.” the Assad regime had not only “manifestly failed” to protect its During the wars in the Balkans, the five permanent Security citizenry, but had used barrel bombs, shelling and old-fashCouncil members churned out many such resolutions whose ioned shooting and torture on them, the U.N. finally acted—bepolitical purpose was to allay public demands that “something cause people had died in Paris and a Russian airliner was must be done”—while doing as little as possible until the conflict blown up. The refugees making safe haven on the beaches of burned itself out. Resolution 2249, however, goes to the next Greece are fleeing the conflict in general, but also the cross fire level of humbuggery and obfuscation, invoking “compliance with of government bombings and shellings and the interventions of international law, in particular with the United Nations Charter, different air forces who trumpet their good Samaritan deeds as well as international human rights, refugee and humanitarian law,” while carefully refraining from spelling out what the law is.

For example, it allows powers to determine unilaterally which Ian Williams is a free-lance journalist based at the United Nations who blogs at <www.deadlinepundit.blogspot.com>. groups on the ground are “terrorists,” but does not spell out any

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decision on what military action can be taken against them. ties that he would have to explain to Congress, NATO’s What is clear is that most of the significant players in the implanes had to fly higher than 15,000 feet—which in a cloudbroglio could not give a fig about the victims of the conflict, covered mountainous terrain almost guaranteed accidents whether they be the Syrians being bombed and shelled by the and the euphemistically termed collateral damage.

Ba’athist regime or those being beheaded back into the Dark The end of that war came within hours of NATO deciding to Ages by ISIS. commit ground troops despite Clinton’s earlier disavowal. As The Ba’athist Assad regime has epitomized Levantine polisoon as pro-Serb NATO officers let the Serbian leader know tics for years, so its current conjunction of allies and “enemies the decision, he ran up the white flag. However, while wiser of enemies” is unrivaled. In Lebanon over the years it had pundits emphasize the need for “boots” on the ground to clear supported the Phalangists and attacked the Palestinians while up the mess in Syria, there are few volunteers and even fewer preaching its front-line status against Zionism. It had sponwho would qualify. sored Hezbollah in their attacks on the Israelis—while ensurIf one considers just the bombing: The Russians, Iranians ing that not a sparrow made a threatening cheep against the and Hezbollah are almost the only ones with any cover from Israeli lines in Golan. Ba’athist Syria committed troops to international law, in that their intervention is at the invitation of Desert Storm against Saddam Hussain, and its rivalry with the what is still the recognized government of Syria. Ethically it Iraqi Ba’athists cemented its relations with Iran and Hezbollah. should not be, but ethics are a separate issue to law—as we The alleged Shi’i axis there with the Assad’s Alewite sect is should all have noticed over the decades. gratuitously expedient, with as much theological underpinning Forces operating in Iraq might or might not be operating as an axis between Southern Baptists and Episcopalians. It is with the invitation of that country’s government, a recent creof more use to outside pundits trying to make deeper sense of ation of the U.S. Baghdad is now collaborating with the Rusintermittent expediency. sians, Iranians and Syrians against Da’ish, while being coy All this time, the Assads’ Syria had sponsored serious terabout support from the Americans, even though there seems rorist groups across the world, but had happily lent its copious to be tacit collaboration between the U.S. and its (and more to experience in physical torture to help out CIA rendition of susthe point, Israel’s) enemy, Iran. pects picked up after 9/11. It had leveled whole cities like “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well/It were done Hama in the past for supporting Sunni dissidents. quickly,” said Macbeth. Sadly, the time for effective intervention In this bizarre welter of Olympic standard relay back-stabbing, was at the beginning, when a no-fly zone against Assad might Russia and Israel connive to avoid clashes, while the Russians have been effective. But unless Washington can get Moscow bomb Assad’s opponents—and the Israelis occasionally bomb on board, a unilaterally declared zone would risk World War III. Assad’s allies, the Iranians and the Hezbollah forces, inside We have now reached a stage where every move is wrong, but Syria. Israel would clearly much rather some more so than others.

(Advertisement) have a beleaguered and weak Assad in It would be nice to think that the threat power than any of his rivals and, despite of Da’ish would unite the various parties the rhetoric, has over the years shown into common action. Any effective soluevery sign of appreciation of Assad’s detions now would demand a sophisticated termination to keep the peace. multilateral approach involving all the The Russians bomb Turkoman militias parties, which includes a determination near the Turkish border, geographically that the various tails will not wag the and ideologically far from Da’ish, and dogs. The major powers have to be preTurkey shoots down Russian planes pared to rein in the various surrogates in while bombing the Kurds, who are the the area that have run riot. main obstacle to Da’ish hegemony. BeThe U.N. is not a power in itself. As forcause Turkey is a NATO member, howmer Secretary-General Boutros Ghali ever, Britain, France and the U.S. do not lamented, it has no troops, no police of its make as much fuss about this as they own. As the latest resolution shows, it reshould, any more than they have while flects the disagreements between the Wahhabi Gulf monarchies have been great powers and their clients. But in the arming and financing Salafist groups inend, the world organization is the only inside Iraq and Syria. But the U.S. and strument that they can use to craft a soluRussia are tacitly conferring to avoid tion. clashes as they each bomb the enemies While the fear of “terrorism” sends of their respective allies. shivers up the spines of the great powIt is not only the obfuscation that ers’ citizenry, the present spectacle of evokes the Balkan Wars. Readers with the cradle of civilization, the Fertile Creslonger memories will recall that in 1999 cent, being reduced to an open-fire President Bill Clinton, to protect his rear killing zone should worry us even more. with the then-isolationist Republican The United Nations, which 70 years ago right, ruled out the involvement of tried to establish the rule of law in the ground troops, but countenanced the world, has the legal technology to remuse of airstrikes to stop Slobodan Miloedy the situation. But it must be willed sevic’s depredations in Kosovo. Howand implemented by its members—noever, to avoid embarrassing U.S. casualtably the permanent five. ❑ JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

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Special Report

Pearls on a String: Artists, Patrons, and Poets at The Great Islamic Courts

By Michael Keating

T

Our works point to us, so gaze after us at our works.

—Dust Muhammad

© THE TRUSTEES OF THE CHESTER BEATTY LIBRARY, DUBLIN, WWW.CBL.IE

As Abu’l Fazl makes clear, Akbar was strongly motivated by a deep curiosity and reverence for the cultural traditions he kitabkhana—a multidisciplinary of his subjects and neighboring domains. artistic workshop—is a cultural inWith his translation projects, Akbar stitution that originated in Iran and brought the literature and history of India spread through Muslim Asia and into the to his Persian-speaking court. “Having Ottoman Empire. These workshops drew observed the fanatical hatred between together artists, calligraphers, craftsmen, the Hindus and the Muslims,” Abu’l Fazl poets and philosophers to articulate and wrote, “and being convinced that it arose design the high culture of a realm. Men only from mutual ignorance, the enlightof diverse, highly developed skills—from ened emperor rendered the books of the historians and translators to painters and former accessible to the latter.” paper makers—worked under the proAkbar visited ancient temples, met with tection of political elites to produce beauIndian Brahmans and holy men, and tiful books and design carpets, tiles and safeguarded their manuscripts. “Akbar other luxury goods.

Presiding over Discussions in the IbaIt was a very rich collaboration. But datkhana” depicts the emperor discussing because the emphasis was on the crephilosophy with Christian Jesuits, Jains, ation, not the creator, on collective geHindus and Muslims. The man directly to nius rather than the individual, biographAkbar’s right most likely is Abu’l Fazl, who ical information is scant at best. Neverserved as translator for the Jesuits. theless, the Walters Art Museum in BalA century later, in another Islamic timore, MD has assembled an exhibit court, Muhammad Zaman changed the tied together by three remarkable men. course of Persian painting. Despite his “Pearls on a String: Artists, Patrons, and artistic importance, not a single referPoets at the Great Islamic Courts” exence has been found in the historical amines the world of writer and historian record, except for his own elegant and Abu’l Fazl in the 16th century Mughal “Akbar Presiding over Discussions in the Iba- sophisticated inscriptions on his paintcourt, the painter Muhammad Zaman in datkhana,” From the Akbarnama (Book of ings. “Following court etiquette,” the exthe Safavid court of the late 17th cen- Akbar). Attributed to Narsingh Mughal, India, ca. hibit’s wall text explains, “the painter retury, and Sultan Mahmud I of the Ot- 1600–1603, opaque watercolor, ink and gold on ferred to himself as slave of the royal toman court from 1730 to 1754. household,” thereby emphasizing that paper.

Abu’l Fazl’s great achievement was “he was part of a service elite, a collecAkbarnama, a three-volume biography of the Emperor Akbar, tive bound to the shah that viewed service as a virtue.” whom he described as a protector of all subjects regardless of Shah Sulayman, Zaman’s patron for more than two religion and a spiritual guide working to foster brotherhood. decades, shared his fascination with the growing prestige of His Sunni-dominated court nurtured and reexamined regional Europe and its art. The churches of the large Armenian comcultural, religious, and intellectual traditions. munity of New Julfa just outside Isfahan were richly adorned Partly motivated by realpolitik, Akbar sought ways to rule a with illustrations from the Old and New Testaments. Although divergent population of Muslims, Hindus, Jains, Jews and the shah was disconcerted by figural displays in houses of Christians scattered across present-day India, Afghanistan and worship—so contrary to the prohibitions of Shi’i Islam—his enPakistan. He ordered the translation of many books from Santourage often toured the Armenian churches and commisskrit, including the Ramayana, the Indian epic of King Rama. In sioned paintings of the pre-Islamic prophets. absorbing other cultures and literatures, Akbar provided a rich Zaman took those Armenian images, as well as prints and new source of imagery, themes and stories for the Mughal artwork imported from Europe, and reinterpreted them for a court. To traditional Persian imagery was added the exotic Persian audience. In “Turktazi’s Visit to the Magical Garden of world of India. “Krishna Dancing on the head of Kaliya,” for exTurktaz,” for instance, the composition and the story are Perample, introduces themes from Indian myth and images modsian. But the fascination with light effects is entirely new. Claseled on Indian statuary. sical Persian book illustrations were self-consciously two-dimensional, the light was flat, and the emphasis was always Michael Keating is editor of The VVA Veteran. upon precision, beauty and clarity.

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MAMUD’S GUN PHOTO© THE WALTERS ART MUSEUM, BALTIMORE

© THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD, OR. 2265, FOL. 221V

In “Akbar Presiding over Discussions,” mentioned above, only the full moon tucked into the upper left-hand corner suggests a night scene.

Zaman replaces that classic clarity with the night’s moody shadows in “Turktazi’s Visit,” and introduces Western costumes and rounded, voluptuous trees and bodies.

Some works, like “The Return from the Flight into Egypt,” are fully realized in his new farangisazi (Europeanized) style. Others, like “Simurgh Assisting at the Birth of Rustam,” are a glorious mix. The Simurgh is classic Persian: beautiful yet ferocious, with sweeping, fantastic, multicolored tail feathers. The composition, too, is lyrically Persian. The story is from LEFT: “Turktazi’s Visit to the Magical Garden of Turktaz, Queen of the Fairies” From the Khamsa (Quintet) of Nizami Firdowsi’s Shahnama. Muhammad Zaman, dated AH 1086 (1675/76); RIGHT: “The Return from the Flight into Egypt” Muhammad Zaman But rather than a refined Isfahan, dated AH 1100 (1689), opaque watercolor, ink, and gold on paper.

Persian garden, the background is a rough mountain forest—modeled on European sioned a fabulous jeweled gun for himself (below) made of landscapes but a more suitable home for the wild Simurgh. The steel, wood, gold, silver, nephrite, diamonds, emeralds and figures are different as well: No longer slender and graceful as rubies. The gun had secret chambers for a dagger and writing the cypress, these are ample, heavy-bosomed women. instruments. He carried it often, and used it to underscore the The reign of Mahmud I is little remembered, perhaps bemilitary’s new reliance on firepower. The gun, built in 1732-33, cause his quarter-century rule was a period of calm and peace has yet to be fired. in a turbulent age. The luxury of peace, however, allowed him Each of these three Islamic states considered itself the cento pursue other luxuries, and he used his imperial wealth to inter of the universe, and the Walters exhibit honors that perspire artists to create works that projected the image of a spective. Each had the confidence, curiosity and intellectual mighty and glorious empire. rigor to examine, appropriate, and incorporate elements of culIn addition to being the patron of artists, Mahmud I also intures outside their own. Europe was too remote and of little invested in urban architecture and amassed impressive book colterest to the Mughals. But to the Safavids and the Ottomans, lections that he housed in new libraries. At the crossroads of the West was “the Other.” And they viewed that exotic culture Europe and Asia, he was fascinated by Eastern and Western with a mixture of curiosity, tantalization and dread—a sort of cultures alike—and apprehensive about both. His predecessor Occidentalism, if you will. had suffered a humiliating defeat by the Austrian Habsburgs, “Pearls on a String” will remain at Baltimore’s Walters Art and he was determined not to repeat that experience.

Museum until Jan. 31, and is free to the public. It will then So Mahmud I re-armed the Ottoman army in the new fashtravel to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, where it will ion, relying on firepower rather than swords. He commisbe on view from Feb. 26 to May 8, 2016. ❑

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WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

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HARVARD ART MUSEUMS/ARTHUR M. SACKLER MUSEUM, CAMBRIDGE, MA, GIFT OF JOHN GOELET (1966) IMAGING DEPT. © PRESIDENT & FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE

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Congress Watch

No Surprise: Congressional Likudniks Blame Palestinians for Violence in Israel

By Shirl McArthur

WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES

leading Israel-firster Rep. Ileana RosLehtinen (R-FL), “expressing concern over anti-Israel and anti-Semitic incitement within the Palestinian Authority,” but updated to include recent events. It was passed Nov. 2 by voice vote under “suspension of the rules.” When passed it had 72 co-sponsors, including RosLehtinen. Only Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) publicly opposed the measure, saying, “I oppose this resolution because any resolution that attacks one side while ignoring the other can only further tension and violence.”

The Senate measure was S.Res. 302, introduced by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) on Nov. 3. It passed by voice vote on Nov. 10. Being more recent, its main focus was “Palestinian terror attacks against Israelis.” When passed it had 69 co-sponsors, including Blumenthal.

Another resolution “condemning Palestinian incitement of violence” was Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Constitution, Civil H.Con.Res. 96, introduced by Rep. Rob Woodall (R-GA) on Nov. 19 with 11 coRights and Human Rights Subcommittee, Dec. 9, 2014. sponsors. fter their failure to scuttle the nuclear agreement with In introducing H.Res. 485 on Oct. 21, Rep. Martha McSally Iran, as described in the previous issue, congressional (R-AZ) went even further. The measure “expressing solidarity Likudniks and AIPAC turned their attention to trying to with the people of Israel in the wake of recent terrorist attacks lay sole blame for the ongoing violence in Israel on Palestinians and condemning the PA for inciting an atmosphere of vioand the Palestinian Authority. lence,” blames the PA and Palestinian leaders for “supporting Probably to demonstrate its continued political clout after its or allowing terrorist activities in Israel”—although none of the embarrassing defeat over the Iran agreement, AIPAC strongly attacks have been carried out with the support or backing of and successfully pushed three anti-Palestinian measures. Prethe PA. It then urges the president to “freeze U.S. funding to dictably, none of the three made any mention of the fact that the PA until their leaders openly increase efforts to end their there have been twice as many Palestinian as Israeli deaths incitement of violence.” It has 52 Republican co-sponsors, induring the violence, nor of the harsh and degrading actions of cluding McSally. None of the previous measures to cut aid to Israel’s government causing the humiliation and frustration drithe PA has made any progress. ving individual Palestinians to take desperate actions. AIPAC’s And after UNESCO’s Executive Board on Oct. 21 had the strongest effort was to get the most House signatures on the temerity to pass a resolution condemning Israel for the recent letter originated by Reps. Ed Royce (R-CA) and Eliot Engel (Dsurge in violence and blaming Israel for violating the status NY) to PA President Mahmoud Abbas. The letter, sent Nov. 5, quo of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, 19 Jewish House memexpressed concern “over the recent wave of Palestinian viobers, led by Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), immediately issued a lence” and urged the “PA to take concrete steps to avoid furstatement condemning the resolution, calling it “offensive and ther violence.” When sent, it had 369 signatures. incendiary.” On Oct. 22 Reps. Engel and Lois Frankel (D-FL) The other two measures strongly pushed by AIPAC were also wrote to Secretary of State John Kerry thanking him for the House and Senate resolutions condemning “the Palestinopposing the resolution. ian terror attacks against Israelis” and anti-Israel “incitement” Senate Letter Another Effort to Equate Israel’s

by PA officials and PA-controlled media outlets. The first was the previously described H.Res. 293, introduced in June by Colonies with Israel The European Union on Nov. 4 issued a directive saying that products coming from Israeli colonies on the West Bank and Shirl McArthur is a retired foreign service officer based in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. the Golan Heights could no longer be labeled “Made in Is-

A

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rael,â&#x20AC;? but must be labeled as coming from a â&#x20AC;&#x153;settlementâ&#x20AC;? in the territories.

This prompted a disingenuous (if not downright dishonest) Senate letter, initiated by Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), to the EUâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s High Representative for Foreign Affairs Frederica Mogherini complaining about the directive and urging her not to implement it. The letter, sent Nov. 9, makes no mention of Israelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s â&#x20AC;&#x153;settlementsâ&#x20AC;? but, instead, refers to â&#x20AC;&#x153;certain products made

by Israeli companies,â&#x20AC;? and claims the policy would â&#x20AC;&#x153;promote a de-facto boycott of Israel,â&#x20AC;? which it does not. Instead, what the letter does is represent another congressional effort to equate Israelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s colonies with Israel, contrary to longstanding U.S. policy. When sent the letter had 36 signatures, including Cruz and Gillibrand.

Hard-Liners Against Iran Agreement Continue Their Efforts to Sabotage It

With congressional failure to reject the Iran nuclear agreementâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s â&#x20AC;&#x153;Joint Comprehensive Plan of Actionâ&#x20AC;? (JCPOA), which (Advertisement)

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sets forth the timeline of events to implement the agreement, most of the previously described measures to scuttle it can be considered dead. However, some hard-liners continue to fight; some measures are still active and new anti-Iran measures have been introduced.

The previously described S. 1682, introduced in June by leading Iran hawks Sens. Mark Kirk (R-IL) and Robert Menendez (D-NJ), â&#x20AC;&#x153;to extend the Iran Sanctions Act of 1996 and to require the Secretary of the Treasury to report on the use by Iran of funds made available through sanctions relief,â&#x20AC;? still has four co-sponsors, including Kirk and Menendez.

The bills aimed at naming Iranâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a terrorist organization are still barely alive. Of the three, only H.R. 3646, introduced by Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) in September, has gained support. It now has 19 co-sponsors, including McCaul.

S. 2094, introduced by Cruz, and H.R. 3693, introduced by Rep. Ted Poe (RTX), still have no co-sponsors.

Three new anti-Iran measures were introduced. On Oct. 9 Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-VA), with 14 co-sponsors, introduced H.R. 3741, which would establish â&#x20AC;&#x153;in the legislative branch the Commission to verify Iranian Nuclear Compliance.â&#x20AC;? And on Oct. 8 Rep. David Schweikert (R-AZ) introduced H.R. 3728, which would remove presidential waiver authority regarding previously enacted sanctions regarding the provision of specialized financial messaging services to the Central Bank of Iran.

An indication that the fight against the JCPOA continues is H.Res. 500, introduced by Rep. Steve King (R-IA) on Oct. 28, expressing the sense of the House that â&#x20AC;&#x153;Israel has the right to defend itself against Iranian hostility and that the House pledges to support Israel in its efforts to maintain its sovereignty.â&#x20AC;? Among other things, it states that the JCPOA â&#x20AC;&#x153;substantially diminishes the security of Israel.â&#x20AC;? It has 42 Republican co-sponsors, including King.

After Iran conducted a long-range ballistic missile test on Oct. 8, at least three letters were sent to President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Kerry. In an Oct. 14 letter to Obama, Sens. Kelly Ayotte (RNH) and Kirk claimed that the test â&#x20AC;&#x153;heightens risks to Israel and the U.S.â&#x20AC;? Also on Oct. 14, eight senators, led by Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), wrote to Kerry seeking a determination on whether the test violated

an existing U.N. Security Council resolution. On Oct. 21, 11 Democratic senators, led by Cardin, wrote to Kerry expressing their concern and urging him to â&#x20AC;&#x153;consider unilateral and multilateral responsesâ&#x20AC;? to the test.

Senate Passes Hezbollah Financing Bill

As previously reported, back in May the House passed, under suspension of the rules, H.R. 2297 â&#x20AC;&#x153;to prevent Hezbollah and associated entities from gaining access to international financial and other institutions.â&#x20AC;? In June Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) introduced the similar S.1617.

Then, on Nov. 17 the Senate called up H.R. 2297, replaced its text with the text of S.1617, changed its title to â&#x20AC;&#x153;Hezbollah International Financing Preventionâ&#x20AC;? bill, and passed it by voice vote. It was returned to the House on Nov. 18, which likely will agree to the Senate amendment. When passed, S.1617 had 28 cosponsors, including Rubio.

Identical bills were introduced on Nov. 3 aimed at designating the Muslim Brotherhood a foreign terrorist organization.

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WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

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mcarthur_36-38_Congress Watch 12/10/15 6:25 PM Page 38

Status Updates

S. 1789, introduced in July by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), the Senate version of the House-passed U.S.-Jordan Defense Cooperation bill, was placed on the Senate Calendar Oct. 27, but no action has been taken. It has 20 co-sponsors, including Rubio.

S. 2009 and H.R. 3445 are identical bills prohibiting the U.S. from selling or transferring to Bahrain specified weapons until Bahrain has implemented all recommendations in the “Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry report.”

S.2009, introduced by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) in August, has gained a co-sponsor and now has four, including Wyden. H.R. 3445, introduced by Rep. Jim McGovern (DMA) in September, has gained 8 co-sponsors and now has 11, including McGovern.

H.J.Res. 57, introduced in June by Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI), a “constitutional” authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) against ISIS, still has no co-sponsors.

S. 1587, introduced in June by Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), AUMF against ISIS, still has two co-sponsors, including Kaine.

H.Res. 209, introduced in April by Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-IN) deploring “the actions of the Palestinian Authority to join the International Criminal Court,” still has 32 co-sponsors, including Walorski.

H.Res. 270, introduced in May by Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ), expressing “the sense of Congress regarding the Palestinian Authority’s purported accession to the International Criminal Court,” still has 12 co-sponsors, including Franks.

H.R. 1489, introduced in March by Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY), urging “the president to make every effort, in conjunction (Advertisement)

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with the government of Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and the international community, to establish an International Fund for Israeli-Palestinian Peace,” still has two co-sponsors, including Crowley.

BILLS TO MOVE THE U.S. EMBASSY TO JERUSALEM H.Con.Res. 62, introduced in July by Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), has gained 2 co-sponsors and now has 34, including Blackburn.

H.R. 114, introduced in January by Rep. Scott Garrett (R-NJ), still has 23 co-sponsors, including Garrett.

S. 117, introduced by Sen. Dean Heller (R-NV) in January, still has eight co-sponsors, including Heller.

BILLS OPPOSING THE BDS MOVEMENT H.Res. 402, introduced in July by Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA), has gained no co-sponsors and still has five, including Royce.

H.Res. 318, introduced in June by Rep. Carlos Curbelo (RFL), has gained 3 co-sponsors and now has 34, including Curbelo.

H.R. 2645, introduced in June by Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA), still has no co-sponsors.

H.R. 825, introduced in February by Rep. Peter Roskam (RIL), still has 70 co-sponsors, including Roskam.

S. 619, introduced in March by Sens. Benjamin Cardin (DMD) and Rob Portman (R-OH), has gained a co-sponsor and now has eight, including Cardin and Portman.

H.R. 1572, introduced in March by Rep. Doug Lamborn (RCO), still has 12 co-sponsors, including Lamborn.

—S.M.

S. 2230 was introduced by Cruz and has one co-sponsor. H.R. 3892 was introduced by Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) with six co-sponsors. Both bills claim that, since the Muslim Brotherhood has met the criteria for a foreign terrorist organization, the State Department should so designate it.

Ros-Lehtinen Introduces Bills to “Reform” the U.N., Neuter UNRWA

As mentioned in the previous issue, RosLehtinen introduced H.R. 3667 in October “to promote transparency, accountability, and reform within the U.N. system.” This long, far-reaching bill seems designed to render the U.N. ineffective.

A key provision to this end is one directing the president to use U.S. influence to shift funding for the regular U.N. budget from an assessed to a voluntary basis.

Among its several anti-Palestinian provisions, reflecting Ros-Lehtinen’s apparent allegiance to Israel, is one that would direct the administration to “withhold U.S. contributions from any U.N. entity that recognizes a Palestinian state or upgrades the status of the Palestinian observer mission at the U.N., the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Palestinian Authority, or any other Palestinian administrative organization or governing

WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

entity before achievement of a final peace agreement with Israel.”

Then on Oct. 26 she introduced H.R. 3829 specifically designed to eviscerate the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) because of its unforgivable sin of helping Palestinian refugees. It would withhold U.S. contributions to UNRWA until the State Department certifies that UNRWA has met a long list of unlikely conditions.

Given how extreme these bills are, it is not surprising that each of them has only two co-sponsors.

Bill Introduced Prohibiting Funds for Military Operations in Syria

On Nov. 4 Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM) and two co-sponsors introduced S. 2239, which would prohibit funds being made available “to the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, the National Security Agency, or any other U.S. agency or entity involved in intelligence activities for the purpose of, or in a manner which would have the effect of, supporting military or paramilitary operations in Syria.”

The other previously described Middle East-related measures have made little progress (see “Status Updates” box). ❑ JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

khan_39_Campus News 12/10/15 5:32 PM Page 39

Campus News

Anti-SJP/MSA Posters Found on DC, California Campuses

U

By Suhaib Khan

PHOTO COURTESY ARAM GHOOGASIAN/THE DAILY BRUIN

niversity campuses in “Whereas it is important to California and Washensure that our fellow Muslim ington, DC were plasand Palestinian students are tered with posters in early Noaware that we fully support vember that contained inflamthem and are behind them folmatory anti-BDS (Boycott, Dilowing these attacks,” exvestment, and Sanctions), antiplained the resolution.

SJP (Students for Justice in UCLA Dean of Students Palestine), and anti-MSA (MusMaria Blandizzi fiercely critilim Students’ Association) mescized Horowitz, saying, “As an sages. The posters, which inoutsider to our campus, percluded messages linking the haps Mr. Horowitz can resort MSA to al-Qaeda and BDS to to fear-mongering and allujihad, and labeling SJP as sions to ethnic stereotypes “Jew-haters,” were discovered without needing to live with on the campus of American the impact of his words,” she University in Washington, DC wrote. “But as Bruins we are and the University of California better than that. As Bruins, we at Los Angeles. recognize the need to engage According to UCLA’s Daily in compassionate debate and Bruin, similar posters were reasoned analysis without placed on the campus in April name-calling and demaby the David Horowitz Freegoguery.” dom Center, although Horowitz Replying to the accusations himself did not return calls for of Islamophobia, David comment regarding this recent Horowitz published an op-ed incident. He later took credit for in the Nov. 18 Daily Bruin, the campaign. saying he targeted SJP and One of the posters depicted the MSA because “both orgaa camouflage-clad child standnizations were created by ing next to a rifle with the capmembers of the Muslim Brothtion, “SJP: regardless of how erhood, the spawner of althey picture themselves, this is Qaida [sic] and the creator of who they really are.” On the UCLA students found copies of this poster on campus on the morning Hamas, and because their bottom of the poster was the of Nov. 12, 2015. campus political campaigns hashtag, “#StopTheJihadOnadhere chapter and verse to Campus.” Another poster depicted a hand with a knife stabbing the genocidal propaganda campaigns of Hamas.” As evithe Star of David, with the caption, “The real meaning of BDS: dence, he wrote that “Israel is not ‘occupied Palestine’ as boycott, divest, stab.” Both posters contained the hashtag Hamas and leaders of both campus groups claim.” Instead, he “#SJPJewHaters.” A third poster targeted the MSA, reading, argued, the state was created on land owned by the Turks.

“MSA Terrorist Anwar Al-Awlaki: President MSA Colorado Horowitz further alleged that the “Hamas-SJP-MSA campaign State.” (The U.S. Treasury Department named Al-Awlaki a against Israel is part of a jihadist campaign to ethnically global terrorist in 2010, and he was assassinated in a U.S. cleanse Jews and Christians from the Middle East.” drone strike on Sept. 30, 2011.)

In response, UCLA student and SJP member Felipe Bris In response, the American University Undergraduate SenAbejon replied in a Nov. 25 op-ed: “We firmly believe that witate unanimously passed a resolution “Condemning the Islamnessing the systematic oppression of the Palestinian people ophobic and anti-Palestinian Posters on Campus,” written colmakes it difficult for people to forget or feel comfortable being laboratively by Jordanian-American and Jewish-American stucomplicit in these crimes against humanity. In recent years, as dents George Khnouf and Haley Lickstein. awareness of the injustice of the Israeli occupation has been rising, so too have the instances of desperate attempts to conSuhaib Khan is communications director of the Washington Report on flate the secular organization SJP with violent religious ideoloMiddle East Affairs. gies.” ❑ JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

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gorvett_40-41_Talking Turkey 12/10/15 5:36 PM Page 40

Turkish Elections: Four More Years

Talking Turkey

By Jonathan Gorvett

ILYAS ASKENGIN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

For the first time, the HDP managed to overcome a 10 percent national vote threshold and swept the southeast of the country—the predominantly ethnic Kurdish region bordering Syria, Iraq and Iran.

There, the HDP’s main rival has long been the AKP, which began a program of public investment around cities such as Diyarbakir, the regional capital, soon after it first took national office back in 2002. This won it some support, particularly from more religious Kurds, whose region had suffered from decades of armed conflict between the Turkish military and the leftist Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK).

The AKP also began a “peace process” with the PKK that included dialogue with its imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan, and a cease-fire. Indeed, back in March, Ocalan had called for a Prominent Kurdish lawyer Tahir Elci (c) speaking just moments before his assassination, Nov. definitive end to the conflict and a future 28, 2015. Elci, president of the bar in Diyarbakir, was speaking at a gathering there when gun- in which Kurds and Turks would live men opened fire, shooting him in the head. He had been detained in October for alleged “ter- “within the Republic of Turkey…in peace, as sisters and brothers.” rorist propaganda.”

Yet, the peace process was always he surprise victory of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Develcontroversial, with many nationalist Turks and military men opopment Party (AKP) in November’s snap general elecposed. Support for it in Ankara also came under pressure from tion confirms that 2015 will not go down as a good year Kurdish successes across the border. for pollsters. Election results from Canada to the UK have conThere, with Kurdish peshmerga from northern Iraq going to founded expectations, with Turkey’s ballot also throwing out the the aid of the PKK-linked People’s Defense Committees forecasters.

(YPG) of northeastern Syria at Kobani and elsewhere, one of The election, widely expected to end in another draw (see Turkey’s oldest nightmares—a Kurdish state—appeared to be August 2015 Washington Report, p. 26), also confirms that becoming a reality.

2015 will not go down as a good year for opponents of Turkish This explains Ankara’s reluctance to support Kurds battling President Recep Tayyip Erdogan either, or of his AKP, now inISIS—although it also undermined support for the AKP in the stalled in office for another four-year term. southeast. Thus, in June, the HDP, led by the charismatic SeNovember’s parliamentary victory gave this conservative, Islahattin Demirtas (see p. 62) and his co-chair, Figen Yuklamist-oriented party 49.5 percent of the vote—just shy of its sekdag, made its major electoral breakthrough. Demirtas had 2011, best-ever result. Yet this triumph also came just five also made a successful appeal to liberal and left-leaning months after the AKP had put in its worst performance since Turks to support the HDP in order to head off their great fear: taking office in 2002. Indeed, when 2015’s first general electhat an AKP victory would lead to President Erdogan being tion was held back in June, voters had left the party without able to change the constitution and give himself executive enough seats to form a government. powers.

Much, therefore, had happened in those five months, with Thus, when the dust settled from the June ballot, the AKP the events of summer and autumn 2015 likely to shape the found itself unable to form a new government. The AKP’s actcourse of Turkish politics for many years to come. ing prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, then began an ultimately fruitless search for a workable coalition.

Strategies of Tension While these talks stumbled on, however, suicide bombers The June election saw the AKP lose many of its seats to the struck a peace rally in the southeastern town of Suruc in July, rising, pro-Kurdish, leftist Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). killing 33 people. The government blamed ISIS for the attack, while the PKK blamed the AKP. Soon after, two policemen Jonathan Gorvett is a free-lance writer based in Istanbul. were killed in an assassination first claimed, then denied, by

T

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JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

gorvett_40-41_Talking Turkey 12/10/15 5:36 PM Page 41

the PKK, which initially accused them of being connected to the bombing.

The response of the government to the policemenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s killings was rapid and massive. Turkish planes bombed PKK camps in northern Iraq, while the army and police staged arrests of suspected PKK members across Turkey. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The response was disproportionate,â&#x20AC;? says Nigar Goksel, the International Crisis Groupâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s chief Turkey analyst. Indeed, â&#x20AC;&#x153;The police killings were a trigger for a policy change by the government, which had been viewing growing PKK entrenchment in the southeast and its development of parallel structures, along with the Syrian gains of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), with increasing alarm.â&#x20AC;?

What followed was a rapid descent into hell for many in the southeast. Briefly, the military lost control of areas of Diyarbakir, Cizre and other towns, as youths and PKK fighters fought the Turkish army, which responded with sieges and air strikes.

Neighborhoods that only a few months earlier had been celebrating a political breakthrough were reduced to ruins.

As the death toll of Turkish soldiers mounted, initial anger at the warâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s restarting turned to anger by some against ethnic Kurds. HDP offices were attacked and further bombings took place. These culminated in Turkeyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s worst terrorist attack ever, when 102 people were killed in a double suicide bombing in Ankara, again at a peace rally, on Oct. 10.

Meanwhile, and against this background of conflict and tension, attempts to form a coalition government failed, with President Erdogan calling a fresh election for Nov. 1.

The AKP was thus able to campaign for that election on a very simple message: that the chaos enveloping the country

could only be ended by single-party rule. This also played to memories of the 1990s, when Turkey had been beset by unstable and weak coalition governments. â&#x20AC;&#x153;They used fear,â&#x20AC;? says Cengiz Aktar, a leading political analyst and professor at Istanbulâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Bahcesehir University. â&#x20AC;&#x153;People got afraid of conflict and the AKP kept saying that without single-party rule, the country would collapse. So people from all parties turned back to the AKP.â&#x20AC;?

This included former HDP voters. The pro-Kurdish party narrowly scraped over the 10 percent threshold in November, and now holds just 59 seats. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The cycle of violence was very bad for the HDP,â&#x20AC;? adds Goksel.

While, in contrast, the conflict may have been good for the AKPâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s vote tally, it now poses some major difficulties for the government. The violence in the southeast continues, albeit at a lower level, as winter sets in. Meanwhile, the election still failed to deliver the AKP the two-thirds parliamentary majority it needs to change the constitution and institute an executive presidencyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;although Erdogan is pushing hard for a referendum on the subject.

The greatest difficulties, however, may lie ahead for Turkeyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Kurds, now returned to an environment of violent conflict, and for Turkeyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s secular oppositionists, whose hopes in June that AKP rule might soon end have been comprehensively dashed. â&#x20AC;&#x153;There is a very bleak mood right now,â&#x20AC;? says Aktar. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Kurds are the Westâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sweethearts and have other optionsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; they might even be tempted by succession. But what about secular Turks? Where do we go now?â&#x20AC;? â?&#x2018;

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WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

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gee_42-43_Islam and the Near East in the Far East 12/10/15 9:33 PM Page 42

Islam and the Near East in the Far East

Religious Zealots, Islamophobes Share Similar, Unrepresentative Outlooks

By John Gee

ANDIKA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

land, and when the Zionist movement chose to settle Palestine, the fact that most of its inhabitants were Muslim was an irrelevance.

A survey of the conflicts in Asia where there was a Muslim presence shows how unfounded the polarizing views of the Islamophobe and Muslim extremist zealots are. It certainly discredits the idea of worldwide Muslim aggression.

In Muslim-majority Indonesia and Malaysia, there are certainly serious problems with growing intolerance, reflected in campaigns in 2015 to demolish unauthorized churches in Aceh, Indonesia, and calls for the imposition of syariah [shariah] law in Malaysia, but that’s only part of the story.

Groups of ISIS sympathizers exist, but they don’t have much popular support.

Some 800 Indonesians and 200 Malaysians are reported to have gone to Members of the Indonesian anti-terror police squad Densus 88 search houses in Kedire, on the fight in Syria, where Indonesians are outnumbered by Russian and French naisland of Java, after shooting dead a suspected Islamic militant, Jan. 16, 2015. tionals, and Malaysians by German, Belxtremists tend to feed off each others’ activities at the gian, Chinese and Dutch nationals. Last year, ISIS formed expense of the rest of humanity. Indeed, the views of Isthose who joined it into a Malay-speaking unit called Katibah lamophobes and those of ISIS, al-Qaeda and their coNusantara, which it then threw into action against Kurdish terthinkers are in many ways a mirror image of each other: The ritory in northern Syria. At least part of the reason for creating other guys have values that are alien to ours; they are out to dethe unit was the problem the Malay speakers had coping in an stroy our civilization; even when some of them seem reasonenvironment where they found it difficult to communicate both able, we must not trust them because, deep down, they’re all with the local Arabic speakers and with the thousands of other hostile to us; those who advocate coexistence and dialogue are foreigners who have joined ISIS—but the authorities in their weak-kneed appeasers/dupes who are letting themselves be home countries worry that this is a prelude to terrorist attacks used and betraying their people/faith. within their borders. Malaysia’s The Star newspaper reported Each side tries to portray itself as the victim who is merely in November that three wanted Malaysians who had gone into responding to the other side’s aggression. This involves taking hiding in the southern Philippines with the Abu Sayyaf terrorist a highly selective view of the world: focusing on situations group were planning to try to bring together a recognized where Muslims seem to be the aggressors/victims and disreSoutheast Asian section of ISIS. garding those that do not fit this worldview. It means seeing a The Indonesian and Malaysian governments and their secuconflict between Muslims generally and non-Muslims, where rity forces feel that the West does not fully appreciate their efthere actually may be only a very small number of unrepreforts to counter terrorism, but instead tends to focus on their sentative people, with grand claims, engaged in conflict. failings. Malaysian Deputy Home Minister Jazlan Mohamed It also involves recasting conflicts that may be mainly ecosaid in October that, since 2001, the authorities had arrested a nomic, social or national as religious. Palestine would be the total of 128 people linked to “jihad activities” in Iraq and Syria. prime case: this is a national conflict between an indigenous Indonesian prisons hold more than 250 people convicted of ofpeople and a settler colonial movement. The Palestinians fenses linked to terrorism. Plans were announced in November (Muslim and Christian) would have opposed any movement, to concentrate them in one prison and separate them accordregardless of religion, that sought to dispossess them of their ing to their degree of culpability and potential for rehabilitation; at present, they are dispersed among the general criminal popJohn Gee is a free-lance journalist based in Singapore, and the ulation, where some have tried to recruit new supporters. author of Unequal Conflict: The Palestinians and Israel.

The major Muslim political organizations in Indonesia—the

E

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JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

gee_42-43_Islam and the Near East in the Far East 12/10/15 9:33 PM Page 43

40 million-strong Nahdlatul Ulama and its rival, the Muhammadiyah, with 29 million members, both conservative in outlookâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; are opposed to terrorism in the name of Islam. The same is true of the major religious figures in Malaysia and of the Islamist parties in the two countries.

All of this hardly supports a â&#x20AC;&#x153;clash of civilizationsâ&#x20AC;? analysis, of any description.

In Myanmar, the treatment of the Rohingya Muslim minority did not receive any real discussion during the national election in November. When challenged to speak up for their rights while visiting Rakhine state, where most of them live, National League for Democracy (NLD) leader Aung San Suu Kyi was evasive.

This followed a campaign by an organization of militant Buddhist monks called the Patriotic Association of Myanmar to whip up anti-Muslim sentiment in advance of the elections and then brand the NLD as pro-Muslim. The NLD leader clearly did not want to jeopardize votes by appearing to take a stand in defense of the Rohingyasâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;or, indeed, having any Muslims among her candidates. Most of them could not have voted for her party in any case; nearly a million Rohingyas were disqualified from voting earlier in the year on the grounds that they could not prove that their families had been resident for a long time in Myanmar.

In neighboring Thailand, conflict between the central government, now in the hands of the military, and Muslim activists in the south who want to break away from the Thai state continues at a relatively low level. More than 6,500 people have been killed since 2004. Bangkok was shaken by a blast at the Erawan Buddhist shrine on Aug. 17 that killed 20 people. There were strong suspicions that this was a terrorist attack carried out in response to Thailandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s July 9 deportation to China of 109 Uighur asylum-seekers.

Beijing claimed that they were on their way to join ISIS. When the deportation was condemned by Washington and international human rights organizations, Prayuth Chan-ocha, the prime minister appointed by the military regime, claimed that Thailand simply could not afford to let them stay. After the Erawan JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

shrine bombing, the Thai government was at pains to deny that it was a terrorist attack; there was speculation among the public that it wanted to play down the incident to contain the damage to tourism.

China remains troubled by violence in Xinjiangâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;hence its interest in having the Muslim Uighur asylum seekers in Thailand returned. On Sept. 18, while the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region was being commemorated, assailants armed with knives carried out a nighttime attack at the Sogan coal mine, killing more than 50 people, mostly Han Chinese miners.

Despite reports from China that Uighur activists have gone to Syria, the conflict in Xinjiang remains one based on local factors, particularly resentment at the influx of Han Chinese settlers into the region.

In South Asia, since the election in India of Prime Minister Narendra Modiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s government, right-wing Hindus have put pressure on non-Hindu religious groups and challenged Indian secularism. In 2015, three secular intellectuals were killed and the government tried to introduce teaching a version of Indian history that matched the ideological values of the Hindu chauvinists. Predictably, in this atmosphere, Indian Muslims felt particularly under threat. Three were murdered following allegations that they had

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slaughtered and eaten cows, held to be sacred by many Hindus (although most poor and many secular Hindus also eat beef: India is the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s seventh largest beef-consuming country). In some areas, vigilante groups stopped vehicles, allegedly to check them for cattle or beef, but this made Muslims there feel like they were under siege.

In Bangladesh, four atheist bloggers were murdered by extremist Muslim activists last year. Hundreds of protesters took to the streets of the capital, Dhaka, to protest the governmentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s failure to arrest those responsible and deter future attacks. The protesters feel that their countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s tolerant norms are under attack from a small minority which the government chooses to appease.

For much of the latter part of 2015, the big issues for most Southeast Asians had no discernible connection to religion: they were the haze problem that arose from the burning of forest and peatland in Indonesia, and the simmering crisis over possession of tiny islands and shoals in the South China Sea that pits China against Vietnam and the Philippines, in particular.

The world really is a more complex place than the Islamophobe and Muslim zealots recognize and it is still mainly populated by people who are resistant to their polarizing visions. â?&#x2018;

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,PSURYLQJ /LYHV WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

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activisms_44-66_January/February 2016 12/9/15 10:53 AM Page 44

Arab American Activism

44

(L-r) Ramallah Governor Laila Ghannam with CPAO executive board members Samiah Bahhur and Dr. and Mrs. Hanna Hanania. vice to Our Country” will be featured at the Pentagon for a year. The AANM is accredited by the American Alliance of Museums, a rare honor. It also is an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution and a founding member of the Immigration and Civil Rights Network of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience.

Amid the displays of historic Omani artifacts and dazzling traditional dress, ACCESS director Hassan Jaber and deputy director Maha Freij joined Ambassador Al-Mughairy and former U.S. Ambassador to Morocco Ed Gabriel [a founding member of the American Task Force for Lebanon] in welcoming guests. Animated conversation, Arabic music and food, and traditional abundant hospitality enhanced this signature event.

porting our struggle for independence and sovereignty.

“We can’t continue to whine and cry.

It’s time to do something about it. Every election we talk about what we can do.

It’s time to stop talking and do it. Be an integral part of both societies,” Areikat urged. “Be a proud American but also be proud of the culture, religion and place where you come from—Palestine.”

After remarks by numerous speakers, including Rateb Rabie, president of the Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation, Dr. Laila Ghannam, governor of Ramallah and Al-Bireh addressed the audience. The first woman (and youngest) governor gave a sobering update on the formidable obstacles facing Palestinians.

For more information, please visit <www.coalitionofpao.org>.

—Delinda C. Hanley

Arab American National Museum: The First Decade

Friends, donors and dignitaries gathered on Nov. 10 in Washington, DC to celebrate the Arab American National Museum’s 10th anniversary at the elegant, state-of-the-art Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center under the auspices of the Sultanate of Oman’s ambassador to the U.S. Hunaina Al-Mughairy.

Museum director Devon Akmon highlighted the Dearborn, MI-based museum’s first decade of exhilarating milestones, national recognition for its stellar programs, and unique exhibits, and announced that the acclaimed “Patriots & Peacemakers: Arab Americans in Ser-

WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

PHOTO COURTESY TONY POWELL IMAGES

The Coalition of Palestinian American Organizations (CPAO) held its first dinner gala on Nov. 15 at the Westin Tysons Corner hotel in Virginia. Members have met every six months for the past three years to form a coalition of organizations and discuss ways to advance the agenda of Palestinian Americans. CPAO will address the concerns of the PalestinianAmerican community and support initiatives and projects. The coalition will also work to fundamentally change U.S. foreign policy in support of a free and independent Palestinian state.

For decades members of the diaspora from one city or village in Palestine gathered in Jordan, North America or sometimes the West Bank for social events.

As a new umbrella organization, CPAO will for the first time unify 20 organizations, including the American Federation of Ramallah, the Bethlehem Association, Nablus Society, Mikhmas, Lifta, Al Tayba, Betein, Tormus Aya, Beir Lahia, Al Tayba, Betein, Tormus Aya, Khalil Al Rahman, Nablus, Colonia, Deir Dibwan and Bait Laqya associations.

Dr. Hanna Hanania, a CPAO executive board member, urged Palestinians to unite and work together to help people back in their homeland by raising funds for scholarships and clinics. He said CPAO also seeks to help Americans of Palestinian descent do a better job reaching out to their fellow Americans, and “telling who we are and explaining our cause.” After all, Hanania said, “freedom, liberation and democracy for Palestinians are consistent with American values.” Finally, CPAO will try to counter the tremendous influence the Israel lobby has on U.S. foreign policy.

Early the next morning CPAO held a Palestinian advocacy day on Capitol Hill with the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC). “Advocacy shouldn’t be just once a year,” Hanania said. “It should be a habit—a continuing process—working with ADC, the Arab American Institute and others to encourage voter registration, voting, volunteering for campaigns and running for office.”

Palestinian Ambassador Maen Rashid Areikat praised CPAO, saying the organization “will make my own job easier. It gives me strength to see this gathering...a community standing with us sup-

Ambassador Hunaina Al-Mughairy (l) and Kathleen Ridolfo, director of the Qaboos Center.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

STAFF PHOTO D. HANLEY

New Coalition Unites Palestinian Diaspora Community

STAFF PHOTO D. HANLEY

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Members of the audience join the Wishah dancers after the Turaath performance.

From the day it opened on May 5, 2005, the museum has been an international destination venue. Its current special exhibit features St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital founder Danny Thomas. All are welcomed to visit Dearborn and learn about these great Arab Americans.

—Ruth Ann Skaff

Palestine’s Wishah Popular Dance Troupe Headlines Turaath

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) and the Coalition of Palestinian American Organizations (CPAO) joined together to produce the fifth annual “Turaath: Celebrating Arab Culture in America” on Nov. 22 at the Lincoln Theatre in Washington, DC. This year’s Turaath program featured spirited “Steps and Melodies from the Arab World,” by a Palestinian national treasure, the Wishah Popular Dance Troupe. The troupe was established in 2003 by a group of Palestinian students who passionately believe in the arts as an effective tool to preserve and promote culture.

The Wishah perfomance featured music and folkloric dance from Palestinian as well as other Arab traditions. Their dances traced wedding traditions including meetings between the families, henna night, wedding eve dances for the groom’s family and friends, and a song by the bride before leaving her family home.

Musical performances included a song for Palestinian prisoners, a medley describing the Palestinian struggle against the Israeli occupation, and another describing the Arab history of Jerusalem.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

Luci Murphy sang “Palestine,” an inspiring solidarity song written by Matt Jones.

The extraordinary music and dance lifted the spirits of Arab Americans and their friends, many of whom brought the whole family to celebrate a rich and diverse culture.

—Delinda C. Hanley

Music & Arts

San Francisco’s Arab Film Festival Inspires, Educates

From Oct. 16–25, in venues in San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland, the 19th annual Arab Film Festival screened some 50 features, documentaries and shorts from 24 countries. The festival opened to a capacity crowd at San Francisco’s Castro Theater, where the audience enjoyed “From A to B,” Ali Mostafa’s entertaining tale of three longtime male friends on an overdue self-described pilgrimage from Abu Dhabi to Beirut.

For the second year the festival offered an evening of classic Arab cinema. As a tribute to the late Egyptian superstar Omar Sharif, “Ayamna El Helwa” screened at Oakland’s Grand Lake Theatre.

Other highlights included: • “Haunted,” Syrian-based Liwaa Yazji’s documentary gem which provides a rare glimpse into the innermost feelings of her countrymen forced to flee their homes amidst the raging civil war.

The dangers of filming in an area rife with shelling, missile attacks, snipers and checkpoints did not allow for a crew or state-of-the-art equipment, ultimately

producing a gritty quality which added to the authenticity of the footage.

Everyone interviewed expressed a sense of disillusionment. “I thought my life in Damascus would go on forever,” said one young man who was considering returning to his native Golan Heights, now under Israeli control.

Some of the interviewees were Palestinians who had a long history of being forced from their homes by war and occupation. One family described moving from Jaffa to Jerusalem, then to Amman, Beirut and then the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus. “The Syrians will now share the pain of the Palestinians, of all refugees,” a family member from the camp noted.

All spoke of the trauma of packing a lifetime of possessions: a silver souvenir from a 1978 trip to Madrid, a favorite jacket, silver, china, deeds to homes and educational diplomas. “It’s not easy to leave everything behind and become like a feather in the wind,” said one interviewee.

An elderly gentleman who had escaped the rocket attacks outside Damascus and found refuge in an abandoned prison in Lebanon’s Bakaa Valley lamented losing the only photo of his deceased son and, without it, possibly forgetting how his son looked.

“I swear the world is ending here,” said another Syrian forced to flee his home.

“Killing people is the goal of both sides.”

• “The Wanted 18,” a joint Palestinian-Canadian-French animated documentary which, in 75 minutes, uniquely, clearly and succinctly presents one chapter of Israel’s nearly 70-year illegal occupation of Palestine.

The film tells of the efforts of Beit Sahour residents during the 1987 intifada to boycott Israeli products—along with their practice of not paying taxes to their occupiers—and become, in some form, self-sufficient. In order to produce milk for their community, they purchased 18 cows from an Israeli kibbutz and began operating their own small-scale dairy.

The directors, Canadian Paul Cowan and Palestinian Amer Shomali, skillfully interweave interviews of first-hand participants in the project with archival footage, re-enactments, drawings and four adorable cartoon cows.

In addition to recounting the Beit Sahour residents’ civil resistance to the illegal occupation, the documentary brings to light the senseless cruelty of the Israeli military against nonviolent Palestinian citizens by fatally shooting 22-year-

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old Anton Shomali (see July 1992 Washington Report, p. 38) and the total absurdity of the Israelis’ actions when the military uses two helicopters in addition to house-to-house searches to search for the errant cows. The Israeli military governor justifies the search by proclaiming, “The cows are dangerous for the security of the state of Israel.”

“The Wanted 18” is Palestine’s submission to the 88th Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film.

• “The Living of the Pigeons,” one of five short films, collectively titled “Visions,” shown at an Oct. 21 screening co-hosted with AFF by San Francisco State University’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative (AMED) and Cinema Studies.

Director Baha’ Abu Shanab’s film was among the audience’s favorites because of its honest telling of the condition of many Palestinians’ lives. The 17-minute documentary offers a shocking portrayal of the stark daily reality of Palestinian workers trying to pass through the filthy concrete and barbed wire heavily-guarded checkpoint from Bethlehem to Jerusalem.

The men interviewed describe their feelings at having to endure the degrading and inhumane experience in order to provide for their families. Arriving in the pre-dawn hours, when the weather is especially cold and miserable in the winter months, they return late at night to reverse the ritual. Under the unwavering scrutiny of Israeli soldiers, the workers have no rights.

Abu Shanab received an associate diploma in documentary film production from Dar al-Kalima University College of Arts and Culture in Bethlehem in 2015.

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The film won Best Documentary at the 2015 Zayed University Middle East Film Festival in Abu Dhabi. —Elaine Pasquini

“The Wanted 18” Also In DC

The Washington National Cathedral held a Nov. 18 screening of “The Wanted 18,” a film that takes a fresh look at the first intifada through the story of the West Bank village of Beit Sahour’s resistance to Israeli occupation during those difficult years. Combining stop-motion, home video footage and re-enactment of the events, the films focuses on four cows— all of which had Jewish names and memorable personalities—bought by the villagers from an Israeli kibbutz and their role in the effort to resist food dependence on Israel. Because Beit Sahour managed to achieve a degree of self-sufficiency with the help of Rivka, Ruth, Lola and Goldie, Israel declared the cows a threat to its security, forcing the villagers to devise creative ways to hide the cows and continue their milk production.

The troublesome cows.

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Director Amer Shomali was present at the screening and spoke at length with audience members, some of whom were from Beit Sahour and witnessed the events chronicled in “The Wanted 18.”

He also discussed the relationship between resistance, art and community.

“I always had a feeling that the West, in general, is not ready yet to listen to Palestinians, so maybe they are ready to listen to cows,” he commented. “It’s easier to sympathize with a cow than a Palestinian, so let’s give the cows a voice to tell the story. And while you listen to the cows, you get to know what it feels like to live under the occupation. So we tried to get three cows to act in the film, and they kept saying ‘moo,’ so we had to animate those cows eventually.”

Shomali, who currently lives in Ramallah, said that the film’s footage of the first intifada was collected from home videos donated to the filmmakers, rather than news footage. The process of shooting the film actually became a form of community building, he said, in which residents of Beit Sahour acted out scenes from the time either as themselves or as their parents, and assisted the filmmakers in any way they needed.

“In a second, all of Beit Sahour turned out to be like a big Hollywood studio, the whole town” Shomali recalled. “For the Canadian crew, it was a big surprise.

“We wanted to shoot the [final] demonstration from a camera among the demonstrators, because visually the demonstration is shot from a camera behind the soldiers for the journalists. So the camera will be behind the soldiers and the Palestinians will be throwing stones at you, the audience. So we wanted the camera to be among the demonstrators to give the audience the feeling that they are among the Palestinians at this point.”

In order to get the extras necessary to shoot such a demonstration, Shomali called in to a radio show to request the residents of Beit Sahour to come act in a staged demonstration. In response, he said, hundreds of Palestinians of all ages turned up.

The troublesome cows caused controversy in 2015 as well. According to Haaretz, Israeli Culture Minister Miri Regev has PHOTO COURTESY “THE WANTED 18” INDIEGOGO TRAILER

(L-r) Arab Film Festival programming associate Alex Farrow, artistic director Deana Nassar, filmmaker Liwaa Yazji and executive director Serge Bakalian.

STAFF PHOTO E. PASQUINI

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LA Screens Powerful Documentary “Little Gandhi”

“Little Gandhi: The Lost Truth of The Syrian Uprising” is a documentary about the revolution that began in 2011. Directed by Sam Kadi, it covers the life of Syrian peace activist Ghiyath Matar. The film was screened on Nov. 1 at AMC Orange 30 under the co-sponsorship of Syrian American Council-Los Angeles and the Rahma Relief Foundation.

In the spring of 2011, sparked by peaceful protests in the southern city of Daraa, Syria joined the Arab Spring revolutions. The city of Darayya, outside Damascus, became the center of the protests, and here Matar became famous for carrying flowers and water to every anti-regime demonstration and giving them to the Syrian soldiers there just to be nice.

Matar was arrested in the first six months of the uprising and tortured to death. The government forbade his family from holding a public burial for Matar, but they nevertheless held an aza’ (wake) at their home, attended by U.S. ambassador to Syria Robert Ford.

Despite the risks that award-winning director Kadi faced, he was determined to be authentic and film only in Darayya. The documentary took him two and a half years to make, and was complicated by the fact that the government had destroyed all Matar’s possessions.

A post-screening panel discussion included director Kadi, Jay Abdo (who has a sizable role in Nicole Kidman’s movie “The Queen of the Desert”) and Abdo’s wife, attorney Fadia Afashe. They answered all questions from the more than 200 people in attendance.

“Ghiyath Matar is not dead,” asserted Afashe, to which Abdo added, “Matar moved the Syrian people when he was alive and in his death.”

—Samir Twair JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

“Little Gandhi” director Sam Kadi.

Columbia Launches Palestine Library Series

Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies launched a new series, The Palestine Library, to give authors an opportunity to talk about their most recent books. To inaugurate the series, Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies and Co-Director of the Center, moderated an Oct. 6 discussion with Dr. Steven Salaita about his just-published Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom (available from AET’s Middle East Books and More).

In 2014, Salaita resigned a tenured position at Virginia Tech to accept a tenured appointment in the American In-

STAFF PHOTO J. ADAS

established a special task force to screen the film (in addition to other films) to decide if it violates Israeli law before it is screened at the International Festival on Nakba and Return. The filmmakers also were invited to screen the film at the 48 mm festival in Tel Aviv, and accepted on the condition that they be allowed to show the film in Jaffa rather than at the Tel Aviv Cinemathèque.

Shomali was prevented from appearing at a June screening of the film at the Human Rights Watch Festival in New York because Israeli officials would not allow him to travel to Jerusalem to obtain a U.S. visa.

—Suhaib Khan

STAFF PHOTO S. TWAIR

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dian Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. That summer, Salaita tweeted scathing comments about Israel’s “Protective Edge” assault on Gaza that some in the U. Illinois community deemed to be “uncivil” and antiSemitic. On Aug. 2, as he was preparing to move to Illinois with his wife and son, Salaita received a letter of termination from Chancellor Phyllis Wise. Stunned, he called a lawyer friend, who advised him to keep his mouth shut. Salaita learned how brutal it is to be unable to respond to nasty insults; therefore, he said, he began writing to preserve his sanity. His essays, written at different stages and in various moods of a tumultuous year, comprise Uncivil Rites.

Salaita began his book talk by apologizing for “inherent self-indulgence. I am not the first person on or off campus to get in trouble for criticizing Israel,” he acknowledged, “and won’t be the last.” Beyond personal redress, Salaita urged addressing the conditions that led to his firing: the corporatization of universities that leads to viewing them as consumer enterprises, increasing reliance on expendable adjunct professors, orchestrated pressure campaigns from big-time donors, and viewing political activism as a failure of civility.

Khalidi added another factor: the misuse of tenure. “If you have the right to academic freedom, you have the obligation to exercise it,” he stated. In response to a request for advice to untenured young scholars of marginalized identity, Salaita recommended being “hyperaware of your positionality within a

Steven Salaita (l) and Rashid Khalidi.

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architect, but suddenly “people in Syd- are strong and weak, superstitious and ney, Australia were talking about my skeptical, flamboyant and prim. Abulmother-in-law. My dog Noura became hawa reported that one reader exfamous.” She wrote a second book, pressed surprise that “these women are Nothing to Lose But Your Life, about all so different.” Abulhawa assured her Palestinians working illegally in Israel. that “our society spans the spectrum of Both were fun to write, Amiry said, but humanity”—not all Arab women are her most recent book was difficult. pious, and Palestinians are not limited to Golda Slept Here is about how four being victims or threats. people are dealing in different ways with Abulhawa concluded by saying, the personal losses of their family homes “Everything has been taken from us. in West Jerusalem, which, she noted, was What we have left is our voice, our narraan Arab neighborhood. Amiry saw an ac- tive.” She acknowledged that she “feels tual street map that has in Hebrew “You protective when others step in to narrate are here” and in Arabic “You were here.” our wound for us.” Therefore she hopes Amiry asked us to imagine walking out that what we read about Palestine is acof your house and never returning. She tually written by Palestinians. writes about the Baramki house, which —Jane Adas Israel seized in 1948. Andoni Baramki, who was a leading architect, took his Ghada Karmi on Return case to court and won, but because he Dr. Ghada Karmi launched her East was designated a “present absentee,” he Coast book tour for Return: A Palestinian could not even buy his own house—that Memoir with an Oct. 30 appearance at he himself had designed and built. His the Palestine Center in Washington, DC. Pointing to the cover of her latest son Gabriel, who was president of Birzeit University, was only able to visit his book, the author of In Search of Fatima house as part of the ticket-buying gen- noted that the image of hands holding a eral public when it opened as the Mu- key has become a Palestinian icon.

When forced to flee their homes, she exseum of Understanding.

Amiry said she was honored to be with plained, “They kept their front door Abulhawa, “a genuine writer,” while de- key”—and, nearly seven decades after scribing herself as a hakawati, a teller of their dispossession, still do.

While it is not fashionable to talk about stories. Therefore Amiry never revises a manuscript, whereas Abulhawa’s latest the right of Palestinians to return to their book went through more than a hundred homes, Karmi said, she emphasized that drafts. Abulhawa was born to Palestinian it is the fundamental cause of the Palesrefugees from Jerusalem. She is the tinian-Israeli conflict.

Now a British citizen living in London, founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, dedicated to the Right to Play for Pales- Karmi applied for a position funded by tinian children living under military occu- the U.N. Development Program to enpation and in refugee camps. It was after able Palestinians to work with the Palesshe had been in Gaza to build play- tinian Authority in Ramallah. In 2005 she grounds that she decided to anchor her accepted a three-month assignment as a media consultant to the PA Ministry of next book in Gaza.

The Blue Between Sky and Water is a Media and Communications, where she wonderful novel, in the literal sense of unwittingly walked into the middle of inthe word. There are jinns and time travel, but “the book allows for explanation.” It focuses on generations of women in Gaza from before the Nakba to the present. One major male character is Khaled, who has developed “Locked-in Syndrome.” He is aware, but cannot move or communicate verbally.

Abulhawa said the “blue” is his timeless space, and it is his voice that opens every chapter. The women Dr. Ghada Karmi.

STAFF PHOTO DELINDA HANLEY

given structure and mindful of people close to home. When speaking about human rights, someone will be punished.

If you are unable to be that person, it is prudent to hang back. You can do good work without being in the spotlight.”

Salaita is currently teaching at the American University of Beirut. He admitted that it is liberating to teach in a place where there are no Zionists, and therefore no need to self-censure or to preface every remark with “I renounce terrorism.” Although “it feels good to say I am an academic again,” the position is for one year only. He finds the lack of security that tenure affords frustrating, but this is what adjuncts deal with all the time.

Last November Salaita successfully sued the University of Illinois to compel them to release all records relating to his termination. As a result, Chancellor Wise and the Provost, Ilesanmi Adesida, were forced to resign. On Nov. 12, a month after this talk, a second breach of contract lawsuit was settled out of court.

The University of Illinois will pay Salaita $875,000, but will not reinstate the job offer and has admitted no wrongdoing.

In January 2015, Librarians and Archivists for Palestine inaugurated a onemonth national reading campaign focusing on a single book: Susan Abulhawa’s novel, Mornings in Jenin. For January 2016, they have chosen Suad Amiry’s Sharon and My Mother-in-Law. The two authors discussed their latest books (all available from AET’s Middle East Books and More) with Khalidi on Oct. 19, under the auspices of The Palestine Library.

Amiry is a prize-winning architect who, in 1991, founded and directed The Riwaq Centre for Architectural Preservation, tasked to identify and rehabilitate beautiful but decaying or war-damaged Arab properties. Khalidi noted that Amiry did what is too rare in the Arab world: she voluntarily stepped down, allowing for new leadership. Amiry said she became an architect for two reasons. She never saw her father’s house in Jaffa.

Able only to imagine it, she has spent much of her life making architectural models of it and all the lost houses in Palestine. Second, she is dyslexic. She therefore never expected to become an author. It happened accidentally.

In 2002, while under 44 days of curfew during Israel’s invasion of the West Bank, Amiry sent out e-mails. These became her first book, Sharon and My Mother-in-Law. She had received little international attention as a distinguished

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Gallery Al-Quds and the Garden of Eden

From Nov. 6 to Dec. 18, the Jerusalem Fund Gallery Al-Quds in Washington, DC hosted “At Home in the Garden of Eden: An American Family in the Middle East,” a multimedia installation exploring the history of one American family’s 166-year engagement with the Middle East.

Artist Ammanda Seelye and videographer Kate Seelye use paintings, mixed media collages, super-8 video and archival material to tell the story of a rich and evolving relationship between AmerJANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

1989, after only 17 days in office, described the difficult period that Lebanon is currently undergoing. With the burden of two million Syrian refugees at a cost of over $7 billion up until now, Lebanon’s internal social balance is threatened. “This sudden overpopulation is affecting every imaginable sector: the economy, health, education, safety and infrastructure,” she said.

Moawad stressed the importance of giving back to Lebanon during this challenging time.

“We have to help people Ammanda and Kate Seelye’s great-grandmother on horseback. live a decent life in Lebanon,” she stated. ica and the Arab world. Letters and pho- With the help of the U.S. Agency for Intertographs evoke the long-ago era of mis- national Development (USAID) and a few sionaries and teachers in the 1800s, to the European Union- and French-funded promulti-cultural, multi-religious establishment grams, RMF was able to implement muof major educational institutions such as nicipality projects as well as “reinforce the American University of Beirut, through women and children’s empowerment, and latter-day diplomatic exchanges and pre- children enrollment in schools through sent-day journalism and scholarship.

[RMF’s] technical Institute.”

Their artistic interpretation of this hisMoawad presented this year’s Distintorical material opens a conversation guished Lifetime Achievement Award to about America’s changing connections, three Lebanese deans who teach at presperceptions and actions in today’s Mid- tigious colleges in the U.S.: Amale Andle East. On opening night, Ammanda draos, dean of the graduate school of ArSeelye, who lives and works as an artist chitecture, Planning, and Preservation at in New York, and Kate Seelye, presently Columbia University; Rodolphe Elsenior vice president of the Middle East Khoury, dean of the school of Architecture Institute, both addressed a large audi- at the University of Miami; and Hashim ence of diplomats, scholars, journalists Sarkis, dean of the School of Architecture and Middle East hands. and Planning at the Massachusetts Insti—Dagmar Painter tute of Technology (MIT). The three recipients, who all studied in Lebanon, have Rene Moawad Foundation Honors achieved tremendous success in the U.S. Three Deans and around the world.

The Friends of the Rene Moawad FounIn their remarks, El-Khoury, Andraos dation (RMF) held their 22nd annual ben- and Sarkis stressed the important work efit gala on Oct. 23 at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Washington, DC. The proceeds from this year’s gala were allocated to RMF’s vocational school, which provides alternative education as well as healthcare services to the needy. Master of ceremonies, former Congressman Nick Rahall (D-WV), briefly described RMF’s work, which focuses on human, social and economic development in Lebanon.

Nayla Moawad, the country’s former first lady and founder of the Rene Moawad Foundation, named after the former presi- Honorees (l-r) Dean Hashim Sarkis, Dean dent who was assassinated Nov. 22, Rodolphe El-Khoury and Dean Amale Andraos.

PHOTO COURTESY RENE MOAWAD FOUNDATION

tense bureaucratic infighting, and thus received a hostile reception.

Karmi described Ramallah as “absolutely littered with NGOs,” none of which “make the slightest difference.”

While they do provide a salary and interesting assignment to their employees, Karmi objected to Palestinians being “the objects of study and assignments.”

She found life in Ramallah to be like living in a bubble, with its pretend politics and pretend sovereignty, when in fact, Karmi pointed out, “Israel is sovereign.”

Nevertheless, she confessed, “After a while, I started to believe in the fantasy as well. I got sucked in as if it were real.”

The seeming normality of Ramallah abruptly ends, however, when one tries to leave—and is confronted by an Israeli military checkpoint.

But Karmi was determined to see the “tragic reality” that underlies the Ramallah bubble, and visited as many Palestinian cities as she could, as well as the Gaza Strip on the eve of Israel’s unilateral withdrawal. In the face of the Israeli occupation—“so wanton, so cruel”—she found Palestinians becoming increasingly disheartened. “And who can blame them?” Karmi asked.

Only when she visited Jordan’s largest refugee camp, home to 100,000 Palestinians, did she find an “atmosphere and spirit of determination,” where people still spoke of returning to their homeland. The camp was “a corner of Palestine that still lived on,” Karmi said, in “islands of memory. It was such an uplifting experience.”

Toward the end of her “return” to Palestine, the Jerusalem native said she “started to doubt that the right of return would happen.” But without it, Karmi reiterated, “Palestinian injustice would never cease.”

Both Return and In Search of Fatima are available from AET’s Middle East Books and More.

—Janet McMahon

PHOTO COURTESY JERUSALEM FUND

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that RMF does and the role of education in transforming nations. “Actions, however modest, can transform lives,” ElKhoury said. “With education and opportunity, we can win the struggles of a better Lebanon." Sarkis added that by working together, a lot of things can be achieved. “Between our complexity and collaboration, we can change the course of architecture education,” he stated.

The Dedicated Service Award was presented to Palestinian-American Deya’ Leonard Dresner, the executive director and founder of the Leonard Education Organization (LEO). Saying she’s taken up her father’s educational values (Dr. Graham Leonard was a traveling Harvard fellow who lived in the Middle East for 35 years), Dresner hopes to empower extraordinary Palestinian youth through undergraduate college scholarships in U.S. institutions. In order to foster future leaders and prepare them for a sustainable future, Dresner takes a holistic approach through “mentoring, internship placement, assistance with graduate school and start-up funding.”

After presenting the awards, Moawad said that the honorees are the kind of people that “exemplify the Lebanon that we are striving for.”

—Rina Abd El Rahman

Dr. Jackson, the King Faisal Chair of Islamic Thought and Culture at USC and considered one of the top 10 experts on Islam in America, went on to say that “We Muslims should focus on the credibility gap for blaming Muslims for any violent act in our society.”

Whatever happened in Paris shouldn’t be held against American Muslims, Dr. Jackson emphasized. When the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or al-Qaeda does something, it should be attributed to them, not to our peaceful Muslims here at home. Jackson urged Muslims to speak out and say, “These acts by these groups don’t represent us.”

As early as 1996, Jackson wrote a book titled Islamic Law and the State, in which he pointed out the similarities between the extremists of the world and the Islamophobes of the U.S. “Muslims condemned the assassination of President Anwar Sadat of Egypt by the Jama’a Islamiya at that time,” Jackson noted, “and we should condemn what happened in Paris yesterday. It’s time for Muslims and non-Muslims to join in partnership in the fight against extremism anywhere and everywhere.”

Honored at the banquet was Dr. Suzanne Barakat, whose brother Deah Barakat was murdered by a gun-toting neighbor in Chapel Hill, NC. Prior to her residency, Dr. Barakat worked at a makeshift polyclinic serving 20,000 refugees along the Turkey-Syria border.

CAIR-LA executive director Hussam Ayloush announced that there are 30 new chapters of CAIR nationwide. This year, he added, 500 Muslims from California joined the Muslim Advocacy Week at the Capitol in Sacramento.

—Pat McDonnell Twair

Muslim American Activism

CAIR-LA Keynote Speaker Addresses Paris Attack

“What happened in Paris yesterday is our duty as Muslims to condemn,” Prof. Sherman Jackson of the University of Southern California (USC) told the more than 2,000 Muslim Americans in attendance Nov. 14 at the Anaheim Hilton Hotel for the annual fund-raiser of the Council on American-Islamic Relations-Los Angeles (CAIR-LA).

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STAFF PHOTO SAMIR TWAIR

Dr. Sherman Jackson.

MAS Speakers Examine Struggles in the Arab World

The Muslim American Society (MAS) held its 18th annual meeting Nov. 29 at the Ontario Convention Center in Southern California. More than 1,000 delegates gathered to hear Tunisia’s former president, Mohamed Moncef Marzouki; former Egyptian parliamentarian Dr. Abdul Mawgoud Al Dardery; chairman of American Muslims for Palestine, Dr. Hatem Bazian; director of the Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies Dr. Radwan Ziadeh; and Dr. Kadoor Al Saeedi of the Libyan Party of Justice and Development.

The struggle for freedom continues in the Arab world, Marzouki said. “We need to evolve from the tribal stage to the

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Immediate past president of Tunisia Mohamed Moncef Marzouki.

modern state. Gaza is the issue today and we need to lift the siege of it now.”

He smiled when an audience member commented: “I admire you more as past president than as president, because you are the only former Arab president alive."

“The Arab revolution just started,” replied Tunisia’s former president, “and it will take 20 to 30 years for it to come out with results and real change, like other peoples' revolutions."

According to Dr. Al Dardery, “The story of Egypt is not the story of the pyramids, it is the story of the oppressors and the oppressed. The mission of all messengers of God was to stop oppression and establish justice on earth. We learned elections from the British, and ‘give me liberty or give me death’ from the Syrians." [The Syrians learned from Patrick Henry and were chanting that saying in Arabic during their early peaceful demonstrations in 2011.]

Today, the media and politicians describe the Middle East as a mess and don't want to mess with it, Dr. Ziadeh said. But he disagreed. “It is not. It is about freedom, justice and democracy.

"The situation in the Middle East relies on three factors,” he explained: 1. The national army and its structure; 2. The elite in each country and whether to accept change; 3. The Arab League, which has failed to do its mission.

"The Arabs didn't create ISIS,” Dr. Bazian reminded the audience. Instead, it was created by “George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld when they invaded Iraq in 2003."

Libya today is fighting against extremism and the remnants of Muammar Qaddafi, said Dr. Al Saeedi, adding that ISIS is foreign to Libya. “There are two governments in Libya—one is in the JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

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cisco. The Palestinian mother of four was on a multi-city speaking tour sponsored by the Berkeley-based Middle East Children’s Alliance to bring attention to Madaa’s efforts to help the children of Silwan, who suffer daily under illegal Israeli occupation, increased illegal settlement expansion and violence.

The center provides the community’s children and youth with recreational activities, including art, theater, music, dancing, sports and language classes, along with occupational therapy (see October 2012 Washington Report, p. 46).

Much-needed psychological counseling is also provided to help counter the effects of daily harassment and attacks on the children by Israeli settlers and arrests by the police and military.

Some 60,000 Palestinians live in Silwan, a neighborhood directly opposite the Old City walls which has been illegally occupied by Israel since 1967. For the past 20 years, Baidon said, the extremist settler organization El’ad has been moving Israeli settlers into Silwan. Some 700 Israelis now live in settlements there that are illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which bars occupying powers from moving their citizens to occupied land. To further its agenda of creating a Jewish majority in Palestinian areas, El’ad has displaced many residents of Silwan by conducting a series of Israeli government-condoned archaeological digs to develop the so-called “City of David National Park” (see December 2009 Washington Report, p. 16).

Ateret Cohanim, a group dedicated to creating a Jewish majority in Jerusalem’s Old City and East Jerusalem, is seizing 5,200 square meters in Silwan’s Batan al-Hawa neighborhood, where an esti-

west and the other is in the east. Both get their checks from the Central Bank of Libya.”

—Samir Twair

Human Rights

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Dr. Mads Gilbert signs copies of Night in Gaza.

because it is U.S. money and the U.S. arms industry that supports the occupation of Palestine.

“Pictures are important. Children are important. Justice is important,” Dr. Gilbert stated. Some pictures have helped make major changes in the world, he reminded his audience, as he showed a picture of Hector Pieterson, killed by apartheid white police in Sharpeville, South Africa. We all remember the little girl Kim Phuc, running with burning napalm on her back in Vietnam, and the Kent State University protests and killings. “Those days, we still had an unembedded media,” Dr. Gilbert recalled.

“They reported honestly from what happened around the world...Today, the mainstream media is mostly lying to you: lying about realities, lying about the facts on the ground and lying about the human suffering of the militarism and the military so-called solutions.”

Dr. Gilbert’s photos, taken with permission of his patients and the Ministry of Health in Gaza, show the human costs of Israel’s colonial project. His stunning images and painful tales tell the stories the mainstream media is not showing us.

Buy his book from Middle East Books and More, and watch his presentation and read the transcripts at <www.the jerusalemfund.org>. —Delinda C. Hanley

Child Arrests and Illegal Settlement Expansion in Silwan

Sahar Abbasi Baidon, deputy director of the Madaa Creative Center in Arab East Jerusalem’s Silwan neighborhood, spoke on Oct. 27 to students in instructor Kinneret Israel’s “Demystifying the Middle East” class at City College of San Fran-

STAFF PHOTO PHIL PASQUINI

On the same day Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was asking for more U.S. weapons and cash at the White House, Nov. 9, Dr. Mads Gilbert was at the Palestine Center in Washington, DC giving a gripping description of Israel’s devastating attacks on Gaza in 2014.

Gilbert spent two weeks with Palestinian doctors, working night and day to save lives in Gaza at Al Shifa hospital. Gilbert is a doctor at the University Hospital of North Norway who travels regularly to Gaza to teach and work as an emergency-care doctor on behalf of UNRWA. He told his audience he is part of a strong solidarity movement in Norway among medical staff and medical institutions. “When I go to Gaza, I go as a representative of my hospital,” Gilbert said.

“I’m on call. I get my pay. They pay for my ticket and my insurance.”

Dr. Gilbert said he was also in Beirut during Israel’s 1982 siege and bombardment of Lebanon. “They did the same as they do in Gaza now,” he recalled. “They cut the water supply, the electric supply, the medical supply, the food supply, and they bombed everything. Hospitals, ambulances, residential areas, schools, pipelines, water pipelines, sewage— everything.”

Dr. Gilbert arrived in Gaza on July 13, 2014. Israel had launched massive air attacks on July 7, which were followed by the ground phase of their operation 10 days later. While helping the wounded, Dr. Gilbert kept a camera inside the pocket of his scrubs and documented some of the human cost of the Israeli invasion. His book, Night in Gaza (available from AET’s Middle East Books and More) is a photo account of the situation in Gaza hospitals, and a tribute to the courage, endurance and amazing spirit of Palestinian health care workers and volunteers.

Many of his photos and stories feature children, who represent Palestine’s future. One memorable image was a little girl walking through her totally devastated neighborhood in Shujaiya just after the cease-fire. “Still under siege, she is still there as we are speaking. She is part of our responsibility,” Gilbert said,

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Dr. Mads Gilbert’s Night in Gaza

Sahar Abbasi Baidon.

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mated 80 Palestinian families DC summit to repudiate neolive, Baidon explained. conservatism and instead proOn Oct. 19 the Abu Nab mote an American foreign polfamily was evicted from their icy centered on realism and home of 67 years, which the restraint. The summit was coIsraeli government then sponsored by The American granted to Ateret Cohanim.

Conservative, the Charles The right-wing settler organiKoch Institute, and George zation has worked for decades Washington University’s Deto move Jewish Israelis into partment of Political Science.

Palestinian areas of occupied Rep. John J. Duncan, Jr. East Jerusalem, including the Calls for a Return to True Old City’s Muslim Quarter, under the guise of Israel’s Conservative Principles The summit opened with re“right of return” for Jews.

“Palestinians cannot even An altar on display at San Rafael, California’s Day of the Dead marks by Rep. John J. Duncan, mention the ‘right of return,’” observance honors the 34 servicemen on the USS Liberty killed by Jr. (R-TN), one of six Republicans who voted against the Baidon noted, “even though Israeli military forces.

2003 Iraq war. we had homes in Tel Aviv, nia. The Nov. 7 event featured memorial Duncan recalled being summoned to Jaffa, or Haifa.”

Baidon went on to discuss the heart- altars honoring deceased loved ones and the White House in 2003 after the Bush administration learned of his intention to breaking issue of child arrests in Silwan. victims of current or historic tragedies.

Thirty-four miniature handmade boats vote against the war. After hearing the “The majority targeted for arrests are children between the ages of 7 and 17,” with each service member’s name and a case for intervention, Duncan said he she said. “Army soldiers, police officers, small American flag adorned the altar, became even more convinced that his undercover intelligence and special along with a chain, anchor and nautical opposition to the war was in line with forces are all involved.” Often arrested at life vest. A backdrop in front of a large conservative principles. The administrahome during the night, no family member American flag included photos, names tion presented no evidence of an immican even talk to the child. According to and biographies of the slain men, along nent threat, he recalled, yet was preIsraeli law, children should not be hand- with details of their heroic efforts to save pared to risk American lives and billions of dollars in Iraq. cuffed, blindfolded or interrogated with- shipmates during the attack.

Attendees lingered before the poignant The congressman noted that voting out parental representation, Baidon pointed out, but Palestinian children are. display to read about the innocent victims against the war was a dicey political During interrogation they are subjected of the unprovoked attack on the Navy in- move, as polls at the time showed that to physical, psychological and verbal telligence ship by Israeli military forces just 9 percent of his district approved of his decision. However, he said, as the abuse and humiliation. Baidon described without warning in international waters.

The circumstances of the attack have Iraq debacle unfolded his vote slowly the experience of one young child who, when he asked to use the bathroom, never been the subject of a congres- gained popularity among his constituents.

Despite the obvious failures of Iraq, was told by his Israeli interrogators: “you sional investigation, despite the filing of a Report of War Crimes by the USS Lib- Duncan noted that a majority of his can just pee in your pants.”

Many children subsequently experi- erty Veterans Association with the secre- party’s 2016 presidential candidates still ence bedwetting, nightmares, anxiety, tary of the Army. For more information adhere to hawkish principles. “I hope sleep disorders, weight loss and behav- visit <www.gtr5.com>. —Elaine Pasquini that we can get back to a traditional conservative position,” he said. True conserior problems by either withdrawing or vatives believe that war must be a last being aggressive. Sadly, their academic Waging Peace resort, he emphasized, and that providperformance suffers, and many children prefer to just drop out of school. “We are Conservative Thinkers Denounce talking about children!” Baidon exclaimed. “For me, it is really torture and War Hawks, Endorse Restraint Since 9/11, conservative foreign policy not related to any laws.”

To donate to help the children of Sil- has been closely associated with aggression and unilateral military action. The wan, visit <www.mecaforpeace.org>.

—Elaine Pasquini likes of William Kristol and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) receive regular airtime on USS Liberty Servicemen Honored American news networks and use their in Day of the Dead Observance prominence to argue for a more assertive The 34 U.S. servicemen who were killed U.S. foreign policy. in the June 8, 1967 Israeli attack on the In the midst of this neocon onslaught, USS Liberty were honored by 14 Friends it’s easy to forget that many conservaof Palestine at the 27th annual Day of the tives bitterly disagree with the war Dead observance in the Albert J. Boro hawks. On Nov. 4, a group of conserva- Rep. John J. Duncan, Jr. is the last serving ReCommunity Center in San Rafael, Califor- tive thinkers gathered at a Washington, publican who voted against the 2003 Iraq war.

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ing domestic services to Americans engaging in more public and cultural should be prioritized over empire diplomacy. Such efforts, he said, abroad. would help counter anti-American proDuncan cited Presidents John F. paganda campaigns and improve Kennedy and Dwight D. Eisenhower global opinion of the U.S. as two leaders who understood the Lenczowski, however, is no fan of purpose and limits of American liberal internationalism. He expressed power. skepticism about the efficacy of Kennedy realized that American treaties, arms control agreements and power could only reach so far, Duninternational law. These things may be can said. “We must face the fact that useful, but must not be viewed as the United States is neither omnipopanaceas that bring about enduring tent nor omniscient—that we are only peace and stability, he warned.

6 percent of the world’s population— William Ruger (l) and Kori Schake share their vision At the same time, Lenczowski rethat we cannot impose our will upon for American foreign policy. jected the idea of isolationism, saying the other 94 percent of mankind— it is utopian to believe that simply leavRuger pointed out that recent history ing other nations alone would put an end that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity—and that therefore shows that primacy undermines that which to foreign threats. In his opinion, the better there cannot be an American solution to it claims to provide: safety and security to alternative to both isolationism and liberal every world problem,” Kennedy said in Americans. Wars of choice hamper coun- internationalism is a realist approach in terterrorism efforts, create chaos and force which alliances are managed, public 1961.

Eisenhower, who served in World War II the U.S. to entangle itself in dubious and diplomacy is seen as vital, the threat of as a five-star Army general, understood costly alliances, he argued. force is credible and intervention is not the Primacists also fail to acknowledge how first option. the problem of excessive military spending, Duncan noted. Warned by his de- secure the American homeland actually is, Daniel Larison, a senor editor at The fense secretary that budget cuts to the mil- Ruger added. “The United States is ex- American Conservative, called for a prinitary would harm national security, Eisen- ceptionally safe today from traditional state cipled foreign policy based on restraint and hower replied: “If you go to any military in- actors,” he stated, citing the country’s ge- an openness to international diplomacy. stallation in the world where the American ographic position, robust intelligence caNeocons fail to distinguish between vital flag is flying and tell the commander that pabilities and economic and military might. and peripheral interests, Larison argued.

Ike says he’ll give him an extra star for his “The siege mentality the primacists have The reality, he said, is that there are few shoulder if he cuts his budget, there’ll be is quite dangerous,” he warned. places where the U.S. truly has vital inThe U.S. would keep its unrivaled mili- terests, and the vision and scale of U.S. such a rush to cut costs that you’ll have to tary advantage even if military spending foreign policy ought to reflect this. get out of the way.”

Duncan added that Eisenhower also were right-sized, Ruger said. As an exWhile not opposed to alliances, Larison reportedly told his chief of staff, “God ample, he noted that the U.S. has 10 air- believes that Washington too often allows help the nation when it has a president craft carriers, while the rest of the world its allies to draw the U.S. into precarious who doesn’t know as much about the has 10 combined, and no other country situations. As an example, he cited U.S. has more than 2. military as I do.” support for the Saudi-led military effort in Primacy is also unsustainable, Ruger Yemen, arguing that the U.S. has no real Duncan believes we are now living in this era. “I think it’s unfortunate that we argued. The unipolar system that has ex- vital interest in the conflict other than aphave too many chicken hawks who really isted since the collapse of the Soviet Union peasing its Gulf allies. The U.S. must redon’t know that much about the military,” is unnatural, he believes, and will eventu- strain, not enable, its allies' worst behavally come to an end. Massive and waste- ior, he said. he concluded. ful military expenditures hasten America’s Larison also emphasized the imporWhat Should American Restraint decline, he argued, by undermining the tance of diplomacy and economic inteLook Like? country’s financial security, which is the gration. Unlike Lenczowski, he voiced his The summit’s first panel featured a lively foundation of American military might. support for the Iran nuclear deal, citing it discussion on the principles that ought to Above all, Ruger said, the “fatal flaw” of as a triumph of diplomacy over war. guide American foreign policy. Though all primacy is the belief that the U.S. knows Kori Schake, a research fellow at the four panelists were united in their opposi- how to tear down and rebuild other na- Hoover Institution, deviated from her tion to neoconservatism, they at times dif- tions in its own image. “That is hubristic fellow panelists by embracing a more infered in their policy views. and untrue,” he commented. ternationalist approach to foreign policy.

William Ruger, vice president of research John Lenczowski, president of the In- The U.S. must set the rules of the interand policy at the Charles Koch Institute, stitute of World Politics, was less eager national order, she argued, in order to outlined the many flaws he sees in neo- than Ruger to chip away at U.S. military avoid having to follow rules imposed by conservatism, which is the belief that Amer- spending. He specifically expressed con- others. ican primacy is necessary to ensure global cern over China’s military programs and This does not mean the U.S. must peace. Primacy is a poor policy, Ruger cited this as a reason for the U.S. to main- engage in endless wars in order to impose argued, because it is expensive, counter- tain a strong deterrent force. its will, Schake insisted. The key is getting productive, unnecessary, idealistic, ill-fitting Lenczowski also encouraged the U.S. others to buy into the rules, she said. If the for a liberal republic and unsustainable. to expand its soft power capabilities by rules are consensual, she argued, they JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

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the country’s vast defense structure as “the grandest middle- and upper-class welfare scheme ever conceived.”

Prestige also offers little motivation for those within the establishment to promote reform, according to Lind.

“The establishment is made up almost entirely of people who want to be something,” he noted. “They want to be a member of the establishment and they have spent decades kissing every ass in creation to get there.

They’re not about to risk their mem“Deep State,” New Era of William Lind (l) and Philip Giraldi warn that the U.S. bership in the establishment.”

Global Warfare: Threats to U.S. military cannot defeat modern threats.

Lind said the public must work to find ways to kick the establishment out Sustainability?

Following panels on how foreign policy is subverted by particular interests hiding of power. Until then, he concluded, “The made and the role of religion in U.S. for- behind the mask of patriotism." one thing we can be certain of is that the eign policy, the conference concluded William S. Lind, author of the Maneuver next president will be a member of the eswith two presentations that called into Warfare Handbook and fierce critic of tablishment and nothing will change.” question the long-term viability of the American military strategy, warned that —Dale Sprusansky American way of war and governance. the U.S. military is incapable of defeating Poll Reveals Deepening Partisan Philip Giraldi, a former miltary intelli- modern threats. gence officer in the CIA and executive diA leading proponent of what he calls Divide on Israel rector of the Council for the National In- fourth-generation warfare, or the end of A public opinion poll on “American Attiterest, expressed concern about the the Westphalian order, Lind believes that tudes Toward the Middle East and Is"deep state" that he believes holds signif- states have lost the monopoly on war they rael” released by University of Maryland icant power within the American govern- have held since the 1648 Peace of West- Professor Shibley Telhami at the Brooking system. The deep state is a term used phalia. Warfare, he claims, is thus return- ings Institution in Washington, DC on to describe a group of individuals who ing to a pre-Westphalian order in which Dec. 4 contained three significant findwork covertly within a country's political wars are fought not between states, but ings: Democrats and Republicans are insystem to enact their will by subverting de- against and between tribes, clans, reli- creasingly divided on the issue of Israel; a significant number of Americans bemocratic forces. The term traditionally has gions and other non-state entities. been used in reference to Turkey's alThis reality makes current defense poli- lieve Israel has too much influence on leged "shadow government." cies obsolete, Lind argued, noting that U.S. politics; and bipartisan skepticism Unlike the Turkish example, Giraldi said well-armed states such as the U.S. have about the viability of the two-state soluthe American deep state largely operates been incapable of defeating rugged tion to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

A poll Telhami conducted in 2014 reopenly and legally, even though it is rarely fourth-generation opponents. “Almost all subjected to the rule of law. He defined the money we’re spending on defense, vealed that just 25 percent of Democrats the American deep state as a "loose con- which is about a trillion dollars a year, is a held a favorable view Israeli Prime Minisfederation [of bankers, interest groups, complete waste,” he stated, because it is ter Binyamin Netanyahu. In the past year, lobbyists and defense contractors] that being used on equipment and strategies his stock has decreased further, as just 18 percent of Democrats now say they view support common objectives." that cannot win fourth-generation wars.

The deep state has flourished in postUnder this new order, Lind stressed, Netanyahu favorably.

The story is different on the Republican 9/11 America, Giraldi argued, because it states must unite to defeat non-state positions itself as a protector of the nation actors. It is unwise for states to fight one side, where 51 percent of individuals exin times of crisis. "For the deep state to be another, he explained, because the de- pressed favorable attitudes toward Neeffective, it must be intimately associated feated state will deteriorate and become tanyahu, up from 49 percent last year. with the development, or pre-existence of, home to a fourth-generation opponent Asked in an open-ended question to a national security state, coupled with the that is far more dangerous to the victoriperception that the nation is in peril, justi- ous state. fying extraordinary measures undertaken He cited Israel as an example. “The nonby brave patriots to preserve life and prop- state forces that are now rising all around erty of the citizenry," he said. "Those con- it in its region, which it did a lot to bring ditions apply perfectly to contemporary about, are far more dangerous to it than the post-9/11 America.” sclerotic states they faced before," he said.

Giraldi warned that the deep state perThe U.S. will not change its military stratpetuates itself by rigging the system in its egy until the establishment is uprooted, favor. “The deep state wins no matter who Lind maintained. Bad policies are recycled, is in power by creating bipartisan-sup- he said, because the elite are motivated by ported money pits within the system," he money and are insulated from the consesaid. “American democracy has been quences of their decisions. He described Shibley Telhami shares his poll results.

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won't be resisted, thus putting an end to costly wars and conflicts.

The simple reality, Schake concluded, is that military force is not a sustainable option. “The use of force alone is but temporary; it may subdue for a moment, but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again. And a nation is not to be governed that must perpetually be conquered," she said, quoting 18th century political theorist Edmund Burke.

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name the national or world leader they Human Rights Advocates Oppose Murray of the Boston Coalition for Palesadmire the most, Netanyahu (chosen by Massachusetts State Senators’ tinian Rights (BCPR) recently returned 12 percent of respondents) tied former from a delegation to Palestine/Israel.

Israel Trip President Ronald Reagan as the most fre“I’ve been visiting since 1988,” she said, quently mentioned individual among Re- The Boston Alliance for Water Justice “and things have never been worse. Ispublicans. Pope Francis came in third (6 gathered on Nov. 23 to oppose a Dec. 4 rael is completing its land grab. This trip percent), followed by Russian President trip to Israel by 10 Massachusetts state endorses the status quo.”

Vladimir Putin (5 percent). Only one per- senators. After brief statements on the Ann Glick of United for Justice with cent of Democrats chose NePeace (UJP) emphasized tanyahu as their most adthe racial segregation in mired leader.

Palestine/Israel. She, too, On the topic of Israel’s influrecently returned from a trip ence in American politics, the to Palestine/Israel, where poll found that “twice as many she visited Jewish-only Americans say the Israeli govtowns such as Nazareth Ilit, ernment has too much influsituated near the original ence (37 percent) than say too Palestinian town of little influence (18 percent), Nazareth: “I discovered while a plurality (44 percent) there were two cities: one say it’s the right level.” for Jews and one for nonHere too, a partisan divide Jews.” is evident. Forty-nine percent State senators going on of Democrats said Israel has the trip included Senate too much influence, while just President Stanley Rosenberg 14 percent of Republicans ex(Amherst), Ben Downing pressed the same opinion.

(Pittsfield), Anne Gobi On the question of two- Nancy Murray speaks out against her senators’ partisan trip to Israel at (Spencer), John Keenan states vs. one-state, the poll the Massachusetts State House.

(Quincy), Barbara L’Italien found that 35 percent of (Andover), Karen Spilka Americans advocate for two-states, while Statehouse steps, members of the al- (Ashland), Michael Barrett (Lexington), 31 percent believe a one-state solution liance visited the offices of each senator, Eileen Donoghue (Lowell), Richard Ross should be pursued. Interestingly, Republi- as well as the governor, to deliver a peti- (Wrentham), and Dan Wolf (Harwich). cans were just as likely to accept two- tion signed by more than 1,200 MassaOther groups delivered their own letchusetts voters. They asked their law- ters to the senators, including Camstates as they were one-state.

The poll also delved into American views makers to reject economic collaboration bridge Bethlehem People to People Proof the current escalation of violence be- with Israel until it complies with interna- ject (CBPPP) and Massachusetts Peace tween Israelis and Palestinians. A plurality tional law by ending its occupation and Action (MAPA). In his letter, Munir Jirof respondents, 31 percent, blamed the the dispossession and oppression of manus of MAPA questioned the ethics of unrest on the absence of serious peace Palestinians. this trip: “JCRC is a pro-Israel group that Speakers emphasized the narrow polit- spent $211,000 last year lobbying for diplomacy, while 26 percent blamed continued Israeli occupation and settlement ical agenda of this trip, planned by the some of its issues on Beacon Hill. The expansion. Another 26 percent blamed partisan anti-Palestinian groups, Jewish reported cost for the trips to our state Palestinian extremists. Democrats were Community Relations Council (JCRC) senators will range between $5,000 and more likely to blame the occupation, while and Combined Jewish Philanthropies $6,000 per senator.”

—Sara Driscoll Republicans were more likely to blame (CJP). “While the senators are meeting in Jerusalem, they won’t see what’s right Tree of Life Conference Hosts Palestinian extremists.

Asked how the U.S. should react to Is- next door behind an 8-meter concrete Israeli, Palestinian Voices of raeli settlement construction, 31 percent of separation wall at Aida Refugee Camp, Conscience respondents recommended that the U.S. where I was born and raised,” said Nidal With Roger Waters, co-founder of the limit its opposition to words, 27 percent al-Azraq of 1for3.org, which is building a globally acclaimed band Pink Floyd, on suggested the U.S. do nothing, 27 percent water garden project at Aida. “As a the program at the 11th annual Tree of recommended economic sanctions, while Palestinian living in the U.S.,” he added, Life Conference held over the weekend of 10 percent suggested taking more serious my tax dollars fund the tear-gassing of Oct. 17-18, it was no surprise that almost every seat was taken at the First Congreaction. Among Democrats, 49 percent rec- my own mother and father.”

Petition signers viewed the trip as a gational Church of Old Lyme (FCCOL), ommended either imposing sanctions on tacit endorsement of Israel’s policies, in- CT. With the broad theme, “How can we Israel or taking more serious action.

The poll, available on Brookings’ web- cluding ever-expanding military occupa- be agents of change to secure universal site, also measured Evangelical attitudes tion, continued building of Jewish-only human rights for Palestinians and Istoward Israel, American attitudes toward settlements, segregation, military harass- raelis?” the conference sought to deterMuslims and the role the U.S. ought to play ment and arrests of children, lack of ac- mine how to reach a “tipping point” when in mediating the Israel-Palestine conflict. cess to schools, destruction of housing change regarding the Israeli occupation —Dale Sprusansky and other human rights violations. Nancy becomes self-propelled simply through JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

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the sheer number seeking it.

Speakers from Israel, Palestine and the United States presented powerful data on the Israeli occupation, described their own exasperating and distressing experiences of human rights abuses in Palestine, and discussed how the struggle for peace and justice in the area lies not only with political leaders but ultimately rests with concerned individuals.

Suhail Sami Khalilieh, a leading Palestinian political analyst and writer, presented an extensive range of data on the occupation, including the fact that a Palestinian has to work 12.5 years to earn the same annual average income as an Israeli. Comparing the Berlin Wall to Israel’s so-called security wall, he pointed out that the former ran for 96 miles and stood 11.8 feet high, whereas the latter extends 480 miles at a height of 26 feet—and, of its entire length, only 31 miles follow the Green Line.

Aleen Murad Masoud, a student at Bethlehem University, spoke passionately about how the occupation has impacted her as a Palestinian. “The vast majority of Israelis and Palestinians want to live in peace,” she noted. “Why isn’t the rest of the world pressuring Israel to return our land to us?” she asked poignantly. “Please keep supporting Palestine’s right to exist and enjoy justice, freedom and human dignity.”

Gideon Levy, a distinguished Israeli journalist and former deputy editor of Israel’s oldest daily newspaper, Haaretz, confessed that “I am a typical product of the Israeli system—it was only in the late ’80s that I realized how ignorant and brainwashed I was.” After he started to travel to the occupied territories, he said, 56

he experienced a “moral darkness” and saw that “Israel’s major tool is the dehumanization of the Palestinians.”

The British-born Waters, whom Levy described as “a man of justice and courage—a source of hope,” said his personal but powerful campaign to encourage musicians not to perform in Israel has caused him to go from being “a rock star to someone who…should be locked up.”

Regarding the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), Waters said that if he ever heard of a better alternative, he’d consider it...but he hasn’t.

Sports could be a powerful tool, he added, in the same way it was with the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.

Waters spoke of his embarrassment that his industry is only just beginning to see the light, but his audience was encouraged when Waters said he does at last feel it is beginning to happen. He concluded succinctly, “The only way to make something happen is from the outside.”

Summing up the success of the conference, Rev. David Good, former FCCOL senior minister and now chairman of the nonprofit Tree of Life Educational Fund, declared, “We are deeply appreciative of all the contributors to our event and delighted that our message of peace and hope reached so many people.” —Olwen Logan

Bethlehem University Aims to Be a Source of Stability for Palestinians

As supporters of Bethlehem University gathered for a Nov. 8 fund-raising dinner at the

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Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Land in Washington, DC, images of frustrated young Palestinians committing acts of violence were capturing global attention.

Such headlines agonize the hearts of those committed to ensuring a better future for the Palestinian people, and lead to questions about the efficacy of programs and institutions designed to foster a change to the unjust status quo.

In the midst of this discouragement, those attending the Bethlehem University dinner were offered a source of hope. A video showing the different programs offered by the university and the real impact the institution has on the lives of many young Palestinians served as a reminder that positive things are happening in Palestine.

While Bethlehem University seeks to be a place of peace and stability for its students, it is not immune to the realities of life in Palestine. When the current wave of violence broke out, the school was forced to alter its schedule—but worked to quickly return campus operations to normal.

Maintaining a sense of consistency for students is critical during times of unrest, said Bethlehem University Vice Chancellor Brother Peter Bray. The university has thus continued to operate, albeit with interruptions, through numerous wars, intifadas and periods of turbulence. This, Bray said, is because it seeks to serve as an instrument of steadfastness and inspiration for young people plagued with feelings of frustration and disenfranchisement. “One of our biggest challenges at Bethlehem University is keeping hope alive,” he commented.

Supporters of the university help keep this hope alive through their commitment and charity, Bray added. Students are always heartened to find out that people

Brother Timothy Coldwell (c) accepts the 2015 Bethlehem University Legacy Award from Sister Irene O'Neal and Brother Peter Bray.

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(L-r) Bob Gelbach, co-chairman of Jewish Voice for Peace-New Haven, Gideon Levy and Roger Waters at Tree of Life Conference.

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across the world actually care deeply about Bethlehem University and the Palestinian cause, he said.

For this reason, the Bethlehem University Foundation used the dinner to honor three organizations that have been particularly generous in their support of the university.

The Schmidt Family Foundation, a Florida-based charitable organization, was recognized for providing scholarships to many students. USAID’s American Schools and Hospitals Abroad (ASHA) program, which has contributed to the development of every building on campus, was thanked for its continual support.

The De La Salle Christian Brothers Conference, the Catholic organization that founded Bethlehem University, was also honored. Accepting the award, Brother Timothy Coldwell, general councilor of the Christian Brothers Conference, reflected on the mission of his group. “The central vow that organizes our life is association,” he explained. “We live together and we minister together.

We pray together and we plan together.

Perhaps one of the most exciting and energizing aspects of this vow is that we found together. I know that I have personally been part of the founding of a school and community, and it is the closest I believe I have felt to the heart and purpose of the life of Saint La Salle. This award is a recognition of the spirit, resolve, tenacity, faith, love, dedication, innovation, resilience and solidarity of the founding and ongoing founding of Bethlehem University.”

Established in 1973 by the De La Salle Christian Brothers, Bethlehem University currently enrolls 3,200 students. A Catholic school, the university nonetheless has a diverse student body and works to foster the common good.

—Dale Sprusansky

Palestine Center Annual Conference Educates and Updates Attendees

On Oct. 23, the Palestine Center held its annual conference in Washington, DC. The all-day event included panels on the media, Palestine activism in America and internationally, and Gaza following the 2014 Israeli war.

The Mainstream Media and Palestine

The first panel, “Covering Palestine: The U.S. Media, the Israel Lobby, and Public Opinion,” included journalists Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada, Philip JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

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(L-r) Said Arikat, Philip Weiss and Ali Abunimah describe pro-Israel propaganda in the U.S. media.

Weiss of Mondoweiss, and Said Arikat of Al-Quds Newspaper.

Abunimah began by speaking about the recent outbreak of violence in Israel and Palestine. “Israel has gone from the pretense of a state with formal processes to a literal lynch mob incited by its top leaders,” he said. “The results of that are being seen: extrajudicial killings, summary assassinations in the streets. We’re seeing this on a day-to-day basis.”

He pointed out that all of these Israeli responses have been fully embraced by the Obama administration. The “law and order” language used by President Barack Obama to describe Israel’s response, Abunimah said, is the same socalled “racist” language used in American cities where “police brutality” is also described as “law and order.”

While at the establishment level the response to Israeli violence has not changed, Abunimah argued that there are significant shifts, particularly along partisan lines, in how the issue of Israel is seen among Americans.

“The theme here is consistent,” Abunimah said after citing data from recent American public opinion polls. “The younger you are, and if you come from a non-white background, the less likely you are to buy Israeli propaganda. This is reflected in the partisan split, because you see that Israel is becoming more and more aligned with other far-right socalled conservative causes.”

Weiss discussed the shifts taking place within the American Jewish community. The Israel lobby’s recent attempt to kill the nuclear agreement with Iran irritated many American Jews, he said, and caused many within the community to rethink their support for Israel.

While a large range of groups have become increasingly critical of Israel, members of the Washington establishment still largely refuse to publically

question Israel, Weiss noted.

“I would agree with Ali that the mainstream is stuck….It’s obvious to everyone in the [Obama] administration that the occupation is the root cause of the recent violence, but no one can say so. I think that the best thing that’s been happening in recent months—and it reflects some of the demographic shifts that Ali refers to—is that this awareness of the occupation is everywhere, it’s everywhere in the world, it’s everywhere in any media outside the United States. It just hasn’t penetrated the mainstream of American public opinion and the leadership class and our elites yet, but it will.”

Arikat focused on the American media’s lack of context in its coverage, its dehumanization of Palestinians, and the lack of representation of Palestinians in the mainstream media. He also agreed with Abunimah that the Iran deal will have adverse consequences for the Palestinians due to the increased military aid that Israel will be receiving as a result.

“The state of affairs in the United States’ media on how they cover the conflict is really not very good,” Arikat continued. “We have seen for awhile on Iran there were some good points and good editorials, but there is a complete absence on Palestine, and whenever it is mentioned, it is the Israeli narrative. Nobody talks about the occupation, and I don’t think we are doing much to help the situation. Look at the Arab press: the Arab press is so consumed with other issues that the Palestine issue is marginal even in their press.”

—Suhaib Khan

Pro-Palestine Student Activists Targeted on College Campuses

The second panel featured a discussion on “Palestinians and Palestinian Americans in the United States,” with a focus on the challenges faced by student activists.

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Andrew Kadi, co-chair of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, described the challenges faced by Students for Justice in Palestine activists, as well as the history of nonviolent protest in the Palestinian struggle.

“Realizing that nothing was going to happen, in 2005 Palestinian civil society called for comprehensive boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel, and that call came from trade unions, women’s organizations, political coordinating committees, and other NGOs,” Kadi explained. “That call included demands for equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel, an end to Israel’s military occupation, the dismantling of its wall and, of course, respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in U.N. Resolution 194.”

He cited various battles won by BDS, including Lauryn Hill’s cancellation of her concert in Israel, Junot Diaz’s endorsement of BDS, and financial losses of companies such as Veolia (responsible for the construction of the Jerusalem Light Rail, the line connecting Jerusalem to various West Bank settlements).

Palestine Legal staff attorney Radhika Sainath discussed the issues faced by her clients, including false accusations of anti-Semitism, erroneous charges of support for terrorism, bureaucratic barriers hindering their activism, and administrative sanctions.

“Over the course of 18 months, Palestine Legal responded to 292 incidents of suppression,” she said. “And when we say ‘responded to,’ we mean that these are the kinds of incidents that people actually called us about or e-mailed us about. We’re not saying that these are all the incidents that happened in this country over an 18-month period, we’re saying this is what people called us about.”

As an example, Sainath cited students at Northeastern University who attempted to introduce a divestment referendum asking the university’s board of trustees to divest from companies that aid and abet human rights violations in the West Bank. In response, she said, the student government released two legal memos that argued that the student body could not even discuss this matter because doing so would create a hostile environment for Jewish students.

“Over half of our incidents involved these kinds of false accusations,” Sainath said. “Obviously, they can have 58

Panelists (l-r) Prof. Fouad Moughrabi, Dr. Manal Jamal and Dr. Yousef Munayyer and (at podium) Dr. Subhi D. Ali, chairman of the board of the Palestine Center. a terrible chilling effect; it makes people afraid to speak out or to criticize Israeli government policy for fears of being maligned as anti-Semites.”

Omar Shakir of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) emphasized that uncivil speech is protected fully by the First Amendment. He discussed the case of Prof. Steven Salaita of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who was removed from his post after tweets critical of Israel during its 2014 assault on Gaza. Shakir and the CCR filed a lawsuit on Salaita’s behalf, and in the ensuing months the chancellor of the university was forced to resign.

“Over the course of the last year, a lot has happened to support Professor Salaita,” Shakir continued. “Sixteen departments at the University of Illinois voted ‘no confidence’ in the administration soon after Professor Salaita’s termination. Five thousand—actually far more than 5,000—scholars have agreed to boycott the university until it agrees to reinstate Professor Salaita. Those include people like Cornel West and Angela Davis. The committee for academic freedom and tenure at the university criticized the university’s decision-making, as well as many national academic organizations. The AAUP, which is a major union for professors and academics, actually added the university to its censure list—and this may not seem like a big deal, but basically that censure list is reserved for right-wing universities that don’t teach evolution. The fact that the University of Illinois is on the list is a big deal.”

Shakir also discussed NYPD surveillance of the Muslim community. “The reason it’s relevant to this conversation is, of course, among those groups surveilled were MSAs [Muslim student associations] and other Arab and Muslim groups that do some work on Palestine,” he said.

—Suhaib Khan

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Palestine and International Politics

The third panel focused on “Palestine and International Politics.” Panelists were Dr. Manal Jamal, professor at James Madison University; Fouad Moughrabi, professor at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga; and Dr. Yousef Munayyer, executive director of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.

Munayyer spoke about the Israel lobby’s losing effort to quash the Iran nuclear deal, Russia’s involvement in the Syrian civil war, and the recent spate of violence in Israel and the West Bank.

When it became clear to Israel and to pro-Israel interest groups that the U.S. was going to go for a deal [with Iran], they used their leverage to pressure the administration to produce a “consolation prize” for the Iran deal, Munayyer said.

“This consolation prize is reportedly $4.5 billion per year in new military aid for Israel—a record number which would come in a 10-year memorandum of understanding between Israel and the United States, about $15 billion more over 10 years than the previous memorandum of understanding.”

In this way, he said, the Israel lobby shifted U.S. public opinion against the Iran deal, managed to secure increased military aid, and was able to get a very good deal that reduced Iran’s ability to obtain a nuclear weapon, while simultaneously convincing The New York Times that Israel “came out with the short end of the stick.”

Dr. Jamal discussed the current political state of the Palestinians, as well as how it had been affected by the international peace process.

“It’s necessary to appreciate and be very cognizant that, at this moment, the Palestinians lack a coherent national political program,” she began. “There are tactics in place, but to think there is a national political program, a coherent one, I think is being too optimistic...The PalesJANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

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tinians are internally divided right the hardships faced by nonprofits now, and I think it’s fair to say that working in Gaza. Organizations they have not been this internally undertaking reconstruction prodivided in recent times. To put jects need to go through a dauntforth a coherent national political ing and expensive process set up program, there will need to be by the Israeli government. In addisome kind of semblance of nation to submitting a proposal plan tional unity, and I’m not sure how for every building, all materials easy that is.” used for home construction must While acknowledging that be purchased from Israel and later Palestine’s joining of international stored in a special warehouse that organizations such as the Internais monitored 24/7. An Israeli-detional Criminal Court was signifivised system called the General cant, Jamal considers it naive to Reconstruction Mechanism (GRM) think that this path alone would then decides whether to even aplead to statehood or Palestinian prove the construction. nationalist aspirations. The U.S.In addition, items imported to led peace process is effectively (L-r) Max Blumenthal, Bill Corcoran, Laila El-Haddad and Gaza need to be accompanied by dead, she said, and had actually Palestine Center board member Omar Fayez. forms justifying why they aren’t caused the circumstances for dual military usage. ANERA staff Palestinians to deteriorate, with increas- tivist and co-author of Gaza Kitchen: A in Jerusalem spend hours justifying Palestinian Culinary Journey (available every import, Corcoran stated. With so ing settlement expansion.

“In 1993, on the eve of the Oslo ac- from AET’s Middle East Books and many restrictions on cement, iron piping cords, there were 250,000 settlers in the More), gave a short illustration of what it and other building materials, which could West Bank,” she noted. “Today, there is like to be in Gaza these days. “We are have dual military usage, organizations are more than 650,000 settlers in the talking here about a very closed off, very in the field are getting creative. “EveryWest Bank. In addition to that, of course, isolated, very besieged, very surveilled thing now has to be plastic,” Corcoran this involves continuing land expropria- piece of territory that is largely refugees,” said. “It is doable but highly inefficient.” tion, deteriorating socioeconomic circum- she stated. Most Palestinians who live in Many nonprofits like ANERA are now stances for the Palestinian population, Gaza are not actually from Gaza. As shifting from construction to agricultural the separation barrier, the separation refugees they are entitled to certain pro- development, trying to restore productive tection and rights—that, obviously, are capabilities to the land. “Only 25 percent wall, and the list goes on.”

Moughrabi spoke about the disintegra- not being afforded them, El-Haddad of agricultural land in Gaza has been retion of the Arab world and the increasing said. Israel restricts its fishermen from stored,” he said. militarization of American foreign policy. going more than three nautical miles out Max Blumenthal, award-winning jour“The Arab state system exists no more,” to sea, and farmers don’t have access to nalist and author of The 51 Day War he stated. “More disintegration is likely to fields, which has led to a situation that (also available from Middle East Books follow, with untold human suffering re- the U.N. calls “fishing without water, and More), outlined some broad Israeli sulting in a huge refugee crisis which is farming without land.” policies that have led Gaza to this “postEl-Haddad went on to explain how Is- apocalyptic point.” It all boils down to the the worst since the Second World War.” The U.S. and its allies, including Israel rael has targeted Gaza’s productive sec- Hebrew term hafradah (separation), he and Saudi Arabia, have engaged in mas- tor—a quarter of the targets the Israelis explained, adding, “It’s a particular kind sive destruction of the region, he said, hit were agricultural infrastructure. of separation, it’s about ethnic separaturning it into “rubble.” This has exacer- “Greenhouses, irrigation, these were tion. It’s not just about physical separabated latent and existing trends, which also obliterated, rendering 44 percent of tion. And there is a cynical logic behind explains the rise of Muslim fundamental- Gaza uninhabitable,” she said. it,” Blumenthal said, with the goal of Ending on a positive note, El-Haddad maintaining a Jewish majority. ism that, according to Moughrabi, is more strident and more lethal than any- addressed ways in which Gazans are Arnon Soffer, co-founder of Haifa Unicoping with what they have left. “This versity, is the architect of this policy. Softhing in history.

“In the end, we are doomed to live to- man had 500 acres of his land de- fer advised former Prime Minister Ariel gether,” he concluded, “and we have to stroyed, but there he was at a farmer’s Sharon to implement the Gaza disenfind new and creative ways by which we union learning how he could rebuild,” gagement, hoping “it would bring more can actually do so.”

—Suhaib Khan she said. People are recycling demol- Jews under direct Israeli control.” He ished houses and resorting to using clay pulled Jews out of the Gaza Strip and Gazans are Besieged in the ovens. There is a massive government- put them in Ariel and other major settleAftermath of Israel’s 2014 Invasion run initiative for organic and sustainable ment blocs.

The final panel, “Gaza in the Aftermath of agriculture in Gaza. In addition, El-HadAfter the Gaza disengagement in the 2014 Israeli Invasion,” featured pan- dad said, women’s role in society is 2005, the ‘“Dahiya Doctrine” came into elists who have been to Gaza and worked transforming as “women are becoming effect, Blumenthal explained, aiming to on the ground with local residents and breadwinners in their families.” demoralize Palestinians and to wear various non-profit organizations.

Bill Corcoran, CEO of American Near down the civilian population so it no Laila El-Haddad, a social media ac- East Refugee Aid (ANERA) discussed longer supports the resistance. “It’s a JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

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MEI’s Annual Conference Examines Critical Challenges

The Middle East Institute (MEI) held its annual conference, titled “The Search for Stability and Opportunity: The Middle East in 2016,” at the Capital Hilton in Washington, DC on Nov. 13.

Obama’s Middle East Legacy

The first panel examined “Obama's Mideast Legacy and the Next Administration.” It featured Prem Kumar of the Albright Stonebridge Group, Michael Singh of the pro-Israel AIPAC spinoff Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Tamara Cofman Wittes of the Brookings Institution, and Robin Wright of the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

The panel was introduced and moderated by Elise Labott of CNN. Referring to President Barack Obama’s 2013 speech to the U.N. General Assembly, Kumar cited the four vital national security interests of the U.S.: safe access to energy, prevention of the emergence of terrorist safe havens, prevention of the use and spread of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), and protection of U.S. allies against external aggression. He noted that the speech also emphasized Middle East peace and reaching a nuclear resolution with Iran, the latter of which “will be the most important legacy of this administration in the years to come.”

Wright questioned the U.S. role in the region, asking, “Is our priority stability, or is it trying to nurture the kind of values and political systems that we have?” She commended President Obama for walking away from Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak in 2011 to demonstrate a responsiveness to the will of the people, but expressed her belief that the 60

administration is now reverting back to the old position of supporting military leaders.

Kumar stressed the important role Syria will play in the president’s last year in office. Laying “the foundation for an eventual end of conflict in Syria…would probably be the most important legacy that this administration can leave its successor,” he said, “in terms of beginning to manage, or at least helping to manage, the crises we see across the region.”

Cofman Wittes, however, expressed doubts about Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent diplomatic efforts in Vienna.

“Although it does for the first time bring in all the relevant external players, it’s disconnected from the internal players…the [Syrian] people,” she said.

She and Singh both stressed that the next year will be “vital” in shaping the Syrian conflict’s outcome.

“President Obama, if he doesn’t get more serious about addressing [the refugee flow], could bequeath an even worse situation to his successor, which is harder to solve,” Singh cautioned.

Cofman Wittes argued that the absence of any discernable consensus within Syria, in the Arab world and in the U.S. makes strategy-building an insurmountable obstacle at the moment. Kumar agreed that the lack of unity has hurt the potential for a resolution, but stressed the importance of the U.S. working with other nations to facilitate the best outcome possible. “You deal with the partners you have,” he said, paraphrasing former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, “not with the ones you want.”

—Lana Gura

MEI Panel II: Turkey, Iran, and the Gulf States

The second conference panel was called “Turkey, Iran, and the Gulf States: The Challenges of Rebuilding Regional Stability.” Moderated by Yochi Dreazen of

Foreign Policy, the panel featured Abdulkhaleq Abdulla of Emirates University, Jamal Khashoggi of Al Arab News Channel, Payam Mohseni of Harvard’s Belfer Center, and Gonü l Tol of the Middle East Institute.

Khashoggi began by discussing the diplomatic failures of the many regional powers in achieving peace in the Middle East, as well as his pessimism for the international talks on Syria in Paris, which are ongoing talks between regional and international powers, excluding the Syrian government and opposition groups.

“I see Vienna is to organize or to coordinate between the conflicting parties in Syria rather than finding a solution,” Khashoggi commented. “Is it just to avoid a confrontation, a larger confrontation between, let’s say the States and the Russians, or the Saudis and the Russians, rather than doing a solution for Syria itself? In principle, if regional countries cooperated they could have developed a solution not only for Syria, but for all the Middle East.”

Khashoggi divided the competing factions into two camps: those who prioritize countering the effects of the Arab Spring, which include Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, and the group that wants to stop the chaos engulfing the region, which includes Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey.

Tol agreed with Khashoggi’s pessimism regarding the Vienna talks, and spoke primarily of the flawed relationship between the United States and Turkey.

Although Turkey and the U.S. are allies, she said, they have different priorities regarding the region.

For Turkey, she said, “Those red lines were Assad has to go, and it has to be the priority, and that is something I think that’s not really shared by the Americans. When they look at Syria they see

(L-r) Yochi Dreazen, Jamal Khashoggi, Gonül Tol, Payam Mohseni and Abdulkhaleq Abdulla.

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psychological war,” Blumenthal said.

The military expression of this principle is the targeting of Gaza’s civilians and infrastructure. In a 2006 interview, after Israel’s failed invasion of southern Lebanon, Gadi Eizenkot, now the army chief of staff, said, “From now on, every Lebanese citizen is [Hezbollah leader] Hassan Nasrallah, and every resident of the Gaza Strip is [Hamas political leader] Khaled Meshal.” Concluded Blumenthal: “Short of a military solution to Hamas or Hezbollah—and there is none—the civilian population would be the target of any future assaults: civilian infrastructure would be destroyed.”

—Rina Abd El Rahman

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region. Khashoggi stressed that Saudi Arabia will continue to reject any Iranian influence in Syria, which in Riyadh’s eyes means that that an Assad victory is an Iranian victory. Abdulla argued that Iran’s expanding influence came at a cost to the Gulf states, as it was an inherently sectarian, expansionist state.

—Suhaib Khan

Turkey’s Regional Challenges

The Middle East Institute (MEI) held its annual Turkey conference at the National Press Club in Washington, DC on Dec. 3.

The event featured discussions on the country’s domestic and international challenges.

A panel on “Turkey’s Middle East Policy Challenges” began with remarks by Amanda Sloat, deputy assistant secretary of state for southern Europe and

STAFF PHOTO D. SPRUSANSKY

the Islamic State as a bigger threat. On the other hand, Turkey thinks that the Islamic State is just a symptom. The root cause is the Assad regime and without tackling that you cannot really do anything about the Islamic State.”

The second Turkish red line is the Syrian Kurdish forces, she said, “I think from the get-go Turkey built its Syria policy on its fear of Kurdish irredentism. So it always tried to marginalize the PYD [Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party], which is the Syrian offshoot of the PKK. And I think that undermined American interest and also Turkish interest in Syria.”

She also noted the apparent irrationality of Washington’s support of the PYD in its resistance to ISIS, while at the same time Turkey bombs PYD targets in northern Syria.

Mohseni also shared his co-panelists’ pessimism regarding the Vienna talks, but stressed that Iran’s inclusion in the talks was important.

“Of course Syria’s the main subject of the talks,” he said, “and Iran’s role in Syria. Iran sees itself as a key winner in showing its operational capability and sustaining and preserving the Assad regime, and sustaining Syria as part of Iran’s axis of resistance or its larger regional alliance of states. That includes Hezbollah [and] Iraq, so Syria is a pivotal piece on the chessboard for Iran in geopolitical strategy.”

Abdulla discussed the global powers’ irrelevance in the Syrian conflict, as the forces on the ground now have their own logic. This means that it is very hard to predict the “next big surprise,” he said.

The action is not in Tehran, Ankara, Riyadh or Cairo, Abdulla elaborated, or even in Moscow or Washington. They have created non-state actors, he said, “monsters, small and big ones, and they unleashed them and these are the monsters that have gone out of control and they are the ones who are creating facts on the ground and shaping the destiny of this very troubled region.”

He went on to argue that these militias, which number around 1,500 to 1,600 in places like Syria and Libya respectively, have capabilities greater than the states of Syria or Iraq. It is these “little monsters” that are shaping the region itself, including the breakup of states, the confusion, the acts of violence, and the refugee crisis in the Middle East and now Europe.

Nonetheless, the other panelists did provide an analysis of the future roles of regional and international powers in the

She called the recent agreement between the E.U. and Turkey—in which Brussels will send $3.2 billion to Ankara in exchange for Turkey agreeing to stem the tide of refugees into Europe—a step in the right direction.

Turning to Turkey’s domestic scene, Sloat expressed hope that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Turkish government will return to a cease-fire.

“More war is not in the interest of Turkey’s citizens,” she said. Sloat called on the Turkish government to respond proportionately to PKK attacks and told the PKK that the ballot box, not bullets, will improve the situation of Kurds in Turkey. She also affirmed that the U.S. government still classifies the PKK as a terrorist organization.

Gonül Tol, director of MEI’s Center for Turkish Studies, offered a more nuanced

Ambassador Unal Cevikoz and Amanda Sloat describe Turkish domestic challenges, including the refugee crisis, and its shifting international policy.

eastern Mediterranean affairs. Her remarks represented Washington’s official position on Turkey-related matters.

Describing Turkey as a valuable partner in the fight against ISIS, Sloat noted that Ankara has granted the U.S. access to its air bases and is participating in the Western-led air campaign on ISIS. Because of this assistance, she said, the coalition has reclaimed land from the terrorist group and diminished its capabilities.

Sloat also called on the international community to assist Turkey as it deals with large refugee populations. She commended the country for accepting more Syrian refugees than any other country, but warned that “Turkey cannot bear the burden alone.”

A comprehensive solution to the refugee crisis is needed, Sloat stated.

review of Turkey’s international relations.

When the Syrian civil war began, she said, Ankara’s top concerns were toppling the regime of President Bashar alAssad and marginalizing Syria’s Kurds.

Both of these objectives have failed, Tol pointed out: Assad remains in power, and the Kurds have emerged as a critical Western partner in the fight against ISIS. Russia’s decision to intervene in the war has only complicated matters for Turkey, and all but eliminated the prospects of a no-fly zone being established over northern Syria. Turkey desires a no-fly zone, Tol explained, because it believes it would prevent the Democratic Union Party (PYD) from establishing an autonomous Kurdish region in Syria. The West, however, has been reluctant from the beginning to implement a no-fly zone.

Russia’s decision to enter Syria all but as-

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sures a no-fly zone will not be established, as the West wants to avoid a direct confrontation with Moscow.

Its Syria policy a failure, Ankara is beginning to recalibrate its strategy, Tol said, noting that it now is more focused on working with its Western allies to confront ISIS. Following its controversial shooting down of a Russian military jet in November, Turkey has become more reliant on the support of its Western and NATO allies, and thus more sensitive to their concerns, Tol said.

She questioned, however, if Turkey will be able to truly align itself with the West when it comes to the PYD. With internal fighting between Ankara and the PKK having resumed, she was skeptical that Turkey will be able to truly recalibrate its PYD strategy.

Ambassador Unal Cevikoz, former Turkish ambassador to Iraq and the United Kingdom, agreed that Ankara is moving from an ideological to a realist foreign policy. When the so-called Arab Spring broke out in 2011, Turkey adopted a pan-Islamist approach, Cevikoz said, citing Turkey’s reaction to the 2013 coup that ousted Egypt’s democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi. In Cevikoz’s opinion, Ankara’s strong opposition to the military coup had less to do with democratic principles and more with the Islamic ideology of the party that was ousted. Turkey’s recent embrace of NATO and the EU is an indication that the country is beginning to step back from its ideological policies and embrace a realist approach, Cevikoz believes.

—Dale Sprusansky

HDP Leader Slams Erdogan’s Government

Selahattin Demirtas, co-leader of Turkey’s Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), gave the keynote speech at the Middle East Institute’s annual conference on Turkey.

Speaking in conversation with MEI’s Gonü l Tol, Demirtas discussed Turkey’s recent parliamentary elections, the repression faced by those affiliated with his party, and regional politics. His remarks were delivered in Turkish.

The HDP is a relatively new left-wing party that has its roots in minority (especially Kurdish) rights, feminism and secularism. In Turkey’s June 2015 general election, the party won enough seats to become the third largest party in the parliament, but suffered losses in the November 2015 election.

“We’re all wounded,” Demirtas said of 62

his country. “We [the HDP] wanted to be like a medicine for all these wounds. We took some risks like political parties have to take risks in order to change certain things.”

Although the party has significant support, mainly from Kurds, he emphasized that there are also many non-Kurdish Turks supporting the HDP. In Demirtas’ opinion, about half of Turkey sympathizes with the HDP’s ideas.

Demirtas spoke about the repression faced by the HDP, and in particular, the Oct. 10 bombing of its rally in Ankara, which claimed more than 100 lives. No one has claimed responsibility for the attacks, but the HDP has blamed President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP party for the bloodshed. According to Demirtas, the reaction of the security forces to the bombings, various attacks on other rallies, and repression of the press all have put increasing pressure on the HDP and indicate that the government is not interested in protecting the security and freedoms of dissidents.

“We wanted to discuss some of the issues but they [the AKP] didn’t want to do any of these things,” Demirtas alleged.

“We were attacked in 130 places; 400 party holdings were burned down. Our general center was attacked; it was all burned. Hundreds of policemen were waiting outside and the fire trucks didn’t come.”

Demirtas also spoke out against the prospect of civil war in Turkey, arguing that “to increase civil war is not a smart attempt. I believe in Turkey everybody will go back to thinking right.” However, he said, “the people’s rights are not a matter of bargaining.”

—Suhaib Khan

Lawrence Wilkerson at Drake University

Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and a high-profile, outspoken critic of what he refers to as “the military-industrial-congressional complex,” visited Iowa in late October on a speaking tour that included presentations at multiple universities, including Drake University in Des Moines, where on Oct. 22 he spoke to a capacity crowd in the Olin Hall auditorium.

Regarding the military-industrial complex, which President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about in his famous 1961 “Farewell Address to the Nation,” Wilkerson said, “If you know anything about Eisenhower, you know that he wanted to write, and did write himself, ‘congres-

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Lawrence Wilkerson speaks at Drake University in Des Moines.

sional,’ but one of his political aides said, ‘I don’t think it’s very circumspect of you, sir, to bash the Congress on the way out the door.’ And so he took it out. But it is that complex, all three entities, it requires all three to work and to work perniciously, insidiously, and viciously against your and my interests if your interests are in peace and not killing people in the world when it’s not necessary,” Wilkerson declared.

Prior to his prepared remarks, this writer spoke with the retired U.S. Army colonel who is currently the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William and Mary—and, as he repeatedly reminded his Drake audience, a member of the Republican Party.

“We’ve become an imperial state, an empire. Arguably, we inherited the British Empire, and others too, post-WWII. We’ve been busy managing that empire ever since, and the tools of empire become more imperial as you go along.

You almost automatically make your leadership more imperial and tend to do things that are antithetical to democracy, to a republic. I think you see that today most vividly exemplified in that we have been at war since 2001 and there’s no end in sight,” said Wilkerson, who has previously described the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s influence on the Bush administration’s decision to go to war in Iraq.

This writer asked Wilkerson about corruption in the Israeli government harkening back to the Dotan Affair (see Jan./Feb. 1997 Washington Report, p. 27).

“There hasn’t been an Israeli prime JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

minister recently that didn’t have some problem. It’s almost like Rhode Island, leave the governorship and go to jail,” Wilkerson replied.

The former Bush administration official said that Ariel Sharon, Israel’s prime minister from 2001 to 2006, was about to be investigated for corruption when he suffered a debilitating stroke.

“His family was really involved in a mess,” said Wilkerson, referring to Sharon’s sons, Gilad and Omri, who were under investigation by Israel’s National Fraud Investigation Unit in connection with $4.5 million transferred into their bank accounts by an Australian financier.

In 2005, atop a garbage dump located on the site of Al-Khayriyya, a Palestinian village ethnically cleansed during the Nakba, the Israeli government began constructing Ariel Sharon Park, a massive green space that when completed will be three times the size of New York City’s Central Park. The park will feature bike and golf cart paths, sports fields, picnic areas, a lake s and a 50,000-seat amphitheater.

Wilkerson described corruption as just one of the problems Israel faces right now. “They’ve killed their labor movement. They are for all practical purposes an apartheid state. Their non-Jewish citizens are third- and fourth-class citizens.

Sixty percent of the wealth in Israel is in the hands of about 20 families. About 51 percent of the land is owned or leased by the security complex. One in five Israelis is now a settler. It’s the group that Netanyahu counts on,” said Wilkerson.

Israel is no longer the land of kibbutzim and “collective governance and collective sharing of toils and taxes and everything else. Now it’s one of the most predatory capitalist states in the Mediterranean, if not the world,” said Wilkerson.

—Michael Gillespie

Alison Weir Speaks in Des Moines

Alison Weir, founder of If Americans Knew and president of the Council for the National Interest, spoke on Nov. 6 at Trinity United Methodist Church in Des Moines. She discussed Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine and her book, Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of how the U.S. was used to Create Israel (available from AET’s Middle East Books and More).

“I saw a people and their land being destroyed with our tax dollars. To me, that is newsworthy,” Weir said of her first trip to Palestine in 2001.

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Alison Weir speaks in Des Moines.

Weir explained to an audience of about 50 gathered in the church sanctuary that she was so concerned by what she saw in Palestine and by a growing awareness that American news reports seldom reflected the situation she had observed, that after her return to the U.S. she founded If Americans Knew.

“I didn’t name it If Liberals Knew, If Conservatives Knew, If Christians Knew, If Jews Knew, or If Muslims Knew. I named it If Americans Knew, because I felt that all of us would abhor what I had seen and would want to do something about it,” Weir explained.

“We decided to focus on telling Americans the facts as clearly as we could without any kind of political bias. We also decided to focus on the media and do media studies,” she said. “It’s my belief that the news media is the most powerful institution in a democracy, in a republic.

That’s how most of us learn what we think we know about many issues, especially international issues.”

Weir, who earned her journalism degree at the University of Michigan and worked as a reporter and editor in California before traveling to Palestine, said she decided to compare and contrast news coverage in American media outlets regarding the deaths resulting from the conflict.

“I liked the idea of doing a study that would be as immune to subjective bias as possible,” she said, “and I chose a category that was acknowledged as significant and that was quantifiable. We decided to study media coverage of deaths among both populations. The key word is both, because they all matter.”

Her media studies, which began with deaths in the year 2001, are widely recognized as having exposed both the disparity in numbers of deaths of Israelis and Palestinians and what Weir describes as “troubling patterns of omission

and disparities in emphasis,” as well as bias in the use of terminology—all of which distort reality and interfere with readers’ and viewers’ ability to understand the conflict.

If Americans Knew has conducted dozens of such studies, analyzing thousands of news reports by major news organizations across the United States, including the Associated Press, ABC, CBS, NBC, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, as well as several regional and local newspapers.

Weir spoke at length about her book, Against Our Better Judgment. “What surprised me when I did my research was that the political Zionist movement has been very active in the United States for well over a century,” she said, “and yet most Americans have never even heard the term. Here we have a political ideology that has profoundly affected our own nation, and we don’t even know about it.”

Her prodigiously documented exposé explores aspects of the hidden history of the Zionist movement and the activities of prominent and not so well-known American Zionists, and has been a cause, if not the subject, of some controversy. Weir reports that sales of Against Our Better Judgment are strong. Her presentation in Des Moines was sponsored by Veterans For Peace Chapter 163.

—Michael Gillespie

David Sheen on Israeli Racism

In an Oct. 29 talk at the Markaz (formerly the Levantine Cultural Center) in Los Angeles, CA, titled “The Bullet, the Ballot and the Boycott,” David Sheen focused on Israel’s dehumanizing discourse inspiring vigilante attacks on Palestinians, Africans and other non-Jews.

David Sheen was raised Jewish in Canada. He was shocked by his first visit

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to Israel as a young adult, when he observed Israelis’ racist treatment of Palestinians. His subsequent trips to the “Promised Land” as a journalist confirmed his first impression of abject racism on the part of Israel’s armed forces.

He noted that nearly 50 percent of Jews marry non-Jews, and intermarriage is becoming increasingly common in America. According to Sheen, the Israeli government has spent more than $50 million trying to prevent inter-racial marriages and the immigration of intermarried newlyweds, as well as halting immigration by Africans to Israel.

Sheen cited Israel’s transportation minister Yisrael Katz, a right-wing religious fanatic, who said, “You should praise the government for its [racist] policies.” Another unnamed Israeli advocated, “Whites only within city limits after dark.”

Africans from Sudan and Eritrea were attacked in Israel with impunity, Sheen said. He is still bothered by the memory of a protest by Ethiopians against police brutality in a Tel Aviv neighborhood during which he saw Israeli soldiers mow down Ethiopian youngsters while their parents franticly begged the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) not to do so. If you don’t want to take Africans as refugees, Sheen added, then don’t take their resources.

Attacks on gays in Israel are commonplace, he said, and are carried out by the same thugs every year. Some religious Jews justify the killing of homosexuals according to their beliefs.

Sheen is making films for MENA-X (Middle East/North Africa Exchange) such as the four-minute “Inside Israel’s Race Wars, Thieves in the Temple.”

—Pat McDonnell Twair 64

The General Delegation of the PLO to the United States hosted a Nov. 19 reception at the Park Hyatt Washington hotel celebrating the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, observed on or around every Nov. 29, when in 1947 the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the partitioning of Palestine. The Palestinian community was joined by ambassadors, diplomats, representatives from the U.S. government, heads of organizations working in Palestine, media and friends.

In his welcoming remarks, Ambassador Maen Rashid Areikat pointed to the importance of this event, which first became an annual U.N.-organized observance on Nov. 29, 1977. Ambassador Areikat assured guests that the Palestinian people will not cease their efforts to achieve freedom until the Israeli occupation ends, a Palestinian state is born with East Jerusalem as its capital, and a just solution is achieved for the refugee problem as mandated by the U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194.

On behalf of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Areikat bestowed the Order of the State of Palestine, the Star of Merit, upon the well-respected diplomat and brilliant writer and thinker, Dr. Clovis Maksoud. Areikat thanked Maksoud, a Lebanese national who served as the Arab League’s ambassador to the United Nations and its chief representative in the U.S. for more than 10 years, for all his efforts in support of the Pales-

Ayman Odeh, Leader of the Knesset’s Joint List, Makes Historic Visit to Washington

Israeli Knesset member Ayman Odeh, leader of the Arab Joint List, made history in early December by becoming the first prominent Palestinian-Israeli lawmaker to be invited to Washington, DC to participate in high-level talks.

During his two-week visit to the U.S., Odeh met with senior officials at the White House, State Department and Congress. He also traveled to New York for meetings at the United Nations, and to Atlanta to engage with civil rights leaders and speak at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s church.

Odeh’s Joint List, the Knesset’s thirdlargest party, is an alliance of Israel’s four major Palestinian parties. The parties’ decision to unite and run on one ticket in Israel’s March 2015 parliamentary elections has helped raise the profile of Palestinian Israelis, who comprise an estimated onefifth of Israel’s population.

Before his departure, Odeh acknowledged the significance of his trip. “The issues that matter to Israel’s Arab citizens are hardly represented in the international conversation,” he told reporters.

“I'm going to the U.S. to bring that voice with me….Less than a month after Netanyahu's visit to the U.S. and his halfapology [for racist remarks about Palestinian Israelis], I go so that I may tell the hard truth about him and the government in Israel, which rose to power through racist incitement against Arab citizens.”

Speaking at the Palestine Center in Washington, DC on Ambassador Maen Areikat (l) presents Ambassador Clovis Maksoud Dec. 2, Odeh further (c) with the Star of Merit, as Mrs. Maria Hariri lends a hand. discussed the racism

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David Sheen (r) and Estee Chandler of Jewish Voice for Peace.

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Celebrating International Solidarity Day with Palestinians

tinian cause. Maksoud was an editor at Al Ahram and Al Nahar newspapers and taught at The American University in Washington, DC. The beloved scholar received a standing ovation after he reaffirmed his belief in the legitimacy of the Palestinian cause and the inevitability of the success of the Palestinian people in achieving freedom and independence.

—Delinda C. Hanley

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Binyamin Netanyahu’s statements equating what happened in Paris with the recent knife attacks in Jerusalem, or the struggles of Palestinians for independence and freedom. “Trying to label the Palestinians as part of this overall campaign to target France and other Western countries is deplorable. It is a very cheap ploy...we should not get confused here and blur the lines between those Israeli Knesset member Ayman Odeh visited Washington who are fighting for their freeto share the often ignored struggles of Israel’s Palestinian dom and justice and those who are killing for the sake of citizens. killing to terrorize people Palestinians living in Israel are forced to around the world.” endure. This racism, he said, begins with Areikat also condemned the U.S. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who media, candidates and members of Conregularly disparages Palestinians. Such gress who dehumanize Palestinians, talkremarks are not slips of the tongue, Odeh ing about Israeli but not Palestinian casucautioned, but rather calculated state- alties. They give the impression that ments meant to destroy the legitimacy of Palestinian lives don’t matter and that Isthe Palestinian-led civil rights movement raeli lives are more precious than Palesin Israel. tinian lives, Areikat said.

Odeh, who is from Haifa, praised his He urged Americans to visit the occufellow Palestinian-Israeli lawmakers for pied Palestinian territories and see the putting their differences aside and agree- daily humiliation that Palestinians must ing to run on a joint ticket. Ideology, he endure. They’ll understand the level of resaid, should not prevent Palestinian Is- sentment and see why Palestinians are raelis from uniting. so desperate that they do the things that The lawmaker also noted that living in they are doing. No Palestinian wants his Israel—the state that occupies their broth- or her child to attack Israeli police and ers and sisters in the West Bank and civilians, knowing in advance that they will Gaza—often puts Palestinian Israelis in be killed in the process. Palestinian paruncomfortable situations. His community ents aren’t teaching their children to hate, regularly faces discrimination during times Areikat said, nor are Palestinian leaders of conflict, particularly when they make inciting their people. “The occupation is known their opposition to Israeli policies, he said.

Odeh expressed hope that the Joint List will be able to improve the lives of Palestinian Israelis and slowly change mainstream Israeli opinions about Palestinians.

—Dale Sprusansky

the main source of incitement,” he explained. “Once the occupation ends there is no reason for any kind of violence between Palestinians and Israelis.”

Turning to the issue of security, Areikat said Israel will not enjoy security unless there is a just peace and unless the occupation is ended. It’s simple. They have been trying to convince the world that security must come before peace. “How can you ask an occupied people to guarantee the security of the occupier? This is something that has never happened in the history of conflicts,” he pointed out.

Ever since the current Israeli government took office there has been a deliberate escalation of tension between Palestinians and Israelis and a 20 percent increase in settlements, Areikat said. Netanyahu is ideologically opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state. He said very clearly, on the eve of the Israeli elections, that “a Palestinian state will not be made under my watch.” Yet here he was last week trying to convince the Obama administration that he was in favor of the two-state solution, Areikat said. “It is one thing to talk about it, and it is another to take steps to do it,” the ambassador stated. “The only steps he is taking on the ground are preventing the Palestinians from establishing their state.”

Areikat said he was concerned by the level of racism, intolerance and incitement that he’s seen in Israeli society over the last month and a half. He said he’s also shocked that the U.S. is “turning your eyes the other way and not telling them that what they are doing is wrong.” Without holding Israel accountable and mak-

Ambassador Maen Areikat, the chief PLO representative to the U.S., began his remarks at the Palestine Center in Washington, DC on Nov. 16 by expressing his country’s solidarity with the Lebanese and French people after the attacks the previous two days. He also reminded listeners that most of the victims of the ISIS terror campaign are Arabs and Muslims.

Ambassador Areikat went on to strongly deplore Israeli Prime Minister JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

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Shifting the Paradigm with Ambassador Maen Areikat

Ambassador Maen Areikat speaks to reporters following his talk.

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State Department Spokesman Skeptical Nuclear Deal Will Improve U.S.-Iran Relations

Speaking at the National Iranian American Council's leadership conference in Washington, DC on Oct. 24, Alan Eyre, the State Department's Persian-language spokesman, expressed his personal hope for the resumption of full diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Iran, but conceded that this is unlikely to happen in the near future.

The recently agreed upon nuclear deal with Iran was a significant diplomatic achievement, Eyre said, and shows that the two nations ought to be able to discuss other pressing matters. “What we have now is at minimum proof of concept," he stated. “We have shown that smart, tough diplomacy with Iran can work and can solve real problems. So if it can work on the nuclear issue, then, theoretically at least, it can work on other issues.”

This is, of course, easier said than done.

The nuclear deal has only partially bridged the chasm created by the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Eyre said, and thus many issues between the two nations remain.

The problem is twofold, he cautioned: the U.S. and Iran suffer from mutual distrust due to years of not communicating, and have competing regional ambitions.

This latter point, he said, poses a significant challenge to a détente. "One cannot ascribe all such tensions in the bilateral relationship to misunderstanding, when it is more the case that it arises from mutually incompatible strategic views and goals between Iran and the U.S.," he said.

In the months since the Iran nuclear deal was signed, Tehran has given no indication it seeks to discuss other issues with the U.S., Eyre continued. He noted that anti-American rhetoric continues to be spread by conservative ele66

State Department Persian-language spokesman Alan Eyre assesses the U.S.-Iran relationship.

ments within the ruling apparatus, and that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has publically dismissed the idea of expanding Tehran's relationship with Washington.

According to Eyre, who was a member of the nuclear negotiating team, the U.S. desires improved relations with Tehran but will not be afraid to raise contentious issues with the country's leadership. The U.S., he said, will continue to express concern about Iran's human rights violations, its role in the region and its imprisonment of American citizens.

While rapprochement appears unlikely, Eyre reminded his audience that circumstances can quickly change in Iran, and that predicting the future of the country is a fool’s errand. When asked

where the U.S.-Iran relationship will be in 10 years, he replied, “I have no earthly idea."

As the bilateral relationship evolves, Eyre stressed patience and diligence. In an era in which people binge watch multiple seasons of television shows, he stressed that one cannot expect international relations to unfold in a similarly rapid fashion. "By focusing on the work at hand today, we can help write the script for the next season and help draft the future’s answer to the present’s question," he said. —Dale Sprusansky

Lebanese Singer Headlines National Day

A highlight of the 72nd National Day of Lebanon was a performance by visiting Lebanese songstress Dany Arakelian at the Riviera Country Club on Nov. 22.

More than 600 guests witnessed the cake-cutting ceremony presided over by Consul General Johnny Ibrahim, with Judge James Kaddo offering congratulatory comments. The celebration was an informal reunion of old friends such as Dr. Hanna and Dr. Najwa Shammas, Pierre and Giselle Alwan, Beirut Times publisher Michel Abssi, Dr. Raja Srour, Arab American Affairs publisher Joseph Hayek and Dr. Raymond Jallow. A video was shown of an expatriates’ conference depicting efforts to revisit Lebanon.

The consul general announced that at the beginning of the year Lebanon’s consulate will be moved to a new location on Wilshire Blvd.

—Samir Twair

Celebrating Lebanon’s national day are (l-r) Judge James Kaddo, Suad Kaddo, Maya Ibrahim and Consul General to Los Angeles Johnny Ibrahim.

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ing it clear that their actions will have consequences, Israel will not stop, Areikat predicted. “Israel is acting like a spoiled brat...and instead of spanking them or keeping them in their room—no Xbox, no PlayStation—you keep giving them chocolate and carrots. They will take it and say ‘thank you.’”

This is exactly what we are seeing today, Areikat warned. “It’s $40 to $50 billion Washington will be giving Israel between 2018-2028 [a whole lot of carrots] to help create a bully in the Middle East.”

—Delinda C. Hanley

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gious division inevitably leads to war.

Peter Wright, Lake Oswego, OR

Xenophobia is not the Answer

Hate Must be Denounced

To The New York Times, Nov. 23, 2015 Re “Donald Trump Again Insists He Saw Celebrations in New Jersey on Sept. 11” (First Draft, nytimes.com, Nov. 22): Every morning now, I see a news item quoting leading candidates for president of this country I live in and love, and I think that I am living a nightmare.

Where are the denunciations by millions of Americans to this frightening incitement to hate? What does this fear of disagreeing with those statements mean?

This must not be allowed to continue and fester.

Someone among the grown-ups has to denounce it before we are swept into a dystopia beyond my imagination.

I am really frightened by the future that we are creating.

Rita Lasar, New York, NY. The writer, whose brother died in the World Trade Center, is a co-founder of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows.

Religious Liberty for All

To The Oregonian, Dec. 8, 2015 Jon Meacham, in his book Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, writes, “[I]n 1786, a statute for religious liberty from Jefferson’s pen became law. The bill, Jefferson said, was ‘meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo and the infidel of every denomination.’” If we start to discriminate against one religion, soon it will be another and then another. ReliJANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

To The Seattle Times, Nov. 18, 2015 In 1939, 61 percent of Americans surveyed said the United States should not accept 10,000 largely Jewish refugee children from Europe. Is that something people would still agree with today?

If not, we need to stop advocating reactionary, fear-based policies. The risk of admitting refugees is not zero, but it is also not so high as to be unmanageable.

Gaining admission to the U.S. as an official refugee takes 18 to 24 months. No refugees admitted since 9/11 have committed acts of terrorism.

If the Islamic State really wants to attack targets within the United States, are they really going to queue up waiting for two years to obtain official status? Or is it more likely they would simply send people as “tourists” using the legitimate passports of their many Western recruits? The attackers in Paris were almost all (and perhaps even exclusively all) French and Belgian. Shall we keep all of those nationalities out of our country too?

Xenophobia is part of the problem, not a solution. We should expect more from our leaders than the promotion of fear.

Tara Van Niman, Redmond, WA

Know-Nothings Will Fail Again

To The Desert Sun, Nov. 22, 2015 Thirty-one governors and many in Congress want to pause or halt taking any further Syrian refugees. This after hundreds of Syrian refugees have arrived in the U.S. since 2011 without incident—including in [most] of the states opposed.

Opposition to immigration has a long tradition in our country. From the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798 laws have been passed to restrict immigration of Irish, Germans, Jews, Asians and Catholics, among others. The idea of excluding terrorists—then called anarchists—was first considered by Congress in 1889.

Theodore Roosevelt urged the exclusion and deportation of anarchist immigrants in his first address to Congress in 1901.

Despite all this, our nation has thrived by the efforts of immigrants from around the world.

Today, we are in far more danger from our guns (35,327 killed or injured year to date), our cars (32,719 dead in 2013) and our drugs (44,000 dead in 2013)

than from Syrian families fleeing devastation and horror. Death from guns, cars and drugs is certain. How many Americans have been killed by refugees?

The know-nothing tradition has never been allowed to succeed in America and it should be recognized and thwarted at every turn. Folks come to America seeking refuge—all immigrants are refugees.

And refugee lives matter.

Jerry Marshak, Palm Springs, CA

History Won’t Forget

To The Dallas Morning News, Nov. 21, 2015 Re “Governor: Risk isn’t worth it—He cites exposure to ‘unacceptable peril,’ but jurisdiction is an issue,” Tuesday news story.

In his open letter to President Barack Obama, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott proclaimed that state agencies would “not participate in the resettlement of any Syrian refugees in the State of Texas.” As the son of a refugee, I hear in Abbott’s fear-mongering the clear echo of a shameful chapter in American history.

Some 80 years ago, the nation faced a similar challenge: Hitler’s rise to power provoked tens of thousands of Jews to flee Germany. Humanitarians penned the Wagner-Rogers Bill, which would have admitted 20,000 young Jewish refugees.

In words chillingly like our governor’s, one prominent opponent wrote, “20,000 charming children would all too soon grow up into 20,000 ugly adults.”

The Wagner-Rogers Bill was defeated, and most of those “20,000 charming children” never grew to adulthood.

This week, Abbott declared that Texas will welcome not one Syrian refugee man, woman or child until he receives an absolute—and therefore impossible— guarantee that no one among them might harm us. Governor Abbott, there is but one guarantee: History will not be kind to the man who slammed the door in the face of families fleeing ISIS and the Syrian president’s butchery.

Paul Zoltan, Dallas, TX

Focus on the Threats at Home

To the Tampa Bay Times, Nov. 25, 2015 It is amazing that my congressman, Gus Bilirakis, and his colleagues can so quickly pass knee-jerk legislation regarding a terrorist attack in Paris, but do absolutely nothing when a Columbine High School, Sandy Hook Elementary or other school terrorist attack happens.

“Stand your ground" laws here in the

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United States scare me more than refugees.

Georgie Bowser, New Port Richey, FL

Ground War Not the Answer

To The Buffalo News, Nov. 28, 2015 When it comes to the Middle East, I am amazed by the ability of American politicians to deny the obvious.

Two quick points. In the wake of the Paris attacks, France claims to be at war with ISIS, yet makes no plans for putting combat troops into the area. Yet a segment of our present and hope-to-be future leaders think the Paris attack is basis for the United States to risk the lives of our children and grandchildren in a ground war.

Second, and the most important point to keep in mind, is the basis for the 2003 invasion of Iraq: After deposing Saddam Hussain, a sovereign government less dangerous to the West would be put in its place. Despite the inroads ISIS has made on that sovereign nation’s territory and the subjugation of large numbers of its population, the sovereign nation of Iraq has not asked for the assistance of Western combat ground troops in its war to retake its territory.

Without a negotiated invitation to put ground troops into their fight, one can easily imagine to do so will be considered tantamount to a second invasion and occupation by the U.S.-established and U.N.-recognized legitimate government of Iraq.

Pity the U.S. soldier facing west with Sunni-based ISIS fighters to his front and Shi’i-based insurgents fighting “the invaders” to his rear.

Larry S. Fallon, West Seneca, NY

Don’t Punish the Innocent

To the Los Angeles Times, Nov. 20, 2015 When has punishing the innocent along with the guilty ever stopped violence? (“Israeli soldiers raid West Bank refugee camp, destroy home; 2 Palestinians die in clashes,” Nov. 16) The Israeli raid on a West Bank refugee camp to destroy the home of a Palestinian accused of killing an Israeli, in the process killing two Palestinian protesters, will only justify further resistance.

Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is a physical disaster for the Palestinians and a moral disaster for Israel.

Doris Isolini Nelson, Los Angeles, CA

Why Palestine Protests

To The Courier-Journal, Nov. 9, 2015 The recent naive commentary regarding the situation in Israel-Palestine incorrectly simplifies the reasons for the current violence.

The two writers claim the cause of the Palestinians’ current mini-uprising is “incitement” by the Palestinian president, but this is unlikely. A September 2015 poll said that 65 percent of Palestinians want President Abbas to resign. He has little credibility.

Palestinians have been protesting for decades. Who else will struggle for Palestinian grievances? An oppressed people is rising up, again. Who will listen?

Five million Palestinians live as political refugees. Unlawfully, Israel has never allowed them to return in order to dominate Israel-Palestine demographically.

West Bank Palestinians live under martial law, suffering a 19th-century-style colonial takeover. Their land is steadily apprehended by settlers. Gaza—a series of decades-old refugee camps—is under an economic blockade to the global outrage of humanitarian organizations.

I think the question is: Why wouldn’t Palestinians continually protest Israeli policies that daily ruin their lives? The vast Palestinian majority protests, as any oppressed people would, to be able to live in dignity, with full equality.

Matt Bewley, Louisville, KY. The writer is a former exchange student at Al Quds University in the West Bank.

Don’t Ignore Palestine’s Reality

To The Morning News, Dec. 9, 2015 Cal Thomas’ opinionated column on Palestine/Israel that was published Friday in the Morning News (“In Israel, the

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more things change …”) gave a very myopic and distorted picture of the situation in occupied Palestine.

Israelis with a conscience, such as Ilan Pappé in his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, give a graphic picture of the Zionist plan to evict all Palestinians from their homeland.

My Christian grandparents were driven from their beautiful two-story home in Jaffa by Zionist terrorists. I used to spend the summers there going to the beach with my aunts.

At present, Beit Jala and Beit Sahour, two Christian Palestinian towns in the vicinity of Bethlehem, have walls built separating their citizens from their farms and olive groves to make room for more illegal Israeli settlements.

There are Israeli human rights organizations trying to help Palestinians. Here in the United States, Jewish Voice for Peace is advocating for justice in Palestine/Israel.

To quote Amos 5:24: “...let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

Gabriel John Batarseh, Florence, SC

More U.S. Money for Israel?

To The News & Observer, Nov. 10, 2015 Regarding the Nov. 10 news article “Obama, Netanyahu renew their call for peace in Mideast”: Without doubt, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is meeting with our president to ask for more money—$3 billion is not enough.

How will he spend it? On more home demolitions, over 26,000 since 1967? On building more Israeli condominiums in the West Bank and West Jerusalem, in contravention of international law, where 520,000 Israeli settlers currently live? Will he build more than the 600 checkpoints, which make it almost impossible for Palestinians to go to work, school or visit holy places in Jerusalem? Will Netanyahu extend the separation barrier, now 450 miles long and 28 feet high, that extends into Palestinian land and farms?

This barrier is a political border defining Israel’s expanded borders and the confines of the Palestinian cantons.

More than 97 percent of Palestinians are confined to dozens of tiny enclaves.

Will he build more Israeli-only highways creating greater barriers to Palestinian movement, and will Netanyahu continue to control all water sources in the entire country? I hope President Obama addresses these vital questions.

Ruth Zalph, Chapel Hill, NC ❑ JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

cartoons_69_January-February 2016 Cartoons 12/10/15 9:34 PM Page 69

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THE WORLD LOOKS AT THE MIDDLE EAST

New York Times Syndicate, New York

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The Irish Times, Dublin

Aukland, New Zealand

COPYRIGHT @2013 KHALIL BENDIBL www.bendib.com

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Lianhe Zaobao, Singapore

Ad-Dustour, Amman JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

www.OtherWords.org WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

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B O O K S •

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Congress and the Shaping of the Middle East

By Dr. Kirk J. Beattie, Seven Stories Press, 2015, hardcover, 320 pp. List: $30; MEB: $24.

Reviewed by Andrew I. Killgore Dr. Kirk Beattie of Boston’s Simmons College spent nearly a decade on his book Congress and the Shaping of the Middle East, described as “stunning”

by Harvard professor Stephen Walt. During the 2005-6 and 2010-11 academic years Beattie interviewed hundreds of congressional staffers and Middle Eastcentered groups—including this magazine’s executive editor Richard H. Curtiss, managing editor Janet McMahon and this writer. Nobody else has dug into the very essence of Congress to show how it shapes the Middle East.

The book opens with a question: Is Congress broken? and ends with Beattie’s answer: Yes, it’s broken, impacted by “special interests.” Beattie lists issues with which Congress has trouble, such as healthcare, the economic crisis and gun control. But on the Arab-Israeli issue, Beattie writes, “Most Americans are inclined to see a high degree of confluence between American and Israeli interests. This is the message they are fed by most American and Israeli political figures.”

The author’s original aim was to study the Israel-Palestine question, but he ended up looking at all questions affected by that conflict.

In between Beattie’s opening question and final conclusion are chapters on: The Costs

Andrew I. Killgore, former U.S. ambassador to Qatar, is publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

70

of Getting Elected; Getting Elected to Congress; House/Senate Staffers on the Job; Explaining Congresspersons’ Behavior on Mideast Affairs; How House Members/Senators Make Mideast Policy; and Appropriations.

Beattie writes that congresspersons are heavily dependent on their staffs. At the lower end staff members don’t stay in their positions long because they are overworked and underpaid. When they do quit, they often end up working for a lobbying firm with better pay.

Beattie found that most congresspersons know little about the Middle East and care not a lot. That being the case, they generally take a position recommended by lobbyists, especially from the omnipresent American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Beattie learned that AIPAC interviewed every congressperson to determine their views, to find out about their plans, and to make clear what AIPAC expected of them. AIPAC’s power was clear: $67 million to $70 million annual budget, 200 people on staff, and a (claimed) membership of 100,000.

The moment a congressman is elected, Beattie writes, “he is concentrated on the campaign to get reelected.” That is the number one goal: get re-elected, while looking over his shoulder at possible rivals.

Beattie tells the tale of former Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, who was anti-Israel. In his next election bid AIPAC

WAshington REpoRt on MiddlE EAst AffAiRs

put up so much money against him that it became the most expensive Senate race ever. Helms won, but after that he became pro-Israel.

AIPAC does not win every time. An affiliated PAC (political action committee) tried and failed to oust now retired Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA).

AIPAC is overwhelmingly the largest pro-Israel force in the Congress. It takes a stand on everything and sees nearly every member of Congress as frequently as every three weeks.

But there is some room for hope. For example, congresspersons’ “loyalty” to AIPAC is paper thin. A considerable number of Jewish staffers, particularly the young, are uneasy about some of Israel’s policies.

Beattie writes with approval of former Congressman David Obey of Wisconsin, not identified as a “water carrier” for Israel. He tells of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who, according to Beattie, told Obey: “I just ask you to do two things. Please do not let Israel’s well-meaning friends in the United States prevent you [Obey] from continuing good relations with the Palestinians.

Otherwise all will be lost. And try to keep AIPAC off my back. I’m a big boy now and I can do this [what needs to be done] by myself.” The story illustrates Rabin’s impression of AIPAC and how it sought to derail the Oslo peace process.

Obey did not toe the AIPAC line and claimed (to Beattie) that money was not decisive. Yet when questioned, he maintained that his high position and the myriad battles he had to fight supported his case. Perhaps, Beattie, says, Obey was unaware of just how much money he was getting from pro-Israel PACs. But Obey still “dialed” for pro-Israel dollars.

In The Israel Lobby (also available from Middle East Books and More), John Mearsheimer and Walt give an overall view of a pro-Israel Congress, while Beattie examines it minutely. Both are disillusioning. ❑ JAnuARy/fEbRuARy 2016

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Middle East Books and More Literature

*

Films

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Pottery

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Solidarity Items

W i n t e r

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More

2 0 1 6

Poems for Palestine by Maher J. Massis, Hesperus Press Limited, 2015, paperback, 96 pp. List: $16.95; MEB: $15. This fantastic collection of poems showcases the literary prowess of Palestinian poets and brings together a diverse assemblage of poetry addressing numerous aspects of the Palestinian struggle, calling attention to their continued plight. A portion of proceeds goes to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF).

The Confines of the Shadow by Alessandro Spina, Darf Publishers, 2015, paperback, 371 pp. List: $15.99; MEB: $15. Libyan author Alessandro Spina presents a masterful series of stories tracing the Libyan city of Benghazi from a small Ottoman port to the bastion of resistance where the fight to topple Muammar Qaddafi was based. These mini-novels highlight different aspects of the city’s development and history, beautifully weaving together an epic tale of one of North Africa’s great cities. This is the first volume in what will be a three-part series.

Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom by Steven Salaita, Haymarket Books, 2015, hardcover, 243 pp.

List: $22.95; MEB: $18.

When Prof. Steven Salaita was offered a position at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign in 2014, then had it questionably revoked after he tweeted comments critical of Israel, it set off a firestorm of controversy and a full investigation into the relationship between higher education and Israel. This book contains Salaita’s reflections and thoughts since that incident.

The Audacious Ascetic: What the Bin Laden Tapes Reveal About AlQa’ida by Flagg Miller, Oxford University Press, 2015, hardcover, 459 pp. List: $34.95; MEB: $26. In 2002, a compound occupied by Osama bin Laden was raided, revealing an archive of more than 1,500 audiotapes. This book is the result of the long investigation and study of these tapes, suggesting a different story of bin Laden and his organization in the years before 2001 than many mainstream narratives put forward. Miller brilliantly discusses bin Laden’s ideological transformations and his role as a leader of a movement.

We Too Sing America: South Asian, Arab, Muslim, and Sikh Immigrants Shape Our Multiracial Future by Deepa Iyer, The New Press, 2015, hardcover, 229 pp. List: $25.95; MEB: $20. In the aftermath of 9/11, new waves of racism against immigrants were apparent to the entire nation.

Ever since then, consequential acts of racism have continued to occur at alarming rates. This powerful new book explores such incidents and examines the role of the state, police profiling, Islamophobia, the Black Lives Matter movement, and much more to discern the impacts of post-9/11 racism and future discussions of race in America.

Food of Oman: Recipes and Stories from the Gateway to Arabia by Felicia Campbell, Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2015, hardcover, 257 pp. List: $40; MEB: $30. As a result of its diverse and globally connected history, Omani cuisine boasts an incredible mix of flavors and spices. This tantalizing collection of dishes covers all courses and showcases Oman’s Persian, Indian, African and Asian influences, accompanied by informative snippets and beautiful photography. This is a great introduction to an often overlooked cuisine from the Arab world.

Against Apartheid: The Case for Boycotting Israeli Universities by Ashley Dawson and Bill V. Mullen, Haymarket Books, 2015, paperback, 258 pp. List: $19.95; MEB: $18. This wellargued collection of essays lays out the case for boycotting Israeli universities, pointing out their complicity in the occupation of Palestine, and what a cultural boycott might look like and accomplish. The prestigious contributors include Ali Abunimah, Steven Salaita, Joseph Massad, Ilan Pappe, Noura Erekat, Omar Barghouti and Sunaina Maira.

Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate by Abdel Bari Atwan, University of California Press, 2015, hardcover, 256 pp. List: $24.95; MEB: $20. In this important new book, Atwan smartly delves into the history and genealogy of the Islamic State movement, relying on extensive research and interviews with IS members to trace the origins of this critically important organization. He focuses throughout on how IS members utilize social media, the “dark web” and other digital platforms to expand and solidify their territorial control.

Survival and Conscience: From the Shadows of Nazi Germany to the Jewish Boat to Gaza by Lillian Rosengarten, Just World Books, 2015, paperback, 189 pp. List: $21.99; MEB: $20. This engaging autobiography follows the life of Lillain Rosengarten, who fled Nazi Germany in 1936 and settled in New York.

After the horrors she witnessed, she began a personal transformation into a peace activist, culminating in her 2010 participation in a “Jewish Boat to Gaza” aimed at breaking the Israeli siege. Hers is a moving story of courage and hope.

Shipping Rates Most items are discounted and available on a first-come, first-served basis. Orders accepted by mail, phone (800-368-5788 ext. 2), or Web (www.middleeastbooks.com). All payments in U.S. funds. Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express accepted. Please send mail orders to Middle East Books and More, 1902 18th St. NW, Washington, DC 20009, with checks and money orders made out to “AET.” U.S. Shipping Rates: Please add $5 for the first item and $2.50 for each additional item. Canada & Mexico shipping charges: Please add $15 for the first item and $3.50 for each additional item. International shipping charges: Please add $15 for the first item and $6 for each additional item. We ship by USPS Priority unless otherwise requested.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

Library packages (list value over $240) are available for $29 if donated to a library, or free if requested with a library’s paid subscription or renewal. Call Middle East Books and More at 800-368-5788 ext. 2 to order. Our policy is to identify donors unless anonymity is specifically requested.

WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

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O• B • I • T • U • A • R • I • E • S Sophie el Goulli, 84, a Tunisian writer and art historian, died Oct. 10 in Tunis.

Born in Sousse, Tunisia, she studied art history at the Sorbonne in Paris. She taught art history at the University of Tunis, established the Tunisian film library, and won numerous awards and honors for her work, including the Prix national de la Critique (National Prize for Criticism) in 1992. She also published many novels and collections of poetry, including Les mystères de Tunis (“The Mysteries of Tunis”), her most famous novel.

Ken Taylor, 81, a Canadian diplomat who hid U.S. officials in Tehran during the 1979 Iran Hostage Crisis, died Oct. 15 of colon cancer in New York. Born in Calgary, he entered the Canadian Foreign Service after receiving an M.A. in business administration from UC Berkeley. He served in Pakistan and London before being assigned to Tehran as Canada’s ambassador to Iran. In 1979, Taylor came to the aid of six U.S. officials in Tehran and harbored them for 79 days before they were evacuated by the CIA. In 2012, his character was portrayed in the popular film “Argo,” which was criticized for minimizing Taylor’s role in the rescue operation while emphasizing the bravery of the CIA agents.

Gamal al-Ghitani, 70, an Egyptian editor and journalist, died Oct. 18 in Cairo of heart and respiratory problems. He was born in Upper Egypt in 1945 but raised predominately in Cairo, and began writing at a very young age. In 1966 he was arrested for criticism of then-President Gamal Abdul Nasser. While working as a journalist for Akhbar El Youm, he continued to write historical fiction. His most famous novel was Zayni Barakat, a scathing critique of authoritarianism. He was the recipient of numerous international literary prizes and in 2013 was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago. Al-Ghitani was known for his outspoken support of artistic freedom and criticism of consecutive Egyptian regimes, as well as of the Muslim Brotherhood. (His novel The Zafarani Files is available from AET’s Middle East Books and More.)

Hashem Azzeh, 54, a Palestinian doctor and peace activist, was killed on Oct. 21 by the IDF in Hebron after excessive tear 72

gas inhalation. He had previously worked with the U.N., but was forced to quit after the IDF closed off Hebron’s main Shuhada Street, where he lived. A respected community leader in Hebron and a dedicated activist for the liberation of Palestinians, Dr. Azzeh was known for founding a community health clinic and assisting displaced Palestinians with housing.

Mohammad Daud Sultanzoy, 64, an Afghan politician, was assassinated by Taliban fighters on Oct. 22 on a highway outside of Ghazni. Born in 1952 in Kabul, he became a pilot for United Airlines and also fought against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. After the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, he returned to his homeland and entered politics. He served on the Grand Assembly and as a member of parliament, where he was known for his efforts to include women in the voting process. He ran for president of Afghanistan in 2014 and also hosted a TV talk show.

Guiseppe Nazzaro, 77, a bishop of the Apostolic Vicariate of Aleppo and Custodian of the Holy Land, died Oct. 26 of unknown causes in Avellino, Italy. He was born in Italy but, after enrolling in the Franciscan College of the Holy Land in Rome, continued his theological education in Bethlehem and Jerusalem. He then spent a number of years in Alexandria and Cairo, Egypt, serving as priest, pastor and bishop for various congregations. From 1986 to 1992, he served as secretary of the Custody of the Holy Land in Jerusalem and was elected Custodian of the Holy Land in 1992. In 2002, he was appointed by Pope John Paul II as Vicar Apostolic of Aleppo, with his ordination occurring at a special ceremony at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. He left Syria in 2013 after the political situation became too violent for him to remain.

Abd Al-Karim Al-Iryani, 81, a Yemeni politician, died Nov. 8 in Frankfurt.

Throughout Yemen’s turbulent recent political history, he was considered by most to be a reasonable and reliable voice. He became most well-known in the international media in 2011, when he became one of the chief brokers of the peace deal that saw former President Ali Abdullah Saleh cede power. Al-Iryani

WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

Compiled by Kevin A. Davis was born in Ibb, in central Yemen, to a prominent family, his uncle serving as president of the Yemen Arab Republic from 1967 to 1974. Al-Iryani studied in Texas, Georgia, and at Yale, where he completed his Ph.D. in biochemical genetics. He then returned to Yemen to enter politics and held countless high positions, including prime minister.

Dr. Ahmad Sakr died Nov. 23 in Southern California of unknown causes. Born in Lebanon, he studied at the American University of Beirut before coming to the United States to complete his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois. He served as president and founder of the Muslim Students' Association, as well of as the World Council of Mosques. He also was the Muslim World League’s first representative to the United Nations.

Throughout his long career, Dr. Sakr taught at many different universities, and in 1973 was named an Outstanding Educator of America. He also served as acting president of the American Islamic College in Chicago in 1976-77. The author of more than 50 books, he was a frequent media spokesperson for the Muslim community.

Marcus Klingberg, 97, an Israeli scientist, died Nov. 30 in Paris of unknown causes. As a spy for the U.S.S.R. he revealed many of Israel’s scientific secrets.

Born in Warsaw, he fled Poland in 1939 and sought refuge in Russia, where he joined the Red Army as a medical officer.

After the war ended, he returned to Poland. In 1948, Klingberg immigrated to the new state of Israel for religious reasons. There he served in the IDF Medical Corps, working his way up the ranks.

In 1957 he joined the top-secret Israel Institute for Biological Research, where he began spying for the Soviet Union.

For more than 20 years he passed on information on Israel's chemical and biological warfare programs. In 1982, a captured Soviet spy gave Mossad his name and, under physical coercion, Klingberg confessed to being a spy. He was arrested and secretly tried and sentenced to 20 years in prison, although he was moved to house arrest in 1998 for health reasons. After his release in 2003, he moved to Paris to be near his family. He is considered by many to be the spy who damaged Israel the most. ❑ JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

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AET’s 2015 Choir of Angels

Following are individuals, organizations, companies and foundations whose help between Jan. 1, 2015 and Nov. 30, 2015 is making possible activities of the tax-exempt AET Library Endowment (federal ID #52-1460362) and the American Educational Trust, publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. Some Angels helped us co-sponsor the April 10 conference, “The Israel Lobby: Is It Good for the U.S.? Is It Good for Israel?” We are deeply honored by their confidence and profoundly grateful for their generosity.

HUMMERS ($100 or more)

Anonymous, San Diego, CA Catherine Abbott, Edina, MN Mohamad Abdelnabi, Union, KY Fatima Abdulla, Oak Hills, CA Jeff Abood, Silver Lake, OH Rev. Fahed Abu-Akel, Atlanta, GA Rizek & Alice Abusharr, Claremont, CA Shukri Abu Baker, Beaumont, TX Miriam & Stephen Adams, Albuquerque, NM James C. Ahlstrom, Stirling, NJ Sohail & Saba Ahmed, Orland Park, IL Christopher Ake, San Diego, CA Dr. & Mrs. Salah Al-Askari, Leonia, NJ Sakker Al-Joundi, Milton, Canada Mazen Alsatie, Fishers, IN Dr. Bishr Al-Ujayli, Troy, MI Hamid & Kim Alwan, Milwaukee, WI Nabil & Judy Amarah, Danbury, CT Edwin Amidon, Charlotte, VT Abdulhamid Ammuss, Garland, TX Louise Anderson, Oakland, CA Emile Arraf, Calgary, Canada Dr. Robert Ashmore, Jr., Mequon, WI Mr. & Mrs. Sultan Aslam, Plainsboro, NJ Ahmed Ayish, Arlington, VA Dr. & Mrs. Roger Bagshaw, Big Sur, CA Zaira Baker, Garland, TX Dr. Sami Baraka, Wyandotte, MI Nader Barakat, Moorpark, CA Jamil Barhoum, San Diego, CA Carolyn Barrani, The Tapis-Tree, Salt Lake City, UT Allen & Jerrie Bartlett, Philadelphia, PA Joseph Benedict, Mystic, CT Frances Buell, Lincoln, NE John Carley, Pointe-Claire, Canada Lynn & Aletha Carlton, Norwalk, CT Roger W. Carpenter, Denver, CO Ouahib Chalbi, Coon Rapids, MN Patricia Christensen, Poulsbo, WA Dr. Robert G. Collmer, Waco, TX Robert & Joyce Covey, La Canada, CA Lynn Ellen Dixon, Woodward, PA Robert Dobrzynski, Alexandria, VA Dr. George Doumani, Washington, DC Dr. David Dunning, Lake Oswego, OR Kassem Elkhalil, Arlington, TX Dr. Mohamed Elsamahi, Marion, IL JANUAry/FEbrUAry 2016

Barbara Erickson, Berkeley, CA M.R. Eucalyptus, Kansas City, MO Dr.& Mrs. Hossam Fadel, Augusta, GA Albert E. Fairchild, Bethesda, MD William Fairchild, Nolensville, TN Family Practice and Surgery, Eatonton, GA Renee Farmer, New York, NY Elisabeth Fitzhugh, Mitchellville, MD Claire Bradley Feder, Atherton, CA Sylvia Anderson de Freitas, Paradise Valley, AZ John Freitas, Fresno, CA Donald Frisco, Wilmington, DE William Gefell, Turnbridge, VT Richard Gentilcore, Ft. Lauderdale, FL David C. Glick, Fairfax, CA Dr. Fawwaz Habbal, Cambridge, MA Nabil Haddad, North Wales, PA Allen Hamood, Dearborn Hts., MI Delinda C. Hanley, Kensington, MD Shirley Hannah, Argyle, NY Prof. Hugh R. Harcourt, Portland, OR Robert & Helen Harold, West Salem, WI Mr. & Mrs. Sameer Hassan, Quaker Hill, CT Dr. Colbert & Mildred Held, Woodway, TX M.D. Hotchkiss, Portland, OR Alexander Humulock, Jr., Romulus, NY Mary Izett, Walnut Creek, CA Rafeeq Jaber, Oak Lawn, IL Janis Jabrin, Washington, DC Anthony Jones, Jasper, Canada Dr. Jamil Jreisat, Temple Terrace, FL Mr. & Mrs. Basim Kattan, Washington, DC Akbar Khan, Princeton, NJ Dr. M. Jamil Khan, Bloomfield Hills, MI Dr. Mohayya Khilfeh, Chicago, IL Rafik Khoury, Adamstown, MD Ernestine King, Topsham, ME Paul N. Kirk, Baton Rouge, LA Loretta Krause, Little Egg Harbor Twp., NJ Ronald Kunde, Skokie, IL Sandra La Framboise, Oakland, CA John Lankenau, Tivoli, NY William Lawand, Mount Royal, Canada Tony Litwinko, Los Angeles, CA J. Robert Lunney, Bronxille, NY Anthony Mabarak, Grosse Pointe Park, MI Robert Mabarak, Grosse Pointe Park, MI††† Allen J. MacDonald, Washington, DC Dr. & Mrs. Gabriel Makhlouf, Richmond, VA Dr. Asad Malik, Rochester Hills, MI Tahera Mamdani, Fridley, MN Aida Mansoor, Berlin, CT Ted Marczak, Toms River, NJ Amal Marks, Altadena, CA

Martha Martin, Paia, HI Nabil Matar, Minneapolis, MN Carol Mazzia, Santa Rosa, CA Tom & Tess McAndrew, Oro Valley, AZ Shirl McArthur, Reston, VA Gwendolyn McEwen, Bellingham, WA Janet McMahon, Washington, DC*** Darrel Meyers, Burbank, CA Lynn & Jean Miller, Amherst, MA Maury Keith Moore, Seattle, WA Earl Murphy, Fallbrook, CA Elizabeth Murray, Poulsbo, WA Jacob Nammar, San Antonio, TX Hadeel Naqib, Baltimore, MD Neal & Donna Newby, Las Cruces, NM John & Judy Nicholson, Waukee, IA Susan Nicholson, Gloucester, MA Shirley O’Neil, Cleveland Hts., OH Nancy Orr, Portland, OR Khaled Othman, Riverside, CA Amb. Edward & Ann Peck, Chevy Chase, MD Dr. Bashar Pharoan, Timonium, MD Jim Plourd, Monterey, CA Phillip L. Portlock, Washington, DC Peter P. Pranis, Jr., McAllen, TX Dr. Humayun Quadir, Saint Louis, MO Mr. & Mrs. Edward Reilly, Rocky Point, NY Amb. Christopher Ross, Washington, DC Dr. Wendell E. Rossman, Phoenix, AZ Brynhild Rowberg, Northfield, MN Nuhad Ruggiero, Bethesda, MD Dr. Mohammed Sabbagh, Grand Blanc, MI Antone Sacker, Houston, TX Leyla Schimmel, Andover, MA Henry Schubert, Damascus, OR Dr. Abid Shah, Sarasota, FL Dr. Ajazuddin Shaikh, Granger, IN Richard J. Shaker, Annapolis, MD Dr. Najah Sharkiah, Atherton, CA Gretchen K. Sheridan, Mill Valley, CA Kathy Sheridan, Mill Valley, CA Dr. Mostafa Hashem Sherif, Tinton Falls, NJ Zac Sidawi, Costa Mesa, CA Lucy Skivens-Smith, Dinwiddie, VA David J. Snider, Bolton, MA Jean Snyder, Greenbelt, MD Robert Snyder, Greenbelt, MD William R. Stanley, Lexington, SC Gregory Stefanatos, Flushing, NY Viola Stephan, Santa Barbara, CA Edward Stick, Phoenix, MD Dr. William Strange, Fort Garland, CO Vincent Stravino, Bethlehem, PA Mushtaq Syed, Santa Clara, CA

WAShINGToN rEporT oN MIDDLE EAST AFFAIrS

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Eddy Tamura, Moraga, CA Doris Taweel, Laurel, MD Dr. & Mrs. M.A. Thamer, Woodbridge, VA Michael Tomlin, New York, NY Thomas Trueblood, Chapel Hill, NC Charles & Letitia Ufford, Hanover, NH United Muslims of America Interfaith, South San Francisco, CA Paul Wagner, Bridgeville, PA Joseph Walsh, Adamsville, RI Thomas C. Welch, Cambridge, MA Sara Najjar-Wilson, Reston, VA William A. Wood, Newtown, PA Nabil Yakub, McLean, VA Darrell & Sue Yeaney, Scotts Valley, CA Mashood Younes, Eagan, MN Raymond Younes, Oxnard, CA Dr. Robert Younes, Potomac, MD Dr. & Mrs. Fathi S. Yousef, Irvine, CA John Zacharia, Vienna, VA Munir Zacharia, La Mirada, CA Mahmoud Zawawi, Amman, Jordan Fred Zuercher, Spring Grove, PA

ACCOMPANISTS ($250 or more)

Dr. M.Y. Ahmed, Waterville, OH Robert Akras, N. Bay Village, FL Mohamed Alwan, Chestnut Ridge, NY Louise Anderson, Oakland, CA Anace & Polly Aossey, Cedar Rapids, IA Geoffrey W. Atwell, Akron, PA Dr. & Mrs. Issa Boullata, Montreal, Canada Andrew & Krista Curtiss, Herndon, VA† Joseph Daruty, Newport Beach, CA Robert & Tanis Diedrichs, Cedar Falls, IA John Dirlik, Pointe-Claire, Canada Nabila El Taji, Amman, Jordan

IndextoAdvertisers American Friends of Birzeit University . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA) . . . . . . . Inside Front Cover Folk Art Mavens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 HolyLandOliveOil.com. . . . . . . . . . . 33 Israel’s Influence: Good or Bad for America? Conference . . . . . . 11, 12 Kinder USA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 LeonardEducation.Org . . . . . . . . . . 38 Mashrabiya . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Mondoweiss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Muslim Link . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Palestinian Medical Relief Society . 10 Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Persian Heritage. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 United Palestinian Appeal (UPA) . . . . . . . . . . Inside Back Cover 74

Eugene Fitzpatrick, Wheat Ridge, CO Ray Gordon, Bel Air, MD Erin K. Hankir, Ottawa, Canada Indiana Center for Middle East Peace, Fort Wayne, IN Abdeen Jabara, New York, NY Fahd Jajeh, Lake Forest, IL Omar & Nancy Kader, Vienna, VA Matt Labadie, Portland, OR Kendall Landis, Wallingford, PA Nidal Mahayni, Richmond, VA Joseph A. Mark, Carmel, CA Stanley McGinley, The Woodlands, TX Maury Keith Moore, Seattle, WA Charles Murphy, Upper Falls, MD Dr. Eid B. Mustafa, Wichita Falls, TX William & Nancy Nadeau, San Diego, CA Michel Nasser, Beirut, Lebanon Mr. & Mrs. W. Eugene Notz, Charleston, SC Hertha Poje-Ammoumi, New York, NY Sam Rahman, Lincoln, CA Neil Richardson, Randolph, VT Fred Rogers, Northfield, MN Ramzy Salem, Monterey Park, CA Lisa Schiltz, Barbar, Bahrain Henry & Irmgard Schubert, Damascus, OR†† Shahida Siddiqui, Trenton, NJ Yusef & Jennifer Sifri, Wilmington, NC Michel & Cathy Sultan, Eau Claire, WI J. Tayeb, Shelby Township, MI J. Peter van der Veen, Bellingham, WA Mashood Yunus, Eagan, MN

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WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

BARITONES & MEZZO SOPRANOS ($1,000 or more)

Khaled Almaeena, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia Asha A. Anand, Bethesda, MD Graf Herman Bender, North Palm Beach, FL Wilhelmine Bennett, Iowa City, IA Branscomb Family Foundation, El Jebel, CO G. Edward & Ruth Brooking, Jr., Wilmington, DE Rev. Rosemarie Carnarius & Aston Bloom, Tucson, AZ Rev. Ronald C. Chochol, St. Louis, MO Forrest Cioppa, Moraga, CA Luella Crow, Eugene, OR Tom D’Albani & Jane Killgore, Bemidji, MN Linda Emmet, Paris, France Dr. & Mrs. Clyde Farris, West Linn, OR Evan & Leman Fotos, Istanbul, Turkey Dr. & Mrs. Hassan Fouda, Berkeley, CA Hind Hamdan, Hagerstown, MD George Hanna, Santa Ana, CA Judith Howard, Norwood, MA William Lightfoot, Vienna, VA Jack Love, San Diego, CA John Mahoney, AMEU, New York, NY Mr. & Mrs. Hani Marar, Delmar, NY Sahar Masud, Mill Valley, CA Bob Norberg, Lake City, MN Dr. Wendell E. Rossman, Phoenix, AZ John Van Wagoner, McLean, VA Young Again Foundation, Leland, NC

CHOIRMASTERS ($5,000 or more)

Anonymous*, #, ##, ###, + Estate of Rosemarie Carnarius, Tucson, AZ Donna B. Curtiss, Kensington, MD John & Henrietta Goelet, New York, NY Andrew I. Killgore, Washington, DC Vince & Louise Larsen, Louvin Foundation, Billings, MT *In Memory of Richard H. Curtiss **In Loving Memory of Bob Keeley ***In Memory of Donald Neff †In Honor of ADC’s Rachel Corrie Award ††Free Palestine †††Helen Thomas Internship Fund #In Memory of Rachel Corrie ##In Memory of Anthony Shadid ### In Memory of the 34 who died on the USS Liberty and the survivors +In Memory of all those who gave their lives for Palestinian freedom, human rights and self-determination

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

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American Educational Trust Washington Report on Middle East Affairs P.O. Box 53062 Washington, DC 20009

January/February 2016 Vol. XXXV, No. 1

O LittLe tOwn Of BethLehem: Palestinians run to take cover after israeli security forces fire tear gas during clashes at the main entry of Bethlehem after 19-year-old malek Shahin was killed during an early morning raid of Dheisheh refugee camp, Dec. 8, 2015.

MUSA AL-SHAER/AFP/Getty Images