Washington Report on Middle East Affairs - May 2020 - Vol. XXXIX, No. 3

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ARAB INFLUENCE GROWS IN BOTH U.S. AND ISRAELI ELECTIONS

DISPLAY UNTIL 6/12/2020

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TELLING THE TRUTH SINCE 1982

Volume XXXIX, No. 3

On Middle East Affairs

May 2020

INTERPRETING THE MIDDLE EAST FOR NORTH AMERICANS ✮ INTERPRETING NORTH AMERICA FOR THE MIDDLE EAST

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

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Palestinians Would Die for the Israeli Kind of Lockdown—Gideon Levy

Prisons are Super-Spreaders of the Coronavirus: Free Palestinians and Americans —Delinda C. Hanley

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A Deadly Combination in Iran: Coronavirus and Sanctions—Two Views—Eli Clifton, Marmar Kabir

No to Xenophobia: Stand Up 4 Human Rights and Dignity—Dr. Ali Qleibo

Pro-Israel Bullying is Failing at Home, But is it Paying Dividends Abroad?—Dale Sprusansky

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Coronavirus: Gaza Joins International Panic —Mohammed Omer

Poll: Is Anti-Zionism Anti-Semitism?—Grant F. Smith

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Whether or Not AIPAC Is a “Hate Group,” It Should Register as a Foreign Agent—Allan C. Brownfeld

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Trump’s “Peace” Plan Threatens to Revoke Citizenship of Palestinian Arab Israelis—Jonathan Cook U.N. Resolutions Keep Israel from Getting Clear Title to Looted Land—Ian Williams

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Israel: Never Missing an Opportunity—Walter L. Hixson Canadian Activists Challenge Adoption of Problematic Anti-Semitism Definition—Candice Bodnaruk Arab and Muslim American Voters Endorse Candidates Who Fight For Justice—Two Views —Dr. James Zogby, Amer Zahr In Israeli Politics, the Watchword Is: The Jewish Race Before All Else—Odeh Bisharat Measures Following Soleimani’s Assassination Continue to Move Through Congress—Shirl McArthur

SPECIAL REPORTS Trouble Brewing Beneath Turkey’s Frozen Politics —Jonathan Gorvett

Without a Single Vote, Malaysia Changes Government —John Gee

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Art Exhibitions Engage in Palestinian “Existential Contest”—Eleni Zaras

New York City’s MoMA PS1 “Gulf Wars” Exhibition Caught in Crossfire—Eleni Zaras

ON THE COVER: An elderly man wears a mask as a preventive measure against coronavirus (COVID-19) as Idlib Health

Directorate, Civil Defense Crews and local charities disinfect schools and tent cities in Idlib, Syria, March 18.

PHOTO BY MUHAMMED SAID/ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES

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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

California Releasing Inmates for Fear of Coronavirus, But Israelis Keep Vulnerable Gaza As Largest Open-Air Prison, Juan Cole, www.juancole.com

OV-1

During the Coronavirus Crisis, Israel Confiscates Tents Designated for Clinic in the Northern West Bank, B’Tselem, www.btselem.org OV-3

Exposing a Biden Staffer’s Connections to Troubled Israeli Spyware Firm, Jefferson Morley, independentmediainstitute.org

OV-8

“A Policeman, a Pastor and a Palestinian”: The “Chilestinians” as a Model for Palestinian Unity, Ramzy Baroud, www.ramzybaroud.net

OV-9

The Unhappy U.S. Occupation of Iraq, Paul R. Pillar, responsiblestatecraft.org

The IDF Spokesman Announces: Continue to Shoot Palestinian Children, Gideon Levy, Haaretz

OV-3

Israel’s Attack on Palestinian Bread, Mariam Barghouti, www.aljazeera.com

OV-4

With 3 More U.S. Soldiers Wounded, Iraqi Joint Command Urges Swift Departure of U.S. Troops, Fearing Instability, Juan Cole, www.juancole.com OV-12

OV-5

For Pakistan, the Taliban-U.S. Deal Is an Opportunity for Stability, Tom Hussain, www.aljazeera.com

OV-13

Without International Aid, the Coronavirus Crisis in Iran Will Spread Throughout South Asia, Fatemeh Aman, responsiblestatecraft.org

OV-14

A Foretaste of the Horrors of Biological Warfare, Eric S. Margolis, www.ericmargolis.com

OV-15

Appeals Court Affirms Dismissal of 8-Year Lawsuit Over Israel Boycott, Center for Constitutional Rights, ccrjustice.org Israel’s Rejection of U.N. List of Companies Tied to Settlements Reveals Stark Truth About Annexation, Noa Landau, Haaretz Israel Joins Totalitarian States Using Coronavirus to Spy on Citizens, Barbara Boland, theamericanconservative.com

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DEPARTMENTS 5 Publishers’ Page

51 the World looks at the Middle east—Cartoons 52 MusiC aNd arts: artLords: Effecting Peace through art in afghanistan 53 diPloMatiC doiNgs: Iraqi ambassador on U.s.-Iran Hostilities, Iraq’s Future 54 WagiNg PeaCe: amid Coronavirus Pandemic, Iran and U.s. remain on Warpath

STAFF PHOTO D. HANLEY

6 letters to the editor

Are you feeling trapped at home? See p. 46 to take a virtual tour of the Middle East Institute's exhibit.

64 arab aMeriCaN aCtiVisM: arab american Women, true Excellence in our Midst

64 MusliM aMeriCaN aCtiVisM: CaIr and Civil rights Partners respond to Expanded Muslim Ban

66 Middle east books reVieW 72 other PeoPle’s Mail

74 2020 aet Choir oF aNgels 50 iNdeX to adVertisers

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First and foremost, we hope this magazine finds you and your loved ones in good health and spirits. Like so many others around the world, our staff is bunkereddown at home until the coronavirus pandemic passes. The good news is that we are still able to produce the Washington Report thanks to the wonders of modern technology. Our printer and the United States Postal Service remain open, and we anticipate no disruption to the production of the magazine. Of course, developments are changing quickly, so we encourage all our print readers to subscribe to our email list at www.wrmea.org so that you can be informed of any unanticipated changes—plus you’ll receive all our important action alerts about what is happening in the Middle East and closer to home!

Staying Informed and Connected

We hope our work helps you stay informed at a time when the mainstream news media is focused almost exclusively on the coronavirus. No doubt, leaders with nefarious motivations will attempt to use this crisis to implement dangerous new policies and carry out human rights violations while the world is distracted. We will be here to document their actions and hold them accountable. In addition to fulfilling our journalistic duties, we also hope this magazine helps facilitate a sense of communal connection among those concerned about peace and justice. For instance, together, we can enjoy visits to now-shuttered art galleries (pp. 46-50).

With Easter and Passover upon us, and Ramadan beginning shortly, we know this is a particularly difficult time to be isolated from your communities. In the midst of your subdued seders, iftars and Easter dinners, know that your compatriots in justice are likewise flipping through these pages with you—in ever greater solidarity.

New Conference Date

The Transcending the Israel Lobby conference and gala dinner, scheduled for May of this year, has been rescheduled to March 4-5, 2021. This was a difficult, but common-sense decision to make, in light MAY 2020

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but it’s important to keep in mind that we’re not equally fragile.” We have full coverage on how the virus is impacting the region’s most vulnerable communities on pp. 8-17 of this issue.

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We’re Still Working

American Educational Trust

Gantz’s Racist Rejection

Monks pray in front of the closed door of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. of the ongoing public health crisis. The very good news is that all our rock star speakers have confirmed they will be able to join us in 2021! Current ticketholders have been issued tickets for the new date, and those in need of a refund may obtain one by emailing dsprusan@wrmea.org.

While we won’t be able to convene in person this year, this issue is chock-full of analysis (pp. 21-27) on the Israel lobby’s failing attempts to maintain its bipartisan grip on power.

Open for Online Orders

While our bookstore, Middle East Books and More, was forced to close its physical store due to the coronavirus, we are still accepting online orders. We encourage you to grab books to read, Yemeni coffee to sip, Palestinian olive oil and spices to cook with and pottery to enliven your home. Visit MiddleEastBooks.com to place your order, and show your solidarity while in solitude!

An Acute Threat to the Vulnerable

As we adjust to the new normal at home, we remember the immense suffering of the most vulnerable during this pandemic, especially refugees and those living in besieged Gaza and sanctioned Iran. As Basma Alloush of the Norwegian Refugee Council recently pointed out (see pp. 5758), “Everyone...is fragile in this outbreak,

After three elections, Israel finally has a government, albeit an emergency one born of racism amidst a health crisis. As Odeh Bisharat notes on p. 39, opposition leader Benny Gantz had enough members to form a governing coalition and oust indicted Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. The only problem: 15 of those members were Palestinian Israeli citizens from the Joint List. After making overtures to the Joint List and raising hopes that he may begrudgingly transcend the racism that has historically excluded Palestinian parties from participating in governing coalitions, Gantz threw the Palestinians aside and formed an “emergency government” with Netanyahu. Gantz said his decision to renege on his pledge to never join forces with an indicted prime minister was born of necessity, given the coronavirus’ toll on Israel. His reasoning sadly shows the degree to which the idea of governing with Palestinians—who constitute 20 percent of Israeli citizens—is considered beyond the pale in mainstream Israeli politics. On pp. 28-30, Jonathan Cook notes that this racism runs so deep that Israel is hoping to strip a large swath of Palestinians of their Israeli citizenship by transfering their villages and towns over to the Palestinian Authority.

Counting on Your Support

In the midst of these trying times, the need for solidarity and humanity is more evident than ever. For nearly four decades, it has been the mission of this magazine to open the eyes of Americans to the depravity and division too often facilitated by U.S. foreign policy. While money is tight for many right now, it is only through your continued support that we can remain on the front lines of justice. Now more than ever, we know we can count on you to...

Make A Difference Today!

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Executive Editor: Managing Editor: Contributing Editor: Contributing Editor: Other Voices Editor: Middle East Books and More Director: Assistant Bookstore Dir.: Finance & Admin. Dir.: Art Director: Founding Publisher: Founding Exec. Editor: Board of Directors:

DELINDA C. HANLEY DALE SPRUSANSKY WALTER HIXSON JULIA PITNER JANET McMAHON SAMI TAYEB ELENI ZARAS CHARLES R. CARTER RALPH-UWE SCHERER ANDREW I. KILLGORE (1919-2016) RICHARD H. CURTISS (1927-2013) HENRIETTA FANNER JANET McMAHON JANE KILLGORE

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (ISSN 87554917) is published 7 times a year, monthly except Jan./Feb., March/April, June/July and Aug./Sept. combined, at 1902 18th St., NW, Washington, DC 20009-1707. Tel. (202) 9396050. Subscription prices (United States and possessions): one year, $29; two years, $55; three years, $75. For Canadian and Mexican subscriptions, $35 per year; for other foreign subscriptions, $70 per year. Periodicals, postage paid at Washington, DC and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, P.O. Box 91056, Long Beach, CA 90809-1056.

Published by the American Educational Trust (AET), a nonprofit foundation incorporated in Washington, DC by retired U.S. foreign service officers to provide the American public with balanced and accurate information concerning U.S. relations with Middle Eastern states. AET’s Foreign Policy Committee has included former U.S. ambassadors, government officials, and members of Congress, including the late Democratic Sen. J. William Fulbright and Republican Sen. Charles Percy, both former chairmen of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Members of AET’s Board of Directors and advisory committees receive no fees for their services. The new Board of Advisers includes: Anisa Mehdi, John Gareeb, Dr. Najat Khelil Arafat, William Lightfoot and Susan Abulhawa.

The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs does not take partisan domestic political positions. As a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli dispute, it endorses U.N. Security Council Resolution 242’s land-for-peace formula, supported by nine successive U.S. presidents. In general, it supports Middle East solutions which it judges to be consistent with the charter of the United Nations and traditional American support for human rights, self-determination, and fair play.

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CONTACT INFORMATION: Washington Report on Middle East Affairs Editorial Office and Bookstore: 1902 18th St. NW, Washington, DC 20009-9062 Phone: (202) 939-6050 • (800) 368-5788 Fax: (202) 265-4574 E-mail: wrmea@wrmea.org bookstore@wrmea.org circulation@wrmea.org advertising@wrmea.org Web sites: http://www.wrmea.org http://www.middleeastbooks.com Subscriptions, sample copies and donations: P.O. Box 91056, Long Beach, CA 90809-1056 Phone: (888) 881-5861 • Fax: (714) 226-9733 Printed in the USA

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LetterstotheEditor PRO-ISRAEL BIAS ON THE DNC’S PLATFORM COMMITTEE

I am alarmed about the composition of the foreign policy team on the 2020 Democratic National Committee (DNC) platform committee. Everyone with Middle East experience has a pro-Israel bias. Why not include sophisticated critics of the status quo, like International Crisis Group president Robert Malley or Arab American Institute president James Zogby?

It looks to me as though billionaire Haim Saban, the DNC’s Sheldon Adelson, is paying for the DNC’s Middle East plank.

The recent attack ads in primary states against Bernie Sanders were funded by a rebranded AIPAC pro-Israel Super PAC called the Democratic Majority for Israel.

The group spent nearly one million dollars in a cynical campaign to weaken the only presidential candidate willing to criticize Israel’s brutal treatment of Palestinians.

Recently we witnessed the unveiling of the Trump-Kushner Middle East Peace Plan. This “great deal” gives the Israeli far right everything they could ever want. In contrast, it gives the Palestinians a conditional offer of a truncated state. This Bantustan arrangement will cement a situation in which Israelis retain control over the Palestinians without being responsible for upholding their rights.

I fear the 2020 DNC platform committee is looking for a way to hide this horrific problem from the political debate. That is cowardly and immoral.

Thomas Welch, Cambridge, MA Many have correctly observed that elected officials and elite institutions are often the last to reflect societal progress.

Throughout American history, grassroots movements dismissed by official Washington have worked with dogged determination—organizing, protesting, writing, educating and changing minds—until large swaths of the political class have no choice but to adopt their position. This is currently playing out with Israel and Palestine. Polls (see p. 24) show public opinion on the subject is changing, and a small cohort of bold elected leaders (see p. 21) are rising to give voice to growing criticism of Israel. It’s our

WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

job to believe that justice will eventually come, and thus remain resolute. It is only through persistence that official change ultimately comes—often suddenly.

SOUTH AFRICAN V. ISRAELI LAND SEIZURES: A DOUBLE STANDARD

The Feb. 20 Associated Press article, “Pompeo says South Africa land seizures would be disastrous,” demonstrates the hypocrisy of the Trump administration’s foreign policy, which criticizes South Africa while, at the same time, it supports Israel’s land and water theft in the illegally occupied Palestinian territories. The Israeli peace group B’Tselem has detailed how Israeli settlers have already stolen 42 percent of private Palestinian land and now, emboldened by President Trump, continue to steal even more.

The U.S. double standard results from pro-Israel billionaire megadonors contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to Trump and the Republican Congress, and in return, being allowed to dictate Trump’s one-sided, pro-Israel agenda against the Palestinians (as well as against Iran).

Ray Gordon, Venice, FL There is no doubt U.S. policy toward Israel is in large part a reflection of the desires of wealthy donors within both major parties. Our next issue will contain “PAC Charts,” which show how much money proIsrael political action committees are giving to congressional candidates. Of course, we can’t officially track the billions in “dark money” being used to cripple American foreign and domestic policy.

ISRAEL: ANOTHER “DARK PLACE”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently cited China, Iran, Venezuela and Cuba as “examples of ‘dark places’ where rights...are infringed upon.” Glaringly absent from this list is our “ally” Saudi Arabia. But I would also include Israel, which has violated almost all 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document, ironically, that was put in place after World War II in order to preclude Nazi-like activities. Likewise, the Geneva Conventions have been violated by Israel, especially as

MAY 2020

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it pertains to collective punishment The Parisian, the Palestinians hear KEEP THOSE CARDS AND LETTERS and settling one’s citizens in occuof riots between Arabs and Jews, of COMING! pied territory. fellahins losing their land, and Send your letters to the editor to the Washington Report, P.O. Box 53062, Washington, DC 20009 Sometimes it is questionable as to Midhat, the main character, comes or e-mail <letters@wrmea.org>. whether Israel is a friend or a foe. I to know Henryk, a Jew fleeing the can’t recall an instance where U.S. pogroms in Poland. support for Israel has benefited the U.S. ment should recognize this fact.

Author Isabella Hammad slips politics nearly as much as it has benefited Israel. It Doris Rausch, Columbia, MD into the story through such encounters, is frequently the opposite: the monetary Supporters of the Israel-U.S. relationship the perspectives of multiple characters support the U.S. gives Israel (a minimum of love to boast of the mutually beneficial and news that trickles into Nablus. This $3.8 billion per year, plus other support) frenature of the alliance. Even some critics of approach skillfully reflects how the townsquently goes to financing jobs, particularly Israel, such as Noam Chomsky, give crepeople themselves might have heard in the technology field, that could be done dence to this view by describing Israel as news and also how Hammad gathered right here in the U.S., thus depriving our an instrument of U.S. imperialism. The evmuch of her research through oral histoworkers of jobs. Additionally, our support of idence, however, seems to suggest the reries and newspaper clippings. In this way, Israel makes foes of countries which could lationship is largely one-sided in favor of she also avoids anachronisms. Since we, easily be our friends.

Israel—and decidedly not in the interests of the readers, know the gravity of the ensuFormer Secretary of Defense Robert the U.S. ing conflict, and as other characters grasp Gates has called Israel an ungrateful ally it and dedicate their lives to resistance, THOUGHTS ON THE PARISIAN that gives the U.S. nothing in return for the Midhat does appear frivolous and selfEleni Zaras’ penetrating review of Isabella massive amount of aid and high tech intel centered.

Hammad's first novel, The Parisian, notes that we give them. Our media and governYet, The Parisian also seems to humanits subtlety and “graceful and light” ize the day-to-day realities and remind us style—and does so with its own that many tried to carry on with their lives, grace and style. or like Midhat, held on to past loves and asLet it also be known, however, pirations. Anti-hero or not, the story begs that this meticulous rendering of a the question: Can one judge him for that? rich young man's desires, vani—Eleni Zaras ties, heartbreak, maneuverings BOOK TALKS, FROM AFAR and failures in bygone France and As Nathan Thrall so well put it in his January never-again Palestine is deeply 29, 2020 New York Times opinion peace, affecting and packs a surprising “Trump’s Middle East Peace Plan Exposes political punch. the Ugly Truth”: “This isn’t a break with the How Hammad does this is not status quo. It’s the natural culmination of obvious. She brings us very close decades of American policy.” to the people in still very traditional But you all have been standing tall for jusNablus. But the protagonist whom tice, not only for decades, but for generashe so lovingly depicts is an antitions! hero really. He sits out the brutal Also, kudos to the Middle East Books British-Zionist crushing of the folks! I enjoy being able to “attend” recorded Palestinians in the 1936-39 Arab book talks now via your YouTube channel.

Revolt, longing for the pleasures Keep up the good work! and freedom of life in Paris and a OTHER VOICES is an optional 16-page supple Enclosed please find my 2020 contribucertain young French woman. ment available only to subscribers of the Washingtion to the American Educational Trust LiHammad doesn’t show us the brary Endowment to assist in educating the racist villains of settler-colonialism. ton Report on Middle East Affairs. For an additional American people about the need for justice Yet we are made to feel in our $15 per year (see postcard insert for Washington in Palestine. bones the cold hand of disposReport subscription rates), subscribers will receive Brigitte Jaensch, Carmichael, CA session, humiliation and death Other Voices inside each issue of their Washington Readers stuck at home during the that comes upon the land and its Report on Middle East Affairs. coronavirus pandemic are encouraged to people—a plague that we know Back issues of both publications are available. check out our YouTube page, which inwill become ordinary reality for the To subscribe telephone 1 (888) 881-5861, fax cludes recent book talks, as well as next more than 80 years, and will (714) 226-9733, e-mail circulation@wrmea. org>, archives of past Israel lobby conferences. spare no Palestinian.

Visit YouTube.com/c/WashingtonReporton Steve France, Cabin John, MD or write to P.O. Box 91056, Long Beach, CA 90809MiddleEastAffairs. Be sure to like, comThough settler-colonialism is 1056. ment, share and subscribe! ■ not necessarily labeled as such in MAY 2020

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Gaza on the Ground

Coronavirus: Gaza Joins International Panic

By Mohammed Omer

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from the lack of medical supplies and medicines, due to the harsh Israeli blockade. With only 3,000 remaining hospital beds available to the 2 million people living under military occupation, Gaza doctors dread the onslaught of COVID19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. The United Nations has issued repeated warnings about the collapsing Gaza health system resulting from the 13-year siege and repeated Israeli military assaults. Now, Gaza is panicking as it is facing the deadly virus with primitive equipment and ill-equipped hospitals.

As of this writing, Gaza has nine confirmed cases. The enclave also lacks sufficient testing kits, with Israel providing just 200 kits in March.

At the same time, Israel boasted that its Mossad intelligence service was able to procure 500,000 test kits from undisclosed nation(s).

The Ministry of Health in Gaza has already enforced the medical isolation for 1,400 Gazans suspected of having contracted the virus from their travels to Egypt, the West Bank and Israel.

The continuing outbreak of the COVID-19, in the West Bank has raised a number of concerns and dilemmas among people in Gaza about how to contain the virus if it spreads. Policemen began inspecting passengers at Rafah Crossing with Egypt, but appear with simple masks that provide no protection to travelers or police officers. In mid-March, the Gaza Ministry of Health turned a school East of Rafah into a quarantine space for incoming Gazans who have been to Palestinians work on the production line of sterilizing gel at a cleaning materials factory Egypt. in the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah, March 17. Gaza authorities declared a new set “We are not safe—there is no system put into of precautionary measures amid concerns about the spread of the novel coronavirus in place,” says Majed Taha, father of four children, the coastal enclave. who decided to stop his kids going to school even before the official decision came to close all schools in Gaza.

MORE THAN 180 countries have already reported cases of novel “Gaza is the worst place to have such deadly coronavirus—hoscoronavirus—from China, Italy, South Korea, Iran and Japan—and pitals are simply not ready,” he added. Even under normal circumall are struggling to deal with the deadly virus. Less visible in the stances, “it takes months to wait for a surgical intervention in Gaza.” headlines is that it has also hit the West Bank, Israel and Egypt. In Recently, B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, spoke of an this pandemic virus, Gaza is not an exception. unprecedented health crisis in the besieged Gaza as the barely Even before the outbreak of the coronavirus, Gaza was suffering functioning hospitals desperately tried to deal with the thousands of injuries resulting from the “Great March of Return.” Desperate young Award-winning journalist Mohammed Omer reports regularly on the Gaza Strip. people have been demonstrating every Friday on the Gaza side of 8

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MAY 2020

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the dividing fence with Israel since March 2018, protesting the closure, unemployment, and shortages of goods and opportunities. An estimated 190 people have been killed and more than 9,300 have been injured, including 6,106 injured by snipers leading to life-changing wounds in many.

The U.S. cut in all aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the organization dedicated to assisting Palestinian refugeesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;has made the situation even more acute than any time before.

The United Nations has declared that Gaza health care is at â&#x20AC;&#x153;breaking point.â&#x20AC;?

In March 2019, United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator for the occupied Palestinian territory Jamie McGoldrick warned of â&#x20AC;&#x153;chronic power outages, gaps in critical services, including mental health and psychosocial support, and shortages of essential medicines and supplies.â&#x20AC;?

Meanwhile, Qatar has pledged $10 million to help Gazans deal with the coronavirus outbreak and the World Bank has

transferred a grant of $7 million to Palestinians to address the coronavirus crisis.

Unable to access goods, Gaza is experiencing a lack of protective gear for hospital medical teams as well as testing kits. Even hydrogen peroxide is currently banned from entering Gaza. The Strip only has 60 breathing machines, which are vital for treating serious cases of the virus. There is also a limited number of qualified staff members to deal with the crisis. No one knows if the pledged assistance will translate into immediate actions. If history is any indication, the answer is no.

On March 19, Michael Lynk, the U.N. Special Rapporteur for the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, said he is worried about the potential impact of the novel coronavirus on Gaza due to its collapsing health system. He urged Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas to live up to their international legal responsibilities.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;I am particularly worried about the potential impact of COVID-19 on Gaza. Its health care system was collapsing even before the pandemic,â&#x20AC;? said Lynk. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Its stocks of essential drugs are chronically low. Its natural sources of drinkable water are largely contaminated. Its electrical system provides sporadic power. Deep poverty amid appalling socio-economic conditions is prevalent throughout the Strip,â&#x20AC;? he added. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Coronavirus is a death sentence to all of us here in Gaza,â&#x20AC;? says Nidaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;a Abu Saleem, a 21-year-old student. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Being locked in a cage, we thought we were protected, but in fact, one patient is all it takes to put 2 million at risk,â&#x20AC;? she added. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The one thing that I know for sure, is that with the coronavirus outbreak becoming a global concernâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;Gaza will remain in the margins, without much media attention. â&#x20AC;&#x153;We never made a choice to live in a cage, and we should not die in that cage either,â&#x20AC;? she concluded. â&#x2013;

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Special Report

Palestinians Would Die for the Israeli Kind of Lockdown

Rutiya Mishriki wears a face mask as she sits on a bench near the beach on March 16, in Tel Aviv, Israel. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu announced emergency measures to combat COVID-19 after more than 300 Israelis tested positive.

THE HEAVENS HAVE DARKENED and everything is closing in around us. Only fate, God or the shaper of history are laughing at us from up high, a bitter, ironic laughter. The irony of fate: For the first time, Israel is tasting some of the hell it has been dishing out for decades to its subjects. With alarming speed, Israelis have entered a reality known to every Palestinian child.

Even the terms have been borrowed from the occupation: Israel is on its way to a lockdown, the army is taking over hotels, the Shin Bet security service is taking over our cellphones, and the Border Police and its checkpoints are right around the corner. It’s no coincidence that Haaretz’s military analyst has been recruited to serve

Gideon Levy is the Haaretz correspondent for the occupied terri tories. He is also a speaker at the upcoming “Transcending the Israel Lobby at Home and Abroad” conference on March 5, 2021. Copyright © Haaretz Daily Newspaper Ltd. All rights reserved.

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as the coronavirus analyst. Tel Aviv now resembles Jenin, and Israel the Gaza Strip. What is routine there has become a frightening dystopia here.

Of course, the differences are many. What for us constitutes the end of the world would for them be an easing of the closure, with the pandemic looming over everyone. Still, we can’t but marvel at the similarities. First, the state of siege. The gates are practically locked. No one leaves or enters.

Think of Gaza for 14 consecutive years. Young people who have never seen a passenger plane, even adults who have never been inside an airport, not even dreaming of a vacation abroad. Israelis have difficulties with thinking of life without Ben-Gurion Airport even for a moment. Gazans don’t know about a life that includes trips abroad. Where’s that? What does it look like?

Passover is coming soon, and kids and their parents here will go

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MAY 2020

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By Gideon Levy

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stir crazy without their getaways, malls, cruises, Disney or duty-free shopping.

Gazans have no clue what all that means.

They know about curfews, which sometimes last for months, like during an intifada.

They know about curfews with many more children and fewer rooms, with tanks outside and hatred inside. Imagine the Border Police patrolling the streets checking documents and putting up checkpoints.

In Israel the security forces will behave like caring nurses compared to their thuggish behavior in the territories, and it will still be unbearable for us. How much easier it is when the police officer is one of yours and the state is your own state. How galling and hard it is when they’re a foreigner, an invader, an occupier. Still, we’ll get to have some taste of what that’s like.

We’ll also get to taste the taste of lost time, Palestinian time, where you leave the house and don’t know when or if you’ll

MAY 2020

reach your destination. You go to university but don’t know when and for how long it will shut down. You have a job but try unsuccessfully to get to work.

The economic situation will also become more similar. We already have 100,000 new unemployed—people who lost their work, their business, their entire world. At least for now it seems to them that they have no future or present, that everything has gone down the drain. And how will they pay the bills and feed their children? This is so routine under the occupation, the reality of decades. Sitting at home climbing the walls for months is elementary in the territories.

The Shin Bet says it will use “digital measures.” Don’t make Palestinians laugh.

That’s the most humane way they’re treated by the security service. Let the Shin Bet eavesdrop and track, just stop torturing, extorting and abusing. In the territories the Shin Bet always knows everything, every(Advertisement)

where, with no legal restrictions. Criticism of privacy violations in Israel can only amuse the Palestinians—just like the picture of Home Front Command officers running a hotel. How many hotels have been taken over by the army and turned into headquarters in the territories?

There are differences as well. Even at the height of the pandemic, Israelis will not be humiliated or beaten in front of their children or parents. Their houses will not be invaded in the middle of the night, every night, to carry out a brutal and purposeless search.

No one will abduct them from their beds.

Even in the worst of dystopias there is no expectation of snipers shooting at demonstrators’ knees for fun. Our houses won’t be bombed or our fields sprayed. It’s just a temporary siege, with Shin Bet eavesdropping and Border Police patrols, the dream of every Palestinian dreaming of a better life. ■

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Special Report

Prisons are Super-Spreaders of the Coronavirus: Free Palestinians and Americans

Palestinians, wearing protective masks amid fears of the spread of the novel coronavirus and waving national flags, take part in a protest in solidarity with Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails outside the U.N. High Commissioner’s offices in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, March 16. Protesters called for the release of children, elderly and ill prisoners.

AMERICANS CONCERNED about “flattening the curve” of COVID19 infections around the country are beginning to release elderly and frail prisoners. There are more than 7,000 overcrowded prisons, jails and detention centers in the U.S., employing half a million workers who are also at risk. According to a report from Prison Policy Initiative, there are nearly 2.3 million people incarcerated in federal, state and local prisons, jails and other correctional facilities in the United States—the highest incarceration rate in the world.

Piper Kerman, author of Orange is the New Black, whose memoir inspired a popular American Netflix series, published a plea to free prisoners in the March 31 Washington Post: “Our nation’s prisons and jails will soon become uncontrollable super-spreaders of this pandemic—and the reach will extend beyond their walls and barbed wire fences...an outbreak will overwhelm nearby health-care facilities, which are often in already underserved, rural communities.”

As for releasing elderly and ill prisoners, Kerman argues that they pose very low public safety risks because seniors have some of the lowest recidivism levels of all former inmates. Kerman also suggests the release of many of the 555,000 people in jail awaiting trial who can’t afford to post bail and home confinement for people serving

Delinda C. Hanley is executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

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short terms for minor nonviolent crimes. There are 48,000 kids incarcerated in U.S. juvenile prisons and immigrant detention centers on any given day that Kerman urges should be reunited with their families or sent to safer settings immediately.

Palestinians are also concerned about the danger of coronavirus to prisoners crammed together in squalid Israeli prisons. About 5,700 Palestinians are believed to be held in 23 Israeli prisons including 186 children, 41 women and scores of elderly people.

On March 19, Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCIP) called on Israeli authorities to take immediate action to release all Palestinian child detainees: “Palestinian children imprisoned by Israeli authorities live in close proximity to each other, often in compromised sanitary conditions, with limited access to resources to maintain minimum hygiene routines, according to documentation collected by DCIP.” At least three Israeli prison guards have contracted the virus and others have not been tested in both the Ofer and Nitsan jails, where there are hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. On April 1, a newly released Palestinian prisoner tested positive for the coronavirus. That same day, the Palestinian Prisoner’s Club, the Center for Defense of Liberties and Civil Rights (Hurryyat) and other organizations launched a petition calling for Israel to release more than 1,000 prisoners, including women, children and the sick.

WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

MAY 2020

SAID KHATIB/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

By Delinda C. Hanley

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Palestinian organizations as well as the Cairo-based League of Arab States called on all relevant international organizations, including the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), to intervene and pressure the Israeli authorities to provide necessary medical care and implement precautionary measures to prevent any further cases of coronavirus.

In prison, practicing social distancing is nearly impossible, one Israeli inmate told Haaretz in an article published on March 23. â&#x20AC;&#x153;How can you stay two meters apart when youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re nine in a room? Everything is very crowded, toilets and showers too, and the hygiene level is very low,â&#x20AC;? he said. â&#x20AC;&#x153;We got soap twice in a month. They promised more, but they havenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t brought in any.â&#x20AC;?

Palestinian prisoners have it much worseâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;even before the pandemic hit Israelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s notorious prisons. Ramzy Baroud helped prisoners tell their inspiring stories in his recent book, These Chains Will Be Broken, available from Middle East Books and More. Readers come to know and admire the individuals who stood up for

their rights or just happened to be in the wrong place and are trapped for months or decades awaiting justice.

A prison guard poured boiling water over Wafaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hand when she begged for a cup of tea. Wafa adopted a cat whoâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;to the lonely prisonerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s delightâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;gave birth. When guards discovered her secret friends they poisoned and stomped on the little family.

Dareen, 33, charged with inciting violence by publishing a poem on social media, spent 97 days in prison and another nearly three years under house arrest, only to be jailed again for another five months. During her incarceration she fell and broke her leg. After enduring hours of pain she was finally treated at a hospital.

She wrote, â&#x20AC;&#x153;As the prison vehicle began moving, I thought to myself: one foot broken, another tied to a metal chair; my hands cuffed as I sit inside a cage that feels like a mobile grave, and all that for writing a poem condemning the occupation.â&#x20AC;? (When she returned to her cell she penned another poem!)

Dima, a 12-year-old, was accused of (Advertisement)

trying to stab an armed illegal settlerâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a story she insisted he had fabricated. After serving two and a half months, she was suddenly released after an interrogator told her the previous day she had received a life sentence.

Hilal joined the resistance after his younger brother was deliberately run over by a Jewish settler, and another was drowned by an Israeli extremist. Arrested when he was 20, Hilal was released when he was 46. During his incarceration Hilal read 3,000 books, learned 16 different languages, and taught English and Hebrew to hundreds of his fellow prisoners. During one prison raid, guards confiscated all the works he had translated and hoped to publish one day.

These are just some of the stories Baroud gathered to tell readers about Palestinian prisoners. Detainees like these, who have endured so much, now risk contracting COVID-19. Israelis donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t really care about Palestinian prisoners, but perhaps Piper Kerman and other Americans will exert international pressure to set them free. â&#x2013;

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Two Views

Health officials check body temperatures of drivers and passengers at checkpoints following the launch of travel restrictions to stem the coronavirus (COVID-19) spread in Tehran, Iran, March 26, 2020.

Collective Punishment has Always Been the Stated Goal of Iran Sanctions Hawks

By Eli Clifton THE CORONAVIRUS pandemic’s impact in Iran, which already claimed over 1,800 lives and infected more than 23,000 people, is one of the world’s more troubling examples of widespread infection,

Eli Clifton reports on money in politics and U.S. foreign policy. Clifton previously reported for the American Independent News Network, ThinkProgress and Inter Press Service. Published in Responsible Statecraft, March 23, 2020. Reprinted with permission.

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with insufficient medical resources to treat the victims and a staggering anticipated death toll. [Update: As of April 2, there have been more than 3,000 deaths and 50,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19.

The numbers continue to rise daily.]

While public health experts and human rights advocates all point to the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” sanctions regime against Iran as contributing to the public health crisis, sanctions advocates in the Trump administration and at two ultra hawkish think tanks, claim that the “humanitarian trade” sanctions exemption is sufficient to address Iran’s medical needs.

But, the reality is that advocates of an expansive sanctions campaign have been working to deny Iranians the staples of daily life in pursuit of bringing the regime to its knees or fomenting

WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

MAY 2020

FATEMEH BAHRAMI/ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES

A Deadly Combination in Iran: Coronavirus and Sanctions

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regime collapse. And it’s likely why, to this day, the Trump administration, and its pro-Iran war/regime change allies are reluctant to relent to massive domestic and international pressure to relieve sanctions on Iran.

Indeed, remarks and actions from sanctions hawks in the State Department, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), and United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) illustrate their desire to inflict collective punishment on Iran as a means of generating political instability and state collapse.

Amid the crisis, on March 17, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced new sanctions against Iran, telling reporters, “We have an open humanitarian channel to facilitate legitimate transactions even while ensuring our maximum pressure campaign denies terrorists money.”

But that assessment of the humanitarian channel isn’t widely shared and, despite Pompeo’s repeated assertions that the Trump administration offered Iran help to deal with the coronavirus crisis, he hasn’t provided details of what those offers entail.

“Our research showed that in practice, humanitarian exemptions in the U.S. comprehensive sanctions regime have been ineffective in offsetting the strong reluctance of companies and banks to conduct trade with Iran, including the humanitarian trade that is presumably legal,” Human Rights Watch Iran researcher Tara Sepehri Far told Responsible Statecraft. “The Iranian healthcare system, both in terms of access to specialized medicine and also with regard to access to medical equipment, has taken a toll as a result of sanctions,” she added.

Even Pompeo acknowledged that collective punishment and threat of a humanitarian crisis were very much part of the sanctions strategy he was pursuing.

“The leadership has to make a decision that they want their people to eat,” said Pompeo in 2018. “They have to make a decision that they want to use their wealth to import medicine and not use their wealth to fund [Iran’s Quds Force commander] Qassim Soleimani’s travels around the Middle East, with causing death and destruction.”

Two of the most prominent groups advocating for “maximum pressure” against Iran, even in the face of the coronavirus epidemic, have repeatedly called for collective punishment against Iranians.

Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of FDD, the think tank that has regularly called for harsh sanctions and preventive military action against Iran, has repeatedly called for punitive measures against Iran’s entire population.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed last April, Dubowitz urged lawmakers to “build a sanctions wall” with the goal of “crippl[ing] key sectors of the [Iranian] economy and lead to larger protests.” He added, “[T]he resulting economic and political instability could be leverage for a better, comprehensive deal.”

In a September Fox News appearance, Dubowitz again argued that widespread collective punishment of Iranians was a desirable strategy in bringing pressure on Iran’s leadership to MAY 2020

negotiate with the Trump administration about their nuclear program.

“I think the Iranians are in a situation where they are running out of foreign exchange reserves, they’re not going to have the money to pay for imports that they need to run their factories.

With factories closing they’re going to have massive unemployment, and so their situation is getting worse every day,” said Dubowitz. “And I think the administration, with a few moves, could actually bring about that kind of economic collapse which will then put the regime in a position where they’ll have to choose between negotiations and the survival of its regime.”

This mentality isn’t a recent phenomenon. Squeezing the Iranian people has been a goal for some time. FDD “freedom scholar” Michael Ledeen made this argument even more bluntly back in 2012 when he openly celebrated ordinary Iranians being unable to afford chickens, claimed this was largely the effect of sanctions, and applauded the fact that Iranians were blaming their leadership for hardships that were largely out of the government’s control. “[T]here are a lot of very angry Iranians, who not surprisingly are blaming their government for this foul state of affairs,” wrote Ledeen. “In part, the government is blameless, since the cost of imports and the cost of feed grain have been driven up by the sanctions. But then again, the behavior of the government provoked the sanctions in the first place, and the singularly incompetent economic policies of the regime probably constitute the most important cause of the crisis.”

A U.S. senator at the time was even more explicit in promoting the strategy of denying Iranians basic foodstuffs. “It’s okay to take the food out of the mouths of the citizens from a government that’s plotting an attack directly on American soil,” said then-Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) in reference to sanctions that might impose food shortages on Iranians.

Kirk now serves on the advisory board of UANI, a group that has engaged in a lengthy campaign to pressure all companies, including those engaged in U.S. government licensed humanitarian trade with Iran, to halt their business with the Islamic Republic. (Kirk’s former foreign policy adviser, Richard Goldberg, later went to work at FDD where he promoted military options against Iran. And in an unusual arrangement, he later went to work in Trump’s National Security Council while FDD continued to pay his salary and travel expenses. There Goldberg advocated for an expansive sanctions regime against Iran.)

UANI applauded the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” strategy for “wreaking maximum havoc on Iran’s economy.”

Its CEO Mark Wallace, endorsed “economic isolation…to the point of being unbearable.”

Indeed, both UANI and FDD’s fondness for imposing collective punishment on Iranian civilians in order to pressure Iran’s leadership to make concessions on its nuclear program is also reflected in statements from some of their biggest donors.

GOP and Trump megadonor Sheldon Adelson contributed at least $1.5 million to FDD by 2011 (FDD claims he is no longer a

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LI PEISHAN/CHINA NEWS SERVICE VIA GETTY IMAGES

funder) and contributed nearly one-third of UANI’s 2013 budget, sending $500,000 to the group.

Adelson told an audience at Yeshiva University in October 2013, that Obama should launch a preventive nuclear attack on a swath of uninhabited Iranian desert and threaten that Iran will be “wiped out” if the country’s leadership doesn’t dismantle their nuclear program.

UANI’s top funder, billionaire Thomas Kaplan, is an investor whose companies have looked to profit from “political unrest” in the Middle East. At UANI’s 2018 conference, Kaplan was presented with a framed Iranian rial by Wallace to recognize his support of UANI and their shared efforts to devalue Iran’s currency.

People in Yinchuan, China wearing face masks in front of boxes of donated medical supplies, The calls for economic collapse, mili- including 1,000 N95 masks, 10,000 surgical face masks, 30,000 ordinary medical masks and tary strikes, cheering food shortages, and 1,000 protective suits, headed to Iran’s Qazvin province, March 27. demanding more “maximum pressure” to diagnosed cases more than doubled, from 2.5 percent to 6.5 percome at a severe humanitarian cost. But for many in the Trump cent. Some officials say those figures are gross underestimates. administration and their allies, that’s precisely the point, which [Update: Since the original publication of this article, the U.S. is top explains why, up until now at least, President Trump has refused in numbers of confirmed cases but the confirmed cases in Iran conto suspend U.S. sanctions on Iran. tinue to climb with the morbidity rate staying at 6.5 percent.]

“During last year’s nearly-nationwide flood relief, problems with The effect of sanctions are visible, as economist Thierry Coville licenses required for transferring funds to Iran slowed down the wrote in La Croix on March 13, “If you take away 40 percent of a relief efforts,” said Far. “The COVID-19 outbreak is more of a secountry’s income by prohibiting the export of its gas and oil, there rious threat by order of magnitude. There’s a collective responwill obviously be consequences on the effectiveness of its healthsibility to ensure Iran’s access to resources they need to protect care system.” the health of millions of Iranians.”

U.S. President Donald Trump has offered humanitarian aid via Switzerland—but without any concrete proposal. (He says, “All they have to do is ask.”) Iranian President Hassan Rouhani responded

By Marmar Kabir to this on March 4, saying that if the U.S. truly wanted to help Iran combat the virus, it should lift sanctions on the country. He added, ON MARCH 12, for the first time in 60 years, Iran asked for $5 billion “They’ve appeared with a mask of sympathy that ‘we also want to in aid from the International Monetary Fund. According to the Iranian help the people of Iran.’” foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, the reason for the request On March 2 and 16, France, Germany and the UK provided symis to help his country fight the coronavirus. He announced on Twitter bolic aid to Iran in the form of medical supplies. But most help has that a letter had been sent to the U.N. Secretary General urging him come from China, with experts on the ground and solidarity deliv“to disregard inhuman [sic] U.S. sanctions on [his] country.” eries from Chinese donors. President Xi Jinping said, on March 14, At the time, Iran was the third hardest-hit nation, behind China that China will continue to help Iran as much as it can in its battle and Italy, counting 18,663 coronavirus cases and 1,213 deaths by with COVID-19.

March 18. And, that only accounted for patients who had been On the ground, Iranian health professionals are on the frontline tested and diagnosed, not the total number of sick people. against COVID-19, working in difficult circumstances with limited reAlthough the first case of COVID-19 was announced on Feb. 19, sources; several have already died while caring for the sick. Iranians its precise origin in Iran remains unknown. Some say that Mahan, have posted millions of grateful messages on social media. an Iranian airline, brought the virus when it repatriated people from For several days, videos claiming to be filmed in hospitals have China to the Middle East; others say it was a businessman who had appeared online, showing medical personnel, faces hidden behind travelled to China; yet others blame Chinese students at a Qur’anic school in the holy city of Qom. Marmar Kabir contributes to Le Monde diplomatique’s Persian ediOfficial statistics show that the number of deaths attributed to tion. Translated by Jeremy Sorkin. Published March 24, copyright ©2020 Le Monde diplomatique—distributed by Agence Global.

COVID-19 is rising: between March 8 and 18, the death rate relative

Iran in the Time of Corona

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Speculators are arrested daily. The police chief in charge of ecomasks, dancing to traditional music or Iranian pop to keep their nomic security announced that on March 14 alone, more than 16 spirits up. Some of these are posted with the hashtag #Tchalèchmillion health supplies (gloves, disinfectants, masks, etc.) were é raqs (challenge dance) or #Corona_ra_chekast_midahim (we’ll found hidden across the country. beat the Corona).

Waiting for a reply from the IMF in Iran, the health system is in In Tehran and elsewhere, isolation orders have not always been particularly dire straits. Under the “maximum pressure” campaign, respected. Ali Reza Zali, who heads the campaign against the outthe hardening of U.S. sanctions and internal corruption and specbreak, complained in March about this: “Our observations on the ulation, thousands of people are already in economic difficulty ground show that today was one of the busiest days in Tehran even facing unemployment, without any fallback. The unemployment though we warned people of the risks of passing it on.” rate and inflation will keep rising at a feverish pace as long as Drastic measures were announced after Supreme Leader AyaCOVID-19 continues. Economic pressures, as well as the climbing tollah Ali Khamenei ordered the military to control the movements curve of the virus, are a crushing weight on the population. At a of people in cities across the country. Armed forces chief of staff Momoment like this, embargos become criminal—especially the one hammad Hossein Baqeri said, in a televised speech, that a comon healthcare supplies. mission had been created to supervise the operation “to empty What are the odds that the IMF will approve Iran’s request, and stores, streets and highways,” in accordance with a national order. could it help rescue Iran without approval from Washington, DC? The visible presence of the Pasdaran (IRGC, Islamic Revolutionary What will be the reaction of the large international institutions and Guard Corps) and the army, notably in city disinfection operations, of other countries, all preoccupied by the pandemic, and who will also seems aimed at cleaning up their image after skirmishes in Nodare defy the Americans in these unprecedented times of crisis? vember over the rising price of fuel.

Without answers to these crucial questions, the health emergency Help for those in need, confinement, illness and stagnation weigh in Iran seems beyond control. heavily on the public, already staggering under the health crisis.

[Update: As of March 31, the IMF has allocated more than the Thousands of stores, workshops and large companies have initial $50 billion they set aside for the Rapid Financing Instrument stopped functioning, and many people have exhausted their reand the Catastrophe Containment and Relief Trust to help sources and are struggling. In response, government aid is offering member countries to address the economic and financial effects loans of 1-2m tomans ($73 to $133)—charging 4 percent interest— of the virus. The IMF management is working to increase the reto construction workers, seasonal employees, day laborers, street sources available in view of the magnitude of damage caused by vendors, taxi drivers and restaurant staff. Around three million famthe virus. More than 80 countries, including Iran, have apilies stand to benefit; families with no income at all will receive proached the IMF for assistance and it is trying to expedite the vouchers of up to 200,000 tomans a month, per person, and up to requests. The Fund has maintained open and friendly relations 600,000 a month for five people or more ($17 and $45 respectively). with Iran, although in financial transactions, the Fund has to make The Mostazafan Foundation also announced on March 16 that it sure it does not violate United Nations imposed (not U.S.) sancwould give 1m tomans (around $73) to 4,000 street vendors in the tions but recognizes the severity of the virus and obstacles to south of Tehran.

Iran’s ability to respond.] ■ But that’s just a drop in the ocean. These steps, to help those in need, do not seem commensurate to the (Advertisement) gravity of the situation. The Iranian economy is already weak from the “maximum pressure” exerted by the U.S., as well as from internal corruption. Meanwhile, wealthy individuals and large corporations are heaving a sigh of relief after promises of lower taxes this year.

Palestinian Medical Relief Society, a grassroots communityThe virus affects everyone, regardbased Palestinian health organization, founded in 1979 by less of class, but its consequences are Palestinian doctors, needs your support today. much graver for the poor. It’s clearly more difficult to follow recommendaVisit our Website <www.pmrs.ps> to see our work in action. tions about hygiene when you are barely making ends meet. Many conMail your U.S. Tax-Deductible check to our American Foundation: tinue to work despite confinement Friends of UPMRC, Inc orders, including the thousands of PO Box 450554 • Atlanta, GA 31145 people who make deliveries to those who can afford to pay for the privilege For more information call: (404) 441-2702 or e-mail: fabuakel@gmail.com of remaining at home.

MAY 2020

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Special Report

No to Xenophobia: Stand Up 4 Human Rights and Dignity

A member of the Palestinian security forces lights a candle as others carry Palestinian and Italian flags showing signs of solidarity with Italy, which has also been under lockdown due to the outbreak of COVID-19, in front of the closed Church of Nativity in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, March 15.

Xenophobia (a compound of ξένος, xenos, “foreign, unusual” and φόβος, phobos, “fear”) is defined in most dictionaries as fear or hatred of strangers/foreigners.

“WHAT IS SHE doing here?” Elena and I have been spending our winters in Jericho for more than 30 years. Everyone knows us except for this Palestinian lady at the vegetable market. She pointed her finger at Elena, of French Costa Rican descent, and exclaimed in a loud voice: “No foreigners are allowed in Jericho!” Her denuncia-

Anthropologist and renowned oil painter, Dr. Ali Qleibo has lectured at Al-Quds University, held a fellowship at Shalom Hartman Institute, was a visiting professor at Tokyo University for Foreign Studies, and is currently visiting professor at Kyoto University, Japan. As a specialist in Palestinian social history, his work at the Jerusalem Research Center, and a member of the Muslim family that holds the key to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, he has developed the Palestinian Social and Muslim Tourism Itinerary.

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tion fell on deaf ears. People were polite and ignored her. Ironically, Elena and I were the locals in Jericho, while she was from another village and didn’t know us. Someone whispered something in her ear. She muttered something and left. The moment passed in peace.

The coronavirus was discovered in Bethlehem and its surroundings on March 5, 2020. Palestinians were confronted with the fact that tourists, the main source of their livelihoods, normally welcomed with enthusiasm and warmth, could also pose a threat to their daily lives. The news immediately caused fear and heightened mistrust of what it could mean for them; a people who already struggle under the yoke of occupation.

Throughout history, social stigma, blame and discrimination are recurrent phenomena during epidemic outbreaks as people often need to make sense of or find a reason for an outbreak of a contagious disease. Scapegoating by singling out particular communities, ethnic groups or races is a common strategy of laying the

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MAY 2020

PHOTO BY LUAY SABABA/XINHUA VIA GETTY

By Dr. Ali Qleibo

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blame on the “other” for events beyond individuals’ control.

The outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), first reported in the city of Wuhan, Hubei, China, in December 2019, led to increased prejudice, xenophobia, discrimination, violence and racism against Chinese people and people of East Asian and Southeast Asian descent and appearance as it spread, not only in Palestine but throughout Europe, the Middle East and North America.

Rumors of the increasing number of tourists, both afflicted with or carriers of COVID-19, circling around social media since early February, alarmed the Bethlehemites. The sporadic closure of a hotel here and there, stories of four tourists being hospitalized, with others quarantined and/or deported while Palestinian hotel workers, who had been in touch with them, were put under medical surveillance, seemed to confirm the worst fears; coronavirus as the foreign disease brought in by tourism. The lack of action by both the minister of tourism, likely at the request of the business council,

and the local politicians did not calm the fear. But then, Palestinians awoke to the news confirming the rumors were true and realization that their source of income, namely tourism, was going to be shut down.

A state of emergency was declared in Bethlehem, one of the major destinations of tourism in the Holy Land, especially during the Easter holiday season. The Palestinian Ministry of Health announced that there were seven confirmed coronavirus cases under quarantine. Moreover, those affected were confirmed to be local Palestinian hotel workers who had been in contact with a group of Greek tourists. Late on March 5, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh announced a 30-day lockdown in Bethlehem, saying the measures were essential to contain the disease.

All schools and educational facilities would also close, he said. The virulent coronavirus epidemic had arrived in Palestine.

Alarmed by the new developments, Defense Minister Naftali Bennett announced on the same day that, in coordination with the IDF and the Palestinian Authority, the

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Israeli defense ministry had also imposed emergency measures on Bethlehem.

Everyone was forbidden from entering or leaving the city.

Pandemonium broke loose. All public parks and tourist sites closed while large sporting events, conferences and other major gatherings were cancelled and churches, mosques, hotels and restaurants were shut down as tourists were rushed out of Bethlehem. The unseemly manner in which the foreign visitors were evacuated shook the Palestinians with the realization that tourists of various European nationalities were carriers of the virus. Their boom was their hamartia. Xenophobia toward the Chinese tourists was generalized to encompass all tourists.

Unfortunately, before our experience in Jericho, an incident of xenophobia had occurred in Ramallah. A Palestinian mother with her daughter chanted “corona, corona” to two Japanese women who work for an NGO. The mother then attacked and pulled the hair of one of the Japanese women who attempted to record the incident. The Pales-

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tinian woman was arrested later that day and true to Palestinian cultural norms, Governor of Ramallah Leila Ghannam invited the two Japanese ladies to her office to thank them for their relief efforts. A senior police officer gave them flowers during a visit to the NGO’s office. Asians in Palestine, namely Japanese, Koreans and Filipinos, have been living among us for years, and posed no greater risk than others living and working in Palestine. But, unfortunately, these factors did not matter because with diseases there is no “convenient other” to blame for the victims, except the foreigner.

Having lived in Japan for a total of almost six years and having traveled extensively in Korea and China, my sense of identity has been shaped to a great extent through the friendships that I forged. I feel deeply embarrassed when a few of my fellow Palestinians act negatively toward Asians.

As the coronavirus epidemic increased and spread from a geographically confined epidemic in Bethlehem, to one that crossed borders to become pandemic, the panic increased as did the temptation to blame and fear the outsider—the other. The foreign disease brought by tourists was shown to be a myth that soon dissolved, as the virus spread globally, and Palestinians learned that coronavirus does not differentiate between race, culture, religion and language.

This apologetic explanation, however, does not justify the behavior. Palestinians, like all other peoples, are complex human beings. Vulnerable, emotional, they love and hate. But most of all, like everyone else they are afraid of sickness and ultimately of death. Ironically, our collective human panic can undermine our traditional humanist values, even if briefly.

In the world at war against coronavirus, the diversity of human cultures faces the same virus. Humanity at large, men and women of all races, ethnicities, cultures and languages stand united against the invisible enemy—the virus itself. Each people conduct a battle in the war of containment in their homeland and eventually will defeat the virus. Each nation contributes to the war waged against the onslaught of the virus by strategically fencing it and delimiting its scope 20

of expansion. Danger is no longer from the foreigner, for each of us runs the risk of being a carrier. The danger does not lurk outside, it may be in the friendly face of the neighbor, the jovial face of the baker, butcher and grocer, the sweet smile of the mother and the compassionate caring pat of the father, brother or husband. The coronavirus lives among us. Each of us is a potential incubus.

Our sense of altruism deepens, as witnessed in the manner with which villagers, townsmen and Jerusalemites have come to realize that our moral duty compels us to protect the others from ourselves. In this jihad (struggle) against the invisible power of nature, we are aware that we should neither allow it to afflict us nor become carriers passing it to others. We stay home.

“Overall Palestinian families in the West Bank have adapted to the new situation and stay indoors,” my friend Mohammad from al Ma’sarah told me. “Since the onslaught of the Israeli occupation, we have had to live under siege, closures and curfews. In fact, we have kept to our homes ever since mid-February when the rumors first started.” After a moment of pensive silence, Mohammad explained, “There are no social visits and children are kept indoors. Internet keeps everyone in touch. Shopping for necessities is done briskly and most people have stored food for months…”

The precept of the enemy as the “other” persists. As many Palestinian families

depend for their income on the Israeli labor market, they have no alternative but to go on working inside the green line. But on March 25, Prime Minister Shtayyeh ordered the thousands of laborers to return home.

Dozens of these workers brought the virus back with them.

Whereas Palestinians pride themselves in their sense of discipline and hence the containment of the virus in one region, namely Bethlehem, they view Israelis as nonchalant, easy going and lax. The triumph of order versus chaos, Palestinians argue, is evident in the disproportionate increase in the number of patients in the Jewish sector.

Palestine remains under quarantine, as of this writing. At this critical moment in living under the threat of the virus, a group of Bethlehemites—much like the chorus in a Greek tragedy—formed a line in Manger Square in homage to the Italians. The gesture, an expression of human solidarity with the Italians where the battle with the virus has reaped many victims, was followed by the Augusta Victoria Hospital in Jerusalem that lit the monumental building, atop Mount of Olives, with the colors of the Italian flag.

The threat of coronavirus and the war being waged against it, must unify humanity and dissolve cultural, racial, ethnic divides.

Let us fight racism, call out hatred, and support each other in this time of a public health emergency. StandUp4HumanRights and dignity. ■

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WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

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Special Report

Pro-Israel Bullying is Failing at Home, But is it Paying Dividends Abroad?

MICHAEL BROCHSTEIN/SOPA IMAGES/LIGHTROCKET VIA GETTY IMAGES

By Dale Sprusansky

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaking during the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) policy conference in Washington, DC. CRITICS OF THE UNITED STATES’ unwavering support for Israel had several notable reasons to celebrate this winter.

Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren made headlines by doing the once unimaginable: boycotting the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) policy conference. Sanders even went as far as issuing a tweet accusing the organization of being a purveyor of “bigotry.”

Just a decade ago, scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt observed in their landmark book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, “any politician who challenges [the Israel lobby’s] policies stands little chance of becoming president.” Sanders and Warren set an historic precedent by remaining viable candidates despite their unwillingness to kowtow to the country’s foremost foreign policy lobby.

Of additional note was AIPAC’s steepened descent into a partisan organization. The group’s public confrontation with Sanders—at the time the front-runner for the Democratic nomination—was a destructive blow to its long-touted ability to corral nearly unanimous and unflinching bipartisan support for Israel.

Sanders’ unreserved denunciation of AIPAC came in the midst of

Dale Sprusansky is managing editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs magazine.

MAY 2020

numerous polls showing that left-leaning Americans are increasingly critical of Israel and support elected officials challenging the AIPACenforced status quo.

The Israel lobby’s response to this trend has been to resort to smearing and bullying. The Democratic Majority for Israel, a lobbying group formed in 2019 with the hope of sustaining support for Israel within the Democratic Party, launched a deluge of television ads attacking Sanders ahead of the Iowa and Nevada caucuses. Even more remarkably, AIPAC launched attack ads accusing Democratic Reps. Ilhan Omar (MN), Rashida Tlaib (MI) and Betty McCollum (MN) of anti-Semitism and being “maybe more sinister” than ISIS. This is not a new tactic. In his authoritative 2015 book, Congress and the Shaping of the Middle East, Professor Kirk Beattie noted that AIPAC has long sought to make dissidents pay a high price. He quoted one Hill staffer as saying that AIPAC is “so unused to people defying them that when it happens they try to create so much pain for your office that it’s not worth the effort.”

Now, however, an increasing number of elected officials are willing to hold their ground against the lobby’s attacks. Rep. McCollum, targeted for introducing legislation that would protect Palestinian children from abuse at the hands of the U.S.-funded Israeli military, has been unequivocal in her response to AIPAC’s smears. In a state-

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Power of Ethnic Groups in the Making of American Foreign Policy. “In 1998-99 I was told by different knowledgeable observers that Turkey and Jordan considered the body with which they must first negotiate their relations with the United States to be not the State Department or some congressional body but AIPAC,” he wrote.

Given the plethora of foreign leaders brought in by AIPAC to speak at their 2020 conference, it’s clear the lobby still plays a meaningful role courting international support for Israel via the U.S. One needs to look no further for evidence than DemocraResidents of Khartoum protest against Sudanese Sovereign Council Head Abdel Fattah al-Burhan’s tic Republic of the Congo Presimeeting with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in Uganda. dent Felix Tshisekedi using his speech at this year’s event to announce his decision to appoint an ambasIf nothing else, McCollum, Sanders and ment, she called AIPAC a “hate group” and sador to Israel. other leaders appear to have taken to heart accused them of “weaponizing anti-SemiHowever, in the era of the Trump adminMearsheimer and Walt’s observation that tism and hate to silence dissent.” istration, where “true believers” of the Israeli because the lobby’s “strategic and moral In subsequent comments to Israel’s +972 cause occupy key White House and diploarguments are so weak, it has little choice Magazine, the congresswoman identified matic positions, it is likely that Washington’s but to try to stifle or marginalize serious disfear as the motivating factor behind global campaign to support Israel is less cussion.” These politicians are transcendAIPAC’s attack. “They’re trying, the best I lobby-driven than merely lobby-endorsed. ing the lobby by pioneering the notion that can figure out, to intimidate and bully memIsrael scored a major geopolitical victory its bullying cannot, and must not, usurp the bers of Congress from speaking out,” she this February when Sudan’s interim leader, moral reality on the ground in Palestine. said. “This is an example of somebody General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, met Prime who’s paranoid or frightened. It makes me THE PATH TO WASHINGTON GOES Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in Uganda think it comes from fear.”

THROUGH JERUSALEM and began the process of normalizing relaIf McCollum’s analysis is correct, it reptions with Israel. resents a major sea change. It would mean While American politicians are slowly beIn subsequent remarks, Burhan affirmed that the group that was once so powerful ginning to overcome the heavy-handed tacKhartoum’s solidarity with the Palestinian that it had, according to one Senate staffer tics of the Israel lobby, there are signs that people, but emphasized that engaging quoted by Beattie, the ability to issue a “poleaders from the so-called developing world Israel is critical to the national interests of tential electoral ‘kiss of death,’” is now opincreasingly see establishing good relations Sudan. erating from a place of weakness and rewith Israel as a prerequisite for effective enBurhan explained that establishing relasorting to desperate attacks. gagement with the United States. tions with Israel is a conduit to getting his The rising number of voices unapologetThis is not necessarily a new developcountry removed from the U.S. State Deically critical of Israel and the apparent inment—Washington has for decades propartment’s State Sponsors of Terrorism list. ability of AIPAC to successfully shame leadvided diplomatic cover for Israel and voSudan’s presence on the list since 1993 ers such as Rep. McCollum certainly give ciferously declared to the world the inexhas severely restricted its ability develop its this argument credence. However, the fact tricable link between the two countries. economy and receive financial assistance. that many Democrats unreservedly atAmerican support for Israel on the world “During the meeting that took place in tended AIPAC’s policy conference after the stage is closely tied to the Israel lobby’s inEntebbe, Uganda, we stressed the role of organization offered only a tepid apology for fluence over U.S. politicians. Political scienthe Israeli side in supporting Sudan with reits attack ads suggests that the group’s abiltist Tony Smith supplied anecdotal evidence gards to the list of state sponsors of terrority to exert power, though reduced, remains. of this in his book Foreign Attachments: The 22

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ism,” Burhan said in an interview with Asharq Al-Awsat. According to the Associated Press, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called Burhan in advance of the meeting to thank him for normalizing ties with Israel and to invite him to the U.S. The Entebbe meeting was reportedly orchestrated by the UAE, whose leaders have a close relationship with White House adviser and ardent Zionist Jared Kushner.

Some analysts speculate the UAE viewed the meeting as a way to enlist Khartoum in its regional agenda, which includes isolating Iran by forming an unspoken but transparent alliance with Israel.

It thus appears the UAE, U.S. and Israel capitalized on Sudan’s economic desperation and desire to emerge from international isolation to impose a quid pro quo: join the Washington/Jerusalem/Abu Dhabi alliance in exchange for the removal of U.S. sanctions.

Scholar Joseph Massad recently noted in the Middle East Eye that this arrangement is hardly a new proposition. “In January 2016, with [then President] Omar al-Bashir still in charge, foreign minister Ibrahim Ghandour sought to lift the U.S. economic sanctions on Sudan by offering to open formal diplomatic ties with Israel,” he wrote.

THIS REALITY RINGS TRUE THROUGHOUT THE REGION

Tunisia raised eyebrows in February when its newly elected President Kais Saied hastily fired his U.N. ambassador, Moncef Baati. Media reports indicate that Saied, eager to cozy-up to the U.S., terminated the diplomat after Washington lodged a complaint about Baati’s efforts to oppose the Trump administration’s “peace plan.”

Saied maintained the firing was purely based on Baati’s job performance. His colleagues summarily rejected that characterization. “He was among the most respected ambassadors at the United Nations and the government said he was fired because he was unprofessional? It’s a joke,” one U.N. ambassador told reporters.

Further west, there are reports that Israel is approaching Morocco with an agreement similar to the one it reached MAY 2020

with Sudan. Netanyahu has apparently offered his assistance in securing U.S. recognition of Morocco’s sovereignty over occupied Western Sahara if Rabat agrees to normalize relations with Israel. Like many other countries in the region, Morocco currently has a covert military and economic relationship with Israel that it officially denies.

Even Jordan, which has long enjoyed cordial relations with Washington and a strong working relationship with Israel, has apparently started to wonder if its $1.3 billion in U.S. aid could be jeopardized by its opposition to Trump’s peace plan.

Jordanian political commentator Fahd alKhitan recently reported in Al-Ghad that senior officials in the Hashemite Kingdom view “the unpredictability of the White House” as “a cause of concern.” While Amman still views the withdrawal of U.S. aid as unlikely, their concern speaks volumes of the extent to which Israel is on the minds of officials in the region—and beyond—when it comes to their bilateral relationship with the U.S. It’s easy to chalk up Washington’s international support for Israel to standard diplomatic practice. It’s well known, after all, that in international negotiations, the stronger party should not merely give away gifts, but extract concessions from the weaker party.

If the U.S. is willing to remove Sudan from its terrorism list, what’s wrong with it throwing its ally Israel a bone by tying the move to Khartoum normalizing relations with Israel?

That logic is fair enough. But there is one important reality to consider in this case: The Trump administration, an allegedly impartial mediator that claims to view IsraelPalestine peace as being in the U.S. national interest, has not once sought to extract a concession from Israel. Asking Israel to give up nothing in return, Washington has simply handed Israel the Golan Heights, Jerusalem and a blatantly onesided peace deal.

It appears other nations must make concessions to Israel in order to play ball with the U.S., while Israel in turn extracts nothing but concessions from the U.S. Who benefits from this arrangement?

CHANGE ON THE HORIZON?

The late Sen. Charles Mathias (R), who represented Maryland from 1969-1987, once warned that when “factions among us lead the nation toward excessive foreign attachments or animosities,” it results in the “loss of cohesion in our foreign policy and the degradation from the national interest.”

Countless observers have warned that unwavering U.S. support for Israel has resulted in a disjointed Middle East policy that jeopardizes many of its interests. For decades, the Israel lobby has used its strength to stifle an open dialogue about this policy. However, with the lobby increasingly losing its bipartisan standing and struggling to rebuff critics, a rethinking of U.S. policy may, at long last, be on the horizon. ■

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smith_24-25 2.qxp_IRmep Polls 4/2/20 8:56 AM Page 24

IRmep Polls, Telling Hard Truths Since 2014

Poll: Is Anti-Zionism Anti-Semitism?

By Grant F. Smith SPEAKERS at the March 1-3, 2020 American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference claimed 18,000 were in attendance, but the annual gathering took place under a cloud of controversy.

AIPAC had to retract and apologize for its Facebook ad campaign claiming U.S. lawmakers supportive of Palestinian human rights were “worse than ISIS.” On Feb. 12 Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN) released a statement saying, “hate speech makes AIPAC a hate group.” McCollum hit back at AIPAC’s opposition to her legislation to protect Palestinian children from being “interrogated, abused and even tortured in Israeli military prisons.” Just before the AIPAC conference, McCollum tweeted, “@AIPAC’s agenda: Occupy & annex Palestinian land, Dehumanize Palestinians, Imprison Palestinian Children. Promote Islamophobia.” She did not speak at AIPAC. AIPAC is facing new challenges to its longstanding claim that unconditional U.S. support for Israel is bipartisan. Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren boycotted the AIPAC gathering. Mike Bloomberg attended and praised the group, while Joe Biden and Amy Klobuchar appeared via video.

Some Israel lobby operatives are stepping up a campaign of false charges of anti-Semitism to shut down prominent individuals that express valid criticism of Israel’s human rights record and ongoing military occupation of lands Israel invaded or annexed through war.

Expanding the definition of anti-Semitism to include those who are not adherents of Zionism has taken on new urgency. The Israel lobby is struggling against growing public awareness of Israeli practices and their own politicians’ unconditional support for Israel. Israel lobbyists are campaigning for U.S. government policies designed to suppress both Jewish and non-Jewish voices of those who either strongly self-identify as anti-Zionist or are simply non-Zionist.

Zionism is a political movement that took hold in the late 1800s under the promotion of journalist Theodor Herzl who wanted to create a Jewish nation. After the modern state of Israel was established in 1948, Zionism came to mean support for Israel.

According to the American Council for Judaism, for most of American history, anti-Zionism was the default position of the organized Jewish community. Upon dedicating the first Reform synagogue in Charleston, SC in 1841 Rabbi Gustov Poznanski de-

IRmep Poll: “VP Mike Pence proclaimed, ‘anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.’ Zionism is a political movement supporting a Jewish state while anti-Semitism is a form of bigotry against Jews. Is anti-Zionism anti-Semitism, or not?”

Grant F. Smith is the director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy in Washington, DC. For more IRmep polls, visit https://IRmep.org/Polls. Smith’s latest book, the israel lobby enters state government, is now on sale at Middle East Books and More.

24

Source: IRmep representative poll of 1,790 American adults fielded through Google Surveys on March 5-7, 2020. Answer order randomly reversed.

RMSE score sample bias 4.3 percent.

Washington RepoRt on Middle east affaiRs

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smith_24-25 2.qxp_IRmep Polls 4/2/20 8:56 AM Page 25

clared “This happy country is our Palestine, this city our Jerusalem.” In 1885, Reform rabbis meeting in Pittsburgh declared, “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community and therefore expect neither to return to Palestine nor a sacrificial worship nor the laws concerning a Jewish state.” Widespread support for a Jewish state in Palestine only began to grow with the rise of anti-Semitism in Russia and Eastern Europe in the early 20th century. Most American Jewish establishment organizations didn’t become Zionist until the rise of Nazism and in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

Among the general population of voting age Americans, self-identification with Zionism is weak. A 2017 IRmep poll defined a Zionist as “a person who believes in the development and protection of a Jewish nation in what is now Israel.” 70.3 percent of Americans responded, “I do not consider myself a Zionist.” Majorities of Americans also consistently oppose AIPAC’s signature lobbying demand: massive and unconditional U.S. foreign aid to Israel. That aid, adjusted for inflation, exceeds $250 billion since 1948.

MAY 2020

Take-Aways From This and Previous Polls • About half of Americans believe anti-Zionism is not a form of bigotry.

• Only 30 percent align with the Trump administration policy that “anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.”

• Most Americans don’t self-identify as Zionist (70.3 percent).

• Majorities of Americans consistently oppose U.S. aid to Israel, government crackdowns on student human rights protests (58.8 percent) and bans on boycotts of Israel (74.9 percent), while 68.8 percent would not personally accept the terms of the Trump Middle East “Deal of the Century.”

For more IRmep polls, visit https://IRmep.org/Polls

While addressing AIPAC, Vice President Mike Pence touted a string of controversial and legally dubious—under international law—actions implemented by what he termed “the most pro-Israel president in history.” Some of the policies— opposed by the American public—were moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem (56.5 percent opposed) and the terms of the lopsided Middle East (Advertisement)

“Deal of the Century” peace plan (68 percent rejection). Americans oppose bans on their free speech rights to boycott Israel (75 percent opposed). They are ambivalent about recently announced U.S. policy that international law does not apply to Israel’s military occupation and colonization of the Golan Heights, West Bank and East Jerusalem. (53.6 percent neither “agree nor disagree.”) ■

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Israel and Judaism

Whether or Not AIPAC Is a “Hate Group,” It Should Register as a Foreign Agent

By Allan C. Brownfeld

MARVIN JOSEPH/THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES

experience with AIPAC.” In explaining why he was not attending this year ’s AIPAC conference, Sen. Bernie Sanders declared: “The Israeli people have the right to live in peace and security. So do the Palestinian people. I am concerned about the platform AIPAC provides for leaders who express bigotry and oppose basic Palestinian rights.”

In a column headlined, “AIPAC Makes Sanders’ Point for Him,” Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank writes: “AIPAC and Netanyahu seemed intent on proving Sanders’ point. As the conference opened...Netanyahu, Hannah Recht (l), Lauren Maunus and other members of IfNotNow hand out information to people speaking to the group via attending the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) annual conference outside the Walter E. satellite...derided the Palestinians as ‘the pampered children Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC, March 1, 2020. of the international community.’ The AIPAC audience applauded....Netanyahu told AIPAC he was moving forward with plans REP. BETTY MCCOLLUM (D-MN) called the American Israel Public to annex Palestinian territory—-a move that would make the long Affairs Committee (AIPAC) a “hate group” after it placed ads on sought two-state solution all but impossible.”

Facebook which implied that McCollum and other members of ConIn what many considered a direct effort to influence the American gress who had defended the rights of Palestinians were worse than presidential election, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations the terrorist group ISIS. Danny Danon declared: “We don’t want Sanders at AIPAC. We don’t McCollum declared: “as a member of Congress and the vice-chair want him in Israel. Anyone who calls our prime minister a racist is of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, I believe deeither a liar, an ignorant fool, or both.” fending human rights and freedom are foundational to international In Milbank’s view, “AIPAC...finds itself not only at odds with Desecurity and our democracy. The struggle to promote human dignity mocrats, but also with most American Jews, instead of its tradition inevitably results in confronting entrenched forces determined to deof representing strong, broad support for Israel, AIPAC is becoming humanize, debase and demonize individuals or even entire popuabout as bipartisan as the National Rifle Association. Even Nelations to maintain dominance and an unjust status quo. Hate is used tanyahu reportedly regards AIPAC as just another right-wing Ameras a weapon to incite and silence dissent. Unfortunately, this is my ican interest group. ‘We don’t need AIPAC anymore,’ Netanyahu reportedly told one of his advisers. ‘We have enough support in the Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of United States from the evangelicals. I’d happily give up on AIPAC if the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for we didn’t need to counteract J Street,’ a liberal pro-Israel group.

Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.

Writing in The Forward, Batya Ungar-Sargon, in an article titled, 26

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“How AIPAC Proved Bernie Right,” notes, “I had never before been in the same room as a person who has defended genocide...until the AIPAC policy conference.

Words like apartheid and genocide and ethnic cleansing are often thrown around in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict... But it wasn’t a defender of Israeli war crimes, real or imagined, who was hosted

by AIPAC. It was someone from a different context entirely.

“In July of 1995, 8,000 Muslims were murdered in Srebrenica in what the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia deemed a genocide.

Under the command of Ratko Mladić, a Serbian paramilitary unit killed thousands and thousands...Aleksander Vučić was then serving as Minister of Information. He imposed fines for journalists who opposed the government and banned foreign TV networks. The Serbian media he oversaw was accused of justifying atrocities and demonizing ethnic minorities....Vučić has reinvented himself...and has been serving as president of Serbia since 2017...AIPAC welcomed the Serbian President to address its 18,000 delegates.”

Over the years there have been frequent calls for AIPAC to register as a foreign agent. In the 1970s, Sen. J. William Fulbright (D-AR), then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, argued that this should be done, as have other U.S. foreign policy and intelligence analysts.

In April 2005, AIPAC policy director Steven Rosen and AIPAC senior Iran analyst Keith Weissman were fired from AIPAC amid an FBI investigation into whether they passed classified international security information to Israel. They were later indicted for illegally conspiring to gather and disclose classified information to Israel. AIPAC agreed to pay the legal fees for Weissman’s defense through appeal if necessary, but charges were ultimately dropped.

In May 2005, the Justice Department announced that Lawrence Franklin, a U.S. Air Force Reserve Colonel working as a Department of Defense analyst in the Pentagon, had been arrested and charged by the FBI with providing classified international defense information to Israel. The 6-count MAY 2020

criminal complaint identified AIPAC by name. Franklin pleaded guilty to turning over classified material to both AIPAC and an Israeli government official. He was sentenced to almost three years in prison.

Respected Jewish commentator Peter Beinart said of AIPAC, “In reality, they are not independent of the Israeli government.

When Netanyahu came out against the Iran deal, AIPAC did not have an independent choice of whether it was going to or not. It pretty much has to kowtow to the Israeli government all the time.”

According to journalist Connie Bruck, AIPAC has been able to “deliver the support of Congress” to prevent any president who wants to negotiate with Israel from using the multi-billion dollar packages of military aid that go to Israel each year as leverage for passing the spending and taking away this strongest negotiating chit.

AIPAC has helped to make Israel the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since the end of World War ll. It now receives more than $3.8 billion in aid yearly. As a result of AIPAC’s efforts, this aid includes numerous provisions that are not available to other American allies.

According to the Congressional Research Service, these provisions include providing aid “as all grant cash transfers, not designated for particular projects, and transferred as a lump sum in the first month of the fiscal year, instead of in installments. Israel is allowed to spend about a quarter of the military aid for the procurement in Israel of defense articles and services...rather than in the U.S.” An important reason for AIPAC’s influence is that it markets itself as representing American Jewish opinion. In fact, most American Jews disagree with its embrace of total support for Israel as its governments steadily move away from democracy. A recent Pew Center poll showed that only 38 percent of American Jews believe that the Israeli government is seriously pursuing peace, while 44 percent believe that the continued construction of settlements in the occupied territories damages Israel’s national security.

Increasingly, young Jewish activists are separating themselves from AIPAC. In March the Washington Post reported, “...the activists represent a new generation of

Israel critics that differs with the pro-peace movement of the 1990s.That earlier movement focused on a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict...The new groups are the product of the post-millennial liberal politics, with antipathy for nationalism of all kinds and a hunger to tear down the entire system of money in politics.”

Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, which formed in 2007 as a liberal but still pro-Zionist alternative to AIPAC, declares: “What we said was: ‘There’s another way to be pro-Israel, you don’t have to support whatever the Israeli government does.’” According to the Washington Post, “Younger groups are saying: ‘You don’t have to be pro-Israel, you should be pro-human rights, and everyone should have a state.’”

This year’s anti-AIPAC campaign was led by the Jewish group IfNotNow. A few days after members of IfNotNow videotaped themselves confronting former Vice President Joe Biden about AIPAC’s opposition to the 2015 U.S.-Iran nuclear deal, Biden said he would go to the conference “to convince them to change their position.”

In the end, Biden sent a video message, telling delegates that Israel’s annexation plans and settlement activities were “choking hopes for peace.”

The idea that supporting the Israeli government’s policies is the way to attract Jewish voters has no basis in reality. J Street recently asked Jewish voters to name their two most important issues. Just 4 percent chose Israel. The same survey found that 65 percent said they were somewhat or very attached to Israel. The American Jewish Committee’s 2015 poll found a similar result.

The views of most American Jews were never represented by AIPAC and at the present time, AIPAC speaks only for a small minority, which embraces the occupation and the Israeli government itself. It may have become what many, such as Rep. McCollum, call it, “a hate group.” That it should register as a foreign agent of the government of Israel is increasingly clear.

We should not permit it to pretend that it, in any way, speaks for millions of American Jews whose opinions are far different and who embrace human rights and equality for men and women of every nation and faith, in particular the Palestinians. ■

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The Nakba Continues

Trump’s “Peace” Plan Threatens to Revoke Citizenship of Palestinian Arab Israelis

By Jonathan Cook

AHMAD GHARABLI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

ulation. These Palestinians are descended from families that managed to avoid the large-scale expulsions by the Israeli army in 1948 that led to the creation of a Jewish state on the ruins of the Palestinians’ homeland.

The plan would require minor modifications to borders recognized since Israel agreed to a ceasefire with its Arab neighbors in 1949. The result would be to transfer a long, thin strip of land in Israel known as the “Triangle” into the West Bank— along with a dozen towns and villages densely populated with Israel’s Palestinian citizens.

Samer Atamni, director of A view of the Arab-Israeli town of Baqa al-Gharbiya in northern Israel, Jan. 30, 2020. Residents of the Arab the Jewish-Arab center for "Triangle," a cluster of 14 towns and villages where more than 260,000 Israeli Arabs live, are scared and angry over a proposed U.S. peace plan which sees them as part of a future Palestinian state, while giving Israel a peace at Givat Haviva, an ingreen light to annex chunks of territory in the occupied West Bank, where more than 400,000 Israelis live in stitute promoting greater settlements deemed illegal under international law. social integration in Israel, lives in Kafr Qara, one of the towns likely to be moved under the plan. “There’s been talk about THE TRUMP administration’s decision to green-light Israel’s annexthis idea for a while but mostly from the extreme right. Now Trump ation of illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank grabbed headhas brought it out of the margins and into the mainstream,” he said. lines when it was published in late January. But one of its other pro“The worry is that it will become the basis of any future political sovisions—one equally cherished by Israel’s extreme right—went lution. It has been normalized.” largely unnoticed.

In fact, before Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu began lobbyUnder the terms of the “Peace to Prosperity” document, the U.S. ing for a transfer of the Triangle in 2017, he had sought to persuade could allow Israel to strip potentially hundreds of thousands of its former President Barack Obama’s officials of its benefits as early own inhabitants of their citizenship in a so-called “populated land as 2014. According to the Maariv newspaper, Netanyahu argued swap” with the settlements. that the move would reduce the Palestinian minority from a fifth of Those in danger of having their citizenship revoked are drawn from Israel’s population to 12 percent.

Israel’s large Palestinian minority—one in five of the country’s popYousef Jabareen, a member of the Israeli parliament from Umm Jonathan Cook is a journalist based in Nazareth and a winner of the al-Fahm, home to 50,000 Palestinians and the largest community Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. He is the author of targeted by the “land swap,” said the proposal was a dramatic stepBlood and Religion and Israel and the Clash of Civilisations (available from AET’s Middle East Books and More). up in a growing campaign to delegitimize the Palestinian minority.

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“Even if the plan cannot be implemented yet, it presents us—the native people of the land—as unwelcome guests, as a fifth column, as the enemy,” he said. “And, it will inflame the right-wing’s incitement, including from Netanyahu, that Palestinian members of the parliament are representatives for a terrorist population.”

Defenders of the plan have argued that it does not violate the rights of those affected because they would not be physically forced from their homes. Instead, their communities would be reassigned to a Palestinian state. But forcible transfer of the kind suggested in the Trump plan—sometimes referred Schoolgirls walk past a mural in the Arab-Israeli town of Umm al-Fahm, part of the “Triangle’’ in northto as “static transfer”—is likely to ern Israel, Jan. 30, 2020. constitute a war crime under the decisive Jewish majority, the transfer plan is transferred to? From the Trump plan it is Fourth Geneva Convention. both a demographic and territorial win. Acclear that there will be no Palestinian state, In an attempt to address that argument, cording to polls, about half of Israeli Jews only a series of ghettoes, South Africanthe Israeli foreign ministry produced a docsupport the expulsion of Palestinian citizens. style Bantustans. Under this plan, we would ument, in 2014, analyzing how a “populaAyman Odeh, head of the Joint List, be placed under Israeli military rule, under tion exchange” might be presented as in acwhich brings together the main Palestinian occupation and apartheid.” cordance with international law. It political factions, warned in February that Baraa Mahamid, a 20-year-old activist concluded that the measure would require the transfer of the Triangle was likely to be with the Umm al-Fahm Youth Movement, that either the affected Palestinian citizens only the first stage in wider measures. The agreed. He pointed out that many residents would need to support the move or the Israeli right, he said, was “conveying a clear of the Triangle travel into West Bank cities Palestinian Authority headed by Mahmoud message to all of Israel’s Arab citizens: ‘You like Jenin, which is close by. “We see the Abbas would have to back it. However, are not welcome here and your turn will greater poverty there, the checkpoints, the polls have consistently shown that a majorcome when the next plan is released.’” walls, Israeli soldiers everywhere. There are ity of Palestinian citizens are opposed.

The transfer of the Triangle offers a many problems for us living here in Israel, Atamni noted that families would be torn twofold gain for the right. First, it subtracts but people are afraid their life would become apart. Those inside the Triangle would be large numbers of Palestinians from Israel’s much worse on the other side of the wall.” separated behind checkpoints and walls population without losing much territory, According to Israeli government sources from family members living elsewhere in thereby strengthening Israel’s Jewish maquoted by the Haaretz daily, Netanyahu was Israel. It would also cut many off from their jority. Second, it rationalizes Israel’s “recipthe one who persuaded the Americans to places of work, schools and colleges, as rocal” annexation of swaths of West Bank include the transfer option. He is reported to well as their historic lands. “We study and territory on which the Jewish settlements are have been lobbying U.S. officials to adopt work in Israel. It is the only reality our combuilt, thereby defeating any chance of crethe provision since work first began on munity has known for decades,” he said. “It ating a viable Palestinian state. But critically Trump’s so-called “deal of the century” back confirms our worst fears that Israel does not for those who support annexation, it subin 2017. It is the first time that an official U.S. take our rights as citizens seriously, that it stantially increases Israel’s territorial area peace plan has included such a proposal or thinks it can simply issue diktats, and play without risking a rise in Palestinian numbers. produced a map showing how such a terriwith our futures as if we are pieces on a According to figures published in Februtorial exchange would work on the ground. chessboard.” ary by Peace Now, some 380,000 PalestiniFor Netanyahu, and many Israeli Jews, Jabareen pointed out that residents of ans—260,000 in the Triangle and a further who see the country’s Palestinian citizens the Triangle had no reason to be reassured 120,000 in East Jerusalem—would be as a “demographic timebomb,” with high about their prospects from the Trump doc“swapped out” to a Palestinian state. Meanbirth rates that might slowly erode the state’s ument. “What state is it that we would be MAY 2020

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constitution-like status on Israel’s JewishThe assumption of disloyalty is implied in while, some 330,000 Palestinians in the ness, revokes Arabic as an official lanthe wording of the Trump plan, which states West Bank and East Jerusalem would need guage, and makes a top priority of Juthat residents of the Triangle’s communities to be “swapped in”—that is, brought under daization—a policy of settling Jews into “largely self-identify as Palestinian.” In fact, Israeli rule as part of the annexations. The Palestinian areas inside Israel and the ocnoted Atamni, the situation is far more comoverall gain would be official U.S. recognicupied territories. plex. Surveys suggest that there is a comtion, for the first time, of territory housing “Over the last 10 years Israeli society has plicated interplay between the minority’s 650,000 Jewish settlers as part of Israel. moved further right very quickly,” said Palestinian, Arab, Israeli and various reli“The demographic rationale behind this isn’t Atamni. “The left in Israel has been a huge gious identities. “Yes, our national identity being hidden,” said Jabareen. “Israel loses disappointment. Most have kept silent is Palestinian, but that doesn’t detract in any lots of Palestinian citizens and gains lots of about the recent threats to our status.” way from the fact that our civil identity is Isterritory seized by Jewish settlers.”

Jabareen observed that the ultra-nationalist raeli,” he said. “When we struggle in Israel Schemes to transfer the Triangle have bloc supporting Netanyahu had a pressing it is for our civil rights, to end the discrimibeen floating around on the right for nearly political need to delegitimize the standing nation we face from the state and receive two decades. It first came to prominence of Palestinians as citizens, and especially equality as citizens.” when a formal plan was published by Avigas voters.

Nonetheless, the transfer proposal condor Lieberman, a settler who has served as Netanyahu has been unable to form a tained in Trump’s so-called “deal of the defense and foreign minister under Negovernment for the past year because, in century” is in line with recent legislative tanyahu. He has been keen to tie citizenthree elections he has narrowly lost to an moves by Israel that sanction the downship rights to “loyalty” to Israel as a Jewish opposition bloc led by a former army gengrading of the status of Palestinian citistate. In previous election campaigns, he eral, Benny Gantz, of the Blue and White zens. The most significant is the nationhas run under the slogan: “No loyalty, no party. The bloc, under Gantz, can only end state law, passed in 2018. It confers citizenship.” Transferring the Triangle has the stalemate and win power itself been seen by the right as a prelude (Advertisement) by allying with the Joint List, which to much wider revocations of citizenrepresents Israel’s Palestinian miship for Palestinians, according to nority. But Gantz has embraced the Jabareen.

Trump plan, making an alliance with In recent years more politicians on the Joint List difficult. the right, including Netanyahu, have At the time of writing, Netanyahu been explicit that Palestinian citizens appeared to have succeeded in are necessarily disloyal to a Jewish pressuring Gantz to break with the state because they hold on to their Joint List, which won a record 15 Palestinian identity. Such imputations seats in an election on March 2, and of disloyalty were a mainstay of Necreate an “emergency” unity governtanyahu’s two election campaigns ment. Netanyahu, who would conlast year. He accused Israel’s Palestinue as prime minister for 18 tinian voters of wanting “to annihilate months, argued that such a move us all—women, children and men.” was vital to deal with the coronavirus He also sent his Likud party’s monipandemic. Gantz’s Blue and White tors into polling stations in Palestinian Playgrounds for Palestine is a project to build playgrounds for our children.

It is a minimal recognition of their right to childhood and party had reportedly split over the communities in Israel wearing body creative expression. It is an act of love. move. cameras, implying that Palestinian Playgrounds for Palestine (PfP) is a registered 501(c)3 non-profit Mahamid, the youth activist from voters were defrauding the Jewish organization, established in 2001. We’re an all-volunteer organization (no paid staff) that raises money throughout the year to conUmm al-Fahm, said the acceptance majority. struct playgrounds and fund programs for of the Trump plan by the two main Jabareen noted: “In the parliachildren in Palestine. political blocs had at least made the ment, members of the ruling coaliSelling Organic, Fair Trade Palestinian olive reality of life for Palestinian citizens tion openly incite against us. Bezalel oil is PfP’s principle source of fundraising. is year, PfP launched AIDA, a private clearer. “We were told our citizenSmotrich [a settler leader, and curlabel olive oil from Palestinian farmers. ship would protect us, that it would rently the transport minister] says it Please come by and taste it at our table. get us our rights if we were loyal. proudly: ‘Accept your inferior status, We hope you’ll love it and make it a staple in your pantry.

But it never did. And now that is or you will go to jail or be expelled.’

For more information or to make a donation visit: being made explicit in the threat to For them, the Triangle plan is a https://playgroundsforpalestine.org • P.O. Box 559 • Yardley, PA 19067 expel us.” ■ sword hanging over our heads.”

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United Nations Report

U.N. Resolutions Keep Israel from Getting Clear Title to Looted Land

By Ian Williams

TAYFUN COSKUN/ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES

for many years an overwhelming majority of member states stuck firmly to international law in the face of American pressure. Even now, most U.N. decisions, resolutions, and declarations favor the Palestinians.

However, enforcing those is a different matter, as history shows. When laws are regularly flouted, they slip into desuetude; frequent recidivism establishes the norm.

In the face of force majeure, the one recourse the helpless have is to be repetitive, to keep reminding everyone what the law is, and that it is being broken. This can make the complainant tiresome to everyone else—especially when those being continuously reminded know it is true but are unwilling or unable to enforce it.

But even with eroding support, the record shows that all is not lost. The Security Council decision against the Indonesian occupation of East Timor was regularly reinforced by the General Assembly at the same time the U.S. wielded its veto against any effective action in the Security Council. Although Portugal and Brazil kept the issue alive in the General Assembly, the relentless The United Nations Headquarters closed to the public “out of an abundance monomaniac pressure from Indonesia eroded the vote of caution” because of the spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) in but, by the end, the abstentions almost had a majority.

New York, March 11.

Although the resolutions would have had a technical legal authority, it would have diluted their moral and political force had it gone to a vote. It took unexpected local events, WHEN GIVEN THE NEWS that notoriously do-nothing President the overthrow of the regime in Indonesia, to restore the rightful Calvin Coolidge had died, the writer Dorothy Parker memorably global order so that the Timorese could have their referendum riposted, “How could they tell?” Palestinians, Yemenis, Syrians and regain their independence. and others in the Middle East could legitimately have a similar reIt is in this context that we need to look at the absence of resoaction to the news that the U.N. in New York was shutting down lutions on Trump’s so-called peace plan. As it stands in the U.N., because of COVID-19. So what? the position is clear and long established: the territories including However, while such a reaction is understandable, it is not very East Jerusalem are occupied and any solution must be based on constructive. Indeed, gratuitously eroding the world body’s standthe 1967 ceasefire line. And, as a corollary, Israel settlement acing in this way is tantamount to singing from Israel’s hymn sheet. tivities in those territories are illegal and the Geneva Conventions In the current geopolitical climate, it is only U.N. resolutions that and international law apply. Of course, this includes the activities keep Israel from getting clear title to its looted land. and judgments of the International Court of Justice. Sadly, to For decades, AIPAC and the Israeli government have pursued a push for a vote on Trump’s plan might have eroded the Palestindual strategy, to delegitimize the U.N.’s authority and its decisions, ian case diplomatically, if there had been enough backsliders. particularly under current Israeli Ambassador Danny Danon, while The shameful—or shameless—recall of the Tunisian ambaspursuing a charm offensive to win over potential allies in the world sador for showing signs of a backbone did not augur well. body. Their target delegations range widely—but most of them But even so, the U.N. provides the ammunition for those with want to stay on the good side of Washington at all costs. Even so, courage. In particular, the referrals to the International Criminal Court and the Human Rights Commission’s list of war crime profiU.N. correspondent Ian Williams is the author of UNtold: the Real teers in the Occupied Territories offer plenty of scope. You would Story of the United Nations in Peace and War (available from Continued on page 65 Middle East Books and More).

MAY 2020

WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

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History’s Shadows

Israel: Never Missing an Opportunity

By Walter L. Hixson

RALPH ALSWANG/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Palestine, but just can’t find a rational partner for peace among the fanatical Arabs. It is thus only with great reluctance that Israel goes about regimenting, repressing and episodically massacring Palestinians.

Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner—laughably described by the president as “an internationally recognized top expert on Middle Eastern affairs”—played the Eban card as he unfolded the stacked “deal.” Dripping with the arrogance of the wealthy white privilege that he personifies, Kushner asserted that the deal provided the Palestinians with an opportunity to achieve “something This White House photo shows President Bill Clinton (c) meeting with Israeli and Palestinian negotiators on excellent.” He added, “If they July 24, 2000 at Camp David, MD. When the meetings collapsed, Clinton and his AIPAC-spawned negotiator screw up this opportunity, Dennis Ross—like Jared Kushner today—heaped all the blame on the Palestinians. (L-r) Abu Ala, Nabil which again, they have a perSha’ath, Clinton, Ross, Elyakim Rubinstein and Oded Eran. fect track record of missing opportunities, if they screw this up, I think they will have a very hard IN THE “DEAL OF THE CENTURY” Israel and the Trump admintime looking the international community in the face, saying they’re istration called on the Palestinians to endorse a plan to hand over victims, saying they have rights.” the heart of their homeland to Zionist settlers. When the Palestinians of course refused, they were branded the enemies of peace.

A HISTORY OF REJECTIONISM This is the oldest play in the Israeli propaganda playbook. It was put into words by the famous Israeli diplomat Abba Eban in 1973 Contrary to the Eban-Kushner canard, the historical record clearly when he declared, “The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss shows that it is Israel that “has never missed an opportunity to an opportunity [for peace].” miss an opportunity” for peace. Throughout the history of the conWell before and ever since that time, it has been a staple of Israeli flict Israel has had regular and realistic opportunities to pursue a and U.S. lobby propaganda that the peace-loving “sole democracy” two-state solution, but the drives of settler colonization invariably of the Middle East always genuinely strives for a just settlement in trumped all such efforts.

In 1948, amid the war that broke out in response to partition, Zionists rejected U.N. mediation—and assassinated the mediator, Count History’s Shadows, a regular column by contributing editor Walter L. Hixson, seeks to place various aspects of Middle East politics and Folke Bernadotte of Sweden. Committed to cementing “facts on the diplomacy in historical perspective. Hixson is the author of Israel’s ground,” Israel refused to pull back to the legally sanctioned partition Armor: The Israel Lobby and the First Generation of the Palestine lines or enable the return or compensate refugees driven out in the Conflict (available from Middle East Books and More), along with Nakba. By the time of the ceasefire in January 1949, the Zionist state several other books and journal articles. He has been a professor of had increased in size from the 55 percent under the U.N. partition history for 36 years, achieving the rank of distinguished professor.

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to 77 percent of the former British mandate of Palestine. Israel still refused to negotiate with its Arab neighbors. “After the sobering experience of military defeat at the hands of the infant Jewish state,” historian Avi Shlaim has pointed out, the leaders of the Arab states were, “prepared to recognize Israel, to negotiate directly with it and even to make peace with it. Each of these rulers had his territorial price for making peace with Israel but none of them refused to talk.”

Rather than talk peace with its neighbors, Israel demonized them as Nazis, repeatedly attacked Jordan and Syria, and in 1956 joined with Britain and France in an invasion of Egypt. Under U.S. pressure the Europeans pulled out but Israel refused to withdraw from Egyptian territory until the Americans acquiesced to Israeli demands for access to the Gulf of Aqaba, which was disputed under international law.

In June 1967 Israel launched the pivotal aggressive war in which it seized the West Bank as well as the Syrian Golan Heights and the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. Israel at this time had a clear opportunity to negotiate a settlement with the Palestinians as well as with Egypt and Jordan (Syria remained obdurate). But “Israel preferred land to peace,” as historian Avi Raz has pointed out, “and thus deliberately squandered a real opportunity for a settlement” in the wake of the June war.

Former Israeli diplomat Shlomo Ben-Ami adds that as a result of “hubris” and “triumphalism” an “opportunity was missed to turn the tactical victory in war into a major strategic victory for Zionism that could have made the Six-Day War into the last major war of the Arab-Israeli conflict and an avenue to a settlement with at least part of the Arab world.”

In subsequent years Israel fended off a peace settlement based on U.N. Resolution 242 (1967) while enabling settlers to flow into the occupied territories. Only after another war with Egypt in 1973 and the determined diplomacy of Anwar Sadat and Jimmy Carter at the first Camp David summit did the Israelis disgorge the Sinai.

Israel refused to negotiate the promised follow-up accord with the Palestinians and MAY 2020

instead tried to destroy the PLO with the first of repeated savage assaults on Lebanon.

The Palestinian intifada, Yasser Arafat’s recognition of Israel in 1988, and international pressures forced the Zionist state back into negotiations. The subsequent Oslo Accords (1993) proved a disaster for the Palestinians. Negotiating from a position of weakness, Arafat consented to deferring to future discussions the critical issues of final borders, return of refugees and status of Jerusalem. The PLO failed even to secure a freeze on Israeli construction of new settlements in the occupied territories.

Not only had Oslo failed to secure Israeli concessions, it created a “double occupation” as the new Palestinian Authority became a repressive police-state determined to stifle protest and dissent on the part of the Palestinians. It also embraced neo-liberal economic policies constructing a façade of economic growth to mask colonial dependency.

Despite the fact that Oslo was a lopsided accord in Israel’s favor, Zionist reactionaries led by Binyamin Netanyahu condemned it as appeasement and vilified Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, leading to his assassination in 1995.

In signing the Oslo Accords the PLO made the historic mistake of relying on the United States to play the role of honest broker and to pressure Israel into ending the occupation. Under the thumb of the Israel lobby and the widespread distortions of the Palestine issue that it fosters, Washington failed to use the leverage that its massive annual military allocations and economic assistance to Israel provided.

When a new round of talks at Camp David collapsed in 2000, President Bill Clinton and his AIPAC-spawned negotiator Dennis Ross—like Jared Kushner today— heaped all the blame on the Palestinians.

In fact, however, Arafat had made a number of concessions, including signing off on Israeli annexation of West Bank settlement blocs and Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem as well as de facto demilitarization of the new Palestinian state.

After the breakdown of the talks, Ariel Sharon sabotaged all diplomacy, orches-

trated the extreme violence of the second intifada, and threw open the doors to West Bank settlers who today number more than 620,000 illegal occupants. The Obama administration issued a tepid call for renewed negotiations but quickly backed off in the face of Netanyahu’s rejectionism and the sweeping influence of AIPAC and its cohorts.

Israel’s persistent opposition to pursuing a Middle East peace flows from the logic of Zionist colonization in which the settlers seek to gain control of as much land as possible with as few Palestinians as possible living on it. Israeli leaders—David BenGurion, Moshe Dayan, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Sharon and Netanyahu among them—often explicitly advanced this very policy in these very terms.

Never missing an opportunity to sabotage negotiations in deference to establishing facts on the ground, Israel remains today what it has always been: a congenitally aggressive settler state determined to privilege land over peace, to commit war crimes and to violate international law with impunity. Despite all its lofty pretensions as leader of the “free world,” the United States continues to serve as the relentless enabler of an oppressive apartheid state.

The “deal of the century” is merely the latest bad act in a long-running historical tragedy. ■

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Special Report

Canadian Activists Challenge Adoption of Problematic Anti-Semitism Definition

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau participates in a Passover seder with members of the Jewish community in North York, Ontario, Canada, April 19, 2019.

ACTIVISTS FOR PALESTINIAN human rights in Canada are mobilizing to halt attempts by local governments across the country to adopt a definition of anti-Semitism that includes criticism of Israel as central to its meaning.

“There is nothing in this definition that offers greater protection or improves safety for Jews from discrimination,” said Harold Shuster, a long-time member of Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) in Winnipeg.

IJV views efforts to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism as a tool that Israel lobby groups are using to suppress support for Palestinian rights.

The group charges that pro-Israel groups such as the Center for

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

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Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) and B’nai Brith Canada are behind efforts to encourage the passage of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism at all levels of Canadian government, as well as by police boards, colleges and universities.

At the prompting of Mark Weitzman of the pro-Israel Simon Wiesenthal Center, in 2016 the IHRA adopted its working definition of anti-Semitism in Bucharest, Romania. The IHRA definition states, “Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

The definition also includes 11 examples of anti-Semitism, four of which refer to criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic, and this of greatest concern to those who support Palestinian rights.

The IHRA definition has been adopted by 17 countries, and the Canadian government adopted the definition as part of its 2019 anti-

WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

MAY 2020

CREATIVE TOUCH IMAGING LTD./NURPHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES

By Candice Bodnaruk

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racism strategy, Shuster explained. Canada joined the IHRA in 2009.

The main text of this definition was adapted from the European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC). The EUMC was established on June 2, 1997 with a view to providing its member states with objective, reliable and comparable data on racism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism. Notably, the lead author of the EUMC definition opposes attempts to use the definition to regulate speech, noting it was only intended for data collection purposes.

Currently, IJV is running a national campaign opposing the adoption of the definition by provincial and civic governments.

IJV says there are already many examples, both in Canada and internationally, of the IHRA definition being used to label support for Palestinian rights and criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic.

“Our fear is that this will send a chill through the Palestinian solidarity community,” Shuster said. He pointed out that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has repeatedly equated anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism by calling the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement an anti-Semitic undertaking.

This January two Canadian municipalities adopted the IHRA definition as public policy: Vaughan, Ontario and Westmount (a suburb of Montreal) in Quebec.

However, the Vancouver, Calgary and Montreal city councils all voted against recent motions to adopt the definition. All three proposals were defeated by activists’ efforts, Shuster said.

“When it came to our attention that the Vancouver city council was introducing a motion to adopt the IHRA definition we quickly mobilized our supporters and launched a massive letter writing campaign,” he explained.

In Montreal, more than 300 letters were sent to Mayor Valerie Plante and city council members asking them to vote against the Jan. 27 motion.

He said people were also encouraged to visit their city councilmembers to express their concerns about the impact the IHRA MAY 2020

definition of anti-Semitism would have on free speech.

Shuster said he is concerned about what will happen when the issue comes to Winnipeg’s city hall, noting Mayor Brian Bowman’s attempts to prevent Palestinian activist Linda Sarsour from speaking at a local event entitled “Sorry Not Sorry: Unapologetically Working For Social Justice” in Winnipeg last year. “He may be easily convinced,” Shuster said.

Recently, IJV has been involved in another, similar campaign, asking Ontario residents to write to their Members of Provincial Parliament (MPPs) asking them to vote “No” on the Combating Anti-Semitism Act (Bill 168).

The bill passed a second reading with a unanimous vote of 55-0 in Ontario’s parliament on Feb. 27. The bill includes adopting the IHRA definition, and was originally proposed by a Conservative MPP. Yet not one New Democrat (NDP) MPP voted against the bill, and in fact, many were absent from the Ontario legislature on voting day, including the party’s leader and anti-racism advocate. The NDP is considered a progressive political party with a strong commitment to human rights.

Furthermore, an NDP MPP who had previously expressed concerns about the impact Bill 168 would have on freedom of expression voted in favor of the bill.

IJV is trying to be proactive by encouraging its members and supporters to meet with mayors and councilmembers in cities across the country to ensure that similar motions “never see the light of day,” Shuster said. The group began their lobbying with civic governments because, “it’s the first place proponents of the definition would go,” he explained.

“Our successes have very clearly pissed off the mainstream pro-Israel institutions and I have no doubt they are doubling their efforts to influence city councils across the country to fear us, and spread lies regarding our motivation and purpose,” he said.

Shuster noted that Palestinian solidarity is on the rise, not only in Canada but also in the United States and around the world, and this fact terrifies both the State of Israel

and its supporters.

“It is particularly concerning because the areas of greatest growth are among younger Jews. And as more and more younger Jews turn their back on Israel not only does direct support for Israel drop but these younger Jews are turning to their own government demanding action,’” Shuster said.

IJV has a dedicated “No IHRA” website and is trying to build an activist base to counter pro-Israel lobbying groups. On IJV’s website people will find the “IJV Working Definition of Anti-Semitism” which clearly states that anti-Semitism is “racism, hostility, prejudice, discrimination or violence, including hate crimes, directed against Jews, as individuals, groups or as a collective—because they are Jews.”

Shuster said many in the pro-Israel community understandably fear the rise of antiSemitism, but have incorrectly placed the blame on Palestinian solidarity activists.

“We have become the face of the new anti-Semitism,” he lamented. ■ (Advertisement)

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Two Views

Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders with Rev. Jesse Jackson address supporters during a campaign rally in downtown Grand Rapids, MI, March 8.

Courting Arab American Voters: The New Normal

T

By Dr. James Zogby

HIRTY-SIX YEARS after Reverend Jesse Jackson first welcomed Arab Americans into his Rainbow Coalition, the 2020 Democratic primary contests held thus far have seen Arab American communities across the country courted by a number of Democratic presidential candidates.

Dr. James Zogby is president of the Washington, DC-based Arab American Institute, founded in 1985. His highly acclaimed book, Arab Voices, is available at Middle East Books and More.

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The community’s involvement has become an accepted fact.

This wasn’t always the case.

The 1980s, when Arab Americans were just beginning to organize as an empowered community, were especially hard. Because some major American Jewish groups saw us as a threat to their dominance in the debate over U.S.-Middle East policy, they spared no effort to isolate us, defame us, and silence our voices. Candidates were pressured to return Arab American contributions, reject Arab American endorsements, and dismiss Arab American staffers. Too many weak-kneed politicians complied.

After facing what we called the “politics of exclusion,” we focused energy and resources to registering and mobilizing Arab American voters. It was our growing numbers and increasingly sophisticated involvement in the political process that ushered in a new era. The

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Arab and Muslim American Voters Endorse Candidates Who Fight For Justice

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community entered the U.S. political mainstream.

In cities like Dearborn, Michigan, long known for being home to the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the U.S., this change meant going from being labeled the “Arab problem” by local officials to registered voters whose support could sway the outcome of elections.

On the national level, it was Jackson who first recognized the benefits of welcoming the Arab American voters into his coalition. Because we were viewed as “the new kids on the block” and because there was still pressure to shun our involvement, the news media reported Jackson’s every encounter with us.

Toward the end of the hard fought 1988 primary, Jackson came to me before the California primary and said, “Your people have made it. When we did Arab American fundraisers in New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, Arizona and Texas, the traveling press would write stories about ’Jackson getting Arab money.’ We just did one in San Diego and they ignored it completely. Working with your community is now normal. That’s a victory.”

That trend of becoming an engaged, organized electorate continued and by the 2000 election, Newsweek magazine noted that Arab American voters, “could prove decisive in key states like Michigan, Ohio and New Jersey.”

Twenty years later, the concentration of Arab Americans in swing states has accounted for a few major candidates paying attention to the community. Several states which will likely be crucial for any presidential candidate to win come November are also home to the largest populations of Arab Americans, such as Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas and Virginia.

This is why this year, we saw major contenders for the Democratic nomination engage in unprecedented and unreported efforts to court the Arab American vote during this year’s primary. Notably, Senator Bernie Sanders’ campaign regularly produced Arabic language posters and social media images. Sanders received the endorsement of prominent Arab Americans from across the country and energized young Arab Americans in support of their “Amo Bernie,” [Uncle Bernie].

Senator Elizabeth Warren did the same. In one of her many highly touted plans, Warren referred to “moments of immense strength and solidarity because of movements that have been powered by Black and Brown Muslims and Arab Americans,” and addressed many issues of mutual concern between the communities. Both of these campaigns had Arab Americans as advisers or in key staff roles. Former Vice President Joe Biden also had a number of Arab Americans in his campaign, especially in Michigan.

Broadly, Arab American voters are quite similar to most Americans in the issues that are most important, though they have heightened concerns for issues such as civil liberties, discrimination and U.S. policy in the Middle East.

President Donald Trump will likely skip courting the Arab American vote, as his policies have largely alienated much of the community—capping off the 16-year drift of Arab Americans from an even split between Democrats and Republicans (with a sizeable MAY 2020

minority of independents) to becoming a reliable Democratic voting bloc.

Although states with influential Arab American populations, like California, Florida, Illinois and Michigan, have already voted, many Arab Americans have not yet had an opportunity to vote in the presidential primaries. States with significant Arab American populations which have yet to vote include Ohio, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

And then we’ll be on to the November general election with Arab Americans working hard to build on the successes of their past hard work which has enabled them to become just another constituency of note in the broad and diverse American electorate. They are now free of the burdens of exclusion and can work to hold candidates and elected officials accountable for not only what they have done in the past, but also what they intend to do in the future. This is the most important step we can take toward becoming a normalized civic force no campaign can ignore, now and into the future.

We Arab Americans and Muslims Are Voting for Bernie. Because He’s Jewish

By Amer Zahr

I’M A PALESTINIAN ARAB AMERICAN. My father is a Palestinian Christian. My mother is a Palestinian Muslim. (They’re hippies, obviously.) Both of my parents were driven from their birthplaces of Yafa and Akka by Israel. After my birth in Jordan, I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, PA. I then attended college, graduate school and law school in Michigan. I then became a comedian. My mom still tells people I’m a lawyer.

I now live in Dearborn, MI, home to the largest concentration of Arabs and Muslims anywhere in the United States. It’s the only place in America where you can eat a delicious shawarma, drink thick coffee, smoke a tasty shisha, and then chant “Free, Free Palestine” with hundreds of your friends, all in the same afternoon. It’s the Arab Disneyland.

I’m also a national surrogate for presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. No, that doesn’t mean I’m having his baby. It means that I campaign on the candidate’s behalf whenever asked to do so. Yes, I am a Palestinian who volunteered countless hours of my time for the old, Jewish guy running for president. And I’m proud as hell about it.

Arab Americans (of all faiths) and Muslim Americans (of all nationalities) overwhelmingly supported Bernie Sanders. In fact, we have stood behind the Vermont senator since 2016.

Four years ago, Arab Americans in Michigan put Bernie Sanders over the top. Reviews of polling stations in Dearborn showed that

Amer Zahr is a Palestinian American comedian, activist, and law professor. He is a national surrogate for Bernie Sanders. Twitter: @AmerZahr. Published in Haaretz on Feb 20, 2020. Reprinted with permission.

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Arab Americans there voted at a ratio of 3:1 for Sanders over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary.

Roughly 400,000 Arabs live throughout Michigan. Sanders won the state by 17,000 votes.

I was a political activist on the ground then, and in this recent campaign too. Back then, and still today, reporters routinely call me with a strikingly similar line of questioning: “Can you explain how Arab Americans are supporting the Jewish candidate for president?”

“Has it been a struggle to convince your community to support Sanders, who is Jewish?”

“Bernie Sanders is Jewish. You know that, right?”

First, yes, we know. We totally know. Second, questions like this are utterly racist. Queries like that assume Mawtini Dabkeh Troupe perform before Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders speaks at a campaign rally at Salina Intermediate School in Dearborn, MI, March 7, 2020. that we Arabs, and Palestinians especially, are somehow genetically “under a banner of justice.” predisposed to anti-Semitism. The premise is simply ridiculous.

This type of rhetoric is simply unheard of in American presidential There are many things we Arabs are predisposed to. Garlic. Barpolitics. And Bernie is able to wade into this area, in large part, begaining. Fighting over the bill. Plastic on the furniture. Disagreeing cause he is Jewish. That has not, however, stopped pro-Israel loudly. Agreeing loudly. Just being loud. Moving our hands while we groups from going after him. A year-old Super PAC named “Demotalk. Yes, even on the phone. But not anti-Semitism. Not that. cratic Majority for Israel” ran ads against Sanders. That political Let me try to explain something. Arab Americans supported action group has, according to reporting by The Intercept, close Bernie Sanders, not in spite of his Jewishness, but because of it. funding, messaging and institutional ties with AIPAC. Sanders, of Sanders has often spoken of how his family’s history of suffering in course, has not backed down. the Holocaust has informed his empathy for that of others, including In 2016, Palestinian and Arab American activists made a bet on —most notably for Arab and Palestinian Americans—the unjust Bernie. We urged his campaign to speak about justice for the Palesplight of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. tinians. We promised our support in return. He did it, and we delivHe routinely outlines how American foreign policy must reflect not ered. And we delivered again. only an emphasis on the welfare of Israelis, but also, just as equally, Moreover, the central themes of his campaign speak directly to on the welfare of Palestinians as well. The deplorable humanitarian our cultural values. His slogans of “We are all in this together,” “Fight situation in Gaza is frequently a focus of his remarks. And he doesn’t for someone you don’t know,” and “Speak up for the weakest among revert to the old line of “It’s all Hamas’ fault.” The responsibility for us” are mantras we’ve been hearing from our Arab moms and dads the Gaza blockade, which has caused immeasurable suffering for for years. His famous hashtag of #NotMeUs is a natural fit for us. the two million residents of that land, lies at the feet of the Israeli Yes, he says these things because he is Jewish, and we hear them government. natively because we are Arabs.

He reiterated these sentiments in February at a townhall meeting As I often say in my performances, Arabs and Jews aren’t that in Nevada, saying, “I feel strongly about it, as someone who is different.

In Arabic, we call Jews awlaad ’amna, our cousins. And Jewish, and knowing how much our people have suffered over the we mean it. We are almost the same. Big noses. Crazy moms. Hairy years, take a look at what’s going on in Gaza right now,” detailing arms (that goes for men and women). The only difference is they the astronomic unemployment and inhumane immobility of Gazans. are chosen by God. And we are chosen by the FBI. In that same event, he also declared, “To be for the Israeli people In this American election cycle, watch for us hairy, crazy Arabs to and to be for peace in the Middle East does not mean that we have vote for the old Jewish guy, even if he is no longer running. It’s just to support right-wing racist governments that currently exist in Israel.” natural. ■ He stated his vision of bringing Palestinians and Israelis together 38

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In Israeli Politics, the Watchword Is: The Jewish Race Before All Else

Special Report

By Odeh Bisharat

MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

ered a traitor.

IF THE MKS of the At this opportunity, it’s “bloc of 62” (Blue and important to examine White, the hawkish Yiswhat’s going on in the rael Beiteinu, dovish “Zionist left” camp. We Labor-Gesher-Meretz see that all three comand the Joint List) had ponents of the Blue and all been of pure Jewish White alliance adopted origin, Benny Gantz Netanyahu’s division. would be busy now diFirst they spoke about viding up the ministerial a government of the portfolios. But it was Jewish majority; later Gantz’s bad luck that they were ashamed, nearly a quarter of his and began speaking bloc were Arabs; the about a government of other bloc may have Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu speaks during a meeting of Israel’s right-wing the Zionist majority. gotten 58 seats, four bloc at the Knesset (parliament) in Jerusalem on March 4, 2020.

Gantz’s slogan, “Israel seats fewer, but the before all else,” was in fact “The Jewish race before all else.” members of that bloc were all kosher Jews.

That’s why it’s not just Netanyahu; this view is an accurate transPrime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu nicely portrayed the racial lation of the ethnic foundation upon which the state was founded. map in Israel using a blue marker: 58 seats for the “Zionist right,” as People talk about the Declaration of Independence as a beacon, he put it, and 47 seats for the “Zionist left.” He simply erased the 15 with its statement “with no distinction by religion, race and gender,” seats won by the Arab Joint List. The entire political system (except but if there was a chance that even 1 percent of the state’s decisions for Labor-Gesher-Meretz) followed along with this racial map. were to be influenced by Arabs, that sentence would be erased, and It’s true that Netanyahu spoke of Zionists, supposedly as believers the proof is the military regime that was imposed on the Arabs during in an ideology, but it was clear that he meant Jews; after all, if he the state’s early years, despite that refreshing sentence. So long as had been talking about Zionists, he would have had to deduct from the Arabs stay locked up in the backyard, slogans about equality the right-wing bloc the 16 seats won by the ultra-Orthodox, who are and brotherhood will flood the public squares. But actually implement anti-Zionist. But in the heat of racial segregation, who’s counting? them? You’ve made David Ben-Gurion laugh.

The question is, why is this ugliness only now being discovered?

Meanwhile, everyone who’s anyone in Israel and even outside of It’s because for as long as all those outside the racial pale were on it keeps telling us what a magician Netanyahu is. What kind of mathe margins, one could tolerate their presence, or even enjoy it. But gician? Saeed, the protagonist in the book The Pessoptimist by when their power started to increase in all areas of life, the right Emile Habibi, would always lose in chess when he played against raised its head—and when they began to exercise their democratic his father, and he thought his father to be a grandmaster. But his power in Jewish society, all the fuses blew. father cooled his enthusiasm when he said, “All my friends beat me, What? Arabs will decide who will be prime minister? In the United my dear son, it’s just that you’re a dunce.”

States, African Americans didn’t only determine who would be president, We would never want to call the prime minister’s rivals insulting one of them became president, and there was no earthquake there. names. So let us say only that it’s not Netanyahu, it’s the whole conIt’s not politically correct nowadays to portray Arabs as an ethnic cept. Once there was a brave leader who tried to shatter it, but the group to be feared. That’s why the campaign against the Joint List three bullets awaiting him when he got off the stage defeated him focused on smearing its members as “supporters of terror.” Only and the whole campaign. them. As if their voters had come from Zimbabwe. But it wasn’t just So what’s the conclusion from this profound op-ed? That the path to the Joint List MKs—anyone who associated with them was considchange is long and full of potholes. Our role here, similar to that of the Odeh Bisharat is an Arab-Israeli columnist for Haaretz and a political “prisoners and the unemployed,” in the poem by Mahmoud Darwish, activist. Copyright © Haaretz Daily Newspaper Ltd. All rights “is to increase the hope.” The hope, my friends, not the illusion. ■ reserved.

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Congress Watch

Measures Following Soleimani’s Assassination Continue to Move Through

By Shirl McArthur Congress

AS REPORTED in the previous issue of the Washington Report many measures were introduced in Congress reacting to the ill-considered and dangerous assassination of Iran’s Quds Force Commander, Maj. Gen. Qassim Soleimani. Of those, on Jan. 9, the House passed H.Con.Res. 83, which was introduced Jan. 8 by Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI). It directed the president “to terminate the use of U.S. Armed Forces to engage in hostilities in or against Iran.”

When passed it had 162 cosponsors, all Democrats. This concurrent resolution, when passed by both houses of Congress, does not go to the president for signature, so it does not have the force of law. It was forwarded to the Senate, where it is held by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC). However, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has said that he doesn’t want to bring to a vote anything that President Donald Trump may not like.

On Jan. 30, the House took up H.R. 550, which, as originally written, honored the U.S. Merchant Mariners of World War II. In that form, it was passed by both the House and the Senate with amendment. So, instead of working with the Senate version, the House Rules Committee amended the bill by stripping out the original language and inserting the text of H.R. 5543, introduced in January by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), “to prohibit the use of funds for unauthorized military force against Iran,” and also the text of H.R. 2456, introduced last May by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) “to repeal the Authorization for Use of Military Force against Iraq Resolution of 2002” [to assure that the previously enacted authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) against Iraq cannot be used to authorize the use of force against Iran]. On Jan. 30, the full House passed the Khanna amendment by a vote of 228-175, with four Republicans voting yes, and the Lee amendment by a vote of 236-166, with 11 Republicans voting yes. It was returned to the Senate, where it rests.

As a war powers measure, it must be taken up by the Senate, but, even if passed by the Senate, it probably will not have enough Republican support to overcome a certain presidential veto.

In January, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) introduced three measures in the Senate, S.J.Res. 63, S.J.Res. 68, and S.J.Res. 69, “to direct the removal of U.S. Armed Forces from hostilities against the Islamic Republic of Iran that have not been authorized by Congress,” finally settling on S.J.Res. 68. After negotiations with Republicans and agreeing to amendments that added three “findings,” including one saying that “the president has a constitutional responsibility to take actions to defend the U.S., its territories, possessions, citizens, ser-

Shirl McArthur is a retired foreign service officer. He lives in the Washington, DC metropolitan area.

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vice members and diplomats from attack,” the measure was passed by the full Senate on Feb. 13 by a vote of 55-45, with eight Republicans voting in favor. It was sent to the House for action, where it was passed on March 11 by a vote of 227-186, with six Republicans voting yes. The White House has said the president intends to veto the measure, and it is unlikely to get enough Republican support to overcome Trump’s veto.

None of the other previously described measures reacting to Soleimani’s killing have received any support, but a few new Iran-related measures were introduced. The two measures introduced by Sen. Edward Markey (D-MA) condemning Trump’s Jan. 4 and 5 threats against Iran’s cultural sites, S.Con.Res. 32, and S.Res. 465, have made no progress. However, a new one, H.Res. 795, “supporting the commitment of the U.S. to lawfully protect international cultural sites,” was introduced Jan. 14 by Reps. Eliot Engel (D-NY) and Tim Ryan (D-OH). Also, on Feb. 13, Sen. Markey, with five cosponsors, introduced S. 3314 “to seek a diplomatic resolution to Iran’s nuclear program.” None of the previous Iran sanctions measures have made any progress but, on Feb. 27, Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) introduced S.Res. 509 to urge the U.N. Security Council to renew the restrictions on Iran that are scheduled to expire. It has 21 cosponsors and was also an agenda item during AIPAC’s March 1-3 annual conference.

S.J. Res. 64, introduced in January by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), makes clear that neither of the two previously enacted AUMFs against Iraq can be interpreted as authorizing the use of force against Iran, and it still has seven cosponsors. S.J.Res. 13, introduced in March 2019 by Sen. Kaine, would repeal the AUMFs against Iraq of 1991 and 2002, still has four cosponsors. But H.J. Res. 66, introduced by Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) in June, which would amend the existing AUMFs to emphasize Congress’ role in introducing U.S. armed forces into hostilities, now has 16 cosponsors. Two new AUMF measures were introduced. On Jan. 30, Rep. John Curtis (RUT) introduced H.Res. 819 expressing the sense of the House that previous AUMFs “do not provide legal justification for war with Iran.”

In addition, on Jan. 24, Rep. Anthony Brown (D-MD) introduced H.J.Res. 83 to amend and improve the War Powers Resolution.

MORE BILLS WOULD PROVIDE GOODIES FOR ISRAEL

On Jan. 9, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) introduced S. 3176 to amend the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 and the U.S.-Israel Partnership Act of 2014 “to make improvements to certain defense and security assistance provisions and to authorize the appropriations of funds to Israel.” As with H.R. 1837, passed by the House last July, this is a grab bag of goodies for Israel. Instead of the provision in H.R. 1837,

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STATUS UPDATES

H.Res. 138 and S.Res. 234, Supporting Two-State Solution.

H.Res. 138, introduced by Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL) in February 2019, which basically endorses Binyamin Netanyahu’s “regional” approach, still has 37 cosponsors, but S.Res. 234, introduced by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) last June, which notes “that Israeli annexation of territory in the West Bank would undermine peace and Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state,” now has 14 cosponsors.

H.R. 3104 and S. 1727, Partnership Fund for Peace. Both measures promote joint economic development and finance ventures between Palestinian companies and those in Israel and the U.S. H.R. 3104, introduced in June by Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY), and S. 1727, introduced in June by Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), now have 47 and seven cosponsors, respectively.

H.R. 2343 and H.Res. 727, Anti-Palestinian Measures. H.R. 2343, introduced in April 2019 by Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), which would require annual reports regarding the educational materials used by the PA or UNRWA for Palestine refugees, still has 18 cosponsors. And, H.Res. 727, introduced in November by Rep. Josh which essentially gives the president authority to provide unlimited military aid to Israel, it includes a provision saying that the president and secretaries of State and Defense shall “prepare and update contingency plans to provide Israel with defense articles and services” necessary for Israel’s defense. It has 34 bipartisan cosponsors.

After passage in the House, H.R. 1837 was sent to the Senate where it still rests with the SFRC. Interestingly, AIPAC’s lobbying agenda did not mention either of these bills; instead urging members to support the $3.8 billion aid to Israel, without conditions.

H.R. 5063, introduced in November 2019

by Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), to authorize “U.S.-Israel unmanned aerial systems cooperation,” still has three cosponsors.

NEW BILL WOULD OPPOSE BDS MOVEMENT

While the previously described bills opposing the BDS movement, S.1, H.R. 336, and S.Res. 120, have made no progress, a new one, H.R. 5595, the “Israel Anti-Boycott” bill, was introduced Jan. 13 by dependable Israel-firster Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY). As with the previous measures, this bill is intended to equate Israel’s colonies with Israel. It has 63 cosponsors, all Republicans, except Tom Suozzi (D-NY).

MAY 2020

Gottheimer (D-NJ), “affirming U.S. support for the State of Israel’s right to defend itself from terrorist attacks,” still has 39 cosponsors.

H.R. 4009, Attacking Free Speech. H.R. 4009, the “Anti-Semitism Awareness” bill, which would implicitly include criticism of Israel in the definition of anti-Semitism, was introduced in July by Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA). It now has 25 cosponsors.

H.R. 1850 and S. 2680, Hamas. These bills would sanction almost anyone who has anything to do with Hamas. H.R. 1850, introduced by Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) in March 2019 and passed by the House in July, is still stuck in the SFRC. But its companion bill in the Senate, S. 2680, introduced in October by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), now has 26 cosponsors.

H.R. 4644 and S. 2934, Libya Stabilization. “To clarify U.S. policy toward Libya, advance a diplomatic solution to the conflict in Libya and support the people of Libya,” H.R. 4644, introduced last October

by Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL), now has 10 cosponsors. Its Senate companion, introduced in November by Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), has three cosponsors.

CONGRESSIONAL LETTERS OPPOSE PRESIDENT’S SO-CALLED “PEACE PLAN” While no Congressional measures have been introduced following Trump’s January release of his so-called “peace plan,” letters strongly objecting to the proposal were sent to Trump from the Senate and the House. On Jan. 28, 12 Democratic Senators, led by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), signed a letter expressing “our profound concern regarding your decision to release a one-sided Israeli-Palestinian plan forged without any Palestinian involvement or support.

Unilateral implementation of this onesided proposal will risk eliminating any remaining prospects for achievement of a peaceful and viable two-state solution.”

On Feb. 6, 107 Democratic Representatives, led by Reps. Andy Levin (D-MI) and Alan Lowenthal (D-CA), signed a letter saying “the ‘ultimate deal’ your team has incubated for the past three years is not a serious or good faith attempt to bring such a durable peace between the parties to this conflict. Of utmost concern, your proposal effectively paves the way for the permanent occupation of the West Bank.”

POSITIVE MEASURES PROGRESSING

On Jan. 28 Sen. Richard Blumenthal (DCT) introduced S. Res. 484 “recognizing January 27, 2020, as the anniversary of the first refugee and Muslim ban, calling on Congress to defund the Migrant Protection Protocols, and urging the president to restore refugee resettlement to historic norms.” It has 16 cosponsors.

In the House, H.Res. 458, introduced last June by Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL), which would reaffirm “the strong partnership between Tunisia and the U.S. and supporting the people of Tunisia in their continued pursuit of democratic reforms,” was ordered to be reported by the Foreign Affairs committee on March 4. It has 30 cosponsors. On Feb. 27, Sens. Chris Murphy (D-CT) and Lindsey Graham (RSC) introduced S.Res. 506 “expressing the sense of the Senate that the U.S. should initiate negotiations to enter into a free trade agreement with the Republic of Tunisia.”

Previously this space reported that H.R. 4862, introduced in October 2019

by Rep. Deutch, with 10 cosponsors, “to reauthorize the U.S.-Jordan Defense Cooperation Act of 2015,” was ordered to be reported to the House on Oct. 30. This still has not happened. ■

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Special Report

Trouble Brewing Beneath Turkey’s Frozen Politics

By Jonathan Gorvett

METIN PALA/ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES

politically-color-blind virus, the polarization and tribalization of recent years has been overshadowed by a new, much less ideological division of those who take social distancing seriously and those who don’t. However, this does stand in sharp contrast to previous months.

Turning the clock back a little, the political struggle between President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s conservative, pro-Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) government and the country’s various opposition groups had seemed to be entering a new phase.

This followed last June’s victory for the main opposition, social democratic Republican People’s Party (CHP) candidate, Ekrem Imamoğlu, in re-run elections for mayor of Istanbul. With earlier victories in Izmir and the capital, Ankara, this gave the CHP control of all three of Turkey’s largest cities.

Since then, too, several other issues, from the performance of the economy to the presence of around four million Syrian refugees, had also been undermining support for the AKP. As the new year began, this gave many a sense of President Erdoğan being trapped in ever-decreasing circles, turning to increasingly violent rhetoric against the CHP, Europe, the West, the Kurds, George Soros and a gallery of other bogey men.

Yet, for several reasons, despite opposition electoral success, domestic politics also remained oddly frozen.

The primary factor behind this is that there are no major new elections due until 2023, removing much of the opposition momentum. At the same time, too, opinion polls have been showing little in the way of a surge in support for the CHP itself—as might be expected following their People show up on their balconies and at windows in Istanbul to applaud and recent success.

Instead, according to Can Selcuki, from the polling comturn on and off their lights, after Turkish Health Minister Fahrettin Koca called for a countrywide campaign to thank healthcare workers for their efforts to curb pany Istanbul Economics Research, much of the electhe spread of coronavirus, March 19. torate “is looking for something new—a new way of politics.” What this might be is still very much in debate, while now, coronavirus, may well shape the kind of Turkey that emerges, WITH EFFORTS to halt the spread of coronavirus placing more and once the political ice melts. more of the country in lock-down, the streets of Turkey’s towns and cities have been emptying out, and traditional Turkish politics has A SEA OF WOES largely gone into enforced hibernation.

Indeed, with many in the country coming together to battle this Internationally, Turkey remains amidst a sea of troubles. These range from the conflicts in Syria and Libya to disputes over maritime gas exploration with Cyprus. They also include Ankara’s decision Jonathan Gorvett is a free-lance writer specializing on European and to buy Russian S-400 anti-aircraft missiles—due for activation in Middle Eastern affairs.

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April—which has alienated Turkey still further from NATO and the U.S. Meanwhile, Erdoğan’s opening the Turkish frontier for migrants and refugees to head north, has further soured relations with Greece and the European Union (EU).

Relations with Russia continue to walk on a knife edge, too. Indeed, in February, President Erdoğan’s calculation that working with Moscow gives Turkey greater leverage against the U.S. and EU led inevitably to his having to accept a grudging apology from President Vladimir Putin, after Russian warplanes killed at least 33 Turkish soldiers in Syria.

Yet, while these issues are all undermining President Erdoğan’s international standing, it is domestic politics that is the principle worry for Turkey’s increasingly autocratic ruler.

First, there is the economy. This had long been a strong point for the AKP, which has presided over a major program of economic growth and public works during its long, 18year rule.

Istanbul has been the main shop window for its success, with a giant new airport constructed, a third bridge across the Bosphorus, and a huge, six-minareted mosque on Camlica Hill, presiding over it all. A metro, new roads, a high speed train to Ankara— all have raised the city’s infrastructure game considerably, while new districts of affordable housing, commercial centers and business districts have given many Istanbul residents new jobs and homes.

Much of it was funded by cheap credit, with Turkey’s state banks in particular lending at interest rates kept artificially low, due to pressure from President Erdoğan to keep the economy moving.

“To finance this, most banks in Turkey resorted to wholesale foreign borrowing,” says Jason Tuvey, senior emerging markets economist with Capital Economics.

“This increased their external debts, which then need rolling over.”

This is a particularly acute problem now because the Turkish currency, the lira, was hit hard in 2018 after President Trump hiked import duties on Turkish goods and threatened sanctions. Since then, the lira has conMAY2020

tinued to struggle, making repaying those dollar and euro loans increasingly arduous.

At the same time, many businesses have also borrowed to expand, then found it hard to meet repayments, pushing them under.

This in turn created growing unemployment, which hit 13.7 percent in the last three months of 2019, before coronavirus emerged in Turkey.

“Just to maintain the current level of employment, Turkey needs to grow at 5 to 5.5 percent a year,” says Selcuki. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), however, calculated the actual growth rate at 2.83 percent in 2018, followed by 0.31 percent in 2019 and had projected a 3.04 percent growth in 2020—again, without coronavirus.

Economics also has a direct impact on another major political and social issue— Turkey’s roughly four million Syrian refugees. Many of these people struggle in low-paying jobs alongside their poor Turkish neighbors. As the economy deteriorated, the initial welcome these refugees received has soured greatly and Erdoğan’s vociferous support for their cause in the early years of the Syrian conflict, is now working against voter support of the AKP. “The refugee issue will become more important as unemployment increases,” says Ozgür Ünlühisarcikli, director of the German Marshall Fund office in Ankara.

“The refugees will become more visible as people lose jobs.”

Also more visible, will be the continued financing of the giant investment projects, which Erdoğan has backed. Coronavirus makes this even more so, as the third bridge in Istanbul, or the grand new city airport, stand deserted while people feel the consequences of the pandemic.

Another potentially contentious project in Erdoğan’s scheme, is a proposed, 45 km (28 mile), $11.6 billion canal bypassing Istanbul. The first round of tendering for the project was carried out last month by surgical mask-wearing officials, while at the same time, “there are millions of people who are about to lose their lives [due to the coronavirus outbreak], or cannot earn an income as their businesses have been

closed,” tweeted Mayor Imamoğlu, describing the decision to hold the tendering as “mind boggling.”

NEW DIRECTIONS?

Many Turks are therefore looking for an alternative to the AKP. Yet, for many conservatives, the main opposition CHP represents an old, secular Turkish political elite that they have long rejected. Persuading these voters to cross over is not, however, impossible.

“The CHP mayors have managed to reach across the aisle,” says Selcuki. The problem is the party leadership. Even the headquarters of the party is “too old and from another era,” Selcuki adds. “They don’t have any strategy to change the party using the mayors.” There may be a ceiling of support for the secular, social democratic left that is still too low to be capable of forming a majority. Thus, the great interest in signs of discontent from among some of Erdoğan’s own former supporters and government colleagues.

In December 2019, former prime minister and foreign minister Ahmet Davutoğlu— who resigned from the AKP in 2016— launched the new, Future Party (GP). In March this year, the former economy minister and deputy prime minister, Ali Babacan, also launched his new grouping, the Democracy and Progress Party (DEVA).

While so far neither has been able to pull significant support away from the AKP, in Turkey, “Breakaway parties are rarely successful,” says Ünlühisarcikli. But, “they don’t need a lot of votes to make a problem for Erdoğan,” he adds.

The AKP already lacks a majority in parliament and relies on coalition partners, while a presidential candidate needs 50 percent +1 of the total vote to win. A shift of just a few percent might thus be decisive in both.

Yet, with the next elections not scheduled for another three years, Erdoğan—ever the wily politician—may well just wait it out, starving the new parties of electoral chances. He may, however, also recall that his own political career was launched when he too was elected mayor of Istanbul, back in those far off days of 1994. ■

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Muhyiddin Yassin (second from left, front) leaves his house for his swearing-in ceremony as Malaysia’s new prime minister in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, March 1, 2020.

FOLLOWING THREE WEEKS of maneuvering, closed-door negotiations and political defections, Muhyiddin Yassin was sworn in as prime minister on March 1, 2020 and set about assembling a new government.

Out went the remaining parties of the reformist Pakatan Harapan (Alliance of Hope—PH) that had won the general election in May 2018, and in came a new coalition, the Perikatan Nasional (National Alliance) that included United Malays National Organization (UMNO), the ruling party before 2018, and the Islamist Party of Malaysia (PAS). The change of government was enabled by the defection of the 26 MPs of Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed’s party, Malaysian United Indigenous Party (PPBM), led by its president, Muhyiddin, as well as of 11 MPs of deputy premier Anwar Ibrahim’s

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

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People’s Justice Party (PKR), led by party vice president, Azmin Ali. Muhyiddin joined UMNO in 1971 and rose to hold a series of ministerial posts until he fell out with then Prime Minister Najib Razak over his handling of the 1Malaysian Development Berhad (1MBD) affair in 2015, as first reported by British journalist Clare RewcastleBrown in 2015 on her website Sarawak Report and later picked up by the Wall Street Journal. Najib was subsequently accused of siphoning approximately $730 million into his personal bank account and other close associates were accused of benefitting from what was estimated by the U.S. Justice Department to be $4.2 billion of the “missing” 1MBD money.

The PH government came to office in 2018 pledging to carry out reforms, including the fight against the corruption that had reached spectacular proportions under the previous Razak-led UMNO administration. It abolished an unpopular goods and services tax and cancelled or renegotiated a number of expensive

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Without a Single Vote, Malaysia Changes Government

By John Gee

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development projects involving foreign firms. Parliament voted to reduce the voting age to 18, despite old guard resistance, and repealed a “fake news” law that had been used to limit freedom of speech. Legal actions were pursued against individuals associated with the previous government who were accused of corruption.

However, at ground level, many felt that the PH government had not produced the kind of economic benefits for which they’d hoped, and some of its proposed measures unwittingly played into the hands of its opponents, as they appeared to undermine the existing status of the Malay majority.

In 2018, opposition parties rallied Malay Muslim support against the government’s decision to ratify the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, based on fears that this would outlaw measures weighted in favor of Malays in education, economic life and state employment. The government backed down. In August 2019, the government was obliged to change course after proposing to introduce the teaching of Malay-Arabic calligraphy in primary schools. The government was caught between Malay groups that wanted it to be obligatory for all schools and virtually unanimous opposition from the minority communities. Eventually, it was decided that it should be optional in Chinese and Indian primary schools. In both cases, the government parties confirmed their distrust of Malays in their negative opinions while undermining the confidence of their Chinese and Indian supporters.

This provided an opening for the opposition. Former rivals UMNO and PAS entered into an alliance in 2019 that was formalized in a pact in September last year. While they promised to protect minority rights, they projected their partnership as one in defense of Islam and the rights of Malays.

Their criticisms of the government played on the role of the mainly Chinese Democratic Action Party, implying that it was the dominant power in the PH government.

Dissent within the PH was crystallized around the handover of the premiership MAY 2020

from Mahathir to Anwar Ibrahim, which had been agreed prior to the PH election victory but, crucially, with no fixed date. Not only did the PPBM oppose a handover to Anwar—seen as liberal and not a defender of the Malays’ existing status—but so did a faction of his own party, the PKR, led by Azmin Ali. The PH was only able to come to power in 2018 by not only winning overwhelming Chinese and Indian support, but also 25 percent of the Malay vote. When, in the governmental crisis of FebruaryMarch, the PPBM and Azmin Ali’s PKR faction allied themselves with UMNO and PAS, they peeled away a decisive segment of that support.

Although the new government takes office with a parliamentary majority, its basis remains shaky. Its diverse elements are likely to pull in different directions, as they disagree about key issues, particularly the long-term role of Islam in Malaysia. UMNO considers itself to be under-represented in the new government and would like the legal proceedings against leading members for corruption to disappear. Muhyiddin insisted that he would not accept as members of his government politicians who have corruption charges hanging over them.

When Muhyiddin rejected PH calls for the immediate reconvening of parliament to allow a vote of confidence in the new government, deferring it until May, it was widely seen as a move that would allow him time to detach further defectors from the PH and thus weaken it. This delay would also strengthen his position vis-a-vis his allies in government, if those who jumped ship could be persuaded to throw in their lot with the PPBM rather than UMNO or PAS. The PH has its own problems as it returns to opposition, but some may have been simplified. Those who joined it opportunistically when it was in the ascendant and then acted as a brake upon reform have left it again. Mahathir, having miscalculated his own support and brought to a head the governmental crisis in February, may now finally be sidelined in Malaysian politics. The PH may be able to renew its reformist commitment, but in order to give it practical effect, it will have to find ways of building a new base of support among

Malays—otherwise, it may descend into bickering, division and irrelevance.

Foreign observers will look for any signs of a change in Malaysia’s relations with the outside world. Middle Eastern states may have a particular interest in this. Under the PH government, Malaysia declined to join a Saudi-led initiative to foster military cooperation between Sunni-majority states directed against alleged Iranian influence.

In December 2019, Malaysia hosted a four-day international meeting that Mahathir said was an attempt to understand why Islam, Muslims and Muslim countries were “in a state of crisis, helpless and unworthy of this great religion.” It was widely seen as an initiative that rejected Saudi leadership of the Muslim states: President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, President Hassan Rouhani of Iran and Emir Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani of Qatar took part, but no leaders of similar rank came from other Muslim states. Mahathir had previously spoken up forcefully about the treatment of Uyghur Muslims in China, on Kashmir and Palestinian statehood—all issues on which the majority of Muslim states have preferred to say little and do less.

With Mahathir out of the way and Anwar in opposition, the new government may be expected to be less of a dissident voice among the Muslim states. ■

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Special Report

Art Exhibitions Engage in Palestinian “Existential Contest”

By Eleni Zaras

to Palestinian existence, cultural heritage and global solidarity.

MEI’S “KEYWORD PALESTINE: II”

STAFF PHOTO E. ZARAS

On March 2, MEI opened their third exhibition, “Keyword: Palestine II.” Hundreds of pieces of art cover the walls of the main gallery space as well as the halls in the lower classroom level. The works up for auction were all donated by the artists; about half of whom are Palestinian and the other

by Arab artists of differing nationalities. While the show naturally gravitates around Palestine, the donated works vary visually and thematically, in contrast to MEI’s previous exhibitions, which curated works around more specific The Middle East Institute’s exhibit, “Keyword: Palestine II,” doubled as a silent auction in support of the guiding questions.

Institute for Palestine Studies.

The result is somewhat overwhelming, as the works on the upper level sometimes com“THE VERY EXISTENCE of Palestine and its people is at stake pete for wall space and attention. Yet they are still carefully curated, today,” Columbia University Professor Rashid Khalidi declares in the aesthetically rather than thematically, and the juxtapositions of catalogue to “Keyword Palestine: II,” the Middle East Institute’s latest colors, compositions and textures are symbiotic. exhibition.

Most works are wall hangings, whether paintings, drawings, phoIndeed, under the current U.S. administration, Palestine has been tographs, prints or mixed media, but a few sculptures dot the upper increasingly undermined, excluded and discredited through disinlevel, as well. Larger pieces are reserved for the main gallery, such formation, accusatory rhetoric and aggressive policies. as Khaled Jarrar’s “Good at Shooting, Bad at Painting,” the title of Two art exhibitions in Washington, DC this spring engage in this which completely reframes the abstract, splatter-painted piece “existential contest,” as Prof. Khalidi dubs it. MEI’s exhibition doubles reminiscent of Jackson Pollock. as a silent auction in support of the Khalidi-led Institute for Palestine Big-name artists are subtly slipped into the mix, such that the Studies (IPS), and the Museum of the Palestinian People’s newest untrained eye might not be able to distinguish the youngest artist exhibition, which centers on the art of five Palestinian women living from the most established. Artworks are labeled, but the labels are in diaspora. While the two differ greatly in size and scope, both testify sometimes reserved to the edges of the gallery walls, as opposed Eleni Zaras is the assistant bookstore director at Middle East Books to directly below or adjacent to the work. Removing this distraction and More. She has a BA in the History of Art from the University of of names and labels gives us the chance to more leisurely and obMichigan and a Masters in History from the Universite Paris Diderot. jectively decide which pieces resonate with us more than others.

Her studies and research have focused on the historiography of Islamic art and late-Ottoman history.

Yet, there are surely eager buyers clambering for pieces by the 46

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likes of Nabil Anani, Tayseer Barakat, Samia Halaby, Mona Hatoum and the many other world-renowned artists on display.

Subject matters range from the overtly political, such as the wall hanging “Carpet Made of Barbed Wire” by Abdul Rahman Katanani, to quiet landscapes, like Georges Hanna Sabbagh’s untitled watercolor, and the abstract and theoretical pieces, such as Amer Shomali’s spools of thread for “Broken Weddings in Lifta.”

However, uniting them all are two overarching goals. The first, as Khalidi articulates, is “to showcase that Palestine [and] Palestinians produce art and culture; to show a side that people aren’t aware of,” and the second, “to show that everything we’re told about Palestinian women’s art, including Malak Mattar's “Woman with Bird” (r), Dana Barqawi’s mixed Arabs not caring about Palestine isn’t media photographs (l) and Lux Eterna's film “Displacing Colonisation,” at the Museum of the true: People’s hearts are still with Palestinian People gallery.

Palestine.” curator Nancy Nesvet selected these five women from the diaspora As an auction, this show differs from MEI’s two previous exhibiwho “carry traditions with them.” Opening just in time for International tions and signals the broadening of IPS’ vision.

Women’s Day (March 8), Nesvet hopes that the exhibition adIPS strives to “renew and rejuvenate” the institute with “arts and dresses, first and foremost, the “journey of heritage of the Palestiniculture,” explains Khalidi. Notably, IPS-Ramallah hosted a talk in ans into diaspora.” The artworks evoke aspects of traditional Pales2019 by Samia Halaby and IPS envisions increasing publicatinian arts and culture as well as their existential threats. tions—in English and Arabic—on arts and culture. This WashingManal Deeb layers calligraphy with expressive portraits sketched ton, DC exhibition was also notably preceded by a similar event in and rendered realistically in paint. Superimposed, the faces of Beirut in 2018, which featured many of the same artists, but this women or image of a child hauntingly rupture text, patterns, and the second edition of “Keyword: Palestine” drew greater participation surface of the canvas, which itself is painted in streaks or clouds of with pieces by an additional 60 new artists. brown, black, grey and gold.

“ART OF PALESTINIAN WOMEN” AT THE MUSEUM OF By contrast, Malak Mattar’s paintings are more sculptural, abstract THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE portraits of women, reminiscent of Palestinian artist Nabil Anani, and have been compared to Picasso. Using bold colors and carefully In the galleries of the Museum of the Palestinian People (MPP), just constructed body language, like a tilt of an eyebrow or the cross of north of MEI and next door to Middle East Books & More, visitors an arm, the women look out and demand the viewer’s attention. are welcomed by a video featuring wind-swept sand dunes, where Inspired by traditional fashion, Samar Hussaini paints with blended five figures cloaked in dark billowing garments float, stagger and colors and abstracted tatreez (embroidery) patterns. She then coldance toward nothingness. The winds are high, rippling the fabric lages activism articles written by her father onto the canvas, and fiand sand, and heighten the drama of the slow, deliberate movenally sculpts these layered canvases into thobes. ments of the bodies in the empty landscape. Reflecting on time and In the final section, the photographs by Lux Eterna and Dana Barexistence, this black and white video, “Dune” by Australian-Palesqawi, hanging adjacent to each other, delve more politically into the tinian artist Lux Eterna, sets the tone for the show “Art of Palestinian existential threats facing Palestinian culture. Lux Eterna’s series of Women.” Opened on March 6, the exhibition features art by five eight portraits of women from different indigenous cultures addresses women of Palestinian descent living across the globe. the reality of endangered homelands and hijacked agency. Her porThe small gallery dedicated roughly a third of its space to this extraits specifically challenge the colonial gaze that dominated photohibition of video, photography, painting and mixed media works. The graphic representation of indigenous women in the 19th-20th cenartists include Malak Mattar in Gaza, where her family was displaced turies. The settings and attire were chosen by the subjects after the Nakba, Dana Barqawi in Jordan, Lux Eterna in Australia, themselves, restoring agency to their own representation. and Manal Deeb and Samar Hussaini in the United States.

Of the more than 100 artists who responded to an open call, Continued on page 50 MAY 2020

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Special Report

New York City’s MoMA PS1 “Gulf Wars” Exhibition Caught in Crossfire

By Eleni Zaras

THE EXHIBITION, “Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 19912011,” at MoMA PS1 (MoMA’s Long Island City annex), curated by Peter Eleey and Ruba Katrib, sparked controversy for more than its sensitive subject matter. Concerns about curatorial responsibilities and damning ties between the museum’s trustees and private prisons or defense contractors, in addition to spotlighting two decades of horrific American involvement in Iraq and the Gulf region, continually made headlines throughout the exhibition’s duration.

From Nov. 3, 2019 until March 1, 2020, this monumental artistic reckoning of American involvement in Iraq filled the MoMA annex for contemporary and experimental art, housed in an abandoned public school building.

The approximately 300 works included hours of video footage and film, and an incredible range of media. Arranged roughly chronologically, the works responded to and reflected on the different stages

Eleni Zaras is the assistant bookstore director at Middle East Books and More. She has a BA in the History of Art from the University of Michigan and a Masters degree in History from the Universite Paris Diderot. Her studies and research have focused on the historiography of Islamic art and late-Ottoman history.

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STAFF PHOTO E. ZARAS

Dia al-Azzawi (Iraqi and British) “Victim's Portrait,” 1991.

and aspects of the Gulf Wars (1991-2011), starting with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1991, carrying on through the period of the U.S. embargo against Iraq, and culminating in America’s invasion and occupation of Iraq through 2011. News outlets from the New York Times, the New Yorker and the Economist, to more specialized art sources like Hyperallergic, ArtNews and Frieze, covered the exhibition as controversies erupted and critics grappled with poignant artworks and unresolved messages.

The exhibition was applauded for boldly addressing such a politically and emotionally charged topic. The New York Times deemed it “a powerful view of the cultural impact of the Persian Gulf and Iraq wars with which American art institutions too rarely engage.” They also gave it due credit for bringing together, in an “unprecedented encounter,” artists from both sides. Iraqis and Kuwaitis, including Palestinians in Kuwait, were exhibited sideby-side with American and Western European artists. Of the approximately 82 artists, about 36 were from Iraq and the Gulf region.

Nevertheless, the exhibition was embroiled in controversy even before it opened its doors to the public. First, although many Iraqi artists were invited and expected in New York for the opening, they were reportedly denied visas or blocked from the U.S. as a result of Trump’s travel ban.

On Oct. 30, only a few days prior to it’s opening, artist Phil Collins pulled his artwork from the show on account of MoMA trustee and CEO of BlackRock, Larry Fink, and his company’s multi-billion dollar shares in defense contractors and private prison companies.

By January 2020, 37 additional participating artists joined the ensuing battle and signed an open letter to the museum’s directors, Glenn Lowry and Kate Fowle, condemning Larry Fink as well as the chairman of MoMA’s board of trustees, Leon Black, for his investments in Constellis Group, the private defense contractor formerly known as Blackwater. Blackwater, the letter declares, is “notorious for its role in the 2007 Nisour Square Massacre [during the War in Iraq], when Blackwater guards killed at least 14 Iraqi civilians and injured many more.” The dark irony of Black’s link to Blackwater during a show addressing these exact atrocities caught the attention MAY 2020

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of veterans, as well. By February, American veterans of the Gulf Wars responded, writing their own open letter signed by 45 veterans, criticizing MoMA board members’ “toxic philanthropy.”

“As veterans of the Gulf War and the ‘Global War on Terror,’” the letter proclaimed, “as well as working artists ourselves, this issue is very important to us.”

MoMA PS1’s lack of adequate response raised eyebrows, as they even ignored artist Michael Rakowitz’s requests to pause his video work in the show. Ultimately, Rakowitz bypassed management and made the trip to New York to do it himself. The museum had the final word, though, and resumed his video.

In a final act of protest, contributing artist Ali Yass organized a group of ac- Rachel Khedoori (Australian) Untitled (Iraq Book Project), 2008-2010. tivists from the MoMA Divest movement itself,” he proclaims, citing the dafatir [notebooks] handmade by to tear his works from the wall on March 1, 2020, the final day of the artists like Hanaa Malallah, which were used as multimedia, visual exhibition. However, the plan was reportedly leaked, and the works journals. were removed before the protesters arrived.

Likewise, Melissa Gronlund writes for Frieze, “To choose two exInside the museum walls, the actual content and curation of the tremes: while Nuha Al-Radi was making sculptures out of stone and show also drew its own criticism and praise. By using the military discarded car parts in Baghdad following the first invasion, someone terminology, “theater of operations,” which refers to active combat in Los Angeles was coding a homemade game called ‘Bomb Iraq’ zones, the exhibition also emphasized how wars become spectacles on an old computer that the artist Cory Arcangel found years later in a “theater” of western media. in a charity shop. He presents it as a found object in ‘Bomb Iraq’ Cable news became more widespread in the 1990s and the cu(2005), an installation on an Apple IIGS computer that visitors are rator's emphasis on this fear and warmongering media also underinvited to play.” scored the stark contrast between how the wars were experienced MoMA PS1’s decision and ability to gather these testimonies of through screens, by Americans and Europeans, and on the ground the war into one show is itself a feat to be applauded. However, the

by Iraqis. The staticky screens flipping through channels at unpreenormous three-level exhibit demanded time and stamina, forcing dictable intervals are dizzying; the cold detachment of game-like visitors to pick and choose which artworks to prioritize. Furthermore, simulations, unsettling; and the left-wing footage hoping to debunk while it provided a frank acknowledgment of events, candid and awepolitical talking heads, never-ending. inspiring responses, proof of creativity in the most stifling times, and However, the more tactile, quieter works left a deeper impression. accounts of horrific torture and death, the taxing production offered For instance, a small room dedicated entirely to Michael Rakowitz’s nothing by way of conclusion. installation didactically traces the history of Iraqi dates and a drawnAs we’re inundated with images of death and suffering in the out attempt to export them during the embargo; the bound and media today, we’ve arguably grown accustomed to feeling ashamed painted book fragments by Himat M. Ali commemorate the bombed and sympathetic, but left with a sense of powerlessness, unsure of Al-Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad, home to many booksellers; clever how to effect change. Susan Sontag, in her 2003 book, Regarding and introspective paintings reveal the burgeoning talent and globthe Pain of Others, writes, “For a long time some people believed ally-connected Iraqi art scene before American sanctions in the that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people would fi1990s; Rachel Khedoori’s Untitled (Iraq Book Project) room of thounally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war.” Some, though sands of bound articles in small print solidifies the outpouring of news not all, of the artworks and curatorial decisions fell into that category. written on the wars. These offered more to dissect and ponder than As Tim Arango, the New York Times’ bureau chief in Baghdad some of the flashy or grotesque media-based works. from 2010 to 2017, aptly muses: “I don’t know if people are going to Critics jumped on these discrepancies, including New Yorker critic want to come to see this show. But if they do, I wonder if they will Peter Schjeldahl, who wrote, “Most informative are scrappy works think about their own responsibility for what happened. Because as

by Iraqi artists whose struggle to make art becomes a subject in MAY 2020

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Thuraya al-Baqsami (Kuwait) “The Last Shot,” 1991 (l) and “The Hour of Martyrdom” (r). an American seeing this show I was constantly thinking: What would contemporary Iraqi art look like today if it weren’t for America’s wars?”

I left the exhibit conflicted: grateful for institutional recognition of the history, of the myriad atrocities committed, and of the countless resilient artists who produced work through it all and who hold us accountable; but simultaneously unsatisfied and disgusted with humanity, including myself—guilty and complicit by my voyeurism and inaction.

On my way out, I caught sight of a permanent installation by James Turrell. “Meeting,” one of Turrell’s renowned Skyspace installations, is sequestered in its own cool, wooden pew-lined room. The ceiling’s square cut-out opened to the pale blue sky. Though not part of “Theater of Operations,” Turrell surely anticipated the necessity of such a space for shaken visitors like me. Perhaps this was the only way to conclude—with a moment of silence and a view toward the sky. ■

ments in Palestine. By enhancing these photographs with color, gold leaf, or embroidered patterns, she “use[s] beauty as a tool to attract the viewer,” she explains. Yet Barqawi (Advertisement)

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is sure to point out the underlying “political agenda to challenge the erasure” of Palestinian peoples’ history and cultural heritage.

This exhibit brings together works that aim to overturn how we view images of, and how we perceive, Palestinians. It makes clear that these artists, along with many others, are guiding the reorientation of conversations and perceptions about Palestinian women, history, arts and culture.

“A CULTURAL ISSUE”

Given the Trump administration’s unbridled support of Israel, to the detriment of Palestinian people and territory, celebrations of the existence of Palestinian people and heritage, as seen in these two exhibitions, become increasingly relevant and urgent, especially in Washington, DC. As Khalidi said in his remarks on the opening night of the MEI exhibition, “the Palestine issue and people are not simply a political cause, issue, or something to be dealt with.

It’s not just a Palestinian issue, but an Arab issue; [it’s] not just a political issue, but a cultural issue.” ■

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Art Exhibitions Engage

Dana Barqawi also challenges colonial optics of photography by manipulating early 20th century photographs of Palestinians, available through the digital archives of the Library of Congress. The photographs, predating the nakba, were deliberately chosen to discredit the widely cited phrase, “A land without a people for a people without a land,” that served to justify Zionist colonial settle-

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MUSIC & ARTS On Jan. 28, one month before the tenuous U.S.-Taliban peace treaty was signed, the co-founders of Afghanistan’s ArtLords, Omaid Sharifi and Kabir Mokamel, appeared at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) in Washington, DC to share their art, vision and stories of their work as “artivists”— artists and activists—in Afghanistan.

Easels displaying paintings by ArtLords lined the bright, open hall leading to the conference room where every seat was filled. ArtLords, though, are known not for small-scale easel paintings, but for the mural projects they orchestrate and paint on blast walls across Afghanistan.

Since their founding in 2014, ArtLords has launched a wide array of initiatives to promote visual and performing arts, art therapy, women’s empowerment, and most recently, bridging communities across the country through dialogue in their “Let’s Talk Afghanistan” project. The most renowned and visible of these efforts are their more than 1,700 murals across 21 provinces in Afghanistan. While they have a dedicated team of artists and volunteers, their projects are all collaborative efforts, inviting passersby to partake. “People want to be engaged, be part of it, take ownership,” explained Sharifi.

Their murals transform the blast walls that line, divide and attempt to dominate the streets in Kabul and across the country.

Transformed by art, these domineering testaments to decades of war in Afghanistan become in effect “visual representation[s] of the communities’ desire to move from war towards peace,” one of the founding goals of the organization, according to its website. “Creating a relationship between people and art, by bringing art to the people, allows for a much-needed psychological shift that opens up people’s minds to new prospects.”

The visual messages are direct: a warlord wielding a pencil in place of a gun, a delicately perched butterfly on the tip of a tank’s barrel, portraits commemorating vic52

Afghanistan’s ArtLords use art to promote a peaceful future for their beleaguered country. tims of terrorist attacks, or simply a massive set of eyes that stare down the corruption “not hidden from our gaze,” the cofounders explain.

Above all else, they project a message of unity, and hope to “become a voice of millions that don’t have a voice [to say] we don’t want corruption, we don’t want war.”

Despite the Taliban’s extreme attacks on arts and cultural sites, the group has mostly tolerated ArtLords. “We grew up where they grew up,” Sharifi explained matter-of-factly.

“The only difference is that they got a gun, and we got a brush or a pen.”

Peace, though, is a nebulous concept to many Afghans who have only lived through times of war, and many are wary of the peace plan signed in Doha between the U.S. and the Taliban on Feb. 29. “What is peace?” Sharifi asked rhetorically, “[The people] know they’re fed up with war, but also want to know, what is the price of peace?”

“My generation has lived an interesting roller-coaster life! And now on the eve of the deal signing in Doha, I’m excited, hopeful, fearful, tired and confused all at the same time,” he said in a later tweet. “But the urge to experience “peace” is stronger.” But on March 5, a post to their website articulates their concerns and skepticism, asking, “Are we really listening to the right people?”

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Extensive media coverage has brought recognition and relative fame to ArtLords, and Sharifi is currently a fellow with the Atlantic Council, Asia Society and American Foreign Relations Council/Rumsfeld Fellowship. They have earned themselves a prominent platform on an international stage and events such as this one at USIP, sponsored by the State Department, also indicate diplomatic recognition. But is it enough to have their voices heard?

Regardless, they continue their public art programs and are committed to engaging in the peace process at home and abroad, and hope they will be heard. The USIP crowd’s warm reception was uplifting, as they lingered after the panel to chat, view the paintings, listen to the rubab (a lute-like instrument) of Hamidullah Natiq and participate in a collaborative painting.

Afghanistan’s ambassador to the U.S. Roya Rahmani, too, reinforced an optimistic tone, assuring, “Artists, with their abilities to imagine worlds beyond our own and to find beauty even in times of darkness, are natural leaders on our journey toward peace.”

—Eleni Zaras

Voices from the Holy Land Film Series Provokes Conversation

Most of the sixth season of Voices from the Holy Land Film Series was screened

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before the coronavirus shut down public gatherings. More than 40 religious and civic organizations support this film series, which seeks to offer perspectives not found in mainstream media. The series presents compelling documentary films by Israeli, Palestinian, American and European filmmakers and aims to start conversations. The discussions after the screenings in Virginia, Maryland and DC venues are a good opportunity to gain insights from the audience and moderator.

On Feb. 21, Voices From the Holy Land screened “West of the Jordan River” at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church in Bethesda, MD. Film director and writer Amos Gitai intersperses 1990s footage of his interviews with Former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin with his contemporary interviews with everyday Israelis and Palestinians living under occupation.

American University Professor Barbara Wien moderated the lively Q&A following the documentary, as the audience described their reactions to Gitai’s film.

Everyone agreed that their favorite scene was watching Haartez columnist Gideon Levy gently interviewing a father and uncle mourning a beloved young boy, a good student, shot to death by Israeli snipers. The audience knows that if Levy doesn’t tell the child’s story no one outside his village will ever come to know him. Meanwhile Gitai gets into an argument with those appalled mourners over who is to really to blame for Rabin’s death (spoiler alert, according to Gitai, it wasn’t a Jewish Israeli student but Palestinian terrorists who had inflamed the murderer into pulling the trigger). Somehow, the mourners politely listen and don’t give the director the boot.

Another toxic moment comes when Gitai interviews a little boy who claims to want to be a martyr. Gitai provides no context, nor does he attempt to make sense of the psychology behind such hopelessness. He interviews other Palestinians trudging through their everyday MAY 2020

lives while he sits comfortably in the backseat of his car. His interviews with Jewish settler moms surrounded by cute children sitting outside their illegal houses become quite jolly chats.

Luckily Gitai also captures the hopeful relationships forged by Israeli and Palestinian bereaved members of the Parents Circle. He introduces us to Palestinian women learning to take photos to document occupation. Gitai’s “West of the Jordan River” helps viewers engage in exactly the conversations sought by Voices from the Holy Land.

This viewer also watched the gripping documentary, “The Truth: Lost at Sea,” screened on March 1 at the Washington National Cathedral. Sitting as far away from others as possible, this audience member soon forgot about the coronavirus and became immersed in the film.

Canadian Palestinian filmmaker Rifat Audeh was aboard the Freedom Flotilla,

the 2010 convoy of humanitarian ships carrying activists from 35 countries, that tried to break Israel’s merciless blockade on Gaza.

Audeh’s ship was brutally attacked by the Israeli navy in international waters and then Israeli propagandists went to work, justifying the raid as “self-defense,” and vilifying the ten dead and dozens wounded— all unarmed humanitarian activists.

Audeh and other survivors reveal the truth in interviews with flotilla members before the attack, damning film taken during the horrific commando raid, and sensitive individual portraits of the murdered activists. Audeh’s award-winning film reveals what really happened and how it was spun in the mainstream.

Mubarak Awad, founder of Nonviolence International, an organization aimed at promoting peace education and nonviolent action, started the Q&A by reminding the audience that Israel learned it could get away with murder after attacking the USS Liberty and killing 34 U.S. crew members on June 8, 1967.

Stay tuned for next year’s Voices from the Holy Land Film Series (www.voicesfromtheholyland.org), and watch this year’s picks from home.

—Delinda C. Hanley

DIPLOMATIC DOINGS Iraqi Ambassador on U.S.-Iran Hostilities, Iraq’s Future

On Feb. 26, the National Council on U.S.Arab Relations hosted the Iraqi ambassador to the U.S., Dr. Fareed Yasseen, for remarks at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, DC. David Des Roches of the National Defense University’s Near East South Asia Center for Security Studies also participated in the discussion.

Commenting on the recent hostilities between the U.S. and Iran in Iraq, Amb. Yasseen remarked that Iraq has to maintain

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good relations with both the U.S. and Iran, which is difficult when there is significant tension between the two countries. Many Iraqis have sympathies toward Iran, given the pivotal role the Tehran-backed Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) played in the fight against ISIS. Hostilities between the U.S. and Iran, he noted, have complicated the fight against ISIS, which is not over. Iraq needs all of its allies and the U.S.-led coalition in the fight, he said, adding that Iraq is “fighting on behalf of the whole international community” against ISIS. Turning to the recent American assassination of Iranian General Qassim Soleimani in Iraq, Amb. Yasseen called it a “before and after moment” for Iraq. “Iraqi sovereignty is something that is non-negotiable,” he declared. The tomb of the leader of the Kataeb Hezbollah militia, Abu Mahdi alMuhandis, who was killed with Soleimani in an American airstrike on Jan. 3 in Baghdad, has become a shrine. This reverence, explained Amb. Yasseen, signifies his popularity in Iraq for his role in fighting ISIS. Amb. Yasseen acknowledged that the mass ongoing anti-government protests in Iraq are the result of pervasive corruption and successive Iraqi governments’ failure to respond to the needs of the people. “The response of the government was not what I wanted it to be,” he admitted. “I was disappointed.” He hopes that a new electoral law and a parliament in which women hold 25 percent of the seats will be more responsive and better able to provide jobs and services to citizens.

Iraq’s way forward, he explained, must focus on rebuilding the country after the territorial defeat of ISIS. This will only be successful if government corruption and mismanagement is also addressed, he added.

Amb. Yasseen’s message to people in Washington, DC was that, “We would like the U.S. to help us rebuild Iraq in the way it helped us defeat ISIS.” In response to criticism that the U.S. showed disregard for Iraqi sovereignty by assassinating Soleimani and other highranking military officials, Des Roches said the degree to which Iraq is a truly sovereign country is questionable, given Baghdad’s inability to maintain a monopoly on the le54

Moderator Pat Mancino (l) listens as Ambassador Fareed Yasseen outlines Iraq’s geopolitical conundrum. While the U.S. and Iran both have a significant presence in his country, he maintained that Iraq controls its own destiny.

gitimate use of force within its own borders.

The U.S., he added, despite its many mistakes, does have a record of respecting Iraqi sovereignty, like when it pulled its troops out of Iraq in 2011. Amb. Yasseen interjected that while neighboring countries have influence in Iraq, no foreign government has authority there.

Iran, Des Roches continued, has extended its battlefield by utilizing groups in Iraq that have dual loyalty, or even primary loyalty to Iran. Although the death of Soleimani was a major blow in the long undeclared war between the United States and Iran, he observed that the death of AlMuhandis was more significant because it signaled that Iran’s proxies are not immune if they embed themselves in another state.

Killing Al-Muhandis, countered Amb. Yasseen, was not the way to reduce Iran’s influence, noting that he is now a “mythic figure.”

Des Roches also warned of Iran using Iraq as a way to bypass sanctions. While the bordering countries have natural economic links, he said an increasing amount of trade is solely for the purpose of evading sanctions. “Iraq is in danger of becoming the economic hinterland of the Iranian regime” and therefore might become subject to U.S. sanctions, he said. Amb. Yasseen responded that Iraqis, having suffered tremendously under U.S. sanctions following Saddam Hussain’s invasion of Kuwait, are opposed to sanctions because they do not work and they backfire, harming the wrong people.

—Alex Shanahan

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WAGING PEACE Amid Coronavirus Pandemic, Iran And U.S. Remain on Warpath

Experts appearing on a March 20 Atlantic Council webcast warned that the crippling impact of the coronavirus on both Iran and the U.S. has not deterred the two countries from escalating their military confrontation in Iraq.

On March 11, rocket attacks attributed to the Iran-backed Kataeb Hezbollah militia killed two American troops, resulting in the U.S. attacking weapons depots belonging to the militia. According to the New York Times, high-level administration officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, advocated for a stronger U.S. response, but senior military officials successfully proposed a more cautious approach.

Kirsten Fontenrose, director of the Atlantic Council’s Snowcroft Middle East Security Initiative, cautioned that further attacks by groups associated with Iran could prompt more aggressive U.S. action. The Trump administration, she said, does not believe that its “measured strikes” are successfully deterring Iran, and that more creative or forceful responses are necessary.

Thomas Warrick, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said there is no reason to believe any U.S. action will deter Iran (still aggrieved by the recent U.S. assassination of its top general, Qassim Soleimani) from its openly stated goal of driving the U.S. military out of Iraq. This, he MAY 2020

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Digital Propaganda and the Challenges of Reporting on Iran

The scene at Karbala Airport in Iraq, following a U.S. airstrike targeting the Iran-backed Kataeb Hezbollah militia, March 13, 2020.

warned, could result in a back and forth that “will lead, perhaps inevitably, to strikes against Iranian home territory.”

“What I’m concerned about is that we’re seeing a crisis build up that could erupt late this spring or summer, and could be the story that drives COVID-19 off the front pages,” Warrick said.

Escalating tensions with Iran in the midst of a global pandemic may seem foolish to most people, but Warrick noted that the Trump administration views the crisis’ particularly devastating impact on Iran as an opportunity to ratchet up pressure. “The United States is showing no sign of wanting to change its policy because it believes precisely that this kind of a crisis is one of the few things that would motivate a fundamental change in Iranian policy,” he said.

Washington also appears unlikely to ease its “maximum pressure” sanctions regime in order to facilitate the transfer of much-needed medical supplies to Iran.

U.S. officials insist that sanctions do not target humanitarian assistance and medicine, but experts have routinely noted that sanctions on Iranian financial transactions make obtaining such supplies nearly impossible.

Barbara Slavin, director of the Future of Iran Initiative at the Atlantic Council, noted that the administration even introduced new sanctions on Iran in March, following the rocket attacks in Iraq. She described the decision as an “incredibly callous act at a MAY 2020

On Feb. 12, the Atlantic Council hosted the event “Iran: Propaganda and Perception 41 Years After the Revolution” at its headquarters in Washington, DC. The conference featured panels on Iran’s digital influence campaigns and the challenges of reporting on the country.

In the first panel, the Atlantic Council’s Emerson Brooking and Suzanne Kianpour discussed their new report, “Iranian Digital Influence Efforts: Guerilla Broadcasting for the Twenty-First Century.”

Iran engages in propaganda and information warfare as part of its public diplomacy efforts to project influence as far as possible, Kianpour noted. The country uses a variety of levers in its online strategy, such as the Twitter accounts of public officials in various languages, the international divisions of the state-run Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) corporation, and “patriotic troll farms” designed to steer social media conversations. Unlike disruptive Russian efforts in these areas, Kianpour noted that Iran’s methods are meant to be “persuasive” and engender support and sympathy rather than to “confuse and

time when Iran is facing these difficulties.”

While Iran has gravely mismanaged the coronavirus crisis, “this is not the time for the United States or others to compound the problems in Iran,” she said. Even Iran’s regional rivals, notably the UAE, have provided humanitarian assistance in the midst of the crisis, she pointed out.

Fontenrose said the Trump administration fears Iran is using the coronavirus to draw undue international sympathy, divert attention from its increased aggression in Iraq and as a convenient way to distract from the rising discontent of its citizens. The U.S., she added, also worries Iran would use any humanitarian assistance, such as the multi-billion IMF loan it requested, to fund its regional proxies.

Abbas Kadhim, director of the Iraq Initiative at the Atlantic Council, warned that Iraq faces a humanitarian crisis of its own. In the midst of political uncertainty, the ongoing effort to uproot ISIS, the escalating U.S.Iran war within its territory, and the prospect of the coronavirus sweeping through the country, Iraq also faces a sudden and severe drop in oil revenue in light of the coronavirus-induced global recession and an escalating Saudi-Russia oil price war.

(L-r) Moderator Asieh Namdar, Barbara Slavin, Nazila Fathi More than 90 percent of and Jason Rezaian.

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Baghdad’s revenue comes from oil, he noted, meaning sustained low oil prices would cripple its ability to pay state employees and provide basic services to citizens.

“That could really cause a state collapse, and if you combine it with the corona pandemic, that will be a very tough situation for Iraq,” Kadhim said.

—Dale Sprusansky

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dismay.”

“The real intent of these Iranian influence operations is to put out that counter-narrative, one that sees Iran as resisting the forces of neocolonialism…and sees Iran as the leader of the anti-U.S. resistance,” Brooking noted.

“Iran uses this apparatus to complement very specific foreign policy objectives,” he added, such as assisting Hezbollah or getting U.S. sanctions removed. He noted that large spikes in Iranian Twitter bot activity occurred in 2015 before the U.S. acceptance of the nuclear deal and around the time President Trump withdrew from the agreement.

Brooking said that Iran also sophisticatedly creates false news stories that seem to originate from legitimate outlets in order to shape the public discourse. “They’ve created facsimiles of different media outlets, written convincing stories which seem to have been published by these outlets, then reached out to individual U.S.-based Middle East experts and journalists to try to seed these false stories through the information environment,” he explained.

Brooking argued that Iran has not been particularly effective at changing the minds of Americans through its digital campaigns, but has seen positive results elsewhere, particularly in the Spanish-speaking world, West Africa and India, where the IRIB’s content has found some noticeable resonance.

In the keynote discussion, Rep. William Hurd (R-TX), who serves on the House Intelligence Committee, argued that Iranian digital operations have done a good job of portraying Iran as a victim. He believes that after the U.S. and Iran exchanged military hostilities in January, Tehran will keep supporting regional proxies and continue developing nuclear weapons. (U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Iran has not pursued nuclear weapons since 2003.) Regarding the Trump administration’s approach to Iran, Rep. Hurd advocated for pressuring Iran with the support of American allies. Iran, he believes, will not return to negotiations with the United States unless European countries endorse Washington’s “maximum pressure” campaign 56

and help bring Iran to an economic breakCholera and Iran’s History of ing point.

Responding to Pandemics The third panel, titled “Reporting on Iran from Afar” featured New York Times reAs technological advances in the 19th and porter Farnaz Fasihi, journalist and author 20th centuries increased global trade and Nazila Fathi, Washington Post columnist interaction, disease outbreaks that once reJason Rezaian and the Atlantic Council’s mained localized quickly escalated into Barbara Slavin. global pandemics.

In her opening remarks, Slavin said that During this period, there were seven Rep. Hurd’s erroneous statement that Iran cholera pandemics, all believed to have has a nuclear weapons program epitooriginated in the Indian subcontinent. Iran, mizes the degree of misinformation suras a thoroughfare for international trade and rounding discussions about Iran. a focus of British and Russian imperialistic Speaking about how to determine the endeavors, was hit particularly hard by truth when writing about Iran from outside these outbreaks. the country, Rezaian and Fathi noted the Amir Afkhami, a professor of global importance of maintaining contacts in the health and history at George Washington country and speaking the language. Slavin University, and the author of A Modern Conadded that journalists must use skills and tagion: Imperialism and Public Health in knowledge gathered over their careers to Iran’s Age of Cholera, outlined Iran’s history discern whether statements or reports of confronting cholera on April 11, 2019. His seem deliberately misleading or inaccurate. talk at Stanford University, which seemed This is especially important today, she of niche interest at the time, now appears added, as “we have been in a true informaeminently pertinent in light of the devastattion war between the Trump administration ing toll of the new coronavirus on Iran. and Iran for the last three years,” with both The Qajar dynasty, which ruled Iran from governments “pumping out propaganda” to 1789 to 1925, largely failed to effectively support their policies. mitigate the impact of cholera outbreaks The panelists noted that reporting on Iran due to financial restraints and imperialistic comes with online attacks and threats, both intrusion, Afkhami explained. from bots and real people supporting the Iran participated in international conferU.S. or Iranian governments, Iranian ences on the disease and was well aware monarchists and the cultish Iranian exile of the successful steps European powers Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) group. had taken to limit the impact of outbreaks.

While being attacked by all sides, jourThe problem, Afkhami noted, was that many nalists often also find their work selectively of these best practices required costly and dishonestly used by individuals and changes to public infrastructure that the figroups seeking to advance their own agennancially strapped country could ill afford. das. Though only so much can be done to prevent this, Slavin— who noted that her nuanced statements are occasionally misrepresented as being proregime by Iranian state media—said journalists must nonetheless be aware of how their work can be manipulated, misused and taken out of context by all sides.

Professor Amir Afkhami explains why Iran struggled to fight —Alex Shanahan cholera outbreaks in the 19th and 20th centuries.

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with foreign armies occupying large swaths of its land. “All of the country was basically a battlefield,” Afkhami noted. The result was almost yearly outbreaks of cholera between 1914 and 1918.

A major turning point in the fight against cholera came in 1925 when, under the Pahlavi dynasty, Iran balanced its budget for the first time in almost 100 years. “This ended the vicious cycle of deficit and borrowing and allowed Tehran to develop the infrastructure of sanitation and public health in urban areas,” Afkhami noted.

Better finances also increased the country’s ability to produce and obtain vaccines, which dramatically reduced the threat of cholera, particularly in rural areas where sanitation infrastructure remained poor.

“This marked the end of Iran’s age of cholera,” Afkhami said.

Afkhami concluded by pondering how Iran’s history of dealing with cholera could inform the country’s ongoing opioid addiction crisis (and, presumably, the even graver threat of coronavirus).

The Islamic Republic’s regional interventions and decades-old hostility with the U.S. have created economic and budgetary crises that severely hinder its ability to address public health emergencies, he noted.

Is history repeating itself? “If Tehran does not address this problem, could the growing epidemic of drug use and hopelessness trigger a larger political movement that could bring an end to the 41-year theocracy,

MANOLIS LAGOUTARIS/AFP VIA GETTY BIMAGES

“Proposals to improve the sanitary infrastructure of the country were largely ignored because of the Qajar regime’s administrative crises and financial deficits,” he said.

The country’s financial woes, Afkhami explained, were largely a result of the burden of reparation payments to Russia in the wake of two military defeats, and an economic crisis initiated by cheap outside industrial goods flooding the Iranian market.

In light of its limited budget, Iran’s management of the disease on its hinterlands was subordinated to imperial Russia and Britain, Afkhami said. Both nations, however, prioritized their own interests over the welfare of Iranians.

The British, given their sea power, managed southern quarantines, while Russia ran quarantines in the northeast where they had sufficient troops and infrastructure.

Russia, Afkhami explained, used their quarantines to divert trade from Iran into their own territories. Meanwhile, the British refused to establish sufficient quarantines because they did not want to enforce onerous restrictions that would hinder their economic activities in the Persian Gulf. “Economic, political and strategic goals took precedence over the health of the Iranian population by the great powers,” Afkhami said.

By the end of the 19th century, Iran’s susceptibility to cholera only increased, as the expansion of steamships “transported the disease so fast that Iranians were not able to establish the requisite quarantines,” Afkhami explained. “You see the role of industrial transportation as being a real potentiator, giving the disease velocity like it never had before in the late 19th century.”

The government’s inability to address cholera had political implications at the beginning of the 20th century. A 1904 outbreak contributed to a particularly deep economic dive that caused near-famine conditions and steep inflation. In 1906, fedup Iranians took to the streets in what is known as the Constitutional Revolution, which brought about two firsts in the country: a parliament and a constitution.

The following two decades were nevertheless particularly tough for Iranians. Despite being ostensibly neutral in the First World War, the country became inundated

just as the 1904 [cholera] epidemic brought an end to Iran’s uninterrupted history of absolutism?” he asked. —Dale Sprusansky

Experts Discuss Coronavirus in the Middle East

The Middle East Institute held an online event on March 20 discussing the effects of the coronavirus on the Middle East.

MEI’s President Paul Salem moderated the discussion between Basma Alloush of the Norwegian Refugee Council, Jihad Azour of the International Monetary Fund, Rana Hajjeh of the World Health Organization (WHO) and Hannah Kaviani of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Farsi language Radio Farda.

“In the region, we have been devastated by so many conflicts and wars that have really weakened our health infrastructure,” which puts countries in the Middle East at a higher risk for suffering the negative consequences of the virus, Hajjeh warned. The WHO, she added, is trying to support governments as much as possible, including by sending them testing kits and personal protective equipment for medical professionals.

Alloush discussed the effects of the virus on refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs). She echoed the warning of the Norwegian Refugee Council that coronavirus could “decimate” refugee communities. Challenges in these communities include the deliberate targeting of health

Migrants working with an NGO on the Greek island of Lesbos sew handmade protective face masks, March 25, 2020.

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uals, and targeted support to especially-affected sectors of the economy. He also highlighted the importance of additional international support for conflict countries.

Speaking about the situation in Iran, Kaviani noted the people’s lack of trust in their government. The combination of government mismanagement and U.S. sanctions have placed the country in a difficult situation, she said. Social distancing, for instance, did not take place in Iran because people don’t trust government messaging.

A lack of testing, she explained, also means that the number of cases and deaths are likely much higher than the official government statistics report. Finally, Kaviani mentioned a report from one of her colleagues detailing how many Arab media outlets are talking about Iran as the source of the virus, and how this is compounding regional animosity. With everything Iranians have experienced in the past year, she lamented, “Iranians don’t see a bright future ahead.”

—Alex Shanahan

Khanna v. Petraeus: Competing Visions for U.S. Foreign Policy

The Quincy Institute and Foreign Policy magazine held a day-long event on the future of U.S. foreign policy at the Capitol Visitor Center on Feb. 26. The conference featured a variety of panelists and discussions, but the highlight was the contrasting visions for American leadership provided

by Ret. Gen. David Petraeus and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA).

Petraeus outlined a vision that ultimately amounted to a continuation of the status quo. He called for a long-term U.S. troop commitment to the Middle East and cautioned that U.S. military disengagement could have dangerous consequences for the region. The general was clear that he does not support unsubstantiated new wars or view war as the sole solution to abating conflict, but was equally adamant that it is in the U.S. national interest to dutifully and indefinitely manage existing conflicts.

This is achievable, he said, by making sure that U.S. troops are not the primary fighters in Middle East wars, but rather provide assistance, such as reconnaissance, to local forces on the front lines. This approach, he argued, is morally and fiscally responsible and congruent with the desires of the American people.

“If you can keep the cost in blood and treasure down, then the American people will tend to regard it more and more like the long commitment that we have had in Korea, where we’ve had over 30,000 troops for many, many decades. [In] Europe, we still have tens of thousands [of troops]. [In] Japan, believe it or not, we have over 30,000 troops.” These examples, he said, should inform the future U.S. approach to the Middle East.

Likely aware that many in the audience were wondering how his vision meshes with the anti-interventionist agenda of the recently launched Quincy Institute, Petraeus offered a perhaps intentionally

Moderator Will Ruger (l) and Rep. Ro Khanna outline a new vision for U.S. foreign policy.

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facilities in war-ravaged Yemen and Syria, migration through multiple countries, overcrowded camps and a lack of sanitation and health infrastructure. Supply chain interruptions, she warned, could exacerbate food and medicine shortages. Additionally, weak governance structures and ongoing conflicts make containing the virus difficult.

“Everyone…is fragile in this outbreak, but it’s important to keep in mind that we’re not equally fragile,” Alloush pointed out.

Refugees, she continued, don’t always have equal access to healthcare services, which make them more vulnerable.

She also warned that countries are using the coronavirus as an excuse to close their borders to refugees, lamenting that “refugees and economic migrants become the first to be stigmatized and unjustifiably blamed for spreading viruses.” Furthermore, she argued for a humanitarian exemption to lockdowns because humanitarian workers can’t get into camps to provide services. At the same time, she added, it’s important to ensure that international NGO staff don’t spread the virus to refugees themselves.

In terms of the economic impacts of the virus, Azour called the effects “a new type of crisis, a great shock that is unheard of in the last 100 years of economic history, with the simultaneous shocks facing almost all countries in the world.” He continued, “In order to address the coronavirus issue, you need to shut down the economy…you are in fact inflicting additional wounds on the livelihood of people.”

Azour predicted severe economic consequences in the region for the first half of the year and possibly longer. These consequences include negative growth in 2020, global recession and recessions in certain countries, and increased unemployment.

The decline in imports and exports, the disruption of value chains, the loss of consumer confidence, travel bans, and the drop in oil prices will combine to put pressure on government budgets and national economies, he said.

Policy priorities right now, he explained, should be sufficient financing for public health, keeping markets liquid to reduce the negative effects for consumers and individ-

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The U.S., Khanna implored, ought to use its power to send an inspiring and transformative message of peace, unity and prosperity to the world. “I want people in the world to look at America and see us as a model for becoming a truly multi-cultural, multi-racial liberal democracy and for them to say ‘wow, our culture, our art, our technologies, our writings reflect those values.’

I don’t want them to think, the first thing when they think about the United States is our military or our bombs.”

—Dale Sprusansky

Is Trump’s Israel—Palestine “Peace Plan” Irreversible?

Prognostication is never exact, but regional experts speaking at Washington, DC think tanks in the days following the unveiling of President Donald Trump’s “peace deal” for Israel and Palestine expressed doubt that the policies set forth in the plan could be undone—especially if the president secures a second term in office.

“They are burning the bridge back to a two-state solution,” Middle East Institute senior fellow Khaled Elgindy said at a Feb. 11 SETA Foundation event. “They’re not only blowing it up, but they’re ensuring that no one can rebuild it. This is a scorched earth policy.”

“If Trump has another four years and Israel starts implementing this on the ground, it’s not far-fetched to imagine that the world and the region will acquiesce to that new reality—and that is precisely what

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snarky quip. “I’m for restraint,” the general said. “We should be for more restraint until we shouldn’t be.”

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) spoke immediately after Petraeus, and was quick to critique the general’s vision. “I thought the title of this conference is ‘A New Vision for America in the World,’” he said. “I was wondering when he was going to say something new that we haven’t heard for the last 20 years.”

The idea that the 19-year war on terror has yielded positive results is unsubstantiated, the congressman argued. “I think the model of thinking that we’re going to bomb our way out of terrorism is just proven to be false,” he said. “Al-Qaeda was in three countries before 9/11—Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bosnia—it’s now in over 23 countries. The Taliban today controls 70 percent of the territory in Afghanistan. Before the surge in 2008, it controlled 40 percent.”

While the U.S. has been busy spilling blood and treasure abroad, Khanna noted that other countries—notably rival China— have taken a decidedly different approach.

“China hasn’t been in a war since 1979.

They’ve been putting all their resources into high-speed rail, into building new universities, into developing things like Huawei [a large telecommunications company the U.S. government sees as a national security threat],” he said.

“We’ve been in 40 conflicts, it’s cost our nation trillions of dollars. On a very simple level, do you think it would have been better to have every single person in this country get a public education, develop our infrastructure, develop broadband, develop alternatives to Huawei, take the lead in quantum computing and AI [artificial intelligence], or to be enmeshed in these wars?”

Khanna described himself as a disciple of President John Quincy Adams, who famously warned against America going abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.”

The sixth president, he said, understood the consequences of the U.S. being “a dictatorial force” that intervenes in countries it does not fully understand. “It was a very clearheaded view…of the limits of military power to reshape societies. I think that lesson is more relevant today than ever before.”

[Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu and [presidential adviser Jared] Kushner are banking on,” Elgindy continued.

Trump’s plan isn’t introducing biased mediation into the conflict, but is rather placing the pro-Israel U.S. position into high gear, he said. “There is precedent for everything that Trump is doing, he’s just simply doing it in its most extreme form,” he commented.

“It’s not trying to change the reality on the ground, it is trying to consecrate the reality on the ground as the final solution, as the permanent solution by getting rid of the rules of the game to begin with.”

One major but overlooked facet of the deal is the proposed transfer of villages home to a quarter of a million Palestinian citizens of Israel to the Palestinian Authority.

Speaking at the National Interest Foundation’s (NIF) Feb. 12 event, University of Maryland Professor Shibley Telhami expressed alarm that the U.S. is endorsing a plan to strip people of their citizenship and forcibly transfer their land to another country.

“It’s really extraordinary to think that there would be an American plan—the leader of the free world—proposing the transfer of territories with populations to another state mainly because of their ethnicity.”

Palestinian citizens of Israel do not want to surrender their citizenship, Telhami said.

“They support a Palestinian state, they want Palestinian freedom, but they don’t want to be transferred under the Palestinian Authority [PA].”

(L-r) Moderator Hasan Yucel, Mark Perry and Khaled Elgindy.

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Elgindy accused the PA of failing to effectively counter Trump’s plan. “It’s not at all clear that Mahmoud Abbas’ leadership has a strategy for confronting this very serious challenge other than registering opposition in various international forums,” he said. It appears the PA’s “non-strategy” mostly amounts to waiting out the Trump presidency, he added.

Palestinian journalist Said Arikat told the NIF audience that two things the Palestinians must do is “end their silly [internal] divisions” and cease security coordination with the Israeli occupation. “Security coordination is for one thing, and that is to prevent Palestinians from fighting back, resisting the occupation,” he said.

Independent author and foreign policy analyst Mark Perry argued that the deal makes manifest long-metastasizing divisions within the American Jewish community. “The primary conflict is between Israelis and American Jews,” he said at the SETA event. The majority of U.S. Jews, he added, increasingly see Israel as an “imperialistic and racially-based” society, causing them “to turn away from their previous loyalty to Israel.”

Perry said Israeli officials told him that they “very purposely cultivated their standing inside the evangelical Christian community” as a way to counterbalance growing Jewish disaffection with the state. “I got the sense the Israelis believed that Jewish Americans, because of their progressive values were going to be at some point in the future an inconstant partner of Israel and a critic of what Israel was doing.”

—Dale Sprusansky

tanyahu, senior White House adviser Jared Kushner and others, including GOP megadonor and Israel financier Sheldon Adelson, committed war crimes through carrying out or funding Israeli polices aimed at ethnic cleansing, genocide, dehumanization and denaturalization against the Palestinian citizens of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).

“Denaturalization is basically telling someone they are meaningless and that you are not human enough for us to care about you,” the lawyer stated.

McMahon went on to discuss policies of the Israeli prime minister that specifically target Palestinians. Netanyahu’s strategies are designed to dehumanize the Palestinian population and “they have done a hell of a job,” he lamented.

Turning to Kushner’s recently unveiled U.S. “peace plan,” one objective contained therein is to declare that Israel owns all of the OPT, which is illegal according to international law, McMahon pointed out. Article 73 of the U.N. Charter states that Israel has a fiduciary duty to protect the lives and assets of every Palestinian citizen living in the territories. Instead, McMahon noted, “Netanyahu has murdered many of them and stolen their property. If no one stops Kushner’s peace plan from going into effect, the property claims of anyone who owns real estate in the OPT are destroyed,”

he said.

International law is clear that “an occupier does not gain any ownership rights,” McMahon continued. “So Kushner is illegally transferring property, but this does not bother him.”

Because of Netanyahu’s actions in the OPT, the complaint charges him with war crimes, which “will affect him in many ways,” McMahon claimed. “Eventually, if we are successful, people in the world will say he is a war criminal,” McMahon predicted, and they won't want him visiting their country. In the past, former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni curtailed overseas travel because of a British-issued arrest warrant against her.

The lawsuit also accuses Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert and others of knowingly financing Israel’s crimes. “If you knew what was going on in the Occupied Territories, and you’re sending $5 million over there so that settlers can buy sophisticated equipment, jeeps, stun grenades, you have aided and abetted the commission of war crimes,” McMahon said.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is also named in the lawsuit for his role in implementing and promoting laws that criminalize support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement in the United States.

McMahon spelled out the legal process

Washington, DC-based attorney Martin F. McMahon held a briefing at the National Press Club on March 4 to explain his litigation targeting Israel for carrying out crimes against humanity and accusing prominent Americans of aiding and abetting these crimes.

The 175-page lawsuit, filed Feb. 25 by several Palestinians and Americans in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, alleges Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Ne60

Attorney Martin McMahon outlines his lawsuit against prominent Israelis and Americans.

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STAFF PHOTO DALE SPRUSANSKY

Lawsuit Charges Netanyahu, Trump, Kushner with War Crimes

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going forward, which includes serving the defendants with the complaint. Undoubtedly, motions to dismiss will be filed, but the attorney is confident the lawsuit will ultimately prevail.

—Elaine Pasquini

MAY 2020

Iqraa runners at last year’s Prince William Half Marathon in Virginia. The running group raised $28,500 for Palestinian education in 2019.

counted for and implemented effectively.

To learn more about either running or sponsoring a runner, please check out our website at <iqraadc.org> or contact me at kirkcruachan@yahoo.com.

And don’t forget that you can make a difference by Running for a Brighter Palestine!

—Kirk Campbell

Activists: Ethiopia’s New Dam Will Imperil Egypt’s Access to Water

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) has been under construction since 2011 on the Blue Nile in Ethiopia, about nine miles east of its border with Sudan.

When completed the dam will be the largest hydroelectric power plant in Africa.

Located only 1,400 miles downstream

STAFF PHOTO PHIL PASQUINI

This is the 13th year that Iqraa runners will “suit up” in our Running for a Brighter Palestine jerseys. What has it gotten us?

For starters, we’ve raised over $280,000 since 2008. Every penny—since Iqraa is an all-volunteer running group with no overhead—goes to United Palestinian Appeal (UPA) for its education programs in the West Bank and Gaza. UPA uses the funds to support its Mahmoud Darwish scholarship program, which grants students university scholarships of roughly $1,000. In 2019, we raised over $28,500, funding almost 29 scholarships.

While each Iqraa runner make a commitment to raise funds—and the cause is truly meaningful—the real reason we love to run is the joy. The joy of motion, the joy of camaraderie, the joy of letting go of stress.

Running can be a slog, no doubt. But when that slog becomes the triumph of completion, the calm of being in the moment, or the bond of sharing encouragement with a running buddy, that’s when the slog is transformed—producing the beautiful and perhaps paradoxical twins of physical motion and emotional peace.

For all these reasons, I invite you to join us in 2020 as we seek to provide 30 scholarships that will bring hope and opportunity to Palestinian students. As Irish poet William Butler Yeats said, “education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”

How do we know you can do this? We partner with Marathon Charity Cooperation to provide a training program every Saturday from May to October, including coaches, seminars, post-run food and drink, and race day support for your marathon or half-marathon. Yes, you can!

We provide advice and templates, as well as information about the cause, to assist with fundraising. And we partner with United Palestinian Appeal, a 501(c)3 charity, which ensures that all the funds are ac-

PHOTO COURTESY K. CAMPBELL

Running for a Brighter Palestine, Iqraa Turns Thirteen

from the site, Egypt opposes construction of the dam, concerned it will cripple the country’s already imperiled water supply.

The Nile supplies Egypt with 90 percent of its drinking and agricultural water.

On March 15, Egyptian Americans rallied in front of the White House to call attention to this multibillion-dollar Chinese-funded project. “We are here to have our voices heard,” said Adla Karim, one of the organizers of the rally. “There was an agreement to build the dam in a way that would not affect the countries that are north of the dam, namely Sudan and Egypt, but the Ethiopian government wants to fill the dam starting in July without reaching an agreement with the other countries. We are just asking the Ethiopian government to abide

Egyptian Americans rally outside the White House against the proposed Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

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by the agreement that the United States and the World Bank created together that benefits all parties involved.”

Last November, President Donald Trump met with the foreign ministers of Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia at the White House to iron out differences regarding construction of the GERD, which is now 70 percent completed. However, in February Ethiopia failed to attend talks in Washington meant to finalize an agreement.

In March, Sudan irked Egypt by opposing an Arab League resolution critical of Ethiopia. Khartoum has instead offered to broker an agreement between the sides and said it opposes efforts to internationalize the dispute.

Egypt wants Ethiopia to fill the dam over a period of 12 to 21 years, while Addis Ababa seeks to fill it over a five to seven year period.

The dam threatens to compound an already dire water shortage in Egypt. A 2013 analysis by West Point researchers noted, “Egypt faces a water shortage at current resource levels.” A November 2019 exposé on the crisis in The Wall Street Journal pointed out that the country’s booming population and the proliferation of water-intensive agricultural sites that export crops to Gulf states have placed a tremendous strain on Egypt’s water supply.

“If the dam is built the way they want to do it, all of the countries north of Ethiopia will suffer greatly as their drinking water is dependent on the Nile,” Karim explained.

“We just want the Ethiopian government to re-think what they are doing and the effect it has on the people of Sudan and Egypt.”

—Elaine Pasquini

How the Obama Administration’s Egypt Policy Went Awry

Internal divisions, misguided contentment with the status quo and naïveté explain why President Barack Obama’s administration failed to seize the 2011 Egyptian revolution as an opportunity to promote democracy, according to Andrew Miller, who served as the director for Egyptian and Israeli military issues on President Obama’s National Security Council.

At a Feb. 27 event on U.S. democracy 62

cially) the coup government of generalpromotion in the Arab world hosted by the turned-president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi were Carnegie Endowment for International not reluctant to adopt authoritarian meaPeace in Washington, DC, Miller said sures. voices within the government pushing for Given the limited U.S. experience with support for democratization in response to the Muslim Brotherhood, Miller said it’s unthe Arab Spring were eclipsed by those derstandable that Washington misjudged urging the administration to remain loyal to how the organization would govern under established authoritarian leaders. “We were Morsi. “It’s much less easy to forgive that outnumbered ten or more to one,” he rewe didn’t understand the military,” Miller called. “It was very difficult to gain any tracsaid. “It’s hard to believe, but there gention, and the victories that we had were uinely were U.S. policymakers who thought often fleeting.” that the military was a relatively non-partiMiller explained that high-ranking counsan apolitical institution that was only interterterrorism and defense officials, including ested in stability. It’s laughable now, but I National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon think Secretary [of State John] Kerry, for inand special assistant Dennis Ross, sucstance, genuinely believed that.” cessfully tempered efforts by foreign policy To the extent the U.S. was committed to adviser Ben Rhodes, U.N. Ambassador promoting democratization during Egypt’s Susan Rice, special assistant Samantha transitions, these efforts were stymied by Power and others to embrace pro-democthe role of regional powers—namely the racy protesters. The result, he said, was UAE, Saudi Arabia and Israel—who used that the White House “wasn’t a clear and their influence to prop-up the established consistent democracy promoter.” authoritarian guard, Miller said. While the The administration’s attempt to reassure U.S. primarily used diplomacy and dialogue long-standing authoritarian allies while to express its desire for greater political paying lip service to the desires of the Arab openness, wealthy Gulf countries used bilstreet was ultimately untenable, Miller said. lions in aid to sway Cairo away from such “Unless the president is directly behind concerns. “They were ultimately prepared democracy promotion, it doesn’t work,” he at the time to put more resources on the line opined, as pro-democracy exhortations by than we were,” Miller said. the secretary of state or other officials carry Washington did not push back against little weight in the region when they are not these Gulf overtures, fearing strong objecfirmly buttressed by clear presidential suption would harm vital relations. “When we port. “A lot of foreign powers…don’t respect began to see the role they were having, we anything other than the president’s word.” were prepared to just let things go because After the ouster of Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak, the U.S. made the mistake of being “excessively deferential” to both interim military governments and the democratically elected government of President Mohamed Morsi on matters of democratization, Miller said.

In the absence of a clear mandate for democratization from Washington, both Mietek Boduszynski (l), author of U.S. Democracy Promotion in the Morsi and (espe- Arab World , and Andrew Miller.

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about the Middle East, a confusion those relationships were considered between the real and unreal.” to be more important to us,” Miller exThe 19th century’s burgeoning plained. newspaper scene provided another Miller, who is currently the deputy outlet for the spread of tales about the director for policy at the Project on ancient Near East. “This was at the Middle East Democracy, believes same time that archaeological activithose in the U.S. government who are ties began to occur,” McGeough reluctant to push for democratic renoted. “People began reading all the forms in Egypt and the broader region time and new genres emerged to feed are well intentioned, though misthe new market of the reading public.” guided. Many, he said, simply believe So deep was the fascination with that because the U.S. cannot force a the ancient world that the practice of country to democratize, it is best for unwrapping mummies for entertainWashington to simply extract as many Dr. Kevin McGeough describes the Western fascination ment at dinner parties was all the rage benefits as possible from the current with the ancient Middle East during the Victorian era. among Victorian elite. Today, of reality. course, virtual unwrapping through state“That’s not an irrational position,” Miller torical reality, and that sometimes becomes of-the-art medical scanning techniques proconceded. “But,” he cautioned, subscribers more appealing in different kinds of ways vides a non-invasive, respectful way to to this belief “don’t recognize the ways in and confuses issues,” he noted. learn more about the individual and reconwhich [U.S.] actions actually make it easier McGeough explored Victorian era perstruct aspects of an ancient society, he exfor the authoritarian order to endure.” ceptions—often fetishized and lacking in plained.

“When we’re providing foreign military accuracy—of the ancient Middle East as Fascination with the ancient and modern assistance to the Egyptian army, we’re depicted in films, literature, theatre, opera Middle East remains prominent in popular propping up their patronage networks,” and even secret societies.

Western culture today, causing the line beMiller elaborated. “When we’re providing Romanticized personal travel accounts tween scholarly research and artistic fiction them diplomatic and political cover, it makes during the time period influenced the to become blurred, mudding public percepit easier for them to sustain the same level public’s perceptions, he said. Italian extions. This, McGeough noted, is worrisome of repression. When we provide economic plorer Giovanni Belzoni’s account wherein for scholars of the region. —Elaine Pasquini assistance that tends to benefit those actors he described “archaeological treasure huntwithin Egypt that are most committed to the ing”—people racing to be first at the discovSolidarity With Algeria’s Al-Hirak regime, that has the effect of making the eries—was widely read and spread the Movement regime stronger, making it more resilient.” idea that there was “a European race to get “Just because we can’t have a positive these materials out of the region,” McA small group of Algerians and their supimpact at all times doesn’t mean that we’re Geough said. “There was a lot of flexibility porters rallied in Washington, DC’s Dupont not having a negative impact.” in how Europeans and Americans thought Circle on March 14. The demonstrators —Dale Sprusansky

Fascination with the ancient Middle East in 19th century Western pop culture was the topic of an illustrated Feb. 26 lecture at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies by Dr. Kevin McGeough, an archaeology professor at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada.

As an archaeologist, McGeough said that when he excavates an authentic artifact he knows there is a real history behind the object. “But the pop culture versions of Egypt and Mesopotamia become more interesting and exciting than perhaps the hisMAY 2020

STAFF PHOTO PHIL PASQUINI

Mummy Unwrapping Parties: Victorian Views of the Middle East

Members of the Al-Hirak movement rally in Washington, DC, calling for a new generation of leaders in Algeria.

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ARAB AMERICAN ACTIVISM Arab American Women, True Excellence in Our Midst

The National Arab American Women’s Association (NAAWA) held one of the last large public gatherings in the region, a fundraising dinner on March 8 at the Sheraton in Tysons Corner, VA. The dinner, art exhibit and musical entertainment celebrated Arab American women, and was appropriately themed, “Excellence in our Midst.”

The University of Miami’s advice not to travel due to the coronavirus prevented one keynoter, visiting professor and award-winning journalist and author Rula Jebreal, from speaking.

Algerian researcher Dr. Hakima Amri, a professor of biochemistry and physiology at Georgetown University, personified the dinner’s theme of excellence. Her breakthrough work in the field of cancer research has brought international atten64

world. A Palestinian Jordanian American, Zuaiter said she grew up in an open family living in a closed society in Saudi Arabia. Like her mother, she found her freedom and an outlet for her creativity in painting. Then she transferred that passion into filmmaking.

Her upcoming documentary, “Yalla Parkour,” features the parkour sport in Gaza. Parkour is an extreme sport that combines running, acrobatics and climbing in a challenging urban environment.

Her camera has taken her around the world and now she is focusing her lens on diaspora Arabs, examining the survival of their identity and also the assimilation of stateless people. Zuaiter said she is “presenting, preserving and protecting people who can no longer find their city on a map.” Being an Arab American woman is not easy, she concluded, but being embraced by her community makes it easier.

—Delinda C. Hanley

tion. She specializes in data mining to personalize cancer treatments.

Growing up, Dr. Amri said, she didn’t have to look far for role models. “Algerian women struggling for independence against colonization embody the spirit of freedom burning in every Algerian woman. We need that spirit of freedom to unite women throughout the world,” she said. Her mother and grandmother demonstrated the resilience and self-reliance that can be found in all our sisters in Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen and Iraq, Amri said.

Urging more women to enter science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), she also addressed the huge disparity in salaries of men and women— especially women of color—in these fields. Data shows women in the Arab world are outnumbering American women studying STEM subjects, she added. Each of you has a story to tell, a torch to carry, Dr. Amri concluded. “Be bold. Draw strength from role models and each other,” especially during this unfolding coronavirus epidemic.

The next speaker to inspire the audience was Areeb Zuaiter, a visual story teller and film professor at American University in Washington, DC, whose shorts have won acclaim at festivals around the

Filmmaker Areeb Zuaiter at NAAWA’s dinner.

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MUSLIM AMERICAN ACTIVISM CAIR and Civil Rights Partners Respond to Expanded Muslim Ban

STAFF PHOTO D. HANLEY

are members of Algeria’s Al-Hirak movement, which was formed on Feb. 16, 2019, following then-President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s announcement that he would seek a fifth term.

The movement demands the removal of a cabal of military, government and business leaders who have corruptly ruled the country since it shook off France’s colonial rule in the 1960s.

After months of mounting pressure by AlHirak, Bouteflika resigned in April 2019.

In a subsequent election, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, the military’s preferred candidate, was elected president. Disgruntled voters boycotted the election with only 41.1 percent of eligible voters turning up at polling stations. The election once again propelled large numbers of Al-Hirak protesters onto the streets of Algiers and other cities in the North African country of 43 million.

The weekly protests in Dupont Circle coincide with ongoing Al-Hirak protests in Algeria and France, which hosts a large Algerian diaspora community.

—Elaine Pasquini

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) gathered civil rights organizations together on Jan. 30 for a news conference in response to President Donald Trump’s expected expansion of the Muslim Ban the following day. Just a week into his presidency, Trump signed Executive Order 13769, banning foreign nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries. That order stranded Muslim visitors from Libya, Somalia, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Yemen and Syria at airports and prompted ACLU lawsuits and federal court rulings to block the ban.

Fast forward to 2020: The Muslim Ban has been in effect for three years and on Jan. 31, Trump expanded the ban to 11 countries, now including most immigrants from Sudan, Tanzania, Eritrea, Nigeria, Myanmar (Burma) and Kyrgyzstan.

Robert McCaw, CAIR’s government affairs director, noted the new ban bars tens of thousands of Muslims, even those MAY 2020

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with immigration visas, from entering the United States. Nihad Awad, CAIR’s national executive director, said the ban continues this administration’s attacks on Muslims and people of color, both globally and in the U.S. “At its core it started as a Muslim ban and it remains a Muslim ban.

Adding one or two non-Muslim countries is just window dressing,” CAIR and other civil rights organizations speak out against President Trump’s expansion of the Muslim Awad declared. The ban separates Ban. families and prevents people from founded on.” journalists, warning that the Muslim Ban attending funerals and weddings. StuOn Jan. 31, the administration also is a racist and xenophobic attack on didents can’t come to the U.S. to further suspended the entry into the U.S. of forversity. The Trump administration has a their education and business people can’t eign nationals who have been in China real problem with brown, black and Asian conduct work, Awad added. Trump’s top out of concern that they may transmit the folks, which is propelling hate against our advisers have said Islam is a cancer and novel coronavirus. Trump administration community, warned Patrice Lawrence, he himself has said “Islam hates us,” reofficials have repeatedly referred to the co-director of UndocuBlack Network. vealing his disdain for Muslims and coronavirus as the “Wuhan virus” or the Ryan Mace, a grassroots advocacy people of color, Awad concluded, pledg“Chinese virus,” in what many view as a refugee specialist with Amnesty Internaing to continue his organization’s legal xenophobic attempt to portray the virus tional, described refugees trapped in fight against this white supremacy as a threat imported to the U.S. by limbo and said he feared the U.S. “has agenda. “others.”

—Delinda C. Hanley abandoned the values our country was Civil rights partners also addressed

U.N. Resolutions Continued from page 31

never guess from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s fulminations against “this renegade, unlawful, so-called court,” that the U.S. had been a signatory to the Rome Convention establishing the ICC. When the Rome Convention was being negotiated, U.S. delegates played an important role in drafting the resulting text. The negotiators were sincere in their support for the concept, as indeed was President Bill Clinton, but they had to take into account his customarily invertebrate attitude to the American exceptionalists in Congress. To pander to them— and to be fair, to other countries with similar mindsets—the resulting text restricted prosecutors in the investigations they could conduct. Above all, the U.S. did not accept that its nationals could be tried elsewhere. American negotiators played what was becoming a traditional role—as they did for example in the Law of the Sea—actively engage in the deliberations, securing compromises in the docuMAY 2020

ments, but then backing out.

Unsurprisingly, Bill Clinton who had the diplomatic game down to a fine art, signed the treaty at the tail end of his presidency and left it to John Bolton to do the actual withdrawal. Israel also signed, but then also withdrew from the organization that both countries now claim has no legitimacy!

Logic is, of course, for losers. So, it was fine for Israel to kidnap Adolf Eichmann from Argentina and bring him to Israel to be prosecuted for genuine crimes committed in Europe. The U.S. could arrest President Manuel Noriega of Panama and take him to the U.S. to be prosecuted under U.S. law. And, of course, the U.S. can insist that the Canadians arrest a Chinese executive and the British extradite Julian Assange on charges of breaking laws, which do not apply to those countries.

The absence of pushback from Canada and the UK has been significant since it implies acquiescence by major powers to U.S. diktats. It is worth remembering that Margaret Thatcher’s ambas-

sadors resolutely voted for Middle East resolutions at the U.N. that were contrary to the vetoes of her chum President Ronald Reagan. It might be argued that this was futile, since the U.S. veto meant the resolutions had no legal force. However, this assumption neglects the very important role of the moral force of a united world community’s condemnation, despite the idiosyncratic support of one lobby-hobbled nation. The sight of the U.S., isolated, standing alone against the rest of the world, even its allies, sent a powerful signal.

However, since Oslo breached global solidarity on the issue, far too much ground has been conceded as countries’ diplomatic stands have eroded under the twin pressure of Israeli lobbies at home and Washington’s pressure abroad. Tony Blair shifted British positions to abstention when the U.S. vetoed resolutions and Canada and Australia went even further, sometimes supporting the U.S. positions.

It was hardly surprising that many EU countries followed suit. It was not that Continued on page 74

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Middle East Books Review All books featured in this section are available from Middle East Books and More, the nation’s preeminent bookstore on the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy. www.MiddleEastBooks.com • (202) 939-6050 ext. 1

The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917-2017

By Rashid Khalidi, Metropolitan Books, 2020, hardcover, 336 pp. MEB: $25

Reviewed by Walter L. Hixson

Professor Rashid Khalidi offers a richly informed and personally poignant narrative of the “hundred years’ war on Palestine.”

Drawing on a lifetime of study, Khalidi presents a definitive academic account but one that is also enriched by personal reflections, as he recounts the intersections of his own life and that of his forebearers and family members with the Palestine tragedy.

Khalidi acknowledges that the “firstperson dimension” is normally “excluded from scholarly history,” but this aspect is what makes the book original and distinctive. Khalidi seamlessly blends himself into the narrative at a variety of places and times, including Jerusalem, Beirut, New York and Madrid. He also introduces and contextualizes the experiences of his family members, including his grandparents who were driven out of Palestine in the Nakba.

The book is interspersed with illustrations of Khalidi and his family members, as they

Contributing editor Walter L. Hixson is the author of Israel’s Armor: The Israel Lobby and the First Generation of the Palestine Conflict, along with several other books and journal articles. He has been a professor of history for 36 years, achieving the rank of distinguished professor.

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were variously driven out, jailed, had their homes demolished or helped to pick up the pieces after the Israeli bombardment of Beirut in 1982.

Rather than a seamless narrative, Khalidi—the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University— frames the account on the basis of six key turning points beginning with the Balfour Declaration (1917) and ending with the contemporary siege of the Gaza Strip. Somewhat idiosyncratically, he represents each of the six turning points and six chapter titles as individual “declarations of war.” Collectively they comprise the hundred years’ war waged against the Palestinian people.

Khalidi emphasizes that settler colonization, the driving force behind the Zionist movement, fueled the century of war against Palestinian national aspirations.

Moreover, he points out that Zionist migrants alone could not have carried out this century of colonial oppression without the support first of Great Britain and then of the United States.

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The Balfour Declaration’s call for a “national home for the Jewish people”—a statement thus couched in the “soft, deceptive language of diplomacy”—constituted the first declaration of war. The second declaration came in 1947-’48 and produced an actual conflict, one that culminated in “the systematic ethnic cleansing of the Arab-inhabited areas of the country.”

The third declaration of war was another real war, albeit one of only six days’ duration, in June 1967. Not only were the Arab states trounced by Israel but, adding insult to injury, Palestinians were omitted from the proposed basis for a diplomatic settlement of the conflict. U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 called only for “a just solution of the refugee problem.” Khalidi notes, “If the Palestinians were not mentioned and not a recognized party to the conflict, they could be treated as no more than a nuisance.”

The fourth declaration of war was the 1982 Israeli assault on Beirut, where Khalidi was living with his wife and two daughters.

The apartment of his brother and mother, who had been living in the city, took a direct hit from an Israeli artillery shell, but fortunately they had already relocated away from the front lines of the assault.

The fifth declaration was not a war but an uprising that began with the outbreak of the intifada in 1987. Khalidi argues that the ensuing Oslo Accords (1993) “in effect constituted another internationally sanctioned American-Israeli declaration of war on the Palestinians,” only this time Palestinian leaders “allowed themselves to be drawn into complicity with their adversaries.”

The sixth and final declaration was the well-chronicled devastation of the Gaza Strip in the 21st century. Here Khalidi points out that it made no difference whether George W. Bush or the “liberal” Barack Obama was in power in Washington, as the latter administration did nothing to restrain Israel’s indiscriminate 51-day assault on a virtually defenseless Gaza in 2014.

Khalidi references “the formidable power of the Israel lobby” and the absence of “an effective countervailing force in U.S. politics,” yet he insists that the lobby’s impact has MAY 2020

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been exaggerated. He condemns the “false narrative” that “the influence of Israel and its supporters on Middle East policy is always paramount,” arguing that this is only true when policy-makers “do not consider vital U.S. strategic interests to be engaged.” He claims a “legion” of examples to back this point, but in actuality there are only a few and they are not on the whole convincing.

Analysis of the Israel lobby was not a major focus of Khalidi’s book, however, which remains otherwise a richly informed, personalized account of a century of repression of a peoples’ national aspirations.

Readers seeking a comprehensive study of the history of Zionism and Palestinian nationalism, yet one enlivened by personal accounts and real-life experiences, will enjoy reading Khalidi’s account.

In the conclusion, Khalidi argues hopefully that Israel is “at least as contested globally” today as ever before. That contestation is a remarkable testament to the stubborn resistance that characterizes the Palestinians, including Rashid Khalidi and his family.

The Old Woman and the River

By Ismail Fahd Ismail, translated by Sophia Vasalou, Interlink Books, 2019, paperback, 160 pp. MEB: $15

Reviewed by Eleni Zaras

“On cultivated land, the nights are normally abuzz with different kinds of sounds, the frogs, the black beetles. Silence meant land that’s barren.”

MAY 2020

On the banks of the Shatt al-Arab River in southeastern Iraq, villages and agricultural lands were once “bursting with green.”

All this changed with the Iran-Iraq War. The Shatt al-Arab divides the two countries and in 1980, Saddam Hussain claimed that territorial disputes over the Shatt justified his invasion of Iran. Villages lining the river were subsequently evacuated and soldiers were ordered to dam its tributaries. In The Old Woman and the River, Ismail Fahd Ismail brings us the both humorous and harrowing legend of the unassuming hero who saved her village from desolation.

Um Qasm was uprooted from her village of Sabiliyat at the start of the war. As per military order, she was forced to flee with her family on foot to Najaf, a journey during which her husband Bu Qasm died. While her grown children carried on with their newly established lives in Najaf, Um Qasm’s heart remained in Sabiliyat. Not one to blindly follow orders, she swiftly made a plan: In the wee hours of the morning and without a word to her children or grandchildren, she set out on the uncertain road to sneak back into Sabiliyat with her donkey, Good Omen.

As she approached her village, “her heart skipped a beat.” Instead of arriving upon flowing rivers, she discovered dried-up beds, yellowed date palms and parched orchards. Even “the sky over Basra no longer looked the way it used to. There was a dullness about it that made her spirit clench.”

Um Qasm’s clever persuasion of the soldiers to let her stay and care for the village and its gardens, her unwavering belief in her husband’s spiritual presence and her inexplicable ability to communicate with her donkey, all humorously baffle the soldiers she encounters, as well as the reader. She gets to work in the ghostly absence of her family and neighbors, resourcefully reviving the village gardens and cooking for the

Eleni Zaras is the assistant director at Middle East Books and More. She has a BA in the History of Art from the University of Michigan and a Masters in History from the Universite Paris Diderot.

WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

troops nearby and, little by little, she nurtures both the soldiers and the land.

Beyond endearing eccentricities of this grandmotherly figure, Um Qasm’s outspokenness, defiance of military orders, and loyalty to the land and nature over military authority contribute to a body of literature that challenges the official, nationalist narratives of the Iran-Iraq War. Both Iran and Iraq waged aggressive propaganda campaigns to sanctify the war, prohibiting anyone to question the tactics or the war itself and celebrating the victims as martyrs. Literature produced about this war thus includes nationally endorsed or sponsored narratives, memoirs and fictionalized first-hand experiences as well as challenging surrealist depictions, such as in Iranian author Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s Thirst.

One recurring theme in Thirst, as the title suggests, is its stress on the maddening thirst experienced by the soldiers trapped in the trench-style war of attrition. Soldiers scan the hills for their enemies but obsess over the water tank below. Yet anyone who dared to fetch water from the tank would expose himself to the enemy and face almost certain death. “Water-bearing,” was thus elevated to “an act of heroism firmly etched on their minds.”

The Old Woman and the River expands on this notion of heroism and symbolism of water. Here, the value of water surpasses basic human needs and is at the heart of the idea of the homeland. The absurdity of waging a war to theoretically defend the homeland, while simultaneously destroying what made the homeland worth fighting for, is the irony elucidated through Um Qasm.

Um Qasm takes advantage of the soldier’s initial perception of her as a harmless, though stubborn, old woman: She asks questions the soldiers cannot and openly condemns and pushes back on unreasonable orders. In this way, The Old Woman and the River, like Thirst, actively questions the war’s validity and tactics, as well as government-backed conceptions of a hero.

Ismail’s folkloric telling lends the story its heart-warming and amusing lightness.

However, he balances the rosy charm of 67

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the promise of renewed date harvests, Um Qasm’s intimacy with the softening soldiers and her surprising stoicism, with inescapable signs of the war’s physical and psychological toll. A graveyard of remains, an undetonated Iranian shell and the weight of pre-war memories catch her off guard and settle heavily upon her in moments of silence and loneliness. Sights of the war’s damage to the trees and her friends’ homes are “as paining as [they are] shameful,” and she assesses candidly to herself, “There are ways of dying one can hardly conceive.”

Though embellished with imaginative details, the story of Sabiliyat and Um Qasm is based on a true story, and translator Sophia Vasalou confirms that Ismail—himself a native to Sabiliyat—did meet the real “Um Qasm.” However, further details of this encounter and Um Qasm’s life story will remain a mystery due to the author’s recent passing. Ismail’s transmission of this tale also leaves certain questions unanswered and brushes over, for example, the fate of Um Qasm’s own children. But perhaps such truths are better left unknown. For we

can imagine that Um Qasm wouldn’t want us to fixate on her, but rather on the “shameful” costs of war and the oasis of sublime date palms, frogs and flowing rivers she risked her life for.

Two Thousand and One Syrian Nights

By Pat McDonnell Twair, Independently Published, 2018, paperback, 282 pp. MEB: $21

Reviewed by Samir Twair

This book is about Pat McDonnell Twair, who was a journalist, archaeologist and ac-

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WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

tivist who travelled the world, especially the Middle East. Born in Long Beach, California, she had been an activist and advocate for the Palestinian cause since 1971 and a columnist for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs since 1987. She first went to Syria in 1977 while working on her doctorate in archaeology from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).

While working there, she fractured her ankle on an expedition in Ashra, near Deir ez-Zor, where she met her future husband Samir (this reviewer) and ended up staying in Syria for six years as a freelance journalist, publishing 1,800 stories covering all aspects of Syrian life. She passed away on Jan. 20, 2018 in Los Angeles after a long fight with an illness. Two Thousand and One Syrian Nights has been published posthumously. It tells the reader about her memories over the period she lived in Syria.

Since Pat was an archaeologist and writer, the reader will learn a lot about the history of Syria and early human history.

And while the book talks about ancient history, it tells even more about modern-day Syria. It covers the social and cultural life in late 1977 and afterward.

After Pat was liberated from crutches, she toured Damascus and, over time, the entire country. She writes about the Twair (which means “little bird” in Arabic) family

and its legacy, Arabian-style marriage and about the women of Syria, the artists of Damascus and excavations that took place in the past and present.

The book is also about a love story that happened on the banks of the Euphrates River between an Arab and an American.

This is a story describing how two worlds met and where the East and West crossed.

It is a love story with a happy ending.

She also devotes a chapter on Nasser Twair (the youngest brother of her husband Samir) and his tragic death. If history is the judge, Pat's adventures in Syria may become legend. Anyone interested in Syria

Samir Twair, former president of the Arab American Press Guild, reports on events in Syria for the Washington Report.

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and its culture, history and people—especially between the years 1977-1983— should acquire a copy of this book. When researchers study this time period in Syria, they will find Pat McDonnell’s writings as a standalone work, mainly because she was one of just a few, if not the only, self-employed Americans in Syria.

B O O K TA L K S Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion and Collective Memory in the Middle East by Kim Ghattas

When Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ascended to power in Iran following the 1979 Islamic Revolution that deposed Reza Shah Pahlavi, Saudi Arabia was largely relieved. The Kingdom had a good working relationship with the ousted shah, and feared the possibility of the revolution’s leftist forces consolidating power and installing an imposing communist regime in Tehran.

As a fellow pious and conservative Muslim, they surmised that Khomeini, though a Shi’a, shared a worldview eminently reconcilable with the one espoused by Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi religious elite.

It quickly became clear, however, that Riyadh dramatically misread the situation.

Khomeini was no ally; rather he was intent on usurping Saudi Arabia as the sole Islamic authority in the region. The Kingdom’s response to this sudden existential threat was swift and far-reaching, transforming the politics, culture and events of the entire Middle East, and unleashing MAY 2020

N E W A R R I VA L S We Are Not Here to Be Bystanders: A Memoir of Love and Resistance, by Linda Sarsour, 37 Ink, 2020, hardcover, 272 pp. MEB $24. Linda Sarsour, co-founder of the Women’s March, shares how growing up a Palestinian Muslim American empowered her to become a globally recognized activist on behalf of marginalized communities across the country.

From the Brooklyn bodega her father owned, where Sarsour learned the real meaning of intersectionality, to protests in the streets of Washington, DC, Sarsour’s experience as a daughter of Palestinian immigrants is a moving portrayal of what it means to find one’s voice and use it for the benefit of others. The memoir follows Sarsour as she learns the tenets of successful community organizing and through decades of fighting for racial, economic, gender and social justice as she becomes one of the most recognized activists in the nation.

The Syrian Revolution: Between the Politics of Life and The Geopolitics of Death, by Yasser Munif, Pluto Press, 2020, paperback, 208 pp. MEB $26. Understanding the Syrian revolution is unthinkable without an in-depth analysis from below. Paying attention to the complex activities of the grassroots resistance, this book demands we rethink the revolution.

Having lived in Syria for more than 15 years, Yasser Munif explores the micropolitics of revolutionary forces. He uncovers how cities are managed, how precious food is distributed and how underground resistance thrives in regions controlled by the regime. In contrast, the macropolitics of the elite Syrian regime are undemocratic, destructive and counter-revolutionary. Regional powers, Western elites, as well as international institutions choose this macropolitical lens to apprehend the Syrian conflict. By doing so, they also choose to ignore the revolutionaries’ struggles. Munif illustrates that this macro and geopolitical authoritarianism only brings death, and that by looking at the smaller picture—the local, the grassroots, the revolutionaries—we can see the politics of life emerge.

Bad News for Labour: Antisemitism, the Party & Public Belief by Greg Philo, Mike Berry, Justin Schlosberg, Antony Lerman and David Miller, Pluto Press, 2019, paperback, 192 pp. MEB $21. There has been an extraordinary amount of media reporting on the issue of Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party and anti-Semitism. In the three years after Corbyn became party leader there were more than 5,000 news stories and articles in the British national press alone.

Bad News for Labour examines the impact of this coverage on public beliefs about the party. It replaces media hype with the rigorous analysis of evidence. The authors draw on carefully compiled research to reveal surprising findings in this guide to the reality behind the headlines.

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what journalist Kim Ghattas calls a “black wave” across the region.

In her new book, Black Wave, Ghattas explains not only the origins of the SaudiIran conflict, but also how this conflict led to a fundamental reshaping of religious identities and everyday life throughout both the Sunni and Shi’i worlds.

“The Saudis became determined to position themselves as the sole defenders of the Muslim faith, at all cost, and on every front, from education to politics, from culture to the battlefields,” she writes. This meant supporting mujahedeen fighters in Afghanistan, investing deeply in religious education throughout the Muslim world and reshaping its own domestic religious laws. The result was the rapid spread of a deeply conservative brand of Islam throughout the region.

“The title [of the book] came from Youssef Chahine, the Egyptian movie director who said that there had been a ‘black wave’ coming from Saudi Arabia and from the Gulf generally to cover women in black, with the abaya and niqab in Egypt,” Ghattas said at the Feb. 5 launch of her book at Washington, DC’s Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In a similar vein, women in countries with close ties to Iran, such as Lebanon and Iraq, began donning the Shi’i chador.

Ghattas’ book emphasizes the regional consequences of the Saudi-Iran rivalry, but she also explores the domestic ramifications of their enmity.

While Iran experienced a sudden and dramatic cultural change—from the secular shah to the fundamentalist ayatollah—Ghattas said Saudi Arabia’s transition to a deeply conservative society was much less dramatic and perceptible. Before 1979, there were liberal strains within the country’s conservative religious code, she noted.

Women, for instance, appeared unveiled on Saudi television, and there were some cinemas in the country. Such liberties began to progressively disappear after 1979, as the country’s religious establishment was given a green light to impose their interpretation of Islam by a Saudi leadership that, according to Ghattas, “wanted to protect its throne and needed the clerics on their side.”

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Many in Saudi Arabia did not realize the profoundness of what was happening at the time. “When you’re in the thick of it, it’s hard to understand the trend lines,” Ghattas said.

“They thought it was temporary, they thought it would end, they thought this would not hold for long.”

Reformist Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has openly lamented the post-1979 cultural shifts and views his liberalizing policies as a way to reclaim Islam from ultra-conservative factions. His efforts have been met with wide support from his citizens, but Ghattas cautioned that conservative elements within the country are displeased with the fast pace of change.

“People are excited, but people are also troubled,” she said. “And I do think it’s possible there will be a backlash, because you can only keep the lid on those who oppose such movement for so long.”

The crown prince’s efforts—as well as the defiant youth movement against religious rule in Iran—are emblematic of a desire among many of the region’s citizens to reclaim a degree of separation between mosque and state. “I do think that the ‘black wave’ is receding generally in the region,” Ghattas said. “I do think that young people don’t want to be hostage any more to the ghosts of 1979.”

As was the case in the build-up to 1979, Ghattas emphasized that critical turning points are often only evident in retrospect.

Her book is thus not an effort to predict the future. Rather, she hopes her work clarifies the fateful events of the past so as to inform the decisive decisions being made today.

“My book helps put together all those pieces of the puzzle, to understand how it started and why we got to where we are today, and where are the key turning points,” she said.

—Dale Sprusansky

Islamophobia, Race and Global Politics by Nazia Kazi Headlines about Islamophobia almost always focus on individual events, such as attacks on mosques or on veiled women.

WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

While these incidents are not to be overlooked or minimalized, Stockton University professor Nazia Kazi believes more attention must be placed on understanding what engenders such acts of hate. In Islamophobia, Race and Global Politics, she contends that Islamophobia is rooted primarily in U.S. government policy toward the Muslim world. Decades of racist and imperialistic policies, coupled with a society and educational system that uncritically accepts and perpetuates government narratives, have fueled Islamophobia’s rise, she argues.

At a Feb. 19 event hosted by Georgetown University, Kazi noted that she recently surveyed undergraduates born after 9/11 to find out how much they know about the attacks. Saddam Hussain, ISIS, Pakistan and Palestine were among the culprits many students incorrectly blamed for the attacks. Many couldn’t list a reason why the U.S. invaded Afghanistan or Iraq. Students, she observed, seemed to only associate the day with patriotism and the heroism of first responders, “forgetting everything else.”

“Never forget,” she noted, is the “brand name of 9/11,” and yet “it seems the way we remember 9/11 has actually meant a deep forgetfulness.”

The troubling ignorance goes beyond the events of 9/11. “What about before 9/11/2001?” she asked. “What if we didn’t forget the geopolitics, the histories between the U.S. and what we now call the Middle East?” As just one example, Kazi noted the prominent role the CIA played in funding mujahedeen fighters in Afghanistan, fueling their flourishing opium trade and enabling their horrific treatment of women.

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“These are not the histories that make it into our social studies books,” Kazi observed. “The histories that are popularly taught have been incomplete, to put it mildly.” The result, she said, is that “generations of Americans have come to see their country as a global force for good, or a hapless victim of evil, but never, to quote Martin Luther King Jr., as ‘the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.’”

Americans, Kazi urged, must come to terms with their country’s history of imperialism abroad and racism at home—and see where the two are interconnected.

“We must push ourselves to see the Islamophobia that is perpetrated by the state, and all too often paid for by our tax dollars,” she said. “We must broaden our definition of Islamophobia. We must include in our definition sanctions passed by wealthy nations that have kept countless Muslims from accessing basic necessities… .We must include the menacing presence of military bases on foreign soil and we must include those unmanned American drones that carry out strikes killing civilians.”

Kazi said the goal of her book is to offer more than a simplistic retort to misconceptions about the Islamic faith.

“All too often when Islamophobia is written about for a general audience it loses its critical content, and what it turns into is a book explaining what Ramadan is about, it turns into a book explaining why some Muslim women wear a hijab, and it takes all that stuff about geopolitics and the histories of imperialism and the histories of white supremacy, and it assumes that the reader can’t digest that,” she said. “And in doing so, it kind of loses the crux of the message.”

Kazi hopes she has filled this void by writing a biting but approachable book that helps everyday Americans connect the dots on the historical events and enduring policies that have produced the Islamophobia we confront today.

—Dale Sprusansky

Dale Sprusansky is managing editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs magazine.

MAY 2020

N E W A R R I VA L S Going Home: A Walk Through Fifty Years of Occupation, by Raja Shehadeh, The New Press, 2020, hardcover, 256 pp. MEB $22. In Going Home, Raja Shehadeh, the Orwell Prize–winning author of Palestinian Walks, takes us on a series of journeys around his hometown of Ramallah. Set in a single day—the day that happens to be the 50th anniversary of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza—the book is a powerful and moving record and chronicle of the changing face of his city. A penetrating evocation of memory, pain and place that is lightened by everyday joys such as delightful accounts of shared meals and gardening, Going Home is perhaps Raja Shehadeh’s most moving and painfully visceral addition to his series of personal histories of the occupation, confirming writer Rachel Kushner’s judgment that “Shehadeh is a buoy in a sea of bleakness.”

Globalized Authoritarianism: Megaprojects, Slums, and Class Relations in Urban Morocco, by Koenraad Bogaert, University of Minnesota Press, 2018, paperback, 312 pp. MEB $28. Over the past 30 years, Morocco’s cities have transformed dramatically. Megaprojects are redesigning the cityscapes of Rabat, Tangier and Casablanca, turning the nation’s urban centers into laboratories of capital accumulation, political dominance and social control.

In Globalized Authoritarianism, Koenraad Bogaert links more abstract questions of government, globalization and neoliberalism with concrete changes in the city. Bogaert goes deep beneath the surface of Morocco’s urban prosperity to reveal how neoliberal governance and increased connectivity—engendered by global capitalism—have transformed Morocco’s leading urban spaces, opening up new sites for capital accumulation, creating enormous class divisions and enabling new innovations in state authoritarianism. Showing how Morocco’s experiences have produced new forms of globalization, Bogaert offers a bridge between in-depth issues of Middle East studies and broader questions of power, class and capital as they continue to evolve in the 21st century.

Dune Song, by Anissa M. Bouziane, Interlink Books, 2019, 369 pp. MEB $15.

Winner of the Special Jury Prize, Prix Littéraire Sofitel Tour Blanche “I came to the Sahara to be buried.”

After witnessing the collapse of the World Trade Center, Jeehan Nathaar leaves her New York life with her sense of identity fractured and her American dream destroyed. She returns to Morocco to make her home with a family that’s not her own. Healed by their kindness but caught up in their troubles, Nathaar struggles to move beyond the pain and confusion of September 11th. On this desiccated landscape, thousands of miles from Ground Zero, the Dune sings of death, love and forgiveness.

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Other People’s Mail Compiled by Dale Sprusansky IN MEMORY OF COURAGEOUS OPPONENT OF IRAQ WAR

To the Olean Times Herald, March 11, 2020 I am saddened over the passing of Rep. Amo Houghton. I respected him more than any other congressional representative of mine because his door was always open, and he listened without prejudging.

I last met with Amo during the fall of 2002, just before the war against Iraq. It was easy to gain access to him, easier than with any congressperson since. I urged him to vote against authorizing the impending war in Iraq.

He asked me why, given our political differences, I thought I might sway him. I said that I remembered well, how, during his first term, 12 of us met with him and urged him to vote against funding the Contras in Nicaragua, and how, in the end, he voted against such aid.

He laughed. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “That was the only time I got a direct call from the president of the United States.

Reagan called me, furious with my vote.”

Shortly after our meeting, Houghton became one of six Republicans who voted against the Iraq war, a vote that was courageous and, in hindsight, wise. We can only hope that his willingness to step across aisles and be open to genuine conversation might inspire our congresspeople today.

Houghton should have become chair of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee because of his tenure in office, but his non-partisanship kept him from getting that position in a Congress that had become highly partisan. He left Congress shortly thereafter.

He is missed.

Barry Gan, Olean, NY

POLITICIANS, NOT INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY, CAUSED IRAQ WAR

To the Wyoming Tribune Eagle, March 18, 2020 The purpose of this letter is to point out a gross misstatement made by Cal Thomas in his March 12 column. There were quite a few misstatements, but I will point out the one I feel is most egregious.

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Thomas stated, “As for the credibility of American intelligence, consider their record during George W. Bush’s administration, beginning with weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which were never found, resulting in the deaths of many in the unnecessary war that followed.” Thomas is implying that it was the intelligence agencies that led us to believe there were WMDs. This is simply not true.

The George W. Bush administration (especially Vice President Dick Cheney, who would be able to take advantage of costplus contracts by his company, Halliburton) led the American people to believe that U.S. intelligence found evidence of WMDs, not emphasizing to the American people that there were “substantial disagreements that existed in the intelligence community” regarding whether Iraq had WMDs. “At one point before the war, CIA Director George Tenet warned the White House not to use sketchy intelligence about Iraqi purchases of uranium in Africa—but the White House inserted it into a presidential speech anyway, much to its later embarrassment,” noted the Washington Post. In addition, the U.N. Inspection Commission warned the U.S. that there were no WMDs in Iraq.

The Bush administration sent Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger to verify that Niger had sold Iraq uranium (to use in WMDs). When Wilson could not find any evidence of this, Bush still claimed that Iraq was buying uranium from Niger in his 2003 State of the Union address. Wilson then wrote a Washington Post op-ed with his findings that opposed Bush’s claim. After this, in retaliation, the Bush administration helped to out Wilson’s then-wife, Valerie Plame, as a covert CIA operative.

Carol Mathia, Cheyenne, WY

AMID CORONAVIRUS, U.S. MUST EASE SANCTIONS ON IRAN

To The News-Gazette, March 27, 2020 To Americans, this coronavirus is doubly novel. We’ve never been exposed to this strain, and this generation has never experienced a pandemic disease here at home.

No matter how dire this situation is, how-

WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

ever, surely we can cease hurting a smaller and poorer nation that is suffering greatly.

Iran has fivefold more COVID-19 cases per capita, plus a many-fold greater fatality rate. Its medical system is overwhelmed, just like Italy’s has been and ours soon will be. Iran must buy more supplies, but the economic sanctions imposed by Trump and the recession they caused make that difficult. Appallingly, in March his administration tightened those sanctions further.

What claim to global moral leadership can remain for America after acting so? The world has seen President Donald Trump unilaterally tear up the nuclear deal and now exacerbate COVID-19’s impact so that thousands die unnecessarily. “America First” descends into solipsism.

Are our minds so self-absorbed that we don’t even notice the suffering we inflict on other people? Will “America” stand for anything more than selfishness, racism and nationalistic military power?

We must instead heed U.N. SecretaryGeneral Antonio Guterres’ call for “global solidarity,” for “if we let the virus spread like wildfire... it will kill millions of people.” China and Korea have shown that coronavirus can be contained. After failing to prepare when there was time, we now face the immediate peril it poses. Yet in the longer term, we will best protect ourselves from COVID-19 by re-engaging the human family as partners and friends, not scapegoating other nations.

Robert J. Hudson, Champaign, IL

IRAN’S FAILED RESPONSE TO CORONAVIRUS

To The Mercury News, March 11, 2020 Members of the Iranian-American community are watching in disbelief how their homeland has become the epicenter of coronavirus, with an appalling rate of fatalities and an exponential rate of infection.

The lack of candor by the regime has not only led to the explosion of the infection, but it’s being accused of causing the disease to spread to neighboring countries.

On March 4, a Washington Post editorial stated: “Iran’s reaction to coronavirus has become a danger for the world.” An article in the New York Times on March 3: “But instead of receiving government help, overwhelmed doctors and nurses say they have been warned by security forces to keep quiet.”

Iran’s security forces are no match to a nanometer-sized virus that is spreading like MAY 2020

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Lott and Phil Gramm.

When I pointed out that PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP SECRETARY OF STATE MIKE POMPEO these men were opposed VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE to everything that I, as a lib1600 PENNSYLVANIA AVE. NW 2201 C ST. NW eral Jew, supported, includWASHINGTON, DC 20500 WASHINGTON, DC 20520 COMMENT LINE: (202) 456-1111 PHONE: (202) 647-6575 ing civil rights, voting rights WWW.WHITEHOUSE.GOV/CONTACT VISIT WWW.STATE.GOV TO E-MAIL and public education, I was escorted out of the room. I ANY REPRESENTATIVE ANY SENATOR oppose religious fundaU.S. HOUSE OF U.S. SENATE mentalism of all stripes, REPRESENTATIVES WASHINGTON, DC WASHINGTON, DC 20510 whether it is Christian, 20515 (202) 225-3121 (202) 224-3121 Muslim or Jewish.

DON’T FORGET YEMEN AIPAC is a fundamentalist organization and Bernie Sanders ness—with poor outcomes. In modern hisTo The Register-Guard, March 16, 2020 knew he could not get a fair hearing from tory, handing off wars to underprepared The U.S. is fueling one of the worst huthem. government forces has seldom succeeded manitarian crises existing in the world Gary Kenton, Greensboro, NC against patient insurgent forces, whose today: The Saudi- and Emirati-led coalitimeline is endless, as it was with North tion’s brutal war in Yemen. In February, 19 UTAH CONSIDERS ANTI-BDS BILL Vietnam General Vo Nguyen Giap, who children were among at least 31 civilians reminisced he would have fought untiringly. killed in airstrikes in Yemen.

To The Salt Lake Tribune, March 12, 2020 Meanwhile, nation-building in Afghanistan Yet across the U.S., those attacks and The Utah Senate is considering SB219, has failed. And how to extricate ourselves deaths received little to no news coverage. a bill that would make it illegal for the state from asymmetric wars—with a “win”—has That’s shameful. There is a virtual media to contract with any company that boycotts confounded policymakers. blackout on Yemen, and the U.S. is giving companies in Israel.

The extraordinary mettle of our fighters, a blank check of military support to the First, boycotting is a protected right under the lethality of our weapons, the quality of Saudis and Emirates. the First Amendment of the Constitution. It our training and the size of our military Three-quarters of the population of is a form of free speech. budget have mattered little. Ending asymYemen—22 million people—need humanSecondly, why even bring this issue up? metric wars to our geopolitical gain continitarian assistance. There are 1.2 million How will it help the state of Utah to pass ues to elude U.S. decision-makers. It’s cases of cholera as Yemen experiences the such a law? This is slippery constitutional better to leave Afghanistan and enshrine largest cholera outbreak in modern history. ground, since many states that have the lessons.

And 8 million children are without regular passed such laws have faced legal chalKeith Tidman, Bethesda, MD access to basic water, sanitation and hylenges, and the Supreme Court has already giene services. ruled that boycotting is constitutional.

AIPAC IS NOT BIPARTISAN The U.S. public, you and I, deserve to Barbara Taylor, Salt Lake City, UT know. We have to do everything we can to To the News & Record, March 2, 2020 PALESTINE’S ISRAEL-IMPOSED educate ourselves, to hold our members of It was upsetting to read the letter from POVERTY Congress accountable and to push for three Greensboro rabbis in Sunday’s peace in Yemen. But to do so, first we have News & Record criticizing presidential To the Star Tribune, Jan. 31, 2020 to know what’s happening. That’s why I’m candidate Bernie Sanders for choosing On Jan. 30, Star Tribune Opinion pubwriting this letter today: to stop the media not to attend a recent American Israel lished an online commentary titled “Israel blackout on Yemen.

Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conferwon the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and any A. Victoria Lambert, Yachats, OR ence (“Sen. Sanders’ AIPAC remarks peace plan has to reflect that.” In it, the misrepresent,” March 1). Rabbis Fred author claimed, seemingly without any AFGHANISTAN WITHDRAWAL WILL Guttman, Andy Koren and Joshua Bensense of irony, “The fact is that Israel has BE PAINFUL, BUT IS NECESSARY Gideon describe AIPAC as being “one of become a prosperous, modern, Western the few bipartisan organizations left in our country, while Palestinians remain mired in To The Washington Post, March 8, 2020 country.” poverty.”

Ending U.S. participation in the nearly That statement is false. AIPAC is utCan any serious person state that the two-decade war in Afghanistan is overdue. terly partisan, representing the interests Palestinians remain mired in poverty withBut let’s be clear: The war isn’t ending so of one party: the Likud Party of Israel. out then acknowledging that they are an ocmuch as it’s being handed off to Afghan When anyone dares to criticize Israel, cupied people under restrictive control by President Ashraf Ghani and his forces to AIPAC goes on the attack, accusing them the state of Israel? How are people supshoulder. Fifty years ago, it was “Vietof anti-Semitism. posed to thrive when the occupier restricts namization”—as President Richard M. Years ago, I attended an AIPAC meettravel and commerce? It would behoove Nixon explained, to “expand, equip and ing in Greensboro and was distressed to the editorial staff to publish items that are at train South Vietnamese forces” to take on hear the leaders express unwavering least somewhat tethered to both common a larger role. Years ago this same strategy support for their best friends in Congress, sense and reality. assumed the guise of “Afghanization.” including Jesse Helms, Dick Armey, Trent Joe Wenker, Minneapolis, MN ■ Yet it’s a strategy born of war weariwildfire. It may be that the rest of the world is thinking about technical solutions to this problem (such as a vaccine), but in Iran the people are fighting in two fronts.

One with a deceptive government, the other to save their own lives.

Shahla Dastmalchi, Pleasanton, CA

MAY 2020

TELL YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS WHAT YOU THINK

WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

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AET’s 2020 Choir of Angels

the following are individuals, organizations, companies and foundations whose help between Jan. 1, 2020 and March 13, 2020 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 are helping us co-sponsor the conference “the israel lobby and american policy.” others are donating to our “Capital Building fund,” which will help us expand Middle east Books and More. We are deeply honored by their confidence and profoundly grateful for their generosity.

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Catherine Abbott, Edina, MN Edwin Amidon, Charlotte, VT Anace Aossey, Cedar Rapids, IA Ahmed Ayish, Arlington, VA Sam Burgan, Falls Church, VA Gregory DeSylva, Rhinebeck, NY Sarah L. Duncan, Vienna, OH Joseph & Angela Gauci, Whittier, CA Doug Greene, Bowling Green, OH Julester Haste, Oxford, IA M. Al Hussaini, Great Falls, VA Mr. & Mrs. Azmi Ideis, Deltona, FL Mr. & Mrs. Basim Kattan, Washington, DC Edward Lesoon. Jr., Pittsburgh, PA Edwin Lindgren, Overland Park, KS Tom Mickelson, Cottage Grove, WI Claire Nader, Winsted, CT Stephen L. Naman, Atlanta, GA Mary Neznek, Washington, DC W. Eugene Notz, Charleston, SC Dr. Mohammed Sabbagh, Grand Blanc, MI Irmgard Scherer, Fairfax, VA

U.N. Resolutions Continued from page 65

they actually voted to legitimize Israeli depredations, rather, that their lack of condemnation sent a signal. And, in the meantime, both Russia and China, having no post-colonial dog in the fight, were themselves engaged in various forms of tailsniffing with Israel, where they now join the Saudis and their friends.

In this context, Britain is almost as important as it generally thinks it is! It is unlikely that there would be so many defections from international legitimacy if Tony Blair had not shown the way. It also puts into context the ferocity of the Israeli hasbara persecution of the British Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who would otherwise, at the very least, have reverted to Britain’s original principled position and almost certainly would have pursued it vigorously and actively.

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Yasser Soliman, Hamilton Township, NJ Darcy Sreebny, Issaquah, WA

Tom Veblen, Washington, DC

William G. Coughlin, Brookline, MA Bilquis Jaweed, West Chester, OH Killgore Family, Washington, DC * Dr. Muhammad M. Kudaimi, Munster, IN Sedigheh Kunkel, Santa Monica, CA Tony Litwinko, Los Angeles, CA Richard Makdisi & Lindsay Wheeler, Berkeley, CA Dr. Charles W. McCutchen, Bethesda, MD Jeanne Riha, Brooklyn, NY William R. Stanley, Lexington, SC Dr. James Zogby, Washington, DC***

Asha A. Anand, Bethesda, MD Nabila Eltaji, Amman, Jordan Dr. & Mrs. Clyde Farris, West Linn, OR*,** Mohammed Jokhdar, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia Ghazy Kader, Shoreline, WA Dr. Imad Tabry, Fort Lauderdale, FL

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A welcome development, that predictably “outraged” Pompeo, was the long delayed release of the U.N. Human Rights Council’s database of companies involved in Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territory. No less than 32 states voted in favor of the Human Rights Council resolution requesting the creation of the database, and 15 abstained. “But it is important to note that not a single state voted against it,” the HRC points out. But it is equally important to note the growing spineless minority, which is not prepared to condone Israeli behavior but will not overtly oppose it.

The Palestinian issue has been the nemesis of several previous Human Rights Commissioners for their temerity in thinking the Universal Declaration of Human Rights applied to the U.S. and Israel as well.

There has been heavy pressure for United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet to quit, but as a former President of Chile, it is not so easy

Washington RepoRt on Middle east affaiRs

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for Pompeo to give her a pink slip, although the former President of Ireland, Mary Robinson was not protected by her former office when she was eased out just as Jordan’s Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein refused to stand for a second term because he would not “bend the knee” to the U.S. However, because of the ideological obduracy of the administration, which quit the council in 2018, it has little leverage.

But there is a message here. Too often the evil that politicians do at the U.N. goes unreported. Governments and diplomats are not held to account for their votes. Are the people of Canada and Western Europe, let alone those of the Arab world, aware of the shameless betrayals of international law and the U.N. Charter that their own governments and allies are practicing? It is long past time for BDS supporters to apply pressure on them. And, perhaps for President Mahmoud Abbas to call out so-called friends. ■ May 2020

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American Educational Trust Washington Report on Middle East Affairs P.O. Box 53062 Washington, DC 20009

May 2020

Vol. XXXIX, No. 3

Palestinian artists Dergham Qraiqea (l) and Samar Saad paint patterns on protective face masks in order to encourage people to wear them amid the COVID-19 pandemic in Gaza City, March 25.

(Photo by yasser Qudih/Xinhua via Getty)