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THE ANNEXATION OF PALESTINE: 21ST CENTURY APARTHEID
Historical “Moments” And Hope For Change
DISPLAY UNTIL 9/21/2020
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TELLING THE TRUTH SINCE 1982
On Middle East Affairs
Volume XXXIX, No. 5
August/September 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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Annexation and Apartheid Have Been the Plan From Day One—Ramzy Baroud, Sam Bahour, Declan Kearney
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Reality and Rights, Principles and Realpolitik —Ian Williams
Canada’s Attacks on Free Speech May Have Cost It a Seat on the Security Council—Candice Bodnaruk
24
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Gulf Reaction to Israeli Annexation Plans —Stasa Salacanin
Israel Viewed as Alien to the Values of Most American Jews—Allan C. Brownfeld
Historical “Moments” and the Hope for Change —Walter L. Hixson
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It Takes a Community to Support Wrongfully Imprisoned Muslims—Jeanne Finley
46
28 30
32 34 36 38 40 42
Jamaal Bowman’s Historic Win Demonstrates Change is Coming—Dr. James Zogby
Congressional Letters, but No Actions, Oppose Israeli Annexation of Parts of the West Bank —Shirl McArthur
Israel Affinity Organizations Received Millions In Forgivable PPP Loans—Grant F. Smith The Zionist Campaign Against Free Speech on Campus—Walter L. Hixson
Preventing Israel Lobby Propaganda in Textbooks —Grant F. Smith
Should Evangelicals Terminate Their Affair With the State of Israel?—Rev. Alex Awad The Economic Hardship is Felt Again in Gaza —Mohammed Omer
Deteriorating U.S.-China Relations Impact Israel —John Gee
SPECIAL REPORTS
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A Time of Reckoning for Lebanon —Akram Krayem and Osama Safi
Turkey’s Libyan Return—Jonathan Gorvett
49 70
Calligrapher Nihad Dukhan Respects Tradition as He Creates Modern Designs—Eleni Zaras
Bahaa Tayar, a Palestinian Social Work Pioneer: 19572020—Ellen Siegel
ON THE COVER: Palestinian artist Taqi Spateen paints a mural of Iyad Halak on the Israeli separation wall in Bethlehem, June 14, 2020. Halak, a 32-year-old Palestinian man with autism, was shot dead by Israeli police outside his school for people with special needs in East Jerusalem on May 30. Moved by watching protests in the U.S., on June 9, Spateen painted a mural of George Floyd, killed by police on May 25, saying, “I want the people in America who see this mural to know that we in Palestine are standing with them, because we know what it’s like to be strangled every day.” PHOTO BY LUAY SABABA/XINHUA VIA GETTY
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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
James Zogby: Palestinians Are “Being Asked to
Please Don’t Call Us “Arab,” Emad Moussa, http://mondoweiss.net
Hold the Scalpel” for Their Own Amputation, Jonathan Ofir, http://mondoweiss.net
OV-1
Netanyahu Adamant on Annexation Without Freezing Expansion of Settlements, Dave Decamp, http://www.antiwar.com
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Annexation Is a Crisis for Israel Supporters, Not Israel—Munayyer, Philip Weiss, http://mondoweiss.net
OV-4
Is AIPAC Finished? No Conference, Guidance, Deference, or Foreign Affairs Committee Chair, Grant F. Smith, http://www.antiwar.com
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Federal Court Allows American Studies Association Boycott of Israel to Stand, The American Studies Association, theasa.net
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Finally Getting a Place at the Academic Table— A New Faculty Chair in Palestinian Studies at Brown University, John Mason, www.arabamerica.com
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As Odd Bedfellows Fall Out, Israel Bans Evangelical GOD TV For Evangelizing Jews, Juan Cole, www.juancole.com
OV-10
Why the U.S. Will Never End Iranian Influence in Iraq, Robert Moore, www.theamericanconservative.com
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Why a U.S. Policy of Fomenting Regime Change in Iran Is a Bad Idea, James Siebens and Charles Meire, responsiblestatecraft.org
OV-11
Israel Is Trying to Provoke Iran to Start a War, Muhammad Sahimi, http://www.antiwar.com OV-12 “Wolf Warrior” Diplomacy: Israel’s China Strategy In Peril, Ramzy Baroud, www.ramzybaroud.net
OV-14
What Was the Deadly India-China Border Clash Really About?, Tariq Mir, www.aljazeera.com
OV-15
DEPARTMENTS 5 Publishers’ Page
6 letters to the editor 52 Culture:
Food During a Pandemic: A Source of
53 WagiNg PeaCe:
Trump Administration Offers No
Resistance to Israeli Annexation 63 the World looks at the Middle east —CARTOONS 64 Middle east books revieW 71 obituaries
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that the Hagia Sophia will become a mosque again, on July 10. The Turkish Republic’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, transformed the site, built as a Christian cathedral and later used as an Ottoman mosque, into a museum more than eight decades ago. 72 other PeoPle’s Mail
73 2020 aet Choir oF aNgels
7 iNdeX to advertisers
PHOTO PHIL PASQUINI
Comfort, Stress and Resilience
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Making Annexation Official
For decades, Israel has been systematically dispossessing Palestinians from their lands. The whole time, the U.S. has done very little to slow down or push back against Israel’s rogue activities. Now, with Donald Trump in the White House, Israel has decided to go for the jugular and announce its plans to officially annex large portions of Palestinian land. In the U.S., the move has been met with strong opposition among many traditionally strong supporters of Israel, especially within the Democratic Party (but much less so among Republicans). While these individuals are not wrong to criticize this latest Israeli initiative, one has to ask…
Where Have They Been?
As Ramzy Baroud and Sam Bahour point out in this issue (see pp. 8-11), annexation is but the latest step in Israel’s long quest to Judaize the land from the river to the sea. It is the end game, not the beginning of a process. Put another way, pro-Israel voices vociferously warning against annexation are at best the equivalent of a dying drug dealer calling in a priest to make a deathbed confession. One appreciates the gesture, but wishes a solid effort to change their ways had been made much sooner. That being said, Palestine is not dead. And, while facts and history are important, activists ought to use this time to welcome genuine converts now seeing the light, and not chastise them for past infractions. As the recent multiracial movement to end racism in the U.S. shows, it’s never too late for justice, and…
Solidarity Moves Mountains.
Our resident historian Walter Hixson (see p. 24) explains that “moments” move history, and it appears the brutal and tragic murder of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer was one of those “moments.” As he powerfully puts it, “George Floyd may have appeared powerless on the evening of May 25, with that jackbooted officer’s knee on his neck, but history has shown the reverse was true. Floyd’s death was tragic, to be sure, but it gave life to the most powerful and inspiraAUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020
Publishers’ Page SAMEH RAHMI/NURPHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES
American Educational Trust
A mural in Gaza City depicts George Floyd, killed by a police officer who pinned him to the ground with a knee on his neck. tional ‘moment’ of our time.” As advocates for justice in Palestine, are we going to lament over Israel’s planned annexation, or use it as a “moment” to transform how the world views Palestine?
Palestinians Recognize the Black Struggle
To Palestinians, including a muralist in Gaza (see above), George Floyd’s killing looked familiar. Israeli soldiers, police and settlers have been getting away with murdering Palestinians for decades. Palestinian artist Taqi Spateen painted a mural of George Floyd in Bethlehem, saying, “I want the people in America who see this mural to know that we in Palestine are standing with them, because we know what it’s like to be strangled every day.” He also wanted Americans to know about Iyad Halak (on this issue’s cover), an autistic young Palestinian, another victim of police brutality and state violence, senselessly killed by Israeli forces in East Jerusalem. Like George Floyd’s murder, the world took note of Iyad Halak’s slaying, and is resolved to bring both men justice.
Thank You “Angels”
You answered our May donation appeal, opened your wallets and your hearts and
reached out to protect the Washington Report and Middle East Books and More (see p. 73-74). While few of our international readers received the appeal (the global pandemic closed postal systems and offices around the world and most international mail was returned), the North American response was heartening. As you know, the loss of walk-in sales and postponement of summer festivals and major conferences (including our own, rescheduled to March 4-5, 2021) has been cataclysmic. We loved seeing you at events and we counted on your purchases at our popular pop-up booth— loaded with books, pottery, embroidery, olive oil products and more. Thank you for continuing to purchase books, redecorating your homes with posters, embroidery and pottery, and trying out our olive oils, coffee and spices—all online and via curb-side pickup.
We’re Asking for More Support
We refuse to join the brick-and-mortar retailers and independent bookstores that are closing for good because of Amazon and other giant corporations. Last week, we spoke with a long-time subscriber who owned many bookstores in California. Gradually he was forced to close all of them and now he said those towns have become “bookstore deserts.” He encouraged us to continue our plan to renovate the bookstore and add a coffee shop now, even before people are ready to congregate in large numbers. He urged us to build today and get Middle East Books ready for future community events. But it turns out we need more than $100,000 to make those renovations. Please send a check to AET, 1902 18th St, NW, Washington, DC, with “bookstore” on the memo line to help make your favorite bookstore a special gathering place for our community. Soon, with your help, friends can meet again to enjoy Middle Eastern hospitality, book clubs and talks, film screenings, coffee, tea and more. Please help us make a special place for our vital community and...
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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:
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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. Material from the Washington Report may be reprinted without charge with attribution to Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. Bylined material must also be attributed to the author. This release does not apply to photographs, cartoons or reprints from other publications. Indexed by ProQuest, Gale, Ebsco Information Services, InfoTrac, LexisNexis, Public Affairs Information Service, Index to Jewish Periodicals, Ethnic News Watch, Periodica Islamica. 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 WEST BANK ANNEXATION LATEST PHASE OF THE PEACE PROCESS
Israeli plans to annex parts of the West Bank and the Jordan Valley are the latest phase in a process that began accelerating 53 years ago. At the end of the 1967 war, Israel seized and occupied the Golan Heights, the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem in violation of international law, which forbids the retention and development of captured territory. After 1973 the illegal settlement program began in earnest and the so-called “peace process” has allowed Israel’s gradual seizure of all valuable Palestinian territory. Western governments, evangelical Zionists, Israel lobby groups, sympathetic pundits and pliable academics have faithfully promoted the fictional “peace process” to facilitate this program of endless expansion. The entire exercise has been illegal under international law since at least 1949, protected mainly by U.S. diplomatic, economic and military power. Trump’s “Deal of the Century” has encouraged the Netanyahu government to proceed brazenly with the final stages of an annexation plan that predates the 1967 war. The modern Israeli state and its prestate founders have always been committed to the seizure and annexation of greater Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan and also southern Lebanon, the Sinai and southern Syria. They call this Eretz Israel, otherwise known as the promised land of biblical legend. Both American and Israeli authorities have always insisted that the Palestinians negotiate privately and directly with the Israelis under U.S. supervision; a prospect most appealing to those with overwhelming power. Morgan Duchesney, Ottawa, Canada History has indeed been cruel to the Palestinians. This issue begins with three articles that brilliantly outline how it has always been Israel’s intention to grab as much Palestinian land as possible. As you note, this has taken place with abundant U.S. financial and diplomatic support. It is our view that Israel’s behavior will not change unless its patrons in Washington
WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS
hold it accountable. There are small signs this is happening (such as long-time Israel defender Rep. Eliot Engel losing his primary in New York), but with Donald Trump and Joe Biden expected to top ballots this November, it appears dramatic change in U.S. policy is still, at best, years away.
U.S. SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL IS COMPLETELY UNWARRANTED
Now that it has apparently been determined that the tactics promoted by the Israeli police in training our police (use of tear gas, rubber bullets, knee on neck) are no longer acceptable, should this not lead then to our repudiation of a country which uses such tactics with apparent impunity? Israel has been guilty of so many human rights violations in its brutal oppression of the Palestinians, yet the U.S. still supports it monetarily, militarily and morally over all others; in fact, even above that of our own interests. In his Sept. 16, 1991 article in the Baltimore Sun, sarcastically titled “The Advantages of Making Israel our 51st State,” Richard Reeves highlighted the absurdity of the degree of U.S. aid Israel receives. “States, the old 50, are getting less and less money from Washington each year, and Israel gets more and more,” he said. “We could even, since Israel’s not very big, make it a city. Call it, say, ‘Detroit,’ and the people who live there would not get a penny, much less $10 billion loan guarantees to build town houses for newly arrived homeless people from the Soviet Union.... The mayor of Detroit demanding loan guarantees for the homeless? Forget it. He would not get past the White House switchboard. These are hard times at home, my friend.” It’s way past time for the U.S. to stand up for its own principles and stop relying on such a racist country as Israel for guidance. As suggested by Alan P. Goldstein in his recent June 10 letter to the Washington Post, “Defunding police is cutting your nose off to spite your face. Remove the military hardware and clothing from police forces and cancel all training contracts with the Israel Defense Forces.” AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020
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Doris Rausch, Columbia, MD our readers to continue sharing our KEEP THOSE CARDS AND LETTERS Richard Reeves’ article truly does articles, as well as other good reCOMING! highlight the absurdity of the sources, such as documentaries. Send your letters to the editor to the Washington Report, P.O. Box 53062, Washington, DC 20009 amount of support the U.S. proAs you have discovered, once or e-mail <letters@wrmea.org>. vides to Israel. Even if Israel were people learn what is going on, they not a serial violator of human rights become advocates for justice. and international law, we’d still find it diffiseems to be never ending, one in which ACTION TOOK TEETH OUT OF cult to legitimize the amount of assistance murder was committed by the Israeli miliANTI-BDS BILL it receives. tary against ten innocent persons. In reference to your story in the June/July The article in question is the one apTHE U.S. MUST PUT AN END TO issue, “State-Level Efforts to Stifle Free pearing on page 53 of the May 2020 issue. ISRAELI IMPUNITY Speech on Israel Continue,” here is my Specifically, the statements by Mubarak I was pleased to receive the most recent comment on the California legislation: Awad concerning the documentary, “The issue of your splendid magazine. But like Although it is true that the California legTruth: Lost at Sea” by filmmaker Rifat most issues over the past few years, I deislature passed a resolution against comAudeh, involving the attack by Israeli sperived little joy in reading the various artipanies and individuals who practice BDS, cial forces in international waters on the cles. One excerpt produced spasms of it is also important to note that a delegation Freedom Flotilla headed to Gaza to proprofound grief and anger of such great inof activists, organized by the Sacramento vide some degree of relief to the Palestintensity that I could not stop the tears from chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, manian residents of that sorrowful Israeli-crewelling in my eyes and spilling down my aged to extract the teeth from the bill. It ated ghetto that daily, weekly, monthly and face. Another report of Israeli perfidy and carries no punishment for so-called “ofyearly becomes more than a hell hole. outright disregard for international law that fenders” and only serves to maintain the What struck me and forced me to tears AIPAC funding for the members of the legand gross anger was a stateislature who proposed it. ment by Awad in which he reThank you for your excellent reporting. minded the audience that Israel I have used your information about AIPAC learned it could get away with and pro-Israel campaign donations in premurder after attacking the USS sentations, and hope to make it to your Liberty on June 5, 1967, killing 34 annual conference sometime soon. American service members and Lois Pearlman, Guerneville, CA wounding another 140. He was We are happy to hear JVP was able to correct on all counts. water down that outrageous piece of legFor the first 60 years of my life islation. It shows how important it is for citI had been a fairly neutral citizen izens to be involved at all levels of goverregarding the issues confronting nance! the world over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Then I discovered the Washington Report in a local library. I presently believe that the Alalusi Foundation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 major threat to peace in the world Al-Mokha Coffee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 exists in that little strip of land that lies between Egypt’s Sinai on the American Near East Refugee Aid south, and Lebanon-Syria on the (ANERA) . . . . . . . Inside Back Cover north. The only real solution to Barefoot to Palestine . . . . . . . . . . . 69 OTHER VOICES is an optional 16-page supple the problem will occur when the Friends of Birzeit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 ment available only to subscribers of the WashingUnited States becomes a truly Kinder USA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 neutral party to the dispute and ton Report on Middle East Affairs. For an additional ceases its unqualified support for Land of Canaan Foundation . . . . . 21 $15 per year (see postcard insert for Washington only one party to the dispute, Report subscription rates), subscribers will receive Middle East Children’s Alliance . . . 45 namely Israel. Other Voices inside each issue of their Washington Mondoweiss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Jack Love, Kailua Kona, HI Report on Middle East Affairs. Palestinian Medical Relief Society. . 39 We are glad our magazine Back issues of both publications are available. continues to provide you with the Playgrounds for Palestine . . . . . . . . 41 To subscribe telephone 1 (888) 881-5861, fax insight and coverage you need to The Israel Lobby Enters State (714) 226-9733, e-mail circulation@wrmea. org>, understand the injustices occurGovernment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 ring in the Middle East, even or write to P.O. Box 91056, Long Beach, CA 90809United Palestinian Appeal though it is often emotionally dif1056. (UPA) . . . . . . . . . Inside Front Cover ficult to read. We encourage all
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Three Views
PHOTO BY JAAFAR ASHTIYEH/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Annexation and Apartheid Have Been the Plan From Day One
A Palestinian shepherd leads his flock near the Israeli Hamra checkpoint, in the Jordan Valley east of Nablus, July 1, 2020. The Oslo Agreements on self-rule signed by the Israelis and Palestinians in the 1990s divide the West Bank into Areas A, B and C. Area C, under full Israeli control, constitutes some 60 percent of the West Bank. The settlements and parts of the Jordan Valley that Israel seeks to annex are mainly in Area C.
On Israel’s Bizarre Definitions: The West Bank is Already Annexed By Ramzy Baroud
WEDNESDAY, JULY 1, was meant to be the day on which the Israeli government officially annexed 30 percent of the occupied Palestinian West Bank and the Jordan Valley. This date, however, came and went and annexation was never actualized.
Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle. His latest book is these Chains Will Be Broken: palestinian stories of struggle and defiance in israeli prisons (available from AET’s Middle East Books and More). Baroud has a Ph.D. in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter and is a non-resident scholar at the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, University of California. His website is <www.ramzybaroud.net>. 8
“I don’t know if there will be a declaration of sovereignty today,” said Israeli Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi with reference to the self-imposed deadline declared earlier by Israeli Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu. An alternative date was not immediately announced. But does it really matter? Whether Israel’s illegal appropriation of Palestinian land takes place with massive media fanfare and a declaration of sovereignty, or whether it happens incrementally over the course of the coming days, weeks, and months, Israel has, in reality, already annexed the West Bank—not just 30 percent of it but, in fact, the whole area. It is critical that we understand such terms as “annexation,” “illegal,” “military occupation,” and so on, in their proper contexts. For example, international law deems that all of Israel’s Jewish settlements, constructed anywhere on Palestinian land occupied during the 1967 war, are illegal.
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Interestingly, Israel, too, uses the term “illegal” with reference to settlements, but only to “outposts” that have been erected in the occupied territories without the permission of the Israeli government. In other words, while in the Israeli lexicon the vast majority of all settlement activities in occupied Palestine are “legal,” the rest can only be legalized through official channels. Indeed, many of today’s “legal” 132 settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem, housing over half a million Israeli Jewish settlers, began as “illegal outposts.” Though this logic may satisfy the need of the Israeli government to ensure its relentless colonial project in Palestine follows a centralized blueprint, none of this matters in international law. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Conventions states that “Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive,” adding that “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” Israel has violated its commitment to international law as an “Occupying Power” on numerous occasions, rendering its very “occupation” of Palestine, itself, a violation of how military occupations are conducted—which are meant to be temporary, anyway. Military occupation is different from annexation. The former is a temporary transition, at the end of which the “Occupying Power” is expected, in fact, demanded, to relinquish its military hold on the occupied territory after a fixed length of time. Annexation, on the other hand, is a stark violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Hague Regulations. It is tantamount to a war crime, for the occupier is strictly prohibited from proclaiming unilateral sovereignty over occupied land. The international uproar generated by Netanyahu’s plan to annex a third of the West Bank is fully understandable. But the bigger issue at stake is that, in practice, Israel’s violations of the terms of occupation have granted it a de facto annexation of the whole of the West Bank. So when the European Union, for example, demands that Israel abandons its annexation plans, it is merely asking Israel to re-embrace the status quo ante, that of de facto annexation. Both abhorring scenarios should be rejected. Israel began utilizing the occupied territories as if they are contiguous and permanent parts of so-called Israel proper, immediately following the June 1967 war. Within a few years, it erected illegal settlements, now thriving cities, eventually moving hundreds of thousands of its own citizens to populate the newly acquired areas. This exploitation became more sophisticated with time, as Palestinians were subjected to slow, but irreversible, ethnic cleansing. As Palestinian homes were destroyed, farms confiscated, and entire regions depopulated, Jewish settlers moved in to take their place. The post-1967 scenario was a repeat of the post-1948 history, which led to the establishment of the State of Israel on the ruins of historic Palestine. Moshe Dayan, who served as Israel’s defense minister during the 1967 war, explained the Israeli logic best in a historical address at Israel’s Technion University in March 1969. “We came to this country which was already populated by Arabs, and we are establishing a Hebrew, that is a Jewish state here,” he said. AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020 2019
“Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you, because these geography books no longer exist; not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there, either.... There is no one place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population,” he added. The same colonial approach was applied to East Jerusalem and the West Bank after the war. While East Jerusalem was formally annexed in 1980, the West Bank was annexed in practice, but not through a clear legal Israeli proclamation. Why? In one word: demographics. When Israel first occupied East Jerusalem, it went on a population transfer frenzy: moving its own population to the Palestinian city, strategically expanding the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem to include as many Jews and as few Palestinians as possible, slowly reducing the Palestinian population of Al Quds through numerous tactics, including the revocation of residency and outright ethnic cleansing. And, thus, Jerusalem’s Palestinian population, which once constituted the absolute majority, has now been reduced to a dwindling minority. The same process was initiated in parts of the West Bank, but due to the relatively large size of the area and population, it was not possible to follow a similar annexation stratagem without jeopardizing Israel’s drive to maintain Jewish majority. Dividing the West Bank into Areas A, B, and C as a result of the disastrous Oslo accords has given Israel a lifeline, for this allowed it to increase settlement activities in Area C—nearly 60 percent of the West Bank—without stressing too much about demographic imbalances. Area C, where the current annexation plan is set to take place, is ideal for Israeli colonialism, for it includes Palestine’s most arable, resource-rich, and sparsely populated lands. It matters little whether the annexation will have a set date or will take place progressively through Israel’s declarations of sovereignty over smaller chunks of the West Bank in the future. The fact is, annexation is not a new Israeli political agenda dictated by political circumstances in Tel Aviv and Washington. Rather, annexation has been the ultimate Israeli colonial objective from the very onset. Let us not get entangled in Israel’s bizarre definitions. The truth is that Israel rarely behaves as an “Occupying Power,” but as a sovereign in a country where racial discrimination and apartheid are not only tolerated or acceptable but are, in fact, “legal” as well.
The Galilee First, If the World is Serious About Israel and Palestine By Sam Bahour ISRAEL’S ANNEXATION of Palestinian lands and Israeli dominance over Palestinian lives comes in a variety of shapes, forms and flavors. Understandably, the international community and many
Sam Bahour is a board member with Just Vision, a policy analyst with Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network and a secretariat member of the Palestine Strategy Group. He blogs at www.epalestine.com. Twitter: @SamBahour.
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A Palestinian takes part in a protest against the Israeli annexation plan in the West Bank city of Salfit, on July 6, 2020. Israeli citizens are in an uproar today about the impending Israeli annexation of large swaths of the West Bank, however, their hypocrisy can no longer be concealed. Not only is this yet another act of de jure annexation by Israel, but the upcoming act of annexation is being made out to be the overarching issue at hand. It is not, per se. For decades, Israel’s actions on the ground have always pointed to the dangerous place we have reached today. For countries of the world or Israeli citizens to be surprised that the U.S.-Israeli partnership is about to embark on another catastrophic and illegal act is only evidence that they have been sleeping at the wheel for decades. The time has come for serious stakeholders to hold Israel accountable for all their acts, in Occupied Palestine and Israel, and not only threaten to take action if the next round of annexation materializes.
PALESTINIANS IN ISRAEL
The horrendous reality of the Palestinian communities inside Israel—in places like Akka, Haifa, Nazareth, Jaffa and the Negev— is not about being relegated to sit in the back of the bus; they could only wish for such blatant racism. Here, racism is multilayered, ideological, well-camouflaged, state-sponsored and non-stop. Anyone who thinks that stopping the next Israeli annexation of additional parts of the West Bank would bring peace closer would be well-advised to peel away the veneer of democratic façade, one that covers an Israeli plan with only one goal in mind—completing the campaign of ethnically cleansing Palestinians—on both sides of the Green Line—that started with the creation of the State of Israel. 10
I witnessed the state of Palestinian citizens in Israel on a visit to northern Israel in 2012. My trip took place on a beautiful Fall day. I sat in a friend’s living room in the village of Fassouta at the northern tip of Israel, adjacent to the Lebanese border, in the part of Israel called the Galilee. This is where the Palestinian citizens in Israel are concentrated. Five generations of Palestinians were sitting in the room. As expected in Palestinian society, within no time, politics was the focus of the discussion. But this political discussion had a different twist from what most of those following this conflict are accustomed to. The issues had to do with the Palestinian citizens in Israel and how the Israeli government systematically and structurally discriminates against them. Bilateral negotiations between the Palestinians and Israelis, better known as the infamous Middle East (Oslo) Peace Process, began with a model (and accompanying actions on the ground) of Gaza and Jericho First. The idea was that the Palestinian Authority, which the Oslo accords created, would start by being set up in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank city of Jericho, a sort of pilot phase before subsequently deploying to all of the Palestinian areas defined in the accords. The standing joke at the time was that what Israel, the military occupying power, really meant was Gaza and Jericho only! With two decades of a never-ending “peace process,” Israel diverted the world’s attention, including the Palestinian leadership, away from the discriminatory workings within Israel itself. As the parties quibbled over who violated the Oslo agreement first and most, Israel never stopped strangulating the Palestinian towns and villages inside it. Even back then, some of the mainstream,
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international research outfits, such as the International Crisis Group (ICG), were forced to take note. Their March 2012 report titled, “Back to Basics: Israel’s Arab Minority and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” stated: “World attention remains fixed on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but a distinct, albeit related, conflict smoulders within Israel itself. It might be no less perilous. Jewish-Arab domestic relations have deteriorated steadily for a decade. More and more, the Jewish majority views the Palestinian minority as subversive, disloyal and—due to its birth rates—a demographic threat. Palestinian citizens are politically marginalized, economically underprivileged, ever more unwilling to accept systemic inequality and ever more willing to confront the status quo.” That’s researcher-talk for a slow and calculated campaign of displacing an entire population in broad daylight—world, take note.
ISRAEL IS EMPTY
As one travels northward in Israel, a stark reality cannot be ignored. Israel is empty. Most of the lands which comprise the State of Israel, as it is recognized worldwide, are empty of any population. The sad irony is that less than one hour’s drive north of where we were sitting, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees, who, since 1948, have been prohibited by Israel from returning to their homes, dwell in squalid refugee camps, waiting for international law and U.N. resolutions calling for their return home to be respected. Dr. Salman Abu Sitta, a Palestinian researcher with the Palestine Land Society, and a refugee himself has extensively documented this phenomenon of empty lands in Israel, lands that Palestinian refugees call home. The undeniable fact is that allowing Palestinian refugees to return home would geographically disrupt very little on the ground in Israel. It would, however, threaten the very basis of its existence as a supposedly exclusively “Jewish state” and create a demographic majority of Palestinians—a normal expectation, given that they were the majority in 1948 before being expelled. Ironically, whether Palestinian refugees are permitted to return to Israel or not, Israel will face the same existential question from natural demographic growth—What will Israel do when Jews in Israel become a minority?
ONE STRATEGY, MULTIPLE APPLICATIONS
Another startling realization, when traveling around the Palestinian farming villages in the Galilee, is that the hilltops are dotted with gated, Jewish Israeli communities and Israeli government-declared nature reserves, all creating a physical barrier to the natural growth of the native Palestinian communities. Added to these physical obstructions to Palestinian development, Israeli law provides for another platform, a legal one, whereby hundreds of Israeli communities can keep out Palestinians on cultural grounds. Coming from the occupied territory of the West Bank, these physical obstacles and legal tools looked to me much like the illegal, Jewish-only settlements that surround every Palestinian city. The physical location of both types of these residential colonies is not random, but rather a sharp demographic weapon to interrupt and stunt the growth of the Palestinian communities. I wanted to see more but had to head back home to the West AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020
Bank. Now that I am a Palestinian ID holder, which means I have West Bank residency status issued by the Israeli occupation authorities, I cannot be in Israel as a tourist. My U.S. citizenship— my only citizenship—is useless now that I am classified as a West Bank Palestinian in the Israeli government’s eyes. Israel is the only place on earth where I am not recognized as the American that I am! Thus, my Israeli military-issued permit, which allows me to enter Israel, restricts my movement so that I have to be back by ten in the evening to what I call my cage, also known as the metropolitan area of Ramallah. What is now clear to me, and wasn’t when I first arrived in Palestine shortly after the Oslo accords were signed, is that the system of command and control, which oppresses nearly 5 million Palestinians under military occupation, is strikingly similar to the system which controls nearly 2 million Muslim and Christian Palestinians inside Israel, who are Israeli citizens. The ultimate Israeli goal is to erase Palestinian collective memory, limit Palestinian education, squeeze Palestinian living space, and strangle any serious notion of Palestinian economic enterprise. But Palestinians are not going anywhere. This was confirmed when I asked a law student from this Galilaean village where he plans to be in five years. Without hesitation, he answered, “Here, in my village, and not for the next five years, but for the next 10 and 20 and 100 years.” Eight years have passed since his answer. He is still in his village, now married and with a son. After hours of deep discussion in that quiet Palestinian village of Fassouta, tucked away in the velvet-like green hills of the Galilee, a veteran Palestinian researcher, who was quiet for most of the time, spoke in a calm, definitive voice. He said that everything we were discussing, in terms of how much harm Israel is doing to Palestinians living in Israel and under military occupation, is true, but in the village, the numbers speak volumes. Over the past 72 years, since Israel’s creation, and despite all of its attempts to force the Palestinians off the land, the population has increased as per official Israeli statistics. As long as the Palestinians exist on this land, he asserted, their rights are bound to be realized.
ANNEXATION HERE, ANNEXATION THERE
The ultimate goal of more annexation is to get more Palestinians to voluntarily leave Palestine and Israel. All the way home, I could not get out of my mind a new political slogan that would reveal the extent of the Palestinian tragedy, The Galilee First. Instead of managing the conflict as if the only contentious issue is about those of us living under Israeli military occupation, the international community, Israeli citizens and Palestinian leadership as well, should call for the world to witness the reality of Palestinians inside Israel. If Israel is bent on discriminating against one-fifth of its citizens, what should we expect of it in the occupied territory, areas that are not internationally recognized as Israel? Indeed, the next time I am asked what I think the solution to this conflict is, my answer will be ready: Let us start with full equal rights for Palestinians inside Israel. In other words, the Galilee comes first if Israel—and the world—is serious about peace and truly desires historic reconciliation with the Palestinians.
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Yochai Damri, head of the Har Hebron Regional Council, shows what Israeli settlers claim is a map of a Palestinian state as envisioned by U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposed peace plan, at his home in the Jewish settlement of Otniel on June 3, 2020.
The Annexation of Palestine: 21st Century Apartheid By Declan Kearney EYAD AL-HALLAQ was autistic and had special educational needs. On May 30, he was going to school through the Lion’s Gate in the old city of Jerusalem when he was summarily shot dead by Israeli soldiers. Al-Hallaq’s killing made me think about John Patrick Cunningham who also had special needs and was shot dead by British soldiers in a field near Benburb, County Tyrone in 1974. I also thought about family members, and my own son, Fiachra, who have autism, and, or special needs. In December 2018, I walked through that part of Jerusalem where Al-Hallaq was killed, with our Sinn Féin delegation to Palestine. It was, and still is, very heavily militarized with Israeli soldiers and security personnel everywhere. Military incursions take place regularly in Palestinian neighborhoods like al-Issawiya, on the eastern edge of Jerusalem. With only 20,000 residents, there are well over 100 political prisoners from alIssawiya currently detained in Israeli jails. Palestinians are being
Declan Kearney is an Irish Sinn Féin politician who was elected as a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly to represent the South Antrim constituency in 2016. He is currently a government minister in the regional power sharing coalition. This article is dedicated to the memory of his friend and comrade Bobby Storey who was a committed friend of the Palestinian struggle and a true internationalist. 12
forced from their homes in Jerusalem’s old city in order to relocate Israeli settlers, and create a single identity population. Palestinian homes are also being summarily demolished not only in Jerusalem, but across the West Bank to enable continued expansion of the illegal colonial settlement strategy. In one of the most recent demolitions of Palestinian property in East Jerusalem, Israeli forces entered the Ras Shihada neighborhood and bulldozed a residential and commercial building belonging to the Alqam family. As a result, 30 family members have been left homeless, 18 of them underage. All of their furniture and belongings were destroyed, including six apartments, four shops, and a ground floor car garage. Such incidents are not accidental. These are the actions of an occupation force. Palestinians are viewed as the enemy, and a nonpeople; to be dehumanized and criminalized. They are subject to a systematic strategy of repression based upon integrated use of Israeli military law, military repression and propaganda tactics. The strategic aim of the Israeli state is to colonize all of Palestine. That long-term strategy began in 1948 when 750,000 Palestinians were forced from their villages and farmland. This phase of colonial occupation became known as the Nakba or “Catastrophe,” because of its devastating consequences for the Palestinian people. It was a direct violation of international law. Earlier this year, both the Israeli and U.S. administrations announced an intention to further annex the West Bank and East Jerusalem by seizing an additional 30 percent of that land mass after July 1. These latest annexation plans will constitute another Nakba, for the Palestinians. The human and political consequences will be catastrophic resulting in huge displacements of people, and wholesale seizures of land and natural resources, including water.
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The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) Negotiations Affairs Department makes the point that de facto annexation already applies in Palestine in the form of the colonial settlements and the annexation wall which carve up Palestine towns and villages, and the multiple permanent Israeli military checkpoints which control the movement of Palestinian people and goods. However, the PLO states the new annexation plans aim to formally declare permanent Israeli sovereignty through the implementation of de jure annexation. It will establish the reality of a full-fledged and open-ended apartheid system, further institutionalizing the oppression of Palestinians. To date, the occupation of the West Bank, Jerusalem and the siege of Gaza have had a devastating impact on the lives of Palestinian children and youths. Young people, between 15 to 29 years-old, make up 30 percent of Palestine’s total population. Israel’s colonial occupation has robbed them, and previous generations, of their childhoods. On the last day of our trip to the West Bank and Jerusalem in December 2018, we visited the home of Ahed Tamimi in Nabi Saleh. Earlier that year Ahed, then 17 years old, was imprisoned for slapping an Israeli soldier. Recently, I watched a video by Ahed about what this new annexation plan would mean for her. She described it as a form of silent ethnic cleansing and an attempt to nullify the existence of Palestinians, by denying her, and future generations, the land upon which to live. This combined Israeli and U.S. plan represents a new humanitarian and political catastrophe for the people of Palestine. It carries within it the potential for an escalation of political conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. The Foreign Minister of Jordan has already warned of the potential for significant political instability within the Middle East region.
Ireland’s new seat on the U.N. Security Council should be used to uphold international law
No right-thinking democrat can stand by and acquiesce in silence to Israel’s latest annexation of Palestinian land. The international community failed to act in 1948, and in 1967, and it failed to intervene when Israel used the Oslo Agreement and Camp David as distractions to intensify the expansion of colonial settlements and ongoing human rights abuses throughout the late 1990s and into the 21st century. On June 15, 47 U.N. human rights experts condemned Israel’s plans to annex the West Bank as a vision of “21st century apartheid.” They predicted increased human rights violations after annexation, and stated, “What would be left of the West Bank would be a Palestinian Bantustan, islands of disconnected land completely surrounded by Israel and no territorial connection to the outside world.” In recent weeks myself and Sinn Féin President Mary Lou McDonald TD have spoken with a very representative cross section of Palestinian political leadership figures, including Nabil Shaath, a veteran and icon of their national liberation struggle. They all spoke of the urgent need for decisive international action to oppose these annexation plans. AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020
The Palestinian people are fed up with hollow words and meaningless sympathy from international agencies and foreign governments who purport to support Palestinians’ political and human rights. As James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, bluntly said in recent days, “And so while I hear European diplomats say they are concerned about annexation, I say that’s great—but what are you going to do about it? Are you going to whine, are you going to complain, are you going to protest, or issue a diplomatic note, which the Israelis will pocket—maybe pocket by throwing it away in a newspaper basket. This is exactly what (the Israelis) want. Because those behaviors only feed impunity—there’s no price to pay…Accountability is key, and accountability requires that there will be a price to pay.” The Irish government should internalize those words. It must listen to the leaders of the Palestinian people and what they are asking of Ireland; implement the 2014 parliament decision to formally recognize the State of Palestine, and end its opposition to and pass the Occupied Territories Bill. Ireland’s new seat on the U.N. Security Council should be used to uphold international law, and to assist in coordinating promotion of the humanitarian and national rights of Palestinian citizens. That is the sort of international leadership and concrete initiative required at this time. The facile, diplomatic pretense of waiting for a right time, or a point “to generate some positive momentum,” needs to be set aside. The time to act is now, and not a moment later. The Palestinian struggle has arrived at a crossroads. The July 1st annexation represents a new strategic challenge for the political and civic leaders of Palestinian national liberation. They are correct to demand serious, substantial international action, including from the Irish government. Our international community now has a moral and political duty to act in the way it ultimately mobilized against South African apartheid. The U.N., European Union (EU), and Irish government must end their acquiescence toward Israel’s occupation and this planned annexation. They need to demonstrate there will be a price to pay for the continued flouting of international law and repression of Palestinians. The U.N., EU and Irish government need to finally decide which side they are on. But Palestinian political leaders also need to urgently assess how to influence international actors. They can give a powerful mandate for a decisive change in policy and action from the international community, by agreeing on common national, democratic strategic and political positions, and by speaking with one united voice. At this time of even deeper crisis for the Palestinian people, national unity and reconciliation among all political forces under the representative leadership of the PLO has never been more essential. Resolving disunity and healing old divisions is never easy. However, achieving national reconciliation and unity among the various political forces on an agreed political strategy and collective action is the most potent strategic initiative which Palestinian political and civic leaders can take to change the balance of forces against annexation, and to influence international opinion. Sinn Féin knows what side we are on. Irish republicans, and other international progressives remain committed to the objective of Palestinian national liberation and helping to secure a democratic, and peaceful Palestine...“We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” ■
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United Nations Report
Reality and Rights, Principles and Realpolitik
By Ian Williams
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lockdown due to COVID-19…and a cynic could still ask, “how can they tell?” On June 24, the Security Council met to consider what was reported as “The Question of Palestine” in the old days, until they eventually decided that it had no answer, and renamed it as the “Situation in the Middle East.” That’s lucky for some, since the agenda title does not mention Palestine, nor Israel, nor annexation, each of which are the major points. The meeting was a virtual one because of the epidemiological consequences of so much viral hot air being breathed in a closed room. The good news was that, as expected, Israel and its surrogate got absolutely zero support for their plans for annexation of large swaths of the Occupied Territories, nor even for its current depredations. Rather, members all warned of consequences if Binyamin Netanyahu went ahead with his threats. But the backdrop was that even Jared Kushner, who invented the neo-Bantustan plan, has apparently been warning that it needs careful nurturing, counter to U.S. Ambassador David Friedman’s enthusiasm for just doing it. Friedman is a pioneering, innovative diplomat. Most amJordanian police break up an Israeli annexation protest outside the U.S. bassadors are sent from their home countries to represent Embassy in Amman, Jordan, July 3, 2020. The foreign ministers of Jordan, them in another country. Friedman, however, represents IsEgypt, France and Germany warned that annexation would have conse- raeli, or rather Likud interests, to the U.S. from the safety of quences. Belgium and the Netherlands have both passed measures to issue his daughter’s adopted home, Israel. But what can you sanctions against Israel if it continues with annexation. expect of the bankruptcy lawyer who has represented the Trump empire in so many busts before? Nevertheless, consequences were missing from the discussion THE JULY 1 DEADLINE came and went and the Occupied Terriin the U.N., or indeed from any other center of power. The U.N. is tories remained “officially” unannexed. When I asked him, John faced with clear defiance of a core principle of the U.N. Charter. Bolton confessed that he had no idea what President Donald Trump Israel’s attempt to acquire territory by force is one of the “situations” wanted out of it. The suggestion from the Israeli press is that Jared for which the U.N. was created and for which Chapter VII of the Kushner is at loggerheads with the even more conservative colCharter empowers the Security Council to take action; up to sancleagues around Trump. Incidentally, Bolton in realpolitik mode, sugtions and even joint military action. When Iraq annexed Kuwait as gests handing Gaza to the Egyptians, the settlements to Israel, and its 19th province, that was exactly why the rest of the member states the rest of the West Bank to Jordan, to improve the lot of the Palesauthorized Desert Storm to rectify the wrong, even if it franchised tinians by tying them to larger more viable economies, since he does military operations to the U.S. and its allies. not consider the Bantustan Palestine state a viable project. Bolton, If Saddam Hussain had installed a puppet government and got as always, eschews the diplomatic niceties and platitudes for what out of Kuwait, the Emir and his family would be punting in casinos he sees as reality, but is not likely to have a hand on the ship of and resorts somewhere on the vacation circuit. It was the annexastate’s tiller for some time, if ever. tion, not the invasion, that tipped the balance. In that immediate So, what about those who allegedly have both dogs and leashes post-Glasnost New World Order, even Moscow went along with in the Middle East fight? The sound of silence. The U.N. is still on Desert Storm to chase Saddam out of Kuwait, and memorably, under the older George Bush, the U.S. did not pursue his forces U.N. correspondent Ian Williams is the author of UNtold: the Real past the border because the coalition would have fallen apart once Story of the United Nations in Peace and War (available from it exceeded its mandate. Middle East Books and More). 14
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Russia’s annexation of Crimea was under different circumstances; Moscow and Washington had reverted to Cold War chills, the U.S. was perceptibly weak, and the Ukraine did not have Arab oil wealth behind it. But, while Russia’s veto inhibited any Security Council action (significantly with no one else against and China abstaining), the General Assembly supported Ukraine’s position. And more significantly, the U.S. and the EU implemented sanctions. The case of Palestinian territories might be somewhat similar, except that there is, of course, a long roster of resolutions against Israeli actions, which should make a condemnatory resolution a certainty if it were not for the American veto. For those impatient with such legalisms, one must check the Weasel Dictionary to see what the involved governments say. Moscow says that Crimea was annexed but that it “acceded” to the Russian Federation, so we can expect Israel’s lawyers to begin suggesting that the settler blocks “acceded” to the State of Israel. They are already claiming the territories are “disputed” not occupied and so they are merely extending Israeli law to parts of them. But they have had a lot of practice at this juridical prestidigitation since they have applied Israeli law to settlers for years and denied its protections to Palestinians. And, of course, they applied smilitary law to Palestinians in Israel for many decades. Although, the Palestinians might have a strong case in law, they are weak diplomatically. Could the U.S. get a resolution through the Security Council legitimizing the annexation? Almost certainly not, if their failed attempt to get “snapback” sanctions on Iran is any guide. That is true in the Security Council despite the permanent members. The regional rotation of seats there, particularly from Africa, does result in the occasional election of diplomatic lightweights like Djibouti but, the smaller states have played a noble role, not least in the Council’s refusal to back the Blair/Bush debacle in Iraq. That is the context in which Canada has now lost two consecutive bids for a Security Council seat. The majority of members looked at Canada’s voting record in the General Assembly and did not trust Ottawa to fulfill its own officially stated policy on the Middle AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020
East, let alone U.N. resolutions (see p. 16). While the Security Council offers negative leverage and even Putin and China, despite toadying to Israel, are unlikely to vote for a resolution legitimizing enforced annexation. There is a strong chance that any such move would not get the nine positive votes necessary but the General Assembly offers more scope than is assumed. One should remember that the battle against apartheid, for Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions was won in the Assembly, in spite of American, British and French veto threats in the Security Council. On the P5 level Moscow wants Iranian cash and the Palestinians don’t have any. The Israeli press have reported that Vladimir Putin lobbied with Barack Obama to stop his Parthian shot when he abstained on and thus let through a resolution condemning Israeli settlements just before he left office. And one cannot help suspecting that even that limp-wristed gesture was more a finger from Obama for all the rebuffs he suffered at Netanyahu’s hands than an attempt to make up for all the injuries Palestinians had suffered. Even more sadly, the Arabs’ feudal and military rulers now seem to have defected almost entirely from the Palestinian cause and joined up with John Bolton and Netanyahu to see Iran as their worst enemy, although some seem undecided whether Turkey’s Erdogan is their main opponent. The Palestinians depend on the smaller principled countries who see that if annexation is legalized for Israel, then they too can be vulnerable to predatory members. But while Israel cannot get a legal mandate from the Council for its predations, neither is it likely that there would be any threat of serious consequences against Israel quite apart from the U.S. veto. Morally, it would be good if a majority of the Council voted for sanctions despite a U.S. veto. That could allow for a reference to the General Assembly where, despite Arab invertebracy, there might well be a majority for some action that could later be hardened incrementally. Indeed it is not just the GA. Michael Lynk, the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian Territory, reported in June that, “What would be left of the West Bank would be a moth-eaten Bantustan, which would be the end, not the beginning,
of a genuine Palestinian state. This would be a modern form of apartheid, a political anomaly in the 21st century.” He added that, “We have reached a point where resolutions without resolve can no longer contribute to reaching the just and durable peace and human security that Palestinians and Israelis deserve.” But then the U.N. rapporteur, seemingly washing his hands of his own organization, called upon the EU, “Should Israel proceed with any form of annexation after 1 July—even if it is ‘annexation-lite,’ consisting of several settlement blocs instead of the announced 30 percent of the West Bank—the European Union must lead the world in imposing accountability measures.” However, it will likely only do that if there is popular pressure on governments to overcome their political elites’ predilection for accommodating Israel and the U.S. Is there the potential for such a movement? Could the U.N. Secretary General finally speak up? Not if he wants a second term. ■ (Advertisement)
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Canada Calling
Canada’s Attacks on Free Speech May Have Cost It a Seat on the Security Council
Marchers protesting Israeli policies at the annual Al Quds rally that began across from the U.S. Consulate and passed City Hall to the Supreme Court of Justice in Toronto, June 1, 2019.
TORONTO’S ANNUAL AL-QUDS DAY DEMONSTRATION UNDER ATTACK
Ontario Premier Doug Ford, as well as the City of Toronto, have been working for three years to ban the city’s annual Al-Quds Day demonstration. Both Toronto’s city council and Ontario’s provincial parliament have taken steps to silence the demonstration. Bill 84, the Prohibiting Hate Promoting Demonstrations at Queen’s Park Act, is currently before the Justice Policy Standing Committee in Ontario’s legislature, and has gone to a second reading. Conservative member of parliament Roman Baber, who was born in Israel, proposed the bill. Meanwhile, last year, the Toronto city council held hearings into the annual rally.
Candice Bodnaruk has been involved in Palestinian issues for the past 14 years through organizations such as the Canadian BDS Coalition and Peace Alliance Winnipeg. Her political action started with feminism and continued with the peace movement, first with the No War on Iraq Coalition in 2003 in Winnipeg. 16
People have been observing Al-Quds Day worldwide since 1979 to protest the occupation of East Jerusalem and treatment of Palestinians by Israel. In Toronto, the event previously took place on the grounds of the provincial legislature, but that changed several years ago to make room for the Pan Am and Parapan Games (a sporting event for people with physical disabilities). Since then, the demonstration has been held at Queen’s Park West, which is municipal property. Toronto city council member James Pasternak has been trying to restrict Al-Quds Day demonstrations since 2017, when he asked the city for advice on the feasibility of banning “hate-infested” rallies and hate speech on city property. He was proposing that Toronto police use some of their resources to prohibit the Al-Quds demonstration. The pro-Palestinian demonstration is the only event Pasternak mentions in his motion. At the time, ten city council members supported Pasternak’s administrative inquiry. Toronto Mayor John Tory also supports banning
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the event, though city legal staff does not feel comfortable with such an action. Supporters and organizers of the AlQuds Day event say the action is being unfairly targeted. Karen Rodman, voluntary director with Just Peace Advocates and member of the Canadian BDS Coalition, said Bill 84 is focused entirely on Al-Quds Day, with no mention of the almost 20 hate rallies that have been held by right wing, Islamophobic and nationalist hate groups in Toronto over the past two years. “The real problem is that under the guise of fighting hate, the motion aims to silence progressive society,” said Robert Massoud, who has acted as a consultant and guide to the Al-Quds demonstration committee. “Al-Quds Day is a legitimate protest against the injustices and actions of Israel toward the Palestinians, which have also been condemned internationally,” he added. “The opponents of Al-Quds Day conflate legitimate protest against Israel with anti-Semitism,” Massoud said. B’nai Brith, a pro-Israel organization, has referred to the annual Al-Quds Day demonstration as a “hate fest,” and after this year’s Al-Quds demonstration, which was held as an online event due to COVID-19, the organization filed a complaint with the Toronto police. “There is a strong element of Islamophobia inherent in the opposition to Al-Quds Day and banning the event would reinforce this,” charged Sheryl Nestel from Independent Jewish Voices (IJV). Nestel pointed out that Premier Doug Ford believes the demonstration to be “incontrovertibly anti-Semitic.” She explained that the fight around Al-Quds has been complicated by the province’s move to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism, which, if invoked, could have the power to ban the event from city or provincial property. Under the IHRA definition, some of the sentiments expressed by demonstrators, including that Israel is an apartheid or racist state, constitute anti-Semitism. “IJV believes that such a statement [of Israeli apartheid] is, in fact, accurate, and in no way misrepresents the reality on the ground AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020
in Israel/Palestine,” Nestel said. She added that any attempt to ban the demonstration would result in a challenge to Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which protects freedom of speech and assembly. She said many activists would welcome an opportunity to put the legality of the IHRA definition to the test. Nestel said the bottom line is that those participating in the Al-Quds Day rally have a right to express their views, even if a minority of demonstrators express radical or even offensive views her organization does not support. “While IJV may be hesitant to endorse the event, we support the right of the protesters to gather,” she said. “We encourage the organizers to continue to be vigilant against overt expressions of antiSemitism.”
ONTARIO MOVING CLOSER TO RESTRICTING SPEECH THAT CRITICIZES ISRAEL
For the past four years, members of Ontario’s provincial parliament (MPPs) have been taking steps toward restricting the voices of Palestinian solidarity activists. In February 2020, Bill 168, the Combating Anti-Semitism Act, was referred to the Standing Committee on Justice Policy after a second reading. The bill is guided by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism, which equates criticism of Israel with antiSemitism. The bill was introduced by two Conservative MPPs, Will Bouma and Robin Martin. Bouma has cited the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement as an example of anti-Semitism. If Bill 168 passes, Ontario will be the first province to adopt the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. Karen Rodman, voluntary director with Just Peace Advocates and member of the Canadian BDS Coalition, says Bill 168 is an unsound piece of legislation. “It purports to create a legal definition of anti-Semitism, but the definition it adopts was not intended to serve as a legal definition. Its vagueness leaves it susceptible to being abused and manipulated by opponents of free expression,” Rodman said.
Hundreds of academics have signed an open letter denouncing the IHRA definition. U.S. attorney Kenneth Stern, the creator of the definition, also opposes its use to police speech. In testimony to the U.S. Congress in 2017, he noted that it was solely intended as a working definition to help researchers track anti-Semitism. Stern warned that legislation like the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act in Congress “is a hate speech code which, if enacted, will do much damage to the university and to the Jewish students proponents seek to protect.” Rodman pointed out that a quiet approach to shut down BDS in Canadian universities started in 2016, when Bill 202, an anti-BDS bill, was proposed in Ontario’s legislature. The bill would have imposed severe limits on the BDS movement, such as preventing the province from doing business with institutions that support BDS, and also stopping universities from endorsing BDS. It failed on its second reading. “At this point no anti-BDS legislation has been passed in Canada, unlike in the U.S.,” Rodman noted. The Canadian federal government accepted the IHRA definition as part of its anti-racism strategy in 2019. While the definition informs the government’s approach to anti-Semitism, it is not legally binding.
DID SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL COST CANADA A SECURITY COUNCIL SEAT
Months of work by activists has paid off, as Canada lost its bid for the much-desired temporary seat at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). Canada lost in the first round of voting on June 17, with Ireland and Norway winning the two available seats. Norway received 130 votes, and Ireland 128, while Canada only received 108. In its last UNSC bid in 2010, Canada managed 114 votes. Canada has been elected to the Security Council six times, and last held a seat in 2000. There are ten temporary member countries that each serve two-year terms. “By rejecting Canada’s bid, the international community also delivered a blow to the Israel lobby,” said Karen Rodman, vol-
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ernment. Engler asserted that the likely result of Canada getting a seat at the Security Council would have been a de facto second vote for the United States, noting that they share a similar voting record, especially when it comes to the Middle East. Long-time Winnipeg peace activist and video- Michael Lynk watching the Trump Peace Plan Announcement. grapher Paul Graham human rights in the Occupied Palestinian expressed similar concerns. He said Territory, and a Canadian citizen, said that Canada’s aggression toward Venezuela, as although Canada may be one of the great well as supporting Israeli actions against advanced liberal democracies in the world, Palestinians, waging war in Afghanistan, it doesn’t have a lot to be proud of in the inbombing Libya and selling arms to Saudi ternational arena. Arabia, all indicate that Canada is closely “We lost the Security Council seat bid in aligned with U.S. imperialism. 2012, in part, because of our record and “When Canada demonstrates consistent, embrace of Israeli policies around occupaactive work for international peace, develtion, and while we have made some opment and cooperation, it will have earned changes in policy since 2015 with the new the right to aspire to Security Council memliberal government…their voting record, bership,” he said. among other things, is really no different With regard to what he referred to as from the Harper years,” Lynk said. Former Canada’s “orphan vote” at the U.N. in Deconservative Canadian Prime Minster cember 2019, when Ottawa voted in favor Stephen Harper was an emphatic supof Palestinian self-determination, Engler porter of Israel. pointed out that Canada had previously Lynk explained that both Ireland and voted against 67 different resolutions for Norway have very strong records with rePalestinian rights. Engler said the vote, spect of voting in favor of U.N. resolutions which received a huge amount of media aton Palestine and both are widely thought tention, was almost certainly designed to of, either because of their peace keeping or respond to the Just Peace Advocates letter because of their international mediation efwriting campaign. He believes that single forts. vote was a way for Canada to counter the Canadians apparently desire to see a opposition to its Security Council run. new foreign policy from their government. Engler also noted that Canada played a A survey conducted from June 5 to 10 and direct role in the ethnic cleansing of Palessponsored by Canadians for Justice and tine in 1947. Prime Minister Lester B. PearPeace in the Middle East (CJPME), Indeson rejected a Palestinian call at the time pendent Jewish Voices, and the United for an end to the British Mandate and esNetwork for Justice and Peace in Palestine, tablishment of an independent Palestinian reported that 75 percent of Canadians state. “Most Canadians, if they understood polled want their government to oppose any element of international politics, they Israel’s annexation of large portions of the would be very uncomfortable with CanaWest Bank and, almost half of those who dian policies,” Engler said. responded, support the use of sanctions Michael Lynk, United Nations Human against Israel. ■ Rights Council Special Rapporteur for PHOTO COURTESY DAVID KATTENBURG
untary executive director at Just Peace Advocates, the organization that initiated Twitter and letter writing campaigns opposing Canada’s UNSC run. As part of the campaign, in the month leading up to the UNSC vote, over 1,300 individual letters from around the world were sent to 193 U.N. ambassadors asking them to vote for Ireland and Norway instead of Canada. More than 100 civil society organizations also wrote expressing their opposition. Hundreds of artists, activists and academics joined the open letter, including Noam Chomsky, Roger Waters, Richard Falk, John Dugard, and English filmmaker Ken Loach. Roger Waters also posted a link to the “No Seat on the United Nations Security Council for Canada” petition on his Facebook page. The letters focused on Canada’s abysmal record on Palestinian rights. The messages highlighted Canada’s many failings in regards to Palestine, among them adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism, which targets critics of Israel. Canada has also added Palestinian organizations to its terrorism list and threatened to cut off funding to the International Criminal Court if it continues investigating Israeli crimes. The reach of the campaign caught Canada off guard. On June 11, Marc-Andre Blanchard, Canada’s permanent representative to the U.N., delivered his own letter to all U.N. ambassadors defending Canadian policy on Palestinian rights and claimed Just Peace Advocates’ letter contained “significant inaccuracies.” Rodman, from Just Peace Advocates, said Canada was undeserving of the U.N. position for many reasons. “Canada has consistently isolated itself against world opinion when it comes to Palestine,” she said. “Canada has voted 166 times against Palestine at the U.N. this century.” She also noted that Norway and Ireland have much more respectable records on Palestine. Yves Engler, a Montreal author and activist, said the Canadian government’s policies are anti-Palestinian, militaristic and aggressive toward the Venezuelan gov-
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Special Report
Gulf Reaction to Israeli Annexation Plans
ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP
By Stasa Salacanin
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (l) speaks with the Emirati Ambassador to the U.S. Yousef Al Otaiba at the NYU Abu Dhabi campus in Abu Dhabi, Jan. 13, 2019. THE ISRAELI PRIME MINSTER’S plan to effectively annex parts of the occupied West Bank has created a major uproar in the international community and media. While almost the entire world strongly opposes Israeli unilateral actions, which will have severe security ramifications possibly leading to a new intifada, the reaction of the Gulf Arab states remains a great puzzle. As key defenders of the two-state solution and traditional backers of the Palestinian struggle for independence, much is expected from the Arab Gulf states, which along with the EU, the United Nations and the Arab League are expected to push back against the annexation. However, it is quite unclear how far they will go in opposing Israel.
Stasa Salacanin is a widely published author and analyst focusing on the Middle East and Europe. He produces in-depth analysis of the region’s most pertinent issues for regional and international publications including the Al Jazeera Center for Studies, Middle East Monitor, The New Arab, Gulf News, Al Bawaba, Qantara, Inside Arabia and many more. AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020
In the last few years, there has been a quiet rapprochement between the two sides around a shared fear of Iran’s alleged goal of forming a “Shia Crescent,” a term coined by Jordanian King Abdullah II in 2004, stretching from Tehran to Beirut, passing through Baghdad and Damascus. Importantly, Israeli-Gulf detente also closely aligns with the current U.S. administration’s hard-line policy toward the Islamic Republic, resulting in a series of statements and public appearances of Israeli and Gulf (mostly Saudi and UAE) officials, giving the impression of a significant breakthrough in their relations. But this chapter may end soon.
WEST BANK ANNEXATION
According to an agreement with his coalition partner Benny Gantz, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was granted the right to proceed with the process of annexation as early as July 1. Netanyahu has said the plan is “not annexation,” claiming that it aims to apply Israeli sovereignty (law) to parts of the West Bank. Re-
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portedly, this may include almost 30 percent of the West Bank with roughly 130 heavily fortified colonies, dozens of satellite outposts and other areas, which are, in Netanyahu’s view, important for the country’s “security, heritage and future.” Palestinians, on the contrary, see the West Bank as the heart of their hoped-for-state, and deeply fear that prior and current Israeli actions, through expanding Jewish settlements and other measures, have been effectively turning the Occupied Palestinian Territories into a fragmented patchwork of isolated enclaves or “bantustans,” negating any possibility of creating a geographic entity called a Palestinian state.
GULF RESPONSE: BARKING DOGS RARELY BITE
The Palestinian leadership called for international pressure in order to prevent Netanyahu’s intentions and their prime minister said Palestinians could declare their own independent state on almost all of the West Bank if the Israeli action proceeds. Arab Gulf states also responded by repeatedly warning Israel not to go ahead with annexation. The UAE ambassador to the U.S., Yousef Al Otaiba, warned Israel against annexing parts of the occupied West Bank, saying the move would “upend” Israel’s efforts to improve ties with Arab countries. In a similar fashion, Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Ministry expressed the Kingdom’s rejection of Israel’s plans to annex or apply Israeli sovereignty over parts of the occupied West Bank and repeated the “Kingdom’s steadfast stance toward the brotherly Palestinian people, and support for its choices, and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, with East Jerusalem as its capital.” The Arab League went even further when stating that “Israeli plans to annex parts of the West Bank would amount to a war crime and a serious violation of international law, if implemented.” But, despite declared rejection, many believe that Arab reaction may well be lip service without substance, as neither Riyadh nor Abu Dhabi’s stance were particularly harsh. 20
However, these statements did not go unnoticed in Israel. According to Dr. Nir Boms, a research fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, the issue is highly contested in Israel even among the coalition partners, who are not sure that a significant unilateral move will indeed be helpful to Israel. Indeed, Netanyahu’s coalition partner, Benny Gantz, from the Israel Resilience Party, has repeatedly spoken against unilateral annexation. Nevertheless, it’s impossible to know exactly how the Gulf states will respond to Israeli annexation, but it seems fairly clear that overt gestures toward normalization, of the kind we’ve seen in recent years, are likely to be put on hold, said Khaled Elgindy, director of the Middle East Institute’s Program on Palestine and Israeli-Palestinian Affairs. In Boms’ opinion, much of this depends on what happens on the ground. “If Israel annexes the Etzion bloc [Jewish settlements between Jerusalem and Hebron in the West Bank] or advances toward a move which appears more symbolic—I do not expect a significant response from the majority of Arab players,” he said. Conversely, if Israel announces a stronger annexation move along the Jordan Valley, the response, in his opinion, might be different. Zaha Hassan, a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, pointed out that even when Israel had indicated its intentions to annex parts of the West Bank, planes from the UAE were landing in Tel Aviv, security cooperation was ongoing with Saudi Arabia, and the Saudi government was welcoming Israeli private companies to partner on Saudi 2030 vision projects. “This kind of schizophrenic foreign policy may prove to be untenable as the situation between Israel’s military and Palestinians deteriorate on the ground,” she added. Thus, a minimum expectation from Dr. Elgindy is that the Gulf states would freeze normalization efforts. But in terms of Arab states, let’s not forget Egypt, which also has a peace treaty with Israel and could take a stronger position against annexation than the Gulf states.
WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS
ABSENCE OF PUNITIVE MEASURES It is also unclear whether Arab states will adopt any punitive measures by targeting Israeli economic or political interests. Europe, for example, openly threatened to introduce sanctions on Israel and Josep Borrell, the 27-nation bloc’s foreign policy chief, warned that Israel’s actions would not go “unchallenged.” Hassan recalls that the European Court of Justice has already upheld the French “country of origin” requirements on Israeli settlement goods and Ireland is on the verge of passing a bill to prohibit Israeli settlement goods from entering Ireland. There are also ever louder voices calling on individual European states to recognize Palestine and to impose measures that would differentiate Israel from its settlements in the West Bank in a more methodical way. But for Elgindy, the EU position is anything but clear or unified. Despite condemning the annexation, Elgindy noted that Borrell has also said the Trump plan “can be used to start joint international efforts on the basis of existing internationally-agreed parameters.” He said that neither the EU nor the Arab states have laid out any clear consequences for Israel if it goes ahead with annexation. While further Israeli actions may push Gulf countries to take more serious measures of their own and perhaps end the more public demonstrations of warming relations with Israel, Hassan is convinced that, behind of scenes, security cooperation with Israel will likely continue. In addition, Elgindy warns that the real danger is not acceptance but acquiescence. What Israel is counting on is that while initially there will be complaints and condemnation about annexation, they will eventually, albeit reluctantly, learn to live with it. But Hassan thinks that the response will be “stronger condemnations in public but little change in relations but, over time, the Arab Gulf States will find it difficult in maintaining relations with Israel.” The Gulf reaction would also be determined by the dynamics and level of coordination between Israel and the U.S. As the main backer of Netanyahu’s aggressive foreign policy, the AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020
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U.S. will probably block any U.N. Security Council resolution condemning or suggesting legal actions against Israel. It is hard to believe that Gulf reaction would risk their relations with the Trump administration and jeopardize their security arrangements with the U.S. for the sake of the Palestinian cause. Bom hypothesizes that, if needed, they could easily manage a response which helps demonstrate their public discontent while not touching other dimensions of the geo-political relations. He points out the case of Israeli-Egyptian relations where there is intimate security cooperation, mediation on Gaza, and open channels that are otherwise in parallel to a hostile public climate and visible public criticism when it comes to the Palestinian issue. However, Hassan thinks that the Palestinian issue is not something that Saudi Arabia or other Gulf countries can so easily discard because of their own domestic concerns. That is why Saudi Arabia led efforts at the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to condemn annexation and actions in Jerusalem. She said that Saudi reliance on the Trump administration
to back it up with Iran and on the Jamal Khashoggi matter did not prevent the king from taking such public stands against the American and Israeli plans to liquidate the Palestinian national project. But, given that Saudi Arabia has lost much of its standing in both U.S. legislative houses and the recently reported withdrawal of two Patriot missile batteries from Saudi Arabia at a time of high tensions with Iran, has raised speculation regarding the current state of U.S.-Saudi relations. The possibility of losing U.S. military protection has caused a cautious response toward any crisis in the region where Saudis may collide with the unpredictable U.S. president and his hawks. But while the Trump administration is aware of their opposition to annexation and to his plan, the main question, according to Elgindy, is whether annexation would disrupt Arab Gulf states’ willingness to cooperate with Israel against the perceived threat from Iran. Nevertheless, Gulf Arabs, in general, share deep sympathies with the Palestinians and their struggle for an independent state, something even Gulf absolute monarchies
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cannot ignore when approaching this sensitive matter. Despite the Arab Gulf’s warming relations with Israel and some attempt to influence Arab public opinion through film and cultural events that paint Israel in a sympathetic light, or normalize Arab-Israeli relations, Hassan is convinced the majority of Arabs and Muslims will not abandon their brothers and sisters in Palestine, who are the only thing standing in the way of extremists who seek to rebuild the Jewish Temple on the Haram al Sharif in Jerusalem. For years, Jordan and Egypt have had peace agreements with Israel and those have yet to translate into any peace between the peoples. Likewise, in Hassan’s opinion, people in the Arab Gulf will remain supportive of Palestinian rights and their governments will continue to reflect that support. Boms concurs, but believes that there might be a difference between that “public” response, which will focus on criticism of Israel and on satisfying the “proPalestinian” voices, and the “nonpublic response” that will continue to take into account the geopolitical interests and the dialogue with the U.S. and Israel. ■
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Israel and Judaism
Israeli demonstrators carry placards during a demonstration condemning the shooting of Iyad Halak, a disabled Palestinian man who was shot dead by Israeli police after they mistakenly thought he was armed with a pistol, in Jerusalem on May 30, 2020.
THE DIVIDE between the values of most American Jews and those embraced by the Israeli government is becoming increasingly clear. As racial tensions grow in the American society as a result of the killing by a police officer of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and a series of killings of black men and women by the police in various parts of the country, attention is being paid to the role Israel has been playing in training American police officers and the role which American Jewish organizations, such as the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, are playing in promoting and financing such efforts. A statement issued In June by the Jewish Voice for Peace Health Advisory Council declares, “In this moment, as we shine the light on police violence here in the United States, we also cannot fail to reaffirm our opposition to the actions of the Israeli police and military, which often act jointly as the agents of social control in Palestine.
Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.
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The U.S. provides $3.8 billion of military aid for Israel each year. Additionally, many police departments from cities across the U.S. contract for military-style training from the Israeli military. It is hard to comprehend the level of dis-investment in human potential that this choice of funding allocation produces. “The latest indiscriminate shooting by the Israeli police occurred on May 30, causing the death of Iyad Halak, age 32. Halak a young man with autism, was walking through his East Jerusalem neighborhood toward school and was killed when police accused him of carrying a weapon, which he did not have. Halak’s death is just the latest in a number of Israeli police and military shootings of Palestinians with physical or mental health disabilities.” According to Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), “Israeli military policing of Palestinians is characterized by the use of lethal force and dangerous ‘less than lethal’ munitions such as tear gas and other chemical weapons, rubber bullets and sound projectiles. Israeli military police act out of impunity from an almost blanket lack of accountability.” A recent report from the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem de-
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AHMAD GHARABLI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Israel Viewed as Alien to the Values of Most American Jews By Allan C. Brownfeld
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clares that, “Israel’s military law enforcement system has a whitewash mechanism...Most cases continue to be closed with no measures taken.” When the U.S. Justice Department published a report in 2016 that documented “widespread constitutional violations, discriminatory enforcement, and a culture of retaliation” within the Baltimore Police Department, there was a general reaction of outrage. But what did not receive much attention at the time was where the Baltimore police received training in crowd control, use of force and surveillance. The training was provided by Israel’s national police, military and intelligence services. Baltimore law enforcement officials along with hundreds of others from Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, Arizona, Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Washington State as well as the Washington, DC Capitol Police all traveled to Israel for training. Since 2002, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee’s Project Interchange, and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs have paid for police chiefs, assistant chiefs, and captains to train in Israel and the occupied territories. Amnesty International and the U.S. Department of State have cited Israel’s police for carrying out extra judicial executions and other unlawful killings, using ill treatment and torture—even against children. In April 2018, the City Council of Durham, North Carolina voted unanimously to bar Durham’s participation in militarized police exchange training with Israel and other foreign countries. The initial petition, crafted by a coalition of 10 Durham organizations, states that, “The Israeli Defense Forces and Israeli Police have a long history of violence and harm against the Palestinian people, and Jews of Color.” One coalition member said, “Training with Israel makes it worse in terms of racial profiling, the use of force and crowd control.” As JVP declares, “One of the most dangerous places the regimes of Trump and Netanyahu converge are in exchange programs that bring together police, ICE border patrol, and FBI from the U.S. with police, AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020
soldiers, and border agents from Israel. In these programs ‘worst practices’ are shared to promote and extend discriminatory and repressive policing tactics that already exist in both countries, in doing extrajudicial executions, shoot-to-kill policies, police murders, racial profiling, massive spying and surveillance, deportation and detention and attacks on human rights defenders.”
ANNEXATION PLANS
The plans of the Netanyahu government to move toward annexing parts of the West Bank have further alienated a vast majority of Jews. In June, more than 500 professors of Jewish Studies from around the world signed a petition against plans to annex large parts of the occupied West Bank. According to the petition, which was published in English, Hebrew and Arabic, the professors oppose “the continuation of the occupation and the stated intention of the current elected government of Israel to annex parts of the West Bank, thereby formally (de jure) creating apartheid conditions in Israel and Palestine.” The petition states that, “At this still uncertain and dangerous historical inflection point, we reject annexation and apartheid, racism and hatred, occupation and discrimination. We commit ourselves to an open culture of learning, cooperation and criticism in relation to Israel and Palestine.” Among those signing the petition are Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller of UCLA, Prof. Samuel Moyn of Yale, Prof. Chana Kronfeld of the University of California, Berkeley, Prof. Susannah Heschel of Dartmouth, and Prof. Hasia Diner of NYU. The petition further highlights that the Israeli government has made clear that Palestinians in the West Bank, who will be annexed to Israel, will not receive citizenship and that “the most likely outcomes...will be further unequal distribution of land and water resources on behalf of illegal Israeli settlements, more state violence and fragmented Palestinian enclaves under complete Israeli control.” Under such circumstances, annexation will “cement into place an anti-democratic system of separate and unequal law and
systemic discrimination against the Palestinian population,” which the signatories say will amount to “conditions of apartheid.” Such a step, they warn, will lead to “an inevitable spike in anti-Semitism and Islamophobia and polarization between minority communities.” According to Prof. Mira Sucharov of Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, Israel’s moves toward annexation signal “a dangerous trend further towards full apartheid...Israeli democracy is being further eroded.” Prof. Nitzan Lebovic of Lehigh University, one of those behind the petition, said, “we were amazed by the immediate response of many of the signatories. There were no arguments about the word ‘apartheid.’” Two hundred and forty legal scholars from around the world, including Israel, signed a separate petition against annexation, saying it would constitute, “A flagrant violation of bedrock rules of international law and would also pose a serious threat to international stability in a volatile world.” Many American Jews once thought Israel shared their values. Few any longer hold this view. And, many Israelis also reject their government’s disregard for traditional Jewish values. One of these is Amira Hass, who began reporting for Haaretz from the West Bank in 1991. An example of Israel’s disregard was highlighted in her 2019 article about the supply of water to 12 Palestinian villages in the West Bank. After six months of clean running water, representatives of the Israeli Civil Administration, soldiers, border police and bulldozers arrived to put an end to this basic service: “The troops dug up the pipes, cut and sawed them apart and watched the jets of water that spurted out...About 350 cubic meters of water were wasted.” This was done despite the critical scarcity of water in the region. As the Civil Administration diligently destroys water lines for many Palestinian villages, “it immediately connects illegal Jewish settlements and outposts to water and electricity and even paves the roads leading to them.” Israel may call itself a “Jewish” State, but when it comes to its behavior toward Palestinians, it is difficult to find anything “Jewish” about it. ■
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History’s Shadows
Protesters block the street in front of the Supreme Court as it heard arguments on whether gay and transgender people are covered by a federal law barring employment discrimination on the basis of sex, Oct. 8, 2019. In a landmark 6-3 decision the Supreme Court ruled, on June 15, that federal sex discrimination protections extend to LGBT workers. GEORGE FLOYD’S horrific video-taped strangulation on May 25 lasted eight minutes and 46 seconds, but it was actually a “moment” in time. Historians often use the term “moment” metaphorically to signal a pivotal or transformative event that alters the trajectory of history. Floyd’s “moment”—and the massive demonstrations that it and scores of other senseless police beatings and killings of African Americans have inspired—has sent the United States cascading in a positive direction toward a less racist future. Other famous historic “moments” include the assassination of the archduke of Austria at Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, which sparked
History’s Shadows, a regular column by contributing editor Walter L. Hixson, seeks to place various aspects of Middle East politics and diplomacy in historical perspective. Hixson is the author of Israel’s Armor: The Israel Lobby and the First Generation of the Palestine Conflict (available from Middle East Books and More), along with several other books and journal articles. He has been a professor of history for 36 years, achieving the rank of distinguished professor. 24
BILL CLARK/CQ-ROLL CALL, INC VIA GETTY IMAGES
Historical “Moments” and the Hope for Change By Walter L. Hixson the First World War, or September 11, 2001, which ignited the ill-fated American “forever war” crusades in the Middle East. Of course, another historic moment came on June 5, 1967, in the Middle East, when Israel attacked its neighbors and seized control of foreign territory, including the West Bank, which it has since held and is now attempting to partition and annex in blatant violation of international law. When will the historic moment come when a critical mass of Americans turns against Israeli apartheid, aggression, and endless lies? Is there a moment coming that will transform American foreign policy and remake the “special relationship” with Israel?
LGBTQ OFFERS HOPEFUL MODEL
Optimists about the prospects of ending U.S. support for Israeli repression in Palestine, often cite the historic transformation in the status of LGBTQ—lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning or queer. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an historic ruling affirming LGBTQ rights. In 1969, a crucial earlier moment in the history of “gay liberation” came with the Stonewall riots, from June 28 to July 3, in New York’s Greenwich Village, when members of the gay community fought back against—you guessed it—a long history of police violence and repression. It took another 50 years, and while all such campaigns are never complete, LBGTQ today have now achieved an unprecedented degree of liberation. Can such a moment arrive for the people of Palestine? Can a critical mass of Americans act on the knowledge that their national security policy and their billions of dollars spent annually, go to support a brutal apartheid regime rather than freedom and justice in West Asia? As an, historian, I know we can learn a lot about the past and AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020
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better understand the present through the study of history, yet we can never, with any assurance, predict the future. History is elusive, enigmatic and it can be a cruel jokester. It can take away as well as give.
A SHARED HISTORY OF RACISM AND POLICE REPRESSION
Yet, there should be a connection between the George Floyd moment and a future moment of meaningful transformation in Palestine. The logic of the anti-racist demonstrations in the United States, and all over the world, should be extended to Israel’s suffocating occupation of Palestine and severe marginalization of Palestinians living inside Israel. Beyond any doubt, the Israeli repression, like the American police repression, is racist repression. The Israelis have a demonstrably racist prime minister who, as a result of repeated reelections, has served longer than any other prime minister in Israeli history. From the outset of the Zionist move-
ment, white Europeans sought to drive out and exclude the Arab “other.” Israel, at its essence, is a racist apartheid regime. Moreover, the Israelis have pioneered— and exported to the United States through various seminars and “deadly exchanges”— the techniques of militarized police repression that we have seen deployed on the streets of American cities. The United States underwrites police repression in Palestine even as it incorporates Israeli techniques into its own law enforcement agencies. According to Jewish Voice for Peace, the Anti-Defamation League—supposedly a civil rights group but actually a repressive wing of the Israel lobby—is the largest nongovernmental trainer of police in the United States, including facilitating worst-practice exchange programs between American police, ICE and FBI, and the Israeli police and military forces. As grassroots peace and justice groups across the United States demand diversion of money from police repression into community health and social (Advertisement)
service programs, we should at the same time demand either eliminating the $3.8 billion annual allocation to the Israeli military or, better yet, shifting it into social services for Palestinians. Can we forge a connection between racist repression and police violence in occupied Palestine and on American streets, and, in so doing, ignite an historical moment that will once again transform the Middle East, but this time in a positive direction? History will decide, but as the demonstrations against police violence in communities across the United States and the world have shown, people do have the ability to mobilize and to change the course of events. George Floyd may have appeared powerless on the evening of May 25, with that jackbooted officer’s knee on his neck, but history has shown that the reverse was true. Floyd’s death was tragic, to be sure, but it gave life to the most powerful and inspirational “moment” of our time. ■
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Islam in America
It Takes a Community to Support Wrongfully Imprisoned Muslims By Jeanne Finley keep working for justice no matter how long it took. Since 2006, an informal coalition of citizens, activists, Muslims, lawyers and family members worked to bring these men home, advocated for them and their families, made sure that the public did not forget them or the case, and effected changes in the criminal justice system from the grassroots level.
A LOT HAS HAPPENED
PHOTO COURTESY JEANNE FINLEY
Both Aref and Hossain are finally free and home with their families. Aref, an Iraqi Kurd, U.N. refugee, and imam of the Masjid As-Salam, where the sting was centered, finished Alicia McWilliams, aunt of David Williams of the Newburgh Four, another terrible preemptive prosecution his sentence in October 2018, case, hugs Mohammed Hossain on his front porch at home in Albany. was transferred to ICE detention, where he spent eight months, and was deported on June 9, 2019. He stepped off the IN 2004, two Muslim men, Yassin Aref and Mohammed Hossain, plane in Baghdad on June 11 and was reunited with his family and respected members of their community, were targeted in a fictional countrymen in Kurdistan after 20 years. One year later, on June 8, FBI sting, convicted of material support for terrorism in 2006, and 2020, Hossain, a Bangladeshi immigrant, small business owner, sentenced to 15 years each. The Muslims were subjected to “preand co-founder of the Masjid As-Salam, was released, helped by a emptive prosecution,” which is a law enforcement strategy, adopted petition filed and signed by 631 supporters for his early release under after 9/11, to target and prosecute individuals or organizations whose the First Step Act. The original trial judge granted him a reduction beliefs, ideology or religious affiliations raise security concerns for in sentence because of his age, failing health and the threat of corothe government. Just in case the targets might become terrorists, navirus in federal prison. Hossain returned to his family in Albany the government concocts a sting. and on June 16, we held an informal street celebration for him, preThe Aref-Hossain case in Albany, NY, garnered international atsenting him with a huge welcome home card, signed by nearly 100 tention, including several articles in this magazine, on different assupporters. He spoke from his front porch about his prison experipects of the prosecution—on the use of informants, illegal wiretapences and his resolve to work to free other unjustly prosecuted Musping, secret evidence, entrapment and prisons for Muslims. It wasn’t lims. He is our newest activist from the Aref-Hossain case. the first case of preemptive prosecution of Muslims post-9/11 and, How to narrate the rest of those 15 years? Perhaps the story is sadly, it hasn’t been the last. But it is one that coalesced a local comnot how long it took to free Aref and Hossain, but the actions taken munity in opposition to the blatant injustice of a prosecution that was by a Community, with a capital C, both Muslim and non-Muslim, not designed to stoke fear that Muslim terrorists were among us. just in Albany but nationwide. That community collectively decided to take action and resolved to Five days after the conviction of Aref and Hossain in October 2006, Cathy Callan, a peace activist, and May Saffar, an Iraqi exile, Jeanne Finley is a photographer, writer, editor and community activist. formed the Muslim Solidarity Committee, which is still going strong. 26
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That same year, the Aref-Hossain Families Fund for both families’ expenses/needs (there are ten children between them) was created. Fundraising was done every year and the fund is still in existence. Starting in 2007, an annual event to commemorate August 4, the day of the men’s arrests in 2004, was held with a street march and various associated activities. In a continued show of solidarity, in 2008 the MSC chartered a bus to take more than 100 supporters to New York City to hear oral arguments for Aref’s (ultimately unsuccessful) appeal to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. Understanding that the struggle would be long and was bigger than one case, in 2008, Support And Legal Advocacy for Muslims (Project SALAM), <www.projectsalam.org> was launched to document in a unique database all the cases nationwide of preemptive prosecutions since 2001 and to advocate for the defendants’ release. The same year, Aref’s memoir, Son of Mountains, written in jail was published and a documentary film about the case, “Waiting for Mercy,” produced and directed by Ellie Bernstein, debuted. By 2009, publication of Rounded Up by the late Dr. Shamshad Ahmad, president of the Masjid As-Salam, became the definitive book on the case that helped inspire the 2014 publication of Inventing Terrorists by civil rights lawyers Steve Downs and Kathy Manley, Project SALAM and the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms (NCPCF), with an updated edition in 2019. From 2014 through 2019 there were four performances of a play, “To Catch a Muslim” by Steve Downs, based on the case. Activists and lawyers continued working on the case and in 2009, the Albany Common Council passed the “Albany Resolution,” opposing preemptive prosecution of Muslims (the first in the country) and supporting Aref and Hossain. Other defendants’ families came from as far away as New Jersey and Maryland to speak for five minutes in support. In order to strengthen collective advocacy, in 2010 the NCPCF (now Coalition for Civil Freedoms/CCF) formed. Based in Washington, DC, the organization of civil AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020
COURTESY AREF FAMILY
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The Aref family at the Slemani airport in Kurdistan, Iraq last August, saying goodbye to Salah, who was leaving to study at Harvard Law School. (L-r) Azzam, Ayah, Yassin, Salah, Zuhur and Alaa. rights and Muslim groups, focuses on public education about the erosion of civil liberties and political freedoms, advocates for Muslim prisoners, supports their families through a unique annual conference, and runs a Ramadan Gift Appeal for prisoners. Continuing the legal fight, in 2010, Aref became lead plaintiff on a Center for Constitutional Rights lawsuit, Aref v. Holder and later Aref v. Lynch, then Aref v. Barr, regarding the formation of two Communication Management Units—the isolating, repressive prisons created for Muslims by the Bureau of Prisons; Aref had been held in both. One element of the suit is still working its way through the courts. In 2011, through a FOIA request, Yassin Aref discovered that in 2002 and 2003, before the sting commenced, the FBI thought he was someone else: a Pakistani al-Qaeda agent named Mohammed Yasin. Armed with this information, Aref filed a 2255 motion arguing that the misidentification, never made public or communicated to the defense, didn’t allow him a fair trial. In support of his motion, Lynne Jackson began a 133-mile Journey for Justice in 2013, walking from Albany to Binghamton to deliver a petition, signed by over 1,700 supporters, to the judge, which demanded he consider Aref’s motion and give him a new trial. The week-long walk gained national attention and expanded the public’s understanding of preemptive prosecution and the Aref-Hossain case. Through CCF’s Coronavirus Prisoner
Release Project, in 2020, Manley submitted compassionate release petitions for seven high-risk Muslim prisoners in danger of infection because of their age and health; three more petitions are pending. However, the release of Aref and Hossain is only the conclusion of the first chapter in the ongoing pushback against preemptive prosecution and the abuse of the criminal justice system. The threat of racially and ethnically motivated terrorism from white supremacists is now “on the rise and spreading geographically” across the country and world, according to a 2019 State Department report on terrorism. It is not only African-Americans who are targets, the “white supremacist and nativist movements and individuals increasingly target immigrants....” Domestic terrorism is finally being correctly defined and a paradigm change is coming, starting with the agencies set up to keep us safe but which have only kept us afraid, insecure and imprisoned. On June 16, I gave Hossain a souvenir— a bumper sticker that had been in my car’s back window since 2006. FREE AREF AND HOSSAIN it said. I wrote Hossain a note, “I swore I would not take this out of my car until you both were free. Now that you’re home I would like you to have it, since I don’t need it anymore.” But, it wasn’t a goodbye, instead it was a hello for the new and different level of activity for this returned member of our community, who never should have been taken away at all. ■
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Special Report
Jamaal Bowman’s Historic Win Demonstrates Change is Coming
Educator and progressive Jamaal Bowman meets with voters at a school, June 23, 2020 in Mount Vernon, NY. Bowman defeated the proIsrael lobby-backed chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, U.S. Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY), to win in the 16th congressional district. ON TUESDAY, JUNE 23, 2020, Jamaal Bowman made history by winning the Democratic Party primary in New York State’s 16th congressional district. Here’s why his victory is so significant. Bowman beat Eliot Engel, a 16-term incumbent congressman who served as chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and had the backing of nearly the entire Democratic Party establishment, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Bowman is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and ran on an unabashedly progressive platform that included support for Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. He was outspent by a margin of two to one. And because Bowman had taken positions
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. 28
calling for justice for Palestinians, “dark money” pro-Israel superPACs spent an additional $2,000,000 in independent expenditures in an effort to tear down his character and defeat him. Despite all of these challenges, Jamaal Bowman won, sending the message that change is on the way. Bowman’s victory against an entrenched incumbent came on the heels of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 unseating of 10-term Congressman Joseph Crowley in the nearby 14th district of New York. There were similarities between the two races and some important differences. Both Ocasio-Cortez and Bowman are young people of color who defeated older white men whose constituents in their congressional districts are majority minority voters. And because both of the young winners were community activists who had developed strong grass-
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roots networks and the incumbent members of Congress they were challenging had grown lazy and entitled, assuming their victories were assured, Bowman and Ocasio-Cortez represented both generational change and the importance of maintaining direct contact with the voters one seeks to represent. Both of these upstart candidates were members of the DSA, running on a progressive agenda that promoted universal health care, a quality education, a decent job, a clean environment, and affordable housing as fundamental human rights. Both were endorsed by Senator Bernie Sanders (Bowman was also endorsed by OcasioCortez and Senator Elizabeth Warren), while Crowley and Engel had the support of the Democratic leadership in the Senate and House of Representatives. As such, they represent the insurgent left’s victories over the party’s centrist establishment. While both of the defeated members of Congress relied largely on large donations from big donors or political action committees to fund their campaigns, Bowman and Ocasio-Cortez raised their campaign funds from individual small donors—replicating the approach taken by Sanders in his 2016 and 2020 presidential runs. Their wins were victories for campaign finance reform. These similarities aside, there were two fundamental differences between the Ocasio-Cortez and Bowman victories that contribute to making the Bowman win historic. Ocasio-Cortez’s victory was a shock that caught both Crowley and the Democratic establishment by surprise. Determined that it wouldn’t happen again, New York State’s governor, its two senators, the speaker of the House of Representatives, and Clinton (in her only endorsement of the 2020 election) all lined up behind Engel. By winning against this formidable line-up, Bowman demonstrated that the progressive wave isn’t a fluke. And then there’s the role played by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While OcasioCortez’s position on justice for Palestinians matches that of Bowman, it never became much of a factor in 2018, largely because Crowley hadn’t made it an issue and beAUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020
cause Ocasio-Cortez’s race was run largely under the radar. She didn’t come under attack from pro-Israel groups until she was in Congress and came to the defense of her sister freshmen members, Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN). Because Bowman was running against the very pro-Israel chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC) and the party’s establishment and the pro-Israel lobby didn’t want a replay of the OcasioCortez win, they invested heavily in the effort to defeat Bowman.
I sit down with AIPAC on
every piece of legislation that comes out. Engel had long been an AIPAC point person in Congress. In 2018, as he was poised to become the HFAC chair, speaking at an AIPAC conference he pledged to use his position “to make sure that Israel continues to receive support...I want to tell you that I sit down with AIPAC on every piece of legislation that comes out.” Protecting Engel was important. One AIPAC-allied group, Democratic Majority for Israel (DMI), spent more than $1.5 million in the Engel/Bowman race. And not unlike the $1.4 million they spent earlier this year to attack Bernie Sanders, their ads were largely personal attacks on Bowman’s character. The DMI was smart enough to know that there were no votes to be won by supporting Israel since Democratic voters were so alienated by Netanyahu’s policies; nothing was to be gained by selling spoiled goods. Despite the money spent against him, Bowman never wavered. A week before the election, he was challenged by a rabbi from Riverdale, an affluent neighborhood in his district. In an “open letter” published in the Riverdale Press, the rabbi expressed his concern that Bowman was espousing anti-Israel views and made a number of rhetorically inflammatory charges—with Palestinian terrorism mentioned in seven consecutive paragraphs.
Bowman refused to accept the bait and instead responded in a deeply respectful “open letter” of his own in which he made clear his views on foreign policy, including the IsraeliPalestinian conflict, “are rooted in the values of human dignity” and his life experiences. In one moving passage, he noted: “The uprising across the country against police violence also makes me empathize with the everyday experience and fear that comes with living under occupation. Just as the police force is an intimidating force in so many black communities, I can connect to what it feels like for Palestinians to feel the presence of the military in their daily lives in the West Bank. I can also understand the crushing poverty and deprivation in the Gaza Strip. I believe Palestinians have the same rights to freedom and dignity as my Jewish brothers and sisters. I will fight for their liberation just as hard as I will fight for yours.” In the end, not only did Jamaal Bowman win, he won by a decisive margin carrying all areas of his district and all major demographic groups. Interestingly, from vote tallies I’ve seen, he also beat Engel in precincts that were heavily Jewish. This is yet another reason why Jamaal Bowman’s victory was historic. For decades, the pro-Israel lobby was able to carry the day in Congress because members feared the repercussions of criticizing Israel. That tide is turning. Polls show that a majority of Democrats now support greater balance in U.S. policy, oppose Netanyahu’s behavior, and believe that aid to Israel should be cut because of violations of Palestinian human rights. That’s why AIPAC was forced to “allow” members of Congress to condemn Israel’s plans to annex West Bank lands. And now their efforts to hurt Jamaal Bowman and save Eliot Engel failed. This isn’t the first time that AIPAC has lost in their effort to defeat an “enemy” or save a “friend.” And it may be too much to hope that Bowman’s win will finally shatter the myth of AIPAC’s invincibility. The most extreme elements of the pro-Israel lobby will not give up easily, so we must remain vigilant. But as Jamaal Bowman’s win demonstrates, change is coming and that is what makes his victory so historic. ■
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Congress Watch
Congressional Letters, but No Actions, Oppose Israeli Annexation of Parts of By Shirl McArthur West Bank
MUCH SOUND AND FURY, signifying nothing, is one way to characterize all the congressional harrumphing and hand-wringing over reports that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is proceeding with plans to annex as much as 30 percent of the West Bank. Americans for Peace Now reported that representatives of Netanyahu and President Donald Trump are working together to develop a detailed map designating the territory to be annexed. They want to get the annexation process completed to establish “facts on the ground” before the U.S. general election in November. No fewer than five letters have been sent, calling on Israel to abandon the plans, but no legislative measures have been introduced, while pro-Israel measures seem to be progressing nicely. In the Senate, on May 21, 19 Democratic senators, led by Sens. Chris Murphy (CT), Tim Kaine (VA), and Chris Van Hollen (MD), signed a letter to Netanyahu and “Alternate Prime Minister” and Defense Minister Benjamin Gantz. While paying lip service to “Palestinians’ right to self-determination,” the bulk of the letter emphasizes that unilateral annexation of Palestinian territory would be “met with deep concern from our mutual allies” and erodes Israel’s “support among the American people.” Separately, on June 3, Sen. Bob Casey (DPA) sent a slightly stronger letter to Netanyahu and Gantz urging them to abandon annexation plans and continue working “toward a shared goal of a two-state solution.” Also, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) wrote to Netanyahu on May 15, expressing her concern about unilateral annexation, but her “concern” was more about the costs to Israel rather than its impact on Palestinian rights. More positively, on May 20, Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) wrote to Secretary of State Michael Pompeo urging that the U.S. “continue to promote a clear path toward negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians and to encourage the Israeli government not to take actions outside of direct talks.” In the House, 191 members, led by Reps. Jan Schakowsky (DIL), Ted Deutch (D-FL), Brad Schneider (D-IL) and David Price (DNC), signed a June 25 letter to Netanyahu, Gantz, and Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi saying that “longstanding, bipartisan U.S. foreign policy supports direct negotiations to achieve a viable two-state solution that addresses the aspirations of both Israelis and Palestinians, and their desire for long-term security and a just, sustainable peace,” and expresses the signers’ fear “that unilateral actions, taken by either side, will push the parties further from negotiations and the possibility of a final, negotiated agreement.” Meanwhile, S.Res. 234 and H.Res. 138, supporting a two-state solution, have made no progress.
Shirl McArthur is a retired foreign service officer. He lives in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. 30
SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE PASSES BILL TO PROVIDE MORE GOODIES FOR ISRAEL
On May 21, the Senate Foreign Relations committee (SFRC) passed, without discussion, S. 3176, amended, introduced in January by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL). The Senate bill, similar to the House bill, H.R. 1837, passed by the House last July, is a grab bag of goodies for Israel, with one significant difference. S. 3176 does not include the provision included in H.R. 1837, which would give the president authority to provide Israel any defense-related articles or services if he determines that Israel is “under an existing or imminent threat of military attack,” without any limitation of law and without congressional oversight. S. 3176 was reported to the full Senate on June 3 and could be brought up for a vote at any time. Next, the Senate will probably amend the House’s H.R. 1837, which still rests with the SFRC, by replacing its text with the text of S. 3176, pass it, and return it to the House for action. If it passes both the Senate and the House, which seems likely, it will send Israel a strong message that there will be no congressional consequences for annexation, or any other outrageous action Israel might take.
MEMBERS OF CONGRESS URGE U.S. AMBASSADOR TO CONDEMN ACTS OF VIOLENCE IN WEST BANK
Following the increases in settler violence against Palestinians over the past two years, on June 11, 54 Representatives, led by Reps. Deb Haaland (D-NM), Jared Huffman (D-CA) and John Yarmuth (DKY), signed a letter to U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman urging him to condemn all acts of violence in the West Bank. The letter points out that “there is no doubt that such incidents, in addition to causing tragic suffering, harm the prospects for a negotiated twostate solution to the conflict that is in each of Israel’s, the Palestinians, and U.S. interests. We believe the U.S. must condemn all acts of violence that pull us further away from peace and should make its condemnation clear whether the victim is Israeli or Palestinian.” H.R. 5595, the “Israel Anti-Boycott” bill, introduced on Jan. 13 by dependable Israel-firster, Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY), now has 64 cosponsors. The previously described bills, S. 1, H.R. 336, and S.Res. 120 opposing the BDS movement, have made no progress. All these measures are intended to equate Israel’s colonies with Israel
NEW BILLS WOULD INCREASE U.S.-ISRAEL COOPERATION, SLAM THE ICC
Two bills were introduced “expanding medical partnership with Israel to lessen dependence on China.” H.R. 6829 was introduced
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STATUS UPDATES
H.R. 550 and H.Con.Res. 83, No War Against Iran. H.R. 550, amended by the House to include 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,” as well as 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,” was sent to the Senate, where it rests. Even if passed by the Senate, it probably will not have enough Republican support to overcome a certain presidential veto. H.Con.Res. 83, introduced in January by Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) after the ill-considered assassination of Iran’s Quds Force Commander, Maj. Gen. Qassim Soleimani, was passed by the House in January. It would direct the president “to terminate the use of U.S. Armed Forces to engage in hostilities in or against Iran.” It was forwarded to the Senate, where it still is held at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC). H.R. 6015, H.R. 6243, and H.R. 6081, Iran Sanctions. H.R. 6015 introduced in February by Rep. Bryan Steil (R-WI), “to authorize the Secretary of the Treasury to require special measures for domestic financial institutions” to stop evasion of Iran sanctions, still has five cosponsors, and H.R. 6243, the “Block Iranian Access to U.S. Banks” bill, introduced in March by Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-MI) still has no cosponsors. But H.R. 6081, introduced by Rep. French Hill (R-AR) in March “to require the president to report on financial institutions’ involvement with officials of the Iranian government,” now has seven cosponsors. on May 12 by Rep. Chris Pappas (D-NH). It has 184 cosponsors. And, on May 13, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), with 28 cosponsors, introduced S. 3722. Twin bills were introduced “to establish a U.S.-Israel Operations-Technology Working Group.” On May 20, Sen. Gary Peters (DMI) and five cosponsors, introduced S. 3775 and, on June 11, Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) and two cosponsors introduced H.R. 7148. Following reports that the ICC had decided to proceed with the investigation of U.S. military personnel for possible war crimes and was considering similar investigation of Israeli personnel for actions in the West Bank, S.Res. 570, “a resolution opposing and condemning the potential prosecution of U.S. and Israeli nationals by the International Criminal Court,” was introduced by Sen. Cruz on May 12. In addition, AIPAC-backed letters were sent to Pompeo from the House and Senate urging that he “marshal a diplomatic initiative with likeminded countries who are members of the ICC to cease its politically motivated invesAUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020
H.R. 2407, Human Rights for Palestinian Children. Introduced in April 2019 by Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN), still has 23 cosponsors. H.R. 1850 and S. 2680, Hamas. These bills would sanction about anyone who has anything to do with Hamas. H.R. 1850, introduced by Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) in March and passed by the House in July, is still stuck in the SFRC, and its companion bill in the Senate, S. 2680, introduced in October by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), still has 26 cosponsors. S. 3572, Remove Troops from Saudi Arabia. As with the previously described measures reacting to the murder of U.S. citizen Jamal Khashoggi, S. 3572, the “strained partnership” bill, has gained no further support. The bill, introduced in March by Sens. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) and Dan Sullivan (R-AK), would “require the removal of U.S. Armed Forces from Saudi Arabia.” H.Res. 458, S.Res. 506, and H.R. 4862, Tunisia, Jordan. 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,” with 30 cosponsors, still has not been reported by the Foreign Affairs committee. S.Res. 506 introduced in February by Sens. Chris Murphy (D-CT) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) “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,” has no further cosponsors. H.R. 4862, introduced in October by Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL), “to reauthorize the U.S.-Jordan Defense Cooperation Act of 2015,” has 10 cosponsors, but still has not been reported to the full House. —S.M.
tigations into the U.S. and Israel.” The House letter, sent May 12, was led by Reps. Elaine Luria (D-VA) and Mike Gallagher (RWI) and signed by 262 representatives. The Senate letter, sent May 13, was led by Sens. Benjamin Cardin (D-MD) and Rob Portman (R-OH) and signed by 69 senators. Complicating matters, neither the U.S. nor Israel is a member of the ICC. But, on Feb. 12, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) introduced H.Res. 855 that would express the “Sense of the House” that “the U.S. should ratify the Rome Statute and join the International Criminal Court.”
AIPAC-BACKED HOUSE LETTER URGES U.N. TO RENEW IRAN ARMS EMBARGO
The long-awaited House letter, led by Chairman and Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs committee, Eliot Engel (DNY) and Michael McCaul (R-TX), to Pompeo urging increased U.S. diplomatic action to “renew the expiring U.N. arms embargo against Iran and U.N. travel restric-
tions” on certain Iranian individuals was finally sent May 4. After much delay to ensure as many signatures as possible, the letter, strongly pushed by AIPAC, was signed by 387 representatives when sent. And S.Res. 509, introduced in February by Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA), to urge the U.N. Security Council to renew the expiring restrictions on Iran, now has 51 cosponsors.
NEW BILL WOULD PROHIBIT AID TO LEBANON; SENATE LETTER URGES DIPLOMATIC SOLUTION IN YEMEN
S. 3691, “to prohibit the provision of U.S. Government assistance to any Lebanese government that is influenced or controlled by Hezbollah,” was introduced by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) May 12. It has no cosponsors. On June 16, a bipartisan group of nine senators, led by Sens. Chris Murphy (D-CT) and Todd Young (R-IN) wrote to Pompeo expressing their concern over recent events in Yemen and urging him to “use the powers of your office to facilitate a comprehensive diplomatic solution to end this devastating war.” ■
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Israelis stand in front of a branch of the Israeli Bank “Bank Leumi” in Netanya, Feb. 18, 2014. Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest bank, has included several Israeli banks on a list of companies which are ethically questionable for investment. UNDER STRONG pressure from Congress, on July 6 the U.S. Small Business Administration, after consultation with the U.S. Department of Treasury, disclosed information about 4.9 million Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans.
The loans were intended to provide relief to U.S. businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies applying through their banks for these Small Business Administration loans had to certify the money was “necessary to support the ongoing operations.” PPP loan funds spent to cover payroll, mortgage interest, rent
Grant F. Smith is the director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy in Washington, DC. Smith’s books, Big Israel: How Israel’s Lobby Moves America and The Israel Lobby Enters State Government, are available at Middle East Books and More. 32
or utilities are eligible for complete forgiveness. Vast numbers of American small businesses found their banks would not return phone calls or process loans. But a number of nonprofit organizations identified in the database of the book Big Israel: How Israel’s Lobby Moves America as being heavily involved in advancing Israel from within the U.S. received substantial support. U.S. branches of two Israeli banks operating in the occupied West Bank participated in the PPP program. Bank Leumi originated 423 PPP loans and lent between a quarter to a half billion dollars under the program while Bank Hapoalim originated seven loans. Among Leumi’s PPP loans were two projects of the Virginia Israel Advisory Board. Energix EPC US LLC is a subsidiary of En-
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Israel Affinity Organizations Received Millions In Forgivable PPP Loans By Grant F. Smith
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ergix Renewable Energies which builds power plants to serve Israeli customers, and operates in the Israeli occupied West
Bank and Golan Heights. Energix received $2-5 million in PPP loans. Oran Safety Glass, which makes bullet-proof
PPP Loan Amount $5-10 million
Recipient Anti-Defamation League
$150,000-350,000
Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA)
$350,000-1 million $2-5 million
Zionist Organization of America (ZOA)
Friends of the Israel Defense Forces
Israel Emergency Alliance
$1-2 million
Israeli American Council
$350,000-1 million
Israel on Campus Coalition
$1-2 million
Activities Advocates for Israel, charges pro-Palestinian activists with anti-Semitism, trains law enforcement officials, infiltrates and disrupts peace & justice groups.
Sends U.S. military and police to Israel for training.
$1-2 million
$2-5 million
glass and paid millions in fines after delivering substandard products to the U.S. Army, received $1-2 million. ■
Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemeth Leisrael) Inc.
American Society for Technion-Israel Institute for Technology, Inc.
Lobbies Congress on behalf of Israel. Ordered to register seven times as an Israeli foreign agent.
Builds recreational facilities on IDF bases in Israel.
Promotes Israel on campus and urges the public to buy Israeli goods. Portrays Israel as a perpetually seeking peace (“Peace takes Two” program) against Palestinian “intransigence.”
Organization launched in 2007 funded by casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, mobilizes the estimated half-million Israeli Americans residing in the U.S. to be more active on behalf of Israel.
Creates and mobilizes pro-Israel groups on American campuses.
Acquires and develops land for Jewish settlement. Tree planting.
Raises funds for Israel’s MIT, which has been credibly alleged to perform work on Israel’s nuclear weapons program.
Source: Small Business Administration loans database, loans totaling $150,000 or more.
Update on Another Misuse of Government Funds
Our report “Partners in Corruption: The Virginia Israel Advisory Board and the Tobacco Commission,” detailed a questionable deal (see Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Jan./Feb. 2020, pp. 17-19). The Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission agreed to forgive a $210,000 loan to Virginia Israel Ad-
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visory Board Vice Chairman Charles Lessin. Lessin had personally hoped to operate a refinery with Israel’s TransBioDiesel in St. Paul, VA. The project failed. But in 2019 the Virginia Israel Advisory Board chairman claimed the VIAB was creating so many jobs and businesses in Virginia ($639.85 million in capital expenditures and 727 jobs) that Lessin should not have to repay his own loan. Jim Metz of Richmonders for Peace in Israel-Palestine filed a com-
plaint on Nov. 25, 2019 to the Office of the State Inspector General (OSIG) that the deal did not comply with state regulations. On July 6, OSIG notified Metz by letter it found his complaint was “substantiated” and must be redressed by the Tobacco Commission. To view a video of James Metz speaking about VIAB at The Israel Lobby and American Policy conference in 2019, visit https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=Gz3jShf-Hmo. —GFS
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Education
The Zionist Campaign Against Free Speech On Campus By Walter L. Hixson
JOE CATRON, CC BY-NC 2.0
After dinner I thanked the host Ken Ledford, the chairman of the History Department at Case Western, and told him that I appreciated his willingness to support the talk even though it risked provoking the ire of university administrators and donors. He replied, “When students take the initiative and want to generate discussion about history and public policy, it is our duty as academics and mentors to support their efforts.” Contrast Professor Ledford’s open-mindedness and support for student activism with the attitudes on display at Tufts University and across much of the country. Last April, the SJP chapter at Tufts Members and supporters of Fordham’s Students for Justice in Palestine rallied on the university’s Manhattan received the Collaboration campus in 2017. Award from the Office of Campus Life as a result of its tireless efforts in support of Deadly Exchange, a JVP program that IN OCTOBER 2019, I gave a talk at Case Western Reserve Unicondemns Israeli training of U.S. police forces in methods of police versity in Cleveland’s east side on the Israel lobby’s efforts to distort repression. The Tufts SJP chapter had collaborated with some 20 the history of injustice in Palestine. After the talk a couple of Case other groups to call into question the campus police chief’s travel to Western professors and a group of students from the school’s chapIsrael for training at a “counter-terrorism seminar,” which SJP argued ter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace represented a larger pattern of militarization of the campus police (JVP), and other groups that had sponsored the event treated me and mistreatment of people of color. to dinner. Today, in the wake of the massive protests over the murder of I especially appreciated the hospitality because Cleveland’s east George Floyd and other African-Americans in police custody, the side has long been a bastion of power for the Israel lobby. Men such militarized police methods are becoming more widely recognized as Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, the Zionist patriarch from the 1940s, and as deplorable. At the time, however, the student activism precipitated Howard Kohr, the current chairman of AIPAC, were Clevelanders. a backlash from administrators at Tufts, who lacked the respect for Only months before my talk, the lobby had mounted sharp attacks free speech on campus that Ledford and hopefully countless other on Ilan Pappe, a historian and critic of Israeli oppression, when he academics will continue to uphold. spoke at the Cleveland City Club. The day after the announcement of the award, Tufts administraContributing editor Walter L. Hixson is the author of Israel’s Armor: tors—the president, the provost, and deans—declared, “We strongly The Israel Lobby and the First Generation of the Palestine Conflict disapprove of this award,” citing SJP support for Boycott, Divestment (available from Middle East Books and More), along with several and Sanctions movement (BDS). The administrators proceeded to other books and journal articles. He has been a professor of history for 36 years, achieving the rank of distinguished professor. parrot Zionist lobby propaganda equating BDS with anti-Jewish prej34
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udice. James M. Glaser, dean of the school of arts and sciences at Tufts, condemned the award even though his own research and publications in political science focus on efforts to “overcome opposition to minority interests due to racial hostility.” That sort of hypocrisy and the absurdity of equating support for a program advocated by a Jewish organization—JVP— with anti-Semitism appears to have been lost on these estimable holders of the Ph.D. degree. Unfortunately, what happened at Tufts was not unusual but rather part of a massive campaign to undermine Palestine advocacy across the country. Not content to take away rights from Palestinians, Israel and the lobby want to take away the constitutional rights of Americans, including free speech on college campuses. Supposedly sacred preserves of free thought and free speech, universities are under siege by Zionist zealots who place the brutal suppression of human rights by an imperious Israel above all else.
A NATIONWIDE CAMPAIGN OF SMEAR TACTICS
The Tufts administrators willingly sacrificed free speech on campus at the direction of the Zionist lobby in Boston. The administration’s smearing of its own students for their excellence in activist collaboration came on the same day that “a barrage proIsrael groups released condemnation of the award,” noted Amira Mattar, the Michael Ratner Justice Fellow at Palestine Legal. “This explains why the university president and the provost, who normally would never have gotten involved in a student award decision, took such a direct and active role.” In 2019, Palestine Legal, an organization founded in 2012 and dedicated to protecting the legal and constitutional rights of advocates for justice in Palestine, recorded 247 such incidents of suppression of U.S.-based Palestinian advocacy. Since January 2014, Palestine Legal has responded to a staggering 1,494 such incidents, a number that reflects only cases reported to Palestine Legal and therefore does not represent a full accounting of the attempts at suppression of free speech on the issue of Palestinian rights. AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020
The efforts to exercise a chilling effect on criticism of Israel “have been going on for a long time but they have become more widespread,” noted Maria LaHood, deputy legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which engages in legal intervention to protect fundamental rights. Both LaHood and Mattar view the smear campaigns as an effort to disrupt and impede free speech and discussion of injustice in Palestine. The Zionist lobby routinely unleashes “baseless accusations of anti-Semitism intended to divert activists, students and professors from their work of advocating for Palestinian rights,” Mattar explained. The lobby groups understand that “the more time an activist spends having to respond to baseless charges, the less time they have to focus on such issues as settlements, diversion of water and human rights in Palestine.” Pointing out that many of the legal challenges against SJP and other activists are baseless, LaHood noted, “It doesn’t always matter if they win, they still succeed in disrupting the efforts of the advocacy groups.” A t t h e s a m e t i m e , h o w e v e r, t h e avalanche of attacks on free speech reveals the lobby’s insecurities over the extent to which Palestinian advocacy has entered into mainstream organizations and especially college campuses. “It has become less of a taboo to advocate for Palestine,” Mattar explained, as the “bonds between Palestine advocates and mainstream organizations are becoming more acceptable. Despite all these attacks and harassment, it is rooted in a just cause and nothing can change that reality.” “As the movement grows in the United States, so does the effort at suppression,” LaHood noted. The pro-Israel lobby “exerts pressure on schools to crack down.” Tactics include urging donors to threaten to withdraw funding as well as threats to spread publicity that might weaken community support for universities.
CAMPUS CASES
On March 6, 2020, just before the coronavirus shut down the campus, Columbia
University President Lee Bollinger condemned a student referendum calling on Columbia to divest from companies complicit in Israeli human rights violations. Like the Tufts administrators, Bollinger parroted Israel and lobby propaganda equating BDS with anti-Semitism by declaring, without citing any evidence or examples, that BDS reflected a “mentality that goes from hard-fought debates about very real and vital issues to hostility and even hatred toward all members of groups of people simply by virtue of religious, racial, national or ethnic relationship.” Pro-Israel lobby groups sponsored a follow-up petition signed by more than 70 Columbia faculty members applauding “our president’s condemnation of antiSemitism in its many forms.” The lettersigning campaign was initiated by the Academic Engagement Network (AEN), a lobby watchdog group created to oppose efforts to “delegitimize” Israel. It seeks to muzzle groups like SJP and proponents of BDS while at the same time absurdly and hypocritically claiming it supports “campus free expression and academic freedom.” As evidenced by its website, AEN has sponsored scores of letter-writing and smear campaigns on campuses across the country. In early March, at Bard College, two SJP students were cleared of baseless charges of anti-Semitism sparked by their criticism of a panel discussion featuring a bigoted Harvard emeritus professor, Ruth Wisse, who once declared, “Palestinian Arabs are people who breed and bleed and advertise their misery.” Palestine Legal came to the defense of the two Jewish students, Ben and Akiva, pointing out that they “disagreed with the speakers’ viewpoint that Palestinians are undeserving of equal human rights.” For exercising their right to free speech, Ben and Akiva had to undergo an investigation by a panel of Bard professors, who in the end cleared them of any wrongdoing. Bard’s President Leon Botstein acknowledged the students had done nothing wrong and were in compliance with the campus policy on free speech. Continued on page 62
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Education
Screenshot from the “What do they teach our children?” Zoom webinar, (clockwise, l-r) Jeanne Trabulsi, Zoha Khalili, Dr. Samia Shoman and Miko Peled.
ISRAELI -AMERICAN author and human rights activist Miko Peled convened the first of two online webinars under the banner, “What do they teach our children? Israel’s Intervention in American Social Studies Curriculum.” The June 25 event attracted 150 live participants and hundreds more viewed video of the discussion after it was posted online. Peled noted his shock at the “level and depth” of the intervention by organized Israel lobby groups in social studies programs covering the Middle East. He observed that they fly beneath the radar and are mostly invisible to Americans, particularly parents, like himself, who are puzzled by some portrayals of Israel in their own children’s public school curriculum. Dr. Samia Shoman of the Advisory Committee to the California Ethnic Studies Curriculum recounted her days of being monitored
Grant F. Smith is the director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy in Washington, DC. Smith’s latest book, The Israel Lobby Enters State Government, is now on sale at Middle East Books and More. 36
in the classroom after a rabbi caught wind of what he thought was unwarranted discussion of the situation in Palestine. Zoha Khalili, staff attorney at Palestine Legal, discussed the increase in organized targeting of students in higher education doing Palestine education advocacy and outreach on campus. An example she cited was a lawsuit filed against Newton Public Schools in Massachusetts after an Israeli-American parent objected to texts and teacher training materials about Palestine. After several years of costly litigation and strong pushback by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the plaintiffs finally abandoned their lawsuit. In an article published by the American Jewish online magazine Tablet, one writer reflected, pro-Israel parents wanted to fight back but they were not joined by the major Jewish organizations. However, in the educational arena, as in politics, the major efforts are often behind the scenes. Or as Peled put it, much more “civilized.” Jeanne Trabulsi, a retired educator who taught for 16 years in Arlington County, VA, now leads the Education Committee at the Virginia Coalition for Human Rights (VCHR). Trabulsi explained
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Preventing Israel Lobby Propaganda in Textbooks By Grant F. Smith
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that one of VCHR’s core values is that Israel/Palestine issues are an ongoing human rights concern. That demands an informed debate. In order to even have that debate, factual, unbiased knowledge about what’s actually happened since 1948 is critical. But Israel affinity organizations don’t want that debate. In a series of slides, Trabulsi recounted how in 2018 VCHR became aware of the actions by the innocuously named Institute for Curriculum Services. ICS’s efforts were promoted heavily by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA), an umbrella group for the hundred or so Jewish Community Relations Councils (JCRCs). The director of the California-based ICS, Aliza Craimer Elias, explained how the ICS had quietly taken “considerable efforts” to change textbooks in public school systems across the U.S. She further claimed that ICS had proposed 11,000 edits to textbooks with an 80 percent acceptance rate by publishers. ICS itself is housed within the Jewish Community Relations Council of San Francisco. It is therefore impossible to know much about its finances, staffing or budget. That JCPA and JCRCs advocate for Israel is not in doubt. The JCPA’s second mission statement goal is “to dedicate ourselves to the safety and security of the state of Israel.” Individual JCRC mission statements echo their mission “to maintain strong support for Israel and its right to exist in peace and security.” Many JCRC websites state openly and unabashedly, “we advocate for Israel.” Virginia’s are no different. Trabulsi provided digital images of letters revealing how in 2018 a group of powerful JCRCs and federations in Virginia secretly lobbied the common wealth’s Department of Education to accept ICS changes and forward a list of ICS changes to major textbook publishers during AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020
a 2018 textbook review process. Their filing occurred right before the public review period ended. An examination of ICS edits led to VCHR quickly determining that ICS was an Israel partisan public affairs operation, as opposed to merely an outside party somehow interested in improving education in Virginia. ICS’s list of edits—obtained from the Virginia Department of Education via the state sunshine law— proposed sanitizing Israel’s history of pre-and post-1948 ethnic cleansing and military occupations, while laying blame on Arabs for all conflict initiation in the region. According to ICS, all textbooks must refer to “settlements” as “neighborhoods” and never use the word “Palestine.” VCHR carefully documented, summarized and categorized the many inaccuracies and false claims appearing in ICS edits and filed its own demand that the Department of Education and publishers not allow false ICS information into textbooks. In addition, VCHR demanded that the Department of Education begin involving bona fide Middle East scholars in its highly flawed textbook review process in order to prevent such misinformation from entering textbooks. VCHR even signed on a number of high profile state educators to publicly support its call for textbook (Advertisement)
reviews that would result in accurate educational materials. The outcome of VCHR’s multi-pronged effort was successful, according to Trabulsi. Nevertheless, the well-funded ICS—boosted by its network of backers—continues to host deceptive workshops at major U.S. social studies conferences. ICS is even allowed to offer continuing education credits to attract unsuspecting educators to its “training sessions.” ICS continues to work with Israel affinity pressure groups nationwide to channel its demands for highly suspect changes in states whenever textbooks come up for review. Trabulsi’s presentation was a stunning example of how dedicated, but mostly under-resourced, efforts can temporarily staunch the flow of disinformation entering textbooks at the state level. The overarching question is how long it will last in Virginia and whether other states can act to “stop the spread” of Israel lobby disinformation in their own education systems. For more information about the VCHR textbook program, see <https://vchr.org/vatextbooks.html>. To view Kathy Drinkard’s VCHR’s presentation “Preventing Israel Affinity Organizations from Politicizing K-12 Textbooks” at the 2019 Israel Lobby and American Policy conference see <https:// youtube.com/watch?v=ZqAJBzkzh0>. ■
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Christianity and the Middle East
Should Evangelicals Terminate Their Affair With the State of Israel?
By Rev. Alex Awad
MICHAEL REYNOLDS-POOL/GETTY IMAGES
apartheid in South Africa and we ask ourselves, “How could Christians have supported such inhumane and bloody injustices in the name of Christ?” Yet, evangelical collaboration in the establishment of Israel and our continued uncritical support of Israel will be added to the list of bloody injustices. Future students of church history will be asking the question, “How could evangelicals who Prime Minister of Israel Binyamin Netanyahu (center, back) holds up the pen used by U.S. President Donald J. Trump never stop preaching (front, left) to sign an order recognizing the Golan Heights as Israeli territory, March 25, 2019 in the White House. sermons on God’s love for all people, have been so callous toward the dispossession, death and suffering FOR YEARS, I, a Palestinian and evangelical, have watched with of millions of Palestinians and Arabs throughout the Middle East?” pain the unholy alliance of evangelicals and the State of Israel. EvanDuring the last 75 years, evangelical leaders have actively supgelical infatuation with Israel began before there was a Jewish state ported every Israeli and American war against Palestinians and in the Holy Land. British evangelicals, some of whom were Christian Arabs. Furthermore, our leaders considered any peace settlement Zionists, helped bring the Jewish state into existence. This fixation between Israelis and Palestinians that resulted in Israel giving terkept deepening in the last seven decades. We used the Bible, our ritory to Palestinians as out of sync with the will of God. Hal Lindsey, pulpits, publications, politics, finances, and our radio and TV stations Pat Robertson, John Hagee, James Dobson and others were to expand the territory and power of a Zionist state in Palestine. The openly critical of U.S. presidents who urged Israel to make territorial average evangelical in the U.S. does not realize the volume of hurt compromises to end the conflict. Some went as far as linking natural and harm that the political might of evangelical leaders has wrought disasters taking place in the U.S. as God’s punishment caused by on the people of the Middle East and especially on Palestinians. presidents pressuring Israel to make territorial compromises. In Students of church history are aware that Christians made ap2016, Christian broadcaster Robertson claimed that former Israeli palling mistakes in the last two millennia. Now, we reflect back on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was stricken by God and ended up in the crusades, the pogroms, the inquisition, colonialism, slavery and a coma due to his withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip. Later he apologized for making the statement. Rev. Dr. Alex Awad is a retired United Methodist Missionary. He and his wife, Brenda, served in Jerusalem and in Bethlehem for more Not all evangelicals are as extreme as their leaders; however than 25 years. Rev. Awad served as pastor of East Jerusalem Baptist most white U.S. evangelicals are either complacent or extremely Church, dean of students at Bethlehem Bible College, and director silent on issues of justice. At any time in the future, if Israel decides of the Shepherd Society. Awad has written two books, Through the to wage a war on an Arab or a Muslim country, evangelicals, as Eyes of the Victims and Palestinian Memories. Rev. Awad is a usual, will demand full U.S. military, financial, and political support member of the Palestinian Christian Alliance for Peace (PCAP). 38
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for Israel regardless of the causes or consequences of such a war. Rev. John Hagee had even urged President Barack Obama to attack Iran to eliminate Iran’s perceived threat to Israel. Since Donald Trump became president, he has given Israel everything that Israelis, extreme Zionists, and my evangelical brothers and sisters asked from him—and even more. Trump’s permissive policies toward Israel are inspired not by moral factors or political advantages to the United States, and certainly not to help bring about a peaceful end to the Arab-Israeli conflict, but rather to please his base of white evangelicals who voted him into office. But, evangelicals should end our affair with the State of Israel because Israel is behaving illegally, immorally and recklessly and these are not evangelical values. Let me explain why. Illegal behavior: International law is clear and the international community has repeatedly and overwhelmingly declared that Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the annexation of lands in the West Bank and in the Golan Heights, and the 13-year blockade of the Gaza Strip are illegal. Regrettably, our evangelical leaders seem to consider “irrelevant” all U.N. resolutions that do not favor the State of Israel. Do evangelicals care about international legality? Or, do we believe that international laws apply to all nations except for the State of Israel? Immoral behavior: Evangelical support for the policies of the State of Israel contributed to the death, the injury and the dispossession of millions of Palestinians and continues to pile more death, destruction and loss of homeland and freedoms. Palestinian Christians and Muslims continue to be considered collateral damage on the altar of evangelical eschatological speculations. We close our eyes and hearts to Palestinian suffering and refuse to question Israel’s daily crimes against them. This is simply due to our zeal to see our prophetical agenda come to fulfillment. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, we continue to play the role of aides and cheerleaders to the robbers and assailants on the AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020
Jericho Road. Such attitudes contradict not only the ethical teachings of Christ and his apostles, but they also go against basic evangelical theology and tradition. Reckless behavior: Evangelical support of the occupation of Palestine and the siege of Gaza torpedoed all efforts to arrive at a peaceful resolution of the conflict. John Hagee, addressing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) convention on March 11, 2007 said, “America should not pressure Israel to give up land and America must never pressure Israel to divide the City of Jerusalem.” Hagee’s prophetic agenda does not allow for any compromise for the purpose of making peace. The tragedy is not what Hagee believes but rather what the millions of evangelicals who follow him and his counterparts believe. Consequently, the continued occupation and the absence of a viable solution is making Israel an apartheid state. Intentionally or unintentionally, evangelicals have pushed Israel to become the apartheid state that it is today. If we continue to approach the conflict through our narrow eschatological prism and refuse to consider issues of legality, morality and justice, we will continue to be culprits in this bloodstained conflict. When we heed the words of the prophet Micah, we may end our political recklessness. He declared:
With what shall I come before the Lord and bow down before the exalted God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of olive oil? Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:6-8 (NIV) Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is threatening to annex much of the West Bank to satisfy Jewish settlers and right-wing Israelis. Most nations, most Christians, and the majority of American Jews are against the possible move. His plans are illegal, immoral and reckless. Evangelicals have the opportunity either to support annexation and continue to lay another brick to the wall of their historical mistakes or terminate their love affair with Israel and side with legality, morality and justice, and start working for genuine peace for all the people who call the Holy Land home. ■
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Palestinian Medical Relief Society, a grassroots communitybased Palestinian health organization, founded in 1979 by Palestinian doctors, needs your support today. Visit our Website <www.pmrs.ps> to see our work in action. Mail your U.S. Tax-Deductible check to our American Foundation: Friends of UPMRC, Inc PO Box 450554 • Atlanta, GA 31145 For more information call: (404) 441-2702 or e-mail: fabuakel@gmail.com WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS
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Gaza on the Ground
The Economic Hardship is Felt Again in Gaza
Palestinian women gather for a demonstration, organized by the Palestinian Women’s Association, to protest against Israel’s annexation plan for the Jordan Valley and some regions located in the West Bank, at Beit Hanoun Crossing, located between Gaza and Israel, in Gaza City, Gaza, July 6, 2020. EVERY TIME 46-YEAR-OLD Abu Dyaa goes to the ATM he comes back with the same results: Zero balance. He knows, better than anyone else, that this means he can no longer provide vital medication for his mother or his dependent extended family. Living with his wife in southern Gaza, he recognizes that wage cuts have imperiled all their lives. He is one of 38,000 civil servants in the Gaza Strip who only learned of new disruptions to their incomes starting at the end of May after trying to extract funds from their bank accounts. After the Trump administration defunded the Palestinian Authority and UNRWA in 2018, the Israelis implemented another freeze of tax revenue payments to the PA again, in February 2019, claiming it would deduct monies the PA owed and not transfer the remaining funds until the PA agreed to not support the families of prisoners,
Award-winning journalist Mohammed Omer reports regularly on the Gaza Strip. 40
which Israel declared as terrorists. The Palestinian Authority has refused this condition and refused to accept any Palestinian tax funds from Israel. In another move, in April of this year, the Israeli supreme court seized $1.2 million in PA assets it claimed were owed as compensation for Israeli “victims of terrorism.” In May, Israel escalated pressure by threatening Palestinian banks over payments to prisoners’ families. It is estimated that Israel continues to “hold” close to a billion dollars of Palestinian tax revenue. The taxes collected by Israel from Palestinians are 60 percent of the PA’s budget, and they know they cannot survive with such a huge budget deficit. In addition, promised funds from the Gulf have not arrived and a few believe this delay is to pressure the Palestinian leadership to negotiate. As a result, government coffers are almost empty and Gaza and West Bank employees are going without pay. The Palestinian Finance Ministry said there was no money for government employees in May, after President Mahmoud Abbas
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ALI JADALLAH/ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY
By Mohammed Omer
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as a PA employee he said he understands going to be severe. “Private sector reprerefused to accept the so-called tax-clearthat his government is protesting Israel’s insentatives have also announced plans to ance funds from Israel. Abbas said the PA tention to annex more territory in the West cut pay by 50 percent. The largest impact was also halting security cooperation beBank. “Think about the dilemma we live would be through a decision to stop the encause of Israeli plans to annex some, or all, in—since 2006, we go through hassles trance of more than 140,000 Palestinian of its West Bank settlements and the every single day—and it is all beyond our workers to Israel, as those workers and Jordan Valley. control,” he adds. their families account for a third of private For more than two decades, the Israeli Meanwhile, Fawzia Al Tahan said her consumption given their higher take-home government has deducted monies beyond late husband had a pension that she still pay,” according to an April 2020 World its 3 percent service fee for hospital and relies on to prepare their oldest daughter Bank report. electricity payments. The Israeli collection for getting married in September. Now she “Someone must feel the pain,” says Abu of funds on behalf of the Palestinian Aurealizes that wedding is out of question— Dyaa, warning, “if this is going to continue, thority came about as part of the 1994 Proand no one knows how long she will have one can never control a hungry nation.” Yet, tocol on Economic Relations. Such funds (Advertisement) to wait before the finantypically include taxes on cial issue is resolved. But imports to the PA-conshe knows the situation is trolled areas and income political and beyond her tax for Palestinians workcontrol. ing in Israel. Since 1997, Palestinian President Israel has withheld these Mahmoud Abbas said payments, as “punishthe PA will avoid any ment” and pressure, 13 more mutual undertimes. standings and end coorIn the West Bank and dination with Israel. In Gaza, revenues have M a y, A b b a s g a v e a also been hard hit as strongly worded speech commercial activities in Ramallah, denouncing decreased with the Israel’s planned annexadecline of salaries and the tion and threatening recoronavirus lockdown. taliation. T h e PA’ s d o m e s t i c Abbas’ plan is more income has been reduced firm than previous warnby 50 percent, according ings, setting out steps to to the Finance Ministry return the Occupied spokesperson, AbdulrahWest Bank to pre-Oslo man Byatneh. Playgrounds for Palestine is a project to build playgrounds for our days, if Israel goes Even prior to the curchildren. It is a minimal recognition of their right to childhood and ahead with its planned rent cut, over the last four creative expression. It is an act of love. annexation. And still, the years, Gaza-based PA Playgrounds for Palestine (PfP) is a registered 501(c)3 non-profit widespread economic employees have been hit organization, established in 2001. We’re an all-volunteer organizahardship is felt more in hard, and only received tion (no paid staff) that raises money throughout the year to conGaza than in the West 50 to 70 percent of their struct playgrounds and fund programs for Bank. wages, which barely covchildren in Palestine. Abu Dyaa continues to ered their needs. go to the ATM every Although Israel reSelling Organic, Fair Trade Palestinian olive morning—even though leased 800 million oil is PfP’s principle source of fundraising. the result is always the shekels ($203 million) to is year, PfP launched AIDA, a private same—and he feels deep t h e PA t o d e a l w i t h label olive oil from Palestinian farmers. Please come by and taste it at our table. in his heart that, “the spirit COVID-19 in May, the of solidarity from the outWorld Bank says if the We hope you’ll love it and make it a staple in your pantry. side world seems to be COVID-19 outbreak is gone.” The situation renot controlled soon, its For more information or to make a donation visit: mains dire and “the coroimpact on economic achttps://playgroundsforpalestine.org • P.O. Box 559 • Yardley, PA 19067 navirus is not helping.” ■ tivity and livelihoods is AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020
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Islam and the Middle East in the Far East
Chinese and Israeli officials pay their respect in front of the flag-draped coffin of China’s Ambassador to Israel Du Wei, 58, during a ceremony at Ben-Gurion International Airport, May 20, 2020. China sent a team to Israel to repatriate the body of its ambassador who died at his home in Herzliya, Israel on May 17, reportedly from natural causes. ISRAEL IS USED to doing what it wants in the Middle East, secure in the belief that it can count upon the U.S. government’s support or, at the very worst, a mild rebuke followed by business as usual. The Israeli Jewish public knows the value of U.S. support and want to retain it; when Israeli politicians visit Washington seeking to confirm U.S. support, they have one eye on the electorate in Israel, which would regard any sign of a weakening relationship with alarm. Had the price of continuing to occupy and settle the West Bank and Gaza Strip from 1967 onwards been a withdrawal of U.S. aid and political backing, there can be little doubt that the occupation would have been terminated long ago. In the Trump government, Israel has the most supportive U.S. leadership yet: it has recognized occupied Syria as Israeli territory;
John Gee is a free-lance journalist based in Singapore and the author of Unequal Conflict: The Palestinians and Israel. 42
moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and pronounced the city off the negotiating table; and advocates a “peace plan” that calls for the Israeli annexation of the Jordan Valley and Israeli settlement blocs in the West Bank. Nevertheless, there has been some friction recently, not because of Israeli conduct toward the Palestinians, but over Israel’s relations with China. U.S.-China relations have been damaged during the Trump presidency first of all by a dispute over the terms of trade between the two states, followed by selective U.S. indignation over human rights violations by Beijing, and finally, Trump’s stand over COVID-19, which he has insisted on calling a “China virus” and blaming China for its spread. In these circumstances, Israel has been under increased pressure to prioritize keeping on the best of terms with the U.S. over expanding its ties with China. China is Israel’s second largest trading partner. In 2018, Israel’s exports to the United States were worth $16.78 billion, and its imports
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Deteriorating U.S.-China Relations Impact Israel By John Gee
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came to $10.25 billion. The corresponding figures for its China trade were $4.79 billion and $10.47 billion, so the U.S. had a trade deficit with Israel of over $6 billion, while China had a surplus of over $5 billion. This does not take into account trade with Hong Kong (constitutionally part of China), which, besides trading in its own right, has historically been a conduit for China trade too. In 2018, Hong Kong only ranked as Israel’s 16th largest source of imports, at $1.34 billion, but it was the fourth largest destination for Israeli exports, at $4.19 billion. While the U.S. government would no doubt prefer that Israel should import more American goods in preference to Chinese products, its complaints have concentrated on security, arising not only from Israeli exports to China (which include arms) but from Chinese investment in Israel. Gil Yaron, writing for Singapore’s Straits Times from Tel Aviv, reported: “Chinese investment in Israeli high-tech firms tripled between 2013 and 2017, reaching U.S. $25 billion. China may overtake the U.S. as the largest source of foreign direct investment. Over 1,000 Israeli start-ups have set up branches in China, while Chinese firms such as Huawei, Legend, and Xiaomi have research centers in Israel.” The U.S. government fears that, besides gaining access to technological advances made in Israel, China will be able to acquire U.S.-developed capabilities that were made available to Israel but that the United States intended to withhold from China. Top officials, including John Bolton when he visited Israel while still National Security Adviser, have called upon Israel to re-assess its links with big Chinese communications firms. In particular, the U.S. has been attempting to persuade all its allies not to incorporate Huawei technology into their communications networks, despite China’s assurances that it would not be used for espionage purposes. In October 2019, in response to U.S. concerns, Israel established a board to monitor Chinese investments, though it appears that its power is limited to offering advice to the Israeli government. Another bone of contention is the contract awarded to the Shanghai International Port Group in 2015 to upgrade the port of Haifa and, from 2021, to manage it. Haifa AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020
is Israel’s biggest port and ships of the U.S. Sixth Fleet dock there periodically. The fleet’s command has suggested that such visits may cease as a result. In May this year, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Israel for discussions that focused on Iran and the proposed Israeli annexation of a swath of Palestinian land in the West Bank, but he was also reported to have raised the question of Israel’s relations with China. This was not the first time the U.S. expressed such concerns regarding Chinese contracts. Israel was obliged to knuckle under in 2000 over its proposed sale of the Falcon airborne early warning system to China and, again in 2006, when the U.S. objected to Israel upgrading China’s Harpy unmanned aerial vehicles, produced and sold to China earlier by Israel Aerospace Industries. One virtually immediate result of the latest conversation may have been a decision to award a contract for the construction of a desalination plant, capable of producing 200 cubic meters of water a year, to an Israeli company rather than Hutchison Water, whose main investor is Hong Kongbased CK Hutchison Holdings. The plant is to be built close to the Palmachim air base and the Nahal Soreq Nuclear Center, site of Israel’s first nuclear reactor. However, this is unlikely to satisfy the U.S. government, which is putting pressure on other states to cool relations with China and may well consider that it has a right to expect more from the biggest recipient of U.S. aid.
or two seats, but in a parliament in which the government has only a five-seat majority, every member counts. One result of this situation has been the awarding of government posts to rally support. In the outgoing government, the number of posts was reduced to 28 ministers and 27 deputy ministers, but this number has been expanded to its previous level of 32 ministers and 38 deputy ministers, with representation from six parties or coalitions. This means that ministers and deputy ministers outnumber non-office holding government members of parliament. There’s talk of a general election being called. Divisions in the opposition would seem to work in favor of the government. On the other hand, Muhyiddin must wonder how an election would reshuffle the representation of the parties in his own coalition: if others outperform his own faction of the PPBM (Malaysian United Indigenous Party), they may see no reason to retain him as prime minister. ■ (Advertisement)
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SO MANY GENERALS, SO FEW SOLDIERS
Despite the COVID-19 outbreak, power struggles have continued between rival political leaders in Malaysia since the establishment of a new government under Muhyiddin Yassin. The new prime minister has been challenged by an opposition that is now fractured between those who want ex-premier Mahathir Mohamad restored to power and those who want Anwar Ibrahim to at last take office. Between them, the opposition parties held 108 seats at the time of writing, and the government parties held 113. The ruling alliance has been created out of no less than 14 parties, some with just one
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A Time of Reckoning for Lebanon
Special Report
Protesters pull barbed-wire closing off a street during an anti-U.S. demonstration near the U.S. Embassy in Awkar, northeast of Lebanon's capital Beirut, July 10, 2020, with the flags of the Lebanese Shi’i movement Hezbollah, the Popular Nasserist Organization and portraits of the late Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser stuck to the barbed-wire. THE YEAR 2020 happened to be the centennial of the establishment of Greater Lebanon which later became the Republic of Lebanon with its current borders. Lebanon’s system of governance was built on consociational power-sharing between a number of competing sectarian minorities with each of them claiming its own stake in the country’s resources and entitlements to influence in the system. For the first 50 years of the country, a free entrepreneurial spirit, and a laisser-faire banking system—coupled with a moderate climate and attractive nature and style de vie—rendered Lebanon the jewel of the eastern Mediterranean. For decades, Lebanon became known as Switzerland of the Middle East, in reference to its formidable financial markets, banking secrecy laws and a variety of services that attracted a high volume of tourism year-round.
Akram Krayem and Osama Safi are political analysts living in Beirut. 44
Lebanon’s consensus-based political system functioned reasonably well and, in fact, seemed like a fairly democratic practice in a region surrounded by undemocratic regimes. That political experience, along with a unique business acumen, became known as the “Lebanese Miracle.” However, a system based on sectarian compromise between small—and often insecure—minorities meant an invitation for foreign influence and interference in the internal affairs of the country at the slightest regional instability. This practice constantly required renegotiation of the balance of power between the various sectarian-political leaders and the outcome was often a compromise that benefitted the leaders at the expense of their country. This year the Lebanese were hoping to celebrate their first century with fanfare and pride at the success they achieved in keeping the “Lebanese Miracle” alive; instead, the country’s citizens find themselves fighting for survival. In fact, the raison d’être of the consensus
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JOSEPH EID/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
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deal-making is now put in question. The system that worked a century ago based on consensual political deals between a few political leaders is no longer viable. Failure to build real state institutions and to foster a political culture with genuine political parties, public policies, and representative elections has caught up with the country’s elites. The post-civil war efforts to rebuild wartorn Lebanon in the ’90s witnessed excessive borrowing and conversion of public debts into high interest-rate treasury bonds, while offering extraordinary interest rates on deposits in Lebanese Pounds. This encouraged people to deposit their money instead of investing it, hence inducing sluggish growth, and giving the banks a stronger sway in the economy. The decades of borrowing money were offset by foreign remittances from Lebanese expatriates, a newly-imposed value-added tax and income from tourism, foreign investment, real estate and the telecom industry as Lebanon was attempting to regain its spot as a haven of tourism, banking and services. But then the winds did not blow in the direction of the Lebanese ship. In 2006, Israel waged a war on Lebanon which wrought destruction in the billions of dollars; in 2008, following the global financial meltdown, most of the foreign income upon which Lebanon relied, shrunk significantly. In 2011, Syria, Lebanon’s main trading partner and supply route, descended into war, severely interrupting economic activity. All the while, lack of accountability, impunity and corruption were rampant; the economy produced nothing of significance; and the basic services such as electricity, water, roads and internet remained backward and barely available. The electricity sector alone cost the Lebanese treasury an excess of $43 billion in waste and mismanagement over the past three decades. That figure is equivalent to more than 40 percent of the country’s entire debt. Lousy and expensive public services, a rise in poverty and inequality, unprecedented rates of pollution and excessive corruption sent people to the streets on October 17, 2019. The most serious street demonstrations Lebanon had seen since prewar time, the 17 October movement, AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020
which united all Lebanese, brought down the government and ushered in a cabinet of quasi-independent professionals hoping to save the country and the economy. But it was too little too late. By then, the banking sector—built on a pyramid scheme of deposits in exchange for high interests— had collapsed. People’s deposits were trapped, and foreign currency reserves depleted, sending the Lebanese Pound into free fall. At the time of writing the local currency had lost close to 60 percent of its value; poverty and unemployment doubled, and a massive number of businesses and retail shops have shut down. The situation is so alarming that the American University of Beirut, a 150-yearold beacon of learning in the region, is facing an unprecedented financial crisis and is about to lay off thousands of employees—a first in its history of existence. Today, under pressure by unprecedented protests and reeling from an economic catastrophe with no end in sight, along with dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, Lebanon is paying the price of decades of negligence, corruption and political failure. Caught in the middle of a regional confrontation between Iran and the United States, there seems to be no light at the end of the country’s long and arduous economic tunnel. The United States accuses the current government of being a Hezbollah puppet and supports an undeclared em-
bargo on any financial aid to the country, lest it be used as a lifeline to save the current government and prolong Hezbollah’s hold. Hezbollah, in return, refutes the allegations and accuses the U.S. of deliberately bankrupting the country by sabotaging an IMF bailout deal and pressuring its allies in the Gulf and Europe not to provide assistance, in the hope of bringing the Party of God to its knees. Lebanon’s entire political system is now under threat and, short of a miracle that extends its life, it is due for a major shake-up. Many Lebanese see a rare opportunity today to reinvent the political system on a cleaner slate of established political institutions and a genuine rule of law that would deliver a truly democratic political practice. In fact, any economic bailout for the country would extend the reign of a defunct political elite that many Lebanese want to do away with. They would like to see them replaced by a new brand of politicians capable of lifting the country out of its current morass. As it faces its most serious existential threat in its century-long history, Lebanon is ripe for fundamental changes to its identity, make-up and foundations. The question remains as to how and in what new form of governance the country will re-emerge from the current political nadir it has found itself in, especially since, at the moment, there are no credible political alternatives to the existing ruling class. ■
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Talking Turkey
Turkey’s Libyan Return
A view of a damaged house in Salahaddin province, 6.2 miles from Tripoli’s city center as the Turkish army’s bomb disposal units defuse explosives planted by Khalifa Haftar in the region, thus enabling the safe return of civilians, June 16, 2020. OVER A CENTURY AGO, the founder of modern, secular Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, fought some of his first battles in the wadis and vilayets of north-eastern Libya. Now, the forces of the would-be founder of a new, pro-Islamist, neo-Ottoman Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, are also fighting across that same terrain, in one of the Turkish leader’s most important overseas ventures. Indeed, for Ankara, much more than the future of Libya is at stake here. The future shape of the Eastern Mediterranean is also on the table, with Erdogan seeing the conflict as a way to leverage wider changes to regional maritime boundaries and to Turkey’s standing as the pre-eminent power in the Levant. For Libya, however, this also means that its fate is now increasingly bound up in ongoing disputes between Turkey and its neighbors, Greece and Cyprus, and between the Turkish-Qatari alliance and its Arab world foes, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
Jonathan Gorvett is a free-lance writer specializing on European and Middle Eastern affairs. 46
SETTING BOUNDARIES
Post-Ataturk, it was not until relatively recently that Turkey had much of a profile in Libya. In the latter years of the Libyan dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, however, Turkish construction companies established a sizeable presence there. However, as a result of the violence of the 2011 revolution, Turkish companies were left with around $1.6 billion in unpaid debts, while their building sites were looted and workers hastily evacuated. After years of Libyan civil conflict, two rival authorities emerged in the country. In the northwest, Prime Minister Fayez Al Sarraj’s internationally recognized Government of National Accord (GNA) was set up in Tripoli. The GNA rules via a patchwork of militias, ranging from secular to jihadist, along with elements of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). In the northeast and south, the administration of the former Libyan House of Representatives, located in Tobruk and led by Aguila Saleh Issa, took control. Loyal to this Tobruk authority is the largely secular Libyan National Army (LNA), led by Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar. Haftar also enjoys Egyptian support, as his anti-Islamist forces control the long, highly porous border between the two countries,
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HAZEM TURKIA/ANADOLU AGENCY
By Jonathan Gorvett
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sealing it to potential jihadi infiltration. He is also supported by Russia, France, and the UAE for a variety of reasons, ranging from his effectiveness as a barrier to illegal migration from Libya to Europe, which appeals to France, to his opposition to the MB, appealing to the UAE. Russia, meanwhile, has an interest in establishing its presence in North Africa, as it seeks to return to regional, and global, great power status. The GNA, meanwhile, has the support of Italy, which imports natural gas from a GNA-controlled complex at Mellitah, in the northwest. Rome also has many construction deals with the Tripoli government, including for the city’s new airport. Turkey has also long-supported the GNA, with Ankara supportive of the MB, a position that has also placed it in the opposite corner to Egypt and the UAE, post-Arab Spring; a position deepened by its support for Qatar in the ongoing Saudi and UAE-led blockade. “Turkey’s involvement is part of its broader geo-political ambitions to stop the encroachment of the UAE axis in North Africa,” says Claudia Gazzini, Libya analyst for the International Crisis Group. “Turkey’s second objective is to redraw Turkey’s maritime boundaries, with the GNA’s help.” Thus, in November 2019, Ankara signed two agreements with the GNA—one, to give it military support, and the second to agree to a maritime boundary between Libya and Turkey that grants the latter a long corridor of sea from the southwestern Turkish coast all the way past Cyprus and the Greek island of Crete to the waters off eastern, LNA-controlled Libya. The military aspect of this was crucial for the GNA, as, in April 2019, Haftar had broken an uneasy status quo and attacked deep into GNA territory, reaching right into the suburbs of Tripoli itself. Under the agreement, a major Turkish military intervention was initiated, backing up GNA militias with Syrian rebel fighters, recruited and equipped by Turkey from the areas of Syria it has occupied during the current Syrian conflict. “There is no doubt that this shifted the military balance in favor of the GNA,” adds Gazzini. In late May-early June, the LNA was thus pushed out of Tripoli and forced to withdraw AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020
south and east, with the frontline just a few miles west of the Mediterranean coastal town of Sirte, at the time of writing. Meanwhile, Turkey has also sent oil and gas survey and drilling ships, with naval escorts, into its new maritime territory—a zone that overlaps completely with waters claimed by Greece and Cyprus. “Libya is widely thought to have more oil and gas offshore than is currently being exploited,” says Calvin Harrison, editorial manager for Frontier MEA and the Libya Monitor. “But it’s hard to say if this is really what interests Turkey. Perhaps more crucial is that this maritime zone has proximity to Cyprus and Greece.” Indeed, the zone cuts right across the path of the planned 1,180mile undersea EastMed gas pipeline, a proposal by Greece, Cyprus and Israel, to take natural gas from Cypriot and Israeli offshore fields to Europe. The zone also passes close to Crete, causing alarm in Athens, which has no agreed maritime boundaries with Turkey. This has long been a cause of friction in the Aegean Sea, with the new Turkish zone effectively opening a new front, and pressure point, in this long-standing dispute. “Even though Turkey is a huge country with a huge population and the longest seacoast on the Mediterranean, it is being squeezed into a very small and unjust sea area,” says Altug Gunal, from the Department of International Relations at Turkey’s Ege University in Izmir. Turkey argues that current maritime boundaries claimed by Greece and Cyprus grant them so much of the Aegean and Mediterranean that maritime access to Turkey itself is effectively blocked. “Not only the current government of Turkey, but any other one would do its best to break these walls,” Gunal adds. Cyprus and Greece, backed up by the European Union, naturally disagree with this position, arguing that their maritime boundaries are those settled by the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. These countries—and pro-Haftar France in particular—have strongly protested Turkey’s new maritime zone. Italy also initially protested the bound-
aries, then also signed an agreement with Greece outlining maritime zones that contradict the Turkey-GNA deal. The response to this was not long in coming, however. In early June, a Turkish-backed Libyan militia attacked the Italian gas complex at Mellitah, temporarily closing the pipeline running from there to the Italian island of Sicily. The warning will not have been lost on Rome.
DANGEROUS ENTANGLEMENTS
The conflagration of conflicts in and around Libya is already having a significant impact on wider Mediterranean disputes. Turkey is the link in all the rising tensions, and operating from a position of power that it has, indeed, not held for generations. In this, it has also been able to exploit diverging interests between European Union and NATO members, France and Italy. There is also a perception that Russia has been weakened by the recent collapse in the price of its primary income—oil— while President Vladimir Putin is under unusual pressure at home from his unpopular handling of the coronavirus pandemic. As for the U.S., “If it can get Russia out of Libya, then Washington is fine with Turkey’s plans,” says Gazzini. “The U.S. has made some effort to bring the parties together, but hasn’t really sent any strong message about this.” Turkey’s strategy is not without its risks, however. After all, the Italian invaders Ataturk once battled spent decades trying to establish control over the country. As Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of Turkey’s main opposition party, recently asked, “What are we doing in Libya? Do we want to make our troops legionaries?” ■
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Arts and Culture
Calligrapher Nihad Dukhan Respects Tradition as He Creates Modern Designs
IMAGE COURTESY NIHAD DUKHAN
By Eleni Zaras
Dukhan upholds traditional calligraphy practices, using above the Tawqi and Muselsel styles to write the following verse: Qur’an: 3:173 “Sufficient for us is Allah, and [He is] the best Disposer of affairs.” QUIET AND ISOLATION, conditions we are all perhaps more accustomed to these days, are not unfamiliar to calligrapher and engineering professor Nihad Dukhan. “I, like many artists, normally have to work for long periods in self-imposed isolation,” he pointed out. Originally from Gaza, Dukhan came to Toledo, OH in 1983 for his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering. Jazz musician Miles Davis, a view overlooking railroad tracks, and boredom defined the artist and engineer’s early days in the United States. It was also a time when he began to miss the Arabic language and to practice calligraphy without particular purpose. Today, not only is Dukhan a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Detroit Mercy, but he is a master calligrapher. Arabic calligraphy is a millennium-old art form with strict rules and
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. AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020
traditions. Dukhan spent 11 years diligently training with Hasan Çelebi in Istanbul—in-person and through mail—to achieve his ijazah, a master scribe degree, in the Thuluth and Naskh styles. The ijazah qualification, he explains, “allows you to represent and talk about calligraphy, to sign your work, and to teach calligraphy according to traditional methods.” In 2013, he achieved his ijazah in a third style, the Taliq style, under the tutelage of Mohamed Zakariya in Arlington, VA. While he writes Qur’anic verses in traditional calligraphic scripts, Dukhan also takes creative liberties in his set of modern works— restyling traditional techniques into his own innovative designs. Taking a word or concept in Arabic, he arranges the letters to abstractly illustrate the form or meaning of the word itself. For instance, for qalam-“( قلمpen” in Arabic) he stretches the letter “lam” into a thin, vertical column as the body of the pen, and the tail of the letter “meem” coming to its sharp point. It is a style he has polished, taking inspiration from Miles Davis’ minimalist and succinct phrasing, but some of the ideas came to him as if “witnessing a birth,” he describes, “as if I wasn’t doing it myself.”
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Intrigued? Visit MiddleEastBooks.com to view and purchase calligraphy. Simply type “Nihad Dukhan” into the search feature to see a complete list of his work for sale.
Sharjah Art Museum Exhibition Addresses Systemic Racism
The Sharjah Art Foundation’s Africa Institute is currently organizing the virtual (and now in-person) exhibition “Homebound: A Journey in Photography” of artist Aïda Muluneh’s Dukhan also noted that individual Arabic letwork. Ethiopian-born and internationally ters themselves are a source of artistic inspiraraised, she came to Washington, DC to tion. “Would you hang a ‘W’ in your living study film at Howard University. After gradroom?” he asked, laughing. “In Arabic, the letter uating in 2000, she worked as a photojouritself is so beautiful people do actually do this!” nalist for the Washington Post before returnWhile he believes traditional calligraphy is ing to Ethiopia in 2007. not in danger, Dukhan said his contemporary The exhibition is divided into two parts: the adaptations of the art form are a way he first, curated by Salah M. Hassan, features hopes to reach broader audiences. “This ten series of Muluneh’s art and photojournalmodern form, I thought, would be more apism. The second, curated by Muluneh herpealing to people who don’t know Arabic,” but self, is of other photographers whose work also to Arab-Americans, through form, simhas been featured in the Addis Foto Fest plicity, space and shapes. (AFF) she founded in 2010. Her photographs From small coffee shop exhibitions in Toledo, engage history and futurism, race and culto gallery exhibitions across the U.S., in Kuwait, tural identity, and legacies of Western reprethe UAE and Istanbul, his work has gained sentation and objectification. recognition among Arabic speakers and nonIn light of the Black Lives Matter demonArabic speakers alike. strations, the director general of Sharjah Despite these exhibitions and an existing Museums Authority (which oversees the high-end market for calligraphic works, there is Sharjah Art Museum), Manal Ataya, puba general “ignorance about calligraphy,” he lished an op-ed on June 15 in The National, lamented. Art historians may be interested “in exploring how museums can help stem a legacy, a history, but they bypass contemporacism, and nudged readers to visit Murary artists as an important source of informaluneh’s virtual exhibition. tion or correction of misconception or undoing Muluneh’s work resonates with these myths about Arabic calligraphy.” Dukhan stretches the Arabic letters to global conversations: some images directly As many contemporary artists incorporate form a pen. address racism in the United States, but calligraphy into their works, the lack of educamost reflect more generally on questions of black and African tion in the field results in a lack of sufficient criticism. Like any other women’s identity. Through her work, she aims to reframe art, “calligraphy can be bad,” he says bluntly, “some people think Ethiopia’s past, take control of its present and imagine its they can hide behind color or symmetry to create an effect.” Or, if future. someone writes something sacred, they “can get away with it [beThe exhibition’s organizers and location sends a similarly decause it’s sacred], but it can be bad calligraphy.” colonizing message. The Africa Institute in Sharjah, inauguEven among his family in Gaza, he is unsure if they understand or rated in 2018, creates a direct line of scholarly engagement appreciate his work, citing, in part, the proliferation of English and the between Africa and the UAE. The UAE and other Gulf states subsequent ignorance of calligraphy’s rich history. As a child, he prachave for decades been carving out their position as art world ticed writing with friends on the walls, “silly things—names of Egyptian leaders; institutions such as The Africa Institute underscore soccer players for instance,” but became more serious and would their goal to lead international conversations in academic and cut his own pens to mimic fountain pens in order to practice. While creative circles. he was praised for his handwriting by his family, it was not something In Muluneh’s “The Distant Gaze” series, she challenges he was encouraged to pursue in an artistic or professional capacity. images of East African women created by European men at the Currently, the stay-at-home orders have not dramatically changed turn of the century that were “designed to fulfill the fantasy of the his routine. “Artists are typically reflective,” he stresses, though “they foreign gaze as it relates to the black female body.” The should not need a crisis to start reflecting.” However, he is taking seascape also deliberately references the migration, both forced the extra quiet time to study the Diwani Jali style and knows that, and voluntary, of East African women. during this period, “ideas will simmer and I may come up with deFor centuries and still today, migration has shaped Ethiopian signs related to this crisis.” 50
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AĂŻda Mulunehâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s "Return of a Departure" is currently on display at the Sharjah Art Foundationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Africa Institute.
history and identity. Official reports estimate that nearly 300,000 Ethiopian female domestic workers migrated to the Middle Eastâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;mostly to Lebanon and Gulf Arab countriesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;between
2008 and 2013. But this does not take into account the likely hundreds of thousands migrating illegally, according to a 2017 report by CVM Ethiopia, the International Domestic Workers Federation, and the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women. The majority of these women obtain visas through the kafala sponsorship system, which grants the employing family absolute control over the sponsored worker. This system has embroiled the Gulf Arab countries in international condemnation, as it has too often resulted in slave-like exploitation. Although Ethiopia barred this form of migration in 2013, new agreements signed in 2018 lifted the ban in August 2019, and women continue to report the same abuses. In April 2020, Saudi Arabia and the UAE also incurred backlash for the sudden deportation of thousands of Ethiopian migrant workers due to mounting fears of COVID-19, highlighting once again their disposable status. Despite Atayaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s direct reference to this exhibition in her article, the reality of Ethiopian women as exploited migrant workers in the Middle East was not explicitly mentioned. However, this exhibition of Mulunehâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work in Sharjah presents an opportunity to address systemic racism on both a local and international scale. As Sharjahâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s two-year-old Africa Institute carves out its place in academia, one hopes that it will heed Atayaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own advice to engage in the difficult but urgent conversations this exhibition inspires. â&#x2013;
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Food During a Pandemic: A Source of Comfort, Stress and Resilience
On June 2, the Middle East Institute’s Arts and Culture Center hosted an online webinar titled “Breaking Bread: Food in Times of COVID-19.” Each panelist was provided an opportunity to share their thoughts on food as a source of comfort, but also anxiety, and on the revival of traditional food practices and recipes during the ongoing pandemic. Mirna Bamieh, an artist, cook and founder of the Palestine Hosting Society, spoke about new cooking techniques that she has been experimenting with, like the process of fermentation as a way to prolong the life of fresh produce, and foraging for wild greens. She continuously returns to the kitchen and deems home a unique space of healing and reclamation. Similarly, Kamal Mouzawak, co-founder of Beirut’s first farmers market, Souk El Tayeb, spoke about kitchens as the guardians of tradition. Aisha Al Fadhalah, co-founder of the Mera Kitchen Collective, a Baltimorebased co-op offering refugee chefs a place to cook, talked about how chefs are being creative with available healthy and nutritious produce. Focusing on dignified meals, the Mera Kitchen Collective wants to change the stigma around free meals, while also hoping its catering business can start up again after COVID-19. All three panelists spoke to the impact of COVID-19 on their work, with Mouzawak sharing that “in times of catastrophe, we always need to adapt and be creative.” In Beirut, Mouzawak’s groups have switched to feeding front-line workers, nurses and doctors. Both Mouzawak and the Mera Kitchen Collective have been humbled by the generosity of people in their communities, and Mera has been able to provide more than 30,000 free meals in Baltimore, cooked by their refugee chefs. Al Fadhalah highlighted the very slim profit margins that restaurants run on, and said she has shifted much of her work to 52
fascism, threats to values and culture, and writing as a means of human connection and a method to reclaim human dignity. Epidemics, Khoury started out, are often found in literature as metaphors for life. The “catastrophe” we face today, though, isn’t metaphorical. The literal health, political and economic crises magnified by COVID-19 ultimately stem from, in Temelkuran’s words, a “global moral crisis.” The role of writers and Mera Kitchen Collective’s refugee chefs have provided more of literature, the authors than 30,000 free meals to residents of Baltimore during the reflected, is to challenge COVID-19 pandemic. the “dominant culture,” reimagining how this system can be which today, they believe, is marked by a rethought in the future. “denial of reality” and corrupt regimes. Mouzawak feels optimistic about some Nafisi argued that this “denial of reality” of the changes that have come out of the permeates through the politics and culture pandemic, like the importance of producof both the Middle East and the United ing locally and sustainably. He sees food States, exacerbating the virus, as well as as a communal experience, integral to the preexisting economic and political family, “not something you buy; it is procrises. “How to deal with this mentality,” duced, planted, harvested, cooked.” Nafisi continues, “becomes the problem Drawing on the many experiences of unfor a writer.” certainty and crisis that Palestinians have If this is the state of the “dominant culfaced, Bamieh sees the intersection of ture,” though, “who is producing culture? food and the pandemic as yet another opHow is culture determined?” Salem portunity to build practices of resilience, probed. suggesting the way that food builds reKhoury acknowledged that political and silience is in the way that it connects economic powers and culture are always people. —Allison Rice connected. The neoliberal ideology that has framed political, economic and social Authors Discuss Writing Amidst a strategies has “destroyed values and put Global Moral and Health Crisis society in such a situation where only the powerful can survive,” he argued. On June 12, Washington, DC’s Middle Citing author James Baldwin, Nafisi East Institute (MEI) hosted the webinar argued that it is the work of authors and “Writing Covid-19” with authors Elias artists to “disturb the peace of not just the Khoury (Gate of the Sun), Azar Nafisi people, but of the rulers…The whole (Reading Lolita in Tehran) and Ece power of literature is the fact that it has Temelkuran (Women Who Blow on access to truth, and truth can be very danKnots), in discussion with MEI’s president gerous,” she said, referencing the fear Paul Salem. leaders have harbored for writers—be The discussion reached well beyond they novelists like Salman Rushdie or jourCOVID-19 and touched on the dangers of
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PHOTO COURTESY MERA KITCHEN COLLECTIVE
CULTURE
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Iraqis peruse books at a store in Baghdad, in the midst of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, June 28, 2020. nalists like Jamal Khashoggi. Temelkuran argued that not all is negative. She observed that in this current crisis, people have exhibited selflessness and solidarity to degrees we wouldn’t have thought possible. Writers, she asserted, must “include this aspect of humankind in the story, to the records of history.” Restoring faith in humankind can change the political game, she suggested. “In times of crisis, yes there is fear, but there is this instant solidarity,” Temelkuran asserted. “My responsibility is to tell stories to make people once again believe in their own kind.” The demonstrations of solidarity and the “rebellion of dignity,” as Temelkuran dubs the recent Black Lives Matter (BLM) and anti-racist protests, are more existential and pressing than the ongoing pandemic. “The whole Arab region is in a catastrophe and the people cannot breathe,” Khoury said, deliberately using the BLM movement’s refrain. “We cannot breathe, we will die,” he continued, “and if we do not die biologically, our souls will die. Here is the big struggle of culture.” Drawing on examples from their writings and experiences, the authors illustrate the importance of literature beyond the act of writing and recording. Writers and the legacy of literature, in fact, “belong” to and live on through those who read, Nafisi insisted. “Reality can imitate literature, not only we [writers] imitate reality,” Khoury AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020
claimed. “Imagination is a dimension of reality.” —Eleni Zaras
WAGING PEACE Trump Administration Offers No Resistance to Israeli Annexation
Questions surrounding Israel’s impending annexation of significant portions of Palestinian territory were tackled in a June 22 webinar hosted by the SETA Foundation in Washington, DC. Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, argued that the Trump administration should have been taken seriously three years ago, “when they basically said that coming into
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office their goal was to erase the Oslo process, erase the peace process, roll U.S. foreign policy back...to a setting which says there is one sole legitimate actor between the river and the sea—and it is Israel.” The Trump White House has put the full weight of U.S. policy behind official annexation, which has been a de facto, ongoing process for decades. “This administration does not care about whether annexation will spark conflict or destabilization,” she said. “We have a president who…handed from day one his Israel-Palestine policy over to ideologues, people who are unapologetically, undeniably motivated by an ideological agenda,” Friedman noted. One of these ideologues, President Trump’s appointed ambassador to Israel David Friedman, “is the most consequential figure in defining what U.S. policy has actually been,” she stated. The ambassador, she said, came in with a clearly defined political agenda “based on long-held [personal] positions which have systemically been transformed into U.S. policy.” With the possibility that Trump might not be re-elected in November, “I do think we will see action before the end of this administration,” Friedman said. “They had a laundry list of things they were going to change on Israel-Palestine. They have made good on every single one of them and this is the final piece of it.…One should take them seriously that they actu-
Palestinians in the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah participate in a rally against Israeli annexation of the West Bank, on July 3, 2020. WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS
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ally mean this [annexation] and they are going to go ahead on it.” As to why annexation is happening now, Geoffrey Aronson, chairman and cofounder of the Mortons Group strategy consulting firm, said one contributing factor is the lack of an acceptable framework for engaging the parties and the discrediting of the Oslo process. “In Israel, talk of a Palestinian state has disappeared from the political agenda,” he noted. He also said the Trump administration poses a unique opportunity Israel feels it cannot pass up. “Failure to annex today is intolerable for Israel,” he said. “It will undermine to some degree their strategic position in the region.” Khaled Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, argued Palestinian leadership has not articulated a plan for the day after annexation. Rather than simply clinging to old formulas of the past, leadership should be embracing new Palestinian voices and talking about “something new and different that could actually inspire Palestinians,” he stated. “One of the problems with the Palestinian leadership right now is that it is such a small circle of people who are around Abu Mazen [Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas] and his decision-making process.” Elgindy hopes the controversy surrounding annexation will at least give Palestinian voices a greater platform in the U.S. “One thing we can look forward to is an increasingly polarized and polarizing debate,” he said. “So we could get voices that haven’t been heard, including Palestinian voices in the public discourse, and maybe some more receptivity to those of us who have been trying to point out the many contradictions in this process and its many failures over the years.” —Elaine Pasquini
The Legal Implications of Israeli Annexation
On April 30, J Street hosted a virtual conversation with Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard to discuss the legal implications of Israel’s planned annexation of Palestinian land. Sfard is an expert on international and human rights law, with a 54
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Israeli forces watch as Palestinians demonstrate against Israeli settlements in Nablus, the West Bank, on July 10, 2020.
focus on the law of belligerent occupation and war. Sfard began by examining how international law goes hand in hand with international relations. “Big changes in legal terms affect, very much immediately, international relations,” he said. Applying this to the occupation of the West Bank, he noted the “tectonic change” caused by Israel officially pursuing a policy of annexation. Since 1967, the official Israeli position has been that it is not an occupying power and that the West Bank is a “disputed territory” that needs to be resolved by negotiations. By pursuing annexation, he said Israel is casting aside this justification for its presence in the West Bank and admitting it is no longer interested in negotiations or relinquishing its territorial grip over the land. Annexation, Sfard said, is a rejection of two major principles of the post World War II international order: that states cannot annex territory that was occupied by force, and that self-determination must be upheld. In reference to the latter, he noted that Israel is rejecting a principle that served as a basis for its own creation. By following through with annexation, Israel will solidify the argument that it practices apartheid, Sfard said. This is important, he noted, as apartheid is not just a
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government type modeled off of South Africa, but is an independent crime in international treaties and agreements. He noted that the definition of apartheid includes the intention to permanently separate and dominate, something that Israel can no longer deny under annexation. Much of the fallout from the anticipated annexation revolves around how other states respond, Sfard said. If the world allows the annexation of the West Bank, it needs to ask why it objects to the annexation of the Crimea by Russia, the Western Sahara by Morocco, or Tibet by China. International law needs to be implemented and enforced equally to all parties, he emphasized. In terms of what to expect from annexation, Sfard outlined several possibilities. Annexation could only encompass the Jordan Valley and specific settlement blocs, or it could be all of Area C. Another possibility is a “gerrymandering” approach in which Israel seeks to grab the most land with the lowest number of Palestinians in those territories. Under this approach, if the number of Palestinians in Israeli annexed territory is small and would not alter the country’s demographics, Israel could offer limited citizenship as a public relations move. Another possibility is Israel deploying the East Jerusalem
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model, where Palestinians live with a nebulous, second-class status. Sfard also warned that Israel may attempt to nationalize annexed Palestinian land using domestic Israeli eminent domain laws. Sfard additionally envisions the forcible transfer of Palestinians living on lands Israel does not officially recognize, especially in the Jordan Valley. He also noted the possibility of massive settlement development, since settler councils would gain the same legal status as councils operating within Israel proper. —Nate Bailey
Jordan’s Response to Threat of Israeli Annexation
On May 28, J Street hosted a virtual event titled “Annexation and Israel’s Peace Treaty with Jordan” featuring Marwan Muasher, Jordan’s first ambassador to Israel, and subsequent ambassador to the United States. He has also served as Jordan’s foreign minister and deputy prime minister. Muasher opened by explaining that relations between the two neighboring countries are at an all-time low, primarily because Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has done nothing to assure Jordan or the international community that he is serious about a viable and credible two-state solution. Muasher explained why Jordan is taking a strong stance against Israeli an-
nexation of the West Bank. He noted that Jordan accepted the 1994 peace treaty between the countries because Amman thought the deal would facilitate the creation of a Palestinian state and permanently bury the idea propagated by some Zionists that Palestine and Jordan are indistinguishable. Jordan is concerned about the potential for mass immigration into Jordan from the West Bank if Israel were to proceed with annexation. If Israel does not want a Palestinian state and also opposes a Palestinian majority within its borders, Muasher fears mass expulsion will be the Israeli solution. “And where would they go? To Jordan.” A strategy of expulsion would be viewed by Jordan as an attempt to uproot its national identity by turning it into a Palestinian state, and would constitute an “an existential threat,” Muasher said. Not only would involuntary expulsion of the inhabitants of one state into another be an explicit violation of the 1994 treaty, but it would also change the nature of Jordanian and Palestinian national identity. Although Jordan has taken in, and largely granted citizenship to, huge numbers of Palestinian refugees, Muasher said they are wary of a solution in which “a Palestinian state exists and it is called Jordan.” The other main breach of the IsraelJordan peace treaty would be the loss of a promised border between Jordan and
Palestine via the Jordan Valley. Legal measures by way of the International Court of Justice is one path the Jordanian government could take, as they believe the only way the Palestinians could ever have a viable state is if they share a border with Jordan, Muasher said. The discussion concluded with an analysis of possible next steps for Jordan to take. Muasher was careful to note that he no longer works for the Jordanian government and that he was merely speculating on future steps. He did note, however, that the “bottom line is business as usual cannot be maintained.” Jordan could freeze or pull out of the peace treaty and the more recent gas deal with Israel. “How can you work and cooperate with a country that you know is working against your own existence?” he asked. Security cooperation would be another likely casualty of annexation. Muasher understands that Jordan alone can’t do much, and must turn to the international community for advocacy, specifically the European Union. He also pointed to longstanding bipartisan support for Jordan on Capitol Hill as a potential source of leverage, though he believes the White House is willing to let Jordan be “collateral damage” when it comes to annexation. He was not widely optimistic about the official Arab reaction, but believed there would be strong coordination with Egypt, which is also heavily affected by annexation. —Allison Rice
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The Arab Gulf-Israel Relationship: Increasingly Viable?
Jordanians protest against Israeli plans to annex large parts of the Palestinian West Bank, June 27, 2020, in the capital of Amman. AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020
Over the past few years, Israel and the Arab Gulf countries have been quietly, and sometimes publicly, expanding their diplomatic, economic and security relationships. On July 7, the Atlantic Council hosted a virtual discussion about this topic, titled “Israel’s Growing Ties with the Gulf Arab States.” The panel featured National Defense University professor Dr. Gawdat Bahgat, journalist Jonathan Ferziger, former Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Ambassador Anne Patterson and Ambassador Marc Sievers of the Atlantic Council.
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Bahgat and Ferziger first discussed their recent report on these ties. “Israel has always wanted good relations with all Arab countries,” Bahgat explained. With the decline of traditional regional powers Egypt, Syria and Iraq, he continued, Israel, Turkey and Iran took their place. Bahgat observed that the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states for the most part have strained relations with Iran and Turkey, making Israel a more appealing ally. Israel is attractive to the Gulf states, he said, because good relations with Israel are a way to maintain close ties with the U.S. and to challenge Iranian regional ambitions. Bahgat also noted that change in the Israeli-Arab Gulf relationship is led from the top down, and can therefore be reversed, especially if people-to-people connections do not develop. The Palestinian issue, he said, appears to be “on the back burner, but not dead.” Ferziger discussed the sectors of medical research, finance and religion, which have been a focal point of Israeli-Gulf cooperation. “If the relationship continues to develop and doesn’t get cut down by the old dynamics of the Arab-Israeli conflict, these elements will play a central role,” he said. In the domain of medical research, Ferziger observed that COVID-19 has provided a platform for open commercial relations between Israel and the Gulf. “There is a whole ecosystem now of quiet Gulf investment in Israeli startups,” he said. As for finance, he pointed to the Saudi and Emirati sovereign wealth funds investing $4.4 billion into WeWork, a startup founded by an Israeli, as well as the long history of maritime deals between Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem of Dubai’s DP World and Idan Ofer of Israel’s Zim Shipping. In terms of religious ties, Ferziger noted the large synagogue being built in Abu Dhabi as part of the Abrahamic Family House interfaith complex. Patterson thought the increased ties are driven by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). “Saudi Arabia has now become the most important player in the Arab world on this issue,” she said. 56
Attendees arrive at the “Peace to Prosperity” workshop in Manama, Bahrain on June 25, 2019. The event was organized by the Trump administration to launch its economic plan to forge peace between Palestine and Israel. Many view the plan as a U.S.-Arab Gulf-Israeli effort to buy off Palestinians. The Kingdom is constrained, however, by the generational gap between King Salman and his son MBS, the potential damage to Saudi Arabia’s image as the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques if it goes too far in its relations with Israel, and the viability of MBS’ “deeply flawed” economic strategy. In fact, Patterson predicted that “there may be a lot fewer economic opportunities for Israelis and everyone else in the Gulf.” Looking to the future, she also sees difficulties ahead in moving forward with the rapprochement between Israel and the Gulf states. Sievers disagreed with Patterson. He was optimistic about the future of IsraeliGulf relations because aspects of the relationship are developing organically. “These are all separate from this whole question of whether a threat from Iran is driving the Gulf states together with Israel because of similar perceptions,” he argued. Oman, he observed, does not feel particularly threatened by Iran, but recently welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. In the UAE, “the relationship with Israel has taken on a life of its own” and Bahrain “has its own kind of organic relationship” with Israel, he said. —Alex Shanahan
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Oman Enduring Tough Economic Seas
While Oman’s location on the Strait of Hormuz—the conduit for a large percentage of the world’s oil and gas—is of strategic importance, the country of five million people often flies under the radar. In January, after the death of Oman’s long-time head of state Sultan Qaboos bin Said, the country quietly transitioned into a new era under Sultan Haitham bin Tariq AlSaid. On June 11, Dr. John Duke Anthony, founding president and CEO of the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations, moderated a webinar of panelists on the challenges facing the country. “The relationship between the Sultanate of Oman and the rest of the world is a story of peace, trade and bridging cultures,” Ambassador Mohamed Al-Hassan, permanent representative of Oman to the United Nations, began. “Oman is going to continue on this path of diplomacy and peaceful relations with all countries, and the foreign policy of Oman will see a similar but more engaging relationship with the rest of the world,” he said. Al-Hassan also encouraged Arab dialogue with Iran. “We do not have a phobia toward Iran,” he said of Oman. “We under-
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Muscat’s historic old town.
stand that the Iranians live in this area and would like to have a role to play. I think the world and the Gulf region will be better with Iran included rather than isolated and excluded.” The ambassador also acknowledged the challenge of diversifying Oman’s economy to rely less on the oil and gas industry, the primary source of government revenue. “We just need to address it in an innovative way,” he said. Oman introduced two rounds of deep budget cuts in the first half of this year, in response to a dramatic decline in oil revenue caused by the global coronavirus lockdown. Richard J. Schmierer, chairman of the Middle East Policy Council and former U.S. ambassador to Oman, said the country is experiencing a generational economic challenge. He said providing educational and employment opportunities to its large youth population—60 percent of Omanis are under the age of 20—is an important issue on the radar of the new sultan, who is the first Omani ruler to have a business background. Managing the expectations of the older generation raised during a period of relative economic boom is another challenge, Schmierer noted. Oman’s standard of living rose markedly during Qaboos’ reign, “an increase that any country would be hard-pressed to maintain,” he said. “Oman is the good news story in the Middle East—a veritable gem in a region that is beset by sectarian division and warfare,” said Professor Linda Pappas Funsch, author of Oman Reborn: BalancAUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020
ing Tradition and Modernization. “The sea has served as its window to the world for centuries,” she noted. Oman’s maritime legacy in both trade and commerce dates back centuries when it began exporting copper which was important in the manufacturing of bronze, she said. Through these seafaring expeditions, Oman’s interactions with people from all over the world helped create the country’s culture of diversity, which cultivated “its distinctive paradigm for development, which is balancing tradition and modernization.” —Elaine Pasquini
Poor Governance, Conflict Worsen Climate Crisis in Middle East
The Arab Center Washington DC held a July 8 webinar titled “Climate Change,
Conflict and Water Politics in the Arab World.” Panelists agreed that climate change poses an existential threat to the Middle East, but also noted that ongoing conflicts and poor governance play a profound role in the region’s environmental crises. Climate change, they warned, will only hasten the damage caused by years of mismanagement and violence. Zena Agha, a former policy fellow at AlShabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, described climate change as a “threat multiplier” for the region. “Whatever preexisting conditions exist, climate change will draw them out further,” she explained. “Gaza is a prime example of this,” she noted. “You have the [Israeli] blockade, poor governance…and then you have rising sea levels [damaging] a coastal aquifer.” In the West Bank, Agha said the Israeli occupation strips Palestinians of the resources and agency needed to respond to climate change. Furthermore, she pointed out that Israel is actively exploiting resources—mostly notably water—in the West Bank, even though it has an obligation under international law to protect Palestinian natural resources. “It’s a complete contradiction to the international reputation of Israel as the bastion of green governance policy,” she said, referencing the fact that Israel proudly promotes itself as a global innovator of green technologies.
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Women tend a field in the drought-hit region of Hasaka, in northeastern Syria, on June 17, 2010. Many have argued that a years-long drought was a major cause of the country’s devastating civil war. WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS
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In terms of reducing emissions, Mason noted that the oil-rich Arab Gulf nations, particularly the UAE and Saudi Arabia, are using their large sovereign wealth funds to invest in renewable energy sources. However, he noted that these countries have not made quantitative emission reduction targets. The Arab Gulf countries currently have some of the highest per capita emissions in the world, he noted. According to some climate models, large portions of the Arabian Peninsula could become uninhabitable due to extreme heat by 2100. —Dale Sprusansky
Experts Hopeful Iran Nuclear Deal Can Be Salvaged
Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, moderated his organization’s June 4 webcast on the topic, “Maximum Pressure or Maximum Failure— America’s Shrinking Options on Iran.” In May 2018, under President Donald Trump, the United States abandoned the Iranian nuclear agreement, instead choosing a policy of “maximum pressure” that they hoped would force the Iranians to renegotiate a “better deal” with Trump himself. “While Trump keeps escalating sanctions, it is no longer clear whether the goal now is a new negotiation or whether it is
to push matters towards war, or perhaps simply to pursue a strategy to ensure that no future administration will be able to resurrect diplomacy with Iran, let alone revive the nuclear deal,” Parsi stated. According to Iranian-American journalist Negar Mortazavi, Iranians are watching American politics very closely and they differentiate between the Trump administration and a potential Joe Biden presidency. “Tehran, surprisingly, is prepared to rejoin the nuclear deal under a potential Biden presidency,” she said. “I think the view in Tehran is not set in stone.” However, the United States’ abandonment of the nuclear agreement “diminished the credibility of the deal-making of the United States as a whole and also weakened the argument of the pro-engagement camp in Iran,” Mortazavi noted. “I think the deal is very much alive— maybe half alive or on life support, but not completely dead.” Jarrett Blanc, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and formerly the deputy lead coordinator for implementation of the nuclear deal in the Obama administration, concurred with Mortazavi. “Our European friends and allies have done remarkably well to keep it on life support and the Iranians have demonstrated
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Georgetown University Professor Marwa Daoudy, author of the recently released book, The Origins of the Syrian Conflict: Climate Change and Human Security, pushed back against those who pinpoint climate change as the primary impetus for Syria’s civil war. “Climate change had an impact,” she acknowledged. “But if you don’t analyze climate change in the context of human insecurity, unsustainable practices and mismanaged government polices, we can’t understand what happened in the context of Syria.” The devastating drought that plagued northeast Syria, the country’s bread basket, in the years leading up to the 2011 mass protests was in part caused by climate change, Daoudy said. However, she argued the drought was primarily caused by the Syrian government’s gross mismanagement of water resources, most notably its over pumping of ground water. Daoudy also noted that both the Syrian government and rebel groups used water as a weapon during the civil war. Government forces targeted water supplies while attempting to retake rebel-held areas, she said, while rebel groups, most notably ISIS, weaponized their water resources. For instance, she noted that on one occasion ISIS flooded 22 villages in an effort to slow the approach of the Syrian army, and in other cases cut off water supplies as a war tactic. Michael Mason, a professor of environmental geography at the London School of Economics, noted that water mismanagement is a pervasive issue throughout the region. Every country in the Middle East experienced a decline in groundwater reserves from 2003-2015, he said, with Iraq and Kuwait experiencing the greatest declines. While a change in weather caused by climate change is partly to blame, he said poor resource management is a far larger issue. For instance, he noted that Jordan’s use of groundwater is twice the rate of natural renewal. Meanwhile, he pointed out that Iraq’s tremendous loss of surface area water is largely a result of extensive upstream dam construction in Turkey and Iran.
Iranian doctor Majid Taheri (l) arrives in Tehran on June 8, 2020, after being detained in the U.S. for 16 months on charges of sanctions violations. Days earlier, Iranian scientist Sirous Asgari was released by the U.S. in exchange for U.S. Navy veteran Michael White, who was sentenced to ten years in prison for insulting Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
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Zahra Ali, an assistant professor of sociology at Rutgers University, discussed the Iraqi uprising that has been ongoing since Oct. 2019. “These protesters are really about establishing the society that they want,” she said. “They are developing new state forms that provide free services, ranging from education services to cultural services. They are also developing new codes of conduct that centralize around gender issues.” One of the features of the uprising, Ali said, is “its bloody repression by the Iraqi regime.” More than 700 unarmed protesters have been killed since October, with more than 25,000 severely injured and hundreds detained. Many recent protests have emphasized the release of imprisoned protesters and demanded justice for those murdered. Razan Ghazzawi, a doctoral candidate from the University of Sussex, focused on how protests in Syria are “non-binary” in a political sense, because protesters do not support either President Bashar al-Assad, nor the militarized opposition. Ghazzawi argued, “these protests reflect the need for new socio-political imaginaries; non-binary protests tell us about different paths and different futures instead of those offered by the state and the opposition.” Lokman Slim, the director of Hayya Bina
tactical restraint in a number of areas that has allowed a vision of a possible endgame either under a new U.S. administration or potentially a modified Trump second term,” he said. In addition, Biden has clearly stated that his policy toward Iran would be “mutual re-compliance” with the nuclear deal, Blanc added. On the regional side, MIT political science Professor Barry Posen posited that “Israel and Saudi Arabia are very much against a normalization of relations between the United States and Iran.” But, he added, “I don’t think they want a war between the United States and Iran, they just want bad relations, because bad relations means the U.S. defends them while they go about their own business.” Posen warned that Tehran is not open to negotiating its regional agenda. “I don’t think Iran gives up its allies and proxies. I don’t think they are going to give up their intelligence operations or their missiles or developing their special operations capabilities,” he opined. The June 4 prisoner exchange of U.S. Navy veteran Michael White, imprisoned by Iran for nearly two years, and Iranian scientist Sirous Asgari, held by the U.S., was “one little area of opening,” Mortazavi said. “But I do not think there is going to be much change in the policy from Tehran except for maybe more prisoner swaps like this.” Iran’s decision in late June to issue an arrest warrant for Donald Trump over his decision to assassinate Quds Force Commander Qassim Soleimani is but the latest indication that any substantive diplomacy between the two countries remains unlikely under current leadership. —Elaine Pasquini
and UMAM, both Lebanese civic organizations, discussed ongoing unrest in Lebanon. Protests began in 2019 as a result of government-imposed taxes on WhatsApp and other applications, but Slim argued that this was simply a final tipping point. The underlying causes of resistance can be drawn back to the overall corruption in the state and unease with the role of Hezbollah and foreign actors, such as Iran. Ahmed Abu Artema, a Palestinian journalist and a founder of Gaza’s Great March of Return, discussed the common struggle between oppressed groups within Palestine and the U.S. “Israel views us with inferiority based on our ethnicity, which is something we cannot choose,” he said. “The same case is seen with black people [in the U.S.]. It is one essence and one problem. Let us struggle to create a world where all people can be treated according to their humanity.” The panelists also explained how COVID-19 is impacting protests. “Coronavirus is being used as a security argument in Lebanon to terminate the protests,” said Slim, while Abu Artema speculated “if COVID spreads in Gaza, the situation would be horrible, as the medical sector has collapsed.” —Incia Haider
On June 24, the Middle East Institute held a webinar titled, “Protests and Solidarity Movements in the Middle East.” The panel discussed topics ranging from common goals of protest movements in the Middle East and the United States, to the impact of COVID-19 on current resistance movements. AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020
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From the U.S. to the Middle East, Protesters Demand Change
Anti-government protesters take to the streets of the southern Iraqi city of Basra, despite the ongoing threat of the coronavirus, on June 3, 2020. WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS
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On June 4, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) hosted a webinar titled “Palestinian Solidarity with Black Communities.” Noura Erakat, an activist and professor at Rutgers University, opened with an analysis of U.S. law enforcement systems and an impassioned call to action. Deeming the enemy to be a history of white supremacy in the United States, Erakat highlighted ghettoization, redlining, lack of access to credit, medical experimentation, forced sterilization, food deserts and the criminalization of addiction as systems that have historically ensured the white domination of black communities in the U.S. To enforce this system, “police forces in the United States have historically and continue to be established as an occupying power that sees black communities as the enemy and as the foreign force within,” she charged. Erakat situated the training of U.S. police in Israel within the long colonial tradition of exchanging technologies of repression. Speaking primarily to her Arab-American community, Erakat noted that although Arab-Americans are certainly overpoliced and racialized as an enemy in the U.S., they remain “eligible for whiteness.” In her assessment, they have an imperative to support the black struggle for rights rather than to vie for inclusion in white supremacy. Ajamu Dillahunt, a key organizer in the Demilitarize! Durham2Palestine Campaign, focused on putting the work of the Black Freedom Movement in union with the Palestinian struggle for freedom. Dillahunt stressed the importance of educating young people on ending police exchanges with Israel. “We must commit ourselves to a project of conscience raising among the masses of our people,” he said. Ahmad Abuznaid, founder of Dream Defenders and the Arabs for Black Lives collective, detailed a “need to lean into our humanity.” Following the killings of Martin 60
STAFF PHOTO DALE SPRUSANSKY
Palestinian Solidarity with Black Communities
A man waves the Palestinian flag with the words “Black Lives Matter” at a rally condemning police violence and racism in Washington, DC on June 6, 2020. Lee Anderson and Trayvon Martin, Abuznaid was inspired by black organizers and took up activism in a way he never had done previously. Though much of his work has been fighting for Palestinian causes, he told the audience, “we cannot keep ourselves in silos.” Questions from the audience primarily centered on actionable steps. What for instance, is the difference between virtue signaling and actually making a difference? Does voting help? In response to these questions, Dillahunt stressed that much of the work is already being done. People simply need to reach out to black organizations and ask what support looks like. Most importantly, he said, “wherever there is struggle, fight.” Erakat and Abuznaid emphasized making sure solidarity does not come from a place of pity and allowing black voices to be amplified. The conversation then shifted to policy options. Erakat began with a call to expand our imaginations, urging not a replacement of prisons, but, drawing on the words of Angela Davis, to “make prisons obsolete.” Dillahunt drew on a divest and invest model, pointing to education, housing, jobs and historically black colleges and universities as spaces where re-
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sources would be better used to support communities of color, rather than enacting violence against them. Erakat charged the audience to “respond to this moment as you would respond to any freedom struggle.” —Allison Rice
Racism, Islamophobia and the Fight for Justice
The Coalition for Civil Freedoms (CCF) hosted a discussion on June 5 touching upon a variety of topics, ranging from the oppressive tendencies of the American prison system to the inherent racism present within America’s police forces. The discussion, titled “#ICantBreathe: A Conversation on Black Lives, Racist Policing and the COVID-19 Death of a Prisoner,” also explored connections between police brutality and anti-Muslim bigotry, as well as the racism that drives and sustains the U.S. war on terror. The discussion brought to light the death of 37-year-old Mohamed Yusuf, who died alone in a solitary cell after succumbing to COVID-19 on the same day that George Floyd was murdered. A Swedish national of Somali descent, Yusuf was arrested in East Africa and extradited to the U.S. on charges of providAUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020
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WILLIAM WEST/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
COURTESY COALITION FOR CIVIL FREEDOMS
ployed in Washington, DC to ing material support to alattack peaceful protesters.” Shabaab. According to his To conclude the webinar, both mother, Yusuf’s last words to her Hudson and Saalakhan shared after contracting the coronavirus opinions on what actions civilwere, “I can’t breathe.” ians should take to show gen“My brother and I shared eral allyship and solidarity with everything and he was my best the black community. “One of friend,” said Hassan Yusuf, Mothe unprecedented beauties,” hamed’s younger brother. “His noted Saalakhan, “has been the heart was pure and he was huge demonstrations that have humble.” Hassan, the first to find taken place from coast to coast, out about the passing of his and in solidarity abroad, to unite brother, shed light on the chalwith the black cause.” lenges he faced in attempting to —Incia Haider arrange an international prison transfer, which would have alPalestinian Women’s lowed Yusuf to transfer from his Football Legend Shares California prison to one near his Uplifting Journey home in Sweden. Hassan said that “after being denied the first Honey Thaljieh, co-founder of Mohamed Yusuf was one of the first prisoners in California to die of prison transfer, we waited anwomen’s football in Palestine, COVID-19. He died on the same day that George Floyd was other two years and reapplied. murdered, and his last words were also, “I can’t breathe.” joined the Museum of the PalesWe applied for another in Notinian People for an online dissomeone who embraced Islam.” vember 2018 and to this day we have not cussion on July 7. She discussed her trailKathy Manley, CCF legal director, noted received any answer.” blazing efforts to launch the Palestinian the role of prison guards in recent Adam Hudson, a San Francisco-based women’s national team, and her recent protests. “We heard two days ago that the journalist, focused on the influence that the work with International Federation of AsBureau of Prisons (BOP) had a nationmilitary and prisons have on American sociation Football (FIFA) to bring the game wide lockdown and indicated that it might policing tactics. “Both the military and the to young boys and girls living in poverty. be because of prison disturbances,” she American policing system have a feedGrowing up in Bethlehem, Thaljieh ensaid. However, the real reason, she realback loop; they are part of the same joyed football as a source of hope and a ized from a call with a client, was besystem, while most of America still views way to escape from the realities of living cause, “BOP riot squads are being dethese two as separate entities,” he said. under occupation. “Football was the best As part of his press visit to Guantanamo Bay, he drew the conclusion that many of the guards at the facility have deployed tactics they learned while working in domestic U.S. prisons. El-Hajj Mauri’ Saalakhan, a human rights advocate and author, described the role of blackness in the case of Imam Jamil Al-Amin, who is serving a life sentence for the killing of two Fulton County Sheriff's deputies in 2000, even though another man confessed to the crime. Al-Amin was a prominent figure in the 1960s civil rights movement, serving roles in both the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panther Party. According to Saalakhan, “what makes him so significant today is the fact that he represents two parties of political prisoners in Honey Thaljieh (second from right), working with young refugees in Australia. America: as an African-American and as AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020
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way, regardless of all the difficulties, to distract us from insanity and just give us a secure place,” she recalled. As she got older, she wanted to seriously pursue football as a career, but received pushback from family who told her playing sports was not a viable career for women. Instead of accepting their answer, she pushed back against their reasoning. “I challenged my community, I challenged my parents, I challenged my neighbors,” Thaljieh said. “I refused from an early age to accept the fact that girls should stay at home while boys play football in the street.” She attributes her tenacity to growing up Palestinian. “I was born as a rebel, I think,” she said. “Most Palestinians are rebels, I believe, and the resilience in us never goes away, because
Education
Continued from page 35
In August 2019, Palestine Legal, CCR and other defenders of free speech on college campuses won a major victory by defeating a lobby-inspired effort by Fordham University to deny the startup of an SJP chapter at the private university in New York City. A New York Supreme Court judge rejected as baseless Fordham’s argument that an SJP chapter would create “polarization” on campus. Justice Nancy Bannon concluded that Fordham’s “disapproval of SJP was made in large part because the subject of SJP’s criticism is the State of Israel” and came “in spite of the fact that SJP advocates only legal, nonviolent tactics aimed at changing Israel’s policies.” As LaHood pointed out, “The students’ support for Palestinian rights and their demand to freely express that support truly exemplify Fordham’s stated values, unlike the administration’s shameful actions here.” Fordham has no shame, however, as it is appealing the decision. In November 2019, the Zionist lobby tried but failed to shut down the National Students for Justice in Palestine meeting in Minneapolis. An Israeli government-sponsored app advised people to complain of an unsafe en62
when we want something we have to make it happen.” Thaljieh ultimately partnered with Bethlehem University in 2003 to launch a piecemeal woman’s football team consisting of just a handful of players. From there the program took off, and just a few years later the team played its first official match. Looking back, Thaljieh is moved by the commitment of her fellow athletes. She noted that many women from that first team now assist with the official women’s football academy: “The girls who played with me, they are the coaches, administrators and they are the decision makers, and that makes me so happy that a movement has been created,” she said. Today, Thaljieh works for FIFA, traveling around the world to empower impover-
ished children. “It’s important for us to go and show them that there is something else,” she said. “They need opportunities. They have the potential, they have the skills, but opportunities are the key.” Thaljieh recalled one particularly moving moment in her travels to India. After leaving the country on an official trip working with children, she was utterly devastated and depressed by the level of poverty she witnessed. Three years later at the Homeless World Cup in Oslo, a girl participating in the tournament approached Thaljieh and asked if she remembered meeting her in India. “I couldn’t handle it,” Thaljieh said. “I just had tears in my eyes.” Seeing that “football has given her the opportunity to change her life” was extremely rewarding and uplifting, she said. —Dale Sprusansky
vironment at the meeting site, the University of Minnesota (UMN) campus, while anonymous websites smeared the organizers with groundless accusations of support for terrorism. UMN rejected calls to cancel the conference, which went ahead, attracting 350 participants, even as shadowy individuals snapped photographs of people entering and exiting the gathering. At Arizona State University (ASU), student protesters were barred from attending a campus event on Nov. 13, 2019 featuring Israeli soldiers. They were then harassed and questioned by university administrators. However, a broad coalition of student organizations, including a local chapter of Black Lives Matter and advocates of justice for undocumented migrants, rallied behind the ASU SJP chapter, offering their support for its demand that ASU divest from companies profiting from Israeli human rights abuses. At the University of Florida, an Israeli militarist and propagandist spoke on campus on Nov. 19, 2019 and then falsely asserted that students called him a Nazi and a war criminal. In actuality 80 students had walked out in silent protest. The university, which had circulated the false charges on its website, was forced to retract them and send a notice of correction to students and
faculty who received the initial email. In October 2019, Chancellor Robert Jones of the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign—a university notoriously hostile to free speech on Palestine as a result of the Steven Salaita case—dispatched an email equating a Palestinian student presentation on Israel with anti-Semitism. The student government responded by voting overwhelmingly to condemn the chancellor’s false conflation of criticism of Israeli repression with anti-Semitism. This accounting touches on only a few recent cases on university campuses, to say nothing of the wide-ranging censorship in high schools or the repressive legislation proposed in Congress, and by state and local governments across the United States. It is clear, however, that as far as universities go, for every academic with integrity—men and women like Professor Ledford at Case Western—there are all too many others who prove willing to cave to the lobby and willingly sacrifice the freedom of expression that goes to the very heart of the mission and integrity of academic institutions to which they are supposed to be dedicated. As LaHood noted, “It’s just sickening to see these institutions of higher education give in to repression.” ■
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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 Wrestling With Zionism: Jewish Voices of Dissent By Daphna Levit, Interlink Publishing, 2020, paperback, 288 pp. MEB: $20
Reviewed by Allan C. Brownfeld
Zionism, many now forget, was always a minority view among Jews. When Theodor Herzl organized the Zionist movement in the 19th century, he met bitter opposition from Jewish leaders around the world. The chief rabbi of Vienna, Moritz Gudemann, denounced the mirage of Jewish nationalism. “Belief in one God was the unifying factor for Jews,” he declared, and Zionism was “incompatible with Judaism’s teachings.” In 1885, American Reform rabbis, meeting in Pittsburgh, rejected nationalism of any kind and declared, “We consider ourselves no longer a nation but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine...nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.” It was only the advent of Hitler and the Holocaust which convinced many Jews that a Jewish state was necessary. Many are now coming to the realization that this was indeed a mistake, and a violation of Jewish moral and ethical values. In this important book, Daphna Levit amplifies the voices of 21 Jewish and Israeli thinkers—scholars, theologians, journalists and activists who challenge Zionism on re-
Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism. 64
ligious, cultural, ethical and philosophic grounds. Beginning in the late 18th century, long before the founding of the State of Israel, she brings together a range of viewpoints into a single historical conversation. Among those she discusses are Albert Einstein, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Noam Chomsky, and such dissenting Israelis as Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Zeev Sternhell, Shlomo Sand and Ilan Pappe. Levit is an Israeli who now lives and teaches in Canada. She served in the Israeli army and slowly came to understand that the Israeli narrative of events was contrary to history. She saw with her own eyes the daily mistreatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories. She writes: “My own lengthy process of disillusionment with the Zionist narrative and search for other dissenting voices began soon after the Six Day War of 1967, when I served as a press liaison officer at the Allenby Bridge and watched Palestinian refugees attempting to flee across the border. The separation from my country was gradual and took several decades. In 2002, WAsHINgtON RepORt ON mIddLe eAst AffAIRs
I left Israel for Canada, at a point when the Zionist agenda was becoming increasingly militant and intolerant of opposition.” A “Jewish” state, Levit believed, was meant to be “a light to the nations.” Instead, she points out, it became something far different. “Instead, we became a military power, armed to the teeth and blind to the victims of our own cruelty. I found other, perhaps more enlightened, kindred spirits in my quest for absolution from the guilt of my complicity in the actions of my country.” The voices she has gathered together are indeed eloquent as they try to maintain the Jewish moral and ethical tradition in the face of the excesses to which nationalism leads. From the very beginning, Zionism’s slogan of “A land without a people for a people without a land” was refuted by the earliest Zionist settlers in Palestine, who discovered that the land was populated by people who had been there for many generations. Asher Ginsberg, a Russian-born “cultural” Zionist, objected to Herzl’s lack of Jewish nefesh or spirit. He wrote under the pen name Ahad Ha’am, which literally meant “one of the people.” In 1891, after his first visit to Palestine, he wrote that the land was not empty, “Its people were not savages, and Jewish moral superiority was unwarranted. Jews in Palestine were behaving in hostile and cruel ways to the native population.” Levit reviews the thinking of a wide variety of Jewish and Israeli critics of Zionism. In 1938, alluding to Nazism, Albert Einstein warned an audience of Zionist activists against the temptation to create a state “imbued with a narrow nationalism within our own ranks against which we have already had to fight strongly even without a Jewish state.” Another prominent German Jew, the philosopher Martin Buber, spoke out in 1942 against “the aim of the minority to ‘conquer’ territory by means of international maneuvers.” From Jerusalem, in the midst of the hostilities that broke out after Israel unilaterally declared independence in May 1948, Buber cried out with despair, “This sort of ‘Zionism’ blasphemes the name of Zion, it is nothing more than one of the crude forms of nationalism.” August/septembeR 2020
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One chapter is devoted to Yeshayahu Leibowitz, an Orthodox Jew and long-time professor at the Hebrew University. He says that no nation or state should ever be worshiped as holy and advocated the separation of religion and state. He saw the occupation of Palestinian land as an abomination that was corrupting the soul of Israel. He did not want Judaism to serve as “a cover for the nakedness of nationalism.” Nor did he want it to be “used to endow nationalism with the aura of sanctity attributed to the service of God.” Reverence for the State of Israel as a holy land was unacceptable, a form of idolatry. In Leibowitz’s understanding of Judaism, no piece of land could be holy nor could any nation or state. Only God is holy and only His imperative is absolute. Another chapter is devoted to Zeev Sternhell, who served as head of the department of political science at the Hebrew University and is a widely recognized expert on fascism. He wrote an article in 2018 entitled, “In Israel, Growing Fascism and a Racism Akin to Early Nazism.” Sternhell asks: “how would a historian in 50 or 100 years...interpret our period? When did the state devolve into a true monstrosity for its non-Jewish inhabitants? When did some Israelis understand that their cruelty and ability to bully others, Palestinians or Africans, began eroding the moral legitimacy of their existence as a sovereign entity?” In the case of Shlomo Sand, Professor Emeritus of History at Tel Aviv University, he believes that the Jewish society in Israel has become intolerably ethnocentric and racist. It has evolved into a closed exclusive cast, which Sand abhors. Jews in Israel today have greater privileges than others living in the same country. Even Jews living outside of Israel, he notes, who never set foot in Israel, have more rights and privileges within Israel than non-Jewish Israelis. There is much in this book about Israel’s “New Historians,” who exposed the ethnic cleansing campaign to rid the country of its Palestinian inhabitants. In his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Ilan Pappe writes that the population problem had already been recognized as a major issue to AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020
the early Zionists in the late 19th century. As early as 1895, Herzl proposed a solution: “We shall endeavor to expel the poor population across the border unnoticed.” And in 1947, David Ben-Gurion reaffirmed the underlying principle, “There can be no strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60 percent.” In 2003, Binyamin Netanyahu reaffirmed this sentiment stating, “If the Arabs in Israel form 40 percent of the population, this is the end of the Jewish state...but 20 percent is also a problem...The state is entitled to employ extreme measures.” Levit notes that, “This book was not intended to be a comprehensive history of opposition to the moral bankruptcy of militant nationalism for that would require a much longer work.” What the book does is introduce the reader to a large number of thoughtful Jewish critics of Zionism, people who are trying to uphold the humane Jewish tradition, which believes that men and women of every race and nation are created in the image of God and deserve to be treated equally. As Israel moves in its current direction, the number of Jewish dissenters is likely to grow dramatically.
Death is Hard Work
By Khaled Khalifa, translated by Leri Price, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, hardcover, 192 pp. MEB $22
Reviewed by Eleni Zaras
Bolbol, the youngest son of Abdel Latif, lives a quiet, “well-behaved” life in Damascus when his father dies a natural death at an old age—a privilege in the midst of WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS
Syria’s civil war that garners little or no sympathy at a time when death is so ubiquitous. In Khaled Khalifa’s Death is Hard Work— published in Arabic in 2016 and translated into English in 2019—three estranged siblings attempt to carry out the dying wish of their father: to bury him in his ancestral village, Anabiya, next to his sister Layla. Bolbol, his brother Hussein and his sister Fatima haul their father’s body out of the morgue fridge “chockfull of bodies,” lay him onto icepacks in the back of Hussein’s minibus and hit the road. As a logistical nightmare takes shape, Bolbol, who had cared for his father in his final days, quickly regrets his sentimental lapse of judgment that tricked him into consenting to his father’s final request. Passing from regime to rebel-held territories demands not only patience, but also cash, connections and a hefty dose of luck, which is not always on their side. Abdel Latif had been a devoted rebel-supporter and their identity cards all bore the name of the town where they grew up—“S.”—a well-known rebel stronghold that immediately raises the suspicions of regime checkpoint guards. Checkpoints, storms, bouts of open gunfire, tank convoys, and off-road detours further delay what should have only been a few hours of driving, transforming the trip into a days-long odyssey. The ice under their father’s body melts and the corpse passes from one stage of decomposition to the next faster than the minibus can move between checkpoints. The siblings, who can’t even bear each other’s company under normal circumstances, teeter on the verge of aborting their absurd mission and leaving the body to the ravenous dogs prowling the outskirts of towns. “What did his father’s body mean?” Bolbol wonders after hours of travel. “It was a harsh but justified question that night. All three of them were wondering it, but none had a clear answer. Silence had settled over the minibus. Hussein stayed silent to
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 degree in History at the Universite Paris Diderot.
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stifle his anger; Fatima was trying not to breathe, so they would forget she was there. The sounds of missiles and anti-tank bombs were getting closer; Hussein said dispassionately, ‘They’re bombing Homs.’” Khalifa writes with matter-of-fact prose and unapologetically reveals attitudes on life as a “pre-death” state, bodies as commodities to declare like “hookah coals, crates of tomatoes, sacks of onions,” and childhood memories “like acid inside them.” Yet these same memories are what save the family and the reader from utter nihilism. “Surrendering to one’s memories is the best way of escaping the wounds they preserve…So as the minibus was leaving the checkpoint at Z, that’s just what Bolbol did, swamped with pain as he was, feeling as though he were sinking into the earth....” With Bolbol, we sink into silent reckonings with once-blissful moments of youth, disappointments of adulthood and paralyzing fear of the regime. His memories of Lamia, the woman he never stopped loving, and of the energy and hope that marked the early days of the revolution remind the reader why this journey is simultaneously futile and necessary. Khalifa jolts us from these poetically sketched reveries, though, with his terse narration of the pitiless guards, the blistering body and indiscriminate destruction.
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The story line itself is straightforward. In its simplicity and without focusing on the politics of the war, Khalifa illustrates how a routine, human need (a burial) is subjected to the war’s dehumanizing effects. This approach, in turn, humanizes the destruction we may only vaguely understand through numbers or unrelenting but faceless tragedies that saturate the media. In a 2008 interview with the New York Times, Khalifa “insists he has no interest in social realism or didactic fiction. Political ideology infected the work of too many Arab writers in the 1960s and ’70s, he said. His own aims are purely aesthetic, and his heroes are William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez. He chose to write about ‘the Events’ [in his novel In Praise of Hatred] not to make a political point, but to give artistic life to the increasingly brutal realities of the world he grew up in.” Death is Hard Work continues in this same vein and has been compared to Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. As the prolonged travel ravages the body of Abdel Latif and whittles away at his progeny’s sanity, the reader’s tolerance, too, wears thin. Our own dread of whatever hurdles the war will throw at this family next and our own desperation for the journey to end cannot be dispelled. While Abdel Latif’s children “couldn’t imagine that anyone else would still harbor any sense of duty toward this man,” the power of Khalifa’s narrative is that he does in fact instill this “sense of duty” into the reader. Like the three travelers, it is imperative www.MiddleEastBooks.com that we bear this burden Nonfiction • Literature • Cookbooks through to the end and Children’s Books • Arabic Books • Films refuse to abandon them Greeting Cards • Palestinian Solidarity Items to face the road alone. Pottery • Olive Oil • Food Products Death is Hard Work is Monday: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. a National Book Awards Tuesday-Friday: 10 a.m.-7 p.m. • Saturday: 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Finalist, one of the Wall Sunday: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Street Journal’s Best 1902 18th St. NW • Washington, DC 20009 Books of the Year and an bookstore@wrmea.org NPR Best Book of the (202) 939-6050 ext. 1 Year.
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Israel in Africa: Security, Migration, Interstate Politics
By Yotam Gidron, Zed Books, 2020, paperback, 213 pp. MEB: $24
Reviewed by Dale Sprusansky
In recent years, there has been a noticeable increase in the number of African countries forging closer diplomatic relations with Israel. This development, along with improved Israeli-Arab Gulf relations, has left some members of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement feeling dismayed. Meanwhile, Israel has built-up the importance of each of these new diplomatic openings, utilizing them to counter the BDS narrative that its illegal occupation of Palestine has left the country largely isolated on the international stage. Perhaps the best-known chapter of Israel’s history in Africa is the close relationship it forged with apartheid South Africa. Beyond that, however, little tends to be known about either historic or contemporary Israeli engagement with the continent. Why, for instance, have Rwanda, Togo, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo opened up to Israel? These are questions that academics, researchers, journalists and activists deeply interested in Israel/Palestine but unfamiliar with the history of Africa increasingly want to understand. Thankfully, researcher Yotam Gidron has stepped up with a timely new book, Israel in Africa: Security, Migration, Interstate Politics, that, in a pithy 159 pages (minus footnotes), masterfully explains the rise, fall, AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020
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and reemergence of Israel-Africa relations since 1948. While Gidron does provide details about Israel’s relations with particular countries, the objective of the book is to provide an overview of the themes that have defined Israel’s engagement with Africa. Readers can enjoy the book as a primer on the subject, and use its many references as a means to launch research into a case study of particular interest. To this reader, there are three key takeaways from Gidron’s work: Israel’s engagement with Africa has historically only yielded modest results, African countries have not been passive victims of Israeli intervention, and Israel’s interaction with the continent has been largely privatized. Here’s a closer look at these themes: Limited Results: Shortly after independence, Israel, isolated by much of the Arab world and Asia, saw decolonizing African countries as a way to gain international allies. Close relations with certain countries on the periphery of the Arab world, particular Ethiopia (one of Israel’s first African partners), also allowed Israel to check the power of its Arab nemeses. While Israel established 22 embassies in African nations by 1963 and provided developmental and security assistance to several countries, they were unable to leverage these relationships on the international stage. “The support of many of Israel’s friends in Africa usually didn’t extend beyond a polite abstention in votes on Israel-related resolutions” at the U.N., Gidron notes. This, he says, was due to the fact that the Arab world also had diplomatic levers to pull in Africa. Israel-Africa relations chilled as a result of African displeasure with the 1967 and 1973 wars, and took on a less important role for Israel after it reached peace agreements with Jordan and Egypt. In the era of BDS, however, Africa-Israel relations are again of importance to Jerusalem, and are rebounding. However, Israel still cannot count on the continent for votes at international fora. For instance, even though Washington was actively “taking names” of AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020
N E W A R R I VA L S This Is What America Looks Like: My Journey from Refugee to Congresswoman, by Ilhan Omar, Dey Street Books, 2020, hardcover, 288 pp. MEB $25. A beacon of positivity in dark times, Rep. Omar has weathered many political storms and yet maintained her signature grace, wit and love of country—all the while speaking up for her beliefs. Similarly, in chronicling her remarkable personal journey, Omar is both lyrical and unsentimental, and her irrepressible spirit, patriotism, friendship and faith are visible on every page. As a result, This is What America Looks Like is both the inspiring coming of age story of a refugee and a multidimensional tale of the hopes and aspirations, disappointments and failures, successes, sacrifices and surprises, of a devoted public servant with unshakable faith in the promise of America. Oilcraft: The Myths of Scarcity and Security That Haunt U.S. Energy Policy, by Robert Vitalis, Stanford University Press, 2020, hardcover, 240 pp. MEB $24. There is a conventional wisdom about oil—that the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf is what guarantees access to this strategic resource; that the “special” relationship with Saudi Arabia is necessary to stabilize an otherwise volatile market; and that these assumptions in turn provide Washington enormous leverage over Europe and Asia. Except, the conventional wisdom is wrong. Robert Vitalis debunks the myths to reveal “oilcraft,” a line of magical thinking closer to witchcraft than statecraft. Vitalis shows how we can reconsider the question of the U.S.–Saudi special relationship, which confuses and traps many into accepting what they imagine is a devil’s bargain. The House of Saud does many things for U.S. investors, firms and government agencies, but guaranteeing the flow of oil, making it cheap, or stabilizing the price isn’t one of them. A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion, by Tom Segev, translated by Haim Watzman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019, hardcover, 816 pp. MEB $35. In this definitive biography, Israel’s leading journalist-historian Tom Segev uses large amounts of previously unreleased archival material to give an original account, transcending the myths and legends that have accreted around Israel’s founder, David Ben-Gurion. Segev’s probing biography ranges from the villages of Poland to Manhattan libraries, London hotels and the hills of Palestine, and shows us Ben-Gurion’s relentless activity across six decades. Along the way, Segev reveals for the first time Ben-Gurion’s secret negotiations with the British on the eve of Israel’s independence, his willingness to countenance the forced transfer of Arab neighbors, his relative indifference to Jerusalem, and his occasional “nutty moments” from UFO sightings to plans for Israel to acquire territory in South America. Segev also reveals that Ben-Gurion first heard about the Holocaust from a Palestinian Arab acquaintance and explores his tempestuous private life. WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS
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countries who supported a 2017 U.N. resolution condemning the U.S. decision to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Gidron notes, “Togo was the only African country that voted with the U.S. and Israel.” African Agency: Gidron makes a strong case that the Israel-Africa relationship has not been a one-sided affair. He does rightly make clear that Israel has always been the stronger member of any bilateral relationship it has enjoyed with an African nation, and that “much of the leverage Israel has in Africa comes from Washington rather than Jerusalem.” At the same time, he emphasizes that African leaders have often played their cards wisely. Awareness of Israel’s desire to use the continent as an avenue to project diplomatic, geopolitical and economic strength has afforded African leaders significant leverage, Gidron argues. For instance, at the height of the Arab-Israeli conflict, African leaders were “always able to increase the price of their friendship by threatening, more or less explicitly, to strengthen their cooperation with the other side.” Gidron thus describes the relationship as, in part, “a story about African leaders utilizing the rivalries of the Middle East and North Africa in order to draw Israeli material and political support for their own local ends.” African leaders, he adds, know they, “can tap into Israeli investments, technologies and expertise without having to pay it back directly in political support.” Privatization: While Israel’s early interaction with Africa was largely initiated by the state, it did not take long for private interests to usurp the Israeli diplomatic corps. Today, even as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu celebrates new diplomatic openings, it is private Israeli interests, particularly those pertaining to the arms trade and mining, which dominate Israel-Africa relations. Given the nefarious nature of many of these operations, Israel officially keeps
Dale Sprusansky is managing editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
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its distance from most of these private sector initiatives, though Gidron notes that, particularly when it comes to Israel’s military, “the distinction between national interests and private ones can be unclear.” That African leaders have welcomed Israeli arms is not to say these weapons are benefiting the people of Africa. As Gidron notes, many despotic leaders have used Israeli arms to fortify their own power, often at the expense of the common good. These conclusions are just a microcosm of the abundant, clearly distilled information available in Israel in Africa. There are many more insights to be gleaned from the book on these topics, not to mention its assessment of topics this review has not explored, such as migration, the role of Evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity, and the influence Washington and pro-Israel lobbying groups have over Israel-Africa relations. Anyone interested in understanding Israel’s role in the world today is strongly encouraged to pick up a copy of Israel in Africa. It’s a short, power-packed book well worth the time. On June 10, the Washington Report held a book talk with author Yotam Gidron. To view the discussion, visit, https://youtu.be/ 929KtEbo1I8.
B O O K TA L K S Interlink Authors Discussing Writing about Palestine By Incia Haider
The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) held a webinar on May 28 titled, “A Zoom Discussion with Interlink Publishing Authors,” featuring three of the publishing house’s writers. Authors discussed Palestinian rights, Zionism and the Middle Eastern conflict and highlighted the importance of Interlink Publishing as a channel for dispersing and printing works ignored by other publishers. Nora Lester Murad, a U.S. native who has lived in Palestine for 13 years, during which time she has co-founded two orga-
WAsHINgtON REpORt ON MIddlE EAst AffAIRs
nizations, Dalia Association and Aid-Watch Palestine, recently published a collection of personal reflections on foreigners living in Palestine titled, I Found Myself in Palestine. She said this “was not a book she set out to write, but it had to be written and compelled itself into existence.” Murad described the process of gathering and listening to stories from ajanab (foreigners) as “wrapping herself around some really raw issues about identity, belonging and the experience of being an ‘inside-outsider.’” Contributors to the book come from all over the world. Various angles of how all these foreigners have been transformed are explored within the work, ranging from transformations of family life to religion to activism. While these reflections give insight into the unique experiences of foreigners in Palestine, Murad stressed the importance of Palestinians sharing their own stories. Daphna Levit, an Israeli-born activist, writer and lecturer, discussed the failure of Israel as a democratic state, as well as the history of dissent in the country, which is the focus of her book, Wrestling with Zionism. Levit expressed herself as, “always the outsider, because being critical of Israel as an Israeli is not really permitted.” She cited Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s declaration of Israel as a state that shows preference to its Jewish citizens as an impetus for her to commit to fighting against the occupation and anti-democratic values within the Israeli state. “If Israel is truly a democracy,” she exclaimed, “why do people who don’t live there but are Jewish have preferential rights over non-Jews who actually live there?” Levit addresses this juxtaposition of democracy and religious nationalism within her work. Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, has published many books with Interlink, with her most recent being the seventh edition of Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer.
Incia Haider, who attends the University of California, Berkeley, is a Washington Report on Middle East Affairs summer intern.
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Despite being raised a “hardcore Zionist,” Bennis came to realize the colonialist intentions rooted within the occupation of Palestine. In much of her work, she explores the dynamic nature of the discourse about Palestine within the U.S. and its somewhat positive changes. However, the “tragic irony,” she concluded, is that “we’re looking at this moment when the discourse in the United States has begun to change so dramatically and at the same time the condition of life for Palestinians has gotten worse and worse.” Bennis also described literature and books as vital to this movement and emphasized that “Interlink publishes more books, in English, about the Middle East, about Palestine, by Palestinians, in greater numbers in the Interlink catalog than anywhere else in this country.” (Advertisement)
1983: Lebanon, U.S. Embassy bombed, 63 killed. Months later, Marine Barracks bombed, 241 killed. 1987: Cassie accepts a job teaching Shakespeare at a private academy to forget memories of her late husband killed at the barracks. First day, she meets Samir, a senior whose parents were killed in the embassy attack. As Cassie teaches the tragedies of Hamlet & Othello, Shakespeare’s timeless themes of trust, betrayal, love & hate become reality as the Palestinian-Israeli struggle destroys their lives. Amazon ($20.98); Kindle ($3.88) AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020
N E W A R R I VA L S The Universal Enemy Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity, by Darryl Li, Stanford University Press, 2019, paperback, 384 pp. MEB $29. No contemporary figure is more demonized than the Islamist foreign fighter who wages jihad around the world. Spreading violence, disregarding national borders and rejecting secular norms, socalled jihadists seem opposed to universalism itself. In a radical departure from conventional wisdom on the topic, The Universal Enemy argues that transnational jihadists are engaged in their own form of universalism: these fighters struggle to realize an Islamist vision directed at all of humanity, transcending racial and cultural difference. Darryl Li reconceptualizes jihad as armed transnational solidarity under conditions of American empire, and highlights the parallels and overlaps between transnational jihads and other universalisms such as the War on Terror, United Nations peacekeeping, and socialist NonAlignment. Developed from more than a decade of research with former fighters in a halfdozen countries, Li explores the relationship between jihad and American empire to shed critical light on both. Istanbul, City of the Fearless: Urban Activism, Coup d’Etat, and Memory in Turkey, by Christopher Houston, University of California Press, 2020, paperback, 242 pp. MEB $34 Based on extensive field research in Turkey, Istanbul, City of the Fearless explores social movements and the broader practices of civil society in Istanbul in the critical years before and after the 1980 military coup, the defining event in the neoliberal reengineering of the city. Bringing together developments in anthropology, urban studies, cultural geography and social theory, Christopher Houston offers new insights into the meaning and study of urban violence, military rule, activism and spatial tactics, relations between political factions and ideologies, and political memory and commemoration. This book is both a social history and an anthropological study, investigating how activist practices and the coup not only contributed to the globalization of Istanbul beginning in the 1980s, but also exerted their force and influence into the future. Falastin: A Cookbook, by Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley, Ten Speed Press, 2020, hardcover, 352 pp. MEB $32. The story of Palestine’s food is really the story of its people. When the events of 1948 forced residents from all regions of Palestine together into one compressed land, recipes that were once closely guarded family secrets were shared and passed between different groups in an effort to ensure that they were not lost forever. In Falastin, Sami Tamimi retraces the lineage and evolution of his country’s cuisine, born of its agriculturally optimal geography, its distinct culinary traditions and Palestinian cooks’ ingenuity and resourcefulness. Tamimi covers the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River—East Jerusalem and the West Bank, up north to the Galilee and the coastal cities of Haifa and Akka, inland to Nazareth, and then south to Hebron and the coastal Gaza Strip. WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS
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siegel_70.qxp_In Memoriam 7/16/20 11:12 AM Page 70
In Memoriam
Bahaa Tayar comforted needy children living in Palestinian camps in Lebanon for 36 years.
BAHAA TAYAR, 63, Ein el-Hillweh Center director, National Institution of Social Care and Vocational Training (NISCVT), commonly known as Beit Atfal Assumoud (BAS), Beirut, Lebanon, died June 12, 2020 from complications of kidney disease in Lebanon. Tayar was from Shaab, a village in the Galilee, in northern Palestine. BAS was established in 1976 after the Tel Al Za’atar massacre to care for those children that were orphaned. Today, after almost 45 years of activities in 10 camps throughout Lebanon, it continues to care for those in need by helping to improve their situation through its centers, which provide services in each camp. Bahaa joined BAS in 1984. She soon became the director of Ein El-Hilweh Center and, according to Kassem Aina, the organization’s director, “became one of the most important pioneers of social work in the Palestinian camps of Lebanon.” Ein El Hilweh is the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon located southeast of Saida. There are 70,000 inhabitants living in 1.5 square kilometers making
Ellen Siegel, an American Jewish nurse, is a peace activist who has focused her activism on bringing awareness of the situation of the Palestinian refugees in the camps in Lebanon to others. She volunteered her medical services in 1982 during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. She was working at Gaza Hospital in Sabra Camp during the massacre. 70
PHOTO COURTESY BEIT ATFAL ASSUMOUD
Bahaa Tayar, a Palestinian Social Work Pioneer: 1957-2020
By Ellen Siegel
it the highest population density of all the camps and is comprised of Palestinian refugees from both Lebanon and Syria. This camp has been subjected to Israeli attacks and internal armed conflicts resulting in much destruction and death. Day-to-day life is extremely difficult due to overcrowded and poor living conditions, unemployment, and outbreaks of violence. In addition, there are many school drop outs. BAS met an urgent need to establish a social/cultural center that could assist and support children and families. The first such center was built in 1985, a larger one was established in 1998, thanks to the support of
some international organizations. Today, the Beit Atfal Assumoud Center in Ein el-Hillweh has projects and programs that include a Family Happiness Project, which sponsors children, families and the elderly. Other services include a Palestinian Embroidery Project, kindergartens, dental clinics, remedial classes for school drop outs, special events for mothers, art, cultural, social, educational and recreational activities. Bahaa was a dedicated social worker serving her people for more than 36 years under very difficult circumstances. Besides running the day-to-day operations of a busy facility, she also helped establish the Family Guidance Center in Saida, which she described as “her baby,” that is dedicated to helping Palestinian and other needy children and families overcome difficult times and develop resources. She wanted to protect children, make them feel secure, and give them comfort. According to Sirkku Kivisto, from the Finnish Psychologists for Social Responsibility, Bahaa was a “great partner, energetic, humorous, brave.” Bahaa will be sorely missed by her colleagues, those she cared for, and the international supporters who come to Beirut every September to commemorate and remember the massacre at Sabra and Shatila. For more information or to make a donation in her name please visit BAS at <www.socialcare.org>. ■
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O• B • I • T • U • A • R • I • E • S Mohammed Ghuneim, 90, former director of the Voice of America Arabic Service, died May 16 in West Palm Beach, Florida. Born in Jaffa, Palestine in 1929, Ghuneim was known throughout the Middle East, and beyond, for his courageous reporting from Lebanon, Syria and numerous other countries in that region. He covered the June war of 1967, the 1973 Arab-Israeli conflict, and the subsequent ill-fated Arab-Israeli peace talks of the 1970s. In 1991, he also reported on the front lines when U.S. troops ousted Saddam Hussain from Kuwait. He reported in both Arabic and English to regional and global audiences. In an article published in the Public Diplomacy Council, another VOA veteran, Alan Heil, writes: “In Syria in 1987, Mr. Ghuneim was detained by police for 12 hours while attempting to enter the country. According to U.S. Embassy officials there, American citizen Ghuneim was taken from Damascus International Airport to another location and kept in a tiny, dark cell. He was interrogated repeatedly about his ties to Iraq, PLO leader Yasser Arafat, and the U.S. government. After vigorous American Embassy appeals to the Syrian ministries of foreign affairs and information, Mr. Ghuneim was released and remained in Damascus for five days. He conducted a half dozen interviews with Syrian educational and cultural figures. And he even hired a contractual reporter for VOA in Damascus. Syrian officials later apologized to Ghuneim, calling his detention a case of ‘mistaken identity.’” In the final years of his career, Ghuneim directed VOA’s Arabic division in Washington, DC. He is survived by his wife, two sons and daughters and six grandchildren.
John William Beattie, 72, survivor of the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty during the Six Day War, died June 29. Known to most as Jack, he was born in Detroit, MI on Jan. 4, 1948. He served AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020
his country honorably in the U.S. Navy. He worked as a machine repairman for more than 20 years at Bridge Port Machine of Troy. He owned DB2 Machine Repair and operated it for many years. He was a longtime member of the Chief Petty Officers Association (CPOA), U.S, Liberty Veterans Association (LVA) and the Algonac Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) Post 3901. Beattie loved being out on the water and boating. He also enjoyed a nice round of golf and bicycling. He was an avid reader who always looked forward to a good book. Above all, he was a fun, loving and outgoing man who understood the true value of friendship. Jack is survived by his wife Debbie of 49 years, siblings Joan Ignash and Tom Beattie, many cherished nieces and nephews and many great friends.
Fazana Saleem-Ismail, 47, community activist and research scientist at SUNY Albany, died June 25 of stomach cancer. An active member in New York’s Albany community, she was known by many for educating people about the Muslim faith and speaking out against Islamophobia. According to an article in Albany’s Times Union, “She had many discussions about Islam with all different kinds of audiences including Girl Scout troops, high school students, church groups and public library patrons. She also played a large role in organizing ‘Ask a Muslim’ events where people were encouraged to ask questions of Muslims in an effort to dispel stereotypes.” Saleem-Ismail was also the founder of Jazzy Sun Birthdays, an organization that provides personalized birthdays to children living in homeless shelters throughout the Capital Region in Albany, and a founding member of Salaam Shalom, an organization of Muslim and Jewish women who speak out against negative stereotypes and prejudice. Saleem-Ismail leaves behind her husband, daughter and son. Mohamed Mounir, 65, prominent Egyptian journalist, died July 13 due to
By Sami Tayeb complications from the coronavirus, just days after he was released from jail. Mounir was a founder of the Front for the Defense of Journalists and Freedoms. He previously worked at a number of newspapers, including Youm7, Masr al-Arabiya and Al-Ahaly. On June 15, Mounir was arrested and put in pretrial detention on charges of “spreading false news, joining a terrorist group and misuse of social media” after he appeared on Al Jazeera Mubasher to discuss Coptic issues in Egypt. Mounir became ill while in detention and was transferred to Cairo’s notorious Tora prison complex on June 30. He was released from Tora Prison on July 2, and his health rapidly deteriorated soon afterwards. He wrote updates on his condition and reached out for help on social media for his medical expenses. In one of his posts Mounir wrote, “When I die, I hope my biography will include just one line: Mohamed Mohamed Mounir Youssef participated in the revolution of January 25, 2011 honestly and sincerely.” On July 8, he tested positive for COVID-19 and died in an isolation unit at Agouza Hospital shortly afterward.
Saiful Azam, 79, a Bangladeshi fighter pilot and politician, died of natural causes in Dhaka, Bangladesh on June 14. “A unique figure in the history of Bangladesh, Azam fought in wars as a fighter pilot in three different countries— Jordan, Iraq and Pakistan. During the 1967 Six-Day War, he was the only pilot to have downed four Israeli aircraft.” Mourning him on social media, Palestinian historian Osama al-Ashqar hailed Azam as a great airman. “Our brothers in Bangladesh and Pakistan were our partners in resistance and defending the Al-Aqsa Mosque,” the holy site in Jerusalem, he added. Renowned Palestinian journalist Tamer al-Mishal lauded Azam, calling him “the Eagle of the Air.” Azam also shot down an Indian fighter jet during the India-Pakistan war of 1965. After his retirement in 1980, Azam became a politician for the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. ■
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Other People’s Mail
TELL YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS WHAT YOU THINK PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE 1600 PENNSYLVANIA AVE. NW WASHINGTON, DC 20500 COMMENT LINE: (202) 456-1111 WWW.WHITEHOUSE.GOV/CONTACT
Compiled by Dale Sprusansky DEFUND ISRAELI TORTURE OF PALESTINIAN CHILDREN
To The Daily Gazette, July 3, 2020 With rising awareness of police mistreatment of African Americans, let’s note that one entity that provides guidance to our police departments, the State of Israel, has a record of its own in mistreating the Palestinians under its occupation. The Anti-Defamation League, sponsor of the police partnership, boasts that since 2003, nearly 200 American police agencies—federal, state and local—have participated in its seminars in Israel on what it calls “resilience and counter-terrorism.” Young boys of the West Bank, those most likely to be in the streets throwing rocks at their Israeli overlords, are especially vulnerable to Israel’s idea of proper policing. Amnesty International reports that Israel has “tortured and otherwise ill-treated” detained Palestinian minors through “beating with batons, slapping, throttling, prolonged shackling, stress positions, sleep deprivation and threats.” Also, that “Israel is the only country in the world that automatically prosecutes children in military courts that lack fundamental fair rights and guarantees.” This is facilitated by American aid of nearly $4 billion a year, even though U.S. law bars military aid to countries that commit gross violations of human rights. A bill pending in Congress would put a stop to it by identifying Israel as such a country. It is H.R. 2407, sponsored by Rep. Betty McCollum of Minnesota, who calls Israeli treatment of Palestinian minors “state-sponsored child abuse.” We are finally owning up to the brutality inflicted on African Americans. Can we also own up to the brutality inflicted on Palestinian children with the help of our tax dollars? Carl Strock, Saratoga Springs, NY
SHAME ON MISSOURI FOR PASSING ANTI-BDS LEGISLATION
To the St. Louis Jewish Light, June 4, 2020 In May, the Missouri legislature passed a bill which, in the words of multiple opposed legislators, forces companies who 72
SECRETARY OF STATE MIKE POMPEO U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE 2201 C ST. NW WASHINGTON, DC 20520 PHONE: (202) 647-6575 VISIT WWW.STATE.GOV TO E-MAIL
ANY SENATOR U.S. SENATE WASHINGTON, DC 20510 (202) 224-3121
have a major contract with the State of Missouri to sign a “loyalty oath” to the State of Israel (Senate Bill 739). A representative from these companies must sign a statement that they will not refrain from buying and selling goods and services to and from Israel (or companies doing business in Israel) for political reasons. They can legally boycott North Carolina, they can boycott organizations they think are promoting homosexuality, they can even boycott the United States federal government, for whatever reason they choose. But if given the opportunity, they must do business with Israel. The bill was heavily supported by Christians United for Israel, whose leader John Hagee once claimed that Adolf Hitler was a descendant of murderous “half-breed Jews.” One supporting representative called Missouri a Christian state and said that attacks on Israel are attacks on “our” Christian faith as Missourians. As a fifth generation Missouri Jew I find this statement both offensive and dangerous. The St. Louis chapter of the American Jewish Committee, by supporting the bill, has allied itself with these extreme right-wing Christian forces, which are dangerous for Jews in America. It did so to shield Israel from facing repercussions for its blatant violations of Palestinian rights. I hope to see other Jewish organizations strongly renounce this unconstitutional piece of legislation. That the legislature spent any time on this issue in the midst of a pandemic and economic crisis is an insult to all Missourians. Michael Berg, St. Louis, MO
PRO-ISRAEL MEDIA MONITOR CLAIMS THERE IS NO OCCUPATION
To the Lethbridge Herald, June 24, 2020 In my Herald letter of May 14, I used the word “occupation” in reference to the toxic Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In response, on May 28 HonestReporting Canada (HRC) declared that my use of that word was disingenuous and misinformed, a big lie: there has been no such occupation, they claim.
WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS
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HRC claims to promote fairness and accuracy in Canadian media coverage of Israel and the Middle East. Its 45,000 vigilant members daily monitor every newspaper, radio station and TV outlet to expose wherever bias might rear its ugly head. I am astonished that HRC has found me so grossly misinformed, because my extensive catalogue of information about the Israeli occupation includes sources like these: Benny Morris of the Middle East Studies department at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, Israel included in his book Righteous Victims: A History of the ZionistArab Conflict 1881-2001 a lengthy description of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. He wrote, “Israel’s occupation was founded on brute force, repression and fear, collaboration and treachery, beatings and torture chambers.” In his book, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy, Noam Chomsky of MIT wrote a large section about the Israeli occupation of Palestine in which he classed Israel as a failed, outlaw, terrorist state. Theodor Meron was a former adviser on international law to the government of Israel, professor of international law at New York University and Oxford and president of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. In 2017 Holocaust survivor Meron published in the American Journal of International Law an article on Israel’s 50-year-long violation of international law by its occupation of the territories of over a million Arabs, mostly Palestinians. “Israel must understand that the violation of Palestinian human rights and the colonization of territory populated by other peoples can no longer be accepted in our time,” he said. If the best propaganda that HonestReporting Canada can come up with is the preposterous claim that there has been no Israeli occupation, those who fund them are being swindled. Owen Holmes, Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada ■ AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020
angels_73-74.qxp_AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020 CHOIR OF ANGELS 7/16/20 7:39 PM Page 73
AET’s 2020 Choir of Angels
The following are individuals, organizations, companies and foundations whose help between Jan. 1, 2020 and June 29, 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 “Transcending the Israel Lobby.” Others are donating to our “Capital Building Fund,” which will help us expand and add coffee service to the Middle East Books and More bookstore. Thank you all for helping us survive the turmoil caused by the pandemic. We are deeply honored by your confidence and profoundly grateful for your generosity.
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Ahmad & Shirley Gazori, Mill Creek, WA Michael Gillespie, Maxwell, IA Ahsen Abbasi, Leesburg, VA Doug Greene, Bowling Green, OH Dr. & Mrs. Robert Abel, Wilmington, DE Dr. Safei Hamed, Columbia, MD Fahed Abu-Akel, Atlanta, GA Ibrahim Hamide, Eugene, OR James C. Ahlstrom, Stirling, NJ Erin K. Hankir, Nepean, Canada Hamid & Kim Alwan, Milwaukee, WI Delinda C. Hanley, Kensington, MD Nabil & Judy Amarah, Danbury, CT Susan Haragely, Livonia, MI Edwin Amidon, Charlotte, VT Dr. Walid & Norma Harb, Dearborn Nazife Amrou, Sylvania, OH Hts., MI Anace Aossey, Cedar Rapids, IA Prof. & Mrs. Brice Harris, Pasadena, CA Dr. Robert Ashmore Jr., Mequon, WI Mr. & Mrs. Sultan Aslam, Plainsboro, NJ Mr. & Mrs. Sameer Hassan, Quaker Hill, CT Ahmed Ayish, Arlington, VA Julester Haste, Oxford, IA Rick Bakry, New York, NY Jim Hausken, Kensington, CA Allen & Jerrie Bartlett, Philadelphia, PA Gerald Heidel, Bradenton, FL Joseph Benedict, Mystic, CT M.D. Hotchkiss, Portland, OR Bradley Bitar, Olympia, WA Barbara Howard, Piscataway, NJ Elaine Brouillard, West HyannisM. Al Hussaini, Great Falls, VA port, MA Mr. & Mrs. Azmi Ideis, Deltona, FL Sam Burgan, Falls Church, VA Issa & Rose Kamar, Plano, TX James Burkart, Bethesda, MD Timothy Kaminski, Saint Louis, MO John Cornwall, Palm Springs, CA Dr. & Mrs. Anton Dahbura, Mr. & Mrs. Basim Kattan, Washington, DC M. Yousuf Khan, Scottsdale, AZ Baltimore, MD Dr. Mohayya Khilfeh, Chicago, IL Gregory DeSylva, Rhinebeck, NY Eugene Khorey, Homestead, PA Dr. George Doumani, Washington, DC Sarah L. Duncan, Vienna, OH Tony Khoury, Sedona, AZ Dr. David Dunning, Lake Oswego, OR Gail Kirkpatrick, Philadelphia, PA Steve Feldman, Winston-Salem, NC Ronald Kunde, Skokie, IL Dr. E.R. Fields, Marietta, GA Edwin Lindgren, Overland Park, KS Erna Lund, Seattle, WA Joseph & Angela Gauci, Whittier, CA Allen J. Macdonald, Washington, DC Dr. & Mrs. Gabriel Makhlouf, Brick-and-mortar retailers are facing a challenge. Even before the Richmond, VA pandemic, competition from Amazon forced a lot of independent Tahera Mamdani, bookstores to close. Thanks to your support, Middle East Books Fridley, MN and More defied that trend! When it’s safe we hope to welcome Ted Marczak, you back to browse, shop, and gather our community together for Toms River, NJ book talks, club meetings and film screenings. We’re still selling Charles Marks, books online (www.MiddleEastBooks.com) but we are also Altadena, CA## using this time to expand and add a coffee shop to the bookstore. Martha Martin, Now that we’ve completed the architectural plans and selected Kahului, HI the contractor, we’ve learned that renovations will cost more than Stephen Mashney, $100,000. Please send a check to AET, 1902 18th St, NW, WashAnaheim, CA ington, DC, with “bookstore” on the memo line to help make your Carol Mazzia, favorite bookstore a special gathering place for our community. Santa Rosa, CA
SUPPORT MIDDLE EAST BOOKSTORE/COFFEE SHOP
AuguST/SEpTEMBEr 2020
Shirl McArthur, Reston, VA William McAuley, Chicago, IL Gwendolyn McEwen, Bellingham, WA Ray McGovern, Raleigh, NC Robert Michael, Sun Lakes, AZ Tom Mickelson, Cottage Grove, WI Curtis Miller, Albuquerque, NM Peter Miller, Portland, OR Maury Keith Moore, Seattle, WA Moe Muhsin, Honolulu, HI Isa & Dalal Musa, Falls Church, VA Sara Najjar-Wilson, Reston, VA Stephen L. Naman, Atlanta, GA Mary Neznek, Washington, DC W. Eugene Notz, Charleston, SC Merrill O'Donnell, New Westminster, Canada Peggy Rafferty, Cedar Grove, NC Amani Ramahi, Lakewood, OH Marjorie Ransom, Washington, DC Kenneth Reed, Bishop, CA John Reinke, Redmond, WA Paul Richards, Salem, OR Ambassador William Rugh, Hingham, MA Hameed Saba, Diamond Bar, CA Dr. Mohammed Sabbagh, Grand Blanc, MI Irmgard Scherer, Fairfax, VA Dr. Ajazuddin Shaikh, Granger, IN Yasir Shallal, McLean, VA Qaiser & Tanseem Shamim, Somerset, NJ Dr. Mostafa Hashem Sherif, Tinton Falls, NJ Yasser Soliman, Hamilton Township, NJ Darcy Sreebny, Issaquah, WA Corrine Sutila, Los Angeles, CA Mushtaq Syed, Santa Clara, CA Dr. Joseph Tamari, Chicago, IL Eddy Tamura, Moraga, CA Doris Taweel, Laurel, MD Tom Veblen, Washington, DC V. R. Vitolins, Grosse Pointe Farms, MI Hermann Weinlick, Minneapolis, MN Duane & Barbara Wentz, Kirkland, WA Michael Wilke, St. Charles, IL
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David Williams, Golden, CO Robert Witty, Cold Spring, NY Mashood Yunus, New Brighton, MN Hugh Ziada, Garden Grove, CA
ACCOMPANISTS ($250 or more)
Catherine Abbott, Edina, MN Michael Ameri, Calabasas, CA Syed & Rubia Bokhari, Bourbonnais, IL Duncan Clark, Rockville, MD William G. Coughlin, Brookline, MA Andrew & Krista Curtiss, Herndon, VA Dr. William Fuller, Valdosta, GA Eyas Hattab, Louisville, KY 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 Nidal Mahayni, Richmond, VA Richard Makdisi & Lindsay Wheeler, Berkeley, CA Dr. Charles W. McCutchen, Bethesda, MD Curtis Miller, Albuquerque, NM Yehia Mishriki, Orefield, PA Museum of the Palestinian People, Washington, DC Claire Nader, Winsted, CT Hertha Poje-Ammoumi, New York, NY Phillip Portlock, Washington, DC Mary H. Regier, El Cerrito, CA Jeanne Riha, Brooklyn, NY Rotary Foundation, Evanston, IL Ramzy Salem, Monterey Park, CA Sarah Saul, Portland, ME Dr. Abid Shah, Sarasota, FL
Bernice Shaheen, Palm Desert, CA**** David J. Snider, Bolton, MA William R. Stanley, Lexington, SC John K. Y. & Margot S. Taylor, New York, NY Benjamin Wade, Saratoga, CA
TENORS & CONTRALTOS ($500 or more)
Sylvia Anderson de Freitas, Duluth, MN Dr. & Mrs. Roger Bagshaw, Big Sur, CA Helen Bourne, Encinitas, CA William G. Coughlin, Brookline, MA Mr. & Mrs. Majed Faruki, Albuquerque, NM Raymond Gordon, Venice, FL Alfred R. Greve, Holmes, NY Dr. Wasif Hafeez, W. Bloomfield, MI Masood Hassan, Calabasas, CA Virginia Hilmy, Silver Spring, MD Kandy L. Hixson, Akron, OH Brigitte Jaensch, Carmichael, CA Gloria Keller, Santa Rosa, CA Tom & Tess McAndrew, Oro Valley, AZ Darrel Meyers, Burbank, CA Lisa Schiltz, Houston, TX James G. Smart, Keene, NH Anver Tayob, Saint Louis, MO Tom Veblen, Washington, DC Dr. James Zogby, Washington, DC***
BARITONES & MEZZO SOPRANOS ($1,000 or more)
Anonymous, San Francisco, CA Asha A. Anand, Bethesda, MD Lois Aroian, East Jordan, MI G. Edward & Ruth Brooking, Wilmington, DE
Paula Davidson, Naples, FL Nabila Eltaji, Amman, Jordan Dr. & Mrs. Clyde Farris, West Linn, OR*,** Ronald & Mary Forthofer, Boulder, CO Judith Howard, Norwood, MA Mohammed Jokhdar, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia Ghazy Kader, Shoreline, WA Damaris Koehler, Mannheim, Germany Jack Love, Kailua Kona, HI Mary Norton, Austin, TX M.F. Shoukfeh, Lubbock, TX Dr. Imad Tabry, Fort Lauderdale, FL Donn Trautman, Evanston, IL Young Again Foundation, Leland, NC
CHOIRMASTERS ($5,000 or more)
American Council for Judaism, Ponte Vedra Beach, FL Anonymous, Palo Alto, CA #
Dr. & Mrs. Clyde Farris, West Linn, OR*,**
John & Henrietta Goelet, Washington, DC William Lightfoot, Vienna, VA Estate of Jean Elizabeth Mayer, Bethesda, MD * In Memory of Andrew I. Killgore ** In Memory of Richard H. Curtiss *** In Memory of Eileen Zogby **** In Memory of Dr. Jack Shaheen # In Memory of Rachelle & Hugh Marshall ## In Memory of Amal Marks
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American Educational Trust Washington Report on Middle East Affairs P.O. Box 53062 Washington, DC 20009
August/September 2020 Vol. XXXIX, No. 5
Children collect waste from garbage bins in Beirut, Lebanon on July 9, 2020. The Lebanese are experiencing dire living conditions amid the countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s financial crisis that coincides with the weakening in the value of the Lebanese pound against the U.S. dollar and an unprecedented increase in inflation. A large number of people have lost their jobs after the closure of thousands of companies. (Photo by bilal Jawich/Xinhua via Getty)
