Washington Report - June/July 2019 - Vol. XXXVIII, No. 4

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THE “DEAL OF THE CENTURY”: A U.S.-FUNDED ATROCITY

DISPLAY UNTIL 7/30/2019

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Your gifftt toda ay will advva ance the educatio on of many Palestinians likkee Iman.

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TELLING THE TRUTH SINCE 1982

Volume XXXVIII, No. 4

On Middle East Affairs

June/July 2019

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

8

The “Deal of the Century” Would Force Palestinians To Swallow a Bitter Pill —Jonathan Cook

11

16 18

Israel Plunged into Political Chaos as Government Dissolved—Three Views —Yossi Verter, Gideon Levy and Zvi Bar’el

14

Two Narratives of Palestine: The People are United, the Factions are Not —Ramzy Baroud

Netanyahu and Trump Administrations Blame the Victims: Palestinians and UNRWA—Ian Williams

Waving the Bible to Block Justice—Rev. Alex Awad

33

36

20 22

26 28 34

The Scenario of a Million Palestinians Going Hungry in Gaza—Mohammed Omer

It’s Time to End Harsh and Sloppy U.S. Policy in Palestine—Three Views —Phyllis Bennis, Dr. James Zogby and Delinda C. Hanley Occupation of The Atlantic Mind—Walter L. Hixson

Republicans Try to Use BDS Issue to Paint Democrats as Somehow Less Pro-Israel—Shirl McArthur The Suppression of Musical Culture in Gaza —Salsabeel H. Hamdan

SPECIAL REPORTS

31

Trivializing Anti-Semitism by Attributing it to Critics of Israel —Allan C. Brownfeld

38

A Familiar Pattern: Bolton’s Threats Escalate Tensions with Iran—Three Views —Scott Ritter, Shahed Ghoreishi and Ben Armbruster

A Letter to the Members of the German Government— Dr. Sara Roy Introducing Nuclear Weapons to the Middle East— —Walter L. Hixson

44 46 48

Adelson’s East Asian Money Trees —John Gee Egyptian Referendum Expands Presidential and Military Powers —Fatma Khaled Istanbul Election Rerun Raises Questions Over Turkey’s Commitment to Democracy —David O’Byrne

ON THE COVER: A Palestinian youth kicks a football through tear gas fumes during a protest marking al-Quds (Jerusalem) International Day, along the border with Israel near Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, May 31, 2019.

MOHAMMED ABED/AFP/Getty Images

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

Other Voices

Compiled by Janet McMahon

The Gaza Ghetto Uprising, Gideon Levy, Haaretz

OV-1

Declassified: Israel Made Sure Arabs Couldn’t Return to Their Villages, Yotam Berger, Haaretz Soldiers Have to Shoot at Palestinians. It’s Israel’s Way to Keep Them in Check, Amira Hass, Haaretz

OV-2

OV-3

But Why During the Eurovision Song Contest?

Here’s Why, Achiya Schatz, www.breakingthesilence.org.il OV-5 Irish Affinity for Palestinians Runs Deep, Dr. James J. Zogby, Washington Watch

Mike Pompeo: American Jacobin, William S. Smith, theamericanconservative.com

OV-9

OV-10

Trump’s Disastrous Plan for the Muslim Brotherhood, Emile Nakhleh, http://lobelog.com OV-11 Why Tiny Qatar May Be Our Greatest Hope In the Iran Crisis, Mark Perry, theamericanconservative.com

OV-13

Swarms of Butterflies Bring Color to Iran’s Capital, Saeed Jalili, www.aljazeera.com

OV-14

Dearborn, Michigan: An Arab American’s Culinary Mecca, Marlo Safi, theamericanconservative.com

OV-15

OV-5

Senator Schumer’s “Divine” Mission to Serve Israel, Lawrence Davidson, www.counterpunch.org

OV-6

Palestine and News Bias, Robert Fantina, www.counterpunch.org

OV-8

DEPARTMENTS

Jonathan Pollard, U.S. Spy for Israel, Complains of Neglect by Israeli State, Joseph Fitsanakis, IntelNews.org

5 Publishers’ Page

50 MusliM aMerican activisM: Despite Threats, Rep. Ilhan Omar Headlines Los Angeles Event

51 arab aMerican activisM: Arab America Celebrates National Arab American Heritage Month

54 Music & arts: Hebron Women’s Cooperative Brings Embroidery to U.S.

55 Waging Peace: Despite Entry Ban, Activist Omar Barghouti Speaks to DC Audience

60 huMan rights: Rights Denied: Palestinian Children Under Occupation

63 diPloMatic doings: PA Ambassador Husam Zomlot Challenges “Deal of the Century”

64 book talks: Noura Erakat and Khalid Elgindy: Palestinian-Israeli Peace Revisited

67 Middle east books and More

68 book revieWs: Breakthrough: Transforming Fear into Compassion; and The Words of My Father: Love and Pain in Palestine —Reviewed by Mary Neznek Scheherazade’s Feasts: Food of the Medieval Arab World —Reviewed by Amin Gharad

70 the World looks at the

Middle east — CARTOONS

71 other PeoPle’s Mail 73 obituaries 74 2019 aet choir oF angels 51 indeX to advertisers

AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

6 letters to the editor

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American Educational Trust

Deadly “Deal of the Century.”

Binyamin Netanyahu’s failure to form a governing coalition following Israel’s April legislative elections has spun the country into political chaos (see pp. 11-13) and will send Israelis back to the polls in September. It will also likely cause yet another delay in the unveiling of the Trump administration’s much touted “Deal of the Century,” purported to be the innovative solution to securing peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. All indications, of course, are that this “deal”—constructed by ardent Zionists and settlement supporters within the Trump administration—is really the most brazen attempt yet in the history of the “peace process” to force the Palestinians into submission. See pp. 8-10 for a more detailed look at the proposed peace plan.

On the Record.

On June 2, Axios released a revealing but unsurprising interview between senior White House adviser Jared Kushner and reporter Jonathan Swan. The exchange revealed the deep-seated disdain for the Palestinian people that underlines the “Deal of the Century.” Asked if he thinks the Palestinians are capable of governing themselves, Kushner responded: “I think that’s a very good question. I think that that’s one that we’ll have to see. The hope is that they, over time, can become capable of governing.” He added: “I do think that in order for the area to be investable, for investors to come in and want to invest in different industries and infrastructure and create jobs, you do need to have a fair judicial system, freedom of press, freedom of expression, tolerance for all religions.” It is, of course, worth nothing that Kushner and the Trump administration have cozied up to, and unwaveringly supported, many Arab regimes where few, if any, of these freedoms exist. Not to mention the fact that Palestinians living under Israeli military rule in the West Bank (including children, see p. 60), and as second-class citizens within Israel, are also not afforded many of these rights.

JUNE/JULY 2019

Publishers’ Page

“America’s Aid is Not an Entitlement.”

That’s a sentiment we’re sure many of our readers support. A growing number of Americans are sick and tired of seeing billions of their tax dollars going to support Israeli violations of international law. Except Kushner, of course, was not talking about cutting aid to Israel when he said this. Rather he was explaining the administration’s rationale behind cutting all aid to Palestinians—including critical, life-saving humanitarian assistance. Correspondents Ian Williams (pp. 16-17), Mohammed Omer (pp. 20-21) and Delinda C. Hanley (pp. 24-25) delve into the ramifications of the U.S. suspending all aid to Palestine.

Learning from the Iraq War.

“We should have never been in Iraq. They lied, they said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none and they knew that there were none.” With those words uttered during a presidential debate in February 2016, Donald Trump received something extremely rare (especially for him): praise from all sides of the political spectrum. A key tenent of his campaign was the promise that a Trump presidency would mark the end of wasteful foreign wars that cost precious lives, waste trillions of dollars, and serve special interests while doing little to bring about world peace. Fast-forward to 2019, and there’s reason to question:

Is Trump Really Against War?

As soon as John Bolton, perhaps this country’s most infamous neocon, became President Trump’s national security adviser, antiwar activists knew the march to war was on.

Since he took office, Bolton has done everything in his power to instigate a war between the U.S. and Iran (see pp. 38-42). When tensions flared in May, many began having flashbacks to the build-up to the Iraq War: spurious allegations of an “imminent threat,” and the deployment of weapons, troops and battleships to the region. Thankfully, thus far Bolton’s efforts have been met with relative restraint by Tehran, which likely realizes Bolton is doing everything in his power to

goad them into a fateful decision. Nonetheless, the latest developments remain disturbing and highlight the need for President Trump to realize that if he is really serious about not beginning another ill-conceived war, he ought to give his national security adviser a pink slip. Speaking of pink slips...

We’ve Earned a Tardy Slip.

Our first biannual fundraising appeal is late!

We realize contributions to humanitarian aid organizations are needed now more than ever, but supporting this magazine and finding and educating more readers may help end these man-made travails.

Welcoming Young Journalists.

Our summer interns have arrived and we put them right to work—you can read some of their event write-ups in this issue! We hope their experience here expands their knowledge of the Middle East, hones their journalistic skills and opens their eyes to how policy is conceived and enacted in Washington, DC. And, before you know it, Fall will be here! All aspiring journalists are encouraged to inquire about a Fall internship by emailing internship@wrmea.org.

More New Faces.

Discerning eyes will notice there are two new names on our masthead! Sami Tayeb has joined us as our new bookstore director, and will also use his own discerning eyes to help ease the load of our editorial team. Walter Hixson, a speaker at this year’s Israel lobby conference and the author of a new book on the Israel lobby (see p. 67), has also joined us as a contributing editor. He brings an invaluable depth of knowledge about the history of U.S. foreign policy and the Israel lobby, which he has promptly put on display in his first two articles for the magazine (pp. 2627 and 36-37). With these new additions we are more prepared than ever to provide you with the information you need to...

Make a Difference Today!

WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

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Executive Editor: Managing Editor: Contributing Editor: Middle East Books and More Director:

DELINDA C. HANLEY DALE SPRUSANSKY WALTER HIXSON

SAMI TAYEB CHARLES R. CARTER Art Director: RALPH U. SCHERER Founding Publisher: ANDREW I. KILLGORE (1919-2016) Founding Exec. Editor: RICHARD H. CURTISS (1927-2013) Founding Managing Editor: JANET McMAHON Board of Directors: HENRIETTA FANNER JANET McMAHON JANE KILLGORE Finance & Admin. Dir.:

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) 939-6050. Subscription prices (United States and possessions): one year, $29; two years, $55; three years, $75. For Canadian and Mexican subscriptions, $35 per year; for other foreign subscriptions, $70 per year.

Periodicals, postage paid at Washington, DC and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, P.O. Box 91056, Long Beach, CA 90809-1056.

Published by the American Educational Trust (AET), a nonprofit foundation incorporated in Washington, DC by retired U.S. foreign service officers to provide the American public with balanced and accurate information concerning U.S. relations with Middle Eastern states. AET’s Foreign Policy Committee has included former U.S. ambassadors, government officials, and members of Congress, including the late Democratic Sen. J. William Fulbright and Republican Sen. Charles Percy, both former chairmen of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Members of AET’s Board of Directors and advisory committees receive no fees for their services. The new Board of Advisers includes: Anisa Mehdi, John Gareeb, Dr. Najat Khelil Arafat, William Lightfoot and Susan Abulhawa.

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

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6

CONFERENCE ACCLAIM

LetterstotheEditor

I wish to commend all of you for your tasteful, interesting March 22 conference revealing much about the Israel lobby.

There is no other way I could have learned more than I did watching the 9 to 5 program online.

The speakers were great, including Mr. Martin McMahon, Esq., Professor Walter Hixson, Ali Abunimah, Susan Abulhawa and more. I listened to their every word. I must get the book Susan referenced [Pollution in a Promised Land].

Thank you, many times over, for the hard work, research and openness given to us. I am always fascinated at the work you do with each issue of the Washington Report.

Carol Rae Bradford, Somerville, MA Thank you for your kind words! We (including the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, the conference’s cosponsor) put a great deal of work into planning the annual Israel lobby conference, and we believe it shows! Those interested in watching videos of conference speakers, or in reading transcripts, are encouraged to visit our website, <wrmea.org>. We’re also happy—eager really!—to send multiple copies of our conference issue (or any other issue) to subscribers who would like to hand them out at conferences or other local events.

This is how you help us spread word of the magazine, grow our subscription base and educate Americans about the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy!

SUPPORTING REP. ILHAN OMAR

I’m a voter who is deeply troubled by the incessant verbal attacks against Rep. Ilhan Omar over her criticism of the Israeli government’s brutal occupation of Palestinian lands. The unfounded accusations directed at the congresswoman have put her life at risk. There is a stink of McCarthyism in the tone of the remarks directed at Rep. Omar by the president and many members of Congress.

Ilhan Omar’s detractors misrepresent the meaning of her words and intentions.

She is not an anti-Semite. In fact, Rep. Juan Vargas’ recent statement that “questioning support for the U.S.-Israel relationship is unacceptable” only serves

WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

to validate Omar’s illustration of America’s dysfunctional Middle East policy.

Similarly, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton of the District of Columbia lectured Ilhan Omar, who is a Semite, on anti-Semitism. As long as the Congress conflates fair criticism of the State of Israel with anti-Semitism, I will stand with the many millions of Americans who support the BDS movement. The canard of racism is used to silence debate about what has now become an apartheid government in Israel.

The IDF has become an army of occupation with a staggering list of atrocities perpetrated against the Palestinians.

These include murder, assassination without trial, mass expulsion, unfettered destruction of houses and entire villages, collective punishment, lethal withholding of food, water, and medical attention, restrictions on movement, and the killing of unarmed civilian demonstrators. Unfortunately, America’s complicity in this brutality has made things worse.

Why does AIPAC pay for fancy congressional junkets to Jerusalem without letting you see Hebron, which is ground zero for hate in the occupied territories?

Thomas Welch, Cambridge, MA It’s almost creepy how obsessed certain members of Congress (we’re looking at you Rep. Lee Zeldin) have become with criticizing every last word that comes out of the mouths of Reps. Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and other supporters of Palestinian human rights on Capitol Hill. Here’s the good news: These young champions of justice are refusing to be silenced and persist in challenging the status quo when it comes to Israel.

Palestinians are suffering tremendously due to U.S. policy (see pp. 22-25), but there is reason to believe that the unhinged attacks against these freshmen representatives are the final, desperate punches of a dying pro-Israel lobby.

HISTORICAL COMMENTARY

On page 49 of your May issue I read, “Lord Balfour knew what he was doing when he gave Palestine to Israel.” How can you gift what is not yours? Who owned Palestine? Certainly not Balfour, nor the UK. What did the declaration say? “His Majesty’s Government views with favor JUNE/JULY 2019

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the establishment of a Jewish time for President Trump to realKEEP THOSE CARDS AND LETTERS national home in Palestine.” It ize there’s a difference between COMING! added significant provisions reemploying a no-nonsense, hardSend your letters to the editor to the Washington garding the status of the indigenosed national security adviser Report, P.O. Box 53062, Washington, DC 20009 nous Arab population. It specifiand an ideological nutbag hellor e-mail <letters@wrmea.org>. cally avoided recommending a bent on starting a war very few Jewish state and was clearly not a leg- in our modern times. people want. islative document; it was simply a “posiWHAT MOTIVATES U.S. FOREIGN tion” paper expressing some support for JOHN BOLTON’S PLAN FOR WAR a proposal that was being circulated by While President Trump is preoccupied POLICY? Zionists and also Evangelists (to whom with avoiding impeachment and obstruct- A large part of U.S. foreign policy consists Prime Minister Lloyd George was sup- ing, John Bolton, the hawkish national se- of harassing Iran. Not that we have any curity adviser, is threatening the Islamic valid reason to harass Iran, it's just that Isportive).

How did the U.S. react to it? Congress Republic of Iran with “dire consequences.” rael and its U.S. supporters (who control endorsed it verbatim two years later. The Both men have much in common. They U.S. foreign policy) tell us to do it, so we British government agreed to administer have never experienced the horrors of do it.

Bill Lightfoot, Vienna, VA Palestine under the terms of a League of war, as both escaped the Vietnam-era We all remember when Binyamin NeNations mandate. In 1947 the United Na- draft. Bolton’s lack of credibility on foreign tions gave 56 percent of Palestine to the policy is matched by Donald Trump’s lack tanyahu testified before Congress in 2002, encouraging the U.S. to go to war of credibility on climate change.

Jews. Forget Balfour.

The bullying tactics of the Trump ad- with Iraq. We also rememberer his 2015 Horace T.E. Hone, West Palm Beach, ministration are forcing countries to boy- speech to a joint session of Congress in FL Thanks for the clarification on the his- cott Iranian oil in favor of American oil, which he attempted to undermine Presitoric and oft-cited declaration by Lord buttressing their profits. In a rare mo- dent Barack Obama’s landmark nuclear Balfour. It’s also important to remember ment of honesty Bolton once admitted deal. It’s clear Netanyahu and many Isthat the Nakba is an ongoing occur- that the wars fought in Afghanistan, Iraq raeli hawks want the U.S. to attack and rence. Events that happened before and and elsewhere were all about oil and cripple all of Israel’s enemies; anything after 1948 are important to remember gas. What do Venezuela, Iraq, Iran, to deflect attention from their brutal occuand discuss, but it’s also critical that we Libya and Afghanistan have in common? pation of Palestinian land. It’s time for do everything we can to bring an end to Oil and gas. Afghanistan serves as a crit- leaders in the U.S. to stop repeating the injustices that unfold on a daily basis ical pathway for transporting natural gas AIPAC talking points and to start taking out of Turkmenistan. Egged on by our the business of initiating a moral, just “allies” Israel and Saudi Arabia, Bolton and unbiased foreign (and domestic) polwill likely engage Iran in an escalation of icy seriously. ■ war of words and a possible conflict that could easily spin out of control. Do we really wish to put our troops in harm’s way to defend two nations, Israel and Coffee from Yemen men Saudi Arabia, which have appalling histories of human rights abuses?

Enjoy Al Mokha’s Yemeni Yemeni coff c ffee, available online and in-sto ore Paul Pillar, formerly with the CIA, commented that the Iranians have shown www.MiddleEastBooks.c com tremendous discipline and restraint, be1902 18th Street NW W,, DC 20009 20009 cause they have not responded to these provocations from the Trump Administration, and they are still adhering to the nuclear deal from 2015.

Tejinder Uberoi, Los Altos, CA It certainly appears that while President Trump is angling for a fanciful “betOTHERVOICESisan optional16-page supplement ter deal” with Iran, other members of his available only to subscribers of the Washington administration, led by John Bolton, are Report on Middle East Affairs. For an additional $15 doing everything they can to provoke an per year (see postcard insert for Washington Report armed conflict between the U.S. and subscription rates), subscribers will receive Other Iran. Here’s to hoping that the president Voicesinsideeachissueof their WashingtonReport sticks to his word and keeps the U.S. out on Middle East Affairs. of unnecessary new wars of choice. One Back issues of both publications are available. To must ask though: Why is he still employsubscribe telephone 1 (888) 881-5861, fax (714) ing John Bolton? Does the president not realize that his national security adviser 226-9733, e-mail circulation@wrmea. org>, or write is attempting to use his access to the to P.O. Box 91056, Long Beach, CA 90809-1056.

Oval Office to serve his own agenda? It’s JUNE/JULY 2019

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The Nakba Continues

The “Deal of the Century” Would Force Palestinians to Swallow a Bitter Pill

By Jonathan Cook

PHOTO BY AMOS BEN GERSHOM/GPO VIA GETTY IMAGES

The unexpected decision

by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to hold fresh elections in September, forced on him by one of his prospective coalition partners, has undoubtedly thrown a wrench in Washington’s timetable for the peace plan’s roll-out—much to the evident irritation of President Trump himself. He said he was “not happy” about the new elections and warned Israeli politicians to “get their act together.”

However, U.S. officials have said the Bahrain Conference will go ahead as planned. Jonathan Tobin, a columnist for the Israeli daily Haaretz, noted that the With new elections scheduled for September 17, Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu remains Trump administration’s optimistic that the “Deal of the Century” will go forward, despite the collapse of his government. In this handout photo provided by the Israel Government Press Office, Jared Kushner (l) meets with Netanyahu peace plan was integral to U.S. efforts to build a reon June 21, 2017, in Jerusalem. gional coalition with Arab states against Iran and would be difficult to jettison.

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S much-awaited “Deal of the The key Arab states from the White House’s point of view— Century” Middle East peace plan looks like a blatant attempt to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar—have rewield an economic stick to browbeat the Palestinian leadership portedly indicated that they will attend the Bahrain Conferinto forgoing their national aspirations. ence. The Palestinian Authority has insisted it will not.

The proposal is due to be rolled out in stages, with the first In late May, as news of the Bahrain conference broke, step an investment “workshop” in Bahrain—titled “Peace to Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh said that the Prosperity”—in late June. The event will seek to gin up tens of Palestinian leadership had not been forewarned by the Ameribillions of dollars, mostly from oil-rich Gulf states, to undercans. He added: “We do not submit to blackmail and we don’t write a later stage, when it is assumed the White House will trade our political rights for money.” put forward its political proposals.

The investment conference follows a series of U.S. blows to The move appears to be designed to implicate the Arab the Palestinians. They include the decision to recognize states in this betrayal, effectively locking them in as partners Jerusalem as Israel’s capital by moving its embassy there, to with the Trump administration against the Palestinians. shutter the PLO’s embassy in Washington, and to defund the U.N. Palestinian refugee agency, UNRWA, and the USAID Jonathan Cook is a journalist based in Nazareth and a winner of the mission to the West Bank and Gaza.

Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. He is the author of Israel, meanwhile, has added to the Palestinians’ economic Blood and Religion and Israel and the Clash of Civilisations (available from AET’s Middle East Books and More). troubles since February by withholding a portion of the taxes it 8

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collects on behalf of the Palestinians, and which it is obligated under the Oslo Accords to pass on to the Palestinian Authority.

The deducted money is the sum the PA transfers as stipends to the families of political prisoners and those killed and maimed by the Israeli army.

This is an incendiary issue, as Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu well knew, given that Palestinians view these families as having made the ultimate sacrifice in the struggle to liberate their people from brutal Israeli occupation.

Abbas has refused to accept any of the monthly tax transfers until the full sum is reinstated, amounting to nearly twothirds of the PA’s revenues.

Given how precarious Palestinian finances are, after decades of resource theft and restrictions on development imposed by Israel, the PA is on the brink of bankruptcy. In late April the United Nations warned that the standoff had left the PA facing “unprecedented financial, security and political challenges.”

These moves appear calculated to break the Palestinian leadership’s spirits, softening them up for the promised economic incentives. The money raised at the conference is also to be divided with neighboring Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, the three Arab states that could stymie the plan, in an apparent effort to leave the PA friendless in the region.

In the words of Anshel Pfeffer, an analyst with Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, the Trump team “reckon that they are getting closer to consigning the Palestinians to the category of the Kurds, Tibetans and Tamils.”

CONFERENCE AGENDA

According to a report by CNN, the Bahrain conference is likely to consider four major economic components: infrastructure, industry, empowering and investing in people, and governance reforms “to make the area as investible as possible.”

However, recent World Bank studies have suggested that any investment carrots offered by the U.S. would pale in JUNE/JULY 2019

comparison to the economic boom that would result from the end of the Israeli occupation and Palestinians having control over their own resources. If barriers to trade were lifted—freeing Palestinians of their dependency on Israel—and if Palestinians had control over their own resources, the Palestinian economy could triple in size.

Any donations from the Gulf are more likely simply to continue public sector salaries and service Palestinians’ massive debts.

But aside from the economic program being cooked up by the Trump administration, clues are emerging as to what the political program may look like.

Three of the plan’s architects— Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner; his Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt; and David Friedman, the U.S. ambassador to Israel—issued a spate of statements in May hinting at the contents.

Friedman, who is a strong supporter of the illegal settlements, suggested that Israel would have permanent military control over the Palestinian territories. He was also reported saying that Israel was “on the side of God.” Greenblatt sought to reassure neighboring Egypt and Jordan that they would not shoulder the burden. He discounted rumors that Gaza’s Palestinians would be encouraged to move to the Sinai, in a land swap that would allow Israel to annex parts of the West Bank, or that Jordan would find itself recast as an alternative Palestinian homeland.

The Jordanian king is in a particularly precarious situation if the plan is seen as a sell-out of the Palestinians, given that a majority of his population is Palestinian and that the country is already suffering from simmering discontent.

Kushner, meanwhile, strongly suggested that the goal of a two-state solution, implied by the Oslo process, would finally be jettisoned. “New and different ways to reach peace must be tried,” he said. He also stated that the plan would stress “economic benefits” for the Palestinians and “security” for Israel.

According to analysts, these state-

ments suggest the White House is preparing the ground to offer the Palestinians “limited autonomy”—an outcome that Arab officials confirmed to The Washington Post.

Sensing the danger, 40 former senior European officials signed a letter in May opposing any plan that creates a Palestinian “entity devoid of sovereignty, territorial contiguity and economic viability.”

“Limited autonomy” would be a reformulation of Israel’s long-running ambition to permanently thwart Palestinian hopes of statehood—a policy the late Israeli academic Baruch Kimmerling once termed “politicide.”

Since the late 1970s, the Israeli right has advocated hemming Palestinians into enclaves where they are denied sovereignty. The model of disparate cantons, effectively operating as glorified municipalities and surrounded by a sea of Israeli settlers, is little different from that of “black homelands,” or Bantustans, established in apartheid-era South Africa.

Recent leaks to the Israeli media have confirmed the contours of the plan. Israel’s Channel 12 reported in May that the United States would greenlight measures by Israel to annex West Bank settlements. That would reportedly allow Israel to push ahead with applying Israeli law to the settlements. Noticeably, the White House did not deny the report.

A leak to the Israel Hayom newspaper—seen as little more than a mouthpiece for Netanyahu—purported to contain the details of the “Deal of the Century.” It outlined plans for a demilitarized political entity for the Palestinians called “New Palestine,” which would lack the features and powers normally associated with a state and would only exist on a tiny fraction of historic Palestine.

All the illegal settlements in the West Bank would be annexed to Israel, thereby satisfying a pledge Netanyahu made shortly before April’s general election. That could leave New Palestine nominally in charge of about 12 percent of historic Palestine.

New Palestine would exist as a series

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of discrete cantons, or Bantustans, surrounded by a sea of Israeli settlements.

It would have no army, just a lightly armed police force, and would be able to act only as a series of disconnected municipalities.

In fact, it is hard to imagine how “New Palestine” would fundamentally alter the current, dismal reality for Palestinians.

As they do now, Palestinians would be able to move among these cantons only through lengthy detours, bypass roads and tunnels.

To help swallow this bitter pill, the Gulf would provide some $30 billion to New Palestine over five years. What would happen after that five-year period is unclear, suggesting that the entity would likely be aid-dependent in perpetuity.

The United States and others would be able to turn the spigot on and off based on the Palestinians’ “good behavior,” just as occurs now. Palestinians would live permanently in fear of the repercussions of criticizing their prison warders.

In keeping with his vow to make Mexico pay for the wall to be built along the southern U.S. border, the leak suggests Trump will expect New Palestine to pay Israel to provide it with military security.

Thus, much of the billions in aid could end up in the Israeli military’s pockets.

Tellingly, the leaked report argues that oil-producing states, not the Palestinians, would be the “main beneficiaries” of the agreement. This hints at how the Trump deal might be sold to the Gulf states: as an opportunity for them to fully embrace Israel, its technology and military prowess, so that the Middle East can follow in the footsteps of Asia’s “tiger economies.”

Jerusalem is described as a “shared capital,” but the small print reads rather differently. Jerusalem would not be divided into a Palestinian east and an Israeli west, as long envisaged. Instead, the city would be run by a unified Israelirun municipality, just as it is now.

The only meaningful concession to the Palestinians would be that Israelis would not be allowed to buy Palestinian homes, 10

preventing—in theory, at least—a further takeover of East Jerusalem by Jewish settlers.

This part of the plan would perpetuate a system in which Palestinians would not be allowed to buy Israeli homes, even as the Palestinian population in East Jerusalem suffers massive housing shortages. An Israeli municipality would have the power to decide where homes are built and for whom. It is easy to imagine that the current situation—of Israel exploiting planning controls to drive Palestinians out of Jerusalem—would simply continue.

Also, given that Palestinians in Jerusalem would be citizens of New Palestine, not Israel, those unable to find a home in Israeli-ruled Jerusalem would have no choice but to emigrate into the West Bank. That would be exactly the same form of bureaucratic ethnic cleansing that Palestinians in Jerusalem experience now.

Much of the billions in aid could end up in the Israeli military’s pockets

Echoing comments from Kushner, the plan’s benefits for Palestinians all relate to potential economic dividends, not political ones. Palestinians will be allowed to work in Israel, as was the norm before Oslo, but presumably, as before, only in the most poorly paid and precarious jobs, on building sites and agricultural land.

A land corridor, doubtlessly overseen

by Israeli military contractors the Palestinians must pay for, is supposed to connect Gaza to the West Bank. Confirming earlier reports of the Trump administration’s plans, Gaza would be opened up to the world, and an industrial zone and airport created in the neighboring territory of Sinai.

The land—its extent to be decided in negotiations—would be leased from Egypt. Helpfully for Israel, such a move risks gradually encouraging Palestinians

WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

to view Sinai as the center of their lives—another way to undermine life in Gaza.

Meanwhile, the West Bank would be connected to Jordan by two border crossings—probably via land corridors through the Jordan Valley, which itself would be annexed to Israel. Again, with Palestinians squeezed into disconnected cantons surrounded by Israeli territory, the assumption must be that over time many would seek a new life in Jordan.

Palestinian political prisoners would be released from Israeli jails to the authority of New Palestine over a period of three years. But the plan says nothing about a right of return for millions of Palestinian refugees—descended from those who were expelled from their homes in the 1948 and 1967 wars.

Should the Palestinians dissent, the leaked report states, the U.S. would cut off all money transfers to the Palestinians in an attempt to batter them into submission.

The proposed plan would demand that Hamas and Islamic Jihad disarm, handing their weapons over to Egypt. Should they reject the deal, the report says the U.S. would authorize Israel to “personally harm” the leadership—through extrajudicial assassinations that have already long been a mainstay of Israeli policy toward the two groups.

If this is Trump’s vision of Middle East peace, he is likely to face a rude awakening.

Efforts to implement the plan could bring about the Palestinian Authority’s collapse and push the Palestinian populace into launching a new uprising. The so-called “Arab street” may be far less accepting of the plan than their rulers or Trump might hope. And solidarity activists in the West, including the boycott movement, would get a massive shot in the arm for their cause.

Equally, it would be impossible for Israel’s apologists to continue denying that Israel, backed by the United States, is destroying the Palestinians’ future, their right to self-determination and their integrity as a single people. ■ JUNE/JULY 2019

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Three Views

Israel Plunged into Political Chaos as Government Dissolved

Even Netanyahu Knows It’s Over

By Yossi Verter

AMIR LEVY/GETTY IMAGES

ON THURSDAY, MAY 30, the countdown to the end of the Netanyahu era began.

On the very same day, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was supposed to look over five signed and sealed coalition agreements with his government allies. He was supposed to call up the Knesset members from his Likud party and divide up the remnants his coalition partners left behind after they finished extorting positions and Former Israeli Defense Minister and Yisrael Beiteinu party leader Avigdor Lieberman attends a press promises from him. conference in Tel Aviv, Israel on May 30, 2019, the day Israel’s Knesset voted to hold new elections on Sept.

Next Monday, the Knes- 17, 2019. set was supposed to have new government—assuming that he wins and puts together convened for a festive session and voted its support for the 61 MKs without Avigdor Lieberman, this time—at the beginfifth Netanyahu government, his fourth consecutive governning of November. This will be a month after his pre-indictment since May 2009. The next day, without any delay or ment hearing. The Supreme Court override law will not have pause, a marathon of two-headed personal-legal legislation passed, nor will he have immunity from prosecution: There will was to begin: One part was meant to rescue the suspect from be an indictment, and Netanyahu will be history. It is doubtful justice, and the other was meant to deal a lethal blow to the that any of his “natural partners” will agree to sign a coalition Israeli legal system, its independence and power. agreement with someone on their political deathbed.

But it won’t happen now. Not here. Israel is going to the One of the most despicable days in the history of the Israeli polls again on September 17. This is the insanity, Italy at its parliament came to an end late at night on Wednesday when worst. A politician entangled up to his neck in crimes, with a the only 30-day-old 21st Knesset—it is superfluous to say the harsh indictment hanging over his head—is dragging an entire shortest in Israel’s history—met to vote to dissolve itself. Necountry to the polls and no one in his party and no one in his tanyahu, the man who on the night of the last election on April planned coalition has put his foot down and told him: Stop! It’s 9, arrogantly and drunken with power celebrated his “incrediover! Leave us alone! ble victory,” entered the Knesset chamber defeated and humilNetanyahu realized on Wednesday night, and he showed it iated. clearly, that the story was over. Elections on September 17, a So far, Israel has had two candidates for prime minister who Copyright © Haaretz Daily Newspaper Ltd. All rights reserved. failed in their task to form a government after being given the JUNE/JULY 2019

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task by the president: Shimon Peres in 1990, after the political “dirty trick” of breaking up the second unity government; and Tzipi Livni in 2008, after the resignation of Ehud Olmert. Peres did not have 65 MKs in his bloc, and Livni was a political rookie who had never put together a government coalition.

Netanyahu is the third prime ministerial candidate to earn this dubious honor. His failure is the most stinging of the three: It came immediately after the election, after a clear victory for the right and with political experience that no one else in the Knesset had. What is the right-wing bloc now? A big question mark is hanging over this question. Avigdor Lieberman, whose insistence on the approval of the passage of the new Draft Law—which no one understands in detail, has driven the political system crazy—can no longer be considered an integral part of the bloc. Not as long as Netanyahu is its leader.

This is Netanyahu’s second total defeat this decade, after his efforts to prevent the election of Reuven Rivlin as president five years ago ended in a rout. To add to the rage and humiliation, Netanyahu spent the tensest hours on Wednesday in a pitiable, sweaty, humiliating and ineffectual pursuit after potential deserters on the left. Both individuals and groups.

Our magician tried to pull a rabbit from up his sleeve, but what came out was a dead parakeet—and then another one and another. What didn’t he offer? The defense and finance portfolios to Tal Rousso and Avi Gabbay of Labor—who fell into the trap and said he would “consider” the offer—the Communications Ministry to Labor and the Justice Ministry to Shelly Yacimovich. He promised to give up on the Supreme Court override bill and the immunity law, which were intended to be his escape tunnel from a trial, and possibly prison. Yes, he was even willing to sacrifice the things most precious to him, the original reason he moved up the election, just so he could stay in office and hope that even after the indictment he could continue on in office—as the law allows.

Wednesday’s disgrace only shows how much of a failure the coalition negotiations were. He needed to have made such arrangements earlier, at his leisure, in secret. After all, he suspected Lieberman from the very beginning, so why didn’t he make sure he had an alternative? That is the price of his arrogance.

There are Things Much Worse than Netanyahu—For Example, Lieberman

By Gideon Levy THE PRIMEVAL HATRED for Binyamin Netanyahu blinds even the eyes of the wise. Suddenly, Avigdor Lieberman has

Gideon Levy is a columnist for Haaretz, and a popular speaker at the Israel Lobby conference. Copyright © Haaretz Daily Newspaper Ltd. All rights reserved.

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become the hope of the liberal secular public. Half of Israel hates Netanyahu as Israel has never hated any prime minister before, and Lieberman is the savior.

This pathological hatred for Netanyahu stems mainly from his lifestyle and his imbecilic efforts to escape justice, not from his policies or his positions. The lust to see him ousted, stoned in the city square and jailed for all eternity has long since ceased to be rational. It’s irrational to the point of obscuring the fact that there could be things much worse than Netanyahu—for example, Lieberman.

The center-left’s sacred cannon is firing at Netanyahu, and its gunners have forgotten who Lieberman is. We’ll forgive and forget everything for Lieberman if he’ll only take down Netanyahu for us. Character witnesses on his behalf have even emerged from among the enlightened public—he’s pragmatic, strong, wise, serious; his word is his word; wait and see.

These assessments are ridiculous and dangerous. Lieberman never deserved them and never will. He’s one of the ugliest, most repulsive thugs in politics, and he may well make us miss Netanyahu.

Lieberman is now riding the liberal public’s two most burning hatreds—for Netanyahu and for the ultra-Orthodox. He has tortured Netanyahu for his own amusement, and the liberal public cheered.

The crisis of the last few days was created by Lieberman, not Netanyahu. Lieberman chose to make a flagship issue out of the conscription law, one of the most marginal issues on the agenda, which is based entirely on the secular public’s loathing for the ultra-Orthodox.

It doesn’t matter in the least whether the ultra-Orthodox are drafted or not. The army doesn’t need them. Conscription into an army that does what ours does is no “moral value.” And in any case, there’s no equality in the burden of service. About half of all Israelis aren’t drafted into the army, and that’s a minuscule disaster.

But for those who hate the ultra-Orthodox, Lieberman is the hero of the hour. He’ll take vengeance on those leeches in black. That is the most important issue the country has to deal with right now.

The criminal cases against Netanyahu are white as snow compared to the earlier cases against Lieberman, yet those came to nothing, under fairly shocking circumstances. Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party is surely riddled with far more rot than Netanyahu’s Likud, and it’s also less democratic. Lieberman’s statements show that he’s far more of a benighted racist and nationalist than Netanyahu. But for those who want Netanyahu’s head, this is no time for a rational assessment of political positions.

Unlike Netanyahu, Lieberman is a criminal who was convicted of assault. Next to Lieberman’s cynicism, Netanyahu is a romantic. Next to Lieberman’s arrogance, Netanyahu is modest. Next to Lieberman’s thuggery, Netanyahu is Mother Teresa.

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Next to Lieberman’s views, Netanyahu is a Breaking the Silence activist. Next to Lieberman’s despicable incitement against Arab Knesset members, Netanyahu is an Ahmad Tibi fan. And don’t forget, Lieberman is a settler from Nokdim, whereas Netanyahu never dreamed of being a settler.

But Lieberman is forgiven everything, if he’ll only topple Netanyahu for us and bring salvation to his people.

Just imagine Lieberman in place of Netanyahu. Even this nightmare scenario has been raised over the past few days.

Granted, as defense minister, he was fortunately a zero, as he has been in all his ministerial posts. But it would be enough for him to carry out even a fraction of his threats for the portion of the public that’s now seeking the downfall of that devil Netanyahu to cry out for his return.

Remember, Lieberman initially supported “transferring” the Palestinians, then eventually replaced it with forcible land swaps, in order to ensure a majority in Israel for the chosen people. He dreamed up loyalty oaths as a condition for citizenship. He opposed the disengagement from the Gaza Strip.

He’s threatened to bomb Egypt’s Aswan Dam and assassinate Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. He’s a fan of the death penalty for terrorists. He’s compared the Yesh Gvul anti-occupation organization to kapos in Nazi concentration camps. He’s blamed the left for all of Israel’s fallen and all of its troubles.

His life is always “paradise.” But ours will be much less so if, heaven forbid, he emerges stronger from the crisis he created—all over an issue of principle, of course.

Netanyahu Might Need a War Before The Election

By Zvi Bar’el

ENTREPRENEURS AROUND THE WORLD know that amusement parks have to keep offering crazy innovations to keep the crowds coming. As soon as a new roller coaster is installed, you have to start planning the next one—higher, faster and scarier. In the amusement park called Israel, the excitement keeps climbing, so even the most unnerving events are in danger of boring the public.

Who remembers that only a few months ago it was the nation-state law that rattled the country, that a housing plan for young couples was a hot-button issue, that another escalation in Gaza sent chills down the national spine, that Jerusalem became a capital recognized by the United States and that the Golan Heights were annexed to Israel by American fiat? What pleasant nostalgia.

To think that once, only moments ago, the public took an interest in the shaping of the country, whereas now we’re merely speculating which political combinations will yield more Knesset seats for which parties. And mainly, people are waiting to

Copyright © Haaretz Daily Newspaper Ltd. All rights reserved.

JUNE/JULY 2019

see if we win the grand prize once again, with Binyamin Netanyahu running the state’s affairs in his spare time.

Luckily, three joyful months await us—a period without someone in charge in which the government isn’t really functional. Development plans will be on hold as the head of the defense, education and justice ministries is a suspect awaiting his pretrial hearing and indictment. Three other ministries—interior and Negev and Galilee development (both headed by Arye Dery) and labor and social affairs (Haim Katz)—are also headed by people suspected of criminal wrongdoing. Other ministries are headed by invisible ministers.

The three months of waiting for the election is a dangerous period. Ostensibly we have a transitional government with limited authority, but it still has enough room to maneuver to harm the country’s stability and security. For example, two airstrikes in Syria within two days, following the rocket fire from Syria at Israel, could be considered a routine response, but such strikes have a dangerous potential to ignite a conflagration.

The new Syrian deployment in the Golan Heights, the Russians’ efforts to attain a diplomatic resolution in Syria, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s threats to act with force “across the Middle East” if Iran is attacked, and a freeze in the implementation of the cease-fire deal in Gaza all oblige Israel to reevaluate its diplomatic and military strategy. But who has time for this?

In the past, in normal days, the security cabinet’s decisions were perceived as being based on professional analysis and balanced thinking. Decision-making processes were often heavily criticized, but the public usually believed that the outcome was based on political impartiality and integrity.

This confidence has evaporated. After Gaza started receiving financial aid in exchange for quiet, once before the election and once before the Eurovision Song Contest, now it may be Syria’s turn. Attacks on it are tinged with suspicions of political considerations.

The conventional wisdom is that embarking on a war or a major military operation is risky for a leader’s political future.

The saying that it’s easy to get into a war but harder to get out of one is especially true before an election.

The thing is, the country is now run by someone whose only consideration is how to stay out of prison. This is a prime minister who has twice taken the country to an unnecessary election, a loose cannon who lost it when he couldn’t cobble together a governing coalition. After appointing a defense minister with no experience or knowledge of the material, he was now willing to offer the job to a political rival who couldn’t even manage his own party.

For Netanyahu, the purpose of the defense portfolio is the same as it was for the communications portfolio, which he once held. If he’s willing to sell it to keep himself out of prison, would he hesitate to start a war if he thought that was his only way out? ■

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From the Diaspora

Two Narratives of Palestine: The People are United, the Factions are Not

By Ramzy Baroud

MAHMUD HAMS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Although none of the speakers made a case for a two-state solution, our call for a one democratic state from Istanbul—or any other place outside Palestine—seemed partially irrelevant. For the one-state solution to become the overriding objective of the pro-Palestine movement worldwide, the call has to come from a Palestinian leadership that reflects the true aspirations of the Palestinian people.

One speaker after the other called for Demonstrators take part in a rally marking Palestinian Prisoners’ Day and calling for the release of jailed Palestinian unity, imPalestinians held in Israeli jails, on April 17, 2019, in Gaza City. The number of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails ploring Palestinians on hunger strike reached 400 on April 9, 2019. for guidance and for articulating a national discourse. Many in the THE INTERNATIONAL conference on Palestine held in audience concurred with that assessment as well. One audience Istanbul between April 27-29 revealed a strong sense of solidarmember even blurted out the cliched question: “Where is the ity combined with an elusive quest for unity within the Palestinian Palestinian Mandela?” Luckily, the grandson of Nelson Mandela, resistance struggle. The conference brought together acadeZwelivelile “Mandla” Mandela, was himself a speaker. He anmics, journalists, activists and students from Turkey and all over swered forcefully that Mandela was only the face of the movethe world for a rare opportunity to articulate inclusive and forward ment, which encompassed millions of ordinary men and women, thinking discourse on Palestine. whose struggles and sacrifices ultimately defeated apartheid.

There was near consensus that the Boycott, Divestment and Following my speech at the conference, I met with several Sanctions (BDS) movement must be supported, that Donald freed Palestinian prisoners as part of my research for my forthTrump’s so-called “Deal of the Century” must be defeated and coming book on the subject. that normalization must be shunned.

Some of the freed prisoners identified as Hamas and others When it came to articulating the objectives of the Palestinian as Fatah. Their narrative seemed largely free from the disgraced struggle, however, the narrative became indecisive and unclear. factional language we are bombarded with in the media, as well Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of palestine Chronas liberated from the dry and detached narratives of politics and icle. His latest book is the last earth: a palestinian story (available academia. from AET’s Middle East Books and More). Baroud has a Ph.D. in “When Israel placed Gaza under siege and denied us family Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter and is a non-resident visitations, our Fatah brothers always came to our help,” a freed scholar at the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, Hamas prisoner told me. “And whenever Israeli prison authorities University of California. His website is <www.ramzybaroud.net>.

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mistreated any of our brothers from any mics, politicians and activists, I was able to is a generational quest around a set of factions, including Fatah, we all resisted decipher a disconnection between the principles, including resistance, as a stratPalestinian narrative on the ground and egy for the liberation of Palestine, Right of together.”

A freed Fatah prisoner told me that our own perception of this narrative from Return for refugees and self-determination for the Palestinian people as the ultimate when Hamas and Fatah fought in Gaza in outside.

The prisoners display unity in their nar- goals. It is around this idea of unity that the the summer of 2007, the prisoners suffered most. “We suffered because we felt rative, a clear sense of purpose, and a de- leadership of Palestinian prisoners drafted that the people who should be fighting for termination to carry on with their resis- their document in 2006, in the hope of our freedom were fighting each other. We tance. While it is true that they all identified averting a factional clash and keeping the as members of one political group or an- struggle centered on resistance against Isfelt betrayed by everyone.”

To effectuate disunity, Israeli authorities other, I have yet to interview a single pris- raeli occupation.

The ongoing Great March of Return in relocated Hamas and Fatah prisoners into oner who placed factional interests above separate wards and prisons. They wanted national interests. This should not come as Gaza is another daily example of the kind to sever any communication between the a surprise. Indeed, these men and women of unity the Palestinian people are striving prisoners’ leadership and to block any at- have been detained, tortured and have en- for. Despite heavy losses, thousands of tempts at finding common ground for na- dured many years in prison for being protesters insist on their unity while dePalestinian resisters, regardless of their manding their freedom, Right of Return tional unity. and an end to the Israeli siege.

The Israeli decision was not random. A ideological and factional leanings.

For us to claim that Palestinians are not The myth of the disunited and dysfuncyear earlier, in May 2006, the leadership of the prisoners met in a prison cell to dis- tional Palestinian is very much an Israeli united because Fatah and Hamas cannot cuss the conflict between Hamas, which invention that precedes the inception of find common ground is simply unjustified. had won the legislative elections in the Oc- Hamas, and even Fatah. This Zionist no- National unity and political unity between cupied Territories, and the PA’s main party, tion, which has been embraced by the cur- factions are two different issues.

It is important that we do not make the rent Israeli Prime Minister, Binyamin NeFatah.

These leaders included Marwan Bargh- tanyahu, argues that “Israel has no peace mistake of confusing the Palestinian peoouthi of Fatah, Abdel Khaleq al-Natshe partner.” Despite the hemorrhaging con- ple with factions, national unity around refrom Hamas and representatives from cessions by the Palestinian Authority in sistance and rights with political arrangeother major Palestinian groups. The out- Ramallah, this claim has remained a fix- ments between political groups.

As far as vision and strategy are concome was the National Conciliation Docu- ture in Israeli politics to this day.

Political unity aside, the Palestinian peo- cerned, perhaps it is time to read the prisment, arguably the most important Palesple perceive “unity” in a whole different po- oners’ National Conciliation Document. It tinian initiative in decades.

What became known as the Prisoner’s litical context than that of Israel and, was written by the Nelson Mandelas of Palestine, thousands of whom remain in Document was significant because it was frankly, many of us outside Palestine.

Al-Wihda al-Wataniya, or national unity, Israeli prisons to this day. ■ not some self-serving political compromise achieved in a luxurious hotel in some (Advertisement) Arab capital but a genuine articulation of national Palestinian priorities, presented by the most respected and honored sector in Palestinian society.

Israel immediately denounced the document.

Instead of engaging all factions in a Palestinian Medical Relief Society, a grassroots communitynational dialogue around the docubased Palestinian health organization, founded in 1979 by ment, PA President Mahmoud Abbas Palestinian doctors, needs your support today. gave rival factions an ultimatum to either accept or reject the document in Visit our Website <www.pmrs.ps> to see our work in action. full. The spirit of unity in the prisoners’ initiative was betrayed by Abbas and Mail your U.S. Tax-Deductible check to our American Foundation: the warring factions. Eventually, Fatah Friends of UPMRC, Inc and Hamas fought their own tragic PO Box 450554 • Atlanta, GA 31145 war in Gaza the following year.

On speaking to the prisoners after For more information call: (404) 441-2702 or e-mail: fabuakel@gmail.com listening to the discourse of acadeJUNE/JULY 2019

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United Nations Report

Netanyahu and Trump Administrations Blame The Victims: Palestinians and UNRWA

By Ian Williams

MAJDI FATHI/NURPHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES

to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so—because, over the long term, the goal of those who think that international law really means anything are those who want to constrict the United States”—and, of course, Israel.

Amid speculation about Trump’s impending “Deal of the Century,” we can be sure that it will try to exclude the U.N.— and international law. It has long been U.S. policy to exclude the U.N. from any significant part in the Middle East peace negotiations, ignoring U.N. resolutions critical of Israeli policy while invoking them whenever it is convenient, for example against Iraq or Iran.

Israel shows profound ingratitude for the U.N., although it provided the legal genesis of its existence through the GenA Palestinian father holds his child before breaking his fast to eat the Iftar meal during the eral Assembly’s hotly contested and ethiMuslim holy fasting month of Ramadan on May 13, 2019, in the southern Gaza Strip refugee cally dubious partition of the British Mancamp of Khan Yunis. date in 1947 without, we often forget, any act of self-determination on the part of the inhabitants of Palestine.

MANY MEMBERS OF THE UNITED NATIONS flout its deciA consequence of partition was, of course, the Nakba (the sions, but they generally do so with circumspection. A criminal catastrophe) and the present plight of millions of dispossessed breaks the law, but an outlaw denies its validity, in effect trying Palestinians, many of whom are dependent on UNRWA, the to undermine the legal system. So, most U.N. members do not U.N. agency set up specifically to ameliorate a humanitarian renounce the U.N. Charter, to which all of them have subdisaster of the U.N.’s own making. UNRWA is now the target scribed to become members, nor deny the legality of deciof a twin assault by Israel and the Trump administration, besions made under it, rather they wriggle and squirm and play ginning with the withdrawal of its funding. Some people regard with the small print. the U.S. funding as conscience money, which makes its withHowever, Uncle Sam’s habit of having his cake and eating it drawal a public admission that the current administration is gets increasingly shameless, as President Trump’s long leash notably lacking in this area. for National Security Adviser John Bolton encourages him to To varying degrees, UNRWA—entirely dependent on volundestroy the institution. Bolton began decades ago with the tary contributions—has fed, sheltered, educated and tended to Heritage Foundation making a specialty of attacking the U.N. the health of generations of the dispossessed. It is an exercise in and international law. His partisanship for the Zionist state has political psychopathology to determine just why the current Isexacerbated his antipathy to international authority. raeli regime and its partners in the U.S. are so profoundly antipaBolton once told Insight magazine, “It is a big mistake for us thetic to UNRWA, especially since 1967 when Israeli military control expanded over the refugees who had earlier fled from the U.N. correspondent Ian Williams is the author of UNtold: the Real Nakba. Under the Geneva Conventions, Israel, as the occupying Story of the United Nations in Peace and War (available from Middle East Books and More). power, was legally responsible for financing and maintaining the 16

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services that UNRWA was performing— so, in a sense, contributions to UNRWA were a form of foreign aid for Israel.

In the past, less rabid Israeli officials tacitly recognized this reality, but their voices have been out-howled by Bolton and other ideologues in the U.S. and Israel, who have made UNRWA a convenient scapegoat. Moreover, the existence of UNRWA and its millions of clients is a perpetual reminder of the human costs of Israel’s creation.

In denial of its own history, Israel tries to expunge all memories of how it was formed and the people it displaced. This fuels animus against UNRWA since one of the tasks that the General Assembly gave it was to act as the custodian of Palestinian claims to the U.N. under resolutions promising return or compensation.

One inveterate UNRWA baiter, Israel’s permanent representative to the U.N. Danny Danon, told the Security Council during the May debate that UNRWA “has been empowering the refugee problem for years, instead of trying to solve it while adopting a unilateral political position. The organization’s schools have been transformed into terror and incitement infrastructures, with textbooks distributed on the ground denying Israel’s existence, and underground tunnels dug

by Hamas.” He added that UNRWA “failed to rehabilitate the Gaza Strip and succeeded only in inciting violence against the State of Israel. UNRWA’s mandate must come to an end.”

After decades of Israeli shelling, bombing and besieging the Gaza Strip, most observers would find it far-fetched to blame UNRWA for the state of the ghettoized enclave. While Danon has made a career of blaming the victim during his four-year tenure at the U.N., he was matched by the equally amoral Jason Greenblatt, the U.S. envoy to the Middle East, who insouciantly told the Security Council, “It is time to face the reality that the UNRWA model has failed.

Year after year, budget shortfalls threatened essential services to Palestinian mothers and children. And year after year, Palestinians in refugee camps JUNE/JULY 2019

were not given the opportunity to build any future; they were misled and used as political pawns.”

Danon also challenged Pierre Krähenbühl, the agency’s head. “UNRWA, like any organization, must have clear goals.

What are those goals? How long will it take to reach them? And how much will it cost?” He demanded that the Security Council members receive the representative’s answers within six months.

It would be good if UNRWA and the U.N. had the courage to answer Danon, stating that the clear goal is the return of the refugees or compensation. Greenblatt, representing an administration that had just completely cut its contribution to UNRWA, added, “We need to start a conversation about planning the transition of UNRWA services to host governments and international or local non-governmental organizations.” Sadly, no one there had the chutzpah to suggest the ethical solution, that the bill should be paid by the countries that created the problem—Israel and the U.S. Krähenbühl was forthright for a normally reserved U.N. officialdom, as he responded, “Making a humanitarian organization responsible for the [Israeli-Palestinian] crisis is misguided and unhelpful.”

The situation was caused by “the parties themselves and the international community and the lack of will and or utter inabil-

ity of the political actors to bring about a solution to this longstanding crisis.”

Greenblatt and Danon would like the U.N. to remove the designation that UNRWA’s clients are, in fact, refugees as part of the “Deal of the Century,” which means that the U.N. would have to rewrite its resolutions and definitions to fit the Netanyahu-Trump line.

Thankfully, that is unlikely to happen.

The U.S. has not had a representative at the U.N. since Ambassador Nikki Haley bailed. Reports indicate the staff at the mission is depleted and demoralized. The U.N. is left to confront partisan drop-ins like Greenblatt and ideologues like Bolton, whose major qualification on Middle East policy was the endorsement by the now departed Senator Jesse Helms.

“John Bolton is the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon,” Helms avowed, “if it should be my lot to be on hand for what is forecast to be the final battle between good and evil in this world.” Helms would doubtless be proud of Bolton’s recent sedulous attempts to stoke war with Iran at Netanyahu’s behest.

Despite the wishes of Bolton and likeminded zealots in the Trump administration, not even a Saudi-Israeli-U.S. axis is likely to get U.N. legitimation for a Middle East peace plan that matches Netanyahu and Kushner’s dreams. ■

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From the Diaspora

Waving the Bible to Block Justice

By Rev. Alex Awad

CBNNEWS.COM - THE CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE

quoted the Bible to justify their influence on nations and armies toward committing grave atrocities. The Crusades and the Inquisition are two of the best examples of this. European powers, supported by church leaders, quoted the Bible to defend slavery and to justify colonialism. In more recent history, the Bible has been frequently used to support the occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

As I was interviewed by a Campus Crusade TV program and was presenting an alternative to Christian Zionism, a woman called the TV station and commented, “The guest speaker has no right to "This is the deed to our land,” Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon says waving the call himself a pastor or a folBible at the Security Council, April 29, 2019. lower of Christ because he must not know his Bible.” In this lady’s world view, true Christians are those who support IsIT IS DEPLORABLE and somewhat surprising to watch Danny rael’s claims to Palestinian lands.

Danon, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, wave a Bible Today, neo-conservatives, hyper-Zionists and Christian Zionat a session of the Security Council to defend his country’s theft ists are received with open arms at Donald Trump’s White of Palestinian land in the West Bank. He is certainly inspired by House. They helped Trump win the 2016 election, and now the his boss, Binyamin Netanyahu, who, although secular, quotes president is endorsing their eschatologic agenda. This explains the Bible frequently to sell his expansionist agenda. why Trump goes against all logic and international consensus to The misuse of sacred texts to score political gains has a long grant Israel full control over all of Jerusalem, moves the U.S. Emhistory. The Bible has often been manipulated by false prophets, bassy to Jerusalem, terminates U.S. humanitarian aid to Palescorrupt religious leaders and shrewd politicians to support their tinians, and accepts Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights. self-serving agendas. In the Middle Ages, popes and emperors Bible-waving in the face of injustice may serve Israel’s immediate agenda and bring excitement to those who speculate about the Rev. Dr. Alex Awad is a retired United Methodist Missionary. He and end times, but the harmful effects of Bible manipulation are imhis wife, Brenda, served in Jerusalem and in Bethlehem for more than 25 years. Rev. Awad served as pastor of East Jerusalem Baptist mense. Following are a few of the consequences: Church, dean of students at Bethlehem Bible College, and director 1. Waving the Bible to block justice is in essence an of the Shepherd Society. Awad has written two books, Through the attack on the true message of the Bible: Danon waved the Eyes of the Victims and Palestinian Memories. Rev. Awad is a Bible as if to say the Bible grants exclusive rights to Israelis on member of the Palestinian Christian Alliance for Peace (PCAP). This all of the Holy Land while totally ignoring the rights of Palestiniarticle first appeared on the exciting new website <www. christianzionism.org>. ans to any part of their historic homeland. This logic runs counter 18

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to Biblical principles in both the Old and New Testaments, which instruct the faithful not to steal or covet their neighbors’ possessions. The Bible also teaches that forcing people out of their land is a crime. Examine the following passages: Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land. Isaiah 5:8. Read also the story of Ahab, Jezebel, and Naboth, 1 Kings 9:1-26 2. Distortion of the character of God: Danon’s assumption that God is only for Jews and that he does not care about other people and their aspirations is an attack on the character of God who cares for and loves all people. John 3:16 and Isaiah 45:22 3. Misleading: In his speech, Danon made many false assumptions relating to the duration of Jewish possession of Palestine. Any objective historian will know that Palestinians have lived in the Holy Land as long as the Jews, if not longer. It is sacrilegious for an Israeli ambassador to wave the Bible while uttering half-truths and falsehoods.

4. Obstruction to the advancement of peace: To achieve a just peace, both Israelis and Palestinians need to realize that both have lived in the land for centuries and have deep historical and emotional connections to the land. No side should deny or delegitimize the history of the other side. Danon, waving the Bible, was denying Palestinian history and Palestinians’ connection to the land. Such rhetoric adds obstacles in the path of peace and reconciliation.

5. An attack on human dignity: Danon’s waving the Bible before the Security Council of the U.N. is an insult to the intelligence and dignity of world leaders and the countries they represent.

Does Danon assume that these leaders are not aware of the Balfour Declaration, the U.N. partition of Palestine in 1947 and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 and afterward? Is he ignoring the fact that the U.N. voted repeatedly and overwhelmingly that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal and an obstacle to peace?

JUNE/JULY 2019

6. Indifference to human suffering: The lingering Arab-Israeli conflict has caused immense suffering to millions of people around the world but especially to Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims. Danon’s waving the Bible serves only to prolong the conflict and, hence, the suffering.

When Israel comes to the point of wanting peace with her neighbors, her leaders will take note of the international consensus at

the U.N. rather than having her ambassador wave the Bible to maintain a regime of oppression, death and suffering.

The Israeli ambassador should stop waving the Bible and start reading it. Once he reads the Bible, he may discover the following words from the prophet Isaiah: Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause. Isaiah 1:17 ■

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ENCYCLOPÆDIA

Palestin

Dr. Mohammad H. Ghosheh

WhatsApp: 00962 79 Email: mohdhmg@hotmail.com mhghosheh@gma

g p from Palestine as published in the Encyclopedia ia Palestinnica.

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Gaza on the Ground

The Scenario of a Million Palestinians Going Hungry in Gaza

Palestinian children pose for a picture outside a house in an impoverished area of Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip on May 22, 2019.

THE HUMANITARIAN needs of more than 2 million people in Gaza do not seem to interest international media, let alone make headlines. Unless it is actual bloodshed, any news of Gaza, with only a few exceptions, steers clear of reporting on the daily suffering of its people.

While sparsely reported, the situation is worsening. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) announced its fears that some 1 million Palestinians in Gaza—half of the territory’s population—“may not have enough food” in June. “This warning drops more salt on our deep wounds” said 68-year-old Hajjah Fathiah Oudeh, whose family depends on the minimal amounts of rice, flour, lentils, cooking oil, and powdered milk she receives from UNRWA. “How do you explain to a child that there is no bread to fill his stomach?”

UNRWA, which is responsible for providing humanitarian relief to 5 million Palestinian refugees across the Middle East, warned

Award-winning journalist Mohammed Omer reports regularly on the Gaza Strip. Follow him on Twitter: @MoGaza.

20

that the agency must secure at least $60 million in emergency funding in the next month or a million Gazans relying on food aid will be at risk.

ABJECT POOR, ABSOLUTE POOR

The U.N. agency declared that 620,000 of the one million Gazans who are dependent on food aid are living in abject poverty. The agency defines them as “those who cannot cover their basic food needs and who have to survive” on about $1.60 per day. The remaining 390,000 are “absolute poor,” surviving on about $3.50 per day. Without food assistance from UNRWA, the agency says these Gazans “cannot get through their day.”

UNRWA, funded almost entirely by voluntary contributions and financial support, has been outpaced by the growth in population needs. From fewer than 80,000 Palestine refugees receiving UNRWA social assistance in Gaza in the year 2000, there are now more than a million people relying on emergency food assistance.

“This is a near 10-fold increase caused by the blockade that led to the closure of Gaza and its disastrous impact on the local econ-

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MAJDI FATHI/NUR PHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES

By Mohammed Omer

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omy; the successive conflicts that razed entire neighborhoods and public infrastructure to the ground; and the ongoing internal Palestinian political crisis that started in 2007 with the arrival of Hamas to power in Gaza,â&#x20AC;? said Matthias Schmale, director of UNRWA operations in Gaza.

The U.N. also notes the death of 195 Palestinians, including 14 students from UNRWA schools, and the long-lasting physical and psychological injuries of 29,000 people during the year-long demonstrations known as the Great March of Return. These events come on the heels of three devastating conflicts in Gaza since 2009, which resulted in at least 3,790 deaths and more than 17,000 injuries combined.

Today, with an unemployment rate of more than 53 percent among Gazaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s population, and with more than a million people dependent on the quarterly UNRWA food handouts, it is mostly preventive humanitarian action of U.N. agencies, including UNRWA, and remittances from abroad that have held Gaza back from the edge of total

collapse. Already battered by joblessness, the Palestinian economy will come under additional strain, as the World Bank predicts a financing gap that could exceed $1 billion in 2019.

The presence of the U.N. is one of few stabilizing elements in a complex environment in Gaza, but the dwindling of resources is expected to fuel demonstrations and an escalation of confrontations in the coming weeks.

SHORTFALLS OF FUNDING

The U.N. reported at the end of 2018 that despite a rise in humanitarian needs across the occupied Palestinian territory, funding levels for humanitarian interventions declined significantly: only $221 million had been received, compared to the $540 million requested in the 2018 Humanitarian Response Plan. In 2017 a U.N. report predicted that Gaza would be unlivable by the year 2020.

On a slightly positive note, the U.N. in Gaza was able to offer work for a few thou(Advertisement)

sand people. A 42-year-old Palestine refugee Tahani Ali, who lives with her seven-member family in Beit Lahia, in northern Gaza, received three-monthsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; work in a strawberry field as part of a cash-for-work program. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I am ready to work on any farm and hope I will find more opportunity for ongoing support for my family,â&#x20AC;? she said, noting that when the strawberry fields have been harvested in two months she will be unemployed and her family will be, among many others, once again vulnerable to hunger and instability.

Unless the international community responds to the dire humanitarian needs in Gaza, a new security concern could erupt.

Then it would be another revolution of hungry masses, trapped in abject desperation.

But as Hajjah Fathiah Oudeh says, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Waiting for a crisis to happen is not an optionâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;food security should be a concern for everyone.

Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t humiliate us further,â&#x20AC;? she adds. â&#x20AC;&#x153;There should be no reason on earth why we have to explain to our kids that they should go hungry to bed.â&#x20AC;? â&#x2013;

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Three Views

It’s Time to End Harsh and Sloppy U.S. Policy in Palestine

ALI JADALLAH/ANADOLU AGENCY/GETTY IMAGES

choice, and it was made much easier because he knew what lay ahead: the most advanced artificial limbs ever imagined.

The kids call him “Bionic Man” now.

Andrew is lucky for another reason: He doesn’t live in Gaza.

According to the United Nations, 1,700 young Gazans are facing amputation, mainly of their legs, in the next two years.

They’re among the 7,000 unarmed Palestinians in Gaza shot by Israeli snipers over the last year.

Since last spring, thousands of Palestinians in Israeli-occupied Gaza have poured out of their teeming refugee camps and houses every Friday to join nonviolent protests, demanding an end to the siege that’s destroying their lives, as well as the right to return to the homes Israel displaced them from.

Players in action during the first amputee teams’ soccer match held by the International Even though they were nonviolent, Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Gaza City, Gaza on April 13, 2019. they were met by Israeli snipers from the beginning. Children, journalists and medics were targeted too.

International law prohibits using live fire against unarmed civilians unless the police or soldiers are in imminent danger of death.

That’s not the case in Gaza. A U.N. investigation of 189 killings durBy Phyllis Bennis ing the first nine months of the protests found that Israeli forces may have committed war crimes.

MY FRIEND ANDREW RUBIN is an amputee. He’s lost his right More than 220 Palestinians have been killed so far. Stunningly, hand, lower arm, right foot and lower leg. more than 29,000 have been wounded—including those 7,000 by He used to be an avid runner and cyclist. He can’t do much of live fire. So far, 120 have had to endure amputations—including that anymore, although his walking is getting much better. Soon 20 children. he might be able to run with his artificial leg.

Anyplace else, their limbs might’ve been saved.

Andrew is incredibly lucky.

But Gaza has been under Israeli military siege for more than 10 The medical catastrophe that left his hand and foot so terribly years. Hospitals are massively under-equipped, many of them sedamaged didn’t kill him. But when his limbs never healed, even riously damaged by Israeli bombing. The delicate surgery needed after a decade, he decided to undergo the amputations. It was his to save shattered bones is virtually impossible there, and the surgeons have no access to the most up-to-date methods.

Phyllis Bennis directs the New Internationalism Project at the InstiAndrew had a choice about his amputations. Gazans don’t. tute for Policy Studies. Her most recent book is Understanding ISIS The U.N. needs $20 million to fill the immediate health funding and the New Global War on Terror: A Primer, available from Middle East Books and More. gap in Gaza. Otherwise, those 1,700 young Gazans face the cat-

The Amputation Crisis in Gaza: A U.S.-Funded Atrocity

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astrophic loss of arms and legs, or risk dying of infection. They’ll have virtually no access to the advanced artificial hands, legs and feet that my friend Andrew uses.

Unfortunately, U.S. taxpayers are funding this madness.

Every year, we send $3.8 billion directly to the Israeli military— no strings attached—and American companies make the tear gas and other weapons that Israel deploys against demonstrators.

Washington makes sure that no Israeli officials, political or military, are ever held accountable at the United Nations for potential war crimes.

Crueler still, the Trump administration has cut off funding for the very U.N. refugee agency that staffs health clinics in Gaza, even as it funds the Israeli military that’s filling them with gunshot victims.

The protests, overwhelmingly nonviolent, continue—and the killing has continued too, week after week. Meanwhile, there are now so many disabled kids in Gaza that the beleaguered territory is setting up special sports leagues for them.

Israel needs to call off its snipers, lift the siege of Gaza, and stop violating the human and political rights of Palestinians. And until they do, American taxpayers need to close their checkbook.

U.S. Complicity in Israel’s Violations of International Law

By Dr. James Zogby

LAST WEEK I ADDRESSED a United Nations Security Council meeting on “Israeli Settlements.”

Because I knew other speakers, experts and diplomats would address the illegality of Israeli settlements, the economic and human rights impact on the Palestinian people, and the stated design of the entire settlement enterprise to eliminate the possibility of a viable and contiguous Palestinian state—I focused my remarks on my government’s role in enabling Israel’s settlements and its complicity in Israel’s violations of international law.

This may seem like harsh language, but when nothing is done to stop an activity that violates international law, contributes to human rights abuses, and presents a clear danger to peace—then I don’t know any other way to describe American actions.

During the past 50 years, there has been a steady erosion in U.S. policy toward Israeli behavior in Palestinian lands.

Successive American administrations’ attitudes toward Israeli settlements have gone from passive acquiescence to outright acceptance.

Even when some presidents expressed opposition to Israeli settlements, they took no concrete action to stop them. The net result has been that the settlement population in the occu-

Dr. James Zogby is president of the Arab American Institute in Washington, DC. JUNE/JULY 2019

pied territories grew from 50,000 during the Carter administration to 620,000 Israeli settlers today. The growth of settlements and settlers has been as steady as the erosion of the official U.S. policy on this critical question.

Successive American administrations’ attitudes toward Israeli settlements have gone from passive acquiescence to outright acceptance.

In 1976, the Ford administration was firm in its support of the applicability of the Fourth Geneva Conventions, which governs the behavior of an occupying power, to Palestine.

President Jimmy Carter was equally firm on this matter. He even sought a formal legal opinion from the State Department legal adviser who determined that settlements were, in fact, a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

U.S. adherence to international law regarding settlements ended with President Ronald Reagan. He was neither a student of law nor policy, and when tackling complex matters in interviews, sometimes made awkward pronouncements based on his vague recollection of policy talking points.

One particularly sloppy example occurred during his first week in office. When asked about Israel’s planned expansion of settlements, he said “As to the West Bank, I believe the settlements there…they’re not illegal. Not under the U.N. resolution that leaves the West Bank open to all people—Arab and Israeli alike.”

Though sloppy, this statement became U.S. policy. During the rest of his time in office, Reagan meandered between contradicting Carter’s position on the illegality of settlements and saying that settlements were eroding “Arab confidence in Israel’s willingness to enter into a peace agreement.”

In the end, Reagan had done real damage to U.S. policy.

After him, no U.S. president referred to settlements as illegal.

Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, was firmly opposed to Israeli settlements, even withholding, as a penalty, congressionally-approved loan guarantees for Israel. Still, Bush never called settlements illegal, instead terming them “obstacles to peace.”

President Bill Clinton, who inherited the Oslo Accords, continued a similar approach to settlements. He never claimed settlements were illegal and instead argued that continued construction was in violation of the “Oslo process,” which prohibited the parties from undertaking “unilateral actions” that could predetermine final negotiations.

While expressing concern with settlement expansion, the George W. Bush administration often took positions which enabled their growth.

For example, he acceded to Israel’s effort to distinguish between “legal” settlements and “illegal” outposts, insisting that the latter be removed (they were not), while only paying scant attention to the former (many of which Israel proceeded to encapsulate behind a 420 mile wall—redrawing its borders with the West Bank).

And despite endorsing the “Road Map”—which called on Is-

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rael to dismantle all settlement “outposts” erected after March 2001 and freeze all settlement activity—Bush sent a letter to Prime Minister Sharon in April 2004 which stated that, “in light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers, it is unrealistic to expect” these settlements will be removed after final status negotiations.

In short, what was once illegal became accepted as a “new reality.”

President Barack Obama made repeated efforts to end settlement expansion. In his 2009 Cairo speech, Obama said, “the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace…it is time for these settlements to stop.”

When challenged by the Israelis on the need to allow “natural growth” and their claim that the Bush administration had given them permission to build within the “blocs” that were assumed Israel would annex—the Obama administration initially denied the validity of the Bush “promise” and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton forcefully stated that President Obama “wants to see a stop to settlements—not some settlements, not outposts, not ‘natural growth’ exceptions…That is our position. That is what we have communicated very clearly.”

Despite this rhetoric, little changed and eventually Obama officials also began speaking of existing settlements as “realities” that would eventually be annexed by Israel with Palestinians being compensated with unspecified “land swaps.”

It was President Donald Trump who delivered the final blow to the U.S. position on settlements.

Under his leadership, settlements are not only legal, they aren’t even “obstacles to peace.” When Israel announces new construction, there’s not a peep from the State Department.

And while we haven’t seen “the ultimate deal,” from what we know, most likely this administration will bless Israel’s retention of all settlements it has constructed.

What’s clear is that the United States bears responsibility for Israel’s continued flouting of international law.

Despite past empty protests, we have continued to provide massive amounts of aid and loan guarantees; we have blocked all efforts to censure Israeli behavior; and, Congress and state legislatures are in the process of criminalizing the right of Americans to use boycotts to oppose settlements.

There is no other way to describe this behavior other than to say that we have become complicit in Israel’s international law violations.

The international community needs to develop a new strategy to deal with this critical matter.

Passing another U.N. General Assembly resolution that protests Israeli policies will accomplish nothing. Neither will more speeches reaffirming the importance and applicability of international law.

The burden for changing Israeli behavior must not be left to the weakest party—the Palestinians—because they are not 24

only confronting Israel. They are also confronting the United States, which has given Israel the green light and the wherewithal to continue to act with impunity.

At this point, an international strategy must be developed to confront Israel and the backing it receives from the United States. What is at stake is not only the human rights of a beleaguered Palestinian nation, but the viability of international law and fabric of civilized world order.

Decades of People-to-People Diplomacy in Jeopardy in Palestine

By Delinda C. Hanley

STAN WALKED INTO our bookstore and nearly wept. Killing time before meeting up with friends at the Green Zone, a new Middle Eastern cocktail bar in Adams Morgan, a few blocks away, he spotted signs for Middle East Books and More and the Museum of the Palestinian People next door. He told his story as he inhaled the aromas of coffee beans and zaatar, and gazed at the kaffiyehs, embroidery, pottery, T-shirts, olive oil and books lining our shelves.

He’d just returned to Baltimore after teaching English as a volunteer in the West Bank town of Nablus, and falling in love with Palestine.

Stan told me how thrilled he was to line up a paid teaching position with America-Mideast Educational and Training Services. Founded in 1951, AMIDEAST has funded international education, training and development activities in the Middle East and North Africa. Suddenly Stan’s offer was rescinded because AMIDEAST could no longer fund his program. He was heartsick.

Rev. Mark B. Brown, from the Lutheran World Federation, gave a talk at a community iftar, hosted by a city that celebrates its diversity, Hyattsville, MD, just outside Washington, DC. During Ramadan, Muslims end their daily fast with an evening meal called an iftar. Throughout the United States, Muslims hold interfaith iftars to introduce themselves to their neighbors. Just like our bookstore visitor, Rev. Brown said he desperately missed the sounds of the call to prayer and the friends he’d made in Jerusalem when he worked at the Augusta Victoria Hospital, which is owned and operated by the Lutheran World Federation.

Both men returned to a different U.S. than the one they’d left, a country they fear is turning its back on children needing cancer treatment or English lessons.

I grew up in a Middle East that loved Americans for a good reason. We were helping build the hospitals, universities and vital infrastructure that would improve peoples’ lives. Americans also traveled the world participating in international exchange programs like Fulbright scholarships, which started in 1946.

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

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This year there will be no Fulbright projects in Gaza, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Qatar, Syria, Tunisia or Yemen.

For more than five decades, Peace Corps Volunteers served in 141 countries, including the Sultanate of Oman, where I volunteered in the late ’70s. This year Morocco is the only country in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) where Americans can serve. AMIDEAST, Fulbright, Peace Corps and other exchange programs are life-changing opportunities for both participating Americans and the people they work with.

This new country is unrecognizable to me, too. I don’t know how I’d explain our actions if I worked overseas today. There’s a so-called Muslim-ban preventing travelers and immigrants from entering the U.S. The U.S. is caging children, separating them from their parents at the border. Our country is also turning a blind eye when Israeli troops do the same and worse to Palestinian children. It’s hard to show people that we care when they’re facing ethnic, racial and religious discrimination at home, and hurtful U.S. policies abroad.

For decades Arabs flocked to the U.S. to obtain a first-class university education and returned home with cherished memories and friendships, as well as skills to build their countries. Those scholarships and exchange programs have dried up. American tax-payers who care about the Middle East and North Africa need to understand what’s happened and demand change.

Donald Trump campaigned on promises to put “America First,” but he’s overturning the work of generations of Americans who’ve worked in the Middle East, and killing the American dream for others who’d planned to study or work here. President Barack Obama knew this was coming. Hours before Trump took the oath office, the Obama administration defied Republican opposition to quietly release $221 million to the Palestinian Authority that GOP members of Congress had blocked.

Funding to vulnerable Palestinians living under Israeli occupation has traditionally had bipartisan support. Congress approved the funding for humanitarian aid in the West Bank and Gaza in fiscal years 2015 and 2016, but now-retired Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA), then chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Rep. Kay Granger (R-TX) in the House Appropriations Committee, placed holds on the funds to punish the Palestinian Authority for seeking membership in international organizations.

The outgoing Obama administration also released another $6 million in foreign affairs spending, including $4 million for climate change programs, $1.25 million for U.N. organizations, and funding for Afghanistan and Pakistan, but it was the release of Palestinian aid that caused an uproar. News stories led some readers to believe the money transfer was dubious but the truth is those funds released by Obama had already been set aside by Congress for Palestinians.

Trump immediately cut $9 billion from the budget of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), nearly onethird of its total budget. Then Congress enacted the Taylor JUNE/JULY 2019

Force Act in 2017, and Trump signed it into law in March 2018. That law stopped aid to the Palestinian Authority because it provided stipends for the families of prisoners and martyrs killed in Israeli attacks. The Taylor Force legislation allowed community-based programs like waste water projects, vaccinations for children and support for hospitals to continue to flow through the Economic Support Fund (ESF), which was implemented by NGOs. In early 2018, those NGOs received word that the Trump administration had begun a “review” of all FY 2017 assistance allocated by Congress to help Palestinians, and those funds were eventually redirected to “address high-priority projects elsewhere.” That “review” is still going on and is now holding up FY 2018 funds. In August or September, the administration may decide to “redirect” that money, too, or perhaps it’s planning to use the funds to sweeten the “Deal of the Century.”

Then to top it all off, in October 2018, Congress passed the murky Anti-Terrorism Clarification Act (ATCA), which allows U.S. courts to sue any entity that accepts foreign assistance funding through the ESF. To avoid potential legal judgments against it in U.S. courts, the Palestinian Authority asked that all U.S. foreign assistance programs end by Jan. 31, 2019.

Some NGO programs supported by U.S. funding have had to close operations, and others had to drastically cut employees and services. (See p. 16-17 for information on cuts to UNRWA.) Augusta Victoria Hospital is one of six hospitals serving West Bank and Gaza patients. This crisis means that AVH can’t pay for the drugs it needs to provide radiation therapy, chemotherapy and kidney dialysis, according to Rev. Brown.

Since 1975, USAID has supported many of American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA)’s essential and sustainable longterm health, economic development and education projects for Palestinians throughout the region. This administration’s funding cuts to USAID meant ANERA was forced to end work on two water projects in Gaza, as well as renovations for schools and other projects that affected 87,000 people. They had to lay off two-thirds of ANERA’s staff in the West Bank and Gaza and halt the work of hundreds of Palestinian contractors who supported large extended families throughout the region.

NGOs are asking Congress to make it clear that ESFfunded NGO programs are not subject to ATCA jurisdiction.

They’re also asking Congress to provide assistance in the West Bank and Gaza in FY2020. Finally they’re asking the Trump administration to complete their “review” of programs in the Palestinian territories and release the FY18 and FY19 appropriated funds. Members of Congress in both parties are sympathetic to the crisis and working behind the scenes to release aid. They could also work with the international community and the U.N. to resolve this crisis.

Humanitarian aid and people-to-people diplomacy will win friends in a peaceful world where we all want to live. It’s cavalier to arbitrarily destroy decades of goodwill from American donors, teachers, doctors, NGO workers and volunteers. ■

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Occupation of The Atlantic Mind

Special Report

ANTOINE GYORI/SYGMA VIA GETTY IMAGES

THE BRILLIANT 2016 DOCUMENTARY film, “The Occupation of the American Mind,” identifies the root of misperceptions, imbalanced reporting, and outright disinformation on the Israel-Palestine issue. For further confirmation of this ongoing “occupation” one need look no further than The Atlantic magazine.

Founded as the Atlantic Monthly in Boston in 1857, The Atlantic is a venerable American publication with a distinguished record of literary and cultural criticism and politLEFT: Benny Morris, Israeli historian and writer; RIGHT: Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor-inical reportage. Today the magachief, attends the Ellie Awards on March 13, 2018 in New York City. zine is distinguished by the intensity of its Zionist distortions of the past and present of the Palestine conflict. generations.” (Goldberg, “No Common Ground,” New York The Atlantic’s palpable pro-Israeli bias should come as no Times Sunday Book Review, May 20, 2009) surprise as its editor-in-chief since 2016, is Jeffrey Goldberg, In the May 14 issue of The Atlantic, it should come as no who is a citizen of both Israel—where he served as an IDF shock that Morris—the man who regrets that only 750,000 peoprison guard—and the United States. Goldberg is a staunch ple were ethnically cleansed from Palestine in 1948—attacks Zionist and is quick to equate criticism of the Israel lobby with Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), the first Palestinian-American in anti-Semitism, as he did in a notorious review published in Congress and a Muslim. The professor’s article is entitled, The New Republic on Oct. 8, 2007, in which he directly linked “Rashida Tlaib Has Her History Wrong.” Morris proceeds to the book by the distinguished political scientists John show that he is indeed an expert at getting the history wrong.

Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Morris condemns Tlaib for pointing out that European Jews Foreign Policy (2006), with Osama bin Laden’s brand of viruescaped anti-Semitism by occupying her family’s homeland. lent anti-Semitism.

He continues with a hoary account ascribing Palestinians with Goldberg at the helm of an influential liberal magazine with “direct” responsibility for the Nazi genocide, citing the antia circulation of almost half a million readers is bad enough, Semitism of an Islamic leader during that era and the efforts to but it gets worse. Goldberg has brought in as a regular conimpede Jewish migration into Palestine. Despite local oppositributor Benny Morris, an Israeli historian turned propagandist tion, thousands of European Jews flooded into Palestine in the whose implacable hostility to Arabs—as Goldberg himself 1930s precipitating the 1936-’39 Arab revolt, which Morris once put it—“sometimes leads him to inflammatory conclublames on the Palestinians rather than the European misions,” including Morris’s lament that Israel’s founder David grants.

Ben-Gurion failed to carry out a “full expulsion—rather than a In Morris’s unapologetic and at least borderline racist reading partial one,” as he could have “stabilized the State of Israel for of the past, “most Palestinians still hope for Israel’s disappearance”—this offered with no supporting evidence—whereas “the Contributing editor Walter L. Hixson is the author of Israel’s Armor: Zionist side over the decades has repeatedly agreed to a comThe Israel Lobby and the First Generation of the Palestine Conflict promise based on partitioning Palestine into two states” only to (available from Middle East Books & More), along with several other have “the Arab side” reject all proposals. So, there you have it— books and journal articles. He has been a professor of history for 36 years, achieving the rank of distinguished professor. peace-loving Israel always making generous offers and the 26

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By Walter L. Hixson

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Allah-worshipping fanatics always turning them down in deference to their murderous plots to destroy the Jewish state. History made simple—and loaded with Zionist apologetics.

For the record, it is a historical fact that since the June 1967 war Israel has repeatedly rejected opportunities to trade land for peace and has instead pursued a colonial domination of the West Bank, the Golan Heights, as well as Egyptian territory and the Gaza Strip—the territories that it did belatedly relinquish but upon which it maintains a crippling siege.

Until the 1990s, Israel vigorously opposed any discussion and refused to negotiate toward the creation of any sort of “Palestinian entity.”

Morris understands that an effective propagandist must offer a counter-argument or two, only to deftly dismiss them.

Thus, he allows, it is true that since 1967 “the Israeli side has oppressed the Palestinian inhabitants and denied them various civil rights,” but sad to say, “such

is the nature of military occupation.”

(Imagine Morris, or anyone else, writing, “Jews were beaten in the streets and had their shops closed, but such is the nature of anti-Semitism.”)

What has happened in Palestine is not a “military occupation,” it is rather a settler colonization, one that as pertains to the West Bank and East Jerusalem, is illegal and thus illegitimate as well as being an ongoing and highly destabilizing human rights atrocity. Jewish settlements are scarcely mentioned by Morris, for the obvious reason that they have been illegal and had already rendered a two-state solution unworkable by 2000, the time of the mythical “generous offer” at Camp David, which Morris the propagandist resurrects as the best example of unregenerate Palestinian hostility to peace. For the record, a scholarly consensus holds that the offer of a bisected, non-contiguous state replete with Jewish-only roads, checkpoints, and ultimate Israeli control of state security repre-

sented no real opportunity for a viable independent Palestinian state, let alone constituted a “generous offer.”

Sadly, at one time, as Norman Finkelstein has pointed out on several occasions, Benny Morris was an accomplished historian and in fact played a key role in much-needed post-Zionist scholarship in Israel. His research revealed that the ethnic cleansing of 1948 had been deliberate.

Only later did he become a cheerleader for it. Unlike Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, Nurit Peled-Elhanan, and many other Israeli historians who have their integrity intact, Morris, as Finkelstein accurately charges, became a court historian—a propagandist for the State of Israel.

The case of The Atlantic and of Benny Morris remind us of the pernicious and monolithic nature of Zionist discourse. It places the noble professions of journalism and history in the service of a crude propaganda regime that seeks to perpetuate the occupation of the American mind. ■

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Congress Watch

Republicans Try to Use BDS Issue to Paint Democrats as Somehow Less Pro-Israel

By Shirl McArthur

AURORA SAMPERIO/NURPHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES

about the anti-BDS provision, McConnell called for three cloture votes on the bill, and all three failed to get the necessary two-thirds majority. On Jan. 28 a fourth cloture motion passed by a vote of 74-19, (“no” votes were all Democrats plus Sen. Bernie Sanders [I-VT]). On Feb. 5 the full Senate passed the bill by a vote of 77-23.

When passed it had 13 cosponsors, including Rubio. It was sent to the House Feb. 6, which has yet to act on it.

Upon passage of the bill, the ACLU, referring to the BDS section, issued a statement saying, in part, “Today the Senate chose politics over the Constitution and trampled on the First Amendment rights of all Americans.” But, while the First Amendment objection to the bill is getting the most attention, it is also objectionable because it applies not just to Israel, but Demonstrators met in front of the White House and marched to the convention center to also to “Israeli-controlled territories.” protest outside the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's conference in Washington, The House’s companion bill, H.R. 336, DC, March 24, 2019. was introduced Jan. 8 by Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Republican Michael McCaul (R-TX). It AS REPORTED IN THE MARCH/APRIL issue of the Washingwas referred to five different House committees, and has not ton Report, the first Senate measure introduced in the 116th been reported out by any of them. It has 54 cosponsors, inCongress was S. 1, titled “Strengthening America’s Security in cluding McCaul. the Middle East,” introduced by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) on Perhaps in an effort to avoid the charge of being somehow Jan. 3. The legislation re-introduces four bills strongly proless pro-Israel, Democrats introduced identical, non-binding moted by AIPAC that did not make it into law in the 115th Conresolutions in the Senate and House “opposing efforts to delegress. It would authorize aid and weapons transfers to Israel; gitimize the State of Israel and the Global Boycott, Divestment extend defense cooperation with Jordan; impose additional and Sanctions Movement Targeting Israel.” H. Res. 246 was sanctions related to the conflict in Syria; and allow state or introduced March 21 by Rep. Bradley Schneider (D-IL), and S. local governments to divest assets from entities applying boyRes. 120 was introduced March 25 by Sen. Benjamin Cardin cotts, divestments, or sanctions (BDS) against Israel.

(D-MD). Strongly pushed by AIPAC, H. Res. 246 now has 277 During the partial government shutdown brought about by cosponsors, including Schneider, and S. Res. 120 has 55 President Donald Trump’s insistence on funding for his wall cosponsors, including Cardin. These measures seem to be along the Mexican border, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell modest improvements in that they do not specifically equate (R-KY) declared that he would only bring measures to a vote the occupied territories with Israel and they give lip service to that Trump said he will sign. Senate Democrats responded a two-state solution, but they still are objectionable on First that they would not support any bill, including S. 1, until McAmendment grounds.

Connell relents and the government is reopened.

Over the next two weeks, in an effort to paint Senate DeSEVERAL OTHER PRO-ISRAEL mocrats as somehow less pro-Israel because of their concern

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

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MEASURES GET SUPPORT

Surrounding AIPAC’s March 24-26 annual meeting, many other pro-Israel bills were introduced. The most significant is H.R.

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1837, the “U.S.-Israel Cooperation Enhancement and Regional Security” bill, introduced March 21 by Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL). The bill is an updated version of last year’s H.R. 5141, described in this column as a “wish list of goodies for Israel.” Among other things, H.R. 1837 would authorize several new “cooperative” programs, extend the authorization for several security assistance programs, including the $3.8 billion per year called for in the 2016 Memorandum of Understanding, and loan guarantees.

The revised bill includes a new section intended to “fix” the unintended consequence of the “Anti-Terrorism Clarification Act” (ATCA) passed last year. While the purpose of the ATCA was clearly to cut off aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA) or PLO, its wording could also apply to any country accepting any amount of the described aid, effectively sacrificing the use of aid as a foreign policy tool. The new section, called “Justice for U.S. Victims of Palestinian Terrorism,” fixes the problem by simply eliminating that provision.

Under pressure from AIPAC, the bill has 173 cosponsors, including Deutch.

No fewer than five other bills were introduced promoting U.S.-Israel cooperation in various areas. H.R. 1459, the “U.S.-Israel Cooperation Expansion” bill, was introduced Feb. 28 by Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) with two cosponsors; H.R. 1795, the “U.S.-Israel Directed Energy Cooperation” bill, was introduced March 14 by Reps. Ted Lieu (D-CA) and Elise Stefanik (R-NY); H.R. 1820, the “U.S.-Israel International Development Cooperation” bill, was introduced March 18 by Reps. Lois Frankel (D-FL) and Randy Weber (R-TX); H. Res. 324, “Recognizing the Importance of the “U.S.-Israel Economic Relationship,” was introduced April 18 by Reps. Lieu and Rick Allen (R-GA); and H. Res. 2488, the U.S.-Israel Cybersecurity Center of Excellence” bill, was introduced May 2 by Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) and four cosponsors.

Identical bills were introduced Feb. 26 in the Senate and House, “Clarifying that it is U.S. policy to recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights.” S. 567 was introduced by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) JUNE/JULY 2019

and 23 all-Republican cosponsors, and H.R. 1372 was introduced by Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and 55 all-Republican cosponsors.

H.R. 1850, introduced March 21 by Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL), with 17 cosponsors, would impose “sanctions with respect to foreign persons and agencies and instrumentalities of foreign states supporting Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or any affiliate or successor thereof.”

PRO-PALESTINIAN MEASURES INTRODUCED

A couple of pro-Palestinian measures were introduced. On April 11 Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and five cosponsors introduced S.Res. 171 “expressing the sense of Congress regarding restoring U.S. bilateral assistance to the West Bank and Gaza.” It says that the executive branch should expend before the end of FY 2019 all bilateral assistance that Congress appropriated. On April 30 Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN) introduced H.R. 2407, similar to her H.R. 4391 in the 115th Congress, that would “require that U.S. funds do not support military detention, interrogation, abuse, or ill-treatment of Palestinian children” living under Israeli military occupation.

Two resolutions were introduced regarding the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The first, H. Res. 138, was introduced Feb. 19 by Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL). “Expressing support for addressing the Arab-Israeli conflict in a concurrent track with the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and commending Arab and Muslim-majority states that have improved bilateral relations with Israel,” it gives passing reference to the importance of a two-state solution, but the rest of the measure seems designed to support Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s “regional” approach. It has 24 cosponsors, including Hastings.

The second resolution strongly supports a two-state solution. H. Res. 326, “Expressing the sense of the House regarding U.S. efforts to resolve the IsraeliPalestinian conflict through a negotiated two-state solution,” was introduced April 25 by Rep. Alan Lowenthal (D-CA). It

says that any U.S. proposals that fail to expressly endorse a two-state solution will likely put a peaceful end to the conflict further out of reach. It has 106 cosponsors, including Lowenthal, all Democrats.

CONGRESSIONAL REACTION TO THE KHASHOGGI ASSASSINATION CONTINUES

Congressional reaction to the murder of Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2 has taken several forms. Apart from the barrage of congressional statements and letters expressing outrage, reactions range from measures dealing specifically with Saudi actions regarding Khashoggi to measures aimed at Saudi actions in Yemen and the Saudi nuclear program.

Previous reporting described the Oct. 10 letter to Trump signed by then-chairman and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations committee Sens. Bob Corker (R-TN) and Bob Menendez (DNJ), which triggered an investigation under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act. The act requires the president, upon receipt of a request from the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, to determine whether a foreign person is responsible for an extrajudicial killing, torture, or other gross violations of internationally recognized human rights against an individual exercising freedom of expression, and report to the committee within 120 days with a determination and a decision on the imposition of sanctions on that person or persons.

On Feb. 7 a senior Trump administration official said the administration would not meet the deadline, citing constitutional separation of powers. This action was expected, prompting Menendez and six cosponsors to introduce on Feb. 7 S. 398 “to support the peaceful resolution of the civil war in Yemen, to address the resulting humanitarian crisis, and to hold the perpetrators responsible for murdering a Saudi dissident.” It would impose sanctions on persons responsible for the death of Khashoggi.

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STATUS UPDATES

S. 28, Jordan Cooperation. S. 28 “to reauthorize the U.S.Jordan Defense Cooperation Act of 2015,” introduced in January by McConnell, still has no cosponsors.

H.R. 31 and S. 52, Syria. H.R. 31, the “Caesar Syria Civilian Protection” bill, introduced in January by Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY), still has 58 cosponsors, including Engel. S. 52, “to halt the wholesale slaughter of the Syrian people, encourage a negotiated political settlement, and hold Syrian human rights abusers accountable,” introduced in January by Sen. James Risch (R-ID), still has only three cosponsors, including Risch.

H.R. 643, Saudi Military Aid. H.R. 643, “to prohibit the provision of U.S. security assistance to the Government of Saudi Arabia,” introduced in January by Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA), has gained nine cosponsors, and now has 30, including McGovern.

H.R. 194, H.R. 571 and H.R. 361, Iran Sanctions. H.R. 194, “to impose additional sanctions with respect to serious human rights abuses of the Government of Iran,” introduced in January by Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), now has four Also, on Feb. 25 Sen. Ron Wyden (DOR) and four cosponsors introduced S. 544 to require the director of national intelligence to submit a report on the death of Khashoggi. On April 2 Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-NJ) and 10 cosponsors introduced H.R. 2037, “to encourage accountability” for Khashoggi’s murder.

At least five measures were introduced requiring congressional approval of any nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia. On Feb. 12 Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and two cosponsors introduced S.Con.Res. 2; on Feb. 28 Sens. Edward Markey (D-MA) and Rubio introduced S. 612; on Feb. 28 Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) and 11 cosponsors introduced H.R. 1471; also on Feb. 28 Rep. Andy Levin (D-MI) and four cosponsors introduced H.Con.Res. 23, and on March 5 Reps. Schneider and Meadows introduced H.R. 1541.

SENATE FAILS TO OVERRIDE TRUMP’S VETO OF YEMEN MEASURE

On April 16 Trump vetoed S.J. Res. 7, “A joint resolution to direct the removal of U.S. Armed Forces from hostilities in the Republic of Yemen that have not been authorized by Congress.” The Senate then, 30

cosponsors, including McCaul. H.R. 571, introduced in January by Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), “to impose sanctions with respect to Iranian persons that threaten the peace or stability of Iraq or the Government of Iraq,” still has four cosponsors, including Kinzinger. H.R. 361, introduced by Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) in January, “to impose terrorism-related sanctions with respect to As-Saib Ahl Al-Haq and Harakat Hizballah Al-Nujaba,” now has ten cosponsors, including Wilson.

H.R. 28, H.R. 204 and H.Res. 12, Anti U.N. H.R. 28, introduced in January by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), which would cut off aid to countries not supporting the U.S. and Israel at the U.N. still has no additional cosponsors. H.R. 204 introduced in January by Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL), which would “end membership of the U.S. in the U.N.,” has gained a cosponsor and now has four, including Rogers. H. Res. 12, which would condemn UNESCO for efforts “to deny Judaism’s millennia-old historical, religious, and cultural ties to Jerusalem,” introduced by Wilson in January, now has eight cosponsors, including Wilson.

—S.M.

on May 2, tried to override Trump’s veto, but failed to get the necessary two-thirds majority in the 53-45 vote. The resolution, introduced by Sanders on Jan. 30, was passed by the full Senate on March 13 by a vote of 54-46 and by the House on April 4 by a vote of 247-175. It had 20 Senate cosponsors, including Sanders.

A nearly identical measure, H.J.Res. 37, was introduced Jan. 30 in the House

by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA). It was passed by the full House Feb. 13 by a vote of 248-177, with 97 cosponsors, including Khanna, but the Senate chose to go with the Sanders measure instead.

Other measures to limit or prohibit U.S. participation in the Saudi actions in Yemen were H.R. 910, the “Yemen Refueling Prohibition” bill, introduced Jan. 30

by Lieu and two cosponsors, and H.J.Res. 56, introduced April 10 by Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI), which is similar to the Khanna measure.

AS USUAL, MORE ANTI-IRAN MEASURES INTRODUCED

At least four new measures were introduced that would impose sanctions on Iran or Iranian organizations. On Feb. 28 Rep. David Kustoff (R-TN) and three

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cosponsors introduced H.R. 1441 to “Stop Corrupt Iranian Oligarchs and Entities”; on March 28 Sen. Cornyn and five cosponsors introduced S. 925, the “Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Economic Exclusion” bill; on April 8 Reps. McCaul and Robert Aderholt (R-AL) introduced H.R. 2118, the “Iran Ballistic Missiles and International Sanctions Enforcement” bill; and on May 8 Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) with 12 cosponsors introduced S. Res. 195 opposing the lifting of sanctions on Iran without addressing other Iranian actions deemed objectionable. On April 10, Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-CA) introduced H.R. 2280, the “Stop Iran from Smuggling Weapons to Terrorists” bill.

Positively, however, at least four measures were introduced aimed at preventing a war with Iran without congressional approval. S. 1039 was introduced April 4

by Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM) and 19 cosponsors; H.R. 2354, introduced April 25 by Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA), now has 46 cosponsors, including Eshoo; H.J.Res. 58 was introduced May 15 by Reps. Seth Moulton (D-MA) and Gil Cisneros (D-CA), and H.R. 2829 was introduced May 17 by Reps. Levin and Tom Massie (R-KY). ■ JUNE/JULY 2019

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Israel and Judaism

Trivializing Anti-Semitism by Attributing it to Critics of Israel

By Allan C. Brownfeld

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THE EFFORT TO LABEL CRITICS of Israel as “anti-Semites” has escalated and threatens to trivialize real anti-Semitism, which is growing in right-wing white nationalist groups. Violent anti-Semitism was manifested in the attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and, six months to the day, in a similar white nationalist attack at a synagogue in Poway, CA in April. The perpetrators did not mention Israel or Middle East politics in their hate-filled manifestos.

With real anti-Semitism on the rise— among racist groups in the U.S. and Europe—the focus of the Zionist establishment has not been on this real threat, but on liberal critics of Israel’s occupation and treatment of Palestinians. Rep. Ilhan Jewish organizations held a protest outside The New York Times offices, over the alleged Omar (D-MN), a Somali-American and anti-Semitic cartoon published in the newspaper depicting Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin one of two Muslim women elected to Con- Netanyahu as a dog on a leash held by a blind President Donald Trump. gress in 2018, fell victim to these tactics.

Rep. Omar insinuated that money from American supporters chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, declared that Omar was of Israel influences members of Congress—“It’s all about the “not an anti-Semite. The way I look at it, how and why should Benjamins,” she wrote on Twitter, specifically citing AIPAC. Her she necessarily have an understanding of Jewish history in tweet, noted The New York Times, “revived a fraught debate in any depth any more than any member of Congress has an unWashington over whether the pro-Israel lobbying behemoth has derstanding or knowledge of Somali history or culture. This is too much sway over American policy in the Middle East. The politics in the ugliest form.” backlash to Omar’s tweet was fierce, with even some DemocraOn Capitol Hill, the House responded to Omar’s comments tic leaders accusing her of trafficking in anti-Semitic tropes. The by passing a broad measure condemning hatred of all kinds. congresswoman apologized.”

By failing to condemn Omar specifically, President Donald Shortly thereafter, Rep. Omar stirred further controversy Trump declared, the Democratic Party showed that it was when she told an audience at a town hall event in Washington “anti-Israel” and even “anti-Jewish.” that accusations of anti-Semitism were meant to silence her Ironically, President Trump, who supports Israeli Prime Mincriticism of Israel and AIPAC. She said she wanted to talk ister Binyamin Netanyahu’s rejection of a two-state solution about “the political influence in this country that says it is OK and its occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, has for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.” openly embraced the notion of “dual loyalty” mistakenly attribIn Minneapolis, close ties exist between the Jewish and Souted to Rep. Omar. At a Hanukkah celebration at the White mali communities. Barry Cohen, a leader of the Twin Cities House in December, Trump told the assembled group of Americans that Vice President Mike Pence had great affection “for Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of your country,” Israel. In April, in his address to the Republican the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Jewish Coalition, Trump denounced Rep. Omar—and then told Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism. his American Jewish audience that he “stood with your prime JUNE/JULY 2019

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minister at the White House.” Trump’s remarks were welcomed by Israel’s supporters with no claim by AIPAC, the American Jewish Committee or others that he had, in fact, imputed “dual loyalty.” By referring to Israel as “your country” when he addresses American Jews, Mr. Trump is embracing the very anti-Semitic tropes he claims to deplore.

In fact, Rep. Omar has many Jewish defenders who abhor the manner in which false charges of “anti-Semitism” are used in an attempt to silence legitimate criticism of Israeli policies.

Rabbi Brant Rosen of Congregation Tzedek Chicago, who also serves as Midwest Regional Director of the American Friends Service Committee, stated: “There is no doubt in my mind that she (Rep. Omar) is being punished because she dared to call out the U.S.’s unconditional support for Israel—because, she points out, correctly, that this support is enabled by a powerful Israel lobby. This resolution (critical of Omar) is not being introduced out of a general concern for anti-Semitism...It is about attacking Omar for her criticism of Israel.”

Interviewed on Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now” on March 8, Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, a columnist for Haaretz, declared that the Israel lobby has become “by far too strong and too aggressive. It’s not good for the Jewish community. It’s not good for Israel.

What’s happening now is that some kind of fresh air, some kind of new voices are emerging from Capitol Hill raising legitimate questions about Israel, about America’s policy toward Israel and about the Israel lobby....These are important questions and it is more than needed to raise them.” However, he added, anyone who raises the question is “immediately or automatically labeled as an antiSemite. Then he has to shut his mouth, because after this, what can you say?”

IfNotNow, a group of liberal Jewish activists, said that Rep. Omar’s criticism of Israel’s occupation and of AIPAC is warranted. Those Democrats who wanted to 32

isolate Rep. Omar with a resolution critical of anti-Semitism, the group stated, are out of touch with the party’s younger members: “The older generation of American Jews pushing for this resolution” was not motivated by any “real concern with Jewish safety but a desire to stop political opposition to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian people...We have a new era where criticism of unjust Jewish policy is not simply equated with antiSemitism. That is a victory.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (Ind.-VT) said that he did not consider Rep. Omar an “anti-Semite” but urged her to “do a better job in speaking to the Jewish community.”

At a CNN Town Hall in New Hampshire in April, Sanders expressed views similar to those of Rep. Omar. He said that the reelection of Netanyahu confirmed that Israel is headed by a “racist government.”

In an article titled “What Ilhan Omar Said About AIPAC is Right,” published in The Nation, Andy Harlan writes: “As a Jew, an Israeli citizen...I speak from personal experience when I say that AIPAC is tremendously effective and the lubricant that makes its operation hum is dollar, dollar bills...Omar is right to point all of this out.” The effort to smear her served as a reminder that “delegitimizing (critics) is a central aim of the Israel lobby.”

The effort to redefine anti-Semitism as criticism of Israel has been going on for at least 40 years. In 1974, Benjamin Epstein, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) co-authored The New Anti-Semitism, a book whose argument was repeated in 1982 by his successor at ADL, Nathan Perlmutter, in a book entitled The Real Anti-Semitism in America. After World War ll, Epstein argued, guilt over the Holocaust kept anti-Semitism at bay.

But as memories of the Holocaust faded, anti-Semitism had returned, this time in the form of hostility to Israel. The reason: Israel represented Jews in power: “Jews are tolerable only as victims,” wrote Epstein and his ADL colleague Arnold Forster, “and when this situation changes so that they are no longer victims, or ap-

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pear not to be, the non-Jewish world finds this so hard to take that the effort is begun to render them victims anew.”

One of the leading practitioners of the effort to silence criticism of Israel by calling it “anti-Semitic” has been Norman Podhoretz, who served for many years as editor of Commentary. Often, those he accused of “anti-Semitism” were themselves Jewish. In an article published in 1983, titled “J’Accuse,” Podhoretz charged America’s leading journalists with “anti-Semitism” because of their reporting on the war in Lebanon and their criticism of Israel’s conduct. Among those so accused were Anthony Lewis of The New York Times, Nicholas Von Hoffman, Joseph Harsch of The Christian Science Monitor, Rowland Evans, Robert Novak, Mary McGrory, Richard Cohen, Alfred Friendly of The Washington Post and a host of others.

They were not criticized for bad reporting but were all charged with “anti-Semitism.”

In 2014, Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick declared that Secretary of State John Kerry was “anti-Semitic.” She wrote: “Kerry is obsessed with Israel’s economic success...The anti-Semitic undertones of Kerry’s constant chatter about Jews and money are obvious.” Moti Yogev, a Knesset member in the governing coalition, concurred, charging that Kerry’s efforts at achieving a peace agreement had “an undercurrent of anti-Semitism.”

Writing in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot, Cameron Kerry declared that charges of “anti-Semitism” against his brother “would be ridiculous if they were not so vile.” A convert to Judaism, Cameron Kerry recalled relatives who died in the Holocaust and noted that Kerrys’ paternal grandparents were Jewish.

Those who have been labeled “antiSemitic” by Jewish groups because of their criticism of Israel include former President Jimmy Carter, journalists Andrew Sullivan and Bill Moyers, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Peter Beinart, Continued on page 42 JUNE/JULY 2019

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On Equating BDS With Anti-Semitism: A Letter To the Members of the German Government TO THE MEMBERS OF THE GERMAN GOVERNMENT: I write to you regarding the motion recently passed by the Bundestag that equated Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) with anti-Semitism. I also write to you as Jew, a child of Holocaust survivors and as a scholar of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

My mother, Taube, and father, Abraham, survived Auschwitz among other horrors. My father was the only survivor in his family of six children and my mother survived with only one sister in a family that was larger than my father’s. I know, without question, that if they were alive today, the motion you are being asked to endorse would terrify them given the repression of tolerance and witness that it clearly embraces.

I shall not restate what others have already written protesting your action, but I do have some thoughts I would like to share.

In September 2014 I was invited to speak on Gaza at the Heinrich Boll Stiftung after the terrible events of that summer. During the question period, a gentleman stood up who was quite agitated. He argued quite strongly that given Germany’s history, it is difficult, if not impossible, for Germans to criticize Israel.

Embedded in his statement was the belief that Germans should never engage in such criticism. He seemed to insist that I accept this. I do not. Nor would my parents.

My response to him, then, is the same as my response to you now: If your history has imposed a burden and an obligation upon you, it is to defend justice, not Israel. This is what Judaism, not Zionism, demands.

Your obligation does not lie in making Israel or the Jewish people special or selectively excusing injustice because Jews happen to be committing it; it lies in holding Israel and Jews to the same ethical and moral standards that you would demand of any people, including yourselves. If you think that by refusing to criticize Israel’s brutal occupation—and punishing those who do—you are protecting and securing the State of Israel or the place of the Jewish people in the world, you are terribly misguided. Your approach achieves the exact opposite—by insisting on treating Jews as an exception, you are weakening us by again making us a kind of anomaly, an intruder, a negation of Europe. It makes us more vulnerable to and unsheltered from the racism and the true anti-Semitism now resurgent throughout the world.

Your sense of guilt, if that is the correct word, should not derive from criticizing Israel. It should reside in remaining silent in the face of injustice as so many of your forebears did before, during and after the Holocaust.

I lost a large extended family to fascism and racism. By endorsing the motion that alleges that BDS is antiSemitic—regardless of one’s position on BDS—you are criminalizing the right to free speech and dissent and those who choose to exercise it, which is exactly how fascism takes root. You also trivialize and dishonor the real meaning of anti-Semitism. How would you explain that to Taube and Abraham?

Sincerely,

Sara Roy

Dr. Sara Roy Dr. Sara Roy is a senior research scholar at Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Her most recent book is Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza: Engaging the Islamist Social Sector, available from Middle East Books and More.

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Special Report

The Suppression of Musical Culture in Gaza

By Salsabeel H. Hamdan

“WHEN MUSIC IS SUPPRESSED within a society, there is something wrong within its history, ideology, mind and—of course—spirit,” says Naem Nasir, a former music teacher and now a well-known director of plays produced in both Gaza and the West Bank.

Visitors to Gaza very quickly notice a strained relationship between local social norms and one of the most important facets of any culture—music. The practice and presence of music is limited, neglected and sometimes not even welcomed. Due to the Israeli-Egyptian blockade and the current highly conservative government and social norms, there are no music majors in secondary school or university, for example, and most (if not all) of few private teachers have left the Strip. The only music funded or otherwise supported to any significant degree is that which exalts Islam or adheres to a narrow definition of Palestinian heritage.

Once visitors pick up on this characteristic of culture in Gaza (and to a much lesser extent, the West Bank), they often ask, “Why did it evolve this way and when?” Naem Nasir is a music historian of sorts in Gaza—but he also speaks from painful personal experience about what he calls “the loss of our musical heritage.”

Nasir is a Palestinian born in the Gaza Strip and is now a theater director. But his original vocation was as a music teacher,

Salsabeel Hamdan is a Gaza-based writer for WeAreNotNumbers.org, a youth project that pairs international mentor-authors with youth in the Strip to share the human stories behind the numbers in the news.

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PHOTOS SALSABEEL. H. HAMDAN

Gaza’s only music store opened in 2017.

both in Libya and Gaza. Twice he has been imprisoned in Israel for protesting the occupation—the first time for two years while in high school and the second for six months during the First Intifada. It was during his first imprisonment that he composed two of his first musicals.

Over the course of his career, Nasir produced and wrote more than 50 plays, musical scores and short poems—appearing in several short films along the way after he got his certification in drama and music from Ashtar Art School in Ramallah. The school sent foreign teachers to Gaza periodically and he was one of the fortunate few to be allowed to study with them for three years.

Nasir went on to participate in many Arabic and European festivals, which enriched his development as a composer and director—a benefit today’s Palestinian artists from Gaza don’t have. Toward the end of the 1990s, he founded both the Masafat Theater Group and the Palestine Orchestra for Arabic Music in Gaza; however, Nasir was forced to shut both down less than a year later due to lack of funding. Nasir is still producing plays, but not music.

“My heart deteriorated after I had to close the orchestra,” he recalls. “I become really emotional whenever I remember the loss; the government couldn’t even afford a place for my musicians to rehearse.”

IMPACT OF OCCUPATION

Palestine had a rich and a very varied musical heritage (before 1948),” he says. “Every village had its own musical taste and style, different from other villages, and this gave birth to many unique, traditional songs. But that all changed when Israel was created and its forces occupied our land, tearing all this apart.”

The displacement of more than 700,000 Palestinians disrupted the social fabric, destroying along with it much of their cultural and musical heritage. Instruments typically aren’t among the items seized when people are in a rush to leave a house under siege, and living in squalid conditions in refugee camps is not conducive to a “luxury” like making music.

This destruction of a society, thought at first to be short-term but later proven to be as good as permanent, had inevitable consequences that persist today. Every generation since 1948

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evolves further away from its cultural roots.

Moreover, notes Nasir, the cultures of the countries to which the refugees moved (Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt) “invaded” over time what remains of Palestinian identity.

“I feel sick when I attend wedding parties in Gaza and don’t hear a single Palestinian wedding song played there, as we used to years ago,” Nasir says. “Instead, we have these Egyptian songs and music styles, as if we do not have wedding songs of our own.”

He adds, however, that the music of many neighboring countries, especially Lebanon and Jordan, heavily borrowed from the original Palestinian music.

There also has been a push over the years to revive and nurture Palestinian heritage. And some Palestinian youth listen and feel an affinity to what is now called Palestinian music, with its themes related to patriotism, wars and lost land.

But this, says Nasir, is not representative of the rich breadth of the original Palestinian music.

“Over time, the occupation narrowed Palestinian music to specific niches,” he explains. “It’s like the occupation of the land is now also an occupation of our culture and our minds. We focus almost exclusively on the need to uplift the spirit of Palestinians, free our land and honor the martyrs and their mothers.”

Still another layer of occupation that has affected musical expression among Palestinians, especially in Gaza, is the Israeli blockade, which prevents most musical instruments, as well as performers and teachers, from entering.

For example, Khamis Abushaban, of the Edward Said Conservatory of Music in Gaza, recently told The Independent that, “We had a cello teacher who was living here since 1997 but this year she had to go back to Romania for personal reasons.

We had a Russian colleague who taught guitar and trumpet, but unfortunately, she left in October too. Of course, here we have no replacement. So those lessons are gone.”

Nasir observes, “The siege has doubled the problem! In my youth, I used to be able JUNE/JULY 2019

to travel to Europe and interact with other musicians from different nationalities who played other genres of music from all over the world. Thus, I was able to develop my own, unique style of music, as a Palestinian, by seeing how different or similar it was to others’. I could learn from other techniques, while protecting it from being confused with neighboring musical styles, especially Arabic, Egyptian, Turkish or what is called Israeli music.”

The characteristics that make Palestinian music unique have now become so vague, says Nasir, that Palestinian youth today often do not recognize the music or songs that originated in their own culture, other than those with patriotic themes.

IMPACT OF RELIGIOUS TRENDS

Another limiting force on music in Gaza today is what Nasir labels false religious beliefs. Some religious scholars regard music as trivial or even haram (prohibited) unless it relates to motherhood, patriotism or Islam.

Nasir responds that this is an extreme interpretation of Islam and, in fact, many Gazans do not believe in such a strict interpretation. For example, Mohammad Assaf, the first Gazan Palestinian to win the Arab Idol competition, performed many Western pop songs and was encouraged by his friends and family. That’s not to deny that he had his detractors; he remains a controversial figure in Gaza.

Several youths in Gaza who were interviewed for this piece, but did not want to be named, said they would be afraid to publicly embrace other types of music.

“Society, as well as our parents, believe that music is only for partiers and losers, who have not been guided by Allah to the righteous path,” said one. “It is not the image they want for us in front of society and relatives; they want us to be doctors, engineers and ‘religious’ people.”

A CUMULATIVE OPPRESSION

As a result of all of these dynamics, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics found in 2015 that only 39.2 percent of Gazans listen to music, compared to 71.2 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank.

However, there are some early signs of resurgence: A store that sells musical instruments opened in Gaza in 2017 and, in October, diploma programs in drama and music opened at Gaza University, the first of their kind. (Note, however, that the university’s website cautions that the programs will be offered for only a year, until the need for these professions decreases.

In addition, no actual instruction with instruments will be offered; the focus is viewed as more technical than “fine arts”— preparing people to work in radio and TV, for instance.)

Finding instructors for those programs will be a challenge. There is no government funding for teaching or reviving Palestinian musical heritage, and there are fewer than five centers/institutions that teach music in the entire Gaza Strip.

Is all of this important, given the dire economic conditions in Gaza? Music doesn’t put food on the table, after all.

Nasir says “yes.” When there is a destruction of any aspect of culture, he says, “it is easier for Israel and other colonial powers to fill the gap with their own inventions— and thus destroy the very existence of a Palestinian identity.” ■

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History’s Shadows

Introducing Nuclear Weapons to the Middle East

By Walter L. Hixson CONFRONTING ISRAEL’S NUCLEAR PROGRAM

AFP PHOTO / JACK GUEZ/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

In December 1960, CIA Director Allen Dulles reported that overflights by U-2 spy planes and other intelligence sources confirmed that the Israeli nuclear complex at Dimona in the Negev Desert probably held a reactor capable of producing weaponsgrade plutonium for a bomb. The Eisenhower administration and members of Congress were “unhappy” that Israel had “deliberately misled” the United States by keeping “a development of this importance secret” even as Israel sought economic and military assistance from Washington.

Confronted with the evidence, Israel insisted it had “no plans for the production of atomic weapons,” but this was deliberA partial view of Israel’s nuclear complex at Dimona in the southern Negev Desert on March ate deception because the United States 8, 2014. posed the “greatest threat” to bring an IF THE NATIONAL INTEREST mandates that the United States end to the program and force Israel into compliance with Intergo to war to stop the spread of nuclear weapons in the Middle national Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) efforts to contain the East then we should have begun bombing Israel in the 1960s. spread of atomic weapons. Until 1964 only the United States, Frequently lost in the discussion over the Iran nuclear prothe USSR, Britain and France had the bomb. gram is the irony that it was of course Israel that first introThe Kennedy administration took up its predecessor’s deduced nuclear weapons to the region and did so after repeatmand for inspections of the Israeli nuclear site to ensure that it edly and blatantly deceiving its “special ally,” the United would not develop bomb-making capacity. Avraham Harman, the States, in the process. As discussed below, today’s hostility toIsraeli ambassador in Washington, protested that Israel “could ward Iran may not primarily be about nuclear weapons, but not conceive why there should be such continuing interest” in Dithe Trump administration will maximize the “Iran nuclear mona, as Israel had “no intention of manufacturing the bomb.” threat” as a propaganda theme in the buildup toward a possiWhen the Americans finally wrangled their way into the facility, ble U.S.-Israel war targeting Iran and Hezbollah. the “informal” visits became a “window-dressing exercise” in Israel of course maintains a stony silence about its own nuwhich the Israelis escorted the visitors through a “bogus control clear arsenal. On this, as with almost any other matter, the center” built on top of the real one and outfitted “with fake control United States complies with Israel’s wishes. History shows the panels and computer-lined gauges.” U.S. diplomats including reverse clearly has not been the case.

Ambassador Walworth Barbour realized the “inspections” were a charade, “a very unrealistic exercise” that “became ridiculous.”

Kennedy hoped that his decision in 1962 to sell Hawk surHistory’s Shadows, a regular column by contributing editor Walter L. Hixson, seeks to place various aspects of Middle East politics and face-to-air missiles to Israel would deter the Zionist state from diplomacy in historical perspective. Hixson is the author of Israel’s continuing with the bomb-making program, yet the administraArmor: The Israel Lobby and the First Generation of the Palestine tion, taking the advice of Jewish affairs adviser Myer Feldman, Conflict (available from Middle East Books and More), along with failed to pursue a quid pro quo understanding from the sale of several other books and journal articles. He has been a professor of history for 36 years, achieving the rank of distinguished professor. the Hawks.

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Israel kept up the deception until it could present the U.S. with a fait accompli in the form of an atomic weapons development program on the threshold.

The Zionist leaders concluded accurately that “the United States would do no more than display an angry attitude.”

At a historic meeting with Foreign Minister Golda Meir in Palm Beach, Florida, shortly after Christmas in 1962, Kennedy pronounced the existence of the U.S. “special relationship” with Israel “comparable only to that which it has with Great Britain.” He made it clear, however, that relations were a “two-way street” and that Israel should address concerns “on this atomic reactor. We are opposed to nuclear proliferation.”

Despite Cold War tensions, Kennedy and the Soviets were working together to contain the spread of nuclear weapons, which led to the signing of the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963 and five years later to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Kennedy did not want the American ally Israel to shatter the effort to maintain the Middle East as a nuclearfree zone. At the Florida meeting, “Mrs. Meir reassured the president that there would not be any difficulty between us on the Israeli nuclear reactor.”

At the time of his assassination, Kennedy was stepping up the pressure for more stringent inspections, as he knew from the CIA and other sources that Israel was pursuing the bomb despite false assurances to the contrary.

Kennedy’s successor Lyndon Johnson, an uncritical supporter of Israel, took up the demand for inspections but these remained informal and un-rigorous. In 1964, intelligence sources revealed that Israel had covertly obtained 80-100 tons of uranium oxide, or “yellowcake,” to fuel the Dimona reactor and enable production of weapons-grade plutonium.

Recognizing that Israel was “closer to nuclear weapons capability than we supposed,” Secretary of State Dean Rusk confronted Israeli officials on the issue.

In March 1965, Israel declared that it “will JUNE/JULY 2019

not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Arab-Israel area,” but Rusk remained skeptical. He pressed Johnson to compel Israel to agree to place all nuclear facilities under IAEA control, but Israel refused.

While the Soviet Union and the Arab states cooperated with international arms control efforts, Israel would not. Advisers urged Johnson to hold back on providing Israel with Phantom supersonic jets until it signed the NPT, but Johnson would not risk confrontation with the special ally and moreover with its AIPAC-led lobby in Washington.

The Israeli nuclear program reached the threshold in 1966. Had the June 1967 War initiated by the Zionist state gone badly, the Israelis had contingency plans to explode a bomb, perhaps on the Sinai Peninsula.

It turns out that by pledging not to “introduce” nuclear weapons to the Middle East Israel meant merely that it would never admit to its possession of them.

The Nixon administration acquiesced to Israel’s status as a nuclear power and called off the demand for inspections and for Israel to sign the NPT. Israel, India and Pakistan are the only major states who have refused to sign the NPT, but the two South Asian nations at least admit to possessing the weapons.

STEPPING UP PROVOCATIONS AGAINST IRAN

Israel has vowed to attack Iran before allowing it to develop nuclear weapons, and it should not be expected that the Netanyahu government would wait until the last minute to do so. In June 1981, Israel bombed an Iraqi nuclear site at Osirak even though the reactor was not close to being operational. The U.S. condemned the attack but President Ronald Reagan nonetheless declared that Israel had “cause for concern.” Asked about Israel bombing a neighboring state that was not close to developing the bomb while stockpiling its own nuclear weapons in violation of the NPT, Reagan offered this naïve and

ironic response: “It is difficult for me to envision Israel as being a threat to its neighbors.” The next year Israel launched a punishing assault on Lebanon.

Recognizing that the Iranian nuclear program could easily become a casus belli, the Obama administration acted rationally by forging the multilateral Iran nuclear deal in 2015. Iran and the European allies have faithfully adhered to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)— which includes rigorous verification provisions—but now the Trump administration has unilaterally savaged the accord. Israel of course has condemned the nuclear treaty from the outset.

The Trump administration—for which a wrecking ball might be the appropriate symbol of its foreign policy—withdrew from the agreement in order to plague Iran with sweeping economic sanctions.

Iran put up with the U.S. action for a year but recently announced that it won’t adhere to limits on uranium enrichment if the sanctions continue. Meanwhile, Washington uses its economic muscle to threaten allies who might otherwise adhere to an international accord that all sides negotiated in good faith.

Not content to put the economic squeeze on Iran, the Trump administration has suddenly dispatched B-52 bombers, Patriot missile batteries, and an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf region while stepping up its condemnation of Iran for regional “meddling,” conducting a “revolutionary foreign policy,” and unspecified attacks on U.S. interests.

Since being forced out of Lebanon in 2006, Israel has longed for revenge against Iranian-backed Hezbollah and would dearly love to enlist the United States in the effort. The United States condemns Iran for human rights violations and intervention in Yemen even as it cozies up to the Saudi regime, which is responsible for war crimes in Yemen.

Another war in the Middle East should come as a surprise to no one. To the extent a future conflict focuses on nuclear weapons, it should be clear who started it. ■

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Three Views

A Familiar Pattern: Bolton’s Threats Escalate Tensions With Iran

STR/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Bolton declared that “the United States is not seeking war with the Iranian regime.” But, he added, “we are fully prepared to respond to any attack, whether by proxy, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or regular Iranian forces.”

It took the Defense Department a full day to respond to Bolton’s statement, with acting Secretary of Defense Pat Shanahan finally tweeting that the “announced deployment of the @CVN_72 and a @USAirForce bomber task force to the @CENTCOM area of responsibility…represents a prudent repositioning of assets in response to indications of a credible threat by Iranian regime Iranian Muslim women perform Eid al-Fitr prayers, marking the end of Ramadan, at the Abdul Azim forces.”

Shanahan followed with anshrine in Shahre-Ray in southern Tehran on June 05, 2019. other tweet: “We call on the Iranian regime to cease all provocation. We will hold the Iranian regime accountable for any attack on U.S. forces or our interests.”

The USS Abraham Lincoln battle group had deployed a

By Scott Ritter month ago from its Norfolk, VA home port and was recently engaged in maneuvers in the Mediterranean Sea. The PentaNATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER John Bolton’s announcegon acknowledged that the Abraham Lincoln was scheduled ment in early May that the U.S. is deploying a carrier strike to support CENTCOM during its deployment, but that its argroup and a bomber task force to the U.S. Central Command rival was being “accelerated” due to intelligence indicating an region seemed perfectly framed to put America on a war footimminent Iranian threat. ing with Iran. And it is.

The fact that Bolton chose to repurpose routine deployClaiming that the decision was made in response to “a numments of U.S. military forces into the Middle East as an emerber of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings,” gency response to an unspecified threat from Iran is in and of Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served itself a curiosity. Bolton is an adviser to the president, a nonin the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in statutory (i.e., not confirmed by the Senate) member of the the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeWhite House staff who is not in the military chain of command ing the disarmament of WMD. He is the author of Dealbreaker: and lacks any command authority.

Donald Trump and the Unmaking of the Iran Nuclear Deal. This While Shanahan followed up indicating that the orders for article was published May 10, 2019 in The American Conservative.

Reprinted with permission. the deployments had been authorized by him the day of

Is America Ready for John Bolton’s War with Iran?

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Bolton’s announcement, this simply isn’t the case—they were authorized well prior to Bolton’s statement. The fact that the White House announced the deployment of U.S. military forces in response to allegations of an emerging threat in the Middle East, as opposed to by the Pentagon, reflects the political and operational roots of the current crisis.

“U.S. Central Command [CENTCOM, the U.S. unified military command responsible for the Middle East] continues to track a number of credible threat streams emanating from the regime in Iran throughout the CENTCOM area of responsibility,” a CENTCOM spokesman noted after Shanahan’s tweet.

This threat was deemed serious enough for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to cancel a long-planned visit with Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel. Pompeo instead made a secret trip to Baghdad, where, according to reports, he met with Iraq’s political and national security leadership to discuss the emerging threat from Iran.

In a statement made to reporters on his way to Baghdad, Pompeo declared that “it is absolutely the case that we have seen escalatory actions from the Iranians, and it is equally the case that we will hold the Iranians accountable for attacks on American interests.” He added, “If these actions take place, if they do by some third-party proxy—a militia group, Hezbollah—we will hold the Iranian leadership directly accountable for that.”

But the reality is that the deployment of American military forces and the diversion of the secretary of state to Baghdad is little more than grand theater. This is being done in support of a policy dictated by Israeli intelligence and passed to Bolton during a meeting on April 16, 2019 at the White House, where, according to Bolton, they discussed “Iranian malign activity and other destabilizing actors in the Middle East and around the world.”

The intelligence, derived from analysis conducted by the Mossad, consisted of “scenarios” regarding what Iran “might” be planning. According to an Israeli official, “It is still unclear to us what the Iranians are trying to do and how they are planning to do it, but it is clear to us that the Iranian temperature is on the rise as a result of the growing U.S. pressure campaign against them, and they are considering retaliating against U.S. interests in the Gulf.”

Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, has derided Bolton’s statements as directed by what he derisively termed the “B-team,” which includes Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman and Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed. Zarif accuses Bolton, in concert with the rest of the “B-team,” of trying to push President Trump “into a confrontation he doesn’t want.”

The precise nature of the supposed Iranian threat hasn’t been officially articulated by either the White House or the Pentagon. CENTCOM had nebulously noted that “recent and clear indications that Iranian and Iranian proxy forces were making preparations to possibly attack U.S. forces in the region,” and JUNE/JULY 2019

added that the threats were both maritime and on land.

However, CNN, citing unnamed Pentagon officials, has reported that specific intelligence that Iran was moving shortrange ballistic missiles by boat into the Persian Gulf, combined with other indicators, is what triggered the military deployment, and that additional deployments of American forces, including Patriot PAC-3 surface-to-air missiles, was being considered. “It’s not clear if Iran could launch the missiles from the boats or if they are transporting them to be used by Iranian forces on land,” CNN reported.

This statement is facially absurd. Iran possesses a wellknown family of short-range ballistic missiles derived from an indigenously produced copy of the Frog-7, a Russian-made short-range artillery rocket. This weapon, known as the Zelzal2, has been exported to Syria, Yemen and Lebanon, where it has been used against Syrian rebels, Saudi-backed opponents of the Houthis, and Israel. The Zelzal-2, lacking a guidance and control system, is not a short-range ballistic missile, but rather an unguided rocket projectile. Iran does, however, possess two derivatives of the Zelzal-2—the Fateh-110 and the Zulfiquar—which meet the technical definition of a shortrange ballistic missile.

The Fateh-110 has been exported to Hezbollah, Syria, the Houthis in Yemen and militias in Iraq. In September 2018, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) fired seven Fateh110 missiles against Iranian Kurdish opposition forces based in northern Iraq. An even more advanced derivative of the Zelzal-2, known as the Zulfiqar, has recently entered service; in June 2017 and in October 2018, the IRGC fired Zulfiqar surface-to-surface ballistic missiles against ISIS targets located inside Syria.

These missiles are real, and they do pose an active and ongoing threat to American forces deployed in the Middle East.

But they are not designed to be operated aboard a ship. Iran has already been accused of supplying Houthi rebel forces with short- and medium-range ballistic missiles via maritime supply routes. A continuation of this activity should hardly trigger a crisis requiring the emergency deployment of U.S. forces. Likewise, Iran has provided short-range ballistic missiles to both Syria and Hezbollah using an existing air bridge between Tehran and Damascus.

Finally, Iran has transferred short-range ballistic missiles to the Iraqi popular militias, Shiite groups affiliated with the IRGC. All this activity has taken place over the course of the past few years and, except for the Houthis, none have required missiles to be sent via sea.

The threat being promulgated by Bolton, CENTCOM, Pompeo, and the media ignores the reality that Iran has been preparing to strike American military forces in the Middle East for years as part of its efforts toward self-defense. Iran’s shortrange ballistic missile capability is part of a larger missile threat that could, at a moment’s notice, blanket U.S. bases in the region with high explosives. Dispatching the Abraham Lin-

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coln battle group and a B-52 task force to the Middle East is an act of theatrical bravado that will do nothing to change that.

Iran’s missile force is, for the most part, mobile.

The American experience in the Gulf War, and Saudi Arabia’s experience in Yemen, should underscore the reality that mobile relocatable targets such as Iran’s missile arsenal are virtually impossible to interdict through airpower.

By purposefully escalating tensions with Iran using manufactured intelligence about an all too real threat, Bolton is setting the country up for a war it is not prepared to fight and most likely cannot win. This point is driven home by the fact that Mike Pompeo was recalled from his trip to participate in a National Security Council meeting where the Pentagon laid out in stark detail the realities of a military conflict with Iran, including the high costs. (Hopefully, they emphasized that Iran would win such a war simply by not losing—all they’d have to do is ride out any American attack.)

That Israel is behind the scenes supplying the intelligence and motivation makes Bolton’s actions even more questionable. It shows that it is John Bolton, not Iran, who poses the greatest threat to American national security today.

Bolton, Iran and Hegemonic Hubris

By Shahed Ghoreishi

IN MAY, National Security Adviser John Bolton announced that the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and Air Force bombers were rerouted to the Persian Gulf because of “new threats” emanating from Iran and its Shi’ite militias in Iraq and Syria. U.S. officials have privately declared that the vague intelligence, which Israel apparently passed to the United States, is “completely blown out of proportion.” As Vali Nasr, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, told The New York Times, “in the absence of some solid evidence about what triggered this action, it feels like the U.S. is picking and choosing what it considers a threat.”

The threat inflation of Iran, a country with a far smaller defense budget than its neighbors, attracts the attention of hawks like Bolton for one specific reason. They want to prevent Iran from becoming a legitimate, independent power outside the U.S. orbit. In their view, this requires capitulation or regime change. It is the latest example of America’s hegemonic hubris.

Bolton’s view of the world is a mix of what realist scholar Stephen Walt calls “hegemonic hubris” with a dash of hawkish unilateralism. According to Walt, the post-Cold War era was one of “hubristic fantasy,” leading the foreign policy elite to

Shahed Ghoreishi is a U.S. foreign policy analyst, focusing on U.S. grand strategy and the Middle East. He’s previously published pieces for the Huffington Post, the Atlantic, and CSIS’s cogitASIA program.

He graduated from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies with concentrations in American foreign policy and Middle East studies. He is on Twitter @shahedghoreishi.

40

“believe they had the right, the responsibility, and the wisdom to shape political arrangements in every corner of the world.”

Mix in Bolton’s hatred of multilateralism and it’s a recipe for strategic disaster. There’s a reason why Bolton framed the executive order President Trump signed that pulled the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA). It’s everything Bolton stands for.

It’s also a complete refutation of President Obama’s foreign policy doctrine on the Middle East.

Whereas the United States mostly accepted Russia and China as independent powers worthy of engagement, Iran had largely remained a pariah since its revolution in 1979. The Obama administration wanted to change that by pursuing diplomacy. The successful result, the JCPOA, could have become a diplomatic foundation to discuss other issues and might have led the United States to accept Iran’s role in its region. In such a case, the U.S. could have pursued offshore balancing in the Middle East and pivot away, allowing Saudi Arabia and Iran, in President Obama’s own words, to “share the region.” In other words, the JCPOA was an attempt to refocus U.S. foreign policy on more pressing issues, like the major role China is now playing on the global stage, while avoiding another costly Middle Eastern quagmire.

Bolton, on the other hand, views the United States as a unilateral hegemon that can pressure any country, small or large, as desired. He has threatened not only Iran (“bomb Iran”), but also Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea. However, this is an outdated and misplaced take on U.S. power. After Bolton rerouted the United States toward confronting Iran, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani announced reduced compliance with the JCPOA. This outcome is not in the interest of the United States. It undermines U.S. allies, handicaps global disarmament efforts, and limits U.S. strategic flexibility in the Middle East by locking in relations with intransigent allies.

Meanwhile, regular Iranians are the real victims of this strategy. The Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” strategy against Iran has caused the country’s economy to shrink by 3.9 percent in 2018 and inflation to skyrocket to 31 percent.

The costs of red meat and poultry, cheese and eggs, and vegetables increased by 57 percent, 37 percent, and 47 percent respectively. The economy is expected to shrink another 6 percent in 2019.

If Iran’s human rights track record were an honest concern, then the Trump administration would realize that sanctions only make the situation worse for regular Iranians. By limiting the country’s access to foreign markets, for instance, the U.S. is strengthening the Revolutionary Guard’s influence over the economy. If Iran’s foreign policy were the main concern, then the Trump administration would have stayed in the JCPOA as a way to address outstanding concerns all while not undermining an agreement that prevents Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. Instead, the Trump administration’s foreign policy team demands regime change. As a senior Trump foreign pol-

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icy official puts it: “we can collapse their economy—it’s not that difficult. But it’s up to the Iranian people.” This is not moral leadership. It’s not even a strategy. It’s economic torture.

It also won’t work. As veteran diplomat William Burns explains in Foreign Policy, “false assumptions about how a muscular, unilateralist U.S. approach can produce the capitulation or implosion of this Iranian regime, which I think is an assumption untethered to history.”

Now that the Trump administration has decided to welcome Iranians celebrating the first day of Ramadan with threats from a national security adviser known to twist intelligence, it’s up to not only Democrats but all of Congress and the media to pay attention to the escalating tensions with Iran.

Like its Yemen policy, the Trump administration’s Iran policy is mean-spirited, misguided and an unnecessary drain on its global influence. It also accelerates the decline of U.S. hegemony that Bolton so fears, especially if the implosion strategy turns into an actual U.S. intervention.

Only four years ago, the Iranian people were dancing in the streets at the possibility of a brighter future post-JCPOA. With a travel ban and economic sanctions in place and touting a policy of “unrelenting force,” the Trump administration has purposefully dashed their hopes. For now, the Iranian people will have to shoulder the burden of an administration “picking and choosing” enmity inspired by the last throes of hegemonic hubris.

to the start of the Iraq war, then-Vice President Dick Cheney went on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and issued a dire warning.

Saddam Hussain was trying “through his illicit procurement network, to acquire the equipment he needs to be able to enrich uranium to make the bombs…specifically aluminum tubes.”

But Cheney made sure to point out that he wasn’t just making this assertion out of thin air (or passing on classified material), but that, in fact, the claim came from the paper of record, The New York Times.

The Times story was even the catalyst for then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice’s infamous assertion: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

We have since learned, of course, that Bush administration officials deliberately leaked the story to Times reporter Judith Miller—who co-wrote the big front page scoop with her colleague Michael Gordon—to build the case that that Saddam was building nuclear bombs. The Times later walked back the reporting, saying there was some internal disagreement about what the tubes were actually for (and in truth, it turned out, the tubes were actually not made for nuclear weapons).

We saw a similar dynamic play out in May, albeit on a smaller scale, after Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser John Bolton issued an unusual statement announcing that the U.S. was sending a carrier and bomber group to the Middle East to counter unspecified Iranian threats.

Instead of expressing skepticism about such a statement from someone who’s been gunning for war with Iran for nearly two decades, and from an administration that has been doing the same for the past two and a half years, reports from U.S. mainstream media outlets basically served as a public relations service, simply repeating Bolton’s statement with little scrutiny across multiple mediums. For example, this was a headline from CNN the next day: “U.S. deploying carrier and bomber task force in response to ‘troubling’ Iran actions.”

Much of the piece then repeated almost verbatim administration claims about the supposed Iranian threat. And it wasn’t until the 24th paragraph that the story noted that such deployments are “routine” and that the carrier group in question, the Lincoln Carrier Strike Group, had already been deployed to “the Central Command region,” as Bolton put it in his statement.

If the Lincoln group had already been deployed, was Bolton —again, who has made it no secret that he’s wanted war with Iran for some time—simply using this routine matter to goad Iran into some kind of conflict? CNN asked no such questions.

Then there was the question of the intelligence itself. Was it accurate? Was John Bolton—who also has a well-documented history of manipulating intelligence for his own policy preferences—playing fast and loose with the facts?

Here again, U.S. reporters simply just repeated Trump administration claims of this alleged dire Iranian threat. For ex-

This is not moral leadership.

It’s not even a strategy.

It’s economic torture.

The Media’s Shameful Handling of Bolton’s Iran Threat Claims Recalls the Run-up to the Iraq War

By Ben Armbruster

MEDIA-SAVVY U.S. government officials, political operatives, and lawmakers and their staffs from all political parties and ideological persuasions have no doubt, throughout the history of our great country, duped a fair-minded but unwitting reporter into writing a juicy story in order to get a piece of information into the public bloodstream without their fingerprints on it.

This is, in large part, how the Bush administration sold the U.S. invasion of Iraq to the American people: Feeding knowingly bogus or unsubstantiated intelligence on Iraq’s (nonexistent) WMD programs to reporters, who then published it as fact, without much in the way of critical scrutiny.

Despite the lessons we’ve learned from that debacle, it’s happening again with regard to the Trump administration’s march toward war with Iran.

In one now infamous incident during the months leading up

Ben Armbruster is the communications director for Win Without War and previously served as National Security Editor at ThinkProgress.

Published May 11 on LobeLog. JUNE/JULY 2019

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ample, this is what CNN’s Barbara Starr tweeted the following day: “Just In: U.S. officials tell me the threats from Iran included ‘specific and credible’ intelligence that Iranian forces and proxies were targeting U.S. forces in Syria, Iraq and at sea. There were multiple threads of intelligence about multiple locations, the officials said. #Iran.”

But that turned out to be false, or misleading at best. Subsequent news stories reported that the intelligence Bolton was working from was “unclear.” Other reports referred to unnamed U.S. officials citing “potential preparations,” intel that “may indicate possible attacks,” and that the U.S. “was not expecting any imminent Iranian attack.” So in other words, nothing concrete, specific, or severe enough to merit an entire carrier group and B-52 bombers being sent to the Middle East.

Later in the week, Starr (like many, many other reporters) was duped again, reporting—based on unnamed sources— that “[i]ntelligence showing that Iran is likely moving short-range ballistic missiles aboard boats in the Persian Gulf was one of the critical reasons the U.S. decided to move an aircraft carrier strike group and B-52 bombers into the region.” But a subsequent NBC report downplayed this claim, noting that U.S. officials have actually “accused Iran of moving missiles and missile components through the region’s waterways for years.”

However, that NBC story too was guilty of uncritically repeating unnamed officials’ claims about intelligence on Iran, asserting that the actual reason for the increased U.S. military posture in the region was “a call [by Iran’s leaders] to awaken and activate” Iranian proxies in Iraq.

But what does that even mean? Does this kind of “threat” necessitate such a gargantuan military response? And isn’t it possible that the Trump administration’s so-called “maximum pressure” campaign toward Iran and ramping up threats (like designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps a terror group) might have caused the Iranians themselves to shift to high alert?

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Here again though, buried at the end of the NBC story, we are provided with a take from a Democratic congressional source who has seen the same intelligence, saying Trump and Bolton’s response to it “seems wildly out of proportion.” Even so, we should think a reporter would be able to conclude that the threat was overblown on his or her own (is a call to a proxy really cause for such a drastic military response?).

And that’s exactly what this intelligence is: overblown. The Daily Beast reported this week that “multiple sources close to the situation” said Bolton and Team Trump blew the intelligence on Iran “out of proportion, characterizing the threat as more significant than it actually was.”

Unfortunately, the damage has already most likely been done. The Trump administration’s claims about this supposed Iranian threat has been repeated by credulous reporters and TV news programs far and wide. And after all, that was the goal. Bolton and Co. knew the media would take the bait for a few days (war and conflict sell after all) and that, by the time the truth about what they were up to was eventually uncovered, the narrative about dire and nefarious Iranian threats—which is already baked into the American psyche anyway—would, in the saying often mistakenly attributed to Winston Churchill or Mark Twain, have “travel[ed] halfway around the world while the truth was still putting on its shoes.” ■

Trivializing Anti-Semitism Continued from page 32

a contributing editor of The Forward, calls the idea that such individuals and groups are anti-Semitic “absurd.”

The Anti-Defamation League issued a report in April indicating that anti-Semitic incidents doubled in 2018. The ADL indicated that almost all perpetrators were identifiable white supremacists. This fact has been downplayed by those who seek to accuse liberal critics of Israel of being “anti-Semitic.” The

Times of Israel, for example, carried an article in May with the headline, “Friedman Plays Down Statistics Linking White Supremacy to Anti-Jewish Violence.” It quoted U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman as saying it was a “mistake” to “rely on such statistics.” He downplayed right-wing violence as “not yet...a daily occurrence,” and launched into an attack on The New York Times for publishing an allegedly “anti-Semitic” cartoon critical of the Netanyahu-Trump relationship.

Bigotry within Israel against non-Jews is growing, something mainstream American Jewish groups have largely ignored.

In the recent Israeli election campaign, Netanyahu embraced the openly racist Otzma Yehudit party which, among other things, endorses legislation to make marriage—or sexual relations of any kind— between Jews and non-Jews illegal, similar to the Nuremberg laws. After the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, a leader in the ultra-Orthodox Zionist nationalist movement, suggested it was “divine retribution” for previous persecution of Jews. He expressed ambivalence about the burning of churches in Israel—which has happened more often in recent years—and refused to condemn such acts.

In April The Times of Israel reported the racist comments of Rabbi Eliezer Kashtiel at Bnei David, a pre-military yeshiva in the West Bank, funded by the Israeli government. He told students that Arabs, “stupid and violent” as a result of their genetic inferiority, deserved to be enslaved. “The gentiles will want to be our slaves,” he explained. “Once they are slaves, their lives can begin to take shape.”

With real anti-Semitism and white nationalism growing in the world—as in chants of “Jews will not replace us” by neo-Nazis in Charlottesville—it trivializes this real bigotry by labeling critics of Israel as “anti-Semitic.” Israel’s defenders should respond to their critics, not demonize them. And they would do well to confront the real bigotry which is growing within their own ranks. ■ JUNE/JULY 2019

georgetown_ad_43.qxp_Georgetown Ad 6/6/19 4:17 PM Page 43

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Islam and the Near East in the Far East

Adelson’s East Asian Money Trees

By John Gee

ANTHONY WALLACE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

were stepping into a slowerpaced life than that of Hong Kong, seeing historic Portuguese churches and buildings such as the opera house and lighthouse, and finding inexpensive but rewarding eating places serving local Macanese dishes influenced by Portugal and its African colonies.

When the Communists took power in 1949, gambling was banned in China, but it remained legal in Macau after it reverted to China in 1999. The autonomous region’s casinos then became a magnet for millions of Visitors stand on a bridge on the grounds of Sheldon Adelson’s Venetian casino resort in Macau on March would-be gamblers from 5, 2019. The gambling enclave of Macau is so far buoyant, despite the looming trade war between China China itself. Two years later, and the U.S. the STDM’s license expired.

The gambling business was opened up to competition, which inREGULAR WASHINGTON REPORT READERS are well-included Australian and U.S. companies. That was when Sheldon formed on casino king Sheldon Adelson’s financial support for Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands (LVS) company obtained a foothold right-wing pro-Israeli groups, such as the Zionist Organization of in what has become the world’s gambling capital.

America. Readers are also aware of Adelson’s clout with the LVS invested in the Venetian Macau, a resort with accommoTrump administration, including a $20 million donation to Trump’s dations and shops, as well as the casino. The Venetian Resort election campaign, as well as $32 million to the Republican Party Casino in Las Vegas has a floor area of 120,000 square feet, for last year’s mid-term elections. What many may not realize is but its Macau version dwarfs that with 550,000 square feet of that a big chunk of Adelson’s income is from Eastern Asia. floor space. The Venetian Macau generates most of LVS’s In the final years of Portuguese rule before its return to gross profit—69 percent (see Nirmal Ghosh’s “Sheldon AdelChina in 1999, Macao (now more commonly spelled Macau) son’s cash cow,” The Sunday Times, Singapore, April 7, 2019). relied on gambling for a third of its revenue. Its casinos were In the first 40 years after independence in 1965, Singapore controlled by a group of Hong Kong and Macau Chinese busibanned most forms of gambling, but then began to consider auness people, operating under the name of Sociedade de Turthorizing the opening of casinos as a means of generating inismo e Diversoes de Macao (STDM-Macao Travel and come. The move was opposed by many Singaporeans, particuAmusement Company). Many of those who gambled in the larly Christian and Muslim religious leaders, who argued that the casinos came over by ferry, hovercraft or jetfoil from the British move would have negative social consequences. Nevertheless, colony of Hong Kong, where gambling was officially limited to it went ahead, with an entrance fee for locals that was meant to betting on horse racing and a few lotteries. Nevertheless, deter them from entering, while leaving foreign visitors unhamonce away from the casinos, visitors could still feel that they pered from gaming away their cash. Two “integrated resorts,” in which casinos were at the center of a complex that included John Gee is a free-lance journalist based in Singapore and the author hotel accommodation, shops and restaurants, were opened. of Unequal Conflict: The Palestinians and Israel.

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At a few polling stations, officials put on costumes, saying that they hoped it might encourage voter turn-out: one was photographed dressed as Spiderman!

This was a response to a decline in voter turn-out in the two decades since the end of the autocratic Suharto regime.

It was reported that, following the election, more than 2,000 polling officials had been taken ill and 569 had died. The General Election Commission ascribed this extraordinary casualty rate to exhaustion, brought on by pressure to provide an accurate count of paper ballots at polling stations and then oversee their transfer to collection points, a process that forced many poll workers to labor 48 hours (Advertisement) without sleep. Adding to the workload, for the first time, voting for the presidency, vice presidency, parliament and local government took place on the same day.

Lastly, the number of women running for Indonesia’s People’s Representative Council reached a new high: 3,194 out of 7,968 candidates for the 575 seats—about 40 percent. Under Indonesian law, at least 30 percent of any party’s electoral candidates must be Playgrounds for Palestine is a project to build playgrounds for our children. women. However, there It is a minimal recognition of their right to childhood and creative expression. is no guarantee that It is an act of love. the same proportion Playgrounds for Palestine (PfP) is a registered 501(c)3 non-profit organization, will be placed in established in 2001. We’re an all-volunteer organization (no paid staff) that winnable seats and raises money throughout the year to construct playgrounds and fund programs only 97 women made it for children in Palestine. into the Representative Council (when it had Selling Organic, Fair Trade Palestinian olive oil is PfP’s principle source of fundraising. is year, PfP launched 550 seats) at the last AIDA, a private label olive oil from Palestinian farmers. election. At the time of Please come by and taste it at our table. writing, a gender breakdown of the final We hope you’ll love it and make it a staple in your pantry. results was not available, so it remains to For more information or to make a donation visit: be seen whether the https://playgroundsforpalestine.org • P.O. Box 559 • Yardley, PA 19067 total has risen. ■

The first was run by Genting Singapore, part of a Malaysian company. The second, known as Marina Bay Sands (MBS), was a $6 billion development of LVS. “MBS hauled in U.S. $3.07 billion net revenue last year, making it one of the world’s most profitable properties...Over 330 million visitors—or 120,000 a day— have walked through its doors since it opened on April 27, 2010. The competition for the ultra-wealthy is global.”

(Joyce Lim, “Sands’ Game Plan,” The Sunday Times, Singapore, April 7, 2019.)

While the mega-profits roll in, it seems unlikely that anyone who gambles away their money in LVS’s Asian casinos gives a thought to the fact that they might be contributing to the ongoing colonization of Palestine and the dispossession of the Palestinian people.

INDONESIA VOTES

Indonesia’s presidential election has seemed like a re-run of the 2014 contest, pitting Joko Widodo against former general Prabowo Subianto, though with a change of vice-presidential candidates. This time around, Joko was standing with five years as president behind him. Commentators saw Prabowo as appealing to devout Muslims, both modernist and conservative, while Joko won the support of Javanese whose Muslim faith is tinged with other traditional influences, as well as Hindus and Christians.

As in 2014, Pra bowo refused to acJUNE/JULY 2019

cept the outcome of the April 17 election, proclaiming that he was the victor according to his election team’s polling of voters. However, opinion polls before the vote had consistently shown Joko in the lead. The official results, released on May 21, showed that Joko won 55.5 percent of the vote. Prabowo accused election officials of fraud and there were riots by some of his supporters in Jakarta for two days following the release of the results. Police claimed to have found evidence that the rioters were paid.

During the election campaign and in its aftermath, there were some reports that did not gain much prominence.

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Special Report

Egyptian Referendum Expands Presidential And Military Powers

By Fatma Khaled

ISLAM SAFWAT/NURPHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES

IN AN APRIL ELECTION marred by accusations of voter suppression, a reported 88 percent of Egyptians passed a referendum approving 14 amendments to the country’s constitution. Activists, lawyers and constitutional experts criticized the amendments, describing them as another step toward authoritarianism.

One of the core changes enabled by the referendum is Article 140, which extends the presidential term to six years from four years.

President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, reelected in 2018 with 97 percent of the official vote tally, was due to step down in 2022, but is now permitted to run for an additional sixyear term—allowing him to rule for a total of 16 years.

Election workers count ballots at the end of a three-day vote on constitutional amendments at a “The amendments are a blunt atpolling station in Cairo, Egypt, April 22, 2019. Egyptians voted on constitutional amendments that tempt to completely demolish the would allow President Sisi to stay in power until 2030. demands introduced by the January 25 uprising in 2011,” prominent Egyptian human rights lawyer expanding the military’s role in the country and threatening the juand activist Mahienour El-Massry told the Washington Report. diciary’s independence.

“They provide no room for democracy or freedom.”

“The articles about presidential terms, military trials and the juEl-Massry, who was leaning to vote “no,” was banned from pardiciary are the worst three articles—expanding the role of the milticipating in the referendum due to her previous arrest for protestitary in judicial and political life and allowing the military to decide ing the government’s 2017 transfer of Egyptian islands Tiran and what is democratic,” prominent constitutional lawyer Essam El-EsSanafir to Saudi Arabia. lamboly told the Washington Report.

A pro-government bloc in parliament proposed the amendments REDUCED JUDICIAL POWER, EXPANDED MILITARY in February, stating that President Sisi deserves more time to build ROLE upon positive macroeconomic indicators and ensure the success Articles 185, 189 and 193 in the constitution now grant the presiof important security reforms. A total of 531 members of parliament dent executive authority over the judiciary and public prosecutor, agreed on the changes in the House of Representatives, while 22 where he will be authorized to appoint heads for all Egyptian opposed, sending the amendments to a public referendum held courts, thus effectively abolishing separation of powers, threatenbetween April 19 and April 22. ing judicial independence and diminishing the likelihood of fair triAmong the riskiest articles in the referendum, according to critals. Court heads were previously elected by their peers, according ics, were not only the extended presidential term, but also those to Taher Abou El-Nasr, a lawyer at Al-Nadeem Center for the Rehabilitation of Torture Victims.

Fatma Khaled is a free-lance writer.

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Per the amendments, the president is granted veto power in the Supreme Judicial Council and the right to select a public prosecutor from that council. He is also granted the right to select the chief justice for the Supreme Constitutional Court (SCC).

The Supreme Judicial Council plays a role in determining the conditions of appointment and promotion in all judicial bodies, while playing a consultative role on draft laws concerning the affairs of judicial bodies. Sisi previously authorized himself in 2017 to select the chief justice of the Egypt’s highest appellate, the Court of Cassation.

“There is no justice in the articles concerning the judiciary, as there will be no capacity for judges to stop the executive authority in case of a legal breach or violation,” El-Massry said.

The articles concerning judicial powers defy Egypt’s previously ratified covenants, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Human and People’s Rights, and the Arab Charter of Human Rights.

Articles 200 and 204 state that the armed forces will “safeguard the constitution, democracy, civil life, the rights and individual freedom and maintain state foundations.”

“Civil life should be protected by a set of laws and rules, not military authority in politics,” El-Massry cautioned.

In 2014, after a deadly attack in North Sinai killed 22 soldiers, Law 136 was issued to refer civilians to military courts until 2021 in cases where the accused committed a crime on public land or in any public facilities and/or attacked military personnel. The new constitutional changes expand this notion permanently, leading critics to question if the military’s authority overlaps or even supersedes that of the parliament and judiciary. Thousands of civilians have been tried in military courts under this law since 2014, according to Human Rights Watch.

WOMEN AND THE NEW SENATE

Other articles reinstate the previously disbanded Shura Council (Upper House) of MARCH/APRIL JUNE/JULY 20192016

2014, under a new name “Senate.” The president will appoint one third of the total 180 members of the new Senate, while the remaining will be elected by Egyptians.

“I hope the Senate operates as an effective independent regulatory body in Egypt because the last Shura Council was only a waste of the state budget,” Abou El-Nasr commented.

Articles concerning representation in parliament were also adjusted to include decreasing the total House of Representative seats from 596 to 450, 25 percent of which will be directed to a women’s quota for the first time.

A senior member at Egypt’s National Council for Women, Amina Shafik, in a public statement, said that women in Egypt gained full political rights in 1956, however they were never put into full effect. She described the provisions for women outlined in the new articles as a positive step forward.

OPPOSITION EFFORTS STIFLED

Egyptians had only less than a week to read, understand and vote in the referendum.

Among the calls for voter turnout, political parties such as the Free Egyptians Party and Protectors of the Nation Party launched nation-wide campaigns advocating for the adjustments, according to a report by the Washington, DC-based Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy (TIMEP).

Days after the votes were cast, the National Election Authority announced that over 88 percent of voters approved the amendments (equivalent to 23.4 million people), 11 percent voted against (equivalent to 3 million people), and 3.6 percent were invalid.

“Although the number of ‘no’ voters are reasonable, the ‘yes’ voters were greatly exaggerated. We didn’t witness a high turnout at polling stations,” said El-Massry.

“Yes” voters said they made their decision to encourage the continuity of security and stability of the country, according to some of the citizens interviewed by the Associated Press.

The state-run National Council for Human Rights reported that buses were hired by political parties to transport people for free to polling centers in some neighborhoods in Cairo and added that some people were giving out food to encourage others to vote.

An opposition group, the Civil Democratic Movement, urged people to vote “no,” however they were banned from launching campaigns and banners on the streets.

“While the state launched its own campaign to encourage a ‘yes’ vote, our members were arrested and had no access to local media at all,” said political figure and movement member Khaled Dawoud.

The movement attempted to launch a protest outside the House of Representatives building to reject the amendments, however a judge at the Cairo Court for Urgent Matters ordered the cancellation of the protest, citing national security concerns.

“The movement asked state authorities for permission to protest, however they have been banned, although they abided by the country’s protest law,” added El-Massry.

A number of attempts were also carried out to halt online rallies leaning for a “no” vote, including Egyptian authorities blocking a campaign website that managed to gather over 60,000 signatures rejecting the amendments only hours after its launch, according to NetBlocks, an NGO that monitors cyber security and the governance of the Internet.

One of the 22 opposing MPs, Haitham el-Hariri, expressed his rejection to the amendments at the House of Representatives, publicly saying, “If you want your children and grandchildren to live in a modern democratic country with peaceful transition of power, then I don’t think these are the amendments we want.”

Although opposition was hindered, activists and members of civil society, including Shafik and El-Massry, retain some optimism. “At least the opposition turnout was positive; we can now officially acknowledge that we have active opposing citizens in Egypt who are not afraid to be silenced,” said Shafik ■

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Special Report

Istanbul Election Rerun Raises Questions Over Turkey’s Commitment to Democracy

By David O’Byrne NARROW VICTORY

PHOTO D. O’BYRNE

The mayoral election in Istanbul was held on March 31 together with local and district elections across Turkey. Few observers expected the Justice and Development Party (AKP) to lose control of both the capital Ankara and Istanbul, least of all the AKP itself, which had already funded billboards in both Istanbul and Ankara thanking voters for support in their election victory.

The defeat in Istanbul, losing by a little over 17,000 votes out of 8.5 million cast to a candidate from Turkey’s main opposition party, the fiercely pro-secular Republican People’s Party (CHP), appears to have hurt most.

It was in Istanbul where Erdogan started his political career and over which he presided as mayor for four years in the 1990s. As recently as two Election posters hang on the Justice and Development Party (AKP) district office in years ago he warned his party, “If we Zeytinburnu, Istanbul. lose Istanbul, we lose Turkey.” Thus few were surprised when his party looked for ways to swing the vote their way.

After successive recounts in contested districts only narLESS THAN A YEAR after controversial constitutional rowed the gap to 14,500, the party charged that ineligible votchanges that facilitated his election as Turkey’s first executive ers had been included on the electoral register, and that empresident, Recep Tayyip Erdogan is facing serious questions ployees of Turkey’s Isbank, which has historical connections over both his commitment to democracy and the extent of popto the CHP, had been allowed to officiate at ballot boxes, in ular support for his government. The issues are clouding Turkbreach of regulations. ish relations with both the EU and the United States.

The YSK upheld the party’s complaints, ordering the IstanCriticism of one-man rule accelerated with the controversial bul mayoral poll to be rerun and stripping the newly elected decision by the Higher Election Council (YSK), the judicial CHP mayor Ekrem Imamoglu of his post, only 19 days after he body tasked with overseeing elections in Turkey, to void the assumed office. results of the recent mayoral election in the country’s biggest city, Istanbul, and order it to be rerun on June 23. The move WHAT WENT WRONG? raised serious questions over both judicial impartiality and whether elections in Turkey can now be judged as being “free On the surface, the AKP’s performance in the March polls was by and fair.” no means bad. The party scored 44.3 percent of the national vote with their coalition partners the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) scoring a further 7.3 percent. A combined score of 51.6 percent David O'Byrne is a freelance journalist based in Istanbul for more than 20 years. was only marginally short of last year’s presidential and general 48

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elections when the partners scored 52.5 percent and 53.7 percent, respectively.

The AKP vote held up in its conservative and mainly rural heartlands, but it lost heavily in both of Turkey’s main industrial centers and in the coastal regions home to the huge tourism sector.

The CHP, which was founded by, and remains committed to the secular principles laid down by the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, won five out of Turkey’s six biggest cities, regions responsible for the bulk of the Turkish economy.

It was those regions that were most adversely affected by the economic turmoil of the past year in which the Lira fell by 34 percent against the U.S. dollar, interest rates hit 24 percent and inflation soared to a shade under 20 percent. Erdogan nonetheless chose to fight local elections on national issues, effectively turning the vote into a referendum on his nine-month long executive presidency.

Shifting focus away from local issues did serve to deflect recent allegations of financial mismanagement, which saw Imamoglu promising a full audit of Istanbul’s finances in the wake of reports that large sums had transferred been to foundations and charities run by members of the Erdogan family. However, it also served to divert attention from the AKP’s local level successes such as the huge improvements made in municipal transport, water, sewage and waste collection services since the party swept to power in 2002. In Istanbul, the March election campaign saw the inauguration of the city’s new 77-km-long Marmaray suburban rail line, under development for 15 years.

This, combined with an ambitious program of metro and tramway development, has revolutionized transport in the city.

Despite these accomplishments, the focus remained on Erdogan himself, management of the national economy by his team, led by his son-in-law Berat Albayrak, and a series of rumbling disputes with both the U.S. and the EU, which apparently were designed to appeal to nationalist sentiment but failed to strike a chord with voters trying to cope with soaring prices.

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With a new mayoral election set for June 23, Istanbul is in the midst of the second month-long election campaign in three months. The March elections were

by Turkish standards quiet, however the decision by the YSK to cancel the Istanbul result provoked spontaneous protests in many parts of the city. Calls by the CHP for its supporters to remain calm have largely been heeded. Nevertheless, Istanbul remains tense with water-canons and riot police deployed in many central districts.

How free and fair will the new poll be?

As candidates from minority parties are expected again to attract few votes, the rerun poll looks certain to be a straight fight between the AKP and CHP candidates, with the CHP candidate, the soft-spoken former businessman Ekrem Imamoglu, seeming to have the edge against former AKP Prime Minister Binali Yildirim.

Imamoglu’s March campaign built considerable momentum despite his being almost unknown and despite minimal media coverage compared to that of Yildirim and the AKP. Imamoglu’s surprise victory and the subsequent cancellation only appear to have bolstered his popularity with voters still far from happy with the AKP’s handling of the economy.

Erdogan and his party for their part are apparently convinced that they can win in June, but the overriding question is how free and fair will the new poll be? An AKP victory would only cement fears that Turkey’s democratic credentials have been compromised.

With all of Turkey’s mainstream media controlled by business groups either close to or sympathizing with the AKP, few believe that a truly free and fair election is possible, even before any changes to the administration of voting procedures forced by the election council ruling. Whatever the result of the new poll, what is clear is that the cancellation of the March result is already having long-term and serious implications.

“Repeat elections in Istanbul just seem set to create more political flux and risk, and months more of economic policy drift,” says long-time Turkey analyst Tim Ash of Blue-Bay Asset Management. “It’s damaging for Turkey’s international image and people will question Turkey’s position as a functioning democracy.”

Cancellation of the mayoral election results has also cast a shadow over relations with the United States and the EU, both of which criticized the decision, prompting furious reactions from Ankara.

Relations with Washington were already strained thanks to Turkish opposition to the reimposition of sanctions against Iran, Turkey’s main source of crude oil, and Washington’s strong opposition to Turkey’s purchase of Russian S-400 missiles, a move which is seen as compromising its membership in NATO. Relations with Brussels have nosedived since early May when Turkey’s state oil company, Turkish Petroleum, commenced drilling in waters claimed by Cyprus. With no sign that Ankara is interested in compromising with either Washington or Brussels, there are fears that the AKP plans to conduct its campaign by again provoking conflict through appeals to nationalist sentiments.

At the end of April, Erdogan alluded to just such a possibility by calling on the country to support him while at the same time implying that those who did not were traitors or terrorists. The state news agency Anatolia tweeted: “President Erdogan invites Turkish people who have not given their hearts and minds to external powers and terrorist organizations to meet on common ground.”

Deployment of such epithets has become increasingly common in AKP rhetoric, but the results of the March elections suggest they appear increasingly unlikely to appeal to voters and can easily backfire. Warnings from commentators that there could be a return of the Gezi Park street protests that erupted in Turkey in 2013 may be exaggerated but with riot police and water cannons openly stationed around the city, it is a possibility that has clearly occurred to the government. ■

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More than 500 people attended the Council on American-Islamic Relations-Los Angeles’ (CAIR-LA) 4th Annual Valley Banquet Mar. 23 at the Woodland Hills Hilton Hotel.

The theme was “Advancing Justice and Empowering Valley Muslims.”

Keynote speaker Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (DMN) presence elicited protests outside the hotel, and even a bomb threat against the venue. She pointed out such incidents of bigotry and threats of violence are sadly not uncommon. "Many of us have experienced threats on our mosques, on our schools, even against our individual leaders," Omar said. The gruesome killing of 51 Muslims attending Friday prayers in Christchurch, New Zealand on March 15 was the horrific, but predictable, next step in the growing right-wing tide of anti-Muslim fervor, she opined.

Omar scolded President Donald Trump for intentionally provoking anti-Muslim sentiments. “We have a leader who fuels hate against Muslims, who thinks it is OK to speak about a faith and a whole community in a way that is dehumanizing and vilifying,” she said.

While some argue Trump doesn’t understand the consequences of his statements, Omar believes his rhetoric is calculated.

“He understands the consequences. He knows there are people that he can influence to threaten our lives, to diminish our presence,” she said. The forces of unity, however, are stronger than those of hate, she insisted: “Love trumps hate. Every time we feel threatened we show up with love and others stand with us in solidarity.”

Omar said it is time for Muslims to boldly stand up and defend their rights. “I say raise hell, make people uncomfortable, because here’s the truth: for far too long we have lived with the discomfort of being secondclass citizens, and frankly I’m tired of it, and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it.”

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STAFF PHOTO S. TWAIR

Despite Threats, Rep. Ilhan Omar Headlines Los Angeles Event

Rep. Ilhan Omar condemns Islamophobia and fear-mongering.

gling out specific countries for critique and condemnation. As a Muslim, she said she feels compelled to hold everyone to account, be they a friend or foe. “People ask ‘why are you always talking about this particular country and not talking about that particular country?’” she noted. “My choice of a country to talk about…is based on what country is violating basic human rights,” she said. “I will criticize that country because I know that every country is capable of living up to their best and every leader has the ability to lead with compassion and to lead with justice.”

Hussam Ayloush, the executive director of CAIR-LA, said the election of Rep. Omar shows the progress being made towards equitable representation. “We used to be

the outside people, today we are the inside people, we’ve made it!” he said. He addressed the massacre in New Zealand, praising the country’s leadership for standing up against Islamophobia, bigotry and discrimination.

Ayloush also addressed the threats against the event. “The threats which came to the Hilton Hotel were unprecedented,” he said. “We had to hire extra security which cost us more than the food at this hotel.

But, we are persistent.”

CAIR-LA honored three activists at the banquet: Jennifer Hyatt (who had her hijab forcefully removed while in police custody in Thousand Oaks, CA) was presented with the Champion of Courage Award; attorney Zakia Kator was presented with the Champion of Community Activism Award; and Jewish Voice for Peace was presented with the Champion of Justice Award.

—Samir Twair and Dale Sprusansky

California Activists Participate in “Muslim Day at the Capitol”

Amid a time of heightened Islamophobia in the United States, the California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-CA) hosted its eighth annual “Muslim Day at the Capitol” April 22 in Sacramento.

The all-day event drew some 650 Muslims of all ages from across the Golden State to discuss important human rights and civil liberties issues with state legislators.

During their meetings in the Capitol of-

STAFF PHOTO PHIL PASQUINI

MUSLIM AMERICAN ACTIVISM

On the Sacramento Capitol steps, students prepare for meetings with their representatives.

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PHOTO COURTESY ARAB AMERICA

fices, high school students and community who stand for peace and justice. Vote for cluding a falafel bar, and beverages from members urged passage of the following people who are anti-military intervention Palestine—Bethlehem wine, Birzeit beer bills and one proposed amendment to the and who would put the trillions of dollars and Ramallah arak provided by Terra that we put into war into our hospitals, Sancta. To perfect the ambiance, Syrian California Constitution: • High School Graduation Require- schools, education system and the infra- oudist/vocalist Muaz Edriss and his band ments Act (AB331), which would mandate structure here in the United States. Those performed favorite tunes.

Following the reception, guests joined the completion of one semester of ethnic are the people that I want to represent me an authentic zeffi for Palestinian Ameristudies to the state’s high school gradua- in office.”

The large increase in attendance at this can Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), who was tion requirements; • Free the Vote Act (ACA 6), which year’s event “illustrates that California Mus- followed up a winding staircase by an would amend the California Constitution lims are strengthening their political muscle entourage of more than 30 people, uluto restore voting rights to people on pa- and helping influence California politics for lating, singing and playing percussional a more inclusive, tolerant and just state for instruments. Tlaib joked that this zeffi role; • California Act to Save Lives (AB392), all,” said CAIR-Sacramento Valley/Central was more impressive than the one at her which would make clear that police offi- California chapter executive director Basim own wedding in Palestine!

Warren David, president of Arab Amercers should only use deadly force when Elkarra in closing remarks.

—Elaine Pasquini ica, welcomed guests and announced they do not have other options. It would that his organization received more than redefine the circumstances under which a 105 proclamations from 28 states comhomicide by a police officer is deemed ARAB AMERICAN ACTIVISM memorating National Arab American justifiable, for example, in self-defense or Heritage Month. in defense of another person.

Arab America Celebrates National Dr. Amal David, director of operations On the Capitol steps, California state AsArab American Heritage Month and community outreach at Arab Amersembly members Jose Medina (D-61st Assembly District), Shirley Weber (D-79th As- More than 300 community leaders, digni- ica, introduced Tlaib, who was her stusembly District) and Kevin McCarty (D-7th taries, members of Congress and friends dent in a public high school in Detroit.

Assembly District) discussed the impor- celebrated Arab America’s “National Arab Tlaib told attendees that they should tance and necessity of these proposed bills. American Heritage Month” at an event on never change their views in order to fit Among many topics in her wide-ranging April 30 in Washington, DC. Guests were in. “You don’t have to change anything keynote address, MPower Change founder encouraged to wear their traditional Arab about yourself,” she declared. “I want you to believe that, don’t let them believe and executive director Linda Sarsour fashions. stressed that all Americans should have acThe event began with a reception fea- that our position around Palestinian cess to a quality education and healthcare. turing examples of Arab culture. Atten- rights is crazy. It isn’t—it’s about human In addition, she argued, “Everyone living in dees sampled Yemeni coffee and then dignity.”

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) commisthe United States–including undocumented visited a fortune teller to have their cofimmigrants–should be treated with dignity fee cups read. Next they could visit a erated with her audience, who may be and respect. This is common humanity.” henna station to decorate their hands shocked by unconstitutional travel bans Supporting human rights for everyone is with traditional designs. Of course, the and inflammatory language directed not “a liberal or progressive issue,” she reception also featured Arabic food, in- against Arabs and Muslims. She also described her efforts to get the pointed out. “Don’t let people give U.S. out of Yemen and her deyou a label or tell you that you sire to see the war end. are too liberal or too far to the left.

House Majority Whip Rep. No, you are just being a Muslim, Jim Clyburn (D-SC) urged liswhich means you stand up for teners to help make this counhuman rights and the dignity of try’s greatness apply fairly and all people. Being Muslim means equitably to all of its citizens. speaking truth to power regardRep. Judy Chu (D-CA) less of the consequences.” talked about her new legislaThe upcoming 2020 election, tion which would ensure “that she told the crowd, “is not about no other president will target who you like. It’s about who is a group like [Muslims] again.” the best candidate for the community. Elect people to office (L-r) Dr. Amal David, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib and Warren She noted that already 100 members of Congress have who stand for human rights, David celebrate their Arab heritage.

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PHOTO COURTESY KTH

PHOTO COURTESY MPP

years, the KTH Leadership co-sponsored the “No Ban Program has grown into a Act,” which would repeal the global movement, and sucMuslim Ban. ceeded in connecting PalesRep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY) tinian youth in the Diaspora to decried the “violence and their shared homeland and to crimes motivated by prejuone another, building a netdice that are unfortunately a work of advocates who work daily reality that we all face.” collaboratively for the unificaShe urged people to “stand tion of Palestinians everytogether in our humanity to where.” He added, “In spite of fight back so that our chilthe many challenges we face dren in this society will not as Palestinians, both at home inherit a society like the one and abroad, KTH continues to we have inherited.”

Rep. Debra Haaland (D- The Museum of the Palestinian People (MPP), the first museum in produce bold ‘Ambassadors NM) said, “Represented by Washington, DC devoted to celebrating Palestinian history, art and of Peace’ who are taking the countless musicians, doc- culture, offered a “sneak peek” on April 27, before opening its doors for program to new heights each tors, artists, scientists and real on June 15, 2019. Donors and community leaders came together to year.” celebrate the completion of construction on the new state-of-the art More than 150 people atmultiple Nobel laureates, gallery, next door to Middle East Books and More and the Washington Arab Americans have made Report’s offices. MPP c0-founders, (l-r) Fakhira Halloun, Bshara Nassar tended the banquet, including extraordinary contributions and Nizar Farsakh have worked very hard to turn this dream into reality. some who traveled from California and Texas. The particito our country since the first major wave of immigrants arrived here Birthright, or the American Israel Education pants viewed videos of KTH’s past trips more than a century ago.”

Foundation (an AIPAC spin-off), and others and listened to participants describe the Washington, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser have organized and financed trips to Israel life-changing experience.

Palestinian American comedians Amer presented a proclamation on behalf of the for Jewish Americans. Those tours entice 700,000 residents of the District of Colum- many to stay and serve in various Israeli in- Zahr and Maysoon Zayid both shared their bia and also noted the many contributions stitutions, including the Israeli army, or to own experiences as Palestinians raised in

by Arab Americans to this nation. return to the U.S. and advocate on behalf America, as well as their experiences Ambassador of the Arab League Salah of Israel. KTH hopes to encourage Pales- while visiting Palestine.

To date, KTH boasts a network of over Sarhan noted that his organization has tinians to visit their homeland and get to dedicated a bureau for Arab expatriates know firsthand the challenges and joys 300 alumni from 20 countries and 5 contiin Cairo. Since 2012 the Arab League Palestinians living under Israeli occupation nents, including Australia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, El Salvador, France, has worked to help Arab Americans cele- endure and experience on a daily basis. brate their heritage and community.

Rateb Rabie, president of HCEF and Guatemala, Honduras, Italy, Jordan, —Delinda C. Hanley KTH, noted that, “Over the past eight Nicaragua, Qatar, Spain, the UK, the UAE and the U.S. Know Thy Heritage Holds Rabie says that, “As the program grew Inaugural Banquet over the years it has demonstrated a selfsustaining multiplier effect with those who Know Thy Heritage (KTH) launched itself were part of the first delegation becoming as a stand-alone organization at an inauleaders for the next.” gural banquet at the Key Bridge Marriott in He added that KTH empowers PalestinArlington, VA on April 27. KTH sponsors ian youth in the Diaspora by strengthening Palestinians in the Diaspora, aged 18 to 35, their knowledge of their Palestinian idenwho want to discover their roots in Palestity, culture, history and traditions, as well tine. KTH has existed for several years as as their understanding of the Palestinian part of the Holy Land Christian Ecumenical economic environment, political landFoundation (HCEF). With this new launch, scape, social structures and conditions. the organization seeks to appeal to a much KTH’s next trip to Palestine will take wider base of Palestinians living throughout place between July 11 and July 21, 2019. the U.S., Canada, South and Latin America, Europe and Australia.

(L-r) Rateb Rabie, William Langhorne with For more information, please visit <https:// kthps.org>.

—Said Arikat For decades, pro-Israel groups such as his daughters and Dr. Najat Arafat Khelil.

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NAAWA volunteers and boardmembers pose with Rep. Rashida Tlaib.

walks the halls of Congress. “I tell her— mom—he should be afraid of us!” She concluded by promising Arab American women she’d have their back, and urging them to have her’s!

Phyllis Bennis described needed changes in U.S. foreign policy. “We have the right to determine how $3.8 billion of our tax-payer’s money is spent,” she said. “Israel needs to be held accountable for violations of human rights and international law.” —Delinda C. Hanley

Arab-American Heritage Festival

An Arab-American heritage festival entertained and educated visitors to the Montgomery County Maryland campus of Johns Hopkins University on April 27.

Sponsors included MyArabicHouse.com, Arab America, Al-Waha Language Village, Maktabatee.com, Kalimah Programs and Middle East Books and More.

Guests enjoyed comedy, songs, dabke dance lessons, calligraphy, henna and lots and lots of food.

Arab-American leaders introduced their organizations. Speakers from the National Arab American Women’s Association encouraged women to join. Warren David, president of Arab America, a leading provider of digital media, said that 26 states celebrated Arab-American heritage in April.

Omar Baddar, deputy director of the Arab American Institute, described the meaningful contributions Arab Americans

have made in medicine, business, sports, film and politics. He encouraged the audience to run for office because 3.5 million Arab Americans need better political and social representation. He urged them to have a voice, since they’re all tax-payers, and to work to gain political empowerment, improve U.S. foreign policy and fight discrimination.

Yasmin Elhady, a lawyer, comedian and matchmaker, had her audience in stitches as she described her experiences as a Muslim Libyan American growing up in rural Alabama after 9/11.

(Elhady was elected senior class president in a landslide victory thanks to a rap song she performed to a Vanilla Ice tune.

She also shared one fan’s comment on

STAFF PHOTO D. HANLEY

The National Arab American Women’s Association (NAAWA) held its fourth annual dinner on April 7 at the Tysons Corner Sheraton Hotel in Virginia, featuring guest speakers Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Phyllis Bennis, from the Institute for Policy Studies. Emcee Noura Erakat, a human rights attorney and assistant professor at George Mason University, started the evening with a fitting Mahmoud Darwish poem, which includes the lines: I am from there. I am from here.

I am not there and I am not here.

I have two names, which meet and part, and I have two languages.

I forget which of them I dream in...

Erakat went on to charge the Trump administration with “ripping families apart” at our borders and denying desperate refugees a safe haven in the United States. Then she recounted the unprecedented strides made by Arab American women, like Tlaib, in this country.

Past presidents of NAAWA, including Najat Arafat Khelil, Ph.D., described how NAAWA is empowering women and helping build the Arab American community.

Mona Sadeq-Omar, the current president, talked about NAAWA’s programs for new immigrants, outreach to local schools, efforts to improve social studies curriculums, and getting out the vote.

Tlaib shared her life story. Growing up the eldest of 14 children in Detroit, she said she’s always been a mama bear who wouldn’t let others mess with her siblings. Now she uses that same drive to unapologetically care for people in her district. For example, she told a story about a “rich guy” who built a fence near his house on public park land. She made him take it down. Her constituents bragged, “our representative is Palestinian. You can’t just occupy our land!”

Tlaib said she is speaking out for everyone, including “children who are caged at our borders, locked up, like Palestinian children.”

Tlaib’s mother is worried about her, so afraid that President Donald Trump

PHOTO COURTESY NAAWA

Palestinian Women Leaders Making a Difference

A shopper admires P is for Palestine at the Middle East Books and More booth.

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her bright green abaya. She gushed, “I didn’t know kids could join a convent!”)

Everyone enjoyed the fun as they celebrated the joys of Arab-American heritage.

—Delinda C. Hanley

said. “It’s harder to sell things that aren’t your own.” Ultimately, however, she wants to be able to spend more time at home. “Instead of traveling around the world, I want to be able to stay put, send the products out, or travel for shorter periods of time,” she said.

Palestinians Celebrate Heritage Awawda raised some concerns about the With a Fashion Show future of the organization, noting that the precarious situation of Palestine perpetuThe Multicultural Affairs Committee in the ates a climate of uncertainty. “I think the city of Gaithersburg in Maryland hosted a shop could be a big problem for us soon,” “DiverseCity Showcase” on May 11 at the she said. Luckily, Awawda does have some Lakeforest Mall. Mayor Jud Ashman, Mulreason for hope. Poland and ticultural Chair Jose Contrthe UK often provide finaneras and a diverse audience cial support to the group, she enjoyed listening to African said. “They give us materials, storytelling and watching help us train our women in traditional Chinese, Mexiweaving and embroidering, can, Indian, Peruvian and and even prepared a room Irish folk dances. for the kids who come with Longtime Gaithersburg their mothers to work to play resident and educator in,” she noted, smiling. With Samira Hussein, who has the financial aid of these two headed Arab American generous nations, Women in Heritage Month activities Hebron was able to open up for decades, presented a a center for training and emPalestinian fashion show. broidering in Idna, a PalestinAs Hussein introduced Dede and her daughter Maya display their Palestinian culture. ian town 13 kilometers west each model, she described Palestinian culture as well as their hand- in her travels, as the founder of the Women of Hebron.

Women in Hebron prioritizes employing embroidered dresses. Dede, holding the in Hebron collective, Nawal Slemiah, travhand of her toddler daughter Maya, stole eled with her. Sadly, “her husband was killed and empowering Palestinian women over the show.

—Delinda C. Hanley 5 months ago by the Israeli army, so she financial gain. “If we have money left over, can’t travel anytime soon. She has to be at the end of the year, we divide it amongst with her children,” Awawda explained. Tak- all the women,” noted Awawda. “What we MUSIC & ARTS ing on the responsibility and hardship alone, want,” she explained, “is to employ women Awawda has travelled beyond the borders and provide them with a sufficient salary for Hebron Women’s Cooperative of the West Bank for a total of three months the crafts they make.”

Brings Embroidery to U.S. Before Women in Hebron, Awawda crethis year, following last year’s 7-month-long The Washington Report on Middle East Af- business trip. Hotels are not an option for ated handmade embroidery and other prodfairs’ bookstore, Middle East Books and Awawda. “I stay with people and More, hosted Leila Hasan Awawda, busi- friends of friends,” she explained, ness manager of the Women in Hebron co- as “staying at a hotel would be too operative, at its store May 22-23 for a spe- expensive.”

When asked why she feels the cial sale of handmade items from Palestine.

Women in Hebron is a nonprofit fair-trade need to travel rather than ship cooperative comprised of 150 women from items, Awawda replied, “We got various villages in and around Hebron in an offer from Amazon, but…shipthe West Bank. The goal of the organization ping costs more than the money is to produce and sell traditional Palestinian we would make from selling the handcrafted goods, such as embroidery products.” She said there’s also and jewelry. Most of the items are made in value in selling your own product. accordance with traditional methods, while “When you talk about your prod- Leila Hasan Awawda displays some of her Palestinian others are inspired by personal ingenuity. ucts, you can sell it easily,” she embroidery at Middle East Books and More.

STAFF PHOTO M. KHATIB

PHOTO COURTESY THE MULTICULTURAL AFFAIRS COMMITTEE

“When we were young, our moms taught us how to embroider, but I learned how to make jewelry on my own,” Awawda said.

When asked why she came to the U.S. to do business rather than selling the products in Hebron, Awawda replied, “If it was easy for me to sell our products at the shop, I would, but it’s not working out,” due to difficulties posed by Israel’s suffocating occupation of the West Bank, and Hebron in particular.

In previous years, Awawda was not alone

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ucts in Jerusalem, “but when they blocked the border to Jerusalem, I couldn’t work again and started working for Women in Hebron,” she said.

Despite the tiresome effort Women in Hebron demands of Awawda, she is thankful for the cooperative. “Embroidery is my job, my business; it is everything to me,” she said.

Visitors to Middle East Books and More will now find a selection of Awawda’s stunning items for sale.

—Mia Khatib

Film Series Provokes Thought, Dialogue About Holy Land

This was the fifth year of film screenings in Washington, DC-area churches and other community settings focused on exploring the complex, difficult and emotional issues preventing peace in Israel/Palestine. This year’s films were sourced from a library of films on the Israel/Palestine/United States tragedy curated by the Voices from the Holy Land Committee, with support from more than 50 interfaith organizations and human rights advocates.

The voices and visuals of life under military occupation make these films an excellent vehicle for community organizing. They also offer an opportunity to invite congressional staff from local district offices, as each film conveys a message that is important for members of Congress to weigh as they vote for more militarized and one-sided policies in Israel/Palestine.

This year’s features included Julia Bacha’s “Naila and the Uprising,” which tells the story of a woman from Gaza joining a clandestine network of women determined to make the world recognize the Palestinian right to selfdetermination during the first intifada. This network of resistance originated with a few committed women and moved the world.

The documentary chronicles the nonviolent organizing that laid one more brick in an ongoing foundation to create a just peace. A discussion following the film featured Mai Abdul Rahman, founder of the American Palestinian Women’s Association.

“1948: Creation and Catastrophe,” directed by Andy Trimlett and Ahlam MuhJUNE/JULY 2019

taseb, provided riveting first-person narratives of the Nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic) from both Palestinians and Israelis. One scene depicts Palestinians being forced to vacate their homes in a town that, days later, turns into a haven for refugees fleeing Europe’s Holocaust extermination camps.

Archival footage and interviews with underground Jewish militant terror groups belie the myth that Palestinians left voluntarily.

The post-screening discussion featured author and activist Miko Peled, the son of Israeli general Matti Peled, who was one of the signatories of Israel’s Declaration of Independence.

The final film, Zelda Edmunds’ “Imprisoning a Generation,” follows the stories of four young Palestinian children arrested in night raids on their homes, and in some cases, detained and imprisoned in Israeli military jails.

Film footage of arrested and blindfolded children being hauled into waiting military jeeps with guns trained on their young bodies is an image that stays with the viewer whose U.S. policies enable this behavior. The resulting trauma can cause the children to experience permanent neurological damage and harm their mental development.

All are encouraged to learn more about the films and explore educational resources at <www.voicesfromtheholyland.org>.

—Mary Neznek

WAGING PEACE Despite Entry Ban, Activist Omar Barghouti Speaks to DC Audience

The day before Omar Barghouti, co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, was set to begin a speaking tour in the U.S., he was notified by au-

thorities at Ben Gurion Airport that he would not be allowed to board his flight to the United States. Told it was an immigration matter, the order came from the U.S. consulate in Tel Aviv via U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. His denial of entry came despite Barghouti holding a U.S. visa valid through January 2021.

On April 11, Barghouti was scheduled to speak at an event co-hosted by the Arab American Institute (AAI) and New York University (NYU) at NYU’s Washington, DC campus. AAI President James Zogby called Barghouti’s entry denial not just a violation of his rights, but also a “clear violation of our rights as American citizens.” He went on to say that “our regressive, discriminatory immigration laws are an impediment to free speech” and that AAI would be exploring legal options to allow Barghouti into the country.

Barghouti appeared at the event via Skype with NYU professor Peter Beinart, who stated that he was not in support of the BDS movement and challenged Barghouti on his pro-BDS stance.

When pressed by Beinart about his personal views on violence, Barghouti reiterated his, and the BDS movement’s, commitment to nonviolence. While highlighting Palestinians’ right to resist under the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Barghouti stated that the movement does not take a stance on legitimizing violence of any kind. Instead, the movement seeks ways to end all violence.

“To end all violence we must end the root cause of violence, that is occupation, settlercolonialism, and apartheid,” Barghouti said.

Beinart asked whether or not the BDS movement has failed in its goals of isolating Israel since the country presently enjoys close relations with the leaders of the U.S., Brazil, India, the Arab Gulf States, Eastern Europe, and several African countries. Noting that the governments Beinart mentioned all have farright nationalist or authoritarian leaders, Barghouti responded by saying that “no Israeli should be comfortable with the fact

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STAFF PHOTO D. HANLEY

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the editor of Palestine Chronicle, that Israel has [now] become began. Palestinians have been the poster boy for the far-right perceived over the years accordunder Trump’s leadership.” ing to who is defining them, he Citing a Likud Knesset memsaid. If you’re pro-Palestinian they ber, Barghouti went on to say that are victims of Israeli colonialism, the paradigm in Israel has shifted Israeli oppression or American to where it is now acceptable for imperialism. If you’re pro-Israel world leaders to be anti-Semitic, you see Palestinians as a violent as long as they support Israeli creature, even a terrorist. Both policies and actions. Barghouti said that while Israel is winning Peter Beinart (l) and Omar Barghouti (on the screen) discuss the descriptions are unfair, Baroud charged. the far-right, it is losing its moral Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

Palestinian political consciousstature around the world—including with Jewish millennials, who cannot anti-BDS legislation, they’re not betraying ness or identity goes back a hundred reconcile their liberal values with what Is- Palestinian rights only, they’re betraying years, or even to the 17th century, he said. the U.S. Constitution, they’re betraying Palestinians rose up against the Ottomans rael is doing today vis-à-vis Palestinians.

Looking internally at the BDS move- your civil rights, and no one is safe.” If they and so many other invaders. Other nament, Barghouti was asked why the move- get away with [doing] this, who knows tional identities were formed by their anticolonial struggles and their fights for indement does not take a stance on a political who’s next?” he said.

After the event, Barghouti released a pendence throughout the 19th and 20th settlement (one-state vs. two-state solucenturies. Unlike in Egypt, Algeria and tion) to the conflict. Stating that taking statement regarding his entry denial: “This U.S. entry ban against me, which other nations, that process for Palestinians such a position is beyond their mandate as a human rights organization, he said the is ideologically and politically motivated, is was interrupted due to the creation of Ismovement focuses on highlighting Israel’s part of Israel’s escalating repression rael, which Baroud called “a western colooppression in the hopes that international against Palestinian, Israeli and interna- nial implant.”

Palestinians have no quarrel with the awareness and action will help bring about tional human rights defenders in the BDS Palestinian self-determination and a just movement for freedom, justice and equal- Jewish people, Baroud emphasized, “only ity. Israel is not merely continuing its with their violations of international law.” and peaceful resolution to the conflict.

Zionists like to say there was never a During the question-and-answer ses- decades-old system of military occupation, sion, the Washington Report asked Bargh- apartheid and ethnic cleansing; it is in- Palestinian people, but Baroud argued outi for the BDS movement’s response to creasingly outsourcing its outrageous, Mc- Palestine didn’t just start existing when the Arab Gulf normalization with Israel, as well Carthyite repression to the U.S. and to Zionist movement began and its leaders as anti-BDS legislation in the U.S. Bargh- xenophobic, far-right cohorts across the were trying to choose where to settle— Uganda, Patagonia, Argentina or Palesouti responded by saying that while rela- world.”

During his trip to the U.S., Barghouti tine...The city of Jericho existed for 10,000 tions between Israel and Arab Gulf regimes are making headway, these was also scheduled to attend his daugh- or 11,000 years. So, for example, when —Sami Tayeb Newt Gingrich (a former Republican cancloser relations do not resonate with the ter’s wedding. didate for president), says the Palestinians people of these countries. Citing statistics Popular Resistance: Reclaiming the are an “invented people,” he’s just playing from 2018, he stated that the question of on the deep insecurity of Zionists, Baroud Palestine is still the leading issue for the Narrative and Recreating the Self majority of citizens in the Gulf States, and Dr. Ramzy Baroud, journalist, author and said. They know what they did to create thus until Israel ends its oppression of frequent Washington RePalestinians there can be no complete port contributor, delivnormalization of relations with Israel by ered the prestigious these states.

2019 Hisham Sharabi Furthermore, he said he was horrified by Memorial Lecture on the number of lies and fabrications found May 9 at Washington, in BDS legislation in the U.S. “How can the DC’s Palestine Center.

United States, with its proud heritage of re“I believe in a version specting boycotts as a matter of freedom of history that is known of speech protected by the U.S. Constitu- as history from below, a tion, accept this McCarthyism?” he ques- people’s history...It’s not tioned. He added that, “when states pass sentimental,” Baroud, Ramzy Baroud at the Palestine Center in Washington, DC. 56

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pute with Israel over the distribution of tax the Jewish state is absolutely horrific, and The New Palestinian Government: revenues. they also know they can’t sustain their proAny Hope for Reconciliation?

Grace Wermenbol, a non-resident scholar ject without using extreme forms of violence.

The Middle East Institute held a panel dis- at MEI, pointed out that in mid-February, the Baroud went on to describe Israel’s lat- cussion in Washington, DC on May 3 to dis- Israeli government—in violation of the 1994 est onslaught which killed 27 and injured cuss the current state of the Palestinian Au- Paris Protocol—decided to withhold some of 200 people, and the Great March of Re- thority (PA) and the Palestinian national the tax money they collect on behalf of the turn, the non-violent popular struggle at the movement following the April 2019 appoint- Palestinians. Israel is deducting 7 percent of border fence, which killed more than 250 ment of Mohammad Shtayyeh as the new the taxes that should be transferred to the PA monthly, she explained. “The deduction and wounded more than 17,000. Seeing prime minister of the Palestinian Authority.

Israel’s victims every day at the fence is a Tamara Kharroub, assistant executive di- is equivalent to the amount that, according reminder of what they’ve done, he said, rector of the Arab Center Washington DC, to the Israeli government, is handed over by and that Palestinians are still there, so the began by noting Shtayyeh’s challenges in the PA to Palestinians in Israeli prisons and Zionist project is not complete. fostering national reconciliation. “Shtayyeh Palestinian families of those killed by Israeli Palestinians must share their real his- did try to form an inclusive PLO govern- troops,” Wermenbol explained. The tax detory, Baroud continued. He has captured ment, but faced resistance from within duction is thus a form of sanction against the some of those narratives in interviews Fatah,” she explained. Additionally, several Palestinian people for transferring money to published in his book, The Last Earth: A political factions declined to participate in individuals Israel considers terrorists, and their families.

Palestinian Story, available In response to this move, from Middle East Books and Palestinian Authority PresiMore. Baroud describes his dent Mahmoud Abbas “angrandfather who refused to nounced that he would refuse pack his family’s blankets all tax revenue if a part were when they were driven out of withheld,” she said. Considertheir village because “they ing the tax revenue accounts were coming right back...The for 63 percent of the PA budArab world won’t let this hapget, Abbas’s refusal has left pen,” he assured his wife.

Palestine in a financial crisis They spent the rest of their and “has brought the PA near lives talking about that miseconomic collapse.” take!

Palestinian writer and acWhen Palestinians tried to tivist Ahmed Abu Artema, return to their land to harvest Grace Wermenbol (l) and Brian Barber (r) note the economic and political speaking via video, expressed their crops, Israeli soldiers issues confronting Palestine. ambivalence toward the killed them in what became known as “the death zone.” One of Baroud’s the government, arguing that the “govern- change in leadership, describing it as a rerelatives went home to pick his figs and his ment serves the interests of Fatah, not the branding of the status quo. “We cannot say gut was opened and stuffed with those figs. interests of the Palestinian people,” she there is an essential political change along His grandmother got the message and noted. Meanwhile, Hamas and Islamic with the change of the prime minister, bestopped trying to go home.

Jihad were not even invited to join the gov- cause the real factors that form the reality didn’t change,” he noted. The unchanged The stories in Baroud’s book reflect ernment.

Palestinian cultural values: sumoud Making matters worse, Kharroub noted reality is that Israel is denying the Palestini(steadfastness) and muqwama (resis- that many Palestinians view Shtayyeh’s ap- ans basic freedoms, while Fatah continues tance). These are the cultural tools Pales- pointment as illegitimate, given the lack of to be uncompromising in its relations with tinians inherited from each generation, and national elections since 2005 and the fact Hamas, he said. “There’s a common feeling they’ve been used against each previous that the Palestinian Legislative Council, among Palestinians that there’s no horizon invader long before Israel was established. which is supposed to approve a new cabi- for the reconciliation’s success,” commented Abu Artema.

They refuse to be marginalized. In fact, at net, has not functioned since 2007.

“Currently in Gaza, I would say that psytimes, they’ve fought their own leadership.

The new prime minister also faces grave That’s the reality. Palestinians have been financial realities. “The PA is facing one of chologically people are weary,” said Brian there since the beginning of time and its worst financial crises in recent years,” Barber, a fellow at New America’s internathey’ll always be there.

Kharroub noted. This crisis is due to funding tional security program and senior fellow at —Delinda C. Hanley cuts by the U.S. administration and a dis- the Institute for Palestine Studies. Providing JUNE/JULY 2019

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that Iran not be permitted to enrich any uranium. Additionally, Vaez observed that Iran has traditionally only agreed to negotiations when it is in a place of strength, rather than weakness. Iran, he noted, was on the cusp of attaining nuclear weapon capabilities, and thus possessed significant leverage, when it began negotiating the nuclear deal.

The Trump administration’s decision to pull out of the nuclear deal and resume a sanctions campaign against Iran has thus far done little to alter Tehran’s behavior, according to Vaez. If the president is serious about reaching a new deal with Iran, Vaez believes he ought to appoint a special envoy who has a demonstrated record of being able to negotiate with Iran. The status quo, he opined, simply indicates to the Iranians that the U.S. is not serious about diplomacy. “It’s almost ludicrous to believe that John Bolton and Secretary Pompeo actually want a win-win solution with the Iranians,” he said.

Kadir Ustun, executive director of the Does the Trump Administration SETA Foundation’s Washington, DC office, Have a Coherent Iran Policy? believes it’s unlikely President Trump will empower an envoy to negotiate with Iran, Amid the U.S. ratcheting up its sanctions given his penchant for one-on-one diploregime against Iran and directing increasmacy (as demonstrated by his meetings ingly bellicose language toward the country, with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un). “He the SETA Foundation convened a timely wants to get a deal, but it has to be on his event at its Washington, DC offices on May own terms—however he defines it and sells 2 to analyze “Trump’s Maximum Pressure it to the public,” he said. “In the meantime Campaign Against Iran.” The event feahe’s happy to just keep applying pressure tured dialogue between supporters and dewithout it necessarily resulting in a compretractors of President Barack Obama’s nuhensive policy solution.” clear deal with Tehran.

The current absence of a viable diploBarbara Slavin, director of the Future of matic path means that Iran is Iran Initiative at the Atlantic likely to continue bearing the Council, accused President brunt of U.S. sanctions. Slavin Donald Trump’s administration believes the Iranian regime of deploying a dangerous and can survive these sanctions, incoherent policy vis-à-vis at least in the short-term. “AlIran. “What is the strategy? most every Democratic candiWhat is the goal?” she asked. date for president has said “I fail to see the strategy. I fail that they would return to the to see a realistic goal.”

JCPOA [nuclear deal] if President Trump, Slavin elected, so it’s a matter of noted, claims to want to negowaiting until at least our 2020 tiate a “better deal” with Iran, elections,” she said. “If Trump but he is empowering hawks is re-elected, I think Iran will such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National (L-r) Kılıç Kanat, Mike Doran, Barbara Slavin, Ali Vaez and Kadir Ustun have to recalibrate and renegotiate, but I think it can surSecurity Adviser John Bolton debate the efficacy of the Trump administration’s Iran policy. who appear to be intent on pursuing regime change. “If you want to negotiate a new agreement, how can you do that if what you’re saying is that essentially this regime must go for that to be possible?” she asked.

Mike Doran, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, insisted that the Trump administration does have a clear goal: to contain Iran and reverse President Obama’s conciliatory approach toward the country. A detractor of the 2015 nuclear deal, he insisted the Trump administration could be doing a lot more to pressure Tehran. “I think it’s wrong to call what we have a maximum pressure campaign,” he said. “We have maximum pressure rhetoric backed-up by some real actions, but it has yet to come anywhere close to maximum pressure, either in the economic sphere or in terms of the effort to contain Iran on the ground.”

Slavin, on the other hand, described the Trump administration’s approach as “cruel and counterproductive.” She explained: “It’s cruel because the main victims are ordinary people and it’s counterproductive because it’s not going to produce a dramatic change in Iran’s regional posture. If anything, Iran may become more aggressive and more belligerent.”

Ali Vaez, the Iran Project director at the International Crisis Group, believes the historical record suggests that hostile overtures do not draw Iran to the negotiating table. He said Tehran only embraced substantial diplomacy after President Obama took regime change off the table and backed off the long-standing U.S. position

PHOTO COURTESY SETA FOUNDATION

insight to the Palestinians’ mental state, Barber believes this weariness arises from economic conditions, political failures, deep distrust in government and the overwhelming feeling of being trapped in Gaza.

After Barber’s most recent visit to Gaza, he noticed how residents of the besieged strip went from mocking Trump’s peace plan to fearing that it could result in their removal from the territory. “People are talking about what it’s going to be like living in Sinai,” he said.

Barber ended the discussion by explaining how many Gazans truly feel about the March of Return. “I found disinterest and often defiant opposition to the march,” he said. Opposition sprung from the belief that the march was co-opted by Hamas, to being dissatisfied with its unsuccessful outcomes. When he asked one prominent individual in Gaza about the march, Barber said the man cynically replied, “Has one single person returned?”

—Mia Khatib

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entrepreneurs. He noted ways vive until then and just tighten Tunisia is hindering its own its belt.” Added Vaez: “The one economic growth post-revoluthing the Iranians consider tion, such as an overbearing more dangerous than suffering bureaucracy and unstable pofrom sanctions is surrendering litical framework. Malouche to them.” pointed out that often the While all the panelists believe hyper-bureaucratic policies the president does not want a surrounding business in war (even the hawkish Doran Tunisia causes entrepreneurs admitted that it’s “in the ethos of to go elsewhere, as doing Donald Trump that the days of business in their country regime change policy of the proves too frustrating. “Tunisia United States are over”), there has an administration of conremains the alarmingly high potrol, not an administration of tential for war to break out amid services,” he said. increasing tensions. Vaez fears Karim Fitouri (l), founder of Olivko, a Tunisian olive oil company, In addition to red tape, the the administration’s strategy celebrates after Olivko won the Gold Award at the 2017 New York government is still recovering could prompt Iran to exit the nuInternational Olive Oil Competition. from years of political uncerclear deal and ratchet-up its nutainty, which translates into economic unclear program in an effort to gain leverage. turn and high unemployment rates.

This, he said, “means we would have to go Karim Fitouri, a highly successful entre- certainty, even at basic levels. However, through a nuclear crisis before we get back preneur from Djerba, who in 2014 Malouche added that despite political and to the negotiating table—and with this na- founded the olive oil company Olivko, economic roadblocks, many Tunisian tional security team in the White House, began by sharing his story. As a busi- companies have found success as startthat means war.” nessman originally working in London, he ups, with some help from international inUltimately, the decision of how to deal saw value in Tunisian exports after the vestors. The next step, he said, is to find with Iran rests in the hands of the comman- revolution and decided to launch his busi- ways to keep the companies within der in chief, and, Doran acknowledged, it is ness. While the economic situation re- Tunisia to sustain economic progress.

The main takeaways of each of the possible, if not probable, that President mains rough, Fitouri is sure his success Trump is not even sure where he wants to shows there are opportunities for entre- panelists fell along the lines of a need for the simplification of the bureaucratic sysgo with Iran. Asked by moderator Kılıç preneurs to take advantage of in Tunisia.

Kanat of the SETA Foundation what he Louise Stoner Crawford, the managing tem, education reform, and better domessees as the objective of the administration’s director for the Tunisian American Enter- tic resources for doing business. Malcurrent Iran policy, Doran responded: “No- prise Fund (TAEF), discussed her organi- ouche argued that although Tunisia is body knows the answer to that. The only zation’s efforts to support start-ups in often praised for having a highly educated person who could answer that question de- Tunisia. She praised the organization’s population, investors would be more interfinitively is Donald Trump, and he’s not team of Tunisians and Americans who an- ested in seeing cutting-edge information telling anyone, and he may not have an- alyze the Tunisian economy and assesses technology and science in order to spark swered it in his own mind.” the need (or lack thereof) for certain types interest in Tunisian start-ups. Fitouri reassured the audience that starting a busi—Dale Sprusansky of businesses.

“It’s really tough to be an entrepreneur ness can be difficult, but “once you’re in, Economics and Entrepreneurship in Tunisia,” Stoner Crawford acknowl- you’re in,” referring to the idea that buin Post-Revolutionary Tunisia edged. She noted there is not a great deal reaucracy can slow the growth of busiThe Middle East Institute (MEI), in part- of foreign investment in Tunisian compa- ness in Tunisia greatly, but businesses nership with the American Tunisian Asso- nies, which hinders growth and often that can manage to find some success ciation (ATA), hosted a group of panelists causes entrepreneurs to leave the coun- often prosper, including his own.

—Yasmine Mattoussi to discuss the future of Tunisia’s post-rev- try, taking with them their contribution to olutionary economy and its entrepreneurs the Tunisia’s economy.

Linda Sarsour Overcomes Mayoral Mohamed Malouche, the board chairon May 13 in Washington, DC. While Tunisia has received a great deal of man of Tunisian American Young Profes- Opposition in Winnipeg praise globally for its post-uprising political sionals (TAYP) and a partner at Deloitte Although Winnipeg’s mayor attempted to accomplishments, the panelists noted that Afrique, works alongside Stoner Crawford disinvite Linda Sarsour from speaking at a the country still faces an economic down- in efforts to fortify Tunisian start-ups and recent event in the city, free speech preJUNE/JULY 2019

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dependent Jewish Voices, Peace Alliance Winnipeg, the Mennonite Church of Manitoba, the Canadian Palestine Association of Manitoba and the Winnipeg Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid.

Sarsour was also successful in gaining many fans while in the city. During her trip to a local Palestinian restaurant earlier that same day, Sarsour said she was “treated like a rock star.”

—Candice Bodnaruk

Minnesotans Use Map to Publicly Commemorate the Nakba

PHOTO B. MCGRATH

Each year in mid-May, people gather in downtown Northfield, MN to observe the Indigenous Manitoba activist Chantell Barker (l) and Linda Sarsour speak at an event targeted memory of several hundred Palestinian vilby pro-Israel groups in Canada. lages destroyed by Zionist forces in 1948 to facilitate the creation of Israel. After an explavailed and Sarsour spoke to a sold-out apartheid, rather than an armed struggle.

In commenting on being criticized by nation of the history of that event—known as crowd at an event titled “Sorry Not Sorry: Unapologetically Working For Social Jus- Winnipeg Mayor Bowman, Sarsour said, Nakba or “catastrophe” in Arabic —particitice,” sponsored by the Social Planning “I’ve been targeted by the son of the Presi- pants form a line and walk slowly toward a Council and the Canadian Muslim dent of the United States of America. I can large map of Israel/Palestine.

As the names of Arab vilWomen’s Institute on April 24. lages are announced, people The forum focused on women’s put a tiny Palestinian flag into activism and the barriers they the styrofoam map. The 90face in doing their work. minute ceremony concludes Sarsour, an American-born with an open-microphone sesPalestinian activist, was almost sion during which anyone can banned from speaking because comment on the Israeli-Palesof complaints and a petition ortinian conflict, including the role ganized by B’nai B’rith, a proof the United States. ComIsrael advocacy organization. ments at this year’s May 12 Mayor Brian Bowman also pubevent included suggestions of licly denounced Sarsour in Winactions that can be taken to nipeg’s media and asked the provide legislators, news media Social Planning Council to disinand the general public with vite her.

At the forum, Sarsour thanked Activists in Northfield, MN use a map to visualize the hundreds of more perspective on the the Social Planning Council of Palestinian villages forcefully depopulated to facilitate the creation Nakba, an ongoing event that is yet another example of EuroWinnipeg for their patience and of the State of Israel in 1948. peans taking the land of a nawork to bring her to Winnipeg in the face of strong opposition. She also re- take a little mayor from Winnipeg.” She tive people.

—Bill McGrath flected on being a mother, a Muslim and a went on to say, however, that this is the first Palestinian, while at the same time giving time a city’s mayor has ever tried to block advice on social justice organizing. She said her from speaking.

HUMAN RIGHTS Sarsour also acknowledged the small she always tries to set an example for her daughters through her activism, and tells group of protestors outside the event, comRights Denied: Palestinian them “to hold their heads high and walk with menting that she wished she could meet Children Under Occupation with them, so they could hear what she has their backs straight.”

An outspoken advocate for the Boycott, to say and she could hear their stories.

On May 21, at the Middle East Institute in There were many groups in Winnipeg’s Washington, DC, Defense for Children InDivestment and Sanctions movement, Sarsour said she embraces BDS because it is social justice community that came out to ternational-Palestine (DCIP) staff members a non-violent movement against Israeli support Sarsour, including members of In- Farah Bayadsi and Brad Parker spoke at a 60

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discussion titled “Rights Denied: Palestinian Children Under Occupation.” The event came shortly after Rep. Betty McCollum (DMN) introduced H.R. 2407, the “Promoting Human Rights for Palestinian Children Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act” on April 30. DCIP, along with other members of the “No Way to Treat a Child” campaign, worked closely with McCollum on the text of the bill.

Since 1991, DCIP has been providing legal aid to Palestinian children and documenting the human rights violations they experience while in Israeli military custody.

“What we find based on that documentation are widespread, systematic ill treatment of Palestinian child detainees arrested by Israeli forces,” said Parker, senior adviser of policy and advocacy at DCIP. Since 1967, Israeli military law has been enforced in the occupied Palestinian territories. “While military law should apply to any person located in the occupied territories, Israeli authorities only apply military law to the Palestinian population,” explained Parker. “If you’re an Israeli settler or an Israeli citizen living in the West Bank, you have the privilege and benefit of Israeli civilian law, which comes with enhanced rights and protections, more in line with international standards, than what you find in military law,” he said.

Unlike in the West Bank, civilian law is applied within East Jerusalem. “If you are a Palestinian child detained by police forces in East Jerusalem, you do not get prosecuted in military court, you get prosecuted in the civil court,” Parker explained. Although there is enhanced protection for children living under Israeli civil law, “what we find with Palestinian children arrested by Israeli forces in East Jerusalem is that there are exceptions, and those exceptions beJUNE/JULY 2019

come the norm,” Parker noted. “So while under the law, there are increased protections compared to the military framework, the treatment looks very similar.”

Bayadsi, a Palestinian lawyer, explained the process of detention, from the arrest to the release of the child. According to Bayadsi, “from the first moment of their arrest, the violations start.” Often, the children are arrested in the middle of night while sleeping soundly in their bed; this method of arrest applies to approximately 50 percent of Palestinian children.

Rather than taking the child directly to an interrogation site, Bayadsi highlighted how Israeli forces often detour and, “put the child in an outside area, blindfolded with hands cuffed behind their back,” often exposed to extreme temperatures. Unaware of where they are or where they are going, the child is scared and alone throughout the trip to the interrogation center.

The violations continue inside the interrogation center, said Bayadsi. During interrogation, lawyers and parents are not present, and lawyer-client consultations may even take place over the phone, “because of the location of the interrogation center— it’s based in a closed military area—my entrance needs to be approved,” Bayadsi noted.

According to Parker, “One of the most routine pieces of the military detention system…is that of physical violence.” In the West Bank, “three out of four kids experience some form of physical violence from the moment they are detained,” said Parker.

“Unfortunately, the documentation process from the Israeli forces and authorities is not enough and it does not reflect the whole and the actual facts of the arrest,” said Bayadsi, leaving advocates with “only the words of the

child” to develop a case.

The corruption does not stop there, as Israeli authorities often offer food to children in exchange for a false confession, or use other incentives to persuade them to wrongfully admit to crimes. Bayadsi explained, “I have clients—children who confessed because they wanted to eat, they wanted to sleep, they wanted to drink.”

The violations do not exist only within detention, but beyond it. If the child is released, they will be criminalized for life.

“The chances of him being arrested again in the future is much higher than another child who was never arrested,” said Bayadsi.

—Mia Khatib

Palestine Mental Health Network Launches in Belgium

The Palestine Mental Health Network in Belgium has recently been established as a new organization, joining the longstanding UK-Palestine Mental Health Network and USA-Palestine Mental Health Network—representing the first such Network available in French.

These networks focus their activities on making known the impact of the occupation on the health and well-being of Palestinians. These activities are varied: holding conferences and panels, issuing statements to the media, organizing trips for international mental health colleagues to visit Palestine and interact with Palestinian professionals, sponsoring film tours and speaking engagements, and contributing to debates on mental health under occupation within both the scholarly realm and popular media.

The networks function independently of one another in day-to-day matters, but often communicate among themselves to share ideas and strategies. Joint Network projects have included “Don’t Go” campaigns to discourage international professional societies in mental health from holding their meetings and conferences in Israel.

A core belief of the networks is that mental health workers have an important role to play in highlighting human rights violations in Palestine. This role is rooted

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in the broad agendas of both public health and human rights—an aspect of the professional commitment to moral responsibility which is the ethical foundation of all health care.

The networks therefore reach out to a broad base of professionals and workers within health care, recognizing that primary care physicians, nurses and workers in other disciplines often represent the front line of mental health care delivery in addition to psychiatrists, psychologists, and other clinical therapists specializing in mental health. Likewise, research scientists, epidemiologists, human rights activists, school personnel, and many others observe and participate in mental health from a wider perspective and have much to contribute to advocacy on behalf of Palestine.

It must also be said that although these networks began as professional groups focused on human rights for the people of Palestine, they also have a broader human dimension. The networks contribute to the theory of anti-colonial psychology and seek to establish bestpractices of social psychology in the context of political violence. In this way, the networks aim to integrate the psychological experience of Palestine and Palestinians into a global framework.

We welcome the establishment of the Palestine Mental Health Network in Belgium and look forward to further growth within global solidarity networks supporting mental health in Palestine.

—Dr. Samah Jabr and Dr. Elizabeth Berger

PHOTO COURTESY PALESTINE MENTAL HEALTH NETWORK

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Palestinian psychiatrist Dr. Samah Jabr, featured in the film “Beyond the Frontlines: Tales of Resistance and Resilience in Palestine,” which premiered at the Houston Palestinian Film Festival on April 26, 2019. She is on the advisory council of the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network.

at the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, VA, where the Hawash family are members and Safa and Nour work in the communications department. “Within seconds, great numbers of backup soldiers swarmed the area.”

As she assisted an elderly woman in a wheelchair, Nour was grabbed by a female soldier, pushed to the ground and handcuffed, Safa said. During the assault, the sisters’ mother, Germeen Abdelkarim, was knocked to the ground. “My sister was holding her U.S. passport when the female soldier threw it to the side and continued to handcuff her, saying ‘I don’t care about your ID.’ Several soldiers gathered around my sister and barricaded her with their feet and bodies,” Safa recounted. “We were beaten,

kicked, shackled and spat on.” Calling on her congressional representatives to condemn this assault, she noted, “This is only a fragment of what the Palestinian people have to endure on a daily basis.”

“The Dar al-Hijrah community holds our government responsible for making sure that American citizens are protected at home and abroad and that our tax dollars are spent to make sure that justice is served throughout the world,” said Saif Rahman, public and government affairs director at Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center.

“This incident before us is just another reminder of Israel’s disrespect for the United States and American citizens,” Osama Abuirshaid, national policy director of American Muslims for Palestine, told journalists.

“This is a country that we annually give $3.8 billion and it continues its crimes and mistreatment, not only of Palestinian citizens, but of American citizens.” Invoking the Leahy Law of 1961 is necessary, he pointed out, because it requires the State Department to account for each dollar in foreign aid that is given to a specific country and explain how the money is being used.

Abuirshaid also demanded that the Trump administration revisit its policies in relation to Israel and the illegal occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.

“These policies are being directed against Americans because the Israelis know there are no consequences,” he stated. “But there should be consequences, and we should demand that American citizens be respected and protected.”

While visiting the Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount) on their first trip to Jerusalem, Virginia students Nour and Safa Hawash were violently assaulted by Israeli security forces outside of the Dome of the Rock on March 12.

“We went to take photos of the Dome of the Rock when we suddenly heard the sound of gunfire and Israeli soldiers chasing people in all different directions,” Safa Hawash told reporters gathered March 18 62

STAFF PHOTO PHIL PASQUINI

Israeli Soldiers Assault Americans Visiting Jerusalem Holy Site

(L-r) Safa Hawash, Saif Rahman, Nihad Awad and Osama Abuirshaid speak to the media at Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, VA.

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and we are not alone.”

He outlined further actions the PA needs to take, including supporting a campaign of popular resistance, holding Israel accountable through international law, and dissolving the profitability of the occupation. “The occupation is too comfortable for Israel. Not just comfortable, but profitable,” Zomlot said. He mentioned how Israel benefits economically through its control over water, phosphate, quarrying, and gas exploration, as well as import taxes, Israeli companies operating in Area C, and its use of the Palestinian popuDIPLOMATIC DOINGS lation as a captive market. He said that the PA would work through international law to PA Ambassador Husam Zomlot get settlement products banned.

Challenges “Deal of the Century” In light of the current political situation— where Israel is taking unilateral actions, opOn April 13, Husam Zomlot, former head of erating under an apartheid system, and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) passing racist nationality delegation to Washington, DC, laws—Zomlot said that more and current Palestinian Ambasthan ever “international law sador to the UK, gave a talk at the needs to be implemented, not Palestine Center entitled, “The Ulnegotiated.” He emphasized timate Deal: The Palestine Perthat “we [Palestinians] must spective.” speak loudly and more Citing the deterioration of U.S.clearly” to the international Palestine relations, Zomlot, apcommunity. pearing by Skype, said that before Zomlot expressed optimism President Donald Trump, Washabout last year’s reconvening ington politicians would “make the of the Palestinian National laws by day, and break the laws Council for the first time in 22 by night,” but now the rules are years, and the new governcontinuously being broken. In reference to recent U.S. and Israeli Ambassador Husam Zomlot (on screen) discusses the Palestinian ment of Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh in the actions, he said that the U.S. de- Authority’s plans for the future.

West Bank. Referring to the funding of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine mestic Israeli issue.” He added: “We’re only PA’s new leadership, Zomlot stated: “This is Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA); the hearing economic incentives from the not a time for technocrats.” —Sami Tayeb U.S. leaving the United Nations Educa- Trump administration, not real engagement Embassy Refuses Kairos Document tional, Scientific and Cultural Organization with the final status issues.”

Looking toward the future, he said there Christian, Muslim and Jewish community (UNESCO) and the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC); the Trump ad- are only two options: the Palestinian Au- leaders and clerics gathered on Nakba ministration’s closure of the PLO mission in thority (PA) needs to either dissolve or dou- Day, May 15, to commemorate the cataWashington, DC; the Israeli annexation of ble down on its commitment to enforce in- strophe that befell Palestinians and to the Golan Heights; the U.S. Embassy move ternational law and find a just solution to the deliver a letter to the Israel Embassy in to Jerusalem; and Israeli Prime Minister conflict. In support of the latter option, he Washington, DC. There were similar acBinyamin Netanyahu’s campaign promise stressed the need for the peace process to tions in front of Israeli embassies and to annex Israeli settlements in the West be internationalized (mediated by new inter- consulates around the world. Peaceful Bank have all contributed to the derailment national actors) since he believes there are protesters tried to deliver the Kairos Docof the two-state solution. He said that de- presently no partners to work with in Israel ument, a statement created 10 years ago spite these setbacks, the Palestinian Au- or in the Trump administration. Expressing and signed by clergy of different faiths, inthority’s resolve has only been strength- optimism about finding new international tellectuals, civic leaders, and others partners, Zomlot said: “We are not isolated, worldwide <www.kairospalestine.ps>. ened.

The Trump administration, Zomlot said, “cannot wave a magic wand to wish away the issues that Palestinians bring up.” He reiterated that the Trump administration cannot be trusted, and stated that after three meetings between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and U.S. President Donald Trump, as well as 30 meetings between the PLO mission and administration officials, the Palestinian delegation was repeatedly told that the issues they were bringing up were considered to be old “talking points.” Five million Palestinian refugees are not “a talking point,” responded Zomlot.

In reference to President Trump’s promise of an “ultimate deal” for Middle East peace, Zomlot said that the “U.S. has only shown contempt for international law” and considers the “Palestinian issue a do-

STAFF PHOTO S. TAYEB

Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) national executive director Nihad Awad urged all Americans to raise awareness about the reality of the brutal illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.

“Putting pressure on Israel is not easy and change will not happen very soon because of the debate that has been prohibited on the influence of the pro-Israel forces on our government officials,” he said.

—Elaine Pasquini

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The Palestinian document is modeled on a theological statement issued in 1985 by a group of mainly black South African theologians who challenged Apartheid in their land.

Israeli diplomats refused to accept the letter, and the solemn delegation was advised not to leave it on the ground or they would be charged with littering.

—Delinda C. Hanley

Washington, DC’s Middle East Institute hosted a May 21 program featuring Noura Erakat, author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine and Khaled Elgindy, author of Blind Spot: Americans and the Palestinians, from Balfour to Trump.

(Both newly-released books are available from AET’s Middle East Books and More.)

The speakers critiqued the efforts of several U.S. administrations to reach an IsraeliPalestinian peace agreement and the failure of U.S. policies to protect Palestinian human rights.

“The peace process is dead and it was not Donald Trump who killed it,” Elgindy, a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Middle East Policy, stated in his opening remarks. “It was more a process of death by 1,000 cuts.” While floundering under the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, “the peace process died on Obama’s watch,” he added.

The Oslo agreement of 1993 failed due to the faulty belief that “peace could only come when Israel feels secure militarily and politically,” Elgindy told the audience. The second false assumption was the idea that “Palestinian internal politics could be re-engineered to suit the needs of the peace process.” Both of these beliefs, he said, reflect “America’s blind spot in relation to Israeli power and Palestinian politics.”

Erakat, a human rights attorney, also maintained that the Oslo accords destroyed the two-state solution and that Palestinians “must get outside the sphere of U.S. influence, which has stunted other internation64

Rev. Graylan Hagler, senior pastor of Plymouth United Church of Christ in Washington, DC, speaks to protesters in front of Israel’s Embassy. alist approaches and solutions that have been offered.”

Erakat said the Trump administration’s so-called “deal of the century” is another attempt to impose a fractured and unviable Palestinian state. “It looks very much like an autonomous framework of Palestinian selfgovernance in 20 noncontiguous land masses throughout the West Bank, whose territorial continuity is cut by settlements, settlers, military infrastructure, bypass roads, firing zones, the apartheid wall and all of the facts on the ground that we do not want to talk about.”

According to both authors, Palestinians

need a new vision, but, Erakat argued, “Palestinians have not been given enough space to even dream of new worlds and possibilities. What would happen if Palestinians are able to imagine something completely different in a new way forward?” This different approach, she believes, forces “some form of pressure on Israel rather than appeasement,” because the self-professed Jewish state has not complied with any basic human rights or international law.

“If there was a credible Palestinian leadership, then lots of things become possible,” Elgindy concluded. “Until then we are in limbo.”

—Elaine Pasquini

STAFF PHOTO PHIL PASQUINI

Noura Erakat and Khalid Elgindy: Palestinian-Israeli Peace Revisited

STAFF PHOTO D. HANLEY

BOOK TALKS

Noura Erakat (l) and Khaled Elgindy discuss the history and future of the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process.”

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The 1953 Coup and the Roots of the 1979 Islamic Revolution

On April 24, Ervand Abrahamian, a distinguished Professor at CUNY's Baruch College, gave a presentation on modern Iranian history at the University of Denver as part of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies’ semester-long lecture series on “The Iranian Revolution: 40 Years Later, 1979-2019.”

Abrahamian argued that analysis of the 1979 Islamic Revolution tends to overlook the significance of the 1953 coup, in which the U.S. and UK orchestrated the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in favor of the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In both academic and diplomatic circles, the 1979 revolution came as a surprise, he noted, as the shah had a large army, sizeable bureaucracy, ample secret police and significant amounts of money. “Most revolutions are pretty unexpected, but this one I think was more unexpected because people saw the regime as a very solid, very viable regime,” he said. However, once the revolution began, the shah’s government “collapsed like a pack of cards” and fell in a matter of 17 months.

In the decades since, most researchers have focused on the short-term triggers that led to the revolution, but Abrahamian contended, short-term triggers alone don’t provoke revolutions—something more foundational is needed. There were notable shortterm triggers surrounding the revolution, such as increased pressure from the U.S. to improve human rights and instability in the oil markets. However, all these shortterm events do not explain why the shah’s regime fell so quickly. The shah collapsed because he lacked legitimacy in the eyes of his people, stemming from his role in the 1953 coup, Abrahamian said.

When Mosaddegh nationalized Iranian oil in 1951, the U.S. and UK wanted the shah to veto the decision. However, the shah refused, knowing nationalization was wildly popular among Iranians and that going against Mosaddegh’s decision would be political suicide. The CIA eventually forced his hands, telling the shah he had a JUNE/JULY 2019

decision to make: support the re-privatization of the country’s oil or also be taken down in the coup. While he was essentially blackmailed into supporting the coup, Iranians never forgave the shah. “The 1953 coup in Iran, you can call it the original sin of the shah,” Abrahamian said. “From then on he was seen as someone who was no longer really representing Iran. He had helped overthrow the symbol of Iranian independence and nationalism, and created a new, basically puppet state of the United States.”

Lacking credibility, the shah attempted to manufacture sources of legitimacy throughout his reign. He sought to portray himself as being a major player in the oil market, even though in reality he had little say over

Guard Corps (IRGC) a great deal of legitimacy and strength that has carried on until today. Although the shah had a large army that was trained by the U.S., it was very unreliable, especially in stifling public discontent, and thus was weaker than the forces that govern Iran today.

The event ended on a final question— what is his prediction for the future? Reform or change? Abrahamian said that much depends on outside forces. Iran is only a player in the drama, while “the major guerilla in the room is the United States.”

The Iranian constitution is flexible enough to permit change and allow referendums that could bring about reform, while still keeping the roots of the country grounded in the Islamic Revolution.

Abrahamian’s newly revised book, A History of Modern Iran, was released last year and is available from Middle East Books and More.

—Craig Sanders (Advertisement)

prices, since he denationalized the country’s oil. He also sought to draw connections between his rule and the 2,500-year history of monarchy in Iran, but, Abrahamian explained, this failed to gain gravitas among the population, as his rule had no connection to past dynasties. The shah also builtup the military and became “Nixon’s policeman in the Middle East” in an effort to show strength. However this too backfired, as he was viewed as a puppet of the U.S. Asked about the similarities and differences between the crises of legitimacy then and now, Abrahamian said that the 1979 revolution was widely popular, so the origins still hold a good amount of legitimacy with the people. Additionally, the 1980s war with Iraq gave the Islamic Revolutionary

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, Shake speare’s timeless themes of trust, betrayal, love & hate become reality as the Palestinian-Israeli struggle destroys their lives.

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SUMMER 2019 Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires, by Tim MackintoshSmith, Yale University Press, 2019, hardcover, 656 pp. MEB: $32. This book shines a light on the Arab people and tribes who conquered lands and disseminated their language and culture over vast distances.

Mackintosh-Smith reveals how linguistic developments—from pre-Islamic poetry to the growth of script, Muhammad’s use of writing, and the later problems of printing Arabic—helped and hindered the progress of Arab history. Even in today’s fractured post-Arab Spring environment, Arabic itself is still a source of unity and disunity.

Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine, by Noura Erakat, Stanford University Press, 2019, hardcover, 352 pp. MEB: $25. Justice for Some offers a new approach to understanding the Palestinian struggle for freedom, told through the power and control of international law. Focusing on key junctures―from the Balfour Declaration to present-day wars in Gaza―Erakat shows how the strategic deployment of law has shaped current conditions. The law has done more to advance Israel’s interests than the Palestinians’ but, Erakat argues, this outcome was never inevitable.

Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians, from Balfour to Trump, by Khaled Elgindy, Brookings Institution Press, 2019, hardcover, 345 pp. MEB: $23. Elgindy looks at the interplay between the U.S.-led peace process and internal Palestinian politics—namely, how a badly flawed peace process helped to weaken Palestinian leaders and institutions. While the peace process was not doomed to fail, Washington’s management of the process, with its blind spot to Israeli power and Palestinian politics, made failure far more likely than a negotiated breakthrough.

Israel’s Armor: The Israel Lobby and the First Generation of the Palestine Conflict, by Walter L. Hixson, Cambridge University Press, 2019, paperback, 324 pp.

MEB: $30. The U.S. and Israel have long had a “special relationship.” The U.S. was the first country to recognize Israel in 1948, and has been an important ally and benefactor ever since. A critical component of the special relationship is the pro-Israel lobby. Israel’s Armor fills a gap in the existing literature by examining the origins and early history of the lobby.

The Modern Kebab, by Le Bab, Ebury Press, 2018, hardcover, 128 pp. MEB: $16. Scrap the greasy kebab made from unknown and unexciting ingredients, and instead indulge in delicious, flavorpacked dishes made the right way and using the best ingredients. Le Bab have reinvented the classics as well as creating completely ingenious combinations—from cauliflower pastilla, endive and pomegranate salad; and merguez and chickpea ragu; to kebabs that include grilled mackerel with dill, pickle and fennel; spring chicken with sprouting broccoli and harissa mayo; and winter pork with beetroot relish, charred cabbage and crackling.

From the Land of Nightingales and Roses: Recipes from the Persian Kitchen,

by Maryam Sinaiee, Interlink Pub Group, 2018, hardcover, 336 pp. MEB: $35. Iranian food blogger and home cook, Maryam Sinaiee, takes us through a full year in the Persian kitchen. Each seasonal chapter offers up delicious recipes alongside insights into the festivals, traditions and rituals that color day-to-day life in this region. Full of flavor, history and culture, Sinaiee’s recipes are a wonderful introduction to the varied and delectable cuisine of this region.

Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires, by Juan Cole, Bold Type Books, 2018, hardcover, 336 pp. MEB: $20. Many observers stereotype Islam and its scripture as inherently extreme or violent. Preeminent Middle East expert Juan Cole demonstrates that Muhammad’s story is actually one of how peace is the rule and not the exception for one of the world’s most practiced religions. In the midst of the dramatic seventh-century war between two empires, Muhammad was a spiritual seeker in search of community and sanctuary. Cole sheds light on this forgotten history, reminding us that in the Qur'an, the legacy of that spiritual message endures.

Celestial Bodies, by Jokha Alharthi, Sandstone Press, 2018, paperback, 256 pp.

MEB: $18. Set in the village of al-Awafi in Oman, we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries Abdallah after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla, who rejects all offers while waiting for her beloved, who has emigrated to Canada. These three women and their families witness Oman evolve from a traditional slave-owning society, slowly redefining itself after the colonial era, to the crossroads of its complex present. Alharthi is the first Gulf writer to win the Man Booker International Prize, and the first female writer from Oman to be translated into English.

The Bird King, by G. Willow Wilson, Grove Press, 2019, hardcover, 440 pp. MEB: $24.

A stunning new novel that tells the story of Fatima, a concubine in the royal court of Granada, the last emirate of Muslim Spain, and her dearest friend Hassan, the palace mapmaker. Hassan can draw maps of places he’s never seen and bend the shape of reality.

Hassan’s gift is seen as a threat to Christian Spanish rule. As Fatima and Hassan seek safety with the help of a clever jinn, The Bird King asks us to consider what love is and the price of freedom at a time when the West and the Muslim world were not yet separate.

S H I P P I N G R AT E S Most items are discounted and available on a first-come, first-served basis. Orders accepted by mail, phone (800-368-5788 ext. 2), or Web (www.middleeastbooks.com). All payments in U.S. funds. Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express accepted. Please send mail orders to Middle East Books and More, 1902 18th St. NW, Washington, DC 20009, with checks and money orders made out to “AET.” U.S. Shipping Rates: Please add $2.50 for the first item and $2 for each additional item. Canada & Mexico shipping charges: Please add $15 for the first item and $2.50 for each additional item. International shipping charges: Please add $15 for the first item and $3.50 for each additional item.

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Library packages (list value over $240) are available for $29 if donated to a library, or free if requested with a library’s paid subscription or renewal. Call Middle East Books and More at 800-368-5788 ext. 2 to order. Our policy is to identify donors unless anonymity is specifically requested.

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B •O •O •K •S Breakthrough: Transforming Fear into Compassion: A New Perspective on the Israel-Palestine Conflict

By Richard Forer, Insight Press, 2010, paperback, 371 pp.

MEB: $19.

Few books can describe the IsraelPalestine tragedy and still allow the stakeholders’ identities to come out unbruised, with their human dignity intact.

Breakthrough, by Richard Forer, does just that.

Forer and his identical twin brother were born into a New Jersey reform Jewish family in 1948. After college, Richard joined the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and his twin became an Orthodox Jew who embraced an identity tied to Israel. The author painstakingly examines his own “crisis of identity,” which tore apart his belief system and opened a completely divergent view of Israel, Palestine, and the U.S. role in that tragedy. He attributes his personal awakening, in part, to the writing of Norman Finkelstein. Forer’s blinders came off and he emerged from a bad dream.

Forer chronicles this saga with clarity tempered with kindness. Using well-documented research, he focuses in particular on the excesses of prominent Israel supporters Abraham Foxman and Alan Dershowitz. He simply says, “no longer in my name” as he takes on the stories that enable Israel’s violent rhetorical and military dominance.

Forer’s memoir imparts a spirit of reassurance, hope and encouragement. He

Mary Neznek is an award-winning Arab Studies specialist, lobbyist and nonviolent conflict resolution/peace studies educator.

For the past 20 years she has taught students with trauma and severe behavior disorders.

68

Reviewed by Mary Neznek and Amin Gharad criticizes U.S. tax-exempt charitable dollars raised to support illegal colonies in the West Bank for Jewish and Christian Zionist garrison compounds. His book examines a growing Christian Zionist media empire and real estate industry that steadily buys up ring-side seats for the “end times,” the final battle of good and evil that Christian Zionists believe will take place in Megiddo, in northern Israel. Forer’s book also takes apart the stories that have been the impetus for the trillion-dollar wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and, most recently, Yemen.

Forer reminds readers that it is all too easy to respond reflexively to injustice or to resort to impotent rage. Instead he favors embracing the common humanity of the other, as hard as that may be. This is a discipline in the spirit of Gandhi, Tolstoy, Dorothy Day and Sojourner Truth. Each resisted unspeakably harsh forms of power imbalance and took action using nonviolent resistance, and like Forer, embraced the powerful spirit of community.

The Words of My Father: Love and Pain in Palestine

By Yousef Bashir, HarperCollins, 2018, hardcover, 224 pp. MEB: $22.

Yousef Bashir, now 28, vividly chronicles the takeover of his family home on the Gaza coast by impulsive and heavily armed adolescent members of the Israeli army. They broke windows to transform the home into a watchtower while giant Caterpillar bulldozers destroyed the family greenhouses full of eggplant, tomatoes and parsley. When they finally departed, the family found their cooking pots and pans filled with human excrement.

Yousef was shot in the spine and nearly killed by one of these soldiers, while he was in his yard talking to a group of U.N. observers. There was

WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

never an apology or investigation and those bullet fragments are still lodged in his spine causing daily pain. The words of his father, who was also shot but less critically injured, echo in Yousef’s mind and help him maintain his humanity. “Because I do not feel any sense of hatred toward the other side, and have already forgiven everything, and because of my deep belief in peace, I have managed to stay in my home and remain sane,” his father declared. “It is the politicians that block the mutual understanding between our two people. I hope for the day when this mountain of ice that is our disagreement will melt,” his father said.

After undergoing surgeries in an Israeli hospital, nearly dying from an overdose of pain medicine, learning to walk again, and attending the Ramallah Friends School, Yousef left Gaza to finish high school in a Wasatch County, Utah boarding school—a world away. Bashir now lives to speak his truth in the U.S. on behalf of those whose voices cannot be heard or who are degraded by a dominant discourse that demonizes Muslims, Palestinians and Arabs. As he did recently in a Washington, DC bookstore, Yousef speaks in quiet, simple phrases of the transformative power of forgiveness to those locked in a prison they have not escaped.

Bashir’s words are reminiscent of a not so well-known 20th century peace activist, another immigrant, a Dutch-American, A.J. Muste. A pacifist from World War I until his death during the Vietnam War, Muste was sometimes called an American Gandhi, as the spirit of pacifism informed his work with the U.S. labor movement, nuclear abolition and as mentor in nonviolent resistance to a young seminarian in Boston, Martin Luther King Jr., Muste’s words resonate with those of Bashir, “There is no way to peace, peace is the way.” In the words of Yousef Bashir’s father, “We are destined to live together with the Israelis. We have to change our mentality. If we let our JUNE/JULY 2019

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wounded memory guide our future steps, we will have only pain.”

Both Forer’s and Bashir’s books inspire in different ways. They are ideal community organizing primers to build skills that help create a healing response to violence and for those working to stop U.S. militarism in the Middle East, especially in Israel/Palestine. Both writers take clear focus and determination not to let a vortex of violent or vengeful thought overwhelm the individual. Both authors are available to meet with community and civic groups to share their practice.

Both books are available at Middle East Books & More.

Scheherazade’s Feasts: Food of the Medieval Arab World

By Habeeb Salloum, Muna Salloum and Leila Salloum Elias, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013, paperback, 232 pp. MEB: $29.

Lately, the intellectual and scholastic achievements of the medieval Arab world have garnered a prominent—albeit long overdue—place in public consciousness. Many now acknowledge the contributions and significance of the thinkers, tinkerers and creative minds that flourished in the knowledge centers of Baghdad and the hospitals of Muslim Iberia, but few have likely pondered the delicious legacies of medieval Arab kitchens. When we study the Arab or Islamic Golden Age, its refined and elaborate culinary culture may not immediately register as attention-worthy.

The patronage of Abbasid sultans fueled translations, art and interactions with diverse cultures creating an era bursting with knowledge. That same spirit inspired cauldrons and kitchens in

Amin Gharad is the former director of Middle East Books and More, a project of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. junE/july 2019

that period, as people explored another of life’s essential pleasures—food. The crafting and creative amending of cuisine—flavored by ever-evolving local tastes and changing demands and availabilities of foodstuffs—can be seen as a metaphor for the parallel ebbs and flows of wider society and culture throughout the medieval Arab world.

In Scheherazade's Feasts, the Salloums guide us through a tantalizing tour of the cuisines and food cultures that defined and embellished an integral part of the rich cultures that spanned societies from Al-Andalus eastward through the Fertile Crescent. It is a portal not only into the palates of yore, but of much more. Behind each dish and the concomitant ingredients is a story of heritage, interaction, experimentation, the movement of peoples and bubbling shifts in culture. And all along the way, between recipes, the authors manage to deftly weave in humorous exchanges, poetic asides, and sage pieces of advice on everything from proper dining etiquette to health and well-being.

The reader is exposed to the historical sojourns and genealogies of dishes, ingredients, habits, words and ideas that encompass the world of medieval Arab cookery, many of which still influence us

today in the East and West.

For instance, the multi-talented artist and social influencer of his day, Abu alHasan Ali ibn Nafi—more famously known as Ziryab or Pájaro Negro (“blackbird” in Arabic and Spanish, respectively) —is credited with introducing the common sequencing of courses in a meal observed across the globe. After settling in Córdoba he is said to have introduced the habit of opening a meal with soup followed by cold dishes and entrées, and winding down with fruits and desserts.

After taking root among the Arab elite in Andalusia, Ziryab’s ordering spread into the interior of Europe and remains the standard sequence we follow today.

And the book doesn't stop at mere history and teasing of the appetite. It is a proper cookbook that boasts more than 120 recipes to guide the adventurous (and hungry) reader through preparing a feast or snack fit for a caliph. In addition to dozens of appetizers, soups, entrées, desserts and beverages, the authors even include a number of sample menus for special occasions: From a dinner feast held in a sultan’s court, to a Christmas or Passover dinner. For the history buff or the foodie—and why not be both?

—it is a worthy addition to the library and kitchen. ■

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CWS/CARTOONARTS INTERNATIONAL www.cartoonweb.com

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THE WORLD LOOKS AT THE MIDDLE EAST

Daily Star, Beirut, Lebanon

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CWS/CARTOONARTS INTERNATIONAL www.cartoonweb.com

National Post, Toronto, Canada

Counterpoint, Madison, NJ

CWS/CARTOONARTS INTERNATIONAL www.cartoonweb.com

CWS/CARTOONARTS INTERNATIONAL www.cartoonweb.com

Cartoon Movement, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Leiden, Leiden Netherlands

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Ad-Dustour, Amman, Jordan JUNE/JULY 2019

opm_71-72.qxp_Other Peoples Mail 6/6/19 3:08 PM Page 71

DON’T LET BOLTON START A WAR WITH IRAN

To The Mercury News, June 3, 2019 Top leaders of both Iran and the United States say they want peace. John Bolton has other ideas.

As George W. Bush’s undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, Bolton prodded him to attack Iraq over “weapons of mass destruction.”

They proved to be imaginary.

Now as Trump’s national security adviser, Bolton is busy imagining Iranian assaults on the interests of America “or our allies” to justify the attack he has long advocated.

Warships and bombers are in the Persian Gulf, threatening the Persians with immediate undeclared devastation.

To avert war (on Syria) in 2013, Americans bombarded Congress and the president with protests. We can do it again.

Paul Lovinger and Jeannette Hassberg, San Francisco, CA

HUBRIS, NOT FAULTY INTEL, LED U.S. TO INVADE IRAQ

To the Los Angeles Times, May 25, 2019 As an Iraq war veteran who was called up to active duty from the Army Reserve in 2005, I respectfully disagree with key JUNE/JULY 2019

parts of former Rep. Jane Harman’s piece recalling the intelligence failures and her pro-war vote leading up to the 2003 invasion.

Harman says that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 2003 presentation to the United Nations, making the case against Iraq, was highly convincing, and that she has “no doubt Powell believed what he was saying.”

I do not recall being persuaded by Powell’s argument. In fact, a contemporaneous Newsweek cover story questioned many claims he made about the supposed weapons of mass destruction and alleged Iraqi connections with alQaeda. I also highly recommend the book, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War, by journalists Michael Isikoff and David Corn. They write that “even his [Powell’s] own specialists did not believe” what he claimed at the U.N., and that when he rehearsed his statements beforehand, he declared, “This is [expletive].”

Invading Iraq was a mistake, so let’s be sure we don’t make the same blunder and rush to judgment in dealing with Iran.

John D. Wagner, Altadena, CA

REJECT WARS OF CHOICE

To the Centre Daily Times, May 31, 2019 I mostly agree with Eric Smith’s May 25 letter in the CDT, “War with Iran could have no winners,” in which he warned that a war with Iran could be as destructive or more so than the 2003 war with Iraq. However, I think that the situation is even worse than he described. The Iraq war’s thousands of American soldiers killed, hundred thousand innocent civilians killed, million refugees uprooted, and trillion dollars spent is mild as a cost estimate for an Iranian war.

Iran is larger than Iraq and Afghanistan combined, about five times the size as Germany or Vietnam. Who wants to go, or send their kids, to occupy all that land for the next couple of decades? Our European allies aren’t eager to help. If Saudi Arabia or Israel get involved, we could have a region-wide religious war.

The Iraq war at least removed Saddam Hussain. A new war might not be that successful. Attacking military sites without overthrowing the government would give it pretext to become even more brutal and repressive. Overthrowing the government without replacing it would mean that much of the Middle East becomes an anarchic terrorist playground. Replacing the government would require decades of nation build-

ing, which candidate Trump rejected.

No good option remains for either side except diplomatic negotiation. I think that “supporting our troops” should mean we don’t send them to suffer and die fighting other countries’ battles, and that “America first” should mean not sacrificing our future for bravado.

John Dziak, State College, PA

GOLAN HEIGHTS GIVEAWAY SHOWS U.S. BIAS IN CONFLICT

To the News & Record, May 17, 2019 Donald Trump recently tweeted—I’m sorry—recently established a new U.S. foreign policy, stating that it’s time to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which he said is of critical strategic importance to Israel and regional stability.

When asked why he did this, he said all presidents said we should do this, but he’s the one who got it done. No, previous presidents have not said that, and let’s look at why.

First, Israel took the Golan Heights from Syria after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. That violates principles of international law. In fact, the United Nations doesn’t recognize Israeli sovereignty.

Trump’s action certainly doesn’t add to regional stability. This will anger Palestinians, and other Arabs.

It likely will foment more violence towards Israel. And it certainly will decrease our standing in the Middle East as an honest broker of peace. How can Trump’s son-inlaw negotiate peace between Arabs and Israelis when the United States takes sides with one party to the problem over the other party? Trump and his son-in-law have just lost all credibility as peace brokers in the Middle East.

This is why knowledge of, experience in, and skillful execution of foreign policy is so important to being president of the United States.

Gary Parker, Archdale, NC

FLORIDA LAW VIOLATES FIRST AMENDMENT, STIFLES JUSTICE

To the Tampa Bay Times, May 23, 2019 I first learned about Palestine and Israel as a girl, listening to my grandmother in a rancorous pool-side debate with her neighbor Pearl in Lake Worth.

They were arguing about what an ethnically “Jewish” state in Israel means for the rights of Palestinians. They were both Jewish, both angry and uncomfortable. But they were learning, as were all the grandkids and other swimmers listening to their raised voices.

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The Florida Legislature has effectively censored these debates in the place where they are most important: public schools. A new bill, which will be signed by the governor during his trip to Israel, imposes a definition of anti-Semitism on the state’s public schools that classifies criticism of Israeli policy or advocacy for Palestinian human rights as discrimination against Jews.

The bill (HB 741) violates the U.S. Constitution. But the new definition is also just plain wrong: Advocacy for Palestinian rights is part of a universal call for freedom, justice and equality for all people.

The fact that Gov. Ron DeSantis is signing this bill during the Florida Cabinet’s trip to Israel indicates that this is more about demonstrating that Florida is “pro-Israel” than it is about protecting my civil rights as a Jewish-American. (Holding a Cabinet meeting in Israel also appears to violate Florida’s Sunshine law, as we warned the governor.)

To classify Palestinian human rights advocacy as anti-Jewish is dangerous for all of us who care about protecting vulnerable communities—because it takes our eyes off the actual threat: a revived white supremacy that targets Jewish, Muslim, black and Latino communities alike.

Liz Jackson, Berkeley, CA. The writer is a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal.

CHALLENGING ISRAEL IS THE WAY TO PROTECT PALESTINIAN KIDS

To the Chicago Tribune, May 7, 2019 Letter writer Raffaella Tonani's praise of Project Rozana (“Uniting Israelis, Palestinians,” May 4) deflects attention away from the true cause of the Palestinian health crisis: the Israeli occupation. Tonani states that “the lack of medical equipment and power cuts in the occupied territories force Palestinians to find care elsewhere. Since elsewhere is Israel, they must apply for a medical permit to go through the checkpoints at the Palestinian Authority, which refers them to an Israeli hospital. The health care is expensive. Palestinians earning less than $40 a day can’t afford it, and when the PA cannot finance it either, Project Rozana does.”

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Why do these restrictions exist? Who is requiring Palestinians to go through these checkpoints? Why is electricity in the West Bank so unreliable? Why is it so difficult to get medical equipment in? Why does the Palestinian Authority have such limited funding? These are not simply the result of natural disasters or unfortunate accidents, but of intentional Israeli policies. Project Rozana was established by Hadassah and Ameinu, two Zionist organizations with Israeli advocacy as a key part of their mission.

Project Rozana is yet another attempt to whitewash Israel's brutal and lethal suppression of Palestinians by pleading Israel's superior technology and alleged humanitarianism in an otherwise-backward Middle East. The best way to save Palestinian children is not by supporting Project Rozana; it's by curtailing our $3.8 billion support of Israel and ending the occupation.

Lesley Williams, Evanston, IL. The writer is a member of Jewish Voice for Peace Chicago’s coordinating committee.

FIGHTING APARTHEID ON CAMPUS

To The Hoya, April 26, 2019 On April 12, the leaders of Georgetown Israel Alliance published an op-ed in The Hoya titled, “Include Diverse Narratives in Israel-Palestine Debate.” The article’s authors accuse Israeli Apartheid Week, a series of events hosted by Students for Justice in Palestine during the first week of April, of presenting a “onesided, divisive narrative, baselessly denigrating Israel as an apartheid state.”

Israel, as it currently exists, is an apartheid state. Since 1967, Israel has ruled over the entirety of historic Palestine and has divided residents into a hierarchical arrangement based on ethnoreligious status.

Jewish citizens of Israel are guaranteed full rights under the law. However,

WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

Palestinian citizens of Israel live under Jim Crow-like laws.

Adalah, a human rights organization that advocates for minorities in Israel, has outlined over 65 laws that discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Palestinians without citizenship are subject to military rule that routinely violates their human rights under international law, which includes Israeli soldiers systematically abusing Palestinian children and trying them in military courts without legal representation, according to multiple human rights organizations.

Israel recently passed the “Jewish Nation-State Law,” which institutionalized its discriminatory policies against both nonJewish citizens and Palestinians in the occupied territories. This law, Adalah explains, “guarantees the ethnic-religious character of Israel as exclusively Jewish and entrenches the privileges enjoyed by Jewish citizens, while simultaneously anchoring discrimination against Palestinian citizens and legitimizing exclusion, racism, and systemic inequality.”

The limited and precarious autonomy Israel grants the Palestinian territories does not change the fact that Israel is an apartheid state, just as the existence of semi-autonomous Bantustans did not change the fact that apartheid existed in South Africa. In a statement from 2014, South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu pronounced, “I know firsthand that Israel has created an apartheid reality within its borders and through its occupation. The parallels to my own beloved South Africa are painfully stark indeed.” This statement, coming from one of South Africa’s leading figures in the struggle against apartheid, says it all.

Narratives have power, and we cannot ignore their material impacts. We cannot allow the narratives of the powerful and the oppressed to be deemed equally legitimate.

Mohammed Alhammami and David Balgley, Washington, DC. Alhammami is a Palestinian refugee from Gaza and a graduate student at Georgetown University. Balgley is a Jewish-American member of Jewish Voice for Peace and a graduate student at Georgetown University. ■ JUNE/JULY 2019

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O• B • I • T • U • A • R • I • E • S Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, 96, died in her home in Tehran on April 20.

The celebrated Iranian artist was born in the northwestern city of Qazvin, and moved to Tehran at the age of 7 after her father was elected to parliament. She would go on to study art in Tehran before moving to the U.S. in 1945, where she studied art and fashion at Cornell University and later the Parsons School of Design. She then began a career as a fashion illustrator during which time she met and befriended prominent designers and artists such as Andy Warhol and Joan Mitchell.

She returned to Iran in 1957 and married Abol Farmanfarmaian. Her work on the Iran Pavilion at the 1958 Venice Biennale won her a gold medal. She returned to New York in the wake of the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

Despite her public criticism of the Iranian regime, she returned to Iran in 2004 and lived to see the opening of the Monir Museum in 2017—the first museum in the country devoted to showcasing the works of a female artist. In addition to seeing the opening of a museum solely dedicated to her own works, Farmanfarmaian’s work was exhibited around the globe—from the Emirates to France— and eventually in the prestigious Guggenheim Museum in 2015 where she enjoyed the honor of being the first Iranian artist to have a solo exhibit.

Her artistic legacy includes having played a key role in the development of abstract art and for her reliance on geometric abstractions imbued with traditional Persian motifs. She is survived by her daughters, Nima and Zahra, and grandchildren.

Bahman "Batman" Batmanghelidj, 83, died of complications from Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s on April 25 in Fairfax County, VA. Born in Tehran in 1936, he was sent to boarding school in England by his father, a successful Iranian businessman. He returned to Iran after attending Oxford but immigrated to the U.S. during the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

Doing business under the name “Batman,” to ease pronunciation issues and promote name-recognition, Batmanghelidj entered the real estate business, purJUNE/JULY 2019

chasing land in Fairfax County and launching construction projects, including housing, office and shopping complexes.

His development projects transformed the Dulles Airport corridor in Northern Virginia. He is survived by his wife, Roshanak, four children, four grandchildren, his brother and three sisters.

Issa J. Boullata, 90, died on May 1, surrounded by loved ones in PointeClaire, Quebec, Canada.

Born in Jerusalem in 1929, Boullata would go on to a celebrated career as an academic, author and translator. Between 1949-1968 he taught at secondary schools in Jerusalem before eventually studying at the University of London where he earned his doctorate in Arabic literature. In addition to his tenure as a professor at Hartford Seminary and McGill University, Boullata translated and penned a number of original pieces including award-winning works of poetry, fiction, numerous scholarly books and articles, and a memoir reflecting on his coming of age in Palestine, The Bells of Memory: A Palestinian Boyhood in Jerusalem (available from Middle East Books & More).

Remembered fondly by former students and colleagues alike, Boullata is survived by his brother, Kamal, sister, Souad Shammas, and his children and grandchildren.

Kadir Mısıroğlu, 86, died on May 5 in Istanbul after battling a long illness.

Born in the Black Sea province of Trabzon, Mısıroğlu moved to Istanbul to attend law school. He developed a deep fondness for history and rose to become a celebrated yet controversial figure in Turkish society. He enjoyed a prolific career of writing and scholarship, producing more than 60 works of history, fiction and poetry. Arguably his most famous work, Lozan: A Victory or Misery?, contested the view that the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne had been a national victory for the Turkish people.

Influential sectors of Turkish society did not always praise and accept his work. In addition to having been briefly imprisoned for his views, the second edition of his book was banned, and he was forced to flee to Germany in the wake of

Compiled by Amin Gharad the Turkish military coup of 1980. He and his family would later be denied residency permits in Germany forcing him to flee once more, this time to the UK. During this period of exile, he was also stripped of his Turkish citizenship.

Mısıroğlu returned to his homeland and regained his citizenship in 1991.

The Turkish president sent condolences and his funeral was attended by thousands at Turkey’s newest and largest mosque, the Çamlıca.

Hani Shukrallah, 69, died on May 5 in his home.

Born in Cairo in 1950 to Coptic Christian parents, he became a student activist, a self-described Marxist and lifelong leftist, in the days of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. He was the editor-inchief of Al-Ahram Weekly between 1991 and 2005, and founded Ahram Online, Egypt’s largest English-language online news outlet. He has been eulogized as not only one of Egypt’s most esteemed journalists, but also as a lifelong human rights activist. In the mid-80s, Shukrallah helped establish the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights (EOHR) with the aim of documenting human rights violations across the country.

Shukrallah briefly joined the Social Democratic Party in the aftermath of the Egyptian revolution of 2011. After the Muslim Brotherhood came to power, he would go on to endorse the removal of President Mohamed Morsi.

Mike Daryoush, 66, died of heart failure on May 8. An Iranian immigrant, Daryoush was the founder of the successful Moby Dick House of Kabob restaurant chain, a Washington Report staff favorite.

After struggling with his first attempt at opening a restaurant 30 years ago, Daryoush shifted away from traditional American breakfast and lunch dishes and began experimenting with new menu items to introduce Persian dishes. The restaurant chain has since enjoyed great success and expanded into more than two dozen locations across the DC metropolitan area.

Daryoush is survived by his wife, Suzan, and four children.

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AET’s 2019 Choir of Angels

following are individuals, organizations, companies and foundations whose help between jan. 11, 2019 and May 14, 2019 is making possible activities of the tax-exempt aet library endowment (federal id #52-1460362) and the american educational trust, publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. some angels helped us co-sponsor the conference “the israel lobby and american policy.” others donated to our “Capital Building fund.” We are deeply honored by their confidence and profoundly grateful for their generosity.

HUMMERS ($100 or more)

Dr. Robert Ashmore, Mequon, WI Marwan Balaa, San Jose, CA Rev. Robert E. Barber, Cooper City, FL Stanton Barrett, Ipswich, MA Allen & Jerrie Bartlett, Philadelphia, PA Anna Bellisari, Yellow Springs, OH Prof. & Mrs. George Wesley Buchanan, Gaithersburg, MD Samer & Nora Burgan, Falls Church, VA Gregory DeSylva, Rhinebeck, NY Bernie Eisenberg, Los Angeles, CA Kassem Elkhalil, Arlington, TX Elizabeth Haas, Wilmington, DE Bilquis Jaweed, West Chester, OH Ghazala Kazi, Columbia, MD M. Jamil Khan, Bloomfield Hills, MI Eugene Khorey, Homestead, PA David & Renee Lent, Hanover, NH Edwin Lindgren, Overland Park, KS Gwendolyn McEwen, Bellingham, WA Merrill O’Donnell, New Westminster, Canada Peggy Rafferty, Cedar Grove, NC Mena Mangal, 31, was shot dead by gunmen on her way to work in Kabul on May 11.

An outspoken advocate for women’s rights, Mangal worked at Afghanistan’s largest private broadcasting station, Tolo TV, and was recently appointed as an adviser to the Afghan parliament. Her killers have not been arrested despite the shooting taking place publicly in broad daylight. Fellow activists decried the lack of governmental protection despite reports of numerous threats to her life just days before her assassination.

Mangal was born and raised in Afghanistan’s Paktia province before going on to train as a midwife and later studying law. She transitioned into a career in broadcast journalism, and composed and performed original poetry as well. She is survived by her parents, five sisters and a brother.

Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir, 98, died May 12, three days shy of his 99th birthday, at the Hôtel-Dieu de France hospital in Beirut, after battling a long illness.

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Amb. William & Andrea Rugh, Hingham, MA Irmgard Scherer, Fairfax, VA Bernice Shaheen, Palm Desert, CA*** Dr. Mostafa Hashem Sherif, Tinton Falls, NJ Jean Snyder, Greenbelt, MD

ACCOMPANISTS ($250 or more)

Anonymous, Eatonton, GA Diane Adkin, Camas, WA Dr. William Fuller, Valdosta, GA Ken Galal, San Francisco, CA William Lightfoot, Vienna, VA

TENORS & CONTRALTOS ($500 or more)

Dr. & Mrs. Roger Bagshaw, Big Sur, CA Raymond Gordon, Venice, FL Brigitte Jaensch, Carmichael, CA

BARITONES & MEZZO SOPRANOS ($1,000 or more)

Americans for Middle East Understanding, New York, NY Cardinal Sfeir was formerly the head of the Maronite Church and played a pivotal role in Lebanese politics and society.

He was born in the Lebanese district of Keserwan in 1920 and was ordained as a priest in 1950. He studied at the SaintMaron Seminary in Gahzir, Major Seminary of St. Joseph’s University, and finally the Faculty of Theology at the University of St. Joseph.

In 1986 Cardinal Sfeir was elected the 76th Maronite Catholic Patriarchate of Antioch. He was eventually made a cardinal by Pope John Paul II in 1994.

The former Maronite patriarch used his considerable political clout to negotiate between warring factions during the Lebanese Civil War and advocate for Syrian troop withdrawal from Lebanon.

Sameeh Hammoudeh, 59, died on May 25 in Ramallah after battling cancer for almost a year.

A celebrated Palestinian scholar and historian, Dr. Hammoudeh published a number of scholarly works and articles focusing on Palestinian history, society

Washington RepoRt on Middle east affaiRs

G. Edward & Ruth Brooking, Jr., Wilmington, DE Nancy Eddy, Chevy Chase, MD Ronald & Mary Forthofer, Longmont, CO Evan & Leman Fotos, Istanbul, Turkey Alfred R. Greve, Holmes, NY Ghazy M. Kader, Shoreline, WA Jack Love, Kailua Kona, HI Roberta McInerney, Washington, DC * Robert & Sharon Norberg, Lake City, MN Dr. Imad Tabry, Fort Lauderdale, FL Donn Trautman, Evanstown, IL

CHOIRMASTERS ($5,000 or more)

Donna B. Curtiss, Kensington, MD*, ** Estate of Dorothy Love Gerner, San Francisco, CA Dr. & Mrs. Clyde Farris, West Linn, OR*, ** John Gareeb, Atlanta, GA John & Henrietta Goelet, Washington, DC *In Memory of Andrew I. Killgore **In Memory of Richard H. Curtiss ***In Memory of Dr. Jack Shaheen

and activism. Some of his most wellknown include writings on the lives and accomplishments of Palestinian revolutionaries such as Dawud Saleh al-Husseini and Izz al-Din al-Qassam, as well as Ottoman Ramallah, which explores the history of the city under Ottoman control from 1517-1918.

Born in the West Bank in 1960, he was studying anthropology in graduate school at the University of South Florida in 2003 when he became embroiled in what has been decried as a prejudiced prosecution of Muslims by the U.S. justice system post-9/11. He and his co-defendant, Prof. Sami al-Arian, were eventually acquitted of all terrorism charges in 2006—but not before spending years in federal prison—and both were deported.

He returned to Palestine and headed Birzeit University’s political science department, where he taught until his death. He is survived by his wife, Nadia, and six children. ■ june/july 2019

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June/July 2019

Vol. XXXVIII, No. 4

Iraqi children play in an amusement park in Baghdadâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eastern suburb of Sadr City during Eid al-Fitr, on June 05, 2019.

Eid al-Fitr marks the end of the holy fasting month of Ramadan.

AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/AFP/Getty Images