Washington Report - May 2016 - Vol. XXXV, No. 3

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Table of ConTenTs

Israel’s Influence: Good or Bad for America?

IntroductIon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

WelcomIng remarks dale sprusansky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Panel 1: Israel’s Influence on congress and government agencies — moderator grant F. smith . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Ten Ways the Israel lobby “Moves” america — grant F. smith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Did Israel steal U.s. Weapons-Grade Uranium and Did It Have Help from U.s. Citizens? — dr. roger mattson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 How Congress shapes Middle east Policy, and How the american Israel Public affairs Committee (aIPaC) shapes Congress — Prof. kirk J. Beattie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 QUesTIons & ansWers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

keYnote address: What I Would tell a Visiting congressional delegation — gideon levy. . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 QUesTIons & ansWers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Panel 2: Israel’s Influence on u.s. Foreign Policy — moderator dale sprusansky. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

a Diplomatic and Military Perspective — col. lawrence Wilkerson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 american neoconservatives: a History and overview — Jim lobe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Israel and foreign Policy Issues in the Presidential Campaign — Justin raimondo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 QUesTIons & ansWers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

Panel 3: responding to Israel’s Influence on campus and in court — moderator Janet mcmahon . . . . . . . . . . 44 The birth of Palestine solidarity activism at George Mason University — tareq radi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Concerted attempts to silence Criticism of Israel in the U.s. — maria laHood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 Why We’re suing the U.s. Treasury Department — susan abulhawa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Holding Israel accountable for the Gaza flotilla raid — Huwaida arraf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

keYnote address: Voices Prohibited by mainstream media and

Its role spreading Islamophobia — rula Jebreal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62

Panel 4: Israel’s Influence on mainstream media — moderator delinda Hanley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66

Mainstream Media Coverage of Israel and Palestine — Philip Weiss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 “Valentino’s Ghost: Why We Hate arabs” — catherine Jordan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 QUesTIons & ansWers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72

closIng remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 conclusIon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 electIon WatcH:

Party loyalty, Party schmoyalty — Israel comes First — Janet mcmahon. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 Pro-Israel Pac contributions to 2016 congressional candidates — compiled by Hugh galford . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

Index to advertisers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Cover Photo Phil Portlock

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Washington Report on Middle East Affairs

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INTRODUCTION

F

Introduction

“”

or decades, think tanks, politicians, professors, journalists and every publication—except the Washington Report—steered clear of one topic: the Israel lobby. For those who “dared to speak out,” the subject has been a career breaker.

Once again this year—and two days before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) held its annual policy conference—the Washington Report and the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep) gathered daring expert panelists and keynote speakers to analyze the enormous impact Israel’s influence has on Congress, federal government agencies, the mainstream media, academia and other major institutions. We devote this entire issue of the Washington Report to the proceedings from the March 18, 2016 “Israel’s Influence: Good or Bad for America?” conference. (You can watch or listen to the event at <www.IsraelsInfluence.org>.)

In addition, the first round of pro-Israel PAC contributions starts on p. 78 of this issue.

IRmep founder Grant Smith opens the conference with a riveting description of the 10 ways the Israel lobby “moves” America. He demolishes common false narratives, including the one that claims that Americans support massive foreign aid packages for Israel.

Dr. Roger Mattson’s talk sounds like a real-life spy thriller, about the theft of U.S. weapons-grade uranium by Israel and its American supporters, as well as the infuriating inaction of those charged with safeguarding U.S. nuclear secrets. Prof. Kirk Beattie describes his interviews with more than 150 Hill staffers, Middle East policy lobbyists and activists, showing how AIPAC’s influence is damaging to the U.S. Keynote speaker and Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy invites staffers and members of Congress to visit Palestinian refugee camps, besieged Gaza, and apartheid Hebron as well as the nightclubs, beaches and cafés of Tel Aviv only an hour away.

These destinations are never on the itinerary of official delegations sponsored by pro-Israel groups, but if American leaders took “Gideon’s tour” they’d finally understand how the occupation jeopardizes the long-term well-being of both the U.S. and Israel—not to mention Palestinians.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson reminds listeners that when Israel was created in 1948, high-ranking U.S. diplomatic and military officials warned that unwavering American support for the new

country would jeopardize the effectiveness of U.S. foreign policy.

Nearly 70 years later, Colonel Wilkerson explains how these dire predictions have come to pass, and offers evidence to refute the much-repeated claim that Israel is a vital U.S. ally.

Journalist Jim Lobe describes the neoconservative crusade, which continually seeks to draw the U.S. into foreign entanglements that benefit Israel. Antiwar.com editorial director Justin Raimondo provocatively asserts that Donald Trump has fundamentally changed the U.S. political discourse on Israel by vowing to be a neutral broker of peace.

Panelists Tareq Radi, who founded George Mason University’s Students Against Israeli Apartheid, and Maria LaHood, with the Center for Constitutional Rights, provide hope that activists working on campus and in U.S. courts are winning the battle to silence criticism of Israeli policies. Poet and author Susan Abulhawa, founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, earns a standing ovation for her damning description of the havoc U.S. tax-exempt groups are funding in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank.

Lawyer and human rights advocate Huwaida Arraf describes legal challenges to Israel’s harrowing attacks on Americans, including participants such as herself in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla.

Turning to the relentless pressure on TV, print and the film industry from supporters of Israel and Islamophobia, keynote speaker, author and foreign policy analyst Rula Jebreal urges collaboration to push back against the bullies who prevent alternative voices from reaching Americans. Philip Weiss, co-founder of the Mondoweiss.com website, describes a war for the soul of Judaism, a war that Zionists are losing as younger Jews confirm their homeland is here in the United States. The conference concludes with a hard-hitting introduction by film producer Catherine Jordan and clips from the must-see documentary “Valentino’s Ghost: Why We Hate Arabs.”

Speaker after speaker hammers home the message that we need to fight back against the false narrative pushed by the Israel lobby. This topic doesn’t attract giant grants, advertising dollars, tenure offers, or talking-head contracts on network TV—au contraire. But thanks to growing public outrage surrounding election campaign contributions from billionaires, big banks, defense contractors and the gun lobby, it is finally possible to criticize the influence of the Israel lobby. Please support the organizations working to inform all Americans, and help spread the word! ■

We need to fight back against the false narratives pushed by the Israel lobby.

ISRAEL’S INFLUENCE: Good or Bad for America?

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PANEL 1: Israel’s Influence on Congress and Government Agencies

Israel’s Influence On Congress and Government Agencies

Grant F. Smith

PANEL 1

Moderator

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Welcoming Remarks: Dale Sprusansky ood morning, everyone. We’re going to get started now. I am Dale Sprusansky. I’m the assistant editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. The Washington Report, along with the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, is sponsoring today’s program. Before we get going with a great first panel to a great day, [I have] just some housekeeping reminders for everyone. Of course, just make sure your phones are silenced and quiet so as not to disrupt the proceedings. We also ask that if anyone would like to have conversations that you take it outside or, better yet, to the Exhibition Hall, which is right by Registration.

There are book signings scheduled today for our speakers who have books. The book signing schedule can be found in your program, and the signings will happen, again, in the Exhibition Hall. You’ll see a big sign that says book signing over there.

Q&A today will be done on the note cards. In the bags you received at check-in, there should be five note cards and a pen. You can use those pens, use those note cards to write questions as the panelists are speaking. Someone will be going around, or multiple people will be going around, to collect the note cards and hand them to the moderator, who then shuffles through them to ask the questions to the speakers. It allows us to keep things fast and stay on schedule.

On the back of the badge that you received, there should be a little red ticket. Just make sure you hold onto that. That will be needed for the reception. That begins at 5:00, after the program. Just a reminder, too, that there is no recording inside of the area unless you have received prior approval. Also, today’s program is being streamed live on C-SPAN and online on various sources. So to our online audience, you can submit questions @israelinfluence on Twitter or e-mail conference@wrmea.org and we’ll make sure your questions get passed on to the moderator.

And finally, we just want to give a big thank you to all of our donors who helped make today’s event possible, because it would not have happened without them. With that being said, I’m going to introduce Grant Smith, who will be moderating and beginning our first panel.

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Grant F. Smith: Ten Ways the Israel Lobby “Moves” America

Ten Ways the Israel Lobby “Moves” America Grant F. Smith

PHOTO PHIL PORTLOCK

Dale Sprusansky: Grant Smith is the director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, one of the organizations that is, again, cosponsoring this event today. He’s the author of a brand new book, which I think is publically launching today. Is that correct, Grant?

Grant Smith: Yes. Sprusansky: It’s called Big Israel: How Israel’s Lobby Moves America.

It’s his eighth book on the Israel lobby. Grant is every day very hard at work doing FOIA requests with the CIA and the Department of Defense to uncover all sorts of stuff that no one else is. So, with that being said, I will hand it over to Grant.

Smith: Thank you, Dale. I’m going to be drawing some interesting facts from that book launching today, Big Israel, and really structuring it into 10 ways that the lobby moves America. Now, I’d like to start off with some figures from the poll that was conducted last week in four countries [see graph p.

8]. Statistically significant Google Consumer research asking a fundamental question vital for understanding the current situation in the Middle East, and that question was, which of the following do you believe to be true: A) Israelis occupy Palestinian land; B) Palestinians occupy Israeli land. As far as I know, no one has ever asked this question to a statistically significant audience in four countries.

Our friends across the pond, the Great Brits, 62 percent of them believe that the Israelis occupy Palestinian land. If you go up to Canada, a majority of that population, 51 percent, believe that Israelis occupy Palestinian land. If you go down to Mexico and ask, Cuál de las siguientes crees que sea cierto?, you will find that some 55 percent of Mexicans also believe— the majority—that Israelis occupy Palestinian land. There is only one country in North America that believes the opposite

is true, with the majority of us, Americans, 49 percent, believing that in fact Palestinians are the ones doing the occupying.

Now why is it we’re so out of sync with these other countries? What is it that we know or are told that they are not? I’d like to remind everybody of a statement that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu made back in 2001 that was only really circulated in 2011—and that was that his perception was, as told to West Bank settlers, “America is something you can move very easily. Move it in the right direction, they won’t get in our way.” What was he talking about? What moves America? Why is it, as uncovered by Edward Snowden, that across federal agencies—perhaps unbeknownst to many Americans—that a policy doctrine that the survival of the State of Israel is the paramount goal of Middle East policy?

Well, I would say, many would say, more are saying, it’s because of the Israel lobby. Note that I’m not saying what was said in “Valentino’s Ghost,” the Jewish lobby, because that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about Israel affinity organizations that are tax-exempt charities that have as a primary objective the advancement of Israel. Together, 336 of these, which are included in the Big Israel study—which went through 4,000 tax returns and a great deal of internal documents obtained by FOIA—336 of them make up what I’m calling the Israel lobby.

Now there are five false narratives about the Israel lobby that it promotes. Number one, that Americans who are Jewish are all Israel affinity organization members who support lobbying from these groups—false. Number two, Americans who are evangelical Christians are major forces in building this Israel affinity infrastructure—false. Number three, Israel affinity organizations are broad, diverse and with a great deal of member sup-

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PANEL 1: Israel’s Influence on Congress and Government Agencies

port—false. Number four, that Israel affinity organizations are representative bodies—false. And number five, Americans who generally favor Israel (which is true generally) are also generally favorable toward massive foreign aid packages—false.

Established news media generally helps amplify these claims and does generally a great job saying that the major organizations represent populations unequivocally. You saw reports from the battle over the Iran nuclear deal. You saw announcements from the Anti-Defamation League, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the American Jewish Committee, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations all saying that they were opposed to the deal. So Americans who were Jewish must have been against the deal as well, right? Wrong. In fact, American support generally was about 53 percent; whereas, Jewish American support was at 59 percent.

So if we look at the latest Pew Charitable Trusts survey, you find that 82 percent of the Jewish population in this country does not belong to such organizations.

They’re only somewhat attached to Israel, 70 percent. Most have never traveled to Israel. Forty-four percent think settlement building is a bad idea. If you take that remaining 18 percent and multiply it by the adult Jewish population, it’s about 774,000, or the population of Charlotte, North Carolina. The lobby knows and talks about this internally, saying, you know what, someday we’re going to be challenged on these numbers and all of these broad claims.

So who does the lobby really represent? Well, the views and concerns of mega donors, for sure, the views and concerns of a relatively small group of boards of directors and top officials, and of course the Israeli government, with which many are in direct and ongoing consultation. If we look at donor concentration and control of some of the top organizations, we find that within the Republican Jewish Coalition, some 143 donors give 76 percent of the funding. At AIPAC, 1,700 donors give 56 percent of the funding, with the top donor giving 13 percent. Casino mogul Sheldon Adelson donated a million to ZOA, the Zionist Organization of America. That was 20 percent of their 2013 funding.

There’s extreme donor concentration at many of these advocacy organizations within the Israel lobbying ecosystem. And 8

governance, as reported in some parts of the press, is extremely unrepresentative. Despite bylaws, despite occasional voice votes, many Israel affinity organizations are authoritarian.

The board select their own members. They hold pro forma voice votes. And of course, many of the CEOs have been around for a quarter of a century or more. If you look at Abraham Foxman at the ADL, he’s been in place, or was in place, for 28 years. Daniel Pipes at the Middle East Forum, in place for 26 years; Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America, 23 years. Now, the average tenure of a corporate CEO is less than ten, a college president less than eight. I would say that the rotation in governance kind of reflects the stagnation and lack of representation of many of these organizations.

Now another false concept is that Christian evangelicals are a major portion of building the Israel lobby in America.

And yes, there are 80 million Christians who are evangelical.

They’ve been courted by the lobby since the 1960s almost constantly. Many of them of course do vote about their feelings for Israel in American elections. But when you peel back the layers, you see that organizations like Christians United for Israel receive their seed funding from large Israel lobby donors to install their fund-raising software Convio, as it happens, to pay for massive public relations campaigns at Burson-Marsteller, as it happens, and that they’re really not very big. Two million dollars at CUFI in 2007 revenue before it went dark under some IRS regulations, and then the 2012 revenue at International Fellowship of Christians and Jews was $113 million.

So there is a false idea that these are major, major forces in the Israel lobby. What we do know, though, is that Americans generally, if you ask them, favorability ratings about Israel, they’re generally favorable. Most are favorable, 59 percent; 41 percent, not favorable or don’t care. We’ve given over $250 billion of aid to Israel, far more than any other country, inflation adjusted. And a large portion of aid is classified. President Obama made a statement at American University that it’s now unprecedented, but you can’t get the figure for intelligence aid.

If it’s unprecedented, then we know with military aid it’s either $1.9 billion a year, or $13.2 billion if the president adjusted for inflation. But when you ask the CIA, which must be handling

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Grant F. Smith: Ten Ways the Israel Lobby “Moves” America

intelligence aid to Israel, they say sorry, that’s classified. We’re suing them for that information, by the way. [Applause] In a 2014 poll, when you ask Americans something beyond favorability, when you ask them about the aid and ask this question: the U.S. gives over $3 billion annually or 9 percent of the foreign aid budget, more than any other country, this amount is _____, the statistically significant 2014 survey conducted through Google Consumer research, 60.7 percent say it’s either much too much or too much; 25.9 percent say about right; 13.4 percent too little.

Well, this is an old poll. Surely, this is a fluke. Many, many respondents must have given, I don’t know, there must have been a fluke. Well, no. In 2016, they conducted again this month, the figure has risen to almost 62 percent who say it’s too much or much too much. This is a specific question with information sufficient to make an informed answer, and the movement is generally against foreign aid. So these five false narratives that are used to move America can be or should be challenged.

Now I’d like to move on to five more, about a variety of subjects. If we look at state and local governments, there’s an absolute explosion in activities and lobbying on behalf of Israel.

A great deal of this is taking place from the Jewish Community Relations Councils which are inside large foundations. They’re distributed across every major population center. They function under the old American Zionist Council model in which, like AIPAC was back in the day, it’s just a little committee inside a big organization. That’s what they do. They lobby as unorganized, unincorporated committees. Well, that stopped for AIPAC back when the Kennedy administration told the AZC to register as a foreign agent. Six weeks later AIPAC broke off and finally incorporated. The Community Relations Councils, however, lobby the way AIPAC used to lobby, without disclosing very much, and some top AIPAC lobbyists are terrified—these slides will be online at the end of the day, by the way—terrified and quoted saying that he would sure hate to see any of this reported properly.

So what we have in terms of the prerogative of the presidency to take away Iran sanctions. It’s hard to unwind all of these state-level Iran boycotts. When we talk about the president maybe wanting to be in charge of whether law enforcement is trained in Israel, nuh-uh. If we talk about changes to state pension funds to allow the purchase of more Israel bonds, that’s not an executive prerogative anymore. In fact, California would love, and passed a resolution saying, that California believes Israel’s border should be determined by the government of Israel—the State of California state legisla-

ture! This is a type of resolution you see passed in many state legislatures.

But when you ask Americans, again, in a statistically significant poll the following question: Congress and state legislators passed scores of resolutions condemning Palestinians or voicing unconditional support for Israel every year, do you support this or not? Almost 70 percent say these resolutions don’t represent my views. So this is not representative government.

One of the JCRCs which does report—which is a big force in greater Washington—that for every dollar it raises, it extracts $1.58 in tax dollars for Israel. It’s very active. It’s building Israel affinity organization buildings on the taxpayer dime. It’s doing all sorts of trade developments, and international studies, and scientific endeavors on the state tax dollar with Israel.

So there’s a great deal of activity going on at the state level.

Another thing that’s very interesting is that Israel affinity organizations, a few of them, enjoy a high level of criminal immunity.

And this has been going on since the ’40s. The original organizations involved in conventional weapon smuggling to Jewish fighters in Palestine, there are only a handful of indictments.

The Zionist Organization of America has received seven foreign agent registration orders. There have never been any high-level criminal prosecutions over nuclear smuggling, which Dr. Mattson will be talking about. There’s no high-level prosecution for espionage. There have been solid cases against AIPAC in 1985 and 2005, all shut down by the Justice Department. The ADL holding classified information in ’90s, shut down by the Justice Department. United Against Nuclear Iran was conducting a smear campaign against a Greek shipper. It held classified information. The Greek shipper sued. The Justice Department waded into the case and shut it down. The Justice Department is losing a great deal of credibility by never seeming to be able to uphold the law when it comes to espionage cases.

Finally, number eight, Israel affinity organization activities inside executive state and federal agencies, we see a wave of

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PHOTO DELINDA HANLEY

PANEL 1: Israel’s Influence on Congress and Government Agencies

political appointees who are becoming known for lobbying and advocating on behalf of Israel within federal agencies: Dennis Ross at the Department of State; Neal Sher at the Justice Department; Josh Mandel, who bought $80 million of Israel bonds after changing state pension fund laws and lobbying to buy more for the Ohio State Treasury; neoconservatives at the Pentagon, which we are hoping Jim Lobe will cover later today; Stuart Levey and David S. Cohen at Treasury, conducting economic warfare against Iran, unaccountable to public inquiries but always seemingly meeting at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy to give private briefings; the FBI-ADL liaison, which I go into great depth in my book, which has been ongoing since the 1950s; and various IRS commissioners whose scorecard on creating more intransparency for Israel affinity organizations or ignoring congressional requests to investigate various groups has been ongoing since the 1960s. And with this level of what I would call regulatory capture of some key agencies, you of course have abuse of taxexempt status.

Now, before many organizations became Israel lobbying organizations, they were in fact holding clear social welfare purposes—immigrant aid, life insurance, cultural and educational endeavors, and charitable hospitals. So this first wave that started in the mid-1800s tended to reduce government burden, which is the actual reason that organizations are given tax-exempt status. But as we’ve moved on, and since 1948, many of the organizations are not really offsetting any government burden. They’re creating more government burden, whether it’s lobbying for increased kinetic action against Israel’s enemies—that’s how they talk—or The Israel Project, 10

which functions as sort of a PR agency for the Israeli governments and attempts to leverage that into being able to quash who appears on certain programs.

So we’ve been moving away as the lobby grows into the largest, collectively the largest, charitable entity in the United States. In 2012, there was about $3.672 billion, by the end of the decade it will be at $6.2 billion. The tax burden that this creates directly means that Americans, just to offset the subsidy, will be paying about a billion dollars extra in taxes by the end of the year. And when you look at it on a chart, foreign aid versus the revenue raised by these 336 organizations, our foreign aid to Israel—the unclassified, what we know about— looks like a big matching grants program where as much money as these organizations can raise to lobby and spend and convince people to move Israel’s way in the United States is not simply matched by the federal government for the annual aid program, which will be a big topic, I’m sure, at AIPAC’s convention next week.

So probably the most costly thing is the constant agitation for policies and military actions against Israel’s enemies, and we can see this as well in the United States when we do consumer research surveys. Right before the final negotiations of the Iran nuclear program, 58 percent of Americans were so scared. They were already convinced that Iran had nuclear weapons. That’s how far we’ve been moved. And so I would argue, in my book I argue, that Americans have been too easily moved and that we’re paying the transport bill. That only through much greater awareness, and particularly focusing on many of these captured agencies, will we be able to stop this downward spiral. ■

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Dr. roger Mattson: Did israel Steal U.S. Weapons-Grade Uranium, and Did it have help From U.S. citizens?

Did Israel Steal U.S. Weapons-Grade Uranium, And Did It Have Help From U.S. Citizens?

Dr. Roger Mattson

Photo Phil Portlock

Grant Smith: And now, I’ve got four seconds left, I would like to welcome Dr. Roger Mattson, who is going to do our next presentation. Dr. Roger J. Mattson is the author of the recently published book Stealing the Bomb: How Denial and Deception Armed Israel.

Dr. Roger Mattson has experience in engineering and management at Sandia National Laboratory, the Atomic Energy Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency and several other nuclear safety and security consultancies. He was the adviser to the Nuclear Regulatory commissioners on policy issues such as safety goals, risk assessment, nuclear standards, Three Mile Island.

And after leaving government service in 1984, he led two private companies that provided safety and security services for U.S. nuclear power plants, the Energy Department’s nuclear facilities and several foreign users of nuclear power.

Following the Chernobyl incident in 1986, he helped developed IAEA guidance on safety principles for the world’s nuclear power plants. He oversaw nuclear safety consultancies in five countries. He also served on the offsite safety committees for several nuclear power plants and several DOE nuclear facilities. In 2012, he was part of a team formed by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers to forge a new safety construct for nuclear power after the tragedy at Fukushima. He has participated in safety analysis and field surveys of nearly 150 nuclear facilities in the U.S., Europe, the former Soviet Union and the Far East, including the startup of the latest U.S. nuclear power plant in 2015. Roger.

Dr. Roger Mattson: I’ll just say a couple of things at the start to get us rolling. This is a complex story that I’m going to

tell you today. It’s been ongoing for about 60 years, as you will learn, and it’s come into the public light in kind of a random way. We learn a little bit here, we learn a little bit there. So it was hard for me to piece it together over the years. I had assistance from Grant in some of his FOIA requests, and I’ll show you some of those later.

There’s some science involved in this story. I’ll try not to go over your head on the science, but the science is important to the story. So if you have questions about that, send a card up and we’ll see if we can answer it at the Q&A session.

I’m going to cover a lot of territory. When I was in China helping them start their first nuclear regulatory authority, I learned a phrase about moving fast through a subject. They call it watching the flowers from horseback, so today we’re going to watch some flowers from horseback, if you get my meaning. There’s some new information in what I’m going to talk about that’s never been talked about publically before. It’s in the book [Stealing the Bomb: How Denial and Deception Armed Israel], and we’ll point it out as we come to it.

I started an interest in this subject—the theft of nuclear materials from the United States to jumpstart the Israeli nuclear weapons program—in 1977, when I was asked to lead a group of NRC—Nuclear Regulatory Commission—security experts to look at the charges by a whistleblower, one of our colleagues at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Over the years, as more information became available, I learned that I hadn’t been told everything the government knew at the time it sent me up to conduct that investigation, so I had a certain curiosity in it.

There were a couple of congressional investigations follow-

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ing the whistleblower activity, the most important of which was led by [Sen.] Mo Udall, a Democrat from Arizona. And his records became available in recent years at the University of Arizona Library, which were a vital source to me. We’re going to hear the story about a man named John Hadden, a CIA person who was station chief for CIA in Tel Aviv at the time of this event. His son made his records available to me about two years ago, after his father’s death, and they proved invaluable, as you’ll see from quotations I’ll provide from them.

And then in 2006, the Department of Energy declassified some technical information about the uranium that was stolen, and it helped put the whole story together. So some of this broke very late, compared to when it happened.

Let me say a couple of things about Israel’s nuclear program. The first reactor built in Israel was supplied by the United States under President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program. Some of you are probably old enough to remember that.

It was an attempt by the Eisenhower administration to stay in the lead over the Soviets in the distribution of nuclear technology in the world, and a small research reactor was built at Nahal Sorek in Israel.

About the same time, because the United States refused to provide a plutonium production reactor, the Israelis made a deal with the French that had its genesis in the Suez Canal crisis and the support that the Israelis provided for the French in that affair. And they obtained on the QT the design and fabrication of a reactor at a place called Dimona in Israel. The French pro12

vided not only the reactor and the fuel, but also the reprocessing plant from which plutonium could be extracted for making nuclear weapons.

An important part of the Israeli program was an organization called LEKEM, which is a Hebrew acronym for a security organization. I think it was the scientific bureau or something that it stood for.

These people were charged with espionage around the world—mainly centered in the United States—to steal materials, components and information about nuclear weapons production capabilities. They were also the people who befuddled the inspector sent by President Kennedy, and for a time by President Johnson, to look into Dimona to try to confirm the Israeli claims that it was a research reactor, not a weapons production reactor. There’s a Ministry of Defense organization called RAFAEL, another Hebrew acronym that you’ll see show up in the chronology as I go through it. Just to give you a time reference, historians believe today, scholars believe today, that the first Israeli nuclear weapons were available for use at the time of the Six-Day War in 1967—to try to give you a time reference.

The next slide is a quick picture of Dimona. It’s hard to see much on that slide. I’ll just point out that on the right-hand side is the usual reactor containment dome that you’re used to seeing at other nuclear plants. I think in the middle there are cooling towers, forced draft cooling towers. And then the tower on the far left would be for gaseous effluents from the plant. An important thing to remember: these plants all have radioactive effluents.

So the company that was involved in the diversion of materials to Israel was a company called NUMEC, Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation. And the next couple of slides provide a timeline for NUMEC’s operation.

I left something off at the start. In 1955 there was the Geneva Conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, where people from developing nations that hadn’t been involved in the Manhattan Project and the bomb production capability of the United States in World War II first came together to talk about, under the Atoms for Peace kind of dialogue, what they wanted to do with nuclear energy. And Israel was a prime attendee at that meeting in the person of Ernst David Bergmann, who went on to become the father of the Israeli atomic bomb. He was the chairman at that time of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission.

Bergmann turned out to be a close colleague of a man named Zalman Shapiro. Shapiro was an American Jew from

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Dr. Roger Mattson: Did Israel Steal U.S. Weapons-Grade Uranium, and Did It Have Help From U.S. Citizens?

the Pittsburgh area who was a world famous nuclear metallurgist. He knew a lot about uranium. He knew a lot about plutonium. He knew a lot about how to clad fuel elements, how to make fuel elements for reactors. And he learned those things in the United States Nuclear Navy program. He designed the first nuclear submarine for the United States, the Nautilus. His neighbor in the Pittsburgh area was a man named David Lowenthal. Lowenthal was a hero, really, of the ’48 war of Independence in Israel. He was on the Exodus, the ship Exodus taking refugees to Israel after World War II. He was a confidant of Ben-Gurion. He organized the funding for the company called NUMEC. Zalman Shapiro became the president of NUMEC. He left the U.S. government employment at Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory and started the company NUMEC. It started processing highly enriched uranium for the U.S. Navy in 1960. By 1964, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory people were learning that there was missing uranium, what they call inventory differences, or material unaccounted for, at the NUMEC facility in Apollo, Pennsylvania. The Oak Ridge people—remember, Oak Ridge is the first uranium enrichment capability in the world, built during World War II. Oak Ridge alerted the Atomic Energy Commission, then under the leadership of Dr. Glenn Seaborg, a Nobel Laureate for the discovery of plutonium. The AEC did an independent audit. They used the best people they could find—the best people from Oak Ridge, the best people from the commission, the best people from NUMEC—and they came up with 178 kilograms of missing highly enriched uranium. Of that 178, they found that 94 kilograms could no way be accounted for.

Over the next year or so, NUMEC borrowed $2.2 million to pay for the 178. They had to pay for it all, whether it went up in the air or whether it went someplace that nobody knew about. In 1967, being in dire financial straits, NUMEC sold to Atlantic Richfield Company—an interesting sale that Grant wrote about in an earlier book [Divert! NUMEC, Zalman Shapiro and the Diversion of U.S. Weapons Grade Uranium Into the Israeli Nuclear Weapons Program]. That coincided with Atlantic Richfield Company’s first entry into the nuclear business. It got a $30 million a year contract at the Hanford Works in the State of Washington, sort of coincidentally with its purchase of NUMEC. Some people can’t visualize this NUMEC facility in Apollo— was it a great big thing or a little bitty thing? Here’s the scale.

It’s about two stories tall. It’s about a block-and-a-half long.

That’s the factory in the top photo. In the bottom photo is the

office building across the street, which figures in the story.

So the inventory difference grew to 287 kilograms. For those of you who think in terms of pounds, that’s about 600 pounds of missing highly enriched uranium. It takes 10 to 20 pounds to make an atom bomb.

Then in 1968—that’s something that’s on the cover of my book and we’ll see here in a minute—is the records of the four senior espionage officials, espionage agents of the government of Israel, who visited NUMEC under false credentials. In 1970 Shapiro left NUMEC, went to work for a company called Kawecki Berylco, which made beryllium components for nuclear weapons, supplied the beryllium which is used in a variety of ways in nuclear weapons.

He applied for a higher security clearance than the one he had. He got involved with the Nixon administration and Attorney General Mitchell.

Some of you will remember John Mitchell.

And Mitchell said, no, don’t give him a security clearance. It was after the Oppenheimer trial, where Oppenheimer lost his security clearance. Seaborg didn’t want to go through that again. With Shapiro, they fought back and forth between the AEC and the Justice Department. In the end AEC found him a job where he didn’t need a security clearance that paid $10,000 a year—more than what he was making—and he took that job at Westinghouse, where he spent most of the rest of his career.

In 1971 Babcock & Wilcox Company—that’s the people who designed Three Mile Island, by the way—bought NUMEC from Atlantic Richfield Company. They stopped operations in ’78.

The plant was decommissioned and returned to a green field by 1992. But it had a waste disposal site a few miles away that is now the subject of a Superfund cleanup by the United States government to the tune of $400 million, organized by the Corps of Engineers, and the costs are being negotiated by the Justice Department. That’s the story of NUMEC. I will go back to the audit in 1965. Of the 178 kilograms that was missing, 94 kilograms unexplained. The NRC historian has recorded that as six atomic bombs, or maybe a little more. There was no FBI investigation of the theft, the alleged diversion in 1965 or ’66. The AEC under Dr. Seaborg said they didn’t think it had been stolen. They didn’t know where it went for sure, but they didn’t think it had been stolen. If you look at the records of their discussions, the commission discussions with their staff, there’s no discussion whatsoever of Dr. Shapiro’s association

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with Israel. There was suspicion, but they didn’t talk in any detail about those associations. I’ll give you some of that detail in a minute.

They had various explanations for where the material went.

None of it panned out. They dug up things in waste disposal.

They counted filters at Oak Ridge Laboratory. They couldn’t find 94 kilograms. That’s 200 pounds of highly enriched uranium.

Later Seaborg wrote a number of books, and he wrote three of them that were memoirs where he discussed NUMEC. In one of them he said, what good would it do to admit that HEU had been stolen and given to Israel? He denied that it happened, but he said what good would it do?

Dr. Shapiro was a Zionist.

He was a national officer in the Zionist Organization of America. He was an awardee of the ZOA. He told both the FBI and the AEC when they had hearings with him that he wanted to immigrate to Israel. Finally, in a wiretap, the FBI picked up his admission that the Israelis told him he was more valuable to them here than he was there. You can read down the slide. You can see it on the Web later. He was associated with Bergmann, the father of the Israeli bomb, a number of LEKEM agents, and people from Mossad. We’ll talk about Rafael Eitan in a minute. And those are some of his associations.

One of the keys to understanding how this happened was that the CIA, beginning in 1966, ’67, and ’68, thought Israel had the bomb. But they hadn’t confirmed that Dimona was producing plutonium. They charged the CIA Station Chief John Hadden and his people in Tel Aviv to make trips to Dimona and collect samples in the environment. Remember the gaseous effluents. At any nuclear plant you can pick up very small traces of radioactivity. That’s why they’re so closely regulated, to keep those traces very small. So they were looking for plutonium in the environment. John Hadden’s son remembers going out there with his dad on peanut butter sandwich trips where the kids would eat the peanut butter sandwich and the father would collect flora in the vicinity, throw them in the trunk, and head back to Tel Aviv.

We don’t know today who counted those or did the radioactive analysis of those samples, but they found highly enriched uranium before they found plutonium. And there was no highly enriched uranium at Dimona. Israel had no capability to enrich uranium. What we know today is that they were able to put a signature on that highly enriched uranium that proved that it

came from the United States, that it came from the naval nuclear program, because the fuel for Navy reactors was 97.7 percent enriched.

A little science: natural uranium, 0.7 percent; uranium in a light-water reactor, a power reactor like we use, 3 percent; uranium in a nuclear weapon, typically 93 percent, depending on the country. But the naval fuel was 97.7, and that’s what Hadden found in the environment near Dimona—the type of fuel processed by NUMEC. This is what’s on the cover of the book [see p. 12]. In 1968 these four Israeli spies showed up at NUMEC—and, just briefly: Avraham Hermoni was the LEKEM chief in the United States. He recruited a number of spies for Israel in the nuclear program. He went back to RAFAEL, where he was the deputy director of that weapon’s effort in Israel.

Ephraim Biegun was sort of the technician of Shin Bet, the Israeli FBI. Avraham Bendor went on to be the head of Shin Bet. Rafi Eitan went on to be the head of LEKEM and recruited and ran Jonathan Pollard in the United States.

They visited NUMEC in 1968, and there were various stories they created. In the book you’ll read my assessment that what they were really there for was to enlist Shapiro’s help with the fabrication of fuel for Dimona using uranium they stole from the Western Europeans.

I’m going to skip the next couple of slides. There’s an eyewitness account of the theft that’s discussed in the book that the FBI did not follow up on, and we today don’t know why.

Then I’m going to talk about what various people concluded.

Grant, please bear with me and I’ll be done.

J. Edgar Hoover said remove his [Shapiro’s] clearance and take away all of his contracts. Four attorneys general touched it—Ramsey Clark, John Mitchell, Edward Levi and Griffin Bell.

They said don’t give him any more clearances. They did wiretaps. They said more was needed. And then by 1980 the whole thing ended.

Seaborg said what good did it do to admit. Morris Udall said that if he had to write in an envelope whether it happened or not, having finished his investigation and the penalty for being wrong was death, he would write in his envelope that it happened. Other politicians have been slow to say. [CIA Director] Richard Helms said we did the job and avoided political risk.

God knows what Richard Helms meant in his biography. Zbigniew Brzezinski, just last year, when presented with documents

The Israelis told him he was more valuable to them here than he was there.

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Prof. Kirk J. Beattie: How Congress Shapes Middle East Policy and How AIPAC Shapes Congress

that Grant found, said, “Well, something did transpire. It’s explosive. It’s controversial. What do you want me to do? Ask them to give it back?”

Enough from me, there are lots of implications of this business of a policy nature. My conclusion is the material went there. Whether Shapiro was actually present when it happened, it’s hard to prove. They tell me about arson, if you don’t see the match held to the flame, it’s hard to make an arson conviction. I think the Justice Department had the same trouble here.

Finally, I would say that NUMEC’s not alone, that LEKEM and Rafael Eitan—who’s still alive, by the way—recruited Arnon Milchan, the famous Hollywood producer. His most recent movie was “The Revenant.” He did “Gone Girl” and “Birdman.” He’s one of the wealthiest men in the world. He was an Israeli spy causing the smuggling of materials and information to their nuclear program for many years.

And last but not the least, on a deeper understanding level, the Israel lobby impedes frank discussion of Israel on this subject. This book has stuff that people haven’t seen before. I hope they’ll pay attention to it. The Israeli policy of nuclear opacity, denying that they have the bomb when we all know they do, impedes frank discussion of a weapons-free Middle East, which the Obama administration and others have talked about and we ought to get on with. The only solution to this nuclear weapons thing is nuclear disarmament.

It’s probably a hundred-year process. We ought to start today. Thank you.

Grant Smith: We’ve encouraged all of our speakers to stay.

We’re certainly probably not going to be able to get to all of your questions on NUMEC or Congress and the making of Middle East policy, but please seek them out during breaks, during the book signings, during other opportunities. ■

How Congress Shapes Middle East Policy, And How the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Shapes Congress Prof. Kirk J. Beattie

PHOTO PHIL PORTLOCK

Grant Smith: Our next speaker, Kirk James Beattie, is the author of Congress and the Shaping of the Middle East, as well as two books on Egyptian politics, Egypt During the Nasser Years and Egypt During the Sadat Years. Professor Beattie is at Simmons College in the Political Science and International Relations Department, specializing in comparative politics with regional expertise in Middle East and West European politics. He’s taught at Harvard, Wellesley, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and the University of Michigan. He’s the recipient

of numerous national scholarships, including a Fulbright-Hays grant, and an International Rotary Foundation fellowship, an American Research Center in Egypt grant, and a Center for Arabic Study Abroad fellowship.

Kirk Beattie: Thank you very much. I’d like to thank the people at IRmep and Washington Report for inviting me here. I’ve benefitted tremendously from their work over the years, and from the ability to interview some of them for, actually, the book that I completed not long ago. I am, by formal training, a Middle East specialist. And as Grant

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just said, my first two books were ones related to Egypt.

My children were at a certain age where I didn’t think it made much sense to be taking them out of the country again, ripping them out of the school system here to maybe a more dubious educational possibility in Egypt. So I decided to follow up on an idea that I had for a number of years, which is to come down to DC and make numerous trips here to look into a subject that had been on my mind for a long time: the role that Congress plays in the shaping of Middle East policy. A lot of people have argued that Congress doesn’t have much of a role in this issue area, so I’ll come back to it later on, but I thought that this could make for an interesting topic, and one that had not been written on very extensively at all.

I like to use as my primary method of analysis one of doing elite interviewing, and so for my first two books I interviewed very extensively people in the broad Egyptian political elite. I want to do the same thing here, because I think that by talking to people who are involved in playing the political game themselves, that gives you as an outsider—myself being the outsider—the best possible view of how the insiders are behaving and what motivates them to take their decisions in the way that they do.

I also knew that probably the people who were actually serving as members of Congress were people who might have a more difficult time talking very frankly about these matters because they’re still in the hot seat, so to speak. But that if I approached the staffers and gave them, of course, the promise of anonymity that they might be able to, if they assented to my request, speak much more openly and frankly about these issues, not only telling me, of course, how they went about doing their own jobs, but also how they perceived their bosses behaving.

So this is what I did. I came down and I generated a random sample for members of the House. In other words, I put 435 in the computer hopper, so to speak, and randomly generated numbers that I associated with the names of each of the members of Congress. Then I just started to work my way down that list so that I would have as close to a random sample of members of the House as I possibly could. I went into all 100 Senate offices requesting interviews. Typically, whether it was on the House side or on the Senate side, I would walk in. You’re naked in Washington, DC if you don’t have your business card, so I pull out a business card and present myself. I tell them why I was there. I was hoping to speak with the person who had the foreign policy portfolio for whomever the boss was in

that particular office, and that I would like to speak with them for the purpose of doing a book on, again, the role that Congress played in shaping Middle East policy.

I, in the end, ended up with somewhere on the order of at least one interview with 130 or more House members. Then later on I went back. My initial wave of interviews was in the 2005-2006 period. I came back down here. I made numerous trips again between 2011-2013 to follow up with additional interviews, typically on the second round talking to as many people as I had met the first time around. On the House side I talked to about 130 people initially, and then had follow-up interviews with a number of them. On the Senate side I had interviews with over 30 Senate staffers in total, which I think were reasonably decent representative numbers across the board.

So this book that I’ve written is one that’s very heavily based on my interviews with the staffers, and I tried to begin just by getting an idea of who they were. These are people that play an incredibly important role for their bosses, for the members of Congress. The members of Congress would be incapable of moving on all kinds of issues in any way resembling an intelligent fashion if they didn’t have the assistance of these staffers.

So I was very curious as to who the staffers themselves were, where were they coming from, how did they get the job, how they were recruited, where they studied, where they’ve done their university studies, had they gone to graduate school or not at all, were they political scientists, were they people who had studied another discipline, were they people who had ever taken a course on Middle East politics, and so forth.

So I spent quite a bit of time trying to get to know the staffers reasonably well at the beginning of my interview. I asked them how old they were and how long they’ve been up on the Hill, and so on and so forth. And so I think I came up with a reasonably good sense of who the people were. And then, of course, the bigger issue was to try to figure out how they went about doing their work, and how they went about advising their bosses, and what kind of communications they had then with their bosses, and ultimately how their bosses thought about issues in this issue area and arrived at their own decisions.

I have not worked on the Hill. I had not worked on the Hill ever. I still have not ever worked on the Hill in terms of being in some sort of a staffing capacity. So this was new to me. I’m not an Americanist by my formal training. I’m a person who studied Middle East politics and so forth. So I walked into these offices, and when I started sitting down with the first

The modal age for my House interviewees was 23.

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PHOTO BILL HUGHES

people with whom I was conducting these interviews I would say, “Okay, well, you’re the person who has the foreign policy portfolio for Representative X. Is this all that you do?”

So I know that there must be some people in this room who know the answer to this question, maybe know this a lot better than I do. But I was stunned because they would say, “Well, yes, I do foreign policy. I also do defense. I do intelligence. I do Homeland Security. I do Veterans Affairs. I do taxation. I do the environment. I do immigration issues.”

Now I think I may be up to about eight or nine enormous portfolios at this point, but usually they went up to about 12 to 14 different portfolios. This is on the House side. How can any human being possibly be knowledgeable and have expertise in this many different issue areas? It’s just humanly impossible. And yet these are the individuals who are providing the information to their bosses across this range of issues, and upon whom the bosses are depending to a considerable extent. The modal age for my House interviewees was 23, so they’re directly out of school. I talk to my students at school and I say to them, look, you’re just a couple years removed from being highly qualified to go on and be working in a House office.

On the Senate side of the picture, it was different in that you had maybe half as many portfolios, or possibly slightly fewer in some cases, that were being carried by the Senate staffers.

And the modal age did go up to 36 in that case. So there’s a significant disparity across the two sides of the Hill, yet the House plays its role and the people on the Senate side play their own role. By the way, there isn’t a lot of communication across the board between the two, if you weren’t aware of that.

But I was blown away again then by the hard work, of course, that was being put in by the staffers on both sides, including on the House side. But the lack of expertise, the lack of knowledge by maybe the youthful exuberance that they brought to their jobs, but by the lack of deeper knowledge. So I would have people who had been around there for three or four years, whom I came to consider more as being like the veterans, right, if they’d been working on the Hill for three to four years. And they would look at me and say, so you’ve

come here to find out how little we know in this issue area, right? This is the standard thing that I came up with.

Now I didn’t go in with the intention of focusing on AIPAC. I’ve been asked if I would focus a bit more on AIPAC for the purpose of this presentation. I’m very happy to do so. I will note, though, that of all the different organizations, lobbyists and so forth that were mentioned to me—and there was not a very long list of organizations that were mentioned to me by the staffers—the only one that came up consistently by every single staffer was that of AIPAC. Every single staffer, even if they’ve been there for a very short amount of time, was familiar with AIPAC. They’d been made aware of its existence from very early on, because people from AIPAC are highly professional, very, very quick to move in, and to introduce themselves and make themselves known, and to offer their assistance to people in the office, and knowing that maybe there’s a brand new person on the job in a particular office.

AIPAC, I came to learn from others, was described in very positive terms by many, many people, but also as kind of the 800-pound gorilla by others, by a number of other people. I looked that up.

There really aren’t 800-pound gorillas. The biggest gorillas only get to be 600 pounds or so. So if you take away anything of interest from this talk, at least you have that going for you.

[Laughter] Now, how does AIPAC go about currying its influence? I’m narrowing the focus a bit now. It begins with elections and it begins very, very early. In fact, it begins before people are even running for Congress per se. AIPAC invests a lot of effort, with the assistance of the JCRC groups that Grant was talking about earlier on at the community level, in scouting individuals and looking for rising stars on either side of the political aisle, to try to see whether somebody who’s running for a municipal council in a major city or for some lower level job looks like he or she has the potential to rise up to be quite a bright promising—or is showing themselves as a bright promising political candidate who might over the longer run then be somebody who is interested in running for a congressional office.

So from very early on the vetting process begins, even before people are running for Congress, and also opportunities are ex-

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tended. This I think is going to be spoken about later on by Gideon Levy, if I’m not mistaken, in his keynote speech, so I’m not going to go into this in any greater detail now. But opportunities are provided such as trips to Israel. So the attempt to socialize people who are perceived even as potential candidates for running for Congress begins at a very early age from the perspective of some of these groups, including that of AIPAC. In addition, of course, money plays an exceptionally important role. I had one young Jewish-American staffer who said to me in a very friendly way—he’s trying to forewarn me—Now, whatever you do, don’t talk about the money. I know that he is afraid that if I started talking about the money at any point, or mention this in the book, that that would open me up all the more to accusations of anti-Semitism and so forth, because it’s the standard trope, right? And so I thanked him for having done that.

But how does one ignore the money when the Congress persons, if I can use that term, themselves spend the bulk of their time looking for money? I mean they only arrive, some of them, here—as Representative David Obey, a longtime veteran on the House side, told me here—maybe on a Tuesday morning or something like that. They work Tuesday through Thursday, and then they’re on a plane by late Thursday or Friday morning back to their home constituencies to raise money again. And they’re raising money while they’re in their offices here as well.

So, money is exceptionally important to all these individuals, as you all well know.

AIPAC, as a 501(c)(4)organization, cannot provide direct assistance this way. But they do then arrange for large meetings with people, usually on a regional basis. And then at these regional meetings, which are fund-raising activities for AIPAC, they’ll put people who are congressional candidates in touch with donors at those particular organizations. So this is the way that AIPAC tends to work these things out.

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The relative absence of significant countervailing influences here is important, because the first thing that people over the years have thought about in terms of a countervailing influence to, I like to say, more pro-right-wing Israeli government actors, is the oil lobby. So I would listen to my, again, interviewees talk about individuals that they were being contacted by and who had influence in whatever shape and manner and so forth. And they would actually, again, to a person not talk at all about the oil lobby. Finally, at the end of this segment of the interview, I would say, well, but what about the oil lobby? They would sit back—these are even people coming from oil-producing states—and they would scratch their heads, and then say, no, we never hear from people from the oil lobby at all on things relating to this issue—which I found very, very interesting.

Once the people are elected and they arrive on the Hill, how does AIPAC try to sustain its influence? Well, numerous measures. First of all, they are very active in providing members of Congress with letters, with the “dear colleague” letters, and with the provision of materials that set bills in action. So this is one important factor. I may have to skip through maybe some of these things along the way, because I see the clock is ticking down at me in a ferocious pace.

They keep scorecards on the way that people vote. They very heavily use and intelligently have recourse to their own constituents. And so people in these offices are much more likely to want to listen to and hear from their own constituents and will respond to constituent concerns than they are to listen to people who are coming from the outside.

But the staffers, again, know of AIPAC’s significance and so forth, and so AIPAC can get its foot in the door in a way that a lot of other actors or interest groups and lobbyists are not allowed to do. They go to great length then to keep score of how people are voting. They communicate that information back to their constituents. Constituents call on a regular basis, so that they become people who have first name basis contact with the person who holds the foreign policy portfolio. Like, Kevin’s on the line from Cincinnati or whatever, would you take it? And they’ll take the call and will talk to people that way. Again, this is not a game that is being played with any-

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Prof. Kirk J. Beattie: How Congress Shapes Middle East Policy and How AIPAC Shapes Congress

cal backgrounds or people who are security hawks. They where near the same success by any of the other lobbyists tend to be clustered in these committees and subcommittees compared to AIPAC. of Foreign Policy and Appropriations in a way that’s very imAnother thing, again—and this is what’s structural in nature portant. about the way that AIPAC succeeds—is that they know exNow let me just try to wrap things up here. Is Congress’ actly how strapped these staffers are in terms of the time that role important? We’ve had a lot of people along the way who they have allotted to deal with any particular issues. And so have argued that this is not the case. Aaron David Miller has for AIPAC to come along and basically deliver talking points written about this. I imagine a lot of people in the room have and information to them on a silver platter makes life so much heard of him. People on the left, like Noam Chomsky, have easier for them that they’re very happy to be on the receiving written about this, that the lobby doesn’t play a very important end of that information. role.

Yet another point is that many of the staffers, of course, only I beg to disagree. The president has tremendous power, of last on these jobs for a very short number of years. They’re course, but it’s the Congress—again, over time—that does only there for one or two or three years, right? They’re not things like sign the bills that provide the $3.2 billion annually, being very well paid. They know that if they can get a job for and now maybe going up to $5 billion annually, in terms of asany lobbying firm, then after they’ve been on the job for, again, sistance to Israel. And so I like to think of this in terms of a short number of years and have acquired that experience, maybe a horse trainer who can bute up and sort of drug a they can leave the Hill, go to work for a lobbyist and they can horse so that it performs more marvelously in a race, but it is start making at least three times as much money as they were potentially injurious over the longer run to the health of the being paid as a staffer. horse, so to speak.

Now I want you to think about that a little bit longer, because Let me just finish, then, by saying that I think the question if your longer-on objective is one of being hired by a lobbyist— posed—Is AIPAC’s influence, then, bad I’m now broadening the focus to think (Advertisement) for America? What I learned along the about the influence of other special interway from the staffers—and, really, so est groups—then how likely are you to be much of the book is based, again, on biting the hand of people who are trying to these hundreds of interviews that I did provide you information for free if you with the staffers—is that you have peomight want to go be employed by those ple who are even Jewish-American people over the longer run? So, all these staffers who are embarrassed by the kinds of factors come into consideration. power of AIPAC. You have many, many Another thing that’s going on, then, is other staffers, including Jewish-American one of the fox that’s being placed in staffers, who are disgusted by the power charge of the chicken coop, so to of AIPAC. In over 30 years of teaching speak. And so if you have the time, look on this subject, not once ever have I in very carefully to see which individuals the classroom ever accused any of the have served over time as the chairs or members of Congress or any of the acthe ranking members and so forth of the Gifted Palestinian students tors in the executive branch of having committee and subcommittee in Foreign can reach their potential with dual loyalties or of being treasonous.

Policy and Appropriations. What you’ll your generous donation.

And yet I can tell you that I had intertend to find in this issue area that we’re (Tax is Applied for) ((T Tax Exemption p views with people who are coming from discussing here are people who are both Republican and Democrat backcoming from what one more conservagrounds who told me—again, anonytive or right-wing staffer described to AFBU mously, and deferred when I asked them me as dark blue as opposed to light to give me specific names—things like blue, meaning in terms of their commitAmerican Friends of Birzeit University insert the name of any other country into ment to Israel kind of backgrounds. And the formula and any member of Conyou’ll tend to see people who are comgress for their behavior would be acing from very hardcore dark blue JewThank you in advance for cused of treason. I’ll conclude on that ish-American districts in the country or ki d ib b i note. [Applause] ■ people who are coming from evangeli-

American Friends of Birzeit University

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PANEL 1: Israel’s Influence on Congress and Government Agencies

PHOTO PHIL PORTLOCK

Questions & Answers

Grant Smith: Just to note that Dr. Mattson will be signing his book at the conclusion of this panel over in the Exhibition Hall. We’ve got a number of questions, which we’re still receiving, by Internet, by Twitter, and of course from our wonderful participants. One of them asked immediately after seeing some of my slides on polling how many Americans believe that Israel has multiple nuclear weapons. We polled that in 2014. It was the majority of Americans, so people know. How that figures into the qualitative military edge we’re supposed to pay for as taxpayers is never discussed, so that’s an open question.

Paul Thomas from Chicago, via e-mail, asks, how do you view presidential candidates on their Middle East policy positions? That will be covered by Justin Raimondo of antiwar.com during his presentation, so stay tuned.

L. Michael Hager from Easton, Massachusetts is asking why do so many states pass resolutions opposing boycotts, divestments and sanctions? It’s the same organizations. It’s the same legislative templates that we see in state after state. So a lot of the organizations, JCRCs, local mini-AIPACs such as exist in the California Policy Committee, are active in passing those. Now, whether or not they’re constitutional should be decided fairly soon.

Is the information given by me today available in the book?

Some of it, the rest of the slides will be on the IsraelsInfluence.org website. And now I would like to pass it on to Roger Mattson for his questions.

Roger Mattson: I had a couple of people ask about the 20

connection between Israel and the South Africans. There was cooperation on nuclear weapons under the apartheid regime.

The Israelis promised not to be the first to introduce nuclear weapons in the Middle East. That was the deal they cut with several presidents of the United States, but they parsed that over time by assembling weapons at the Six-Day War and by conducting the tests that they conducted, of what were thought to be at least one neutron bomb, in the Indian Ocean, with the cooperation of the South Africans. I think what they got in return was uranium ore. It’s in the book briefly, but that’s another whole subject, about which a couple of books have been written.

What was the role of Shimon Peres and France in building Dimona? Well, Shimon Peres made the deal with the French nuclear authorities—some say with, and some say without, de Gaulle’s knowledge. And then Shimon Peres was the man to whom Ernst David Bergmann reported as the chairman of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission. So the triumvirate that built the Israeli bomb was Ben-Gurion, Peres and Bergmann, and their minions.

Then a question about what is the current status of U.S officials, including the president, refusing to acknowledge that Israel has nuclear weapons? That deal is nuclear ambiguity or nuclear opacity. The policy of Israel on nuclear weapons was a deal that was made in private by President Nixon and Golda Meir. Even Henry Kissinger was forbidden to be in the room. It was never written down, but the understanding is: Don’t ask, don’t tell. We won’t talk about it. We’ll quit sending inspectors,

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Questions & Answers

held by Americans for Peace Now and Israel Policy Forum and we won’t acknowledge that you have the bomb. It’s now a and so forth. silly policy. It ought to be undone, but it’s not undone by either So what are some of these other groups that weigh in, and I side. think are doing so with somewhat greater success? One that Kirk Beattie: My question is, is there significant lobbying in comes to mind to me in terms of my experience were The Congress for the Palestinians? Excellent question. I, again, Quakers and FCNL. The Friends’ Committee on National Legwould give free rein to the interviewees to respond to my islation has, again, a small number of people who are dediquestions on the Hill however they chose to do so. Typically, cated to lobbying in this issue area on behalf of peace, right? they would talk a lot about AIPAC, maybe talk about being visAnd so they have made themselves known. ited by some other organizations. But they tend to be pretty Another very tiny group that probably a lot of the people in vague in terms of organizations. I’m making a generalization the room have not heard of before—I don’t even know, benow. Across the board, people tended to be much more vague cause I’ve been out of the country a lot for the last two years. about organizations that would weigh-in on behalf of the But the little tiny group is called Telos Group. And so you have Palestinians or different Arab interests. So you would have people who are coming from evangelical backgrounds who some people who say, well, there was this group of churchhave organized themselves. They’re very knowledgeable peowomen that were in here the other day and they were talking ple. They organize trips to take people to the region where about—they’re probably thinking about the Churches for Midthey have them meet people on the Palestinian side as well as dle East Peace, but they wouldn’t necessarily be able to reon the Israeli side of the picture, and they’re doing a very good member the name of the organization. job of trying to push the peace envelope themselves. So it’s Now let me, though, say this. It’s not sort of a pro-Palestinquite a mixed bag. ian or pro-Israel, pro-Arab issue, in my mind. I don’t think that There’s a question, another very interesting one. Would you that’s the way that it should be perceived by other people as encourage other organizations and concerned citizens to use well, for the following reason. This is a pro-peace or pro-sucAIPAC’s strategies and tactics against AIPAC itself? cessful resolution of the conflict, of the Israel-Palestine conWho can argue with their success? I mean, I did a thing with flict, issue at the end of the day. What does that mean? That Larry King’s blog. He asked me, does the lobby own Congress means that you have very, very interesting and important acand so forth. I said, well, own, no. But I thought later on it tivity by predominantly, overwhelmingly even in many cases, would have been more clever if I had responded by saying, Jewish-American organizations that are collecting data, that hey, pardon the baseball analogy, but if you could bat .800, are presenting the data to people. They’re trying to push the you’d be quite happy to be batting .800. peace envelope if one takes—and I do at Or if you could have a percentage of face value—what it is they’re doing. winning nine out of ten times or eight out And so if you look at an organization of ten times, then who wouldn’t think that like Americans for Peace Now, if you Alalusi Foundation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 that was a job very well done? So yes, I look at an organization like Israel PolAmerican Friends of Birzeit think there’s a lot of merit potentially in icy Forum, they are two in DC that are University . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 copying the AIPAC model. I’ll stop there known to most of the players on the to make room for another response.

Hill that are playing the game that American Near East Refugee Aid Grant Smith: Great. I think we’re way. Other groups that are important, (ANERA) . . . . . . .

Inside Front Cover going to move on. Thank you, everyone too, are not necessarily ones that who sent questions from the Internet come with some sort of Arab name atDar al Islam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 stream and locally here. And again, tached to them. Does the Arab AmeriIqraa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 please pursue the speakers with your can Institute play a role? Yes. Does questions. Dr. Mattson will be signing his the ADC play a role? Yes. They weigh Kinder USA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 book directly after this panel. Gideon in from time to time, but they’re less Mashrabiya . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Levy will be signing at 11:00. At 12:40 likely to be really active on the Hill Professor Beattie will be signing his than a lot of these other groups. They Palestinian Medical Relief Society . 38 book in the Exhibition Hall. Susan Abuldon’t have the same resources that United Palestinian Appeal hawa at 3:00, Rula Jebreal at 5:00, and AIPAC does, to begin with. Their reI’ll be doing it at 5:30. So thank you very sources are dwarfed by those of (UPA) . . . . . . . . . . Inside Back Cover much. Panel 1 is over. ■ AIPAC, as are the resources that are

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KEYNOTE ADDRESS

What I Would Tell a Visiting Congressional Delegation Dale Sprusansky

Moderator

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KEYNOTE

Gideon Levy

Moderator Dale Sprusansky: I know those who attended last year, when they heard Gideon Levy address the conference, were really amazed at what he said. And so we had no choice but by popular demand to bring him back this year for his encore speech. Gideon is obviously a well-known journalist in Israel with Haaretz. He writes frequently and oftentimes controversially, if you are a Zionist Israeli. Last year his speech went viral online. It got over about 200,000 views online, English and Arabic.

And today he will be addressing what he would tell a visiting congressional delegation.

So with that, Gideon, I invite you to the podium.

Gideon Levy: Thank you, Dale. Thank you everybody.

Thank you to the Washington Report [and IRmep] which invited me here last year, and I was prepared for a lecture in front of a couple of hundred of distinguished guests. A few months later, I started to realize that something is going on. Wherever I go in the West Bank—refugee camps, villages—people start to tell me they saw me speaking in the National Press Club. And it went on and on. Then came the trips abroad, and wherever I went, people talk to me about this legendary speech which I totally forgot about.

And then I realized that it became viral and some 200,000 people around the globe watched it—which, Dale, puts me in a very impossible position today, because I can’t repeat myself. As

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Gideon Levy: What I Would Tell a Visiting Congressional Delegation

some of you might know, I am a singer of one song. I am a pony of one trick.

And then you were helpful enough to give this framework of what would I have told to American congressmen or delegation, and this gives me a different framework. But I’m really, really grateful to you and to your people for inviting me again and for making me so famous in the world.

So many congressmen are coming over and the Israeli brainwashing machinery is so efficient that it will be very, very hard to compete with this machinery, but still I would like to try this time, at least virtually. The question that stands on the basis—or two main questions—are, first of all, do they know the truth? Because one can claim that they know the truth, they just ignore it or they don’t care about it, or they think that the truth, that the reality, is the right one. Or really, can we open their eyes by showing them the real truth, the reality, the backside of Israel, the backyard of Israel?

And the second question— yesterday over dinner someone was mentioning the question, is American foreign policy in the Middle East based on interests or based on values? And I have my doubts about both. Therefore, to change this is a hell of a mission, but that’s the main source of hope for us, for people like me in the Middle East.

The key is now in your hands, America. The key is now in your hands, activists, scholars, because as I said here last year—and this I’m sure would be the last sentence that I repeat myself from last year—the chances that change will come from within the Israeli society are so limited. When the brainwashing system is so efficient and life is so good, why would Israel go for any change? What is the incentive? Therefore, as big as the hope is, was also the disappointment in the last seven years, but I will try with a virtual tour with some congressmen who would be ready to listen to me.

First, I would take them to certain places that the propaganda system of Israel wouldn’t take them. And I would like to introduce them to some people that they would never meet if they come through the Israeli Foreign Ministry or through AIPAC. I would maybe start our tour with meeting a family in Gaza, the latest victims, the Abu Khoussa family. Last Saturday, two-and-a-half at night, in the morning, an American-Israeli plane in the sky, an F16—very accurate, as we know, with the most moral pilots in the world who never mean to kill any civilians, who never mean to kill any children, who are busy day and night only in saving lives of Palestinians. An American jet supplied by your country, financed partly by your country with a pilot, who was I guess trained partly

by your country, is going to Gaza to take revenge for four rockets which were sent a few hours before on a Friday night. Didn’t hit anything. Didn’t harm anyone. They were all falling in open spaces—but revenge must be taken.

And this F-16 flies over Gaza, over the neighborhood of Beit Lahia, which is at the north part of Gaza. Children—and this I know for a fact—most of the children wake up in hysteria because they know the noise already and they know what follows this noise. Those who were—and most of them were—already there in 2005, and 2008, and 2014 and during all those operations that Israel had done there, know what an Israeli jet in the sky means. Soon the missile—the very, very accurate and precise and sophisticated and clever missile—falls on the home. To say home is an exaggeration: falls on their hut or whatever you call it, and the two siblings, Israa and Yassin—she’s 6, he’s 10— had been killed. I’m not sure if they woke up before their deaths or they were killed in their sleep.

This attack, which is one of many, should be presented as it is, as a revenge operation of Israel, nothing to do with fighting terror, nothing to do with the security of Israel.

Then I would love to introduce these congressmen and women to a bunch of victims of the recent months, of this recent intifada—the Third intifada—children and their families who were executed, part of them or most of them without any sufficient reason. I will introduce to them to an American, an American citizen, Mahmoud Shaalan, 16 years old. Maybe they would care more about an American? The army claims that he came to a checkpoint two weeks ago and had a knife. In any case, did he have a knife or didn’t he? We don’t know, because there are very few witnesses. He was shot dead immediately, 16 years old with a background that makes us believe that he wanted to stab a soldier almost impossible.

He came to Palestine to spend some years in his village. He was born here in Tampa, Florida. He had his plans and dreams to go back to study medicine. His life even in Palestine was good, a very well-off family. Did he go really to stab a soldier? Did he endanger the soldier? Was there only one choice but to kill him dead and to shoot him with three or four bullets? Wasn’t there any other choice? Is there any definition but execution? And I give his example, but we have them, unfortunately, on a daily basis in the recent months.

American congressmen should know that the life of Palestinians in Israel right now is the cheapest ever. With everything we went through, never was it so cheap. Never was it so easy to

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The life of Palestinians in Israel right now is the cheapest ever.

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KEYNOTE ADDRESS

PHOTO COURTESY TORE LINDVANG

cafés. Look at the clubs. Look at this vivid society. Look at the kill Palestinians. Never was it so little discussed. Never was it beaches. Many times when helicopters are going on their way hardly covered by the Israeli media, the biggest collaborator to bomb either Lebanon, in its time, or Gaza, look and listen to with the occupation. Never was it so natural that any Palestinwhat young people are talking about. Try to ask them, what do ian must be held as a suspect, and any suspect must be exethey know about the occupation? cuted. American legislators should know this.

There was a survey showing that Israel is number 11 in the I would take the American legislators to [a] few places just to world in the happiness index of the U.N. The Israelis are happier show them and to trust their consciences. It’s enough to go for than you, Americans! They are happier than the Germans, the a few hours to Hebron, to the city of Hebron, and say no more.

French, the Brits—11th in the world. Eighty-six percent of Israelis Just take them there. I never met an honest human being who claim that life is wonderful. American legislators should know it, had been to Hebron and didn’t come back after a few hours in because this happiness is partly financed by the United States. shock. It is one thing to hear about those things; it’s another Is Israel really the first on thing to see it and to exthe list to be supported perience it with your own with so much money? Is eyes. And anyone who it the poorest country, the argues still that in the ocmost unprotected councupied territories the [Istry, the weakest one? raeli] regime is not of an What is the answer to all apartheid regime, just those questions? Why? come to Hebron. Stay Without watching the there a few hours. And I life of Tel Aviv, it’s very want to meet one person hard to understand this who would tell me after total loss of connection visiting Hebron that this with reality of the Israeli is not apartheid. But it society, this total moral looks like apartheid. It blindness, this total [lack walks like apartheid. It of] interest in any kind of behaves like apartheid. It solution. Why would Tel is apartheid. Israel is not Aviv go for a solution? Tel yet an apartheid state, Aviv they see, ah, the but the regime there in state of Tel Aviv, this bubthe occupied territories ble, who lives its wondercannot be defined but ful life one hour away apartheid. from the place where Then I would ask the Congress delegation, In Hebron, Palestinian pedestrians are restricted to a barricaded portion of those two siblings were are you accepting an Shuhada St. so Jewish settlers can freely walk along most of the main killed only five days ago.

You think that there are 1 apartheid system in the avenue, June 25, 2013. percent of Israelis who heard at all that the IDF killed two children 21st century? Do you understand that you are financing an just five days ago? Can you imagine yourself what would have apartheid system in the 21st century? Do you know that your happened if Palestinian terrorists would have killed two babies in president compared once the Palestinians to the black slavtheir sleep? What would we have heard about the Palestinians, ery? Do you live in peace with the fact that you are supporting about their cruelty, about their brutality, about their behavior, it automatically and blindly? those animals? But Israel, with their jets, with very precise bombs And then to conclude our tour, I would take this mission, this and missiles, that’s fine.

Congress mission, to the most unexpected place, to Tel Aviv.

I would take those congressmen to some of the refugee Activists usually don’t come to Tel Aviv. I always tell activists, camps. They should see it. I would have taken them to Gaza if please come to Tel Aviv, because you will understand it only if I could. Remember what the world promised Gaza just a few you’ve been in Tel Aviv. Look at the wonderful life in Tel Aviv. years ago? Where is the word of the world? Remember how One hour from Gaza. One hour from Hebron. Look at the lines many signed obligations to reconstruct, to rebuild, to open up for restaurants. Listen to what people are talking about in 24

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Gideon Levy: What I Would Tell a Visiting Congressional Delegation

Gaza, and Gaza is forgotten again. The only way for Gaza to remind [the world of] its existence is only by launching rockets.

This is the message. That’s the only way to remind [the world of] its existence.

And then the Israeli right-wingers will ask me, what do you want? Go to Syria. Look at what’s going on in Syria. It’s so much worse. And then I’ll tell them, the killing in Syria is not financed by the United States. The killing in Syria is not supported by the United States. The killers in Syria do not have a carte blanche to go wild, and to kill, and to conquer, and to depress, and to confiscate. And the killers in Syria are not the biggest ally of the United States.

Coming back to this question from the beginning, is the foreign policy in the Middle East driven by interests or values? It contradicts both, dear friends. It’s not for me to judge Americans’ policy, but for me it’s an enigma. I must tell you it is an enigma. What interest does it serve exactly? And what values do they really share?

Yes, the American congressmen who would come to Israel would find quite a common language with most of the Israeli politicians. We have our Donald Trumps, we have our Hillary Clintons, unfortunately so. The level would be also more of the same. They will find, most of them, common language. Cynicism will be also quite equal in both sides.

But still, Americans should ask themselves and legislators above all, why do we go on with the same policy for so many years? Why don’t you realize that it doesn’t lead to anywhere?

Don’t we see where it goes? Don’t we see that with these enormous sums of money that the United States is investing in this occupation project? At least the minimum would have been to use this to some kind of constructive purposes; to some kind of pressure on Israel; to some kind of effort to put an end to the occupation; to change the values or the interest, the policy, the behavior; the conception that the Palestinians are not equal beings like anyone else; the conception that the Palestinians were born to kill, which is shared right now between the United States and Israel. I would have expected a mission of the Congress to ask itself: Did this policy of supplying carrots and only carrots to Israel, did it prove itself? What came out of it?

Next year, we are celebrating 50 years of the occupation.

You see, when you enjoy yourself, time is passing so quickly.

It’s only the first 50 years of the occupation, I’m afraid. But any American delegation who would come to Israel should ask itself where is it heading, when the chances for the two-state solution are either totally gone or really in the last moments. I

believe that we missed the chance. I believe, by the way, that both America and Israel never meant to go for the two-state solution. I believe that the two-state solution was a trap which, me personally, I fall into it as well. But America enabled it.

Now you can say, don’t put everything on us Americans.

Take responsibility, you Israelis. Right? But America cannot not be taken responsible when everything that Israel is doing today is with the total approval of the United States and the total financing of the United States. We have now those discussions.

This is really when you hear it, you really don’t believe what you hear. The United States, the leader of the free world, the biggest and only superpower in the world, is now negotiating with Israel about foreign aid, the military assistance for the coming 10 years.

First Israel said no, we think we’ll wait until the next president. This president is not good enough. Then they had second thoughts, because they start to think that Donald Trump might be unexpected. Might be unexpected. So maybe they will do a favor and maybe they are ready to discuss with the Obama regime about the coming 10 years. America is begging for Israel to accept a deal. It was until now $3.4 billion [a year]. And I’m not very good in the details, but America is offering, if I understood well, $4 billion a year for 10 years, $40 billion. Israel wants $5 billion. Israel is ready to compromise on $4.5-$4.3 billion a year. But if you look at the mechanism, if you look at the way it goes, you come again and again to the same question: for God’s sake, who is the superpower between the two? And who is in the pocket of whom here? [Applause] Now, it’s really not for me to answer, to give an explanation for this. I understand we have Q&A. I would go for Q&A today, me asking you, because I have so many questions to you. How can it be possible? How can it be possible for so many years such a blind and automatic support, a carte blanche to Israel?

How can it be that America—who claims to care about Israel, who claims that the existence of Israel is important for it, who claims that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East— how can it be that administration after administration, with very little differences between the administrations, they are always competing, the candidates—who will be more pro-Israeli? And at the same time, they are corrupting Israel.

So even from a point of view of an Israeli patriot, for me, AIPAC is far from a friendly organization to Israel. As a matter of fact, I see AIPAC as one of Israel’s biggest enemies [applause], because when you are drug-addicted and people—I’m

I see AIPAC as one of Israel’s biggest enemies.

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afraid I mentioned this also last time, so it’s the second—but only two sentences in the whole speech. But it is so clear that I can’t help but mention it again. A drug addict in your family, a drug addict who is your friend, supplied with more money, he will be so grateful to you. But are you really caring about him?

Do you really take care? Do you really love him? Try to send him to a rehabilitation center. He will be so mad at you, but isn’t this real care? Does anyone here have the slightest doubt that Israel is occupation-addicted? Do you have any kind of doubt that this addiction is dangerous, first of all for Israel’s future?

The real victims are obviously the Palestinians, and in many ways the entire Middle East.

But by the end of the day, the occupation will end one day, one way or the other. But the occupier, look what happens to the occupier. I would have taken this mission, this congressional mission, and introduce them to some colleagues in the Israeli parliament. Look at the last legislation in the Israeli parliament. Does this meet American values? A book which is being banned because it was describing intermarriage between races. Can you see yourself, a book in the United States being banned because it describes intermarriage between two races? In Israel it happened, with the common values between Americans and Israelis.

Can you see an American president calling the voters on the day of the election to run to the [polls] because the Afro-Americans and the Native Americans or the Hispanic community is running to the [polls]? Can you see it happening? It happened in the last election in Israel. And those are the common values.

Can you see an American president after a terror attack made, let’s say, by an Afro-American calling the whole Afro-American community as responsible, speaking every day about the lawlessness of the Afro-American community because of one terrorist, like the Israeli prime minister did a few weeks ago? Can you see it happening? But no, we are talking about the only democracy in the Middle East, and the only democracy in the Middle East has the right to do whatever it wants.

And then, to end up this virtual tour of those congressmen who would never come to listen to me and will never let me take them around, I would end this tour like the Israeli propaganda machinery would start it, in Yad Vashem, in the Holocaust Memorial Museum. I would have taken them because it all started there, because Israel would have never been established without the Holocaust, and it should be remembered absolutely.

But then I would ask my guests who will never come, what is the lesson of it? Never again as Israelis mean it, which

means never again in any price to the Jewish people, which gives the Jewish people the right to do whatever they want after the Holocaust, as the late Golda Meir once phrased it.

Anything? Or should the lesson be never again to any other people? [Applause] I believe that most of the American legislators, or at least a big part of them, know the truth. They know what is being done with their money. They know that the IDF, which is based so much on American money, and training and equipment above all, they know very well what is the use of this army. They know very well that the main role of this army, the most moral in the world, is being an occupier force, chasing after children, detaining children, shooting children on a daily basis. They know very well that with all the sophisticated bombs and submarines and air jets that Israel has, maybe the most sophisticated army in the world, by the end of the day it’s all about maintaining this occupation which no country in the world recognizes—even not Micronesia, Israel’s best friend after the United States. They know very well what use is being done and they support it, and they compete now one against the other [for] who will be more pro-Israeli than the other, and American society accepts it.

Wait, wait for the coming days in AIPAC here. Wait to hear. I saw that already Donald Trump declared that he is the biggest friend of Israel. Wait for Hillary Clinton to answer that she is the best friend of Israel. And I can tell you, dear friends, none of them is Israel’s friend. None of them cares about Israel. [Applause] And if this policy will continue, of this automatic and blind support which enables Israel to go wild like never before—Israel never had this freedom to react as it reacts, never.

I remember still years in which every new terrorist in the settlement which was built was immediately afraid of what will the Americans say. Now I think Obama is much more fearful of what Netanyahu would say, rather than the opposite way.

So the red light [on the speaker’s podium] is already here, and the red light is shining for so long time in the relationship between the United States and Israel. And let me tell you, the day that there will be an American president who would like really and sincerely to put an end to it, who would really like to put an end to this set of crimes, to this criminal occupation, the occupation will come to its end within months. Within months, Israel will never be able to say no to a decisive American president. I would conclude my lecture by saying, so please vote for him—but who is he?

Thank you very much. [Applause] ■

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The occupation will end one day, one way or the other.

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Questions & Answers

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Sprusansky: Thanks again for a fabulous speech. As I’m looking at these questions, I think you’re right. These are questions you should be asking us and we shouldn’t be asking you, but nonetheless, I’ll give it a stab. The first question concerns, I guess, the high number of extreme right-wing Israelis and kind of the notion that a lot of congressmen, especially Democratic ones, any time they see a gun-toting American are quick to push for greater gun reform and stuff like that. But they’re pretty lenient in supporting gun-toting American settlers thousands of miles away in Israel. So the question is what do you make of that kind of hypocrisy, I guess.

Levy: Can you repeat? Because I was— Sprusansky: Sure. Sorry. Just the existence of right-wing Israelis and how the right-wing in the U.S. is often slandered, but not in Israel.

Levy: I would like just a personal sentence, because when I was at the podium a very, very dear friend of mine came in.

Maybe the biggest musician who lives today and the great, great, great friend of justice in the Middle East, Mr. Roger Waters. I’m so grateful for him to be with us here. Now we understand why I wasn’t so concentrated on the question, because I realized that Roger is with us. This for me has a very, very deep meaning.

I do believe that the problem in Israel is not the rightwingers and not the extremists. The problem is the mainstream, the mainstream who choose to close its eyes, the mainstream who wants to feel so good about itself, the mainstream who wants to show the beautiful face of Israel, how gay friendly we are, how we invented the cherry tomatoes, how we contributed so much to the international high-tech industry. Look how beautiful we are. We invented the kibbutz.

And we have the most moral army in the world. Don’t you dare to think that it can be the second moral army in the world. It’s the most moral army in the world.

Look at us. We are forced by those Arabs to do all those things. It’s not our choice. We are the victims. We live in fear.

We live in the trauma of World War II. We live in the trauma of

’48. We live in the trauma of the missiles, and the trauma of the knife-holders, and the trauma of terror. And we are the happiest people in the world, number 11. After all those traumas and all those victimizations, number 11 in the world in happiness standards. Very strange. But in any case, the mainstream who decides to close his eyes, to ignore what’s happening in his backyard, this is the main problem.

And then the right-wingers can do whatever they want. And right-wingers, they find common language with right-wingers anywhere else. You have your right-wingers and we have our right-wingers, and I don’t know which one is worse than whom.

But by the end of the day, and you can take it also to your elections, by the end of the day I will always prefer an honest rightwinger on a bluff to someone who wears a mask and discusses and claims that he is so liberal and so wonderful, and by the end of the day he does the same.

In the case of Israel, when you look what Labor did and what did the right-wingers do, Labor carries so much more responsibility for the occupation project. Nobel Peace Prize winner Shimon Peres did much more for the settlement project and to putting any possible obstacle to reaching any kind of justice in the Middle East than many right-wingers. [Applause] Sprusansky: A couple of questions on your description of the West Bank as an apartheid system. One person wants to know why you don’t extend that to Israel, given the violence in Jerusalem and other places. The second person would like to know, after all these years of apartheid and occupation, where is the hope?

Levy: First of all, I didn’t say there is hope. Did I say? Did someone hear that I—? You will never find me hopeful. Never.

But this is an exaggeration, because there is some kind of hope. I had more hope seven years ago, when Obama came to power. Then I was really hopeful. This was maybe the last time that I was hopeful. But in many lost cases or what seem to be lost cases—like apartheid in South Africa, the communist

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how Israeli congressmen are ignorant, how Israeli legislators regime in Soviet Russia, the wall in East Berlin—it all happened know nothing, how Israeli young people know nothing. But my within months and nobody had foreseen it. I’m sure, Dale, that guess is that—my guess, I didn’t check it, but my guess is that if I would have come here in the late ’80s and tell you, oh, this most of the American legislators know nothing. What they know is is going to fall within months, you would never invite me again, usually a product of a brainwashed system, full of lies and prejubecause this guy is out of his mind. And it happened. dice and stereotypes. We know how Muslims in general are So, first of all, there is room for hope because many times the treated today in the world and how they are perceived in the unexpected does happen, and many times it happens when you world. And Palestinians—I’m not sure there are many Americans, don’t expect it to happen. Like those huge trees, we are now in [but] I know by far there are very few Israelis who perceive the the cherry blossom season, but still you see from time to time a Palestinians as equal human beings. tree lies on the ground. It looks so Very, very few. Even those leftists, if healthy, so strong. What happened? you scratch under their skin, you will And then if you look inside it, then always find the belief that they’re not you see it was totally rotten. And exactly human beings like us. what is more rotten than the Israeli I think that I once wrote that we occupation? [Applause] treat the Palestinians like animals. I But answering the first part of the got so many complaints and threat question about apartheid, I always letters from animal rights organizathink that we should be very precise tions that I have to be very careful. and not exaggerate, because things I’m in great favor, obviously, of aniare bad enough without any exagmal rights, but I think that most of the geration. Israel contains today three Israelis do not perceive the Palestiniregimes. There is a kind of democans as equal human beings, and racy for its Jewish citizens. There maybe this is the core of the issue. are cracks in this democracy, but I believe that this is true also in this still it is a democracy. I may be the country. You know it better than me. best proof. My freedom of speech is And above all, there are so many lies until today—and I don’t take it for Roger Waters speaks with audience member Nour read. You know, when you read the granted—is totally unlimited.

Joudah following his friend Gideon Levy’s talk. media, the Israeli media and many There is the second regime, which times also part of the American media, you read it and you can’t is aimed at the Israeli-Palestinian citizens, who live in a believe about how many lies can be spread so easily. How can democracy but are discriminated on any possible basis, but you fight when you confront such a huge machinery, when basic still gained formal civil rights. And then comes the third regime facts are not only not known but are totally twisted? in the occupied territories, which can not be defined but as an And then you can’t blame, by the way, public opinion, because apartheid regime, when two people share one piece of land if they get this information, maybe they are right in their concluand one people has all the rights in the world and the other sions. Maybe with those animals, you can never get to peace. one has no rights whatsoever. This is apartheid.

Maybe the Palestinians deserve it. Maybe it’s the Palestinians’ And Israel is not yet an apartheid state. Israel has those fault. Yeah. If we are in a situation which, when I write about this three regimes, maybe the only country in the world not only brother and sister who were killed last Saturday in Gaza, two bawithout borders, but also with three regimes. It goes toward bebies, and if I read then the talkbacks in Israel—at least for the coming an apartheid state, because it will not stay there. It basic journalistic mission just to tell the readers what hapdoesn’t stay on the occupied territories. But right now I would pened—and you get so much hate or hatred only because you define Israel according to its three regimes and not one regime. chose to portray two Palestinian innocent poor children as Sprusansky: We’re running out of time, but I’m going to human beings. This is a crime in our country, and I believe that in squeeze in one last— this way America and Israel are really sharing the same values.

Levy: I’m ready to spare five minutes of my book signing.

Sprusansky: Just one final question here. I’m combining Sprusansky: There we go. There’s a question here about— two questions. Do you believe that Jewish nationalism can do you think that Congress people genuinely are ignorant on continue to safeguard the Jewish people peacefully while acwhat’s happening there, or willfully ignorant? cepting human rights and dignity for Palestinians? Also just a Levy: That’s a question for you. I’m much more concerned 28

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mean, they are really left with some people of conscience in the question on the role of Palestinians within Israel and what world, but we know how cheap is conscience and how unappretheir views are on this. ciated it is. To be a man of conscience today is almost in each Levy: So in other words, you give me another two hours, society to be a traitor. To be a leftist in Israel is a curse today. because those are two new lectures. No problem. My flight is So coming back to the second question about the Israelileaving only tomorrow evening. I have time.

Palestinians, they are really torn between their state and their Look, it’s really two very, very basic and complicated quespeople. One should be sensitive enough to understand how tions. Usually when people say it’s so complicated, I say, listorn they are between their people and their state. And to anyten, the situation is much more simple than you think. It is one who asks them for more faithfulness, for more patriotism toblack and white, and those who always portray this as a very ward the state which oppresses their people, again, it doesn’t complicated question want to say, “let’s not find the solution treat them as normal human beings. Normal human beings care because it is so complicated.” Many things are very black and about their people. The Jewish people should be the first one to white, and justice is very black and white today between Israel understand it. What did we do when Russian Jewry couldn’t get and Palestine. Very, very black and white. out from Soviet Russia? The whole Jewish world was recruited But getting to those two questions, so first of all we have to for a campaign against Russia. Can an Israeli-Palestinian not define if Jewishness is a religion or nationality or both, and care about his direct cousin who lives half an hour away from what is stronger than what, how we’re dealing with the Jewish his home, who was deported in ’48, who lost his land, who lost people or the Jewish religion, what is Zionism, what is left of his dignity, whose life is really in the garbage?

Zionism. Many times I’m asked if I’m a Zionist, and I say tell Let me tell you, and maybe this will be my last sentence beme, define [for] me Zionism. I don’t know what it is. If it means cause you’re going to kick me out, I truly believe—and this occupation, I’m not only not Zionist, I’m anti-Zionist, obviously, comes back to the original issue, the original topic of today— like any man of conscience in the world should be. really, I don’t know how knowledgeable are the American legBut what does it mean to be Jewish today in Israel? The exislators. I know one thing. There’s not one single American treme Jewish are not the majority in Israel, but they are the legislator who can imagine himself what it means to live as a only active group in the society. And when the mainstream is Palestinian under the occupation, under the Israeli occupabusy with having sushi and buying new Jeeps, the extremists tion. [Applause] He cannot imagine himself one day of humiliare the only one who are ready to sacrifice something, and ation, of life danger, of daily lack of hope, despair, not having then you get what you get here. By the end of the day, this any chance for anything, being humiliated really on a daily can be changed and I don’t—many times people speak about basis. This is literally on a daily basis. Not knowing what does Jewish values and other things that I never understood what it it mean to see the beaches which are half an hour away from means. I know what global, universal values means. I don’t your home, children who never saw those beaches. know what Jewish values means. If Jewish values is the state So there is not one single American legislator and very few of Israel today, it has nothing to do with morality.

Israelis, if at all, who can imagine themselves what it means In any case, how will [we] live together? Look, we have to to be today a Palestinian under this brutal occupation. And as change basic, basic beliefs. Nothing will move without changing long as this is the case, the chances for change are so small. those very, very basic beliefs. And this, you know, someone has Therefore, Dale, if you could arrange a to lead it, and we don’t see anyone who (Advertisement) delegation of congressmen or any other even tries to go for this change. As long as Join Iqraa, a local who would come, I truly believe that once this change will not take place, nothing will running group, they will experience the occupation, once change, because as long as Israelis will that raises funds they will see how brutal it is, how total it is, continue with their racist attitude toward the for university scholarships in how it penetrates to children’s room and Palestinians—and that’s the core of the Palestine. We have raised over bedroom on a daily basis, how you don’t issue—nothing will change. As long as Is$188,000 since 2008 and provide trainhave one day of dignity and one day of rael will be as strong as it is and the Palesing and race day support for your hope even in peaceful times—and now tinians will be as divided and as weak as marathon, 1/2-marathon, 5K or 10K. we’re not in a peaceful time. Once legislathey are—let’s also [not] forget they are in Website: www.iqraadc.org.

Contact: kirkcruachan@yahoo.com. tors will see it, I give them credit that this their weakest point ever. will touch them. And maybe this, by itself, The world is forgetting them. The world TRAINING BEGINS MAY 7. is an exaggeration. is sick and tired of the whole conflict. The RUNNING FOR A BRIGHTER PALESTINE! Thank you. [Standing ovation] ■ Arab world couldn’t care less about them. I ISRAEL’S INFLUENCE: Good or Bad for America?

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PANEL 2: Israel’s Influence on U.S. Foreign Policy

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Moderator

A Diplomatic and Military Perspective Col. Lawrence Wilkerson

PHOTO PHIL PORTLOCK

PANEL 2

Israel’s Influence On U.S. Foreign Policy

Dale Sprusansky

Moderator Dale Sprusansky: Our next panel is on “Israel’s Influence on U.S. Foreign Policy.” We have three great speakers lined up today. I’m going to keep the intro short, since we’re a little late, but basically Col. Lawrence Wilkerson will begin by speaking about what Israel’s influence is on U.S. foreign policy and that impact. Jim Lobe will be discussing some of the people, particularly the neocons, who push pro-Israel policy. And finally, Justin Raimondo has the delight of looking at how our elections and politicians are impacted by such beliefs.

So, our first speaker will be Col. Lawrence Wilkerson. He’s probably best known for serving as Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff from 2002 to 2005. Before

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Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: A Diplomatic and Military Perspective

that, he served as associate director of the State Department’s Policy Planning staff under Ambassador Richard Haass. Before his time with the State Department, he had 31 years of service in the U.S. Army. During that time, he was a faculty member at the U.S. Naval War College and deputy director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College in Quantico, and he retired in 1997 as a colonel. He’s currently working on a book about the George W. Bush administration, which he worked in, and he’s also a distinguished visiting professor of government and public policy at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg.

Lawrence Wilkerson: Thank you, and thank you all for coming out today. Since I’m limited in time, I want to get started right away.

Ever since 1948, Israel has been a foreign and security policy problem. That Israel was a problem—a rather large one as a matter of fact, in ’47 and ’48 even—was most recently pointed out to me by one of my truly brilliant students. In fact, in a decade of teaching at both the George Washington University Honors Program and William & Mary, and six years at two of the nation’s war colleges, I’ve rarely had better papers than the one he submitted. At the end of our semester on fateful decision-making—now, fateful decision-making is what I teach in this seminar—and as the ancient Greek said, it’s when old men send young men, and now women, to die for state purposes—and something we often forget—to kill others for state purposes. He shall go unnamed, the student paper writer, but not unheralded by me, at least. I will say, too, that he had the additional characteristic, if you will, of being a Jewish American, which recalls to mind for me immediately a most unnerving moment as I had just begun my new career in 2001 as an erstwhile diplomat. I just entered the inner sanctum of a man who would prove to be very powerful at State over the next four years. He had only recently discovered that I had chosen to work for Richard Haass, in his capacity as State’s director of policy planning, rather than staying directly under my old mentor, the new Secretary of State Colin Powell. “Why,” he asked, “did you like to work for that self-loathing Jew?” Recovering from mild shock, I looked him straight in the eye and replied, “I’ll forget I heard that.” I turned and evacuated his inner sanctum while he harrumphed to my rear.

I recall this little anecdote because it reveals what many use as a riposting device against any Jewish American who, through critical thinking, questions from time to time the policies of the modern state of Israel and the U.S. relationship with that state.

Its complement, of course, for gentiles like me is anti-Semite. I

have no doubt were someone such as Alan Dershowitz, from whom I have heard, for example, to read my student’s paper, the response “self-loathing Jew” would not be far from his lips.

In 1948, I would submit, there was no explicit such challenge for Jewish Americans or for any other American for that matter. The ingrained and highly partisan nature of the U.S.Israel relationship and the neoconservative adoption of it in particular—Jim, my hat off to you, he’ll talk more about that— had not yet come about. What my student rehearsed in the opening to his paper were the profound objections of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff of the iconic hero of World War II— after all, Harry Truman in a moment of apoplexy essentially said, he won the war, he won the war; he couldn’t think of anything more to say about this man George Marshall, who was now secretary of state—and others who objected to what Harry Truman was about to do with regard to the State of Israel.

My student summed these objections that the Joint Chiefs had penned as the vehement Arab opposition to a Jewish state, the threats such opposition presented to the key oil imports from neighboring Arab countries, and then my student quoted the Joint Chiefs verbatim: “The decision to partition Palestine, that the decision were supported by the United States, would prejudice United States strategic interests in the Near and Middle East to the point that United States influence in the area would be”—and here come the words—“curtailed to that which could be maintained by military force.” Is that prescience, or is that prescience?

Harry Truman, on the other hand, as my student pointed out, summed up the case for, if you will, thusly. “I’m sorry, gentlemen,” the president said, “but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”

Marshall, in a tale that is not apocryphal, when Truman did decide that he was going to essentially recognize the state that had stood up, Israel, threatened not to vote for the president if he did. Coming from a man like Marshall, who as a military professional never voted in his life, this was almost stunning for Truman to hear. Of course, he went ahead, and so we began our relationship.

There were, to be sure, more counterarguments than the president’s re-election, as my student also pointed out in his excellent paper: the horrors of Holocaust, the plight of hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees, and the need to make

Ever since 1948, Israel has been a foreign and security policy problem.

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up for the wrongs committed against the Jewish people, all spoke for recognition by Truman. My student continued, also in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the British promised the Jewish people a homeland in Palestine. And in the eyes of many Americans after World War II, it was up to the U.S. to give that home to them, and Harry S. Truman did just that.

Today, we can look back on a line of post-World War II presidents who tried to deal with the challenges and more that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had so presciently laid out. And to be honest, and as many of you in this audience probably are well aware of, the Joint Chiefs were not breaking new ground. Ever since World War I and Louis Brandeis’ influence on Woodrow Wilson and his foremost adviser, Edward House, the U.S. State Department’s position on the potential for a Jewish state in Palestine had been quite clear. It opposed the Zionist movement because it was a minority group interfering in United States foreign affairs. Again, talk about prescience and there we have it—prescience par excellence.

Even so, could State at that time have envisioned the power of AIPAC today, particularly after Bill Clinton decided in 1995, as I recall, to make presidential appearances there de rigueur? I love

that French phrase. I looked it up in Merriam Webster to see what English definitions were given to it. The second one was this: “necessary if you want to be popular.” Oh, Bill, the things you did for popularity’s sake.

But despite these heavily adverse conditions, most U.S. presidents managed a rather precarious balance, whether it’s in the beginning—it was Eisenhower in ’56, as we’ve heard before, telling the Israelis, British and French to get their invading military forces out of the Suez Canal area. Or it was Ronald Reagan in mid- to late 1980s, selling AWACS aircraft to the Saudis.

Or George H.W. Bush insisting on real and serious work on the Middle East peace process following the first Gulf war in 1991, in which the U.S. had gained quite a bit of new leverage applicable to that process’ survival and potential success. And you all know probably, too, there are some critics who’ve written quite eloquently in my view that George H.W. Bush lost the election in ’92 because of his vehement opposition to Israeli settlements.

And then came George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and a presidency captured by the neoconservatives of which I was a part.

In a flash, Israel became publicly a strategic ally. Its Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in every Arab eye dripping blood all

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over Oval Office carpet, blood from Israel’s invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1982 and ’83. I might add, an invasion we had to haul their asses out of, and ultimately at the cost of the greatest single-day casualty of Marines since Tarawa in World War II. This man, Ariel Sharon, became, in President Bush’s own words, “a man of peace.”

And all the fears of the 1948 Joint Chiefs of Staff loomed so largely in the rearview mirror of history that some of us in the U.S. government sucked in our collective breaths and found it hard to exhale thereafter. But, of course, we did, and ever since people just like us have been trying—clearly to little avail, with some brilliant exceptions, of which the Iran nuclear agreement is the most exceptional and recent—to restore that precarious balance maintained since World War II by all of the presidents.

And so, today, where are we in this relationship so fraught with danger—and, as has been pointed out, danger to both parties, to Israel and the United States?

Today, how does U.S. policy toward Israel impact our overall foreign and security policy in adverse or positive ways?

To start, we have the unguarded words of Gen. David Petraeus to illuminate our inquiries, before he was himself subjected to the ritual of head-bashing that accompany such remarks. In a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee in March of 2010, Petraeus said quite straightforwardly that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict foments anti-American sentiment in the region due to a perception of U.S. favoritism toward Israel, and it makes military operations that much more difficult. These remarks came amidst a U.S.-Israeli dispute over housing units, 1,600 of them, in Jerusalem—illegal under international law, in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions, and destabilizing to the max. I can tell you that in the military councils, of which I’ve been part over three decades plus, this sentiment was often voiced, and at times in far more dramatic terms.

When my old mentor and boss, Colin Powell, and I used to talk about the issues here, we rarely if ever complimented Israel on its additions to U.S. security posture in the region— quite the opposite, as a matter of fact. Although today I suspect he would deny such conversations, and frankly I wouldn’t blame him, it would prove my point.

But there’s more, there’s concrete evidence of Israel detracting from U.S. security and of being a strategic liability rather than an asset. Where is, after all, U.S. hard power in southwest Asia, in Africa, and the Persian Gulf today? First, it

isn’t in Israel—nor could it be, unless the world was at war and all bets were off. I’ll come to that scenario in a minute.

Under any other conceivable scenario, the U.S. will never land meaningful military forces on the “unsinkable Middle East aircraft carrier of Israel.” That’s a phrase used by some of my neoconservative colleagues. Every instance of the use of force by the U.S. in the region to date has proven that reality beyond a shadow of a doubt.

So where, exactly, is the hard power? It’s in Qatar, it’s in Bahrain, it’s in Saudi Arabia, it’s in Kuwait, Oman, Egypt, Djibouti and a host of other lesser places. The largest U.S. Air Force complex on earth, for example, by some measures, is in Qatar.

The most powerful fleet headquarters in the U.S. arsenal, The Fifth, is in Bahrain. The land-based aircraft carrier, if there is one, is Kuwait, not Israel, as both Gulf wars have proven. As a matter of fact, my comment during the first Gulf war, when we landed over half a million U.S. soldiers and all the supplies that went with them, was, “My God, another Marine, another soldier, we’ll sink Kuwait.”

In fact, in all my years in the military and beyond, I’ve never heard a serious suggestion of using Israel to help defend U.S. interests in the region. Instead, what I have heard many times is advice and decisionmaking to stay totally away from such use.

Moreover, each one of those genuine hard-power interests that I just enumerated is threatened, as General Petraeus pointed out indirectly, by the U.S. unbalanced role as Israel’s lawyer and unquestioning great power supporter. In fact, examining the single strategic scenario in which use of Israel might be a viable option is so grim as to be self-defeating in conception as well as execution. God forbid.

Imagine, if you will, a general war in southwest Asia, with Turks fighting Russians, allied with Greeks; Iranians and Hezbollah, fighting Saudi proxies; Iraqis plunged into sectarian warfare, while the Kurds try desperately to survive; ISIS spread from Kabul through Aleppo, through Tripoli, and perhaps beyond; and the U.S. deciding to do more than provide special operating forces and air power. Imagine, in other words, the beginnings of a region-wide and then possibly global conflict.

Imagine, too, the only ally the U.S. will have in this is Israel—an Israel about to be overwhelmed itself, in all likelihood.

People would be choosing sides. Jordan and Egypt would choose sides, as will 350 million to 400 million others. So, the U.S. lands major military forces on the unsinkable aircraft car-

I’ve never heard a serious suggestion of using Israel to help defend U.S. interests.

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PANEL 2: Israel’s Influence on U.S. Foreign Policy

rier Israel. This is, of course, after we mobilized fully, conscript at a minimum two million men and women, spend a year training them, and then enter the fray—inconceivable? I hope so.

Another major and overwhelming negative influence that I saw up close and personal, besides these hard power facts, was every time Rich Armitage, the deputy secretary of state at the time, took us through the budget drill. It’s been highlighted here earlier, but I want to highlight it for you in even more graphic terms. We would go into the room with all the assistant secretaries, undersecretaries, office heads, directors and so forth, assembled to battle the budget. And mind you, it’s really kind of an anemic battle, because the Defense Department was getting around $600 billion and we were getting around $30 billion. Donald Rumsfeld said he lost more money in a year than we got. He was right.

But we would go in there, and we would look at the money for U.S. foreign affairs.

Yes, U.S. foreign affairs. We would take out immediately $3-plus billion for Israel and $3-plus billion for Egypt to bribe them to keep the peace treaty with Israel, and then we would look at the rest.

We’d then factor out international military education and training, and those other things that are just more or less fixed, and we’d say, wow, we’ve got less than a billion dollars left for the entire foreign policy of the United States of America. Now do you understand a little bit why diplomacy is not really an instrument we reach for very often?

And I’m not refraining either from pointing out possibly more insidious factors that demonstrate to me rather conclusively that Israel is an untenable ally, or that when Israel—you’ve got Israeli arms merchants often selling arms to our most likely enemies, UAVs to Russia here lately, when the UAVs were a problem for Russia—they’re no longer a problem—or that when Israel breaks U.S. law and does things that we don’t like, we do anything but démarche them.

These are other aspects of a relationship that I’ve been very close to that have been disturbing, but mostly have enlightened me as to what it means to have this ally.

Now, let me conclude with the recognition of reality. First, President Obama, as I earlier intimated, with the JCPOA has regained a little ground, but at considerable cost—not least of which is an even more robust military-to-military relationship, intelligence relationship and, as has been highlighted here, an increase in funding maybe to $5 billion. If Israel went away tomorrow, if all the previous military-diplomatic advice had been followed and if we’d not assisted Perfidious Albion in setting up an experiment that would result in ethnic cleansing akin to our own Indian Wars in the heart of Palestine—even if we had not then managed to un-

balance majorly our own approach to the precarious dance required to manage such a concoction, even if all had gone swimmingly since 1948 with regard to Israel, the region in question, southwest Asia—or the Middle East, call it what you will—would still be a boiling cauldron of instability, chaos and wreckage.

In short, were there no state of Israel at all, the region will still be a mess, or settle the Israeli-Palestinian challenge tomorrow with a decent two-state solution that worked and the same would adhere—the region would remain in turmoil. But the United States would not be painted with the broad brush of favoritism and prejudiced policy that it is every day, 24/7, impacting its security and foreign policy. Now, it must be acknowledged as well that part of this reality of a volatile region is our fault, too, because we have coddled, supported, funded, advised and used tyrant after tyrant to fulfill our wishes, whether it was the Shah of Iran for 26 years, the king in Riyadh, the emir in Qatar or whomever—how many dictators have we accommodated, or worse?

The region’s calamities have many causes—a majority religion that has seen no reformation to haul it kicking and screaming into modernity, tyrants who have sucked its people’s blood dry, and, as I said, the distinct lack of entrepreneurial talent or desire nourished by dependency on black gold—interestingly, one of the most entrepreneurial people in the region are the Palestinians—a surfeit of strategic water ways and the adjacent land masses begging to be contested, tribal instincts of the very worse sort, not to mention the legacy of English missteps, misdemeanors, crimes, artificial border drawings and double dealings that all by themselves would damn any people to purgatory at best, and to hell at worse.

But that is no reason for the United States of America to so tie its foreign and security policy to a tiny enclave in the midst of chaos that, when the enclave goes, the master might be sucked into the morass that results, and for no positive purpose of power whatsoever.

Does the unbiased policy of the U.S. toward this enclave jeopardize U.S. national security interest? You bet it does, big time. All we should ask, all I’m asking, all I asked for four years in the State Department, is that the American people be told the unvarnished truth and then decide if they’re willing to do it.

Do they want their foreign and security policy based on sound principles of power management, or do they want it based on passions, ideology and unbridled favoritism? Now, I’m not quite certain what their answer is going to be, but I’m dead certain we need to give them the essential facts and then ask the question. Thank you. [Applause] ■

Part of this reality of a volatile region is our fault, too.

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Jim Lobe: American Neoconservatives: A History and Overview

American Neoconservatives: A History and Overview Jim Lobe

PHOTO PHIL PORTLOCK

Dale Sprusansky: Next we will hear from Jim Lobe. Jim Lobe served as Washington bureau chief for Inter Press Service from 1980 to 1985, and again from 1989 until 2015.

He currently manages and produces LobeLog, a great blog that is primarily focused on U.S. policy toward the Middle East. Last year, the blog quite appropriately received the Arthur Ross Award for distinguished reporting and analysis of foreign affairs from the American Academy of Diplomacy. Jim has been a longtime observer of neoconservatives, and he will discuss American neoconservatives, the history, and then provide an overview.

Jim Lobe: Okay, this timer intimidates me.

Lawrence Wilkerson: It goes fast.

Jim Lobe: That makes it worse, thanks, Larry. So, I’m going to speak quickly. I’ve been asked to give a kind of Neoconservatism 101 over the next 15 minutes or so. That’s a big challenge for me. It took me seven hours to get through it when I addressed the Institute for American Studies in Beijing 12 years ago, when Chinese analysts were desperately trying to figure out why the United States had been so stupid as to invade Iraq. So, I’m going to start by summing up.

If I were asked to boil down neoconservatism into its essential elements—that is, those that remained consistent over the past nearly 50 years—I would say the following: First, a Manichean view of the world in which good and evil are constantly at war and the United States has an obligation to lead the forces for good around the globe; second, a belief in the moral exceptionalism of both the United States and Israel, and the absolute moral necessity for the United States to defend Israel’s security; third, a conviction that, in order to keep evil at bay, the United States must have and be willing to exercise the military power

necessary to defeat any and all challenges anywhere—and there is a corollary to this: force is the only language that evil and adversaries understand; fourth, the 1930s— what with Munich, appeasement, Chamberlain, and then Churchill, the redeemer—taught us everything we need to know about evil and how to thwart it; and fifth, democracy is generally desirable, but it always depends on who wins. [Laughter] Now, this to me is neoconservatism in a nutshell. So I could stop here, but I still have 15 minutes and 46 seconds.

So let’s review very briefly the context in which neoconservatism became a serious movement here. Well, many of you have probably heard of its Trotskyite origins. The movement itself as we know it today dates mainly from the 1960s. It was in that decade that you saw the startling rise of Holocaust consciousness, beginning with the Eichmann trial in Israel and the Oscar-winning movie “Judgment at Nuremberg,” both of which had a major impact not only on the Jewish community—well, not only in Israel and on the Jewish community here in this country—but the general public here as well.

These events were followed by the rise of the new left (of which I was one), the counterculture, hippies, the anti-war movement, the black power movements, as well as the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. All of which left a number of mainly, but by no means exclusively, Jewish public intellectuals and liberals feeling, in the words of neocon patriarch Irving Kristol, “mugged by reality”—and mugged by reality in a way that launched them on a rightward trajectory, hence neoconservative.

That trajectory gained momentum in the early 1970s, when the anti-war candidate George McGovern won the Democratic nomination for president and when Israel seemed to teeter

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briefly on the edge of disaster in the early stages of the 1973 war, which itself was immediately followed by the Arab oil embargo. Two years later, the U.N. General Assembly passed the “Zionism is racism” resolution, and U.S. power globally seemed to be in retreat, especially after the collapse of its clients in Vietnam and elsewhere in Indochina.

And these all created a context in which neoconservatism gained serious political traction in the United States.

Now at this point it may be useful to address an important ethno-religious issue. Neoconservatism has largely been a Jewish movement. By no means, however, are all neoconservatives Jewish. The late Jeane Kirkpatrick, former Education Secretary Bill Bennett, former CIA Chief—however shortly— James Woolsey, and Catholic theologians Michael Novak and George Weigel are just a few examples of non-Jews who have played major roles in the movement over time.

That said, it’s true that most neoconservatives are Jewish—and not only Jewish, but increasingly Republican. So it’s very important to stress now that the very large majority of Jews in this country are neither neoconservative nor Republican, a source of great frustration to neoconservatives—Jewish neoconservatives in particular—over the last 30 years.

Just on Monday, for example, The Wall Street Journal, whose editorial pages are probably the country’s most influential neoconservative media platform, ran an op-ed entitled, “The Political Stupidity of the Jews Revisited,” in which the author bemoaned the persistent tendency of Jews to vote Democratic, and in some cases to even question how well it’s worth supporting Israel. But we’ll go on to that.

Now, back to the movement’s core features. Neoconservatism is more of a worldview than a coherent political ideology.

That worldview has been shaped by rather traumatic historic events, most notably the Nazi Holocaust, and the events of the 1930s that led up to it. Of course, the Great Depression and pervasive anti-Semitism at the time were important causes.

But neoconservatives also stress three other causes. First, the failure of liberal institutions in the Weimar Republic to prevent the rise of Nazism in Germany; second, the appeasement of Hitler by the Western European democracies and their failure to confront him militarily early on; and third, the “isolationism” practiced by the United States during that fateful period.

This assessment of these causes leads neoconservatives to believe that spineless liberals, military weakness, diplomatic

appeasement—or almost any diplomacy—and American isolationism are ever present threats that must be fought against at all costs. This is an integral part of their worldview, and you can often hear it in their rhetoric and polemics—talking about appeasement and Chamberlain and Munich, and so on.

For them, the importance of maintaining overwhelming military power—or what they call peace through strength—as well as constant American engagement or intervention outside its borders cannot be overstated. The latter point is particularly critical, because neocons believe that, in the absence of a tangible threat to our national security, Americans naturally retreat into isolationism.

As a result, they have engaged in a consistent pattern of threat inflation, or you can call it fear-mongering, over the past four years, from Team B’s [outside experts commissioned by the CIA] exaggeration of alleged Soviet preparations for nuclear war in the mid-1970s to the hyping of the various threats allegedly posed by Iraq, radical Islamists, and Iran after 9/11.

Thus, Norman Podhoretz, one of the movement’s patriarchs, has argued that just as we defeated Nazism in World War II and communism in what he refers to as World War III, so must we now defeat Islamo-fascism in what he’s called World War IV. For neocons, a new Hitler is always just around the corner, and we must be in a permanent state of mobilization to confront him.

But assuring American engagement and military dominance is not just a matter of protecting our national security. It is a moral imperative. In their Manichean world, neocons see the U.S. as the ultimate white hat, or, as Elliott Abrams—who is Podhoretz’s son-in-law and was also George W. Bush’s top Middle East aide—once put it: “The United States is the greatest force for good among the nations of the Earth.”

This conviction helps explain Paul Wolfowitz’s call for what amounted to a unilaterally enforced Pax Americana in his famous 1992 Defense Policy Guidance, as well Bob Kagan’s and Bill Kristol’s 1996 appeal to an increasingly anti-interventionist Republican Party to return to what they called a neoReaganite policy of “benevolent global hegemony.” That manifesto set the stage for the Project for the New American Century, whose associates did so much to coordinate the march to war in Iraq, both inside and outside the Bush administration, after 9/11, and which created so much consternation in Beijing.

So, how does Israel fit into this? In my view and that of other veteran observers like Jacob Heilbrunn—the first 100 pages of

“”

For neocons, a new Hitler is always just around the corner.

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Jim Lobe: American Neoconservatives: A History and Overview (Advertisement)

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whose book [They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons] I highly recommend if you want to understand the origin of neoconservatismâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the defense of Israel has been a central pillar of the neoconservative worldview from the outset.

Why? Of course, the fact that neoconservatism began as and remains a largely Jewish movement is one very relevant reason. But, like the U.S., Israel is also seen as morally exceptional due in major part to the fact that its birth as an independent state was made possible by the terrible legacy of the Holocaust and the guilt it provoked particularly in the West. Moreover, its depiction in the media since 1967 as both a staunch U.S. allyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;which is questionable, butâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and a lonely outpost of democracy and Western civilization besieged by hostile, if not barbaric, neighbors has contributed to this notion of moral superiority. Of course, its most recent wars, its treatment of Palestinians, and the steadily rightward drift of its governments have made this image increasingly hard to sustain, not only in the West but within the Jewish community here as well.

Although strong defenders of Israel, however, neoconservatives are not necessarily Israel-firsters. They believe that both the U.S. and Israel are morally exceptional. That means that neither one should necessarily be bound by international norms or institutions

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like the U.N. Security Council that would constrain their ability to defend themselves or to pre-empt threats as they see fit. It means that both countries should maintain overwhelming military power vis-Ă -vis any possible challengers. And in the neoconservative view, the interests and values of the two countries are largely congruent, if not identical. As Bill Bennett once put it, somewhat mystically, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Americaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fate and Israelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fate are one and the same.â&#x20AC;?

But that doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t mean that neocons defer to whatever Israeli government is in powerâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;as AIPAC, for example, tends to do.

They often have different priorities. Through the American Enterprise Institute, the Project for the New American Century, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, to name a few neoconservative groups, neocons very much led the public campaign for invading Iraq from virtually the moment the Twin Towers collapsed. But I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t think Ariel Sharon, who considered Iran the much greater threat, was all that enthusiastic about the idea. Similarly, many neocons were unhappy with Sharonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s withdrawal from Gaza, and with his successorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; decisions to end wars against Hezbollah and Hamas over the past decade without achieving decisive military victories. Unlike AIPAC, neocons almost always believe they know better than anyone else.

Now this has changedâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;that is, the relationship with Israel

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the counter-revolution against the Arab Spring would just be the cat’s pajamas. Indeed, most neocons have historically always had a soft spot for what they used to refer to as friendly authoritarians. And when was the last time you heard neoconservatives advocate for full human rights for Palestinians, let alone their right to national self-determination, unless they want to exercise it in Jordan? In any event, their record over the past 40 years suggests that their devotion to democracy depends entirely on the circumstances.

I’d like to make two final notes as briefly as I can. First, it’s a movement with no recognized leader—although I think Bill Kristol would like to be one. Yes, they work together quite closely and coordinate their messaging to create very effective echo chambers. But they also have differences of opinion over tactics, and sometimes even over substance. Some neocons like Frank Gaffney and Daniel Pipes actively promote Islamophobia; while others, such as Kagan and Reuel Gerecht, disdain it. There are soft neocons, like David Brooks at The New York Times, and hard neocons, like Bret Stephens at The Wall Street Journal. In other words, the movement is not monolithic, except in the core elements I outlined previously.

Second, and last, neocons have been admirably nimble in creating tactical alliances with very different political forces to achieve their ends. In the mid-’70s they worked with aggressive nationalists like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld to derail Kissinger’s efforts at détente with Moscow. Under Jimmy Carter they wooed the Christian Right, despite the clear anti-Semitism of some of its leaders. As Irving Kristol said at the time, “It’s their theology, but it’s our Israel.” That coalition of the three helped propel Reagan to victory in 1980. Then, alienated—as Larry pointed out—by the first Bush’s pressure on Israel to stop settlements and enter into serious peace talks after the Gulf war, many neocons opted for Clinton, and (Advertisement) by the mid-’90s they allied with liberal internationalists in pressing Clinton to intervene in the Balkans, over Republican opposition. By 2000, however, they had reconstituted the old Reagan coalition of aggressive nationalists and the Christian Palestinian Medical Relief Society, a grassroots communityRight. And after 9/11, they of course led based Palestinian health organization, founded in 1979 by the charge, along with Rumsfeld and ChPalestinian doctors, needs your support today. eney, into Iraq. But now, less than a decade later, they have been with the libVisit our Website <www.pmrs.ps> to see our work in action. eral interventionists on Libya and Syria, Mail your U.S. Tax-Deductible check to our American Foundation: and some of them, like Kagan and Max Boot, are openly warning that they’ll back Friends of UPMRC, Inc PO Box 450554 • Atlanta, GA 31145 Hillary this year, especially if Trump gets the Republican nomination. But I’m going For more information call: (404) 441-2702 or e-mail: fabuakel@gmail.com to leave that to Justin. ■

and the Israeli government has changed—somewhat since Netanyahu took power in 2009, and especially since the 2013 elections, which resulted in the most right-wing government in Israel’s history. Bibi has had a very close relationship with key neocons since the 1980s, when he was based here as an Israeli diplomat in the U.S. and neoconservatives had their first taste of power under Ronald Reagan. Their worldviews—that is, neocons’ and Bibi’s—are very similar, but there have been differences. While most neocons have been calling for regime change in Syria through covert or direct U.S. military action, Bibi has wanted the civil war there to go on and on, presumably for as long as possible. And while neocons who have long viewed Moscow as a dangerous adversary have urged a harder line against Russia over Crimea and Ukraine, Bibi has maintained his discreet silence and enjoys a businesslike, if not cordial, relationship with Vladimir Putin.

So, Manicheaism, moral exceptionalism, a benevolent Pax Americana backed up by huge military budgets, Israel’s security—these are all central to the neoconservative world view.

Now, it’s often said that neocons are also Wilsonians, devoted to the spread of democracy and liberal values. I think this is way overplayed. I agree with Zbigniew Brzezinski, who has sometimes observed that when neoconservatives talk about democratization, they usually mean destabilization.

[Laughter] Now I believe some neocons, notably Bob Kagan, are indeed—I believe—sincerely committed to democracy promotion and human rights, but I think his is a minority view, as demonstrated most recently in the case of Egypt, where, like Netanyahu, most influential neocons deeply appreciate President Sisi and want Washington to do more to help him.

And like Bibi, most neocons think a de facto alliance between Israel and the region’s Sunni autocrats who have led

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Justin Raimondo: Israel and Foreign Policy Issues in the Presidential Campaign

Israel and Foreign Policy Issues in the Presidential Campaign Justin Raimondo

PHOTO JAMILA JOUDEH

Dale Sprusansky: Now we have that fun opportunity to talk about the 2016 Election with Justin Raimondo. Raimondo is an author and editorial director at antiwar.com, where he writes a regular column. He’s also a regular contributor to The American Conservative and Chronicles magazine.

He’s also written a handful of books on U.S. foreign policy, as well as on the conservative movement. His talk today is titled, “Israel and Foreign Policy Issues in the Presidential Campaign.”

Justin Raimondo: Let’s do a little experiment. Now, I realize that what most people remember about the recent Republican presidential debates is the vulgarity, the inanity, the name-calling, the references to hand length. But there have been a few moments of lucidity—when history has been made, precedents have been set and, yes, even reasons for optimism have been highlighted, although these may have been lost amid all the brouhaha and the liberal moralizing.

So on to our experiment. Which candidate said the following: “As president, there’s nothing that I would rather do than to bring peace to Israel and its neighbors generally, and I think it serves no purpose to say ‘but you have a good guy and a bad guy.’ Now I may not be successful in doing it. It’s probably the toughest negotiation anywhere in the world of any kind, okay? But it doesn’t help if I start saying, ‘I am very pro-Israel, very pro, more than anybody on this stage.’ But it doesn’t do

any good to start demeaning the neighbors, because I would love to do something with regard to negotiating peace finally for Israel and for their neighbors, and I can’t do that as well as a negotiator—I cannot do that as well if I am taking sides.”

Now I’m going to give you a few seconds to contemplate the answer. I mean here is a rare example of a Republican candidate speaking reasonably, rationally, in a statesman-like manner, about one of the most controversial issues in American politics. Here is someone who has defied the bipartisan consensus on Israeli-American relations, which is that we must always give unstinting and unconditional support to a Jewish state.

Here is an outright abrogation of the conditions of the so-called special relationship, that one-sided love affair that dictates Washington must kowtow to Tel Aviv and ignore the horrific conditions under which Palestinians must live.

Okay, you had enough time. So what’s the answer? [Laughter] Who would dare to step on the third rail of American politics and defy the Israel lobby? The answer has to be Donald Trump, doesn’t it? And indeed it is. He said it in Houston. He said it in Detroit. He said it on Fox News. The two other main contenders attacked him for it, both Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and of course they didn’t have a substantial criticism.

There can’t be any. After all, how can one argue against evenhandedness? Cruz merely repeated his pledge to give Israel everything it wants and more, while Rubio repeated the Israeli Embassy’s talking points: Hamas is evil, Hezbollah is terrorist, and, of course, moral equivalence is immoral. In short, it’s the usual nonsense, as if the Palestinians and their local allies have no right to resist the occupation.

Yet Trump stood his ground. He has repeated his position in

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at least two debates and, wonder of wonders, has suffered not at all for it at the ballot box—which is quite astonishing after the one debate. They have a North Carolina primary and, “oh, Trump is finished part 99.” And of course he wasn’t, was he?

He is the frontrunner by a country mile, and the only flak he’s gotten over it has been from the usual suspects, the neoconservatives who you just heard about, who hated him anyway and are among his loudest detractors. Bill Kristol’s so-called Emergency Committee for Israel ran an ad attacking him—but not, interestingly enough, over his support for evenhandedness in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They didn’t want to go there. That’s because Trump has single-handedly changed the terms of the debate without hardly anyone noticing, and of course without hardly anyone giving him any credit for it.

Israel is no longer the third rail of American politics—not since the rise of Donald Trump—which no candidate dare step on for fear of his or her political future. How did he do it? By simply and fearlessly telling the truth. Of course, some people did notice—the Israel lobby, first of all. And in Israel itself panic has set in. An interesting piece by Chemi Shalev, usually one of the more reasonable Zionists, notes that, “In their Super Tuesday speeches, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio tried to use an Israel hammer to bash Donald Trump. Cruz sneeringly lambasted him for saying that he would remain neutral, while Rubio trounced Trump for trying to stay impartial, as his audience booed accordingly. And Trump? Trump was racking up victories, amassing delegates, and laughing all the way to the top of the Republican presidential field. In this way, the New York billionaire is decimating the conventional wisdom— one of many—that, in 2016, total and unconditional support for Israel is a prerequisite for any aspiring Republican candidate wishing to run for president.”

Remember when the support of evangelical Christians was contingent on a candidate’s willingness to grovel before Bibi Netanyahu? Poor Rand Paul, for example—the alleged antiinterventionist, isolationist and fellow libertarian—had to travel all the way to Israel, cuddle up to the Israeli right-wing and pointedly ignore the Palestinians, whom he didn’t even deign to visit. And where did it get him? Just amused disdain from the Jewish Republican coalition and a series of televised ads from a dark money pro-Israel group attacking him for his trouble.

Appeasement, it seems, doesn’t work when it comes to dealing with the Israel lobby. But one tactic does seem to

work—a direct and honest assault. As Shalev notes in Haaretz, Southern Evangelicals voted for Trump anyway, and in droves. They handed him victories in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Virginia and elsewhere. As Shalev puts it, “The conception is falling apart. The notion that the Republican Party is a monolithic bastion of support that will withstand the test of time is evaporating. The belief that any Republican president who will follow Obama will be better for Israel is eroding with each passing day. Faced with the Trump phenomenon, Netanyahu’s fortress GOP strategy is collapsing like a house of cards.” [Applause] So this is what they’re seeing and saying in Israel. The supposed invincibility of the Israel lobby has been a long time unraveling, but the process began a couple of years ago, with their first big defeat over the nomination of Chuck Hagel as defense secretary. Senator Cruz, in particular, took center stage during this seminal battle, doing his imitation of Joe McCarthy and impugning Hagel’s integrity and accusing his supporters of being “friends of Hamas,” whatever that may mean. It didn’t work, and the Obama administration grew bolder, taking the initiative and defying the lobby and becoming more vocal in its criticism of Israel and its settlement building.

But it took a Republican, it took Donald Trump, to deal the Israel lobby a death blow, breaking its stranglehold on the Republican Party and defying the interdict against evenhandedness in dealing with the occupation. The Israel lobby, for all its legendary wealth and influence, was always a paper tiger, and it was inevitable that this would eventually happen. As Shalev points out, there is no going back. “Every time Cruz and Rubio tried to hit Trump over the head with an Israel club and nothing happens, it is Israel’s weakness that is exposed. Every time Trump wins a party primary without a challenge from his supporters, another nail is driven into the coffin of the unshakeable alliance between Israel and America’s deep right.”

That alliance is now being shaken to its very foundations and the panic extends to a Democratic Party, where Haim Saban, the billionaire who’s great achievement has been the creation of Mighty Morphin Rangers, is denouncing Trump as “unreliable when it comes to supporting Israel.” Calling the Republican frontrunner a clown and dangerous, he ranted in an interview with Israel’s Channel 2 that Trump is “dangerous for the world, and since Israel is part of the world; therefore, he’s dangerous for Israel.”

It took a Republican, it took Donald Trump, to deal the Israel lobby a death blow.

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Justin Raimondo: Israel and Foreign Policy Issues in the Presidential Campaign

has given voice to his position in at least two high-profile deAs Trump would say, okay? [Laughter] And especially danbates and taken lots of heat for it. An article in The Intercept gerous, it seems, for those who consider Israel to be the moral

by Murtaza Hussain fails to cite Trump’s position accurately or equivalent of the entire world. in full, while noting that this is new territory for Sanders, who Says Saban, “It is hard to know what he is thinking. One day has been supportive of Israel, including even during the he’ll give an interview to an Israeli newspaper and say, ‘you’ve heinous attacks on Gaza in the past. This is to be expected. never had such a friend in the White House as you will when I Trump’s hostility to Muslims per se isn’t going to endear him to become president.’ The next day they ask him about the Midpolitically correct liberals who don’t want to give him credit for dle East, and he says, ‘I’m neutral, I’m the U.N., I won’t inanything. volve myself.’ You just don’t know with him. Every day it’s What’s going to be interesting is that both Sanders and something else.”

Trump are scheduled to speak at the upcoming AIPAC conferNothing less than complete and total support satisfies peoence [Audience shouts that Sanders is not speaking at ple like Saban. Anything else is dangerous for Israel. Saban, AIPAC], and so we’ll see what happens there. And I have to by the way, is one of Hillary Clinton’s longtime supporters. He note that our friends at CODEPINK are circulating a petition has given her millions of dollars and is the single biggest urging Sanders not to attend the AIPAC event. One has to donor to a Democratic congressional campaign. He has a net wonder if they’re afraid he’ll continue his long career of panworth of $3.6 billion. dering to the Jewish state and its American supporters, while Now, what’s really significant about Trump’s stance is that, if Trump is surely not going to change or modify his position in as president he tries to make a deal in an evenhanded way any way, as usual. and it all falls through, Israel will be blamed, as Chemi Shalev The Israel lobby is very concerned about Trump. The neorightly says in Haaretz. That’s because for domestic political conservatives who direct it are vehemently opposed to him bereasons, the Israeli leadership cannot and will not make any cause he challenges the very basis of America’s interventionist significant concessions—which is why they view Trump’s foreign policy which they have supported on ideological evenhandedness with absolute horror. That will show the grounds, as well as its obvious benefits to Israel. Trump’s stateworld what Israel is really all about, deepening the rift between ment that the U.S. was deliberately lied into the Iraq war has Washington and Tel Aviv, and perhaps even calling U.S. fienraged them to the point that neocon chief strategist Bill Kristol nancial support to the Jewish state into question. After all, if has called for a third-party candidate to oppose him. Neocon Trump is critical of having to pay for the defense of Japan, Max Boot has said he’d vote for Stalin before voting for him.

Korea, and our European allies without getting much of any[Laughter] Presumably, he’d write in Trotsky. To a man, the thing in return, what’s to stop him from taking the same dim neocons are frothing at the mouth that Trump is winning primary view of our yearly tribute of $3.5 billion to Israel and getting after primary, to which I can only add, by their enemies, ye shall bupkis for our generosity? know them. Thank you. [Applause] The dam is broken. The great breakthrough is upon us, and I just want to make a comment about Sanders. You’re the great irony is that it came about because of a politician telling that he did not accept the invitation to speak, and of widely reviled by liberals, and especially by Muslims, for his course that’s out of sheer cowardice. I undisguised hostility to people of the (Advertisement) mean, he doesn’t want to alienate his Muslim faith. Who would have thought radical left-wing supporters who are so that this man, of all men, would sound a Coming September 2016 busy disrupting Trump’s rallies that they reasonable note on the issue of U.S.-Is21st Annual New Mexico don’t even really care what his positions raeli relations? Yet, history is full of such Muslim Women’s are. So it’s just very consistent with his ironies. I would advise you not to let your Association Retreat reticence on the issue of Israel. And I shock at the rather counterintuitive noSpeaker: Homayra Ziad, Ph.D., might add that at a town hall meeting on tion of a reasonable Donald Trump blind Scholar of Islam, ICJS.org the subject in his district in Vermont, I you to the unfolding political reality. believe it is, he once threw somebody Bernie Sanders, another outsider, has Dar al Islam out of the room for daring to ask about expressed support for a more evenAbiquiu, New Mexico his position on the Israeli-Palestinian handed approach, albeit in much vaguer For more information: conflict. So, so much for liberal moralizterms. His stance on the whole issue of ing on that issue and their big hero, Israel has been given much less promiBernie Sanders. ■ nence by his campaign; whereas Trump

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PANEL 2: Israel’s Influence on U.S. Foreign Policy

PHOTO PHIL PORTLOCK

Questions & Answers

Dale Sprusansky: We are coming up on lunch, but I’m going to try and give the panelists just time to maybe quickly answer one question each. I’ll start with Larry here with a simple question. Someone would like to know the role of the arms industry in our support for Israel.

Lawrence Wilkerson: There is a huge component of Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and others involved in everything the United States does today. One of the reasons that I argue we are in a period of interminable war is not just this threat of terrorism—which, incidentally, the Cato Institute did a nice paper recently showing that you and I have about the same potential to be killed by a terrorist as we do by a lightning strike, and yet we spent $2 trillion on this struggle, and counting.

As it boils out, the defense contracting industry is now so huge that you wouldn’t probably believe the numbers I would give you—still in Afghanistan, still in Iraq and so forth—is a major component of presidential decision-making. It is a major component of congressional approval of that decision-making, 42

because it’s so many jobs, it’s so much money, and there is so much influence. In fact, I would submit that under the table, Lockheed Martin, in its narrow niche, is more powerful than AIPAC. The Israelis in particular, and others too, feed this, the French, the British, and so forth.

Jim Lobe: Just to elaborate on that for a second, I think it’s a very important point, and one that’s not looked at very carefully. You remember I talked about the neocon pattern of threat inflation since the ’70s. And of course one of the biggest financial beneficiaries of threat inflation is the military industrial complex, so to speak. I think this is a great subject of research for aspiring Ph.D. candidates, to determine to what extent the neoconservatives are effectively supported by the defense industry, either as consultants, or House counsels, or in various ways, or taking ads in their publications. Although I don’t think that’s that important. But I think it’s a very important and often overlooked source of support for the neoconservative message, and has been for 40 years.

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Questions & Answers

Dale Sprusansky: Are Dale Sprusansky: I just those who support Trump have one more question for selling out American Muslims, Jim here. Someone wants to Latinos and I guess other miknow if you believe there is a norities heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s taken shots at? fundamental difference beJustin Raimondo: Look, tween the neoconservatives in Donald Trump said that he the Republican Party, and the wants to forbid anyone who neoliberals in the Democratic is a Muslim from coming into Party, as it pertains to Israel? the United States. Now, how practical is that? I mean, is Jim Lobe: Yeah. Well, with neoliberals, I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know what there a test? How can you tell? That is not going to happen. exactly [that means]. I mean, I remember Dukakis was a neAs to the Latino question, I live in Sonoma County in Northoliberal and Clinton was a neoliberal, but it was never very ern California, and I would say maybe half the population is clear to me what that meant. I think itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s more a question of libillegal [laughter], and now theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re giving them driverâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lieral internationalists, and sometimes liberal interventionists. I censes. And of course theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re voting, which is the whole reawould say, globally-speaking, liberal interventionists, or liberal son why theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re given driverâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s licenses. I mean that is aninternationalists in particular, are very multilaterally inclined. other thing that is not going to happen. It just isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t going to They donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t like acting unilaterally. Whereas neoconservatives happen. believe very strongly in unilateral action, particularly by the I should clarify that I am not going to vote for Donald United States and by Israel. With respect to the Middle East Trump. I am merely rooting for him. [Laughter] Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a in particular, I think there are more and more liberal internavery big difference there, because if I tionalists who are having a harder and (Advertisement) voted for him, then Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m going to have to harder time justifying what Israel has take moral responsibility for everything been doing, particularly under this rightthat he did, every single thing. And the wing government. I think there is a only politician that I have actually ever widening gap, and Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m sure Phil Weiss done that for recently is, of course, Ron and perhaps some other speakers this m a s h r a b i y a Paul. [Applause] All of this liberal handafternoon will be elaborating on that wringing and tearing out of the hair is subject. really just virtuous signaling on the part Dale Sprusansky: Finally, for Justin, of the media and those of us who take a couple of questions here about Donald the media seriously. I think that Trump Trump. Someone said yesterday Shelhimself personally, although Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve never don Adelson indicated that heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s open to met him and donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know him, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m also supporting Donald Trump, or inferred as from New York, so I know about New much. So I guess your thoughts on that, York hyperbole. If you say this sucks, given Adelsonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s big support for Israel. this is terrible, this is rottenâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;actually, if And then someone just wants to know, youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re from New York, it probably or I guess kind of clarify, Trump and the means, well, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s probably tolerable. I whole issue of Muslims, what does that mean, he tends to exaggerate. And mean? Are people supporting Trump given the era that we are living in, which selling out Latinos and Muslims, and that is kind of like a cartoon anyway, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s very kind of thing? ;&(37,21$/ ($87< appropriate.

Justin Raimondo: As to Mr. Adelson, Dale Sprusansky: Thank you. Well, I have no insight into his inner psycholyouâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve certainly given us, all three of you, ogy. Certainly, he is a partisan Republi

a lot to talk about during lunch. Lunch will can who would support anyone against

be served over on that side of the room. the Democrats. So I think that he is more Also over at the Exhibition Hall, Kirk of a Republican activist in spite of his Beattie will be signing his books. We will reputation as a pro-Israel person. The see you after lunch. Enjoy. â&#x2013; other question is what exactly?

I am not going to vote for Donald Trump. I am merely rooting for him.

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PANEL 3: Responding to Israel’s Influence on Campus and in Court

Responding to Israel’s Influence On Campus and in Court

Janet McMahon

PANEL 3

Moderator

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The Birth of Palestine Solidarity Activism at George Mason University Tareq Radi

Janet McMahon: I’m Janet McMahon, the managing editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. For those of you who are still print-oriented, our next issue will have the complete transcripts of today’s conference. Videos of the panels and keynote speakers are available on YouTube and at the conference website, www.IsraelsInfluence.org.

Our first panel this afternoon will address efforts to counter Israel’s influence in various venues, beginning with college and university campuses. So I’d like to open by introducing Tareq Radi, a Palestinian-American organizer based here in Washington, DC. Tareq graduated with a BS in finance from George Mason University in Northern Virginia, where he was a founding member of GMU’s Students Against Israeli Apartheid, or SAIA. He’s currently the public affairs coordinator at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. Under the umbrella of the Arab Studies Institute, he’s leading an initiative to mine historical and contemporary documents related to the Palestinian solidarity movement in the United States. The work will culminate in a series of databases aimed at studying the U.S.-based movement, and offering researchers and advocates alike a critical resource. He intends to pursue graduate school, with hopes of developing and conducting research on resistance economies. Please join me in welcoming Tareq Radi.

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Tareq Radi: The Birth of Palestine Solidarity Activism at George Mason University

PHOTO JAMILA JOUDEH

Tareq Radi: So before I begin my talk, I’d just like to thank the Washington Report and the Institute for Research for hosting today’s event.

Thank you to Delinda and Grant for the invitation and all that you all have been doing, and to the staff that made today possible. I would especially like to thank the workers of the National Press Club who have been working so tirelessly to make this venue such a nice venue that we’re sitting in today.

As we walk through the main atrium of George Mason University Student Center, you’ll notice two parallel rows of banners splitting the cafeteria in two. But the banners that you’ll see are things you’ll kind of expect to see at any university—slogans of Patriot pride, advocating for the different university services, things like that. But there’s one banner in particular that always seems to catch the attention of passersby. Because of our banner’s presence, one might assume that, historically, George Mason University has embraced a politically radical climate. But you only need to go back three years to see it’s quite the contrary, actually.

What I’d like to talk about today is going back in these three years and observing the shift in discourse on Palestine and also the emergence of student groups that are committed to radical politics.

GMU’s Students Against Israeli Apartheid first formed as an ad hoc committee during Israel’s Operation Pillar of Cloud.

While an SJP chapter already existed on our campus, they were ardently anti-BDS, and thought protests to be too radical.

Now, this is a symptom of being within the Beltway, you know, something I call Beltway syndrome. It also could be attributed to a number of other factors, obviously. George Mason University is one of the fifth most militarized campuses in the U.S. So there’s a lot of things that will contribute to this. To discuss the effects of Beltway syndrome would take an entirely different talk.

So we set out to establish an organization that would address the issue of Palestine without making appeals to authority. Come January of 2013, we had completed the requirements to become a registered student organization, and all that was left to us was to wait for our application to be approved.

From its inception, SAIA faced tremendous discrimination

from the GMU’s administration.

Every action we took on campus was met with immediate response from the administration. Now, before we were ever granted our club status, we were actually threated with termination.

Now, the administration’s tactics to silence critiques of Zionism can be divided into two phases—the first phase being an outward denial of rights without plausible justification, and the second phase employed a series of policy reforms that aimed to circumscribe the agency and reach of our group on campus. Now, these repressive tactics exercised during the second phase would reveal a set of double standards applied to Palestine solidarity groups that we see constantly on different campuses. For this reason, I believe it’s important to examine these policies and challenge these reforms, because they aim to centralize power within the administration— and by doing that, administrators are able to prohibit movement building of any kind, whether it’s Palestine-related or for other groups.

So, basically, this would end up backfiring on the university.

As they started to restrict all of these policies that were aimed to restrict SAIA, what ended happening is it created a political consciousness amongst the student body.

And before I end my talk, I’m going to come back to this a little bit and discuss some of the larger challenges of social movements on campuses today. You know, while I believe that the double standard for Palestine exists and I think it’s very real— that threat—I don’t want to exceptionalize our cause. I think the issue of Palestine is representative of a change that threatens the status quo and encompasses values that could destroy the foundations upon which repressive institutions are built. So with that, let me start.

One of the first steps we took to change the political climate at GMU was initiating an educational program. We believe that education was a necessary component to engaging and politicizing the student body, and that without it they would not participate on our political actions. Now, despite not being a student organization with access to space, we hosted weekly meetings in a small study room in the library. As students began to feel empowered through the readings, word spread and eventually

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we could no longer cram into these small study rooms.

Now, because the university had frozen our application, we were forced to meet outside. While this was an inconvenience, it actually turned out to be a subversive act that would fuel the university’s overall discomfort by our existence. Our outdoor meetings were a public display of a growing movement to reclaim space, even if we didn’t realize it at the time. And again, this is not exclusive to Palestine. We felt this subversive act in Ferguson, in Baltimore, in response to the National Guard’s curfew. We watched this unfold in the protracted process of the Arab uprisings, and we were inspired by the students at Mizzou, who made their voices heard in front of the administration. And there are countless examples of this changing tide that is occurring, not just on campuses but globally.

Now, through this educational program the students became empowered to challenge their professors and peers who either supported Zionism or claimed neutrality.

Because we refused to normalize with Zionist groups on campus in any way, we were accused of being dogmatic and divisive.

Now, institutions, whether they be academic or nonprofit, they often try to hide behind this idea of objectivity, which actually entrenches a culture of mediocrity and actually supports oppression and seeks to protect the status quo.

As Fanon asserts, “for the colonized subject, subjectivity is always used against him.” But we need not to be colonized to have objectivity serve as a tool of repression toward us. And I say this so that we always question ourselves when we attempt to be objective in these circumstances. Keeping this in mind allows us to be aware of where we stand in terms of power.

Through this analysis we were able to cultivate a culture on campus that not only rejected Zionist normalization but challenged the residual effects of objectivity, one of them being victim blaming. There are a lot of other intersections that we can address.

In the case of GMU, our commitment to anti-normalization served to isolate Zionist groups on campus. During my time there, the only time Zionist groups would emerge was in response to Palestinian organizing. And because we refused to engage with them in official fora, much of the campus community rejected the false parity of Israelis and Palestinians being on equal sides, and kind of the myths of Zionism and the origin of the project.

Now, I attribute much of SAIA’s success in the first year at least toward our dismantling of this false parity. But education

for the sake of education alone is not enough. If you’re not putting people and galvanizing people into political action, you’re really just pontificating and sitting in these rooms. And it’s fun to talk theory, but we wanted to see material change.

We wanted to see ways that we can actually support our allies, where people can feel empowered and have agency. So the first thing that we started was our Sabra Campaign, which was to de-shelve Sabra [hummus] on the campus’ cafeteria.

As we collected hundreds of signatures, the university continued to crack down on us, but we were unwavering on our efforts. One of the repressive tactics the administration deployed was to restrict the areas on campus that were considered freespeech zones. Eventually, the only area on campus that was considered a free-speech zone was in the middle of campus— which, if you could imagine trying to flyer or organize in the winter, how difficult that would be in DC. And again, this is talking about this idea of reclaiming space. I want us to think about that throughout this talk— you know, who is here, who do you listen to, think of this idea of reclaiming space.

Then, you know, eventually, despite the administration’s disapproval, we weren’t able to de-shelve Sabra completely, but we were able to offer an alternative that actually severely affected the sales of Sabra on campus. It’s something worth mentioning, especially it was a way for students to kind of support us, like Buy Hummus Tuesdays, and stuff like that.

Now, certain students took notice of the administration’s repressive policy reforms aimed at circumscribing our reach and agency on campus. As a result, students who may not have been initially interested in the question of Palestine joined SAIA, as they saw Palestine as a vessel to address larger issues in America today; at this point, realize that SAIA needed to have more intersectional understanding and analysis of the effects of Zionism and its role in global capitalism and oppression. As we know, again, there are way too many intersections for me to talk about in this one talk. So I’d like to focus on how we began to better understand Zionism’s proximity to power in capital as we began to call into question the neo-liberalization of the university.

So our next major action would be a walkout on graduation—and this would actually be my graduation. Now, the university announced that Israeli businesswoman Shari Arison would receive an honorary doctor of humane letters at winter graduation and be delivering our commencement speech.

Well, GMU’s President Ángel Cabrera attributed Arison’s hon-

“”

The only time Zionist groups would emerge was in response to Palestinian organizing.

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Tareq Radi: The Birth of Palestine Solidarity Activism at George Mason University

oring to the example she set as a morally responsible investor.

It’s far more likely that it was due to her $3 million endowment of a professorship named after her business model. Now, while Arison claims to be a socially responsible investor committed to values-based business and morally responsible ventures, an investigation of the operations of her company reveals she invests in firms directly involved in the illegal occupation and colonization of Palestine. Arison’s family’s wealth was built through the direct dispossession and oppression of Palestinians.

Now, as we outlined in an open letter to the GMU community, the honoring and speech given by Arison at graduation made it clear that the university was not concerned with the experience of Palestinian students and families who had been affected by this woman’s or family’s presence. But more important than worrying about this question of how did Palestinians feel—because, really, does anybody care about that? More important than this is, we brought up the idea of donor aid and the influence on curriculum.

And this is what started to galvanize people on campus who didn’t really even care about Palestine. The administration stated that the professor of the endowed chair will be dedicated to research and education as exemplified by Arison’s vision. It’s deeply troubling to think that an apartheid profiteer can gain a direct line of communication to do these values to the student body.

And without going into that story, we were able to do the walkout on graduation. The university actually facilitated it. And so I walked out of the commencement speech with 30 friends and 100 or more so in the crowd, and then we walked back in and received our diplomas.

So it wasn’t that we were punished, which was really nice. Again, that wasn’t the university being nice.

That was them being more afraid of what we would do if that didn’t happen. So I think there’s something to be said about having rad[ical] politics on campus and not making appeals to authority and constantly trying to appease the administration in negotiations.

Now, the question of donor aid would ignite a discussion surrounding faculty governance, centralization of power, and the role of the administration on campus. The question of Palestine was no longer solely a critique of Zionism; rather, it

was a lens in which the campus community could begin to understand power dynamics on campus. And for this reason, I now understand, after witnessing student movements on campuses throughout the U.S., that the administration’s backlash against Palestine advocacy is not unique. Rather, it was the typical response of power to those who seek to disrupt the status quo.

From here I would like to shift our conversation and take the opportunity of such a large and engaged audience to offer suggestions but, more importantly, raise a few questions that hopefully we can all work through as we leave this conference. I’ll continue to use GMU as a case study, just because that’s where my experience was grounded.

So in terms of organizing on campus, one of the ways we responded to oppression we faced was through mirroring the tactics of trade unions. We made sure to make every single instance of repression or any violation against our rights—the smallest slight—the biggest deal. This might seem like we’re picking benign little issues, but the sum of all these issues is much greater than if you were to add them individually. And I think there’s something to be said about that.

Now, in thinking through how students organized and our interactions with the faculty after the walkout, I began to understand the relationship that should exist, and had flourished in the past, between students and the faculty. For instance, at GMU, much like other universities, the faculty in regards to self-governance have as much power, basically, as students. They really have no power to enact change within the university’s policies.

So I’d like to quickly rewind to one of our past victories, when the American Studies Association passed the resolution to endorse the academic boycott of Israel. So this was right before the university facilitated our walkout, where they implicitly acknowledged that Arison’s presence may be offensive to members of the GMU community. The administration’s response to the ASA’s boycott resolution embodies the discomfort that institutions in power feel as they watch marginalized communities reclaim space and advocate for selfdetermination.

After the resolution passed, GMU’s President Cabrera made

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the following offensive statement: “Universities exist to build bridges of understanding, not blow them up.” His line, you know, saying this, insinuates that being in solidarity with Palestinians is now on par with terrorism. Cabrera’s use of this damaging language was a blatant response to the support SAIA received from faculty who endorsed our walkout over the graduation.

Now, I’d like to read a small excerpt from a statement we released in response to Cabrera’s opposition to the boycott. “Cabrera’s most recent action is a deliberate attempt to stifle any form of faculty organizing on the GMU campus. Today, we are fighting for the faceless Palestinian academic, but tomorrow we may be demanding better working conditions and pay for you and your colleagues. For this reason, President Cabrera opposed the ASA’s resolution, because the former will lead to the latter, and the latter is an administrator’s worst fear.”

It will only take one year for us to witness this prediction come true. Two prominent figures on our campus who actually had very close ties with SAIA—and again we have no way of proving these types of, forms of discrimination, because the university is not transparent in any way, so we’re not able to prove it—but it’s clear.

When you see somebody speaking at our first Israel Apartheid Week, when we see the ODIME [Office of Diversity, Inclusion and Multicultural Education] director supporting us and seeing that, because we are a movement that is inclusive of everyone, that they should support us and not isolate us like the university had tried to do in the beginning, we can start to see the change that it has on campus.

Now, we can observe that all it took was one small group of students. We started as eight people just causing constant noise all the time no matter what, wherever we could, just reclaiming as much space. Even the voice and the noise, that is a part of reclaiming space. That is putting out your affect, right, talking anthropology.

Today at Mason, it’s a very different campus. SAIA no longer hosts our meetings in these four-person study rooms.

The African and African-American Studies program generously allows students to use the Paul Robeson room for their weekly meetings, which is really a beautiful room. It’s a really beautiful sight to see students talking about these things in a room named after Paul Robeson.

For instance, the student senate, before the emergence of SAIA, they passed a resolution condemning Sodexo workers and university staff for going on strike because it was an inconvenience to students. That’s to show you how conservative this

university was that even the senate is passing these types of resolutions. Just last semester, they passed a resolution to abolish Columbus Day and to replace it with Indigenous People’s Day. [Applause] And I think that’s a really big deal. And these are just a few of the very small instances of how we were able to change the campus climate through Palestine work, and it wasn’t always about Palestine, and I think it’s important to note that.

Now, thinking about this, I’d like us to envision all of us as part of a larger effort to reclaim space for marginalized communities and for those who had been pushed to the fringe. If we come at these challenges that we’re facing with this attitude, it would help us fully understand the attempts to thwart growing grassroots activism, whether that be in the form of anti-BDS bill, you know, repressing students on campus, or the disgusting attack on Rasmea Odeh.

All of these things are one and the same. They challenge power.

It’s important that we fight tooth and nail against the backlash facing Palestinian activism. I’m not saying this because I’m Palestinian, but because what happens next will reflect how those in power will address social movements at large. By challenging these notions of power, we illuminate larger questions of knowledge containment, governance—and we begin to ask who defines boundaries. I’m not going to go into this, but issues of civility that we saw with Steven Salaita’s case. Maria can speak more than I can on that.

As a social movement, we should constantly be asking ourselves about issues of access and inclusivity. To be honest, part of me wonders why I’m here today. I feel really upset that I’m actually breaking up a panel of all-female panelists. It’s the only one that’s here today. At the same time, I’m Palestinian, I’m a Palestinian man. There is a dehumanization of Palestinian men.

There is an infantilization of Palestinian women, categorizing them and collapsing them with children, right? These are things that we are saying. We need to ask what types of voices are allowed to speak and start addressing these types of questions.

The organizers are doing great. I’m just saying that we need to think about these things. We should always be constantly pushing the envelope. [Applause] Thanks. And I’m almost done, I know I have 15 seconds. So if our work isn’t grounded in anti-imperialist, anti-racist, feminist, queer liberation ethics, we must ask ourselves, what is the point of what we were doing? We’re working so hard to, hopefully, create a new world. Let’s break free from the paradigms that we’ve been put in, right? We can do it outside of what we’ve been told, the ways that we were supposed to do. We need to ask, who are the people that we are making appeals to? Is it im-

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All it took was one small group of students.

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portant to have everyone in the room? You know, these are just questions that I’m trying to build for the movement.

In closing, I’ll just implore us to always challenge who is in the room, who are we giving voices to, how do those voices address power? I think if we do this, we will undoubtedly dis-

mantle the institutions that are built upon our repression and that seek to protect the status quo. So, thank you.

Janet McMahon: Thank you very much, Tareq. And please don’t feel guilty—there were no women on this morning’s panel breaking up the all-male panels, so you’re welcome here! ■

Concerted Attempts to Silence Criticism of Israel in the U.S. Maria LaHood

PHOTO PHIL PORTLOCK

Janet McMahon: Our next panelist is Maria LaHood, a deputy legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, with expertise in constitutional and international human rights. She works to defend the constitutional rights of Palestinian human rights advocates in the United States. The cases she’s worked on include Davis vs. Cox, defending the Olympia Food Co-op board members for boycotting Israeli goods; Salaita vs. Kennedy, in which she represented Prof. Steven Salaita, whose offer of a tenured position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was withdrawn for tweets critical of Israel; and CCR vs. DoD, seeking U.S. government records under the Freedom of Information Act regarding Israel’s 2010 attack on the flotilla to Gaza—about which we will hear more from Huwaida Arraf today.

Maria works closely with Palestine Legal to support students and others whose speech is being suppressed for their Palestine advocacy around the country. She also works on the Right to Heal Initiative with Iraqi civil society and Iraq veterans seeking accountability for the lasting health effects of the Iraq war.

Her past work at CCR includes cases against United States officials such as Arar vs. Ashcroft, Al-Aulaqi vs. Obama and Al-Aulaqi vs. Panetta—the last two concerning the targeted killing of American citizen Anwar Al-Aulaqi; against foreign government officials, such as Matar vs. Dichter and Belhas vs.

Ya’alon; and against corporations, such as Wiwa vs. Royal

Dutch/Shell and Corrie vs. Caterpillar—which sold Israel the bulldozer used to kill Rachel Corrie.

Prior to joining the Center for Constitutional Rights, Maria advocated on behalf of affordable housing and civil rights in the San Francisco Bay area. A graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, she was named a finalist for the 2010 Public Justice Trial Lawyer of the year. We’re very pleased to have Maria LaHood join us today to discuss legal challenges to advocates for Palestinian rights.

Maria LaHood: Thank you, Janet. Thanks, IRmep. And thank you to the Washington Report for putting on this terrific conference today, and thanks to all of you for being here. I want to especially thank Tareq for his work. People ask, where is the hope for change in this country? And I present to you Tareq and all the students who are advocating for Palestinian rights. [Applause] That’s where the hope for change is for me.

As the movement for Palestinian rights has grown in the U.S., so too have concerted efforts to silence any criticism of Israel, particularly on U.S. campuses. Students are being stymied, investigated and disciplined; the faculty are being punished; and activists have been sued and arrested. I’m going to talk about—focus on a couple of those cases, the first one being that of Prof. Steven Salaita.

He’s an esteemed Palestinian-American professor and prolific scholar, including on Zionism. Professor Salaita was a

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tenured professor at Virginia Tech University and was offered a tenured position at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in its Native American Studies program. He accepted the offer.

He resigned from his tenured position and was set to start at U of I in the summer of 2014. His wife quit her job. They put money down on a condo. They pulled their son out of school.

Salaita’s classes were listed and his textbooks were ordered.

That summer, the summer of 2014, Professor Salaita, like many, watched with anger and horror as Israel devastated Gaza. He tweeted about it. Just two weeks before he was set to start at U of I, he got an e-mail from the chancellor, essentially telling him not to bother to show up. She said that his appointment would not be recommended for approval by the Board of Trustees, referring to a provision in his contract that his appointment would be subject to approval by the board.

Professor Salaita and his family were left without jobs, income, health insurance, and a home. How did this happen? A self-described Zionist had been monitoring Professor Salaita’s tweets, the right-wing blog Legal Insurrection published some of them, and groups like the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Jewish Federation, and the Anti-Defamation League got involved. Wealthy donors to the university threatened to withhold their donations.

Before deciding to fire Professor Salaita, the chancellor went out of her way to meet with those wealthy donors. Yet she didn’t bother to consult Professor Salaita, the hiring committee that vetted him, or the department he was joining.

Chancellor Wise and the trustees later admitted that their decision was based on his speech, claiming they viewed his speech as uncivil, and a couple of the trustees also called it anti-Semitic.

As we know, the subjective label of incivility has historically been used to demonize groups and to suppress dissent. And labeling criticism of Israel anti-Semitic is a common tactic used to attempt to silence it. Board approval, by the way, happens in September, after new faculty have already starting teaching. It’s always been a line-item vote where everyone is approved at once. Not so with Professor Salaita. Led by the chair of the board, Christopher Kennedy, the trustees voted to reject his appointment. The Simon Wiesenthal Center later awarded Kennedy its Spirit of Courage award for leading the board in firing Salaita.

So CCR and our co-counsel in Chicago sued the university, the trustees and top administrators, seeking Professor Salaita’s reinstatement and damages. They had violated his

First Amendment right by retaliating against him for his speech. They violated his due process rights by failing to give him notice and opportunity to be heard, and they violated his employment contract.

The university argued primarily that he didn’t have a contract because of this clause. The court, however, refused to dismiss the case, finding there was clearly a contract. If there weren’t, the judge said, the entire American academic hiring process as it now operates would cease to exist. No one would quit their jobs and move to a new place on a meaningless offer. The court also found that Professor Salaita’s tweets implicate every essential concern of the First Amendment.

It was political speech in a public forum and the university’s actions were based on its content, which could not be separated from the tone, which is what the university had argued: It’s not his views, it’s the way he said them in a 140-character tweet.

The chancellor resigned a few hours after the decision was issued. [Applause] The next day, it came out that she and other university officials were using personal e-mail for university business that they didn’t turn over in response to Freedom of Information Act requests. In fact, an e-mail from the chancellor revealed that they were using their private e-mail because of the threat of litigation, and that she was even deleting her e-mails. The provost resigned a few weeks later.

Last fall, Professor Salaita became the Edward Said chair at the American University of Beirut and was ready to move on.

He ultimately settled his case for $875,000 against the university. [Applause] It was, I think, a victory not only for academic freedom but for the Palestinian rights movement.

One of the most inspiring aspects of his case was the incredible grassroots support for him. Thousands signed petitions, 5,000 professors boycotted the university, and 16 U of I departments voted no confidence in the administration. His termination was widely condemned by academic organizations, and the American Association of University Professors censured the University of Illinois. Professor Salaita went on tour to speak on more than 50 campuses, finding a larger platform for his critical analysis of Zionism and settler colonialism than he previously had. The movement for Palestinian rights cannot be silenced [applause], but efforts to do so unfortunately are only increasing.

Another case I want to talk about is the Olympia Food CoOp, which is a local food co-op in Olympia, Washington, home to Rachel Corrie and her family and Evergreen State College,

Labeling criticism of Israel anti-Semitic is a common tactic used to silence it.

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where she went to school. The co-op is a nonprofit organization. It has a long history of doing social work and promoting political self-determination. It has adopted various boycotts over the years, but in 2010 the board voted by consensus to boycott Israeli goods. More than a year later, 5 of the 22,000 members sued 16 volunteer board members, those who passed the boycott and those who were sitting on the board when the suit was brought. They claimed that they breached their fiduciary duties and acted beyond their authority. The case seeks to end the boycott, as well as personal damages against the 16 individuals.

Six months before the lawsuit was filed, the Israeli Consulate General to the Pacific Northwest, based in San Francisco, traveled to Olympia, Washington to meet with the co-chairs of StandWithUs Northwest, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, and some Olympia activists. StandWithUs is a nonprofit, whose mission is to support Israel around the world. It’s one of many groups trying to suppress speech critical of the Israeli government in the U.S. It maintains dossiers on people who advocate for Palestinian rights, including some of us here.

Not long after that meeting, nearly a year after the board had passed the boycott, the 5 co-op members sent a letter opposing the boycott and threatening to sue the 16 board members unless they rescinded the boycott immediately, and threatened that they would be held personally liable and that the process would become considerably more complicated, burdensome and expensive. The boycott, again, was passed in 2010. This was six years ago.

The board responded by asking them to specify how they had violated the co-op’s governing documents and by inviting them to initiate a ballot process, to put proposals to a membership vote as provided by the bylaws. They refused to do so and instead filed a lawsuit.

Right after the lawsuit was filed, StandWithUs Northwest listed it as an agenda item for its executive committee meeting, under the category of project status. It posted online that StandWithUs filed a lawsuit against the Olympia Food Co-op, and that it was a byproduct of the partnership between StandWithUs and the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, spearheaded by Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon.

When Danny Ayalon was asked if the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs was involved in the lawsuit, he responded, “It’s very important to make use of every means at our disposal, mainly legal means. And it’s true, we’re using this organiza-

tion, StandWithUs, to amplify our power.”

CCR and our co-counsel in Seattle represent the board members who were sued, and several years ago we filed what’s called an anti-SLAPP motion.

SLAPP is a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. About half the states in this country have laws to deter the abuse of courts to chill free speech.

The law permits early dismissal of the suit when it challenges public statements on an issue of public concern. It provides cost and attorney’s fees, and in Washington State it provided a $10,000 damage award for each defendant.

The Trial Court dismissed the case as a SLAPP, finding it was meritless. It held the board had the authority to pass the boycott and awarded $10,000 to each of the 16 defendants.

Plaintiffs appealed. The appeals court affirmed. And then they petitioned to the Washington Supreme Court. The Washington Supreme Court struck down the anti-SLAPP statute last year as unconstitutional, finding that it violated the right to jury trial under the Washington Constitution, and remanded the case back to the Trial Court. So this year we are back in the Trial Court again, nearly five years after the suit was first brought.

We moved to dismiss the case again, arguing that the boycott was permitted under the governing documents of the coop, which a Trial Court previously and the Appellate Court had already decided was right, and the motion to dismiss, unfortunately, was denied. So the case goes on. Meanwhile the board members, only one of whom is actually still a board member, have been subject to the burden of discovery, and the intimidation and harassment of this meritless lawsuit continues. But the Olympia Food Co-Op’s boycott of Israel still goes on.

These are not isolated cases, but just two of numerous incidents in which people who dare to speak out for Palestinian rights are attacked. In September, CCR and our partner Palestine Legal issued this report entitled The Palestine Exception to Free Speech: A Movement Under Attack in the U.S. It documents widespread and growing efforts in the U.S. to punish and silence protected advocacy on behalf of Palestinian rights and speech that is critical of Israel, including BDS, of course. It details the tactics as well as many case studies. It’s available on both of our websites, ccrjustice.org and palestinelegal.org. And I’ll have materials later on the tables in the other room.

Last year, Palestine Legal responded to 240 incidents of suppression, including baseless legal complaints, administrative disciplinary actions, bureaucratic barriers, false accusa-

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tions of terrorism and anti-Semitism, etc. Eighty percent of those incidents targeted students and professors on 75 different campuses. And this is just the tip of the iceberg of the suppression that’s going on.

At schools around the country, students are investigated for protests when they do mock eviction flyering to raise awareness about home demolitions. Charges inevitably followed that they were targeting Jewish dorm rooms. These charges have never been substantiated, but of course lead to school, and sometimes even criminal, investigations.

The Irvine 11 were criminally convicted for disrupting a meeting, for walking out of a speech by then Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren. Several schools have faced Title VI complaints by the Zionist Organization of America claiming essentially that advocacy on campus for Palestinian rights creates an anti-Semitic hostile environment. Even though decisions dismissing the complaints have said that the First Amendment protected expression alleged [to be objectionable, and] can’t support a Title VI violation, these complaints are still being filed, and universities respond by conducting investigations and cracking down on speech.

These attacks often follow pressure or complaints from groups—not only the ZOA, but the Brandeis Center, the AMCHA Initiative, Shurat HaDin, StandWithUs, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Anti-Defamation League, etc. Netanyahu has launched a full attack on BDS, and Israel has declared it’s the biggest threat it faces. Millions and millions of dollars are being spent to combat criticism of Israel, and BDS in particular. Divestment resolutions on campuses all over the country have faced opposition not on their merits, but because of claims they’re anti-Semitic.

When the American Studies Association passed a resolution to endorse the call for boycott of Israeli academic institutions, they received death threats. Shurat HaDin, the Israel Law Center, threatened to sue them if they didn’t end the boycott. Shurat HaDin admits that it takes direction on which cases to pursue and receives evidence from Mossad and Israel’s National Security Council.

Also, in response to the ASA resolution, legislatures around the country proposed bills to take away state funding from colleges that use any state aid to fund any academic organization that advocated the boycott of Israel. Mobilization prevented those bills from being passed. But now there’s a new slate of

anti-boycott legislation that’s been introduced in about 15 states. Some states, as was mentioned earlier, have passed non-binding resolutions condemning BDS, but those have no legal effect.

But last year, Illinois passed a law requiring the establishment of a blacklist of foreign companies that boycott Israel and compels the State Pension Fund to divest from those companies. Florida passed a similar bill this year which is awaiting signature by the governor. It also prevents state contracts with any such companies if the contract is over a million dollars. New York has similar legislation pending that’s even worse than those. Congress has introduced legislation to try to protect these kinds of state laws from federal preemption challenges, but of course they can’t prevent a First Amendment challenge.

Anti-boycott provisions made their way into the federal Trade Promotion Authority law, making it a principal trade objective of the United States to discourage BDS from Israel and Israel-controlled territories. The Obama administration subsequently reiterated the position that it does not support settlements, for what that’s worth. You can find out more about anti-boycott legislation at righttoboycott.org.

Anti-BDS legislation isn’t only in the U.S., of course. Israel itself has an anti-boycott damages law, and France has even criminalized BDS. Someone was arrested last week for wearing a BDS T-shirt.

These attacks are an extension of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians living under occupation, under siege, under apartheid, and under attack. When there’s no defense, the tactic is to try to stop the debate by intimidating and attacking your opponent. So, Israel and its apologists are also attacking those standing up for Palestinian rights wherever they are.

Free speech is crucial to free inquiry, open debate, and the functioning of our democracy—especially at our universities, where open debate on issues of public concern tends to lead our nation’s consciousness. Campus activism helped turn the tides of the Vietnam War and South African apartheid, and will eventually do the same here. The mounting repression against those who speak out against Israel’s occupation and other violations of international law illustrates the power the movement for Palestinian rights has to expose those abuses and eventually bring them to an end. Thank you.

Janet McMahon: Thank you so much, Maria. ■

Anti-boycott legislation has been introduced in about 15 states.

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Why We’re Suing the U.S. Treasury Department Susan Abulhawa

PHOTO PHIL PORTLOCK

Janet McMahon: As we heard this morning, one manifestation of Israel’s influence on this country is the failure of government agencies not only to guard the interest of American citizens, but to even enforce the law.

Our next speaker, Susan Abulhawa, is one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the U.S. Treasury Department for allowing tax-deductible contributions to go to illegal Israeli settlements.

The attorney who filed that and another lawsuit against Sheldon Adelson, Friends of the IDF, and others who actually make those contributions is here with us today. And I’d like to ask Martin McMahon—who is no relation to me, as far as I know—to stand up so people will know who he is if they want to talk to him more about the details of these cases. So he’ll be available for the rest of the afternoon for those of you who want to speak to him. Thank you.

Martin McMahon: Thank you so much. [Speaks off-mic] Nothing is possible without great plaintiffs like Susan coming up.

Janet McMahon: And I’d like to add to that that Susan Abulhawa is a wonderful novelist, poet, and essayist. Her debut novel, Mornings in Jenin, became an instant international bestseller and was translated into 27 languages. Her most recent novel, The Blue Between Sky and Water, has likewise been translated into 26 languages thus far. She’ll be signing copies of her book in the exhibition hall following this panel.

Susan’s first poetry collection, My Voice Sought the Wind, was published in 2013, and she has contributed to several anthologies. Her essays and political commentary have appeared in print, radio, and digital media internationally.

In 2001, before she left a career in neuroscience research

to become a full-time writer, Susan founded Playgrounds for Palestine, a children’s organization dedicated to upholding the right to play for Palestinian children.

Last July at the Allenby Bridge in Jordan, Israel denied her entry to Palestine, where she had planned to build two new playgrounds and visit possible new sites.

Somehow I suspect she

will not be deterred.

It’s a great pleasure to introduce Susan Abulhawa.

Susan Abulhawa: Thank you to the Washington Report and to all of you for being here, and especially to Martin McMahon. It’s an honor to share the stage with my comrades, Maria and Tareq and Huwaida, and listening to Tareq and Maria just now makes me feel like we are winning.

As you heard, I’m here because I’m a plaintiff in Martin’s lawsuit. But I’m not a lawyer. I’m a writer, and I’m all about narrative. So I’m going to talk about why I joined this lawsuit, because I think bringing it back to Palestine, no matter how much we know about it, is always so important.

First to the question at hand: whether Israel’s influence is good or not for the United States. I think the answer to that largely depends on which United States we’re talking about.

There is the U.S. of the civil rights movement and Dr. King.

Then there’s the U.S. of the Klan and the Grand Wizards.

There’s the U.S. of revolutionaries and warriors like Malcolm, Harriet Tubman, Crazy Horse, Black Hawk, Geronimo, Huey Newton, Angela Davis, Kwame Turé. And then there are the architects of the financial crisis who made off with billions of dollars and people’s lost homes and lost savings. There’s the U.S. of intellectual giants like W.E.B. Du Bois, Howard Zinn, Alice Walker, Edward Said, and Chomsky. And then there are

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the likes of Friedman and Fox News.

The United States I’m briefly going to touch on belongs to the latter grouping. It is some of the wealthiest, most privileged Americans like the Falic family—I assume it is not pronounced “phallic”; the Schottenstein family, owners of American Eagle Outfitters; the Book family, owners of Jet Support Services, who funneled billions of tax-exempt money to finance the persistent incremental theft of Palestine. The theft of another people’s ancestral lands, of our homes, our history and heritage; the theft of our culture, our food, our memories, our cemeteries, our churches, our mosques, our orchards, our olive groves—all so they who have so much can also have an extra country, so that every Jewish person in the world may be accorded an entitlement to dual citizenship, one in their own ancestral homeland and one in mine.

This colonial enterprise or population change can be visualized through maps showing the expropriation and the dramatic

armed, defenseless and besieged native population that they occupy. It is an extraordinary and breathtaking inversion of the historic and forensic record.

So while a mythical narrative of biblical proportions dominates U.S. airwaves, newspapers, radio, film and literature, I’d like to give you a glimpse of what they’re actually doing. These actions are predicated on an ideology explicitly articulated by Zionists in the highest offices, particularly to each other, and often when they think no one is listening. It is a language of supremacy, of the wholesale negation of another people’s humanity. It is replete with various permutations of the word colonize and with words like transfer.

From the very beginning, Theodor Herzl said, “spirit the penniless [population] across the border,” that “the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely.” Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a founding member of Zionism, did not mince words. He said, “Zionism is a colonizing adventure.”

Rafael Eitan, who we heard about earlier today, said, “when we have

transfer of land ownership, such that the native sons and daughters of Palestine are now relegated to what amounts to less than 11 percent of our historic homeland, arranged as an apartheid waterless archipelago of ghettos.

But as Grant showed us this morning, such images of the settler colonial reality have not permeated U.S. popular imagination, principally because U.S. media gives a disproportionate platform to Zionist voices who repeat tired mantras about terrorism to manufacture fear and its resultant alignment of loyalties, tired mantras about negotiations and peace overtures, living side by side, lofty and emotional verbiage that’s carefully orchestrated precisely for American ears in order to create the false narrative of parity—one that paints a highly militarized colonial enterprise as a victim of the principally un-

settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.” And the current Israeli prime minister, in a moment when he thought no one was listening, said, “Israel should have exploited the repression of demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, in order to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories.”

Yitzhak Rabin, the Nobel Laureate and father of break Palestinian bones doctrine, said Israel will “create in the course of the next 10 to 20 years conditions which would attract the voluntary migrations” of Palestinians. Rabin uttered those words in the 1980s—and, indeed, Israel has created those conditions. Here is a glimpse of what he was talking about. As with all colonial projects, a foundational aim is to create a docile, subjugated native population without rights or

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without recourse, a broken humanity that’s good for cheap labor.

They start terrorizing us at a young age. At any given time, Israel typically holds hundreds of Palestinian children in administrative detention, where they are interrogated and tortured without charge, without trial, without their parents, without a lawyer, without an advocate. They’re often kidnapped on their way to and from school, playing in the streets and throwing rocks at tanks, as they have a right to do, or pulled from their beds and dragged away in the middle of the night.

They’re shot and murdered or maimed wherever they stand.

Israel systematically targets Palestinian education. They bomb schools directly and close them down regularly, raid them, fire on students, often inside their classrooms. They impede the ability of students and teachers to physically reach their classrooms. In addition to checkpoints, road barriers and closures, violent settlers often prevent young and old alike from reaching their destinations, whether it’s school, work, shopping, a family visit, a funeral, a field, a mosque or a church, a wedding or any place to be in any moment to complete a day of living.

They demolish our homes one by one, evict whole families, whole neighborhoods. Israel is perhaps the only nation in the world that creates homelessness as a matter of national policy. At the same time that native families are pushed out, Jewish foreigners are imported from all over the world to take their place. Since 1967, 25,000 Palestinian homes have been destroyed, internally displacing over 200,000 Palestinians. Fifteen thousand of those homes were demolished since the signing of the Oslo accords in ’93. Since that year, 53,000 new Jewish settler homes have been built on land confiscated from Palestinians.

They destroy our precious ancient olive trees that we have loved and nurtured for centuries and which have sustained and defined so much of our lives in return. Nearly one million olive trees have been uprooted, cut, burned—a lone statistic, a holocaust in itself. A life-giving earth transformed into a graveyard for broken and burned trees.

They steal Palestinian water. They pump it out from aquifers beneath Palestinian land and then they allocate it on the basis of religious affiliation. What Palestinians are accorded of their own water is sold to them at prices several folds more compared with what Jews in the same area are charged. In 2013,

an Al-Haq report demonstrated how 550,000 illegal Jewish settlers used five times more water than the 2.6 million Palestinians in the same area. Palestinian access to water is further limited by Israel’s denial of Palestinian water development. It is nearly impossible for us to get permission to dig new wells.

And further, what wells and cisterns already exist are frequently damaged or destroyed by Israel. The assault on Gaza’s drinking water is so severe that 90 percent of the ground water in Gaza now is unfit for human consumption.

Israel rules with color-coded ID cards, with massive surveillance of voice data, of movements, of habits, of hopes and secrets. They have color-coded license plates, and segregated roads, and segregated buses. Implementation of Israeli apartheid goes to the smallest details of life, including even cell phone coverage. While Israeli settlers in the ’67 occupied territories enjoy 3G and 4G coverage, Palestinians are limited to 2G—a limitation with massive economic implications, designed to perpetuate economic dependency on Israel.

And yet, in the United States, financial support of such policies are catalogued as charitable.

So much of this system of ethno-religious supremacy has been made possible by external funding—both governmental and by an estimated 30,000 nongovernmental, so-called charitable organizations. In the U.S., tax-exempt groups have poured billions of dollars into subsidizing population change. A 2002 study by Dr. Thomas Stauffer estimated that $50 billion to $60 billion had been transferred from the U.S. charities to Israel over a 20-year period, from 1980 to 2002. Similarly shocking numbers were revealed in a 2013 study by the Forward that looked at 3,600 U.S. tax-exempt groups funneling money to Israel.

A Haaretz investigation reported in a four-year period—between 2009 and 2013—that 50 U.S. tax-exempt organizations alone funneled more than $220 million to exclusively Jewish settlements in Palestine. The Hebron Fund that you see is one example. This is a Brooklyn-based group that provides approximately half of the Hebron settler community’s funding. Between 2009 and 2014 it transferred $5.7 million to the settler community of just a few hundred individuals who live in the midst of 220,000 Palestinians.

This small but heavily armed and guarded settler outpost among nearly a quarter of a million Palestinians has acted as a paramilitary force, terrorizing local inhabitants into leaving.

Israel is perhaps the only nation in the world that creates homelessness as a matter of national policy.

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This community further has well-documented connections to terrorism and human rights abuses. They have been accused of crimes including theft, harassment, murder, assault, destruction of property. They’ve been involved in gunfire, attempts to run people over, poisoning of a water well, breaking into homes, spilling of hot liquid on the face of a Palestinian, and the killing of a young Palestinian girl.

Another organization is this one, Honenu—I’m not sure if I’m pronouncing that correctly, I don’t really care. Donations to this organization go primarily to legal aid and family support for accused, confessed, or convicted Jewish terrorists. Among their beneficiaries was Ami Popper, who murdered seven Palestinian laborers in 1990. He pulled them out, lined them up, and shot them along the wall. They’ve provided support for members of a terrorist underground that attempted to detonate a bomb at a girls’ school in East Jerusalem in 2002.

Other high-profile accused or convicted terrorists who have received funding from Honenu include the settlers who kidnapped, beat, tortured, and then burned alive 16-yearold Muhammad Abu Khdeir from Shuafat in 2014. Also the settlers who firebombed the home of the Dawabsheh family, killing 18-month old Ali along with both of his parents, and severely burning his older brother.

Another organization is the Central Fund of Israel (CFI).

This is an umbrella charity that operates out of a textile company that’s owned by the Marcus Brothers in the Manhattan garment district. It has received money from the likes of Ace Greenberg, Kirk Douglas, Michael Milken—the “Junk Bond King.” In 2014 alone, they sent $25 million to Israel.

Philip Weiss, who’s with us today, reported in Mondoweiss that CFI provides funding to a yeshiva that’s headed by Rabbis Shapira and Elitzur. These guys co-authored a book called The King's Torah, in which they make it clear that the commandment, thou shalt not kill, applies only to Jews who kill Jews.

The bulk of the text in this book is a rabbinical instruction manual explaining the ways of kosher murder for non-Jews. NonJews, the book explains, are uncompassionate by nature and, therefore, attacking them may “curb their evil inclinations.” The book permits the killing of infants and children of non-Jews since, “it is clear that they will grow up to harm us.” These are things that are funded by U.S. tax-exempt dollars. In the interest of time, I think I’m going to skip through some of these.

These are only a few examples in a large body of evidence showing how financial transactions from tax-exempt organizations are used to fund ethno-religious supremacy and entitle-

ment, with its consequent displacement and destruction of native Palestinian life. It does not include a whole other ecosystem of synagogue- and church-giving to Israel.

So, I think the more appropriate question to ask today is whether specific actions, protocols, laws and political adventures bend our collective human experience toward justice, toward universal dignity and moral evolution. The forcible removal of an entire nation, a deeply rooted people, in order to replace them with others from around the world, people whom the new state deems a better form of human, is itself a form of moral regression.

European Zionists conquered Palestine, a place that already had an ancient history that had produced an extensive society whose character formed organically over thousands of years of documented habitation, conquest, pilgrimages, births of religions, religious conversions, marriages, rapes, enslavement, settlements, wars, crusade, commerce, travel and natural migrations of known tribes like the Canaanites, the Philistines, the Mamluks, the Syrians, Hebrews, the Romans. They all passed through our lands and became of us, as we became of them, and we never left. We were always there, until the turn of the century, when European Zionists arrived with guns and hatred and made of us a homeless refugee people, an exiled and an occupied terrorized people.

We were and we remain the children of that patch of earth, of that history. We belong to that place where are buried our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents and on down the line. We did not arrive there a few years ago from Poland and Belarus, or Russia, or Florida, France, England, Germany—or any other place from which the vast majorities of Israelis hail. We do not have hundreds of years of European history, of documented life and achievement in Europe, the Americas and elsewhere, and the whole world knows it. But our humanity is nothing to them. It is as if we are vermin in the eyes of American Zionists financing the destruction of Palestine.

The dismantling of our society is happening today, in 2016.

That’s I why I joined Martin McMahon’s initiative to sue the U.S. Treasury, so that they might investigate these organizations, so that my American compatriots might be moved to shut them down. I joined this lawsuit because I see it as a way to confront power when we are mostly powerless, when we are so outgunned, outmoneyed, outmaneuvered, outconnected. I joined because I believe that confronting power with truth is the least one can do with the privilege we have. When so many who are a fraction of my age are risking their young lives to

The dismantling of our society is happening today, in 2016.

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confront heavily armed soldiers with rocks, when grown men and women with nothing but their bellies to protest waste away as hunger forces the body to eat itself. I joined this lawsuit because I believe in the United States of the Civil War heroes, of its warriors and intellectuals, because the cause of Palestine is squarely in the categories of this America.

I will close with one last quote by Ze'ev Jabotinsky, who, despite his abhorrent supremacist ideas, clearly understood something fundamental about Palestinians. He said this about us: “They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico, or any

Sioux looked upon his prairie. Palestine will remain for the Palestinians not a borderland, but their birthplace—the center and basis of their own national existence.”

But unlike the destruction of the Aztecs and the Sioux, we are not yet outnumbered. Our anguish is audible to global civil society and the moment portending our existential peril is now.

So, the question, then, for this audience is: which United States do we want to prevail? Thank you. [Standing ovation] Janet McMahon: Thank you so much, Susan—and, again, she’ll be signing her books after this panel in the exhibition hall. ■

Holding Israel Accountable for the Gaza Flotilla Raid Huwaida Arraf

PHOTO PHIL PORTLOCK

Janet McMahon: Over the years, countless lawsuits have been filed against Iran for terrorist attacks it allegedly made possible. These lawsuits have not accused Iran of directly killing Americans, but rather of providing material support to Hamas, Hezbollah, the Khobar Tower bombers, you name it. Just last month, in fact, 367—I counted— family members and estates sued Iran for providing material support for the killing or injuring of Americans, including soldiers—in Iraq! As if Iran, not the U.S., had been the one to invade that country.

Israel, on the other hand, has directly killed and injured Americans, from the crew of the USS Liberty in 1967—34 Americans killed, 171 wounded, in international waters; to 23year-old nonviolent activist Rachel Corrie, killed 13 years ago this past Wednesday, days before we invaded Iraq; and 18year-old Furkan Doğan, a passenger on the humanitarian vessel Mavi Marmara, who was killed six years ago. The U.N. Human Rights Council described his killing as, I quote, “summary execution,” by Israeli commandos who boarded the unarmed ship, also in international waters.

Our final speaker, Huwaida Arraf, was a passenger on the Challenger I, one of the other vessels in that 2010 Gaza flotilla. She is one of four Challenger passengers who are suing the State of Israel and four of its ministries for torture; cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment; arbitrary arrest and detention; assault and battery; and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Huwaida is a Palestinian-American lawyer and human rights advocate. As the daughter of an Israeli-born Palestinian, she is also a citizen of Israel. She received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and her Juris Doctor from the American University Washington College of Law, where she focused on international human rights and humanitarian law. In 2001, Huwaida co-founded the International Solidarity Movement, or ISM, for which Rachel Corrie was volunteering when she was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer. Huwaida is coeditor of the book Peace Under Fire: Israel, Palestine and the International Solidarity Movement—an organization which has twice been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Huwaida was one of the initiators and organizers of a dele-

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On the night of May 30th into May 31st, I was in the wheelgation of American lawyers to Gaza in February 2009 and cohouse of the Challenger I. Around midnight, the Israeli navy authored the report on their findings, Onslaught: Israel’s Atcontacted us, and they proceeded to ask us questions about tack on Gaza and the Rule of Law. She is the former chairperwho we were, what our vessel numbers were, where we came son of the Free Gaza Movement, and from August to Decemfrom, where we were heading. The captains of the various ber 2008 led five successful sea voyages to the Gaza Strip to ships answered these questions, so they knew very clearly confront and challenge Israel’s illegal blockade. Huwaida was who we were. one of the primary organizers of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, Then I took over in speaking on behalf of the flotilla, and I which Israeli forces lethally attacked on May 31, 2010. Please repeatedly told the Israeli navy that we are unarmed civilians. join me in welcoming Huwaida Arraf.

We are carrying only humanitarian aid for the people of Gaza, Huwaida Arraf: Thank you, Janet. Thanks to the Washington who are under an illegal blockade. We are not going near IsReport for inviting me again, and thanks to all of you for being raeli waters. We’re going from international waters into Gaza’s here. I must admit, I am now a little intimidated to go after all territorial waters. We conthese wonderful speakers, stitute no threat to the especially since I’m a little State of Israel or its out of my element here. I armed forces. Do not use usually speak kind of as a force against us. And I rehuman rights activist about peated that we are unwhat’s happening in Palesarmed civilians. Do not tine, what we’re doing use force against us. about it. Sometimes I’m At about 1:30 in the called to speak up as a morning, the communicalawyer about some legal istion from the Israeli navy sues implicated. But today stopped, and about three I’m not speaking as either hours later we heard one of those, because the shooting. It was still the topic here is pending litigadead of night. There was tion. It’s rather sensitive, shooting going on all and I’m not the lawyer on around us. I went out onto the case, but rather a plainIsraeli commandos board the Mavi Marmara, as seen from the Challenger I. the deck, and I could see tiff, and one of my lawyers helicopters overhead and Israeli Zodiacs, gunships. The Mavi told me, don’t speak about the legal issues. I’m like, what am I Marmara was the first boat to come under attack. Our ship going to speak about, then? sped off. We were hoping to delay the boarding of our ship at And last year when I spoke here I had my six-month old least until we could get word out on our satellite phones that daughter with me, and she just captivated the audience and we were under attack, but the Israeli ships quickly overtook really added to my talking. Nobody paid attention to what I us. At least two Zodiacs filled with armed masked men trying said—and I could really use her right now! But she had other to board our boats, and I remember myself holding up my plans this weekend, so she’s not here. I’ll try not to bore you. It arms saying, stay away from us. This is an American ship. won’t be that bad, but if you can just understand that there are We’re only civilians. Do not come on board. And I was probably some things that I won’t be able to talk about. screaming, this is an American ship, stay away from us. And So, by way of a brief background, as Janet already said in my then chaos ensued. introduction and some of you already know, I was one of the orThey threw sound bombs. I looked at one of my colleagues. ganizers of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in 2010, and I was one of She had blood all over her face. I don’t know what had hapthe passengers. The Gaza Freedom Flotilla sought to challenge pened to her. I was thrown down to the ground. My face was Israel’s illegal blockade on Gaza. And to do that, we organized smashed into a deck full of glass, and as a soldier stepped on seven ships carrying over 700 people from over three dozen my head, others were trying to get my hands cuffed behind my countries, and over 10,000 tons of urgently needed materials in back. When I was finally cuffed, they dragged me to one end Gaza. I was on the Challenger I, which was a small U.S.of the ship, pinned me down and put a sack over my head as flagged vessel. It was sailing very close to the bigger ship, the they were searching my body, went into my pants looking for Mavi Marmara, which was carrying a bulk of the passengers.

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any media equipment I had on me. Primarily, they were looking for our cameras and our phones, and they indeed succeeded in taking those away from us.

Our boat was eventually taken to the now-Israeli port of Ashdod, where violence continued. I was carried off the ship, as were a lot of my colleagues, by our hands and feet and thrown to the ground. I was later detained for hours, interrogated and, toward the end of the day, was physically abused to the point where I passed out and was taken to a hospital.

But what happened to me, to us, on that Challenger, was nothing in comparison to what happened to our colleagues on the Mavi Marmara, in which nine of our colleagues were shot dead. One was lethally injured and passed away four years later.

And it pales in comparison to what’s happening to the people of Palestine every single day, to what’s happening to the people of Gaza—the very situation that we were attempting to draw attention to with our action. Nevertheless, it wasn’t a minor thing, and we are thankful to be alive.

When we first founded the International Solidarity Movement, we did it believing that Israel kills Palestinians, they have a freehand to do so, no one has ever held Israel accountable for killing Palestinians—but Israel does not want to kill internationals. It doesn’t look good for them. Internationals have governments which will stand up for them, at least try to hold Israel accountable.

But then, as Janet mentioned, 13 years ago they killed our colleague, Rachel Corrie, in Gaza in a brutal way, ran her over with a huge armored bulldozer. And a few weeks later, they killed another foreign national, Tom Hurndall, a UK citizen. He lay in a coma for nine months before he died from a bullet wound to the back of the head. And then a month after that, they killed a British journalist, James Miller. They got some bad PR, but they weren’t held accountable.

For Tom Hurndall’s death, because his parents pursued, went after really—and not only his parents, because also Rachel Corrie’s parents were very active in this—but Tom Hurndall’s parents had a bit of support from their government, and in a sense it pressured Israel a little bit to arrest the soldier who shot Tom, in a sense to hold him out as the sacrificial lamb, but it did nothing to address the total impunity with which the Israel military operates or the government that gives those orders and uses this policy. It’s a matter of national policy.

So, they put this soldier on trial. He spent a few years in jail,

was released early. The American government promised Rachel Corrie’s parents that the Israeli government would conduct an independent, impartial investigation into what happened. That never happened. So, there was no one ever held accountable, and the culture of impunity continues.

In terms of the flotilla, I think something that Israel did not expect was that there was a backlash of sorts amongst the people of the world. Tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people around the world marched in protest. Artists who were supposed to perform in Israel cancelled their performances.

There were different unions and protests at ports because Israel attacked our ship and was not letting ships into Gaza, that they tried to block Israeli ships coming to various ports in Oakland and in Sweden. And so the people reacted, and I think that remains significant.

In addition, we, the people who planned the flotilla, we did not in any way—I mean, it was traumatizing in a sense, what happened, but we made the decision that we were not going to let this violence deter us, and we went on to plan another flotilla. At the same time, we strategized and collected, gathered, lawyers from all over the world to try to decide how we are going to pursue legal action. So, this comes a little bit to the legal part of my talk.

One of the things that we did is assemble a file for the International Criminal Court. The International Criminal Court did not open an investigation as a result of the files submitted from the lawyers representing the plaintiffs, but we also appealed to the Island of the Comoros. Now, the Mavi Marmara ship was flagged in the Comoros, and the Comoros is a signatory to the Rome Statute of the ICC. In 2013, Comoros did request that the prosecutor open an investigation into the attack on the Mavi Marmara and the Freedom Flotilla, and the prosecutor did do so.

The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court came back with a decision that there was evidence showing that war crimes were committed in that flotilla attack, but unfortunately decided that the events did not meet the gravity threshold. It wasn’t grave enough to merit further ICC involvement, and she decided to close the case.

Now, the Comoros Islands appealed that decision to what’s called the Pre-Trial Chamber and, surprisingly—we were surprised—but the Pre-Trial Chamber did issue a decision calling on the prosecutor to reconsider her decision, saying that she overlooked some significant matters, and called on her to reopen the matter, which she and her office tried to appeal.

No one was ever held accountable, and the culture of impunity continues.

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They tried to appeal that decision, and the appeals chamber last year came back and, actually, they did not accept her appeal—and therefore the decision of the Pre-Trial Chamber stands, that she needs to take another look at this case. Now, we don’t know what’s she’s going to do. We hope she doesn’t, but she might find another way to close the case, but that case before the International Criminal Court is still open.

Some passengers filed cases in various countries. In Spain, we had three Spanish citizens on the flotilla, and they filed the lawsuits in November of 2015. So, just a few months ago, a Spanish national court judge instructed the Spanish police to notify him if any of the seven—they named seven officials as guilty; they’re accused of war crimes—if any of these seven step foot into Spain, that the police should be notified in order for these people to be detained and to undergo questioning in connection with this lawsuit.

Unfortunately, over the last few years, Spain has really gutted its universal jurisdiction laws. It used to have a very vibrant universal jurisdiction law. In fact, the laws that allowed for the—I think it was 1998 when Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London and extradited to Spain to stand trial. But in 2009, a Spanish judge agreed to open an investigation, or to actually pursue a case against the perpetrators of a 2002 bombing attack on Gaza. As a result of that—so where you have a potential of an Israeli official being investigated for war crimes in Spain, the foreign minister of Spain at the time promised the Israelis that this would be looked into, that this would not be allowed to happen. And indeed, only a few months later, Spain’s universal jurisdiction law was gutted.

So now it stands that, in order to pursue a case in Spain, not only must a Spanish citizen be involved, be a victim of the abuse.

Before, it could be anybody. I mean, the whole theory of universal jurisdiction is that there are some crimes that are so heinous that any government, any state, any court should be able to take jurisdiction over these war criminals, so that these people can be stopped. But now, in Spain and in many other countries that have gutted their universal jurisdiction laws as a result of political pressure. In Spain, a Spaniard has to be involved, and the person, the accused, has to be on Spanish soil—which did not limit the ability to still prosecute for this case, for the flotilla, because the thought was, there were Spaniards involved, and if any of these people set foot in Spain, they should be arrested.

But, following this ruling, a spokesperson for the Israeli Foreign Ministry told the media, we’re working with the Spanish authorities to get this cancelled, and we hope it will be resolved soon. A month later, the Spanish high court annulled the decision of this judge and removed the seven officials from the police database. The attorney for the three Spanish victims appealed. Unfortunately, not only did the appellate court in Spain

uphold the dismissal, but it also imposed costs on the victims, which is kind of unprecedented. The attorney is appealing now to the Spanish Constitutional Court, and if he fails there, he plans to take it all the way up to the European Court of Human Rights. So, we’re not stopping there.

In the UK, in January 2015, lawyers also presented a complaint to police, who are gathering evidence now with a view to deciding if certain Israeli accused officials—basically, if they set foot in the UK, if they should be arrested. So there is an ongoing case in the United Kingdom.

The United States—so the precedent here hasn’t been so great. After we were attacked, we tried to work with the U.S. government a lot—through the embassy, the State Department—to try to get answers as to what happened to us, to try to get some kind of help. I mean, very basic, to try to get some of our things back.

Everything was taken from us—our money, our wallets, our cameras, our laptops, everything—just to get some of our things back, and that never happened. The Center for Constitutional Rights has been over the last few years since the attack trying through the Freedom of Information Act to get a lot of documents from the U.S. government as to what they knew in relation to the attack on the flotilla, both before, after. This has resulted in way over 15,000 pages of redacted documents.

But in terms of pursuing legal action, Maria actually has been at the forefront of trying to hold Israelis accountable for grave abuses of human rights when it comes to Rachel Corrie against the Caterpillar Corporation, and for a Palestinian, also a victim. Some of the cases were mentioned here. Belhas v.

Ya'alon, Matar v. Dichter. Both of those cases were against Israelis for their involvement in war crimes.

In Belhas v. Ya'alon, it was for the 1996 attack on the U.N. refugee base camp in Lebanon. With Avi Dichter, Matar v.

Dichter, it was for the 2002 bombing of an apartment building in Gaza which killed 15 people, including 8 children. Both of those cases, unfortunately, were dismissed based on sovereign immunity, saying that these officials are entitled to immunity. Let me go quickly to our case today.

We, on Jan. 12, 2016, myself and three others, did file or institute a civil action for compensation against the State of Israel, so not against an official, but against the State of Israel and a number of named ministries. Our jurisdictional claim is the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which in general gives immunity to foreign states because the politics of this country, they don’t want to create a situation where the politics or the actions of foreign states are litigated in U.S. courts.

Okay. That is understandable, but there are some exceptions to that immunity, and we believe that our case fits very clearly into one of these exceptions. One of the exceptions,

Our ship was flying a U.S. flag—it was U.S. territory.

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it’s found under 1605(a)(5) of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which says that a foreign state shall not be immune from the jurisdiction of the courts of the United States in a case in which money damages are sought against a foreign state for personal injury, or death, or damage to, or loss of property occurring in the United States.

Our ship was flying a U.S. flag—for all intents and purposes it was U.S. territory on the high seas. Therefore, immunity does not apply. Now what, unfortunately, the United States government has been doing—and there’s another case—I’m sorry, I forgot to mention— that has been instituted only a few months before in California for the death of Furkan Doğan, who was a United States citizen executed on the Mavi Marmara, executed because the U.N. fact-finding commission found that he was shot five times, once in the face at pointblank range, likely when he was lying on his back already down.

What happened when that U.N. fact-finding mission report came before the U.N. Human Rights Council for a vote, the United States—which had one of its citizens executed—was the only country to vote not to approve that report. If we’re talking about the influence of the U.S. lobby or Israel and its relationship with the United States, is it good for America, when it causes America to take such shameful positions against the rights and lives of its own citizens, that cannot be good for America. But that case is also ongoing in California.

Israel recently sent a letter to the United States government asking for what’s called the Suggestion of Immunity, asking the United States to submit a letter to the U.S. courts saying that they recommend immunity for Ehud Barak, who’s the individual being sued in California. And it is, indeed, what they have done in these past cases that have been dismissed based on sovereign immunity. Now, the United States, to the best of my knowledge, has not submitted this letter yet. It is ongoing. The lawyers on that case are currently responding to Barak’s motion to dismiss.

In terms of our case, it is likely they will do the same thing.

They are not entitled to immunity. What the government of Israel in their letter said is that this is an orchestrated and politically motivated effort to invoke and abuse the judicial systems of various countries to achieve political ends trying to accuse basically us, trying to accuse Furkan Doğan’s parents of politically motivated reasons for this lawsuit, as opposed to seeking justice for lost loved ones and for gross abuse that we faced at the hands of Israel.

If this is politically motivated, is it politically motivated to seek justice for Eric Garner, to seek justice for Sandra Bland, to seek justice for Freddie Gray? Those same people with that same

mindset would say that this is politically motivated. What’s political about it is to say that some people are entitled to justice based on the color of their skin and others are not, or their race, or their ethnicity—and that is unacceptable. [Applause] It’s not politically motivated in any other sense, because freedom for Palestine is not going to be won in U.S. courtrooms. It is going to be won by the people marching in the streets in Palestine, by the people from all over the world marching with them, by the people getting on boats, by the students here and around the world and others that are taking up BDS. These are the ways that we, the people of the world, are going to hold Israel accountable. It is not going to be in the courtrooms.

But what we seek from our courts is to say that our lives are important and that foreign governments cannot abuse and kill, execute people and not face justice for it, because if the United States government submits a letter granting immunity to Israel for attacking Americans on U.S. soil, then who is safe and who is next? And people are going to continue to go. In fact, there is an all-women’s boat being planned right now to sail to Gaza, and there’s a representative of the women’s boat to Gaza here somewhere. Susan, are you in the room?

If you want to talk to her about the women’s boat and supporting that, the effort of the people won’t stop—but we definitely need to use the courts to at least deter or to provide some kind of deterrence, because otherwise, as we’ve seen, when there is no deterrence, the violence continues. And if there is no accountability, what is to stop Israel? That’s a true danger here. It remains to be seen, but we hope, we hope that our national courts will be a place where we can get justice.

But despite that, we will keep on. We will keep on. We keep on marching, and we keep on sailing.

Janet McMahon: I’d like to thank our inspiring panelists for a fabulous session today. We are running a little late, so I’m going to propose that we take a 15-minute break and then come back for a very exciting second keynote address and our final panel of the day. So 15 minutes and then we’ll come back. Thank you so much. ■

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KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Voices Prohibited

By Mainstream Media and Its Role Spreading Islamophobia Delinda Hanley

Moderator

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KEYNOTE

Rula Jebreal

Delinda Hanley: Go find your seats—we’re in for a real treat. Americans are very quick to criticize other countries for their restrictions on their media. The truth is, due to constant relentless pressure from supporters of Israel, our own media is profoundly restricted. We can criticize every country, including our own—except for Israel. Our speakers will discuss Israel’s influence on television, print media, and in the film industry.

So I have the great honor to introduce Rula Jebreal, who is here to present the second keynote address today. It’s titled, “Voices Prohibited by Mainstream Media and Its Role in Spreading Islamophobia.” Then she will sit down and join our media panel.

Rula Jebreal is an award-winning journalist, author and foreign policy analyst. Her first autobiographical novel, Miral, sold two million copies and has been translated into 15 languages.

Rula’s dramatic screenplay turned Miral into a major motion picture, a rarity for any political film—not to mention a film telling a Palestinian’s story. Both are available at our Middle East Books booth, and she’s signing those books during the reception tonight.

Rula was born in Haifa and placed in the Dar El Tifl orphanage, founded by the late Ms. Hind al-Husseini in Jerusalem, where she received a superb education. I met her first at a luncheon hosted by Jumana Areikat, the wife of Palestinian Ambassador Maen Areikat. By the time she was 18, Rula told us, she was frustrated by the way Muslim Palestinians were portrayed in the media. I got tired of throwing my shoe at the TV, she told us. So Rula started writing her own articles. She received a scholarship from the Italian government, graduated,

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and later earned a master’s degree in journalism and political science.

Rula became the first foreign anchorwoman in the history of Italian television. Her career in American television has been more of a challenge. But I will let her tell her own story. Rula, please join us.

Rula Jebreal: Thank you. I’d like to thank Delinda and everybody at the Washington Report and IRmep. They’ve been very active lately, not only in organizing this amazing conference. But I have to say, I received a phone call from Delinda two weeks ago, and I was visiting some friends in Florida who had some health issues. Delinda said, well, I need to send you something urgently and I think you would be fascinated by it. I didn’t understand why she was secretive. Then Monday when I came back home and opened it, there was this package of emails [from an IRmep FOIA request] of some producer in Voice of America asking a former speaker of AIPAC if he would be fine that I would be the guest to debate whoever they deem as a proper Israeli official, eventually to debate him on television about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Obviously I will spare you some of these misogynist, sexist, disgusting details of the back and forth. But basically this has been the way my career—somehow, whenever I was hired by anybody in the American media—I love when they are about to prepare a war, whether it’s a war in Afghanistan or in Iraq, it’s like, we are going to liberate women, we will teach these natives how to treat women. And then you read these e-mails.

I was like, sure, I’m sure you know exactly how to treat women and how to talk about them.

It’s fascinating to have the superior culture, but it’s a glimpse of the kind of power that they not only established, they exercise and wield without any shame. But I am sure these e-mails were not the only e-mails. These are the e-mails that we know of. These are the e-mails that we had access to.

But I am sure if you read private e-mails, internal e-mails of any news outlet—whether it’s The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC—you will find similar things.

Gideon said that the government is begging the Israeli government, that it was like we want to give you the money and they’re saying basically, no, we want more. Somehow we need to kiss their hands. But the media has played a major role in making this happen.

I grew up actually admiring the American media. I grew up thinking American media is, you know, this is a media that managed to expose major cases of corruption in history and forced a president to resign. This is the media that inspired me as a child, because I thought you can live actually in a country

where a simple journalist, a simple reporter, can do his job or her job and can force the most powerful man in the land to answer some tough questions and eventually be forced to resign or be impeached. I thought, that’s the kind of dynamic of a vibrant democracy that makes this democracy vibrant. That’s the kind of journalist I didn’t see around me.

I grew up watching Arabic television, where I knew that somehow somebody in the government has written the questions, and maybe the answers also. So I grew up with that kind of culture, thinking something needs to change here. And I always looked up to Western media. So when I worked in Italian television, they hired me simply because I was the only woman who spoke Arabic.

They needed somebody to understand the Middle East.

They needed somebody that is native from the region to explain to them what went wrong. That famous article in Newsweek—what went wrong with the Arab Muslim world? And I remember going to my director and explaining to him the difference between Shia and Sunni and why the Iraq war would be disastrous, because just simply looking at the numbers, the composition of the population in Iraq—60 percent Shia. They sent me to cover the Iraq war.

I started my career in Italian television, and I always love to be underestimated because it gives me somehow more freedom, because as soon as they realize what they have, as soon as they realize what I was standing for, what I was doing, then these sexist, misogynist e-mails were some of the weapons they used and they throw against me. Obviously it makes me laugh, but it makes me think that there’s a lot to be done.

American media has been the most disappointing thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Even working in countries like Egypt, I’ve seen pushbacks by certain journalists, reporters, TV hosts by far much more than in this country. And I’m saying that because I’ve seen what that produced. Iraq was a war of choice.

It was a non sequitur country that was invaded for a nonexistential threat. It could have happened only with the tacit, silent and vocal consent of American media, which sold a lie—and none of these people have ever been fired! They’ve actually been recycled, and they still are called experienced and the experts on many issues—Iran and the Iran nuclear deal, they’re writing long essays about Obama’s doctrine, as they call it. Nobody ever questioned their failures, their lies, their manipulation. None of that has happened.

But they actually questioned the fact that my hair is long or short, or I am skinny or fat. I mean, we are reduced to a level that allowed and enabled every lobbyist to get away with murder and basically pave the way for Donald Trump to become

I grew up actually admiring the American media.

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the frontrunner. I think we’re responsible for that. And it reminds me very much of the media in Egypt and Italy before the revolution.

The title of the conference, is this good for America? Not only is it bad, Israel’s influence here goes beyond Israel and Israeli borders. If you think of the larger dynamic in the Middle East, if you think how much money—we’re talking about four billion to Israel, think of the two billion to Egypt. This two billion is paid to the Egyptian regime that basically created a deep police state, a deep state and doomed democracy in that country. This is the country that gave us Zawahiri, number one of al-Qaeda today. This is the country that gave us political Islam. Inside the prison cells, more atrocity has been committed, torture since the ’60s that basically radicalized an entire generation. And they left with one idea, transnational jihad. Go after the regime. Create terrorist groups to go after the regime. Blow themselves up and, guess what, [go after] every one of [Egypt’s] backers—starting with the United States.

So somehow we enabled a government that produced mass radicalization, and why? Because of one issue—because of the Camp David Accords. Basically we still give money to a regime that is committing atrocities, and violating human rights, and killing thousands of people, and imprisoning 60,000 as we speak today because of that peace accord with Israel, or to keep the peace with Israel or to do Israel’s dirty jobs, for example closing the borders with Gaza.

The other ally that we never not only question it—if you think of what Israel has been trying to push the United States to do, it goes beyond the Israeli-Palestinian issue. We had Bibi Netanyahu, who came here to testify in 2002. His words were: We need to go into Iraq and do the regime change that we need to, because this will have a positive effect on the entire region. If you look at the region, I don’t see an area where there are positive effects you can see. But the whole issue was one, and they’ve been vocal about it.

They don’t even care about the Palestinian issue, basically.

What they care about is the Iran issue, and the Iran issue has been really the focus of this government for the last 20 years.

So you have the prime minister, the minister of defense, Silvan Shalom, and even the former Ambassador Oren who basically are telling us that they’d rather have Sunni radical groups like ISIS, al-Qaeda, the al-Nusra Front, than any Shia group—as if the answer to the region is, yes, let’s wage war on the Shi’i. And the Sunni, who gave us every, not only radical group, but every group that has committed atrocities, we

can turn a blind eye on these guys.

This is the same reasoning, this is the same mindset, as the Cold War. This is exactly the same mindset and it’s never changed. I think they are not realizing that the post-colonial order that’s been established in the Middle East has collapsed already, it doesn’t exist anymore, and it collapsed because of their choices. The Iraqi war basically ended that post-colonial era, but they are still thinking as if they’re living in 1979. The mentality of the mujahideen was that mentality. There’s a Russian invasion, so the Russians are the enemies. And this is the Cold War mentality. So we need to create an alliance with whoever is there to defeat that monster. We created a Frankenstein monster that is turning on all of us.

We keep repeating the same strategies and the same mistakes. I understand that it’s hard for a politician to change because they are beholden to the checkbooks of Sheldon Adelson and Haim Saban. Somehow, sadly, they call it legal corruption in my world. Here they call it Citizens United.

But the real failure has been my colleagues—the people who are sitting on television with the revolving door. They served as spokespersons for AIPAC 10 years earlier, and then they are on CNN as a neutral TV host, or some prison guard who served [in Israel] is lecturing people on some website on how they need to behave as journalists. Somehow the system allowed for these voices to thrive and to become the establishment voices.

When you listen to people debating, oh, how did we not understand that Trump would become the frontrunner—the signs were all there. The writing was on the walls. What were you thinking when for years, years since 9/11, the idea of us and them went from a marginal idea to a mainstream idea—that “them” was your neighbor who was Muslim, or Sikh, or eventually a Hasidic Jew. The war on diversity started by eliminating critical voices in mainstream media in the United States. I mean, I can’t even fathom until now how it’s possible that, in a country that led serious investigative journalism and led to push an administration to resign with Nixon, can be the country that allowed not only an administration to abuse its power, and pass secret memos, and spy on their citizens, or torture some people.

Our surprise today—and some of these speakers are intelligent—surprised that you have a fascist on the rise and basically telling you that you didn’t actually do enough. When I listen to these debates and some of my colleagues don’t even have a follow-up question for some of these candidates, who are not only calling to commit war crimes but they’re saying it’s not even enough, you need to expand those war crimes

The war on diversity started by eliminating critical voices in mainstream media.

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Rula Jebreal: Voices Prohibited by Mainstream Media and Its Role Spreading Islamophobia

because waterboarding is not enough. You need maybe to kill him and kill his family and his relatives, because this is what will make us all safe.

Look, in my entire life I’ve never worked so hard to make people understand what the stakes are. But I’m concerned for the next generation. Because when I grew up, obviously, I watched that kind of journalist like Dan Rather and others. I think our children are growing up—if they’re 15, 16, or 14— and they look for people to inspire them. I mean, if that person is Anderson Cooper, I want to jump from a window.

The follow-up question matters more than the question itself, to push back. If your job is actually to expose lies, corruption and deflections, push them to answer it. The only person on [TV] who has been doing this somehow, and surprisingly—and I’m horrified to say that—has been people on Fox News. I mean, we are looking at Megyn Kelly as the person who managed to actually challenge some of these candidates.

But we looked for years at the first African-American president being smacked by the leader of a country of seven million people, and here you have a country of 300 million people, supposedly the leader of the free world, and with Congress basically accepting that and allowing that. That can lead only in one direction. This is the beginning of dismantling of a democracy of this country, and this is what is worrisome.

The Israeli model is not contained in Israel. It’s being transported and it’s becoming part of the American model. So when you have police brutality and the cozy relationship with the media, it’s becoming a cozy relationship in the police departments. So the police who abused their powers in Ferguson have been trained actually by Israeli police, and it’s considered normal. Nobody’s investigating this kind of cozy relationship.

I am proud actually to be sitting with Philip Weiss here, who reported about some of these executives at CNN who are speechwriters for Bibi Netanyahu. I mean, the level of cooperation and propaganda has reached such a level that today it’s normal. We are the abnormal. We are the aberration. These people are writing the chapter of this nation’s history. This is the quote from [Antonio] Gramsci, my favorite European intellectual, who wrote from his prison cell. He was asked about [Benito] Mussolini, and he said Mussolini was not an aberration. Mussolini was an autobiography of a nation. He was part of this nation. He was enabled by the media. He was himself a journalist.

He was enabled by a system that turned a blind eye.

I think we need to push harder, and we need to fight more. I think we need to create a community that is—we are part of

an ecosystem that can help each other to expose this more.

We cannot allow ourselves to—obviously 15 years ago I used to throw my shoe at the television. I can’t do this anymore. I’m very happy to be ejected from certain TV networks, but I’m very happy actually to be part of a system that whatever Philip or Max Blumenthal and other people write, we need to cooperate so we can push that message.

It can’t be a parallel world. It must be a united world, because the wave that is coming is by far much more dangerous.

I’ve seen it in other places. I’ve seen it in Europe, and I’ve seen it in the Middle East. These people are beyond ruthless. [Silvio] Berlusconi, when he was elected in 1994, the first things that he did, he sued 18 journalists, kicked 18 others from television, from networks— people who dared to criticize him. Some of them were my friends—Marco Travaglio or Santoro and others.

I worked for an Egyptian television in 2009. After six months I had to leave, because the level of bullying and abuse was beyond me. I couldn’t control it. It wasn’t about me. It was about the people who worked with me. I knew that while the establishment was talking about the transfer of power from the father Mubarak to his son, the people were talking about actually three things, and these three things still exist. They were talking about freedom, democracy, and dignity. And this is what I kept hearing from the ground.

So the detachment between the base and the establishment, the gap is so deep, but we need to stay tuned with the base, because actually the base will lead the change. I don’t believe the establishment will anymore, but I believe the base will. The millions of people who were neglected around the Arab world stood up one morning, apparently without any reason. Three months earlier Hillary Clinton said it’s a stable country. People ignored those voices to such an extent that they didn’t even bother to think or to ask them what do you want, what do you think. These people stood in the streets and demanded dignity.

They overthrew a regime. They had setbacks.

But that kind of power, that kind of sentiment, is still out there. It’s not dead. It’s dormant, but it’s not dead. I am sure it will rise again. I am sure just like I’m looking at you. And I hope in that moment we’ll be ready to help them and build a bigger bridge—a bridge that will unite us here and in the Middle East. It will not be about them and us, but it will be about all of us. Thank you.

Delinda Hanley: Thank you very much. You are reminding me of Gideon Levy’s speech last year. He called for an American Spring, and I think we are all inspired. ■

The follow-up question matters more than the question itself.

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PANEL 4

Israel’s Influence On Mainstream Media

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Delinda Hanley

Moderator

Mainstream Media Coverage Of Israel and Palestine Philip Weiss

Delinda Hanley: Philip Weiss is an American journalist who is the founder and coeditor with Adam Horowitz of Mondoweiss, the widely read news website devoted to covering American foreign policy in the Middle East, chiefly from a progressive Jewish perspective. Phil began his career in mainstream journalism, writing for The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Esquire and the New York Observer. In 2006, while at the Observer, he began writing a daily blog called Mondoweiss.

As he began to explore more deeply the relationship between American Jews and Israel, however, the Observer became increasingly uncomfortable. So in 2007 Phil established Mondoweiss as an independent blog, and today it is a valuable source of news and opinion from a variety of authors. We are so very glad to have Phil here with us today to share his observations on The New York Times in the coverage of Israel over the years. Please join me in welcoming Philip Weiss.

Philip Weiss: Thank you very much. Thanks, Delinda. I just have to say that Rula’s invocation of the Vietnam War and what journalists did around the Vietnam War was very important to me, too, as a young journalist. I remember that I was at the Philadelphia Daily News 30 years, 35 years ago, and the guy at the next desk had read Harrison Salisbury’s book about the Pentagon Papers, and that was when The New York Times took on the government. The government tried to shut down The New York Times’ publication of this vital document that explained the history of the Vietnam War, and The Times stood up to the government and it helped to bring—it took a while, but it

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PHOTO PHIL PORTLOCK

was very important in bringing an end to the American participation in that disaster.

My friend at the next desk said, let’s write to Harrison Salisbury, you know, we’re never going to get a story like that. So we wrote this letter and we said, “Dear Mr. Salisbury: How do you plan your career”—we were just young ambitious journalists—“how do you plan your career so that you can get ready to take on the government and have a big story like that?” And what I remember about his letter is that he said—just hang in there, learn to be a good journalist, work hard and someday you will get your big story.

The thing I find really moving about that now is that, in fact, we did get that big story. We got it in the shape of the Iraq war and just what American foreign policy has been in the last 10 years, and The New York Times has been AWOL on that one.

I think I may have said this the last time—that gives tremendous power to our community, if you think about how much information the people in this community are developing in the way that journalists are supposed to develop, traditionally have developed, information that’s vital.

Even this fact that both Rula and Colonel Wilkerson said earlier, about the extent to which the aid package to Egypt is essentially a bribe to keep them or to hold them—this is a central fact of our foreign policy that just you won’t find stated, and that is on par with anything that was in the Pentagon Papers in terms of a vital understanding.

So I’m here to talk about The New York Times chiefly because The Times sort of sets the parameters and the tone for the mainstream discussion. I did once do some work at The Times, I worked as a staffer at The Times Magazine, and I thought I would just anatomize The Times a little and then move on to the whys of it—why is The Times sort of in the tank for Israel?

So the newspaper’s been a reliable Israel supporter for a long time now, and we keep looking for signs of a thaw. I’m going to be hopeful, but let me first describe the character of that support. As I go through my remarks, I’ll be using the term Zionism. I think that Zionism is embedded; it’s a very important force at The New York Times. What I mean by that is

some degree of commitment to the idea of the need for a Jewish state and the need to preserve a Jewish state in Israel.

So The Times has at least three columnists who are openly Zionist.

Those are David Brooks, who has said that he gets gooey eyed about Israel when he thinks about Israel, and he has been there a dozen times. That was a couple of years ago, I think he’s been there more since. Roger Cohen, who says that Israel is justified by the Holocaust, but he can also be somewhat critical of the occupation. He is openly a Zionist, which I think is a very good thing, in as much as he’s frank about his adherence to the ideology. And then there’s Paul Krugman, who is a liberal Zionist who says he’s critical of Israel but never expresses it. He says it as little as possible. You would think that winning a Nobel Prize and having a Times column would give you freedom, but Krugman surely demonstrates Tolstoy’s principle that the higher you get, the less freedom you have.

I’m leaving that other stratosphere of columnist, Tom Friedman, out of this list because, while Friedman began his career as an Israel supporter back in the suburbs of Minneapolis doing chalk-talks on the Six-Day War at his high school, I think that one of the principles of this conference is that people can change. I sense that Friedman has fallen away from the ideology in as much as he has said, for instance, that Congress is bought and paid for by the Israel lobby—which is a statement that, if a non-Jew made it, would brand them as an anti-Semite.

I think the standard is not being nice enough about Israel.

He has also said recently that the two-state solution is a failure and that that failure was produced by, among others, Netanyahu and Sheldon Adelson and the right-wing Jewish influence, openly speaking of right-wing Jewish influence. That was a very important column and I will return to it, because I think it’s the heart of what I always understood journalism to be. Not quite the heart, because I always understood journalism to be what’s new, true and important. And it’s true and it’s important, it’s just not new what Friedman was telling us.

So I think you may know that David Brooks’ son served in the Israeli military and he’s one of four Times reporters who have had children who served in the Israeli military. The most

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celebrated example of this was Ethan Bronner, who was the previous Jerusalem bureau chief. His son entered while he was writing for The Times and it was shortly after Cast Lead, when Israel slaughtered 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza. It caused Palestinian activists in a truly masterful act of branding to paint The New York Times logo on the apartheid wall. I don’t know if you saw images of this, but it was just kind of wonderful.

Bronner introduced a guessing game into journalism about unspoken ideological agendas. This was, is he or is he not a Zionist? I think that I participated in this guessing game. A lot of journalists in the blogosphere did. When he left the newspaper ultimately in the last year or so, he left less and less doubt about this question, and resolved it entirely when he hosted right-wing Israeli military figures at the 92nd Street Y in New York on a program that was about the “incredible courage of Israeli soldiers.”

So we started the same guessing game when Ethan Bronner’s successor, Jodi Rudoren, took over after him in Jerusalem. I remember that I was a little bit more credulous than others—I’m not proud of this—and I sort of thought, oh, she’s going to be fair. But what we found was that she wrote totally out of the Israeli Jewish experience. That was really the community that she’s openly admitted that she related to more, but she made little effort to get outside that comfort zone. So there were long pieces about young Israelis getting tattoos when their grandparents had had Auschwitz tattoos.

There was an episode where she went to Gaza in 2012 and on Facebook said that Palestinians were ho-hum about the death of family members. She went to a funeral in Gaza and observed that Palestinians were, quote, ho-hum about the death of family members. It was a shocking incident and it was something she had to apologize for, but it wasn’t a prejudice that she seemed to want to shed or to get out of. Recently she gave some podcasts where she said that she spoke one word of Arabic. Actually, I’m sure she speaks more Arabic, in that there are a lot of Arabic words in our language—alcohol and algebra to begin with [laughter]—but it’s a reflection of her deepening incuriosity about the Palestinian experience. It’s kind of White Citizens Council journalism that you see in The Times a lot, and that she exhibited.

So I remember, because she was more adept at this guessing game about her commitment to Israel as a Jewish state, she said, the only ist I am is a journalist, when she was asked about this question. I’m not a Zionist. The only ist I am is a

journalist. I remember that I once wrote that she comes out of a Zionist background. She was upset about even that, being identified even in that fashion, and said, well, why would you say that? I said, well, you’ve said to Jewish groups when you’ve spoken to them that you are familiar with the American Jewish experience, and the American Jewish concern for Israel, and you came to Israel when you were in high school with United Synagogue Youth. You know, that’s a Zionist background. And she said, you know, I went to Lake Winnipesaukee too. [Laughter] So it was one of the most disingenuous deflections I’ve ever experienced, because those trips by United Synagogue Youth and other Jewish organizations were highly ideological in character. They weren’t like vacations in the White Mountains. It was a measure of how obtuse she could be that she would make that kind of statement.

In my one meeting with Rudoren, I told her that her great challenge was to tell Americans that—this was four years ago—that the two-state solution is over. And that if you just go to the West Bank, you’d see that it’s over. They won’t be able to make a viable Palestinian state there. Those people don’t want to leave.

Just a little bit of an ad, some of the journalism I’ve done myself lately about the West Bank, which we have out in the adjoining room.

I said that she had to explain this in a lead [to an article].

This was a vital function of a journalist, to bring this news, and she never did that. It’s not just that I made this challenge.

You’ll notice recently that John Kerry and Dan Shapiro from the State Department, they both said we’re approaching this one-state reality. Well, they’ve gotten no support from the leading American newspaper to explain what that one-state reality is.

So The Times has sort of abandoned this kind of vital journalistic function of telling people what’s going on in this kind of most important American relationship that exists. I think that that, again, is one of the great things about this Tom Friedman column, was he said the Israelis don’t want to leave. They’ve been supported in the West Bank. They’ve been supported by right-wing American Jews. It’s going to be an unending civil war, with greater and greater isolation of Israel on the world stage. All true—and this has been true for the last five, eight years, I think, at least, and yet now a Times columnist and secretary of state are the people who are bringing this information.

It’s kind of White Citizens Council journalism that you see in The NY Times a lot.

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So in the time I have left— and, by the way, I think that there’s something very cruel about maintaining the illusion about the two-state solution, because it’s saying that, oh, these horrible conditions, they’re just temporary. These people, five million people under some form of apartheid or ghettoization in Gaza, in a prison, we’re going to take care of that soon. So it’s prevaricating about tremendous human rights atrocities all the time. It’s White Citizens Council journalism.

If you think about the great Jewish seer Rabbi Hillel, who said if not now, when—this is a situation which demands if not now, when? And the position of Mondoweiss and the Institute for Palestine Studies display their wares in the Exhibition Hall.

The Times is kind of, whenever. time when The New York Times was anti-Zionist, when it did The position of these people who preserve the illusion of the not see Zionism as the answer. It said, our homeland is here, two-state solution is kind of whenever with respect to a we don’t want our patriotism undermined by the creation of a tremendous amount of suffering, as Susie so beautifully Jewish state, and we’re going to oppose it. We’re not going to showed us. send Jewish reporters over to Jerusalem because of their loySo I brought in the Jewish piece, the parochial Jewish alty. We don’t want to place them in a position where there’s piece. I’m one of the American Jews who is in the conference any question about where our loyalty lies. today, and in my parochial capacity I would just have to acSo that era passed in the 1960s. The Times ultimately beknowledge that Zionism comes out of the Jewish community. came an organization where many Zionist Jews work. I think It was an answer to Jewish persecution in Europe and was that there are no anti-Zionists openly at The Times, but that embraced by the world—or the Western world, the colonial will come. It’s bound to because of the changes, not just in the world—as a solution of the Jewish question of Europe. It won Jewish community, but throughout the American community, Jews to its side through the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. And now, which is I think what we’ve witnessed at this conference. I what we’re seeing because of the unending 50-year occupathink the great thing about this conference is that it has tion, we’re seeing even inside the Jewish communities some brought together so many diverse perspectives—American inquestioning of this ideology. terest, Israelis, left-wing, Palestinian solidarity people, and I think that if Bernie Sanders says there is a war for the soul anti-Zionist Jews as well. I think that, again, just to return to of Islam and America has to help Islam in that respect, there’s what I said at the beginning, this gives our community tremenalso a war for the soul of Judaism right now. Whether this is a dous power from the storytelling journalistic perspective. We religious conflict or not, I’m not getting into that. But to the deare the ones who are developing this information, who are gree that the American Jewish community, including large working through these extremely difficult questions of antiparts of The New York Times itself, where Jews of my generaSemitism, anti-Zionism, separating those. We’re developing tion are working in great number—to the extent that the Amerexperience about talking about these things and that will also ican Jewish community embraced this ideology and married make us information leaders. Thank you very much. this ideology and saw it as a deliverance ideology, that’s Delinda Hanley: Thank you. I really recommend everyone something that is now beginning to come undone among starting off their day with reading all the columns on Monyounger Jews. doweiss. Thank you very much for your work. ■ So I would remind you, if you don’t know it, that there was a ISRAEL’S INFLUENCE: Good or Bad for America?

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“Valentino’s Ghost: Why We Hate Arabs” Catherine Jordan

PHOTO DALE SPRUSANSKY

Delinda Hanley: So we’ve had TV media, and talked about the mainstream press. Now we’re going to talk about Israel’s influence on the film industry. Catherine Jordan is the award-winning producer and co-editor of “Valentino’s Ghost: Why We Hate Arabs.” A journalist for 14 years, Catherine spent five years working with director Michael Singh to shape this film first released—and, I believe, suppressed—in 2013.

Viewers from 127 countries watched “Valentino’s Ghost” when it was featured on Al Jazeera English in 2015. “Valentino’s Ghost” has just been re-released, and copies are available from Middle East Books and More booth, and on our website.

It now includes the Israeli bombing of Gaza, the Charlie Hebdo murders, the Hollywood film “American Sniper,” and Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim crusade.

Catherine was an editor and staff writer for the Los Angeles Times and a correspondent for The Daily Telegraph in London, The Hollywood Reporter, Los Angeles Magazine, the Tatler, The New Scotsman. She has spent three years as a writer at Hollywood’s Paramount Studios researching Paramount’s theatrical library of 2,500 films. Jordan was honored at the Muslim Public Affairs Council’s 2014 Media Awards as a “Voice of Courage & Conscience” for her role in producing “Valentino’s Ghost.” Please welcome this gifted film producer.

Catherine Jordan: I’m the final act. I’m just going to talk for four minutes and then show you some of our film. The director of the film, Michael Singh, is in Egypt today, where he showed the full film last night in Tahrir Square in Cairo. He e-mailed me to tell me that the sound was out of sync with the picture by three or four seconds. Despite this disastrous blunder, it was met with enormous enthusiasm by the crowd. So this is good.

Most Americans have been hearing from the media all their 70

lives that the Middle East is somehow inherently in a permanent and inexplicable state of crisis. By media, I mean traditional television news, newspapers, magazines and, no less importantly, the narratives that we see in movies, even in children’s cartoons. Like most people in this country, I never understood why they couldn’t all just get along. Until I got involved with this film, in fact, I always came away from the media coverage of the Middle East with the conclusion that it was just somehow far too complicated to understand, and that it was all over my head.

The media seemed to convey a worldview that Palestinians and other Arabs were just somehow inherently violent and irrational people doing hijackings throughout the 1970s and endless suicide bombings for seemingly no reason.

After 9/11 I think a lot of people in our country found themselves asking huge questions. Who are these people? Why are they so angry? How is it that I know so little about this subject? Our film, I’m very pleased to say, after this amazing day, enshrines much of what has been said today by all the incredible speakers. We seek to expose and explain the reasons behind our longstanding hatred and fear of Arabs, Muslims and Islam in this country. We also seek to show that U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, and especially that of Israel, is what really dictates public perceptions and attitudes toward the Middle East in this country, and has done so for more than a century.

It should astonish and appall the public that the mainstream media typically goes right along with the government’s narrative, and then, in turn, the government brandishes those media reports and says, see, here’s the evidence right here on the front page of The New York Times. The yellowcake [uranium] debacle in Iraq was a flagrant example of this, but

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Catherine Jordan: “Valentino’s Ghost: Why We Hate Arabs”

certainly not the only one.

So the government then recycles those stories to further reinforce their own narrative in support of policy decisions and military invasions and so on. So there’s a vicious circle here. The stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims inform the behavior of policymakers, who then create policies which unashamedly place an extremely low value on the lives of Palestinians and others in the Arab world, and then the policies in turn reinforce the news and the entertainment industry, and so on. So what you get is this self-reinforcing cycle, this infinite loop if you will, and with very destructive results.

This cycle shows the enormous power of the mass media to shape the public’s ideas and mold our opinions for us. So I feel

it’s really valuable for us to be able to tell this story in the medium of film, which, of course, we believe can have a very powerful impact, and a medium which has a lasting impact and can now be widely shared in the digital era by huge numbers of people.

Two months ago, our film was broadcast worldwide on the Al Jazeera English network. As I’m sure you all know, the network is an English-language TV news network carried in more than a hundred countries around the world. So the film ran in Great Britain. It ran throughout Asia. It ran throughout Europe.

It ran to a potential subscriber base of 130 million households, which sounds like a fantastic success.

However, there was one country that wasn’t on the list—the United States. You knew that was coming. The film did not play in the United States, and it has not played in its full feature length in the United States.

Again, we were thrilled when our film premiered at the Venice Film Festival which—along with the Cannes Festival— is the most difficult festival to get into in the world of filmmak-

ing. It's almost unheard of, in fact, that the Venice Festival accepts a documentary film.

The film was welcomed in 12 other festivals in Europe and Asia. But every major festival in the United States has turned us down. A top tier festival for a filmmaker is a launching pad.

It's a marketplace. It's where you get attention and it's where you sell your film to a distributor. Often right there at the festival itself is where the meetings take place and the deal is made. So it's key to the success of your film.

After our success in Venice, where the film got a standing ovation and a lot of good press buzz, our phone started ringing, with all the major U.S. festivals saying they'd heard great things about the film. Some of them had seen it at Venice and they’d like to show it, so could they view a DVD for consideration for their festival?

Even Michael Moore called us to get it into his annual festival. So we submitted DVDs of the film to the selection committees of all these top notch festivals at their behest.

And then we never heard from any of them again across the board. There was a virtual blackout. You are all familiar with this. Was it just not good enough? You have to face that as a filmmaker.

It wasn't just not good enough. We looked at that.

With that said and with all due humility, our film received a standing ovation at Venice. It received a glowing review in The New York Times and in the Los Angeles Times and in the Village Voice. The New York Times designated it a favorite critic's pick, which is a real honor. The magazine The American Conservative published a brilliant feature saying that our film essentially got it right.

Yet, we had a blackout from U.S. festivals and distributors.

So ironically, the very forces which we are trying to expose and discuss in the film are the very forces that are essentially virtually suppressing wide distribution of our film in our own country. Maybe we should have thought of that after spending years and years and years making this film, but we persevered. Perhaps if the wider public is actually informed and educated on this issue and learns the answers to so many questions, maybe we can begin to take the steps toward a future not of violence, but of peace.

I'd like to show you a few clips from the film right now. And just by way of explanation, it's not a tightly edited trailer that you're typically used to seeing. It's just a series of short clips or excerpts plucked from throughout the whole duration of the film. Thank you. ■

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PANEL 4: Israel’s Influence on Mainstream Media

PHOTO PHIL PORTLOCK

Questions & Answers

Delinda Hanley: Thank you. So here is a question for you: how can we get that movie into all the TV networks, to theaters; how can we get that out there?

Catherine Jordan: We’ve been turned down by HBO, Showtime and PBS. We’ve been trying to get the film distributed by all the big networks. A one-hour version of the film was run on 30 or 40 PBS stations, but—it’s a boring distinction but an important one—it wasn’t an official PBS film. It was provided by a third party as content for PBS stations to run it if they chose. The results of that was that plenty of people ran it but it had zero marketing. When there’s zero marketing you might as well not even run the film, because no one knows it’s coming and no one makes the time to see it.

So that had a tiny little ripple of an effect. So we’re still seeking wide distribution in this country anyway.

Delinda Hanley: Thank you. And one more question for you before we go to the next questions. Was the Sundance Independent Film Festival contacted, and what was their reaction to the film?

Catherine Jordan: Yes. We sent the film to Sundance with their encouragement. One of our colleagues who was a consultant on the film has a big position at the Sundance Film Festival, and she said she’d talk to her friends. The reviewer who looked at it actually emailed us on the QT and said she thought it was a fantastic film and it was one of the better films that she had seen, and that it was too political for Sundance.

Of course, we did not get in.

Delinda Hanley: This question is, I think, for Rula. A lot of these questions are for Rula here. I asked an L.A. Times reporter how can he participate in the distortion of the news. He said, “If I can get them to leave 10 percent of my copy uncen72

sored, it is worthwhile to continue.” Please comment. Maybe that goes for all of you. Do you want it, Philip? Do you want to start?

Philip Weiss: So the L.A. Times reporter made that statement that if he can get his editors to leave— Delinda Hanley: Leave 10 percent of it uncensored, it’s worthwhile to continue. Did you find censorship?

Philip Weiss: That’s a good ratio. I mean, censorship, selfcensorship, it’s part of media life. If we could get away with 10 percent on this issue, we’d revolutionize America. I mean right now, it’s a 90 percent censorship ratio. So give it to me, 10 percent, I love it. I just want to reflect, when I was at The New York Times Magazine, I did a cover story on the gun lobby. I wrote a very long article sending up the NRA and talking about their sexual fetishization of guns and everything else.

You’ve never seen an article in The New York Times Magazine about the Israel lobby with one-tenth of that kind of free speech involved.

Rula Jebreal: There is a cozy relationship. I mean, one of the reasons that made me actually in 2014 do what I did on MSNBC was—these Israeli officials would be on like 99 percent of the time and they would never be challenged, as the documentary represented. They would never be asked about the occupation or the siege. I remember I almost choked on my coffee one morning when I was watching Schieffer interviewing Bibi Netanyahu. At the end of the interview, obviously it was softball questions. Like, oh, Mr. Prime Minister, how do you feel? Is it safe in Tel Aviv? He was bombarding and pounding Gaza. He said, well, like the former prime minister of Israel said, we will never forgive the Arabs for forcing us to kill their children. I looked at the television and I said—sorry for

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QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

“”

my language—is this a f---ing joke? I mean, I was horrified.

And then I went to my network, and that morning one of our journalists, one of the best ones we ever had, a reporter who covered the Gaza War in 2012, was Ayman Mohyeldin. He just filmed three kids killed on a beach. He just filmed it. I was in the TV station and I saw the panic. Because suddenly there is one story, and it’s a major story that was filmed on camera, where you see the missiles striking. The first one killing the first two, and then the second missile and this kid is running after—they were actually playing football on the beach. And the third kid, a 6-year-old, running, and the second missile came and strikes him. And you couldn’t explain that. There’s no justification for this. The telephones started ringing. And the justification that there was a missile there, and the producers kept calling Ayman Mohyeldin, are you sure there wasn’t another missile in the area?

He said, “No. Every journalist was there. We watched it. We filmed it. It’s on film.” You had three or four cameras there.

That story was taken from him, and given to another one who wasn’t even in Gaza. He was in Tel Aviv. He just arrived. He [Mohyeldin] was actually called out of Gaza because he witnessed that moment. I went on air and I was with Ronan Farrow. I said, our coverage is not only disgustingly biased; it’s a disgrace. We are betraying the American people, because we are basically not telling them the whole story.

We’re lying blindly to them. My every show was canceled, and I left the building knowing that I will never come back. Leaving the building, I remember some of the producers stopping me.

They said, well, you don’t understand the bullying and harassment and attention.

Recently somebody from—I will not mention the name— from The Washington Post was telling me that every article they write, they have to answer to lobbyists and organizations like CAMERA. I said, you know, I don’t care what kind of harassment. You just stand up to it. Basically you stand up to it.

So when I submit an article and they tell me [applause]—and, look, supposedly an Arab Muslim black woman telling these nice white guys in these networks, you can’t handle a little bit of bullying? You’re in the wrong job. Probably not only in the wrong job, if you can’t stand up to these thugs, then they will get away with it. They will get away over and again.

I am so grateful and thankful that independent organizations exist like Mondoweiss and Alternet [applause] and the Washington Report and this kind of documentary. What I’m asking

all of you, and forgive me if I am shameless about it, we need to support these organizations. These are independent organizations that live on donations. Whatever philanthropy you are doing, this is the ultimate battleground. Whatever you’re doing—I will be like Sanders, $7 or whatever that is, give it to Mondoweiss, to Alternet, to Catherine to promote her movie, because this will change America forever. It will change the public opinion.

You know what? When Rupert Murdoch wanted to buy Reuters the first time, the legal system was clear in the U.K. The first thing he said—and he retracted what he said—he said, “I don’t buy newspapers.” That was a lie, obviously. He said that he used to buy journalists. Guess what? We can actually shift the public opinion. If they put $100 million on one end to manipulate the public opinion, you can put much less because one footage like that can really shift the public opinion. Thank you. [Applause] Delinda Hanley: Thank you. We have time for maybe one more question, or should we close the door here? This was more about what you started out talking about. The e-mail exchange, do you want to talk more about that? That was uncovered, by the way, in a FOIA request made by Grant Smith. He found it accidentally, and that’s the kind of thing that, it appalled us when we read it.

Would you like to talk a little bit more about that?

Rula Jebreal: Again, I’m really grateful that we exposed this disgusting misogyny. And again, I love when white men lecture me or lecture others about how we go in the Middle East and we invade certain countries to liberate women and women’s choices. And then CNN put against me somebody like Rabbi Shmuley, and forgive me if I’m about to throw up.

He is telling me that an Arab woman like myself would never—he’s patronizing me about my rights.

Basically, they look down at the Middle East, at Arabs.

When I wrote my [Oct. 27, 2014] New York Times column about minority rights or minority life in Israel, the only way we are described as Arab Muslim women or brown, as either a terrorist or a Bedouin without a nationality. In American media, every question starts like, how do you feel? As if my job is to feel. My job is to analyze phenomena.

Sorry, my description, whether I’m tall or short, whether I’m big or small—it does not matter. Whether I look like this or had some plastic surgery to look like this, it doesn’t matter. Ultimately, it’s about the argument.

We need to create an ecosystem that collaborates much more with each other.

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Since I started working, everything we predicted about the trajectory of the war on terror, the Iraqi war, if you listen to whatever any Arab analyst has told you about the war on terror, about invading Iraq, how it will create mass radicalization, it will destabilize the entire region and will basically bring—we had only 200 jihadists after 9/11. Only 200. According to the FBI, there were only 200. Today, we have hundreds of thousands. If that is a success, then what is failure? So every Arab analyst has been saying the same thing.

What is their weapon to throw against people like me?

Yeah, her looks. Give me a break. I mean, you know what? It didn’t hit me, but it explained, I think, to the public a mindset of these thugs and bullies. I’m used to it because I had that in Italy. I’m exorcised because I had ministers in Italy refusing to answer questions because I was a Muslim or I was brown or some kind of thing.

I remember interviewing Berlusconi in 2005 the first time.

Usually, it’s hard for me to lose—I have no comment on the kind of—if you think Berlusconi was bad, imagine when Donald Trump will come up there and will start dealing with journalists.

He’s already saying, oh, these disgusting people, I hate them or whatever. I mean, with the kind of attitude that I’ve seen under Berlusconi for 10 years was this kind of thing, where people, basically women and men who worked for him, would call us and threaten us. Threats, real threats. In a country that killed journalists, actually, these threats can happen. I believe that when you somehow use violent words, this can easily translate into real violence and killing. It can easily translate into that.

That’s why, again, forgive me for repeating the same thing.

We need to create an ecosystem that collaborates much more with each other, and that reinforces each other. We have to create a glue, a cultural glue, that reinforces an issue, that reinforce and push back harder. Because, I’m sorry, we’re not pushing back hard enough, because these thugs are bullies and will throw everything they have—from threats to bullying to harassment to even beating of some journalist. But we live in an era where democracy, luckily still functions. So before it collapses, let’s hold it together. Thank you.

Delinda Hanley: Thank you. I’d like to remind you that Rula will be signing her book at the reception afterwards. I’m also going to have a comment from Ralph Nader, who said that he’d sure like this audience to know that Al Arabiya News was not allowed to cover AIPAC’s convention. They denied Al Arabiya access to AIPAC. Rula Jebreal: I think they denied Philip Weiss, if I’m not wrong. And I’m sure they will deny 80 percent of the people sitting here. It’s not the dialogue. I mean, what’s happening at AIPAC on Monday will not be a dialogue. It will be a monologue. Obviously, I have a Catholic daughter, so I go to church with her sometimes and I see how—the way they pray. I feel like when all of these politicians go to pray to AIPAC, it’s just like genuflection and please kill me more or give me whatever, what you want.

It’s painful for somebody who believes in a democratic system and travels around the world and sees millions of people standing in the street, from Cairo to Algeria to Tunisia—people willing to die for the principle of democracy and equality, because they feel like they were born as free men and women.

This is the kind of model they look up to. ■

Closing Remarks

Delinda Hanley: Thank you very much. Well, Grant is going to come up here and speak. But we did have a lot of major media who came to this event. And this room has been bursting to the seams with proof that Americans want to hear these stories. When you go back to your newsroom and write up your stories, please insist that your editors let you do your job.

Grant.

Grant Smith: Thank you, everybody, for coming. We have a special treat for you now. Those red tickets in your badges, those are for a complimentary beverage which will be served over at the bar. We encourage you to stay and mingle. There are some incredibly important people out there who should have been up here. Seek them out. Talk to them. The really 74

important part of this conference is just about to begin. We do want to remind you, the transcripts, video, audio of all of these presentations will be available on the website, IsraelsInfluence.org. Thank you so much for coming.

Delinda Hanley: One more thing, I'd like to thank the Washington Report’s publisher, Andrew Killgore, who has been sitting here, and his whole generation of leaders, Ralph Nader, who was here, Harriet Fulbright, who was here, John Mahoney, Gene Bird and others in this room, and the many students who came. They traveled to DC for this day. Audience members, thank you. Donors, exhibitors, and advertisers, we couldn't have had this remarkable day without your help. Thank you. Enjoy your drinks. Bye. ■

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CONCLUSION

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An Ecosystem That Can Effect Change

n the hours and days after the “Israel’s Influence” conference concluded, fired-up audience members asked organizers and speakers: “What next? What should we do with this vital information panelists gave us?” C-SPAN and RealNews viewers and C-SPAN radio listeners agreed that the thought-provoking presentations could be a “game changer” if more American voters tuned in.

Plenty of media accepted our invitation to attend this year’s conference. Timed as it was to precede AIPAC’s annual policy conference, our own meeting provided viewpoints seldom heard above the pro-Israel lobby din. Washington Post diplomatic correspondent Carol Morello was the only mainstream newspaper reporter who actually got an article published the following day, “U.S. Policy Toward Israel Called Harmful to Both Countries at Conference.” Readers posted lots of comments to her story, including, “Thanks for a little balance to the impending AIPAC propaganda love-fest” and “Shocked to find a story about such a conference in the WaPo. AIPAC usually has an exclusive franchise on conferences about Israel.”

But it was a letter to the editor by Eric Rozenman, Washington director of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), published in the Post on April Fool’s Day, that inspired nearly 200 online comments and piqued our own curiosity. While character assassination and accusations of antiSemitism or self-hatred are standard operating procedure for CAMERA, the Anti-Defamation League and other Israel-affiliated groups, Rozenman—as usual—couldn’t argue with any of the facts presented at our conference or in Morello’s article. Instead, CAMERA attacked the conference’s co-organizer—us—claiming the Washington Report published articles that were “knee-jerk anti-Israel, sometimes virulently.” Rozenman went on to assert, “Years ago it published articles that called Israel’s U.S. supporters a ‘cancer’ and ‘alien intrusion’ and compared the Jewish state to Nazi Germany.”

That all sounded far-fetched, and even libelous, to us. However, when we searched for “alien intrusion” on the Washington Report website, we did indeed actually come across that phrase in “The Full Cost of Israel,” an article written in 1986 by our late co-founder and executive editor Richard H. Curtiss. His 30-yearold editorial summarizes the problem Americans face today whenever they criticize Israeli policies and unconditional U.S. largess, and provides a fitting conclusion to this special issue of the Washington Report.

“The Israel lobby destroys candidates it can’t buy,” Curtiss wrote, describing the concerted efforts of pro-Israel lobbyists who work with willing media to provide space “for sneers and smears aimed at these and other candidates who exhibit too much independence. The Israel lobby, which favors more malleable candidates, has had significant input into the presidential selection process and has virtually dictated which members of key congressional committees win and lose. Is this good or bad for America?”

Turning to some of the very topics “Israel’s Influence” speakers addressed, Curtiss asked, “What about inside the Pentagon, Departments of State, Commerce, Justice and Treasury, the CIA, and the Bureau of the Budget? Every day in those institutions the same battle is fought between those seeking singlemindedly to put as many dollars, grants, weapons, treaties, laws and loopholes as possible at the service of Israel, and those trying to protect the taxpayer and America's good name from this persistent assault on the national interest.”

Curtiss predicted, “Ultimately, however, Americans will discover, define and free themselves of an alien intrusion that turns our best instincts at home against our best friends, best interests, and best traditions abroad.”

Speaker after speaker at the “Israel’s Influence” conference described how they are “standing up to the lobby,” using the Constitution, freedom of speech, campus activism and alternative media to fight back and end lobby bullying. As more and more Americans—including hundreds of conferencegoers as well as C-SPAN viewers, many of whom may have had no inkling of the harmful effect Israel’s influence has on their country—dare to speak out, it will be increasingly difficult for partisans of Israel to intimidate them.

And as the debate over the costs and benefits of U.S. policy toward Israel opens up, Americans will be better able to assess what “values,” if any, the two countries in fact share. Denying basic municipal services to one-fifth of its population, based on religion? Evictions and home demolition based on race? Racially segregated schools? No separation of synagogue and state?

One day, if we are successful, Americans won’t have to watch their vice president, members of Congress and presidential candidates vying to speak at AIPAC’s annual conference and promising to increase U.S. aid for Israel—support that is actually harming Israelis, as keynote speaker Gideon Levy explained.

We are all part of the ecosystem that can help effect this change—before another 30 years pass by. ■

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Election Watch

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Party Loyalty, Party Schmoyalty— Israel Comes First

By Janet McMahon

fter just one term in OP EN AND AREER ECIPIENTS OF the Senate, Mark Kirk (R-IL) is number four RO SRAEL UNDS among Senate recipients of Compiled by Hugh Galford career pro-Israel PAC contributions—thanks in large part HOUSE: CURRENT RACES SENATE: CURRENT RACES to his haul as a member of the House of Representatives Deutch, Theodore E. (D-FL) $27,200 Schumer, Charles E. (D-NY) $46,400 from 2001 to 2010. If one Ros-Lehtinen, Ileana (R-FL) 27,000 Ayotte, Kelly A. (R-NH) 33,055 adds the $12,100 he received Zeldin, Lee M. (R-NY) 22,500 McCain, John S. (R-AZ) 31,700 in 2014, however—when he Hoyer, Steny H. (D-MD) 17,700 Kirk, Mark S. (R-IL) 30,950 wasn’t even running for reEngel, Eliot L. (D-NY) 17,500 Lee, Mike (R-UT) 29,700 election to his Senate seat— Curbelo, Carlos (R-FL) 16,500 Isakson, John H. (R-GA) 26,500 Kirk is a solid number two Quigley, Mike (D-IL) 15,900 Grassley, Charles E. (R-IA) 22,200 among current candidates. As Royce, Edward R. (R-CA) 15,000 Portman, Robert J. (R-OH) 21,000 he did in the House, he has Gabbard, Tulsi (D-HI) 15,000 Blunt, Roy (R-MO) 20,500 Graham, Gwen (D-FL) 14,500 Blumenthal, Richard (D-CT) 18,300 more than proven his Israel bona fides, as this magazine has regularly recounted.

House: Career Totals Senate: Career Totals Kirk’s Democratic opponent in the Nov. 8 election is Engel, Eliot L. (D-NY) $369,918 McConnell, Mitch (R-KY) $582,392 Rep. Tammy Duckworh, who Ros-Lehtinen, Ileana (R-FL) 321,240 Durbin, Richard J. (D-IL) 401,171 has represented the state’s Hoyer, Steny H. (D-MD) 305,725 Reid, Harry (D-NV) 394,001 8th congressional district Lowey, Nita M. (D-NY) 235,623 Kirk, Mark S. (R-IL) 380,436 since 2013.

Pelosi, Nancy (D-CA) 149,150 Wyden, Ronald L. (D-OR) 358,462 She first ran for Congress, Levin, Sander M. (D-MI) 135,827 Boxer, Barbara (D-CA) 279,044 however, in 2006, when she Boehner, John A. (R-OH) 129,200 McCain, John S. (R-AZ) 237,700 was hand-picked by Chicago Sherman, Brad (D-CA) 115,930 Sessions, Jefferson B. (R-AL) 229,325 Hastings, Alcee L. (D-FL) 112,850 Feingold, Russell D. (D-WI) 215,938 Mayor Rahm Emanuel, then Andrews, Robert E. (D-NJ) 112,025 Menendez, Robert (D-NJ) 215,318 head of the Democratic National Campaign Committee, to run as the Democratic candidate to succeed Rep. Henry Hyde. As Andrew Cockburn rehe is pinning his hopes on a double amputee woman Iraq vetported at the time (see March 2006 Washington Report, p. 30), eran, Tammy Duckworth. when opposition to the Iraq war was high: Duckworth—and the Democrats—lost to Peter Roskam, In the last election progressive candidate Christine Cegalis who has represented the district for the past decade. So much actually got 44.2 percent of the vote against the 16-term Hyde, for putting the interests of your party first. despite being outspent $700,000 to $160,000 in a conservaBack in Kirk’s former 10th congressional district, two Jewish tive district with no elected Democrats at all. candidates competed for the 2016 Democratic nomination: Nancy Following this commendable showing, Cegalis figured that Rotering and Brad Schneider. Both support gun control, Hillary with Hyde retiring and the Republicans melting down, she Clinton for president, and women’s reproductive rights, according stood a better-than-even chance of garnering the seat in 2006. to the Forward. But Schneider opposed the Iran deal and Rotering However it seems that in Emanuel’s opinion, Cegalis supported it. Interestingly, several Illinois political figures who inistinks.…she is calling for troop withdrawal from Iraq. So tially had backed Schneider switched their support to Rotering as Emanuel set out to recruit a more suitable candidate.…Now a result, including Judge Abner Mikva, who used to represent the district, former Sen. Adlai Stevenson III and neighboring Rep. Jan Schakowsky. Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin also endorsed Rotering.

Janet McMahon is managing editor of the Washington Report on Many powerful out-of-staters—including House Minority Leader Middle East Affairs.

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Inquiring Minds Want to Know

Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Minority Whip Steny Hoyer—along with pro-Israel PACs, threw their support to Schneider, however, who won the March 15 primary with 54 percent of the vote to Rotering’s 46 percent. Pro-Israel PACs contributed only to Schneider.

Once again, party loyalty—or lack of same—did not seem to concern Democratic party leaders. As the Forward reported, Schneider “contributed to the House campaigns of Republican Mark Kirk” and, “[t]hough he wasn’t in office when Netanyahu spoke to Congress in March 2015…found his way to the House floor for the speech, which was orchestrated—to protest from Democrats—by the House’s GOP leadership in violation of long-standing protocol.”

As of Dec. 31 of last year, pro-Israel PACs had given Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) $15,000, for a career total of $16,500.

This past February, however, she resigned her post as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee to endorse Bernie Sanders for president. We suspect she won’t be getting much more from pro-Israel PACs, since the American Jewish establishment favors Hillary Rodham Clinton over Sanders, a fellow Jew who has uttered the fatal words “an even-handed approach” to the Israel-Palestine conflict. In his quarter-century in Congress, the Vermont Democratic Socialist has received a grand total of $4,000 in pro-Israel PAC contributions, compared to Clinton’s $69,618 for eight years in the Senate.

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) retired from Congress at the end of 2014. Nevertheless, his campaign committee donated $26,215 to the non-candidate in 2015—behind only incumbent Floridians Ted Deutch (D) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R). The committee disbursed a total of $78,785 to, among other “subvendors,” the Jewish Family Service, the MS Society and four synagogues. It also contributed to the campaigns of Brad Schneider, Rep. Kathy Castor (D-FL), Sen. Patty Murray (DWA) and Senate candidate Rep. Ted Strickland (D-OH). Even after all that largess, the Congressman Waxman Campaign Committee still had a balance of $380,493 at the close of 2015! ❑

Dilemma in Wisconsin

Former Sen. Russ Feingold is seeking to reclaim his seat from Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, the Tea Party candidate who defeated him in 2010.

Considered a maverick, Feingold opposed NAFTA and other free trade agreements, and was the only senator to vote against the PATRIOT Act. Nevertheless, his career total of $215,938 puts him, like Kirk, among the the top 10 Senate recipients of career pro-Israel PAC contributions.

But the pro-Israel lobby tends to favor incumbents, and as of Dec. 31, 2015 its PACs had given Johnson $6,000 to Feingold’s $2,500. Stay tuned.

PRO-ISRAEL PAC CONTRIBUTIONS TO 2016 CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATES State Alabama

Alaska Arizona

Arkansas California

Office District S H H H H S S S H H H H H S S H H H H H H H H H H H

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Candidate

Shelby, Richard C.* Byrne, Bradley R. Roby, Martha Rogers, Michael D. Palmer, Gary Murkowski, Lisa* McCain, John S.* Kirkpatrick, Ann*# Grijalva, Raúl M. Gosar, Paul A. Salmon, Matt Franks, Trent Sinema, Kyrsten Boozman, John* Sanchez, Loretta*# Huffman, Jared Garamendi, John Thompson, Mike Cook, Paul McNerney, Jerry Denham, Jeff DeSaulnier, Mark Lee, Barbara Speier, Jackie Swalwell, Eric M. Honda, Mike

Party R R R R R R R D D R R R D R D D D D R D R D D D D D

Status I I I I I I I C I I N I I I O I I I I I I I I I I I

2015-2016 Contributions 1,000 2,500 2,500 2,500 3,500 13,200 31,700 5,000 2,000 4,500 2,500 2,000 2,500 7,500 2,500 2,000 2,000 3,000 2,500 1,000 10,000 2,000 3,500 3,000 3,000 2,000

Career

201,825 5,000 7,500 34,825 3,500 88,800 237,700 17,000 15,500 4,500 11,500 7,600 5,500 16,000 71,450 8,500 18,500 11,500 5,000 33,600 10,000 2,000 8,500 11,000 27,000 26,500

Committees A (D, HS) AS A AS, HS B A (D, HS) AS, HS FO AS

A (FO) AS, HS

AS W AS, FO A (FO), B AS, I I A

KEY: The “Career Total” column represents the total amount of pro-Israel PAC money received from Jan. 1, 2009 through Dec. 31, 2015. S=Senate, H=House of Representatives. Party affiliation: D=Democrat, R=Republican, Ref=Reform, DFL=Democratic Farmer Labor, Ind=Independent, Lib=Libertarian, WFP=Working Families Party. Status: C=Challenger, I=Incumbent, N=Not Running, O=Open Seat (no incumbent), P=Defeated in primary election. *=Senate election year, #=House member running for Senate seat, †=Special Election. Committees (at time of election): A=Appropriations (D=Defense subcommittee, FO=Foreign Operations subcommittee, HS=Homeland Security, NS=National Security subcommittee), AS=Armed Services, B=Budget, C=Commerce, FR=Foreign Relations (NE=Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs subcommittee), HS=Homeland Security, I=Intelligence, IR=International Relations, NS=National Security, W=Ways and Means. “–” indicates money returned by candidate, “0” that all money received was returned.

MAY 2016

WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

79

paccharts_78-82_Special Report 4/19/16 1:04 PM Page 80

State California

Colorado Connecticut Florida

Georgia

Hawaii Idaho Illinois

80

Office District H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H S H S S S S H H H H H H H H H H H H H H S S H H H S H S S S H H H H H H H H H H H H

18 19 20 22 23 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 33 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 47 51 52 53 1

1 2 3 13 14 15 18 20 21 22 24 26 26 27 4 5 10 2

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 10 11 12

Candidate

Eshoo, Anna G. Lofgren, Zoe Farr, Sam Nunes, Devin G. McCarthy, Kevin Knight, Steve Brownley, Julia Chu, Judy Schiff, Adam Cardenas, Tony Sherman, Brad Aguilar, Pete Lieu, Ted Waxman, Henry A. Becerra, Xavier Torres, Norma Ruiz, Raul Bass, Karen Sanchez, Linda Royce, Edward R. Roybal-Allard, Lucille Takano, Mark Lowenthal, Alan Vargas, Juan C. Peters, Scott Davis, Susan Bennet, Michael F.* DeGette, Diana L. Blumenthal, Richard* DeSantis, Ronald D.*# Grayson, Alan M.*# Murphy, Patrick E.*# Miller, Jefferson B. Graham, Gwen Yoho, Theodore S. (Ted) Lynn, Eric Castor, Kathy Ross, Dennis A. Chane, Jonathan Hastings, Alcee L. Deutch, Theodore E. Frankel, Lois J. Hill, Randal Curbelo, Carlos Taddeo, Annette Ros-Lehtinen, Ileana Isakson, John H.* Perdue, David Johnson, Henry C. (Hank) Lewis, John R. Collins, Michael A., Jr. Schatz, Brian* Gabbard, Tulsi Crapo, Michael D.* Kirk, Mark S.* Duckworth, L. Tammy*# Kelly, Robin L. Lipinski, Daniel W. Gutierrez, Luis V. Quigley, Mike Roskam, Peter Davis, Danny K. Morris, Kirk Schakowsky, Janice D. Dold, Robert J., Jr. Schneider, Bradley S. Foster, G. William (Bill) Bost, Michael

Party D D D R R R D D D D D D D D D D D D D R D D D D D D D D D R D D R D R D D R D D D D D R D R R R D D R D D R R D D D D D R D R D R D D R

Status I I N I I I I I I I I I I N I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I O O O N I I O I I O I I I C I C I I I I I N I I I I C I I I I I I N I I C I I

WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

2015-2016 Contributions 2,000 2,000 1,000 2,500 2,500 2,500 4,500 2,500 4,000 2,500 9,500 2,500 6,000 26,215 2,500 6,000 6,000 5,500 2,500 15,000 2,500 2,500 5,500 11,000 2,500 2,000 12,500 3,000 18,300 5,000 3,500 14,000 10,000 14,500 5,000 3,500 1,000 7,500 1,000 10,000 27,200 10,500 9,000 16,500 1,500 27,000 26,500 3,000 3,000 2,000 1,000 4,000 15,000 8,738 30,950 2,500 4,700 5,750 3,000 15,900 3,700 3,000 10,000 1,000 200 5,750 1,700 3,200

Career

12,750 10,750 18,150 7,500 23,500 2,500 21,150 4,500 97,917 11,100 115,930 8,150 7,100 84,147 7,500 6,000 17,550 9,000 28,950 67,950 10,000 8,500 20,200 11,100 5,150 21,163 25,000 10,500 43,800 8,500 11,500 37,500 23,500 22,050 10,500 3,500 28,600 24,000 1,000 112,850 110,550 23,500 9,000 27,000 1,500 321,240 68,000 23,000 46,200 79,250 1,000 39,200 16,500 65,238 380,436 23,474 6,800 18,150 40,561 18,650 33,200 18,250 10,000 38,395 30,700 38,700 25,400 5,700

Committees A I, W Maj. Ldr. AS I

FO AS B

W HS

FO W FO A (HS) FO

AS AS

AS, C FO (NE) FO (NE) I AS, I AS FO (NE)

B

FO (NE) FO (NE) FO (NE), I FO B, FO (NE) AS W A (D), C AS, FO B A (FO) AS FO I A, I W W

W

MAY 2016

paccharts_78-82_Special Report 4/14/16 9:43 AM Page 81

State

Office District

H H H H H Indiana H Iowa S H H H Kansas S S H Kentucky H H Louisiana S H H H H Maine S H H Maryland S H H Massachusetts H H H H Michigan H H H H Minnesota S H H H H Missouri S S H H H Montana H Nebraska H Nevada S New Hampshire S H New Jersey S H H H H New Mexico H H New York S H H H H H H H H North Carolina S S S Illinois

MAY 2016

13 14 16 17 18 6 1 1 2

2 3 6

1 4 5 6

1 2

5 8 2 3 6 7 2 5 9 13 2 4 5 8

1 5 7 At-L. 2 2

1 2 3 12 1 3

1 4 5 16 17 18 20 25

Candidate

Davis, Rodney L. Hultgren, Randy Kinzinger, Adam Bustos, Cheri LaHood, Darin McKay Messer, Allen L. (Luke) Grassley, Charles E. (Chuck)* Blum, Rodney Vernon, Monica W. Loebsack, David W. Moran, Jerry* Roberts, Pat Jenkins, Lynn Yarmuth, John A. Barr, Garland A. (Andy) Cassidy, William M. Scalise, Steve Fleming, John C., Jr. Abraham, Ralph L., Jr. Graves, Garret Collins, Susan M. Pingree, Chellie M. Cain, Emily Van Hollen, Chris*# Hoyer, Steny H. Anderson, David M. McGovern, James P. Tsongas, Nicola S. (Niki) Moulton, Seth Capuano, Michael E. Huizenga, William P. Kildee, Daniel T. Levin, Sander M. Conyers, John, Jr. Klobuchar, Amy Kline, John P., Jr. McCollum, Betty Ellison, Keith M. Nolan, Richard M. Blunt, Roy* Kander, Jason* Clay, William L., Jr. (Lacy) Cleaver, Emanuel, II Long, Billy Zinke, Ryan K. Ashford, Brad Masto, Catherine Cortez* Ayotte, Kelly A.* Kuster, Ann McLane Menendez, Robert Norcross, Donald W. LoBiondo, Frank A. MacArthur, Thomas Coleman, Bonnie Watson Lujan Grisham, Michelle Lujรกn, Ben R. Schumer, Charles E.* Zeldin, Lee M. Rice, Kathleen Meeks, Gregory W. Engel, Eliot L. Lowey, Nita M. Maloney, Sean P. Tonko, Paul D. Slaughter, Louise M. Burr, Richard* Tillis, Thom R. Hagan, Kay R.

Party

R R R D R R R R D D R R R D R R R R R R R D D D D D D D D D R D D D DFL R DFL DFL DFL R D D D R R D D R D D D R R D D D D R D D D D D D D R R D

Status I I I I I I I I C I I I I I I I I I I I I I C O I O I I I I I I I I I N I I I I C I I I I I O I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I N

2015-2016 Contributions 1,000 6,700 2,700 2,000 1,700 3,500 22,200 5,000 1,000 4,000 5,000 1,000 10,000 3,500 1,000 -5,000 4,800 5,500 3,000 5,000 2,000 2,000 1,000 5,000 17,700 2,000 2,000 2,000 2,750 2,000 500 2,150 1,000 2,000 500 4,000 3,000 3,500 1,000 20,500 3,000 2,000 3,000 5,000 6,500 2,500 2,500 33,055 1,000 4,000 7,500 3,000 2,500 9,000 2,000 3,000 46,400 22,500 3,000 2,000 17,500 11,735 1,000 3,000 3,000 15,000 4,500 -2,500

WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

Career

2,800 10,200 12,950 12,000 1,700 4,500 183,523 5,000 1,000 25,000 20,700 93,300 12,500 24,020 1,000 22,000 45,300 19,500 6,000 8,000 147,900 12,676 1,000 9,000 305,725 2,000 16,075 14,000 2,850 11,000 1,000 34,650 135,827 12,000 82,335 31,500 15,750 11,000 4,500 98,850 3,000 24,500 21,000 17,500 11,000 2,500 2,500 50,555 8,000 215,318 7,500 38,750 6,000 17,000 4,000 7,500 132,285 27,500 4,000 2,000 369,918 235,623 13,500 12,000 69,880 49,250 9,500 66,300

Committees

B B A (D, FO), C

W B

A (HS) AS

A (D), I A

B

AS AS, B W

C AS A (D)

A (D, FO), C, I

AS AS

AS, B, C, HS

FO AS, B AS, I AS HS B

FO (NE) HS FO FO A (FO) I AS 81

paccharts_78-82_Special Report 4/19/16 1:07 PM Page 82

State

Office District

H H H H H H North Dakota S Ohio S S H Oklahoma S H Oregon S H H H Pennsylvania S S H H H H H Rhode Island S H H South Carolina S S H H Tennessee H Texas S H H H H H H H Utah S H H Vermont S H Virginia S H H Washington S H H H H H Wisconsin S S H H H H

North Carolina

Presidential

P P

4 5 10 11 12 13

14 1

1 3 4

13 14 15 17 18 1 2

3 6 9

2 4 10 12 23 30 35 3 4

At-L.

8 11 1 5 6 7 9

2 3 4 7

Candidate

Price, David E. Foxx, Virginia A. McHenry, Patrick T. Meadows, Mark R. Adams, Alma Shealey Holding, George E. Hoeven, John* Portman, Robert J.* Strickland, Ted* Joyce, David P. Inhofe, James M. Bridenstine, James F. Wyden, Ronald L*.

Bonamici, Suzanne Blumenauer, Earl DeFazio, Peter A. Toomey, Patrick J.* Stern, Everett A.* Boyle, Brendan F. Doyle, Michael Dent, Charles W. Cartwright, Matt Murphy, Timothy Whitehouse, Sheldon, II Cicilline, David N. Langevin, James R. Scott, Timothy E*.

Graham, Lindsey O. Duncan, Jeffrey D. Clyburn, James E. Cohen, Stephen I. Cornyn, John Poe, Ted Ashford, Jerry D., Jr. McCaul, Michael Granger, Kay Hurd, William Johnson, Eddie B. Doggett, Lloyd Lee, Mike* Chaffetz, Jason Love, Mia Leahy, Patrick J.* Welch, Peter Kaine, Timothy M. Beyer, Donald S., Jr. Connolly, Gerald E. Murray, Patty* DelBene, Suzan K. McMorris Rodgers, Cathy Kilmer, Derek McDermott, James Smith, D. Adam Johnson, Ronald H.* Feingold, Russell D.* Pocan, Mark Kind, Ronald J. Moore, Gwendolynne S. Duffy, Sean Clinton, Hillary R. Cruz, Rafael E. (Ted)

Party

Status

2015-2016 Contributions

D R

O O

5,000 500

D R R R D R R R D R R R D D D D R I D D R D R D D D R R R D D R R D R R R D D R R R D D D D D D D R D D D R D D D D R

I I I I I I I I C I I I I I I I I C I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I C I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I N I I C I I I I

2015-2016 Total Contributions: Total Contributions (1978-2016): Total No. of Recipients (1978-2016): 82

WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

3,500 5,000 1,000 1,000 2,000 5,000 8,500 21,000 3,500 2,000 1,000 2,500 9,000 2,000 3,500 2,000 13,700 -500 1,000 1,000 2,000 2,000 2,000 1,000 1,500 6,000 7,200 1,500 10,500 3,500 3,000 1,000 10,000 2,500 1,000 2,500 1,000 2,000 3,500 29,700 10,000 1,000 5,250 3,500 1,000 2,000 2,000 8,000 2,000 5,000 2,000 4,000 3,000 6,000 2,500 2,000 1,000 2,000 2,000

Career

Committees

69,618 19,000

AS, C

69,327 A (HS) 12,000 44,700 1,000 FO (NE) 2,000 5,000 W 38,000 A (HS) 37,500 B, HS 21,650 8,000 A 136,800 AS 2,500 AS 358,462 B, I 12,500 16,500 W 18,600 45,950 B -500 1,000 FO (NE) 8,500 16,750 A (FO) 6,500 3,000 115,500 B 33,500 FO (NE) 45,500 AS, HS 34,800 120,000 A (D, FO, HS), AS, B 10,500 FO, HS 32,600 33,500 89,580 25,000 FO 2,500 13,000 FO, HS 42,500 A (D, FO) 1,000 HS 9,000 12,500 W 50,200 AS 27,500 1,000 151,161 A (D, FO, HS) 16,500 18,201 AS, B, FO (NE) 2,000 23,500 FO (NE) 203,293 A (D, HS), B 9,000 8,850 11,000 A 14,000 B, W 42,925 AS 11,000 B, C, FO (NE), HS 215,938 8,000 B 8,500 W 4,500 B 13,000

$1,235,942 $57,725,869 2,472 MAY 2016

UPA_ad_c3_UPA Ad Cover 3 4/19/16 12:44 PM Page c3

For For more more information, information, contact contact

Kirk Kirk Campbell Campbell at at k kirkcruachan@yahoo.com irkccruachan@yahoo.com

cover4_May 2016 Back Cover 4/19/16 12:36 PM Page c4

American Educational Trust Washington Report on Middle East Affairs P.O. Box 53062 Washington, DC 20009

May 2016 Vol. XXXV, No. 3