Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Washington Gets “Less Crazy”
Yesterday the New America Foundation (NAF), a center-left think tank located one block north of big, bad K Street, hosted a discussion about the 1948 war, the expulsion of Palestinians from what would become Israel, the new state’s imposition of a draconian military regime upon the Palestinians who managed to stay inside the armistice lines, and all that this painful history implies for the present and the future.
Using and Abusing Memory
A firestorm broke out unexpectedly on my Facebook feed yesterday morning.
Six Questions for Mouin Rabbani
Yesterday in Gaza representatives of Hamas and the Palestine Liberation Organization announced a blueprint for talks about forming a government of national consensus (Arabic text here). Hamas and the PLO’s dominant Fatah faction have been at loggerheads, and occasionally at war, since 2007, when the Islamist movement expelled Fatah security men from their Gaza posts and took over the coastal strip.
Three Updates on Palestinian Political Prisoners
Update 1 on prisoners and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, from the halls of the State Department: Last week, the United States considered releasing Jonathan Pollard, an American convicted of espionage on behalf of Israel, in exchange for Israel doing, as political analyst Yousef Munayyer put it, “several things it already should have done long ago,” including releasing both short- and long-term Palestinian prisoners. The media attention to the Pollard case is just another distraction from the wider issue of Palestinian political prisoners, whose incarceration affects thousands of families every day.
Analyze This
In her column on the Haaretz website yesterday, Carleton University political scientist Mira Sucharov bemoaned the tendency of “some of the cleverest minds on Israel and Palestine” to “devolve” into Manichean thinking about Israel as either “good or bad.”
Our Primer on Israel-Palestine
Some 43 years ago, a group of activists in the movement to end the war in Vietnam founded the Middle East Research and Information Project.
The impetus was that the American public, including the anti-war left, was poorly informed about the Middle East and the US role there. The region was commonly depicted as alien, its politics uniquely determined by religion and impossible to explain with ordinary categories of analysis. The original idea behind MERIP was to produce better reporting that would get picked up by existing left outlets.
The Ongoing Fantasy of Israeli Democracy Before 1967
The past week has a witnessed a flurry of debate in the American and Israeli media over the growing call to boycott companies and institutions that profit from or are otherwise complicit in the ongoing 47-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Maxime Rodinson Looks Back
Maxime Rodinson (1915-2004) was a pioneering scholar of Islam and the Middle East, as well as a prominent Marxian public intellectual. A product of classical Orientalist training, he was professor of Old Ethiopic and South Arabian languages at the Sorbonne. His scholarly sensibility was historical-materialist, a perspective he brought to his famous biography of the Prophet of Islam, Muhammad (1961), as well as later publications including Islam and Capitalism (English edition, 1973), Marxism and the Muslim World (English, 1979) and Cult, Ghetto and State: The Persistence of the Jewish Question (1983). Rodinson was a contributing editor of Middle East Report from 1988 to 2000.
Securing Oslo
On a Friday afternoon in September 2013, dozens of Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces looked exasperated as they tried to move Palestinian youth away from the wall near Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem. Attempting to corral hundreds of children, the PA troops pushed them down the hill toward Aida refugee camp and implored them to stop throwing stones at the Israeli military positions above.
Settlement Secularism
Scan the headlines for news about Israeli settlers, and you are likely to be overwhelmed by stories of a radical and violent religious nationalism: extremists marching on the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, guarded by Israeli soldiers, to pray atop the Temple Mount; West Bank colonists torching olive trees and cars, or making midnight jaunts into Palestinian villages armed to the teeth, to put a “price tag” on both Israeli state slowdowns of the settlement project and Palestinian attacks on Israeli targets. But lately tales have emerged of a kinder, gentler settler as well. Take this Associated Press dispatch:
Breaking “America’s Last Taboo”
American Zionism has made any serious public discussion of the past or future of Israel — by far the largest recipient ever of US foreign aid — a taboo. To call this quite literally the last taboo in American public life would not be an exaggeration. Abortion, homosexuality, the death penalty, even the sacrosanct military budget can be discussed with some freedom. The extermination of native Americans can be admitted, the morality of Hiroshima attacked, the national flag publicly committed to the flames. But the systematic continuity of Israel’s 52-year-old oppression and maltreatment of the Palestinians is virtually unmentionable, a narrative that has no permission to appear.
Round Two to Arafat
The release of the Swiss Institut de Radiophysique’s Experts Forensic Report Concerning the Late President Yasser Arafat has lent further credence to the proposition that the iconic Palestinian leader’s 2004 demise was an act of Sharon rather than of God or nature. Speaking to the Guardian, forensic scientist David Barclay concluded the report provides
What Comes Next
Whatever comes next in the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, the State of Israel is here to stay.
To acknowledge this fact is not to nod to Israel’s “right to exist” — people have rights, states are supposed to protect them — but to bow to the one-state reality in historical Palestine. There is but one sovereign entity in that territory and there is presently no combination of political forces that can produce a second or compel the first to surrender its sovereignty. Anyone who would see peace in Israel-Palestine must first grapple with the many implications of the one-state reality.
UN Admission, Ours and Yours
Having declared independence in May 1948, the new State of Israel was lacking in international legitimacy. Recognizing the deficiency, Israeli officials invested tremendous effort over the course of 1948-1949 in securing Israel’s admission to the United Nations.
A recent paper identifies three arguments advanced by Israeli diplomats at the time in support of Israel’s application:
Power Corrupts
Secretary of State John Kerry has staked his credibility on reviving the Middle East peace process. Supporting this effort on the world stage will be high on Samantha Power’s agenda, should her nomination as US ambassador to the United Nations be confirmed. But though she will urge Israelis, Palestinians, Western journalists and European officials to put aside their cynicism over yet another round of Israeli-Palestinian talks, her own record justifies it tenfold.
Inquiring Into International Commissions of Inquiry
A Palestinian political prisoner, Arafat Jaradat, died in Israeli custody on February 22.
The Shinbet, Israel’s internal intelligence service, claims that Jaradat, 30, died of natural causes. Palestinian authorities suspect foul play, and the Palestinian prime minister in the West Bank, Salam Fayyad, expressed “shock” at the news. Somewhat more proactively, ‘Isa Qaraqa‘, the Ramallah PA minister in charge of prisoner affairs, demanded an “international commission of inquiry to probe the circumstances of [Jaradat’s] death.”
Do We Know Enough?
In January 2007, amid the furor over Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, former President Jimmy Carter made his first major public appearance about the book at Brandeis University, which defines itself as “the only non-sectarian Jewish-sponsored college or university” in the United States. He received a standing ovation, going on to say that he had chosen the word “apartheid” for his book’s title “knowing that it would be provocative” and to deliver a speech describing the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands as “cruel oppression.” Carter then departed, and Alan Dershowitz, author of The Case for Israel, rose to offer a response. Half the audience walked out. A year later, the Brandeis student senate voted not to congratulate Israel on its sixtieth anniversary.
Israel’s “Operation Mow the Lawn”
One can only imagine the nods of self-satisfaction when an Israel Defense Forces planner came up with “Pillar of Cloud” to name Israel’s subsequent eight-day aerial assault on Gaza. By lifting this metaphor from several well-known passages in the Torah, the IDF sought to portray the operation as a divinely sanctioned mission to clear the skies of Palestinian rockets through an immovable force from above, while also branding its heavily marketed Iron Dome missile defense system. It was a three for one.
Four More Years
The 2012 US presidential election elicited less interest among Palestinians than any such contest in living memory. While most Israelis, and their government in particular, expressed a clear preference for a Republican victory, Palestinians seemed resigned to continuity in US foreign policy irrespective of which party won the White House. The main reason was that President Barack Obama, self-proclaimed apostle of change and widely hailed as such in the region when he assumed office four years ago, has yet to demonstrate a meaningful inconsistency with his predecessor George W. Bush when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Events since the election have only confirmed this policy direction and thus the validity of Palestinians’ indifference.
Nays and Yeas in Charlotte
The kerfuffle over the initial non-mention of Jerusalem in the Democratic Party platform throws into particularly sharp relief just how disconnected are discourse and reality when it comes to Israel-Palestine.
