https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/juneteenth-a-national-holiday-for-national-reflection-1.1245149

Federal holidays in the US are few and far between. It has been almost 40 years since a new one, Martin Luther King Jr Day, was adopted in 1983. So when US President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act last week, it was, as he might have said: “a big… deal”.

Juneteenth is not widely known outside the US, and only recently gained widespread recognition outside the Black community. Last year, when former president Donald Trump was considering holding a rally in Tulsa, the site of a heinous massacre of African-Americans, on Juneteenth he reportedly declared: “no one’s ever heard of it”.

In fact, Juneteenth has long served as a de facto African-American Independence Day, commemorating the long-delayed enforcement in June 1865 in Texas of the Emancipation Proclamation issued by Abraham Lincoln that ended slavery in the rebellious states during the Civil War.

It effectively stands in for the comprehensive national abolition of slavery, which technically occurred with the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in December 1865.

The point is not the date, but that the whole country should officially celebrate the abolition of slavery as a second national Independence Day, along with the traditional Independence Day on the fourth of July.

Some on the conservative far right complained that this will somehow undermine the unifying effect of the July 4 celebrations. Indeed, all limited opposition in Congress came from right-wing Republicans.

Yet the passage was swift enough, just two days before its first implementation, to take many Americans by surprise, as some were delighted by a sudden day off and others had to scramble to figure out what to do with their school-age children.

This is certainly another milestone for the integration of the African-American experience into the national narrative.

Some dismiss the new holiday as purely symbolic. Critics say so many Republicans were happy to vote for a representational gesture as a cover for the attack against voting access, and consistent opposition to other measures that would materially improve rights and conditions for minority communities.

Over time, clearly, national symbolism and stories have a profound effect. That is why they matter so much. So, a new federal holiday cannot seriously be dismissed as irrelevant.

The question is what shapes the broader national narrative into which it will fit. A profound struggle is engaged over how to define racism and how to understand its role in US history.

This year the Republicans embraced as a major theme a passionate assault on “Critical Race Theory,” which, strictly speaking, is a legal studies methodology that examines the impact and legacy of white supremacy in laws and regulations, and that critiques traditional liberal approaches.

CRT is now employed as a catchall by Republicans to condemn virtually all educational programmes to seriously examine the legacy and ongoing functioning of racism.

It is easy to understand why the white far-right seized on this heretofore obscure academic terminology. “Critical” sounds like criticism. “Race” itself sounds accusatory to many white Americans. And “Theory” sounds like silly academic gibberish.

Whenever there is any consideration of structural or systemic racism, the far-right now identifies the evil hand of CRT. And they rush to claim it condemns the US as inherently racist, irredeemable or evil.

That is a platform for anti-anti-racism, the rejection of any notion that racism remains a deep-seated, systemic problem that must be urgently addressed.

Republican state legislatures around the country are busy banning the teaching of CRT in schools, a basically nonexistent phenomenon.

A new Florida political-correctness law prohibits teaching “that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white persons.” Apparently, any such observation is considered ridiculous or very dangerous.

Schools now “may not define American history as something other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.”

That cannot be honestly asserted because the founding document of the new nation, the Constitution, included several passages acknowledging the legitimacy of chattel slavery, including defining slaves as three-fifths of a person for political representation.

As American society sails into the dangerous waters of a long-overdue racial reckoning, it badly lacks a shared definition of what racism is, both in theory and in practice.

On the right, racism is almost always conceptualised as an expression of a person’s overt, personal biases or at most long-resolved and repudiated errors of the past.

By decontextualising the problem, this sets up the now-familiar claim that anti-racists are “the real racists,” because they are accused of casting collective blame against white people or suggesting Black Americans simply cannot thrive.

Some leading scholars and practitioners of antiracism on the left have reinforced these attacks by crafting a reductive binary whereby every entity, process or individual is either actively and programmatically anti-racist, as they define it, or is instead, ipso facto, racist. There is no middle ground. There is antiracism, of its own variety, and everything else is essentially racism.

That destructive discourse, especially when fully unpacked, begins to feel exceedingly accusatory to many well-meaning white Americans.

Many are required by their employers to attend anti-bias training seminars. These seminars can sometimes do more harm than good by making reasonable people feel ideologically browbeaten or accused merely on the basis of their white identity.

Anything that hints of an ideological struggle session is more likely to promote than combat racial bias and resentment.

Yet obviously centuries of slavery and decades of segregation and systematic discrimination continue to define much of American life.

Some “errors of the past” are very much realities of the present.

The impact of segregation was not magically evaporated by MLK Day. The haunting legacy of slavery won’t be exorcised by Juneteenth.

Simply passing laws to prohibit forms of discrimination that had been legally mandated and culturally enforced for hundreds of years cannot suddenly eradicate all of their functions and consequences.

They remain pervasive and resonate throughout American society to this day, particularly regarding essential social services like education and healthcare, not to mention policing.

Yet as suggested by the passionate battle over historical narratives – given their indisputable power to shape perceptions over many generations – if Republicans approved the Juneteenth holiday as a cover for opposition to voting rights and other crucial tools to combat ongoing racism, they probably only exchanged short-term victory for long-term defeat.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-06-17/arab-states-israel-have-a-stake-in-iran-s-election?srnd=opinion&sref=tp95wk9l

But the key to reducing tensions in the Middle East lies in relations between Tehran and Washington.

Iran’s Middle Eastern neighbors have a great deal at stake in the outcome of its presidential election on Friday. But the key to reducing friction in the region lies not in the outcome of the vote, but on the winner’s attitude toward the U.S.

No one expects any fundamental change in the Iranian regime: After all, voters only get to choose from a short list of contenders approved by the Guardian Council, a body that vets candidates for ideological purity. All the plausible winners are hard-liners; competitive moderate candidates were all barred from running.

The Iranian president has limited impact on foreign policy, which is directed by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Relations with neighbors are often dictated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.  

But that doesn’t mean the election is meaningless. The next president will have leeway in implementing the broad directives that come from Khamenei. He and his foreign minister will set the tone for the way Iran interacts with other countries.

Iran’s relations with most of its neighbors have long been tense, and deteriorated into a low-intensity conflict during the second half of the Donald Trump administration. But a dialogue has developed over the past year between the Islamic Republic and its key Arab antagonists, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. If the next president is so inclined — and so instructed by Khamenei — he can use these discussions as a platform from which to improve ties.  

The Saudis and Emiratis are unlikely to be enthusiastic about the front runner for the presidency,Ebrahim Raisi, who is also viewed as a potential successor to Khamenei. A hard-line cleric with strong ties to the IRGC, Raisi has hewed closely to Iran’s hostile posture toward its neighbors.

But it is conceivable that a hard-line Iranian president could, under the only-Nixon-could-go-to-China thesis, find it easier to make concessions to regional rivals, and even to the U.S. Indeed, an accommodation with the “Great Satan” would make the Islamic Republic more likely to mend fences with its neighbors.

That, in turn, will depend on the outcome of negotiations in Vienna to revive the 2015 nuclear deal Iran signed with the world powers. The outgoing president, Hasan Rouhani, is keen for that to happen before his term formally ends in August. His successor would then be able to take office in a new atmosphere of dialogue with the U.S., which would have a huge impact on Iran’s neighborhood.

Raisi, who has said that executing the nuclear deal “needs a powerful government,” would probably prefer that the negotiations were completed before he is sworn in, leaving him to enjoy the benefits — mainly, the lifting of American economic sanctions. This would greatly improve his chances of tackling the problems he will inherit from Rouhani, which include a devastated economy, the lingering effects of the coronavirus pandemic and the growing alienation of the population from the theocratic state.

Better Iranian-American relations would also bring the next president some diplomatic dividends. Removed from Washington’s blacklist, Iran would be able to develop normal relations with its neighbors.

This would be welcomed by Arab countries that have maintained a delicate balance between Iran and the U.S. Qatar, Oman and Iraq would be able to strengthen their ties with Tehran without fear of antagonizing Washington. The Saudis and Emiratis would be encouraged to accelerate the process of normalizing relations with the Iranians.

In turn, the regime in Tehran might dial down its own hostility, and restrain its proxy militias from attacking U.S. targets in Iraq and its Yemeni partners, the Houthi rebels, from firing rockets into Saudi Arabia.

One enmity will endure, however. Whoever becomes the next Iranian president can be relied upon to maintain the regime’s hostility toward Israel, which is a core tenet of the Islamic Republic. Benjamin Netanyahu may no longer be prime minister, but there is consensus across the Israeli political spectrum that Iran represents a clear and ever-present danger.

This means the new coalition government under Prime Minister Naftali Bennett will likely keep up Israel’s persistent, low-intensity military campaign against Iran and its militia proxies in Syria — and efforts to damage the Iranian nuclear program.

The Israelis have struck some major blows in recent months, including the assassination of Iran’s top nuclear-weapons expert and the disruption of its main uranium enrichment facility. But if American-Iranian relations improve, the U.S. will press Israel to at least pull some punches.

But all bets are off if the talks in Vienna go nowhere. Iran would then keep enriching uranium to ever higher levels, compelling Israel to continue — or even intensify — its attacks. Saudi Arabia and the UAE would probably keep up their dialogue with Iran, but a normalization of relations would be harder to achieve without support from Washington. And an uptick in anti-American attacks by Iran-backed militias would make matters very awkward for the Iraqi government.

From Baghdad to Riyadh, governments in the Middle East will be keeping a close watch on the results announced in Tehran. But their hopes for reduced tensions in the neighborhood may rest on what happens in Vienna.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/will-americans-see-another-coup-attempt-in-2024-1.1240380

The idea is being rapidly normalised in a big section of US culture.

The words “coup” and “USA” traditionally only appeared together in works of fantasy and satire. But that’s no longer the case. The theme of an American “coup” is being increasingly normalised in US discourse through the conduct and language of former president Donald Trump and his allies.

More than 100 days into the current Biden administration, Mr Trump – who is now reemerging from a period of relative isolation at his Florida resort – has yet to acknowledge either his defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 election or the legitimacy of his successor.

Mr Trump is struggling to be heard, particularly without his preferred Twitter platform. His dwindling band of aides pulled the plug on a much-ballyhooed Trump blog after only 28 days online, because few paid any attention to the incoherent postings. In retrospect, the brevity of Twitter imposed a useful discipline on Mr Trump’s effusive tendencies.

Yet Mr Trump and his allies won’t admit that he lost. The obvious corollary is that he actually won in November but, as he and his supporters insist, he was cheated out of victory by a massive, unprecedented fraud. There is, of course, no evidence whatsoever of this. There is, to the contrary, ample evidence that the election was particularly effective and clean, despite the pandemic and the biggest turnout in more than a century.

The latest fever-dream in Trumpworld is the inexplicable concept that some unimaginable something will happen that leads to Mr Trump being “reinstated” in office this August, or sometime thereabouts. Several of his backers have promoted this theory, and the former president seemed to refer to it in a recent public statement in which he vowed “we’re gonna take back the White House – and sooner than you think. It’s going to be really something special…”

Such an eventuality is not only fanciful, it could only be the result of a coup. There is no provision in the US Constitution for the “reinstatement” of any official. The only lawful way for a Republican president to replace Mr Biden is via the 2024 election. That’s it. Mr Trump cannot be “reinstated” through any normal constitutional or lawful process.

But The New York Times and numerous other major publications, reported the former president has been telling his visitors in Florida to expect his “reinstatement”, along with those of former Republican senators David Perdue and Martha McSally for some reason, later this summer.

These themes were amplified when his first national security adviser, retired Gen Michael Flynn – who was pardoned by Mr Trump for lying to the FBI about conversations with Russian officials – openly endorsed a US coup.

At a QAnon conspiracy theory conference, Mr Flynn was asked why what occurred in Myanmar (pronounced by the questioner as “Minimar”) – obviously referring to the February 1 military coup in that country – couldn’t be done in the United States?” “No reason,” he replied, “I mean, it should happen here.” Mr Flynn later denied he was suggesting a US coup, but he plainly was.

Delegitimising the outcome of the 2020 election and the US political process has become the main focus of Mr Trump’s political re-engagement and a guiding theme for many of his supporters. Their relentless propaganda against the US democratic system has borne fruit. A recent poll found that 53 percent of Republicans, and one-fourth of Americans generally, believe that Mr Trump is the “true president”.

This idea is the usually unarticulated subtext for a raft of Republican state-level efforts to restrict voter access and disempower non-partisan election officials. Even where, for example in Texas, Republicans won virtually every aspect of the election, highly restrictive anti-voting legislation is being adopted based on the false assertion that the 2020 election was marred by rampant fraud, at least elsewhere.

Indeed, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton implied that Mr Trump would have lost Texas too, had he not successfully blocked efforts to mail postal ballots to all registered voters.

The insurrection at Congress on January 6 was certainly some form of extravagantly ineffective “auto-golpe” – a “self-coup” that Latin American strongmen used to keep themselves in power in the 20th century. Yet that deadly riot, which sought to prevent Congress from certifying Mr Biden’s victory, might prove a long-term success, at least in laying the foundation for future violent disruption attacks.

The same applies to Mr Trump’s numerous efforts to overturn the election results behind the scenes, most notoriously by pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him non-existent votes he needed to win the state, reportedly saying: “Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.” Mr Raffensperger, like many other election officials in Republican-controlled states, has been disempowered since.

There is every reason to believe Mr Trump, who remains in solid control of his party, is preparing to run again in 2024. And if, for some reason, he doesn’t, any candidate imbued with his ethos and reflecting the current attitudes of the party would probably refuse to accept defeat.

A great deal of what Republicans have been doing, especially at the state level, as well as in terms of rhetoric and ideas, has been centred on dismantling the administrative, structural and, above all, attitudinal obstacles to rejecting and overturning an unacceptable result.

An American coup, long the stuff of fiction, reared its ugly head but quickly collapsed after the last election. Mr Trump won’t be “reinstated” in August, and Mr Flynn’s Myanmar-style coup by the military won’t happen either.

But all that misses the point.

What has been going on even before November 3, but especially after, is an effort to acculturate Americans to the legitimacy of extra-constitutional political interventions to make “wrong” things “right”. Anyone who still thinks a coup in Washington following the next presidential election is the stuff of fantasy or conspiratorial paranoia simply isn’t paying attention.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/east-jerusalem-s-sheikh-jarrah-heating-up-again-is-a-worry-1.1236647

Sheikh Jarrah is the Palestinian cause in miniature and an ongoing flashpoint

Everything that is most volatile and incendiary about the conflict between Israel and Palestine is boiled down to a quintessence in the occupied East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah. It is a small neighbourhood, about 2km north of the Old City, with its holy and historical places. But Sheikh Jarrah’s outsized significance comes from a persistent campaign by Israeli settlers to evict long-term Palestinian residents and make way for Jewish settlers.

Last month these eviction efforts were the flashpoint that ignited the recent round of violence in Israel and The occupied territories. Now, Sheikh Jarrah is heating up again and everyone should be extremely concerned. It can easily ignite another conflagration if things continue to deteriorate.

The confrontation that sparked the recent violence centres on a decades-long effort by Israeli extremists, backed by the authorities, to evict six Palestinian families from homes they have lived in since shortly after the 1948 war. Many of the families had previously resided in the West Jerusalem neighbourhood of Talbiya, but were, like almost all Palestinian refugees, prevented from returning to their homes after the war. The homes were then seized under Israel’s “Absentee Property Law”.

These refugees now face yet another eviction, this time from East Jerusalem. The trauma of dispossession, which has become a fundamental theme in Palestinian identity, is being reenacted powerfully, with the same refugee families displaced every few decades because of Israel’s evolving national imperatives.

The theme of occupation is highlighted in Sheikh Jarrah, too – the constant grinding and quotidian oppression and a consistent effort to replace Arabs with Jews in culturally, historically, religiously and strategically significant areas. And of course, the pattern of discrimination against Palestinians, particularly regarding land rights, both in Israel and in the occupied territories is forcefully illustrated.

The settlers claim that Jewish groups once owned the areas under question. Under Israeli law, Jews can “recover” territories lost in the 1947-48 conflict on behalf of such groups. There is no provision for Palestinians to recover any lost property, including that of these families from West Jerusalem. This form of discrimination is absolute, and entirely based on ethnicity, which is officially designated within Israel under the rubric of categories of “nationality”, such as “Jewish” or “Arab,” which is distinct from citizenship.

Among the most telling contrasts between the approximately 8 million Jewish Israelis and the similar number of Palestinian Muslims and Christians that reside in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories is legal status. The 8 million Jews enjoy a single, consistent and homogenous status, whereas Palestinians find themselves broken into at least seven or eight different categories depending on where they live.

The differences between Jews and Arabs invariably come down to rights to the land and rights in the land

All Jews in the “greater Israel”, including those living in “unauthorised” or “illegal” settlements in the West Bank that they have simply seized without prior permission from the government, are first-class Israeli citizens. It is as simple as that.

But the variations of legal status that are imposed on Palestinians living under Israeli rule are astonishing. There are almost 2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, who have many rights but face significant discrimination in terms of housing, land rights, education and a range of other prerogatives and services.

Then there are the Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem, who are considered residents of Israel, but not citizens. They have a relative freedom of movement, but lack many rights of citizens. Israeli authorities often note that they can apply for citizenship. They can indeed. And Israel can turn them down, as it often does. These residency rights are notably tenuous and often arbitrarily revoked.

Palestinians have different rights and statuses in Areas A, B and C in the occupied West Bank. And while Gaza is technically part of Area A, it functions more like a giant open-air prison run on the inside by Hamas and from the outside by Israel.

Even among Palestinian citizens of Israel there are special problems facing those deemed to live in “unrecognised villages”, lacking many services (including bomb shelters), and those considered “present absentees”, who were not, in fact, outside the country in 1948 but whose land was expropriated anyway.

The details are complex and excruciating, but that quick rundown illustrates how Israel’s plethora of different legal statuses for Palestinians, as opposed to the single and united one for Jews, serves as a lesson in divide-and-conquer tactics.

The differences between Jews and Arabs invariably come down to rights to the land and rights in the land.

The six families facing immediate eviction in Sheikh Jarrah expected a final Israeli Supreme Court ruling on May 10, and ramped up their protests on May 6. And those protests began to dovetail with unrest at the Al Aqsa Mosque connected to Ramadan restrictions.

On May 10, Hamas began to unleash a barrage of rocket attacks against Israel in an effort to seize control of the agenda from the Jerusalem protesters and turn the latest surge of resistance to occupation into yet another Israel-Hamas aerial bombardment exchange.

With the ruling postponed but expected soon, Sheikh Jarrah is again heating up, with prominent arrests of journalists and activists.

This is anything but a simple “property dispute” as the Israeli government characterises it. The potential for this iconic injustice, and a similar one in the Silwan neighbourhood, which together threaten to displace an estimated 1,000 Palestinians, to ignite passions, particularly in connection with nearby holy places, must not be underestimated.

And both Hamas and embattled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu benefited tremendously from recent violence. Some of their supporters may welcome more.

The Biden administration insists it is pressuring Israel to avoid such provocative measures. Given the recent arrests, they don’t seem to have been heard unmistakably enough.

All of Israel’s friends should be clear that these evictions, and the abuses they so powerfully represent, are unnecessary, indefensible and potentially unmanageable.