http://experts.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/06/16/how_netanyahu_helps_the_palestinians

The response from Palestinian and Arab leaders to Benjamin Netanyahu’s defiant foreign policy speech last Sunday has so far consisted mainly of throwing up their hands in despair. While understandable given the prime minister’s intransigence on Israel’s prior commitment to a complete settlement freeze and other key issues, this approach is not likely to accomplish very much.

By reproducing rhetoric from the 1990s that led to massive Palestinian frustration, Netanyahu may be hoping to provoke a reaction that is more visceral than strategic. If the Palestinians and Arabs adopt a less than constructive attitude at this stage, there is every danger that President Barack Obama and his administration will conclude that the Israelis and the Palestinians are simply two recalcitrant and irresponsible parties that are impervious to reason, and walk away to focus on other matters. But Obama’s new approach, combined with Netanyahu’s unconstructive attitude, presents a rare opportunity for Palestinian leaders to seize the initiative in the peace process.

Rather than simply dismissing Netanyahu’s words, it is vital that they instead move quickly to draw a stark contrast based on a constructive stance of their own, and position themselves in as close alignment as possible with the American president. The Palestinians should be emphasizing their moves to fulfil their road map commitment on security, as recently demonstrated by the Palestinian Authority’s bold and politically costly security operations against Hamas militants in the West Bank.

A new initiative to bolster security measures by combating incitement by militant groups, as Obama urged Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to undertake at their White House meeting in May, would strongly reaffirm Palestinian seriousness to fully play their part in promoting peace and would be an effective means of keeping the focus on Israel’s continued avoidance of its own responsibilities.

It is also important that the Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia, express a sincere desire to engage productively in the peace process in response to significant Israeli moves such as a complete settlement freeze. They should frame such a move as operationalizing the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative.

Future public diplomacy efforts by the Palestinians and Arab States should also focus their attention on the mainstream American Jewish Community. A large number of American Jews support Obama’s efforts to push Israel toward a settlement freeze, a fact Netanyahu is keenly aware of. He seems to be calculating that his rather tepid, theoretical acceptance of the concept of Palestinian statehood and his rhetorical invocations of Israeli nationalism might weaken support for the president’s efforts. The extent to which Netanyahu is effective in gaining currency with this crucial constituency may be an important factor in determining whether the Obama can remain firm with the Israeli government without intolerable domestic political cost.

Obama has placed a great deal of political capital at stake on the issue of settlements. In order to successfully shift the Israeli government from its present position, he is going to need help.

If a settlement freeze can be achieved, along with reciprocal gestures from the Palestinian Authority and Arab states, such as maintaining security and continuing diplomatic overtures, the parties can move quickly into permanent status negotiations, tackling such bedrock questions as borders, refugees, Jerusalem, and security. Many on the Israeli right, possibly including Netanyahu, would prefer to avoid these issues because they may not yet be prepared to take the necessary steps to advance peace.

By supporting Obama’s position through constructive measures, Palestinians and Arabs can greatly strengthen the prospects that permanent status talks become unavoidable, and that with strong American leadership the parties could soon find themselves in serious peace negotiations for the first time since January 2001.

The Press-Enterprise

It is regrettable that Amir Abdel Malik Ali has become a regular speaker at Muslim student events on several southern California college campuses, including, recently, UC Irvine and UC Riverside.

Ali is a convert to Islam and an imam at an Oakland mosque who has expressed overtly anti-Semitic views and bizarre conspiracy theories, especially regarding the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He is noted for incendiary rhetoric regarding “Jewish control” of the media, although he appeared deeply confused about who is Jewish when he wrongly cited Rupert Murdoch as an example. Ali’s rhetoric is often implicitly violent, and, by any standards extreme and intolerant.

Though Ali is frequently invited to speak on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, his only qualifications regarding the complexities of the Middle East appear to be his religious and political fanaticism. Ali is not only categorically anti-Israel, he has also denounced the Palestinian national leadership as “Uncle Tom Palestinian leaders.”

“Silence is Consent” was the title of one of Ali’s recent talks at UC Irvine — an ironic reminder for responsible Muslim Americans to vocally reject the idea that he is a worthwhile contributor to the dialogue about the Middle East.

It seems that national and California Muslim-American organizations have not succeeded in convincing these student groups that by inviting speakers such as Ali, they do palpable damage to the interests of the Muslim-American community.

Student groups will ultimately do what they like, but if responsible leaders fail to take a public stand against this kind of speech, the silence will indeed be taken as “consent.” The organizers of these events should ask themselves what they hope to achieve by inviting Ali to speak, and what they think the political consequences are likely to be.

It is immoral and counterproductive to promote extreme and anti-Semitic rhetoric. Moreover, it is impossible to take a serious and effective stance against “Islamophobia” while promoting or condoning anti-Semitism. These two forms of bigotry are intimately connected, both thematically and historically. Neither the Jewish community nor the Islamic community can advance its legitimate interests or perspectives by promoting fear and hatred of one another.

Intolerant views and defamation only serve to discredit any cause. In this case, invitations to speakers such as Ali discredit rather than promote the Palestinian cause. In addition, extremist speech by such otherwise marginal figures helps to feed fear and hatred of the Muslim-American community, especially when it is endorsed through repeated invitations by large student organizations.

At a time when an increasing number of Jewish American individuals and organizations are recognizing that the occupation in Palestine is bad for Israel and the United States as well as for the Palestinian people, supporters of Palestine and friends of Israel should look for common ground rather than waste time hosting religious and political fanatics.

Historically, there has been little scope for common ground between American friends of Israel and American friends of the Palestinians. However, with a growing consensus nationally and internationally about the urgent need to end the occupation and create a Palestinian state to live alongside Israel in peace and security, unprecedented opportunities for cooperation are beginning to emerge. The development of a common purpose in favor of peace requires goodwill and outreach on both sides.

Rhetoric that clings to an outmoded “zero-sum” analysis that pits Israeli and Palestinian interests as irreconcilable and diametrically opposed, even though the future of both peoples depends on peace, is bad enough. Speakers who engage in demagoguery and spread anti-Semitic and violent ideals poison the national interests of the Palestinian people and their supporters in the United States. With “friends” such as Amir Abdel Malik Ali, the Palestinians need no additional enemies.

Muslim Americans, including student organizations, should steadfastly reject anti-Semitic language. This would best serve their own interests, the interests of the legitimate causes in which they believe, and the interests of our country. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2009/03/the-gaza-war-what-both-sides-must-do/

The recent war in Gaza proves yet again what all reasonable people understood about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for many years: there is no military solution for either side, and both peoples’ hopes for a better future depend on reaching a peace agreement with each other.

Israel showered down extraordinary levels of death and destruction upon both Hamas and the innocent civilian population, killing more than 1,400 people (by most estimates, largely civilians) and destroying or severely damaging more than 21,000 homes and businesses. But the war did not succeed in changing the political status quo ante: Hamas remains in power in Gaza, and may have even been politically strengthened by the conflict. Palestinians remain under occupation, and Israelis continue to live without security.

Israel can certainly kill people, both combatants and innocents, and destroy buildings, but it cannot obliterate the presence of the Palestinian people on their own land or their determination to be free. Until Israelis and Palestinians can achieve an end-of-conflict agreement, Israel will remain a country at war — conducting a foreign military occupation over the land and lives of more than 5 million Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip – and will continue to be denied legitimacy by most of the people and the states of the Middle East.

The Palestinian national interest also depends on achieving an agreement with Israel. Hamas’ reckless actions in firing rockets into southern Israel only succeeded in delivering death and devastation to the people of Gaza. Palestinians cannot possibly hope to achieve independence and an end to the occupation through violence and armed struggle. In order to achieve independence and statehood, Palestinians will have to secure an agreement with Israel.

Friends of Israel and friends of the Palestinians do neither party any favor by rationalizing belligerence or defending indefensible actions. In published documents from March and June 2008, the American Task Force on Palestine warned that Hamas rocket attacks would ultimately provoke a disproportionate wide-scale Israeli military action that would be devastating to the people of Gaza but would not resolve any of the fundamental political problems or enhance security for Israelis in the long run. It has given us no satisfaction whatsoever to see this grimly predictable scenario play itself out so precisely.

Both parties have demonstrated that, on their own, they cannot overcome domestic political opposition to the compromises necessary for peace. Israelis and Palestinians require serious and sustained third-party support, which can only come from the United States. The war in Gaza has served as an important reminder to the incoming Obama Administration that the question of Palestine cannot be placed on the back burner, contained or “managed.” It must be resolved. Early signs from the new administration point towards an intensified American engagement, but this will require both determination and persistence.

Both Israeli and Palestinian societies are split between those who seriously seek a peace agreement and those who would continue to fight in vain for control of the entire territory. Palestinians are divided between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which is committed to achieving a peace agreement with Israel, and Hamas in Gaza that refuses to commit to this goal. The recent election in Israel left the Knesset deeply divided along the same lines.

Obviously, serious American engagement is required to lay the groundwork among both Israelis and Palestinians for a return to public confidence in the prospects for peace. This means helping the PA develop the Palestinian economy and institutions, particularly the security forces, that can serve as the building blocks of an independent state and restore the credibility of the PA leadership and its strategy of negotiations.

However, the most significant step required in helping Israelis and Palestinians move away from conflict and towards an agreement would be securing a freeze to Israeli settlement activity. Recently revealed documents suggest that various ministries in Israel have been planning huge increases in settlement activity in coming months and years. This must be prevented in order to secure the credibility and viability of peace negotiations.

The settlements, by deepening the political and logistical difficulties in establishing a Palestinian state to live alongside Israel in peace with every expansion, are the greatest single threat to a peaceful future. They ensure that the conflict only deteriorates over time. United States can build on its strategic relationship with Israel to provide sufficient political space and incentives for the Israeli leadership to take this essential but politically difficult step.

It would be wrong to downplay the difficulties facing the quest for peace. But it would be even more shortsighted and wrong not to acknowledge that a peace agreement is crucial, not only to Israel and the Palestinians, but to American national interests as well, and that, if we do what we must now, it is not yet too late.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090309/ibish

Initial reaction to the surprising failure of the Israeli film Waltz
with Bashir to win this year’s Academy Award for best foreign-language
picture has suggested that it confronts harsh truths and painful
realities, especially about Israel, too unflinchingly for the
Hollywood mainstream to embrace. As a columnist for the Israeli
newspaper Ha’aretz put it, this year’s Oscars demonstrated that
“Hollywood knows exactly how it likes its Jews: Victims.” Waltz with
Bashir obviously provides little to feed that narrative. However, the
key to the film’s artistic merit is ironically more a function of its
failure than its success as an exercise in the recuperation of
intolerable memories and the reassertion of some sort of “truth” in
the face of psychic denial.

The film makes no overt claim to be an accurate historical account of
the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and is most certainly nothing of
the kind. Instead, it presents itself as a psychodrama focusing on the
long-term traumatic effects on some individual Israeli soldiers (and,
by definition, to some extent on Israeli society in general) of the
experience of the invasion.

Waltz with Bashir is an effort to interrogate the vagaries of human
memory and their role in the development of both personal and
collective narratives. It focuses especially on the distortions caused
by constructed and retrospective memories based on events that took
place long ago–even those that never happened at all and are only
imagined (but deeply believed)–and the important role they play in
the retrospective construction of these narratives. It is also an
extended rumination on the process of personal and historical
repression of memories, events and facts that are too painful to be
successfully incorporated into the personal narratives of
well-adjusted human beings and the collective narratives of
well-functioning societies, especially those that may be suffering
from subtle forms of post-traumatic syndrome. That apparently
inexplicable amnesias and constructed memories based on imaginary past
realities can come to define personal and collective narratives is,
essentially, the subject of the film.

Insofar as viewers take the film as a useful historical account of
what happened in 1982, it does a significant disservice to its
audience. The narrative is far too personal, fragmentary, subjective
and historically inaccurate to provide any coherent sense of what
happened either politically or militarily during the conflict.
However, the danger that it may be taken as such by ill-informed
audiences is significant and deeply unfortunate, and has been
encouraged by a marketing campaign that has promoted the idea that it
bravely and successfully recovers suppressed histories. At the same
time, the marketing of the film, at least in the United States, has
itself been anything but unflinching, systematically downplaying the
massacre that is at the heart of its narrative.

In its purported project of interrogating and clarifying the effects
of distorted and constructed memories and the power of repression,
both individual and collective, the film–at least at the surface
level–is a spectacular failure, since its narrative faithfully and
almost exhaustively reproduces all of these neurotic symptoms.

The war depicted in Waltz with Bashir bears little resemblance to the
exhaustively documented trajectory of the conflict as it actually
happened. The vast chunks of crucial missing history in the film, and
the lacunae regarding what Israel’s military unquestionably did during
the conflict, render it virtually meaningless as a historical document
and unmistakably neurotic.

One of the most striking acts of psychic and historical repression in
the film is its absolute disinterest in the effects of the war on the
people of Lebanon–who are represented mainly, if at all, as distant
shadows–with the exception of the massacre at the Palestinian camps,
which were only the culmination of one of the most destructive wars in
recent Middle Eastern history. Viewers of this movie will be left with
no sense at all of the astonishing scale of death and destruction the
invasion brought upon Lebanon and its people. An estimated 17,000
Lebanese were killed, many if not most of them civilians, and the
Israeli army caused over $2 billion in damage to property. There is no
gesture whatsoever to include the Lebanese people and their
experiences as humanized subjects in this film about a major war in
Lebanon. One almost gets the sense that, from the point of view of
this movie, if the massacre at the camps had not taken place, nothing
of abiding historical significance really took place in the summer of
1982.

The depiction of West Beirut in the film is a classic example of
absolutely fantastical constructed memories, particularly in its
depiction of ubiquitous portraits of Bashir Gemayel, whose iconography
was most certainly not to be found almost anywhere, let alone
everywhere, in that part of the city, which was the stronghold of
opposition to his Phalange party and militia. What is presented as a
painfully recovered memory is, in fact, a constructed memory of the
most symptomatic variety that has both personal and political
imperatives–and indeed that may be the point.

The film’s director, Ari Folman, recognizes that these processes may
be at work, most notably in his skillful explanation of how childhood
“memories” regarding events that never took place can be
retrospectively constructed in the individual psyche, and–although
entirely imaginary–even assume the role of defining moments in any
given, and perhaps every, narrative of a childhood. The passage in
which the principal Israeli soldier protagonist finds himself
wandering through the wreckage of the Beirut International Airport
imagining himself to be a traveler in a normal, well-functioning
airport on some sort of adventurous vacation, only to realize that
what he is traversing is in fact a devastated, bombed-out wasteland,
also hints at the extraordinary tricks of perception the mind can play
on itself both at the time, and, by implication, in retrospect, at the
command of a self-serving personal and collective imperative. The
gesture of making the movie as an animated documentary lends it a
surrealistic quality that further amplifies this alienating effect,
and creates additional space between the film as text and cinematic
experience, and the reality it purports to represent.

As for the treatment of the massacre at Sabra and Shatila, the film is
to be commended for its forthright, albeit often implicit, acceptance
of Israel’s responsibility for the carnage. In effect, it repeats the
finding of the official Israeli Kahan Commission of Inquiry, which
found Israel’s government and leaders to be “indirectly responsible”
for the massacre, particularly then-Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, who
was assigned “personal responsibility.” This concept of “indirect
responsibility” is expressed in the very title of the film, Waltz with
Bashir, which suggests a dangerous engagement with certain unsavory
elements in Lebanon, more than a calculated Israeli action that could
only have led directly to ghastly consequences.

The film acknowledges that Israel was in control of the area of the
camps, and that it made the deliberate and well-informed decision to
allow enraged and heavily armed followers of the recently assassinated
Gemayel and others direct access to the camps, and lit the night sky
continuously with flares in order to facilitate the killing. It is
also frank in acknowledging that Israeli officials were in early
possession of detailed information about the ongoing massacre and
chose to allow it to continue, presumably because they were fully
aware that this was the only possible outcome of their initial
decision to introduce ultra-right-wing Lebanese Christian forces into
the Palestinian refugee camps. Like the Kahan Commission, Waltz with
Bashir at least has the moral decency to repudiate the repulsive,
cynical and frankly racist comment of Israel’s prime minister at the
time, Menachem Begin, that “goyim kill goyim, and they blame the
Jews.”

But the missing element of the basic history of the invasion, in
which, in spite of an onslaught of incredibly destructive bombardment,
Israeli military efforts to enter Beirut were successfully repulsed by
the PLO and allied Lebanese forces, is still entirely repressed in
this narrative. So are the circumstances under which Gemayel was
“elected” (in effect at Israeli gunpoint) by the Lebanese parliament
as the president-elect, and the bitter history of the Lebanese civil
war, in which Israel was heavily implicated, that led up to the
invasion, election, assassination and the ghastly aftermath in the
camps.

It is not enough to say that the film does not purport to be a history
of Israel’s involvement in Lebanese politics, a history of the civil
war or anything of the kind. In effect, these telling omissions are a
conscious or unconscious act of historical denial as pathological as
any other interrogated in the film, since the central events
represented for Israel, Lebanon and the individual Israeli soldiers in
question cannot be understood in any meaningful sense without at least
a cursory acknowledgment of that essential context. To ascribe any
kind of personal or political “meaning” or to construct a coherent
“narrative” of these events absent this context is in itself an
exemplary act of psychic repression.

Another stunning omission is the complete absence of any account of
the evacuation of the PLO and its fighters from the camps, and from
Beirut in general in August, which set the stage for the massacre in
September. Under a US-brokered agreement, while the PLO left the
Palestinian civilians undefended, Israel promised not enter West
Beirut and the refugee camps around it. The notion, referenced in the
film, that the massacre could initially have been sincerely
rationalized as an effort to root out “terrorists” in the camps is, of
course, belied by the fact that the armed Palestinian factions had
already left Beirut, and that following the assassination of Gemayel,
Israel broke its word, seized control of the area and then allowed the
most bitter enemies of the Palestinians in Lebanon into the now
defenseless camps to do their worst.

One could go on listing the psychic repressions, historical omissions
and constructed and distorted memories that characterize so much of
what is missing (and some of what is included) in the film. But there
is no need. As an exercise in the recuperation of individual and
collective memory and the reassertion of an accurate account of
historical events, Waltz with Bashir is less of a cure than an index
of how these symptoms play themselves out over time at both the
individual and popular culture levels–especially when people are
traumatized by fear, guilt or shame.

Whether it is a sly effort to demonstrate the slipperiness of any
exercise in the recuperation of constructed memory and repressed
history, or an unwitting illustration of the ineluctable cunning of
self-deception, the filmmakers have succeeded admirably in revealing a
universal fallibility of human psychology. If this film is viewed as a
frustrated, thwarted or self-defeated effort–no matter how
sincere–to overcome psychic distortions, mental blockages, historical
and personal repression, and what the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish
once called a “memory for forgetfulness,” then it is an entirely
successful and highly instructive project.

Waltz with Bashir must be read against the grain of its own marketing
as an exemplary instance of the impossibility of overcoming the
inexhaustible human reliance on psychic distortions and imagined
realities that allow us to avoid, or cope with, the pain of
intolerable truths.

The marauding pack of dogs (vengeful specters of the watchdogs an
Israeli soldier was assigned to kill during assaults on Lebanese
villages in the early stages of the invasion) that chase and attack
during the harrowing and dreamlike opening sequence of the film has
not been exorcised in any sense at its conclusion. Vicious hounds of
repressed memory, with an animalistic and primal wrath, plainly
continue to haunt the narrative, and the individual and collective
psyches represented, as much at the end of the film as at its
beginning.

The only useful lesson Waltz with Bashir can teach any viewer is never
to ask who those terrifying dogs are chasing: they are always chasing
you.

www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-perspec0125gazajan25,0,4432524.story

The conflict in Gaza has the potential of becoming a transformative
political event in the Middle East that allows Islamists to capture
the Arab political imagination for at least a generation. Along with
familiar appeals to religious and cultural “authenticity,” and dubious
claims regarding good governance and democracy, Islamists are
beginning to consolidate an exclusive claim to the most powerful Arab
political symbols: Palestine and nationalism.

Few observers in the West evince a full understanding of the
unprecedented cultural and political impact of Israel’s attack on
Gaza. The extraordinarily high civilian death toll and perceived
helplessness of the victims, combined with atrocities such as the
reported massacres at a UN school, and Israel’s apparent use of
phosphorus munitions in densely populated areas, paint the most
enraging images Arab television audiences have witnessed.

Although Arab public opinion has been aroused by several other
conflicts in recent decades, until now no hegemonic narrative has
given coherent shape and political focus to this anger. During the
Gaza war, we seem to have been witnessing the consolidation in most
Arab media and political discourse of a coherent narrative that
contains a prescription and a diagnosis: the Martyrs versus the
Traitors.

In this mythology, the present Arab world is defined by a conflict
between “the Martyrs,” led by the Islamist movement and its allies,
and “the Traitors,” which include most if not all Arab governments,
especially the Palestinian Authority, but also the governments in
Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The public, especially when
it becomes swept up in violent conflict, is counted among the ranks of
the Martyrs, but Islamist parties and militias are its vanguard.

Even if many in the West perceive Hamas to be fundamentally at fault
in the conflict, questions of responsibility for initiating the
fighting in the Arab political conversation have become an affront to
the dead and injured. Every outrage simply adds further anger, a
powerful form of political capital, to the Islamist account. They
serve to identify ordinary people, and their basic interests, with the
Islamist movement and underscore the righteous victimization of the
Martyrs as a category.

What gives this narrative its unique appeal and danger is its obvious
programmatic corollary: The Martyrs must defeat the Traitors, for the
nationalistic cause in general, and for Palestine in particular. The
Palestinian issue could become a decisive factor in internal power
struggles within states throughout the Arab world, and prove the
decisive legitimating factor in the frustrated efforts by Islamist
groups in the Sunni Arab world to capture or inherit state power.

This narrative has been developing in Arab political discourse for
many years and is based on long-standing resentments, but perceptions
regarding the war in Gaza—skillfully managed from the outset by those
pushing the Martyrs versus the Traitors mythology—could be sufficient
to establish it as the defining Arab political narrative for the
foreseeable future. Islamists are increasingly garnering support not
only from the devout Muslim constituency, but also to an unprecedented
degree from Arab nationalists in general, including many
self-described secularists, leftists and Christians.

Whether this narrative becomes hegemonic will not be decided by the
outcome of the war. It will instead rest upon the contrast between
what is offered by Hamas’ commitment to confrontation until victory
versus the Palestinian Authority’s policy of seeking a negotiated
agreement with Israel.

Even death and devastation in Gaza, but in the guise of religiously
and culturally authentic resistance, will be more appealing than
stagnation, failure and apparent surrender in the West Bank. Avoiding
this means not only moving immediately to improve the quality of life
in the West Bank, but also securing a settlement freeze that
constitutes significant political victories for those who wish to talk
rather than fight.

The most significant battle will be waged in the upcoming 12 to 18
months, when Palestinians and other Arabs will be carefully drawing
the contrast between the two approaches, especially with regard to
nationalist goals.

If the Palestinian cause is permanently lost to the Islamist movement,
theocratic reactionaries across the region could finally acquire the
broad political legitimacy and nationalist credentials that might well
enable them to begin to seriously threaten existing governments.

The United States and Israel must now choose which Palestinians, and
indeed what kind of Arab world, they want to deal with: one in which
forces of moderation have a fighting chance to rebuild political
legitimacy and credibility, or one in which the political imagination
is completely dominated by the myth of the Martyrs versus Traitors.

http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/015_03/2749

American foreign policy in the Middle East has reached one of those moments at which almost everyone agrees that things are going badly but no one can agree what to do about it. Passionate disputes regarding the American approach toward Iran make this lack of consensus abundantly plain. On one extreme, neoconservatives such as Norman Podhoretz demand war with Iran at once, some even saying it is long overdue. On the other side, a growing chorus, both liberal and conservative, argues that war with Iran is not an option given its high costs and limited benefits; instead, they counsel containment or a foreign policy aimed at rapprochement. The second-term Bush administration, especially since the departure of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, has steered an ambiguous course. White House and State Department officials have hewed to the bellicose rhetoric of “not taking anything off the table” and have maintained a heavy military presence in the Persian Gulf—but they have also engaged Iran in direct negotiations on Iraq, as well as multiparty nuclear talks, and are seriously considering opening an interests section (i.e., a sub-embassy permanent diplomatic presence) in Tehran to station US diplomats there for the first time since the 1979–81 hostage crisis.

Former CIA officer Robert Baer comes down firmly in the accommodationist camp in his new book, The Devil We Know. The only alternative to acknowledging Iran as a major power in the Middle East, he argues, is a protracted, costly, and probably unsuccessful struggle to eliminate its influence in the region. He is largely correct about the big picture: Iran has long shed its revolutionary fervor in pursuit of power and regional hegemony (which Baer plausibly describes as imperialism). And he provides a reasonably acute description of the evolving strategy that Iran has developed, beginning with its involvement in southern Lebanon in the 1980s, to bring “order out of chaos” and to promote its influence through strategically positioned proxies.

Unfortunately, in the details, The Devil We Know is a prodigious mess, lurching from lucid observation to hyperbole to factual error. To make his case, Baer distorts Iran’s successes and regional clout—for example, he asserts that “the Iranians have effectively annexed the entire south, fully one third of Iraq.” It’s hard to overstate Iranian influence in Iraq, but Baer manages to do so. Indeed, the book’s very title is an overheated exaggeration: Iran is an emerging regional force, not a “superpower.” Such overstatements undercut the logic of Baer’s own argument—for if Iran has arrived at superpower status already, what incentives would it have for accommodation with the West?

And then there are the howlers. According to Baer, in Arabic a kafir is “an atheist,” rather than a misbeliever or infidel. The fifteen Saudi 9/11 hijackers are laughably described, via an approving quote from a former aide to the Ayatollah Khomeini, as “the most Americanized Saudis, the crème de la crème of Saudi society.” Sunnis lack discipline, he asserts, because they have no pope. The savior figure known as the Mahdi is bizarrely said to have originated from a prophecy by Zoroaster, where it is actually a (mainly Shiite) Muslim concept from an entirely different era and source. And so on.

Still, Baer’s broader case for engaging Iran is a welcome reality check in a field of foreign-policy debate given to far more damaging—and often delusional—errors and exaggeration. He maintains, on solid empirical grounds, that Iran’s present strategy does not rely on developing a nuclear weapon, a view consistent with the National Intelligence Estimate late last year that held that Iran halted its military nuclear program in 2003. Just as important, Baer is able—unlike many top policy makers in the Bush era—to identify the central factor justifying Iran’s regional ambitions and rationalizing its self-image as a force for justice: the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Palestine, he writes, is “an essential vehicle for dominion over the Arabs” and gives Iranian hegemony a cause “bigger than itself,” since “without the Palestinians, Iran is just another country with raw territorial ambition.” Baer wisely urges the United States to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and end the occupation, “taking it away from Iran as a rallying cry.”

That point, of course, opens onto perhaps an even more divisive, epically unresolved item on the foreign-policy establishment’s Middle East agenda. It is beyond dispute that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict inflicts great damage on American interests throughout the Middle East and beyond. But what exactly the United States can and should do about it is another question entirely. In The Much Too Promised Land, Aaron David Miller supplies an indispensable guide to the recent history of American peacemaking efforts in the defining conflict of the Middle East. Miller spent almost twenty years at the forefront of US negotiating efforts and describes in detail his own journey from a nay-saying “Dr. No,” to an overenthusiastic “Dr. Yes,” to finally, as he puts it, settling for “something in between.” That leaves him acutely aware of the crucial importance of the issue but equally haunted by the obstacles to resolving it.

Miller’s book combines nuanced and careful analysis of successes (he lists Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, and James Baker as the only three American diplomats who were able to find ways of making progress) with unsparing—and often self-directed—criticism of failures. Through a litany of usually dispiriting anecdotes illustrating how delicate, and fraught, the US-brokered peace negotiations have been, Miller retains a hardheaded determination for the United States to press forward. As he convincingly argues, “the Arab-Israeli issue is now more vital to our national interests, and to our security, than at any time since the late 1940s.” Like Baer, Miller recognizes that a stalemated status quo in Palestine hands an invaluable weapon to American enemies like al-Qaeda and rivals like Iran. It is, surely, impossible to disagree with Miller when he argues that “to ignore or address ineffectively an issue that fuels so much rage and anger against us is irresponsible in the extreme.”

Miller knows, from his long tenure at the Department of State, that there are few realistic expectations under current circumstances for a dramatic US-backed breakthrough in assembling a lasting peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians. But he’s also aware that the United States cannot afford to walk away—either for the sake of its own interests or to help promote some desperately needed stability and social progress in the region. After he left government service, Miller published an op-ed in the Washington Post arguing that American diplomatic efforts were often fatally flawed, especially at the 2000 Camp David talks, when the United States assumed the position of “Israel’s lawyer.” He reiterates the point here but also emphasizes that the United States needs to clearly delineate and aggressively pursue its own interests in advancing a peace accord, and thereby actively avoid creating the impression of being a compromised advocate for either Israel or the Palestinians.

Some neoconservatives and others argue that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is a sideshow, which America can effectively ignore as it attends to other crises in the Middle East. After all, they argue, an Israeli-Palestinian end-of-conflict agreement would not solve all the problems in the region—the war in Iraq would continue, al-Qaeda and its ideology would not evaporate, democracy would not suddenly blossom. But from very different vantages, both Baer and Miller have seconded the view that’s long been apparent to nearly every sensible observer of the Middle East: Ending this conflict, and the occupation that drives it, would do more to advance American aims in the region than any other achievable development. And as is equally obvious in this dangerous part of the world, simply allowing the conflict to fester is a tremendous gift to both our enemies and our rivals.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/08/barackobama.islam

http://www.thisweekinpalestine.com/details.php?id=2410&edid=151

The Palestinian-American community is a large, vibrant, and increasingly important component of American life; it constitutes a significant bridge between the Middle East and the United States. Palestinian Americans are among the most active Arab Americans and are deeply conscious of their heritage and their engagement with Palestine, the Palestinian people, and their national aspirations.

The precise size of the community is the subject of some speculation and debate since, like Arab Americans in general, Palestinians are simply classified as “white” in most U.S. Census Bureau statistics. In 2000, the Bureau attempted for the first time to measure the Arab-American and Palestinian presence through the “long form” used by a small minority of respondents, and concluded from this very limited data that there were 72,112 Palestinian Americans living in the United States. Other estimates differ, with the Arab American Institute Foundation counting 252,000 and the Palestinian American Council estimating 179,000.

As with many other Arab Americans, Palestinian immigration to the United States began in earnest at the end of the 19th century. Arab immigrants were a significant part of The Great Migration, the period in U.S. history between 1880 and 1924, when more than 20 million immigrants entered the country. Most of these immigrants originated in southern and eastern Europe, but more than 95,000 Arabs came from present-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine.

By 1924, there were approximately 200,000 Arab Americans living in the United States, many of them with origins in Palestine. They settled all over the country, often first peddling wares door-to-door before opening shops and businesses. They established companies, founded newspapers, created social clubs, and assimilated into American life while preserving aspects of Arab and Palestinian culture. Many proudly served the United States in the armed forces during the first and second world wars and in subsequent conflicts.

A second wave of Palestinian immigration came after 1967, when many Palestinians sought opportunity in the United States as well as refuge from war, oppression, exile, and dispossession in the Middle East.

Mohammed Issa Abu Al-Hawa was one of the first Palestinian, Arab, Muslim immigrants to the United States. In 1902, 15-year-old Mohammed left his hometown, Tur, on the Mount of Olives, just outside Jerusalem. His long, detoured journey to America took him from Tur to Jaffa to Port Said in Egypt, then to Singapore, Bombay, and Southampton, England. Finally, on November 7, 1904, Mohammed reached New York City and, at Ellis Island, entered the United States, renaming himself A. Joseph Howar.

Like many other Arab immigrants, Howar began to work as a salesman and then opened a successful clothing store. He soon found his way into what would become his life’s work – the building trade in and around Washington, D.C.

Over many decades, Howar constructed some of the most recognizable structures in our nation’s capital, especially many well-known apartment buildings, including the first high-rise apartment house in Virginia. But the project that left perhaps the most lasting impact on the city was the construction of the Islamic Center mosque on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C. In 1943, along with the ambassador of Egypt, Howar helped found and provide early funding to a committee to build a major mosque in the U.S. capital. In 1948, Howar, placing a silver dollar on the ground for luck, began work at the site. The mosque was completed in 1954 and dedicated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on June 28, 1957.

In spite of his many achievements in the new world and his extremely effective assimilation into the business and social life of Washington, Howar never forgot his homeland, Palestine, and provided a mosque, a school, and a cemetery for his native town, Tur.

In 1911, another early Palestinian immigrant to the United States, Wadie Ibrahim, made his way from Haifa to Port Said, to Liverpool in northern England, and from there to New York City. After working as a salesman and taking classes at Western Reserve University, Wadie signed up for the American Expeditionary Forces that entered World War I and, along with hundreds of thousands of other American so-called “doughboys,” served in France under General Pershing.

After the war, Wadie returned to Cleveland, Ohio, and went into business with his older brother, Assad – also known as “Al.” Though fiercely proud of his World War I service and his U.S. citizenship, Wadie, now renamed William A. Said, returned to Palestine and married. There, along with his older cousin, Boulos Said, he established the Palestine Educational Company and, later, the Standard Stationary Company. Wadie managed the several branches in Egypt.

The Saids, though Palestinians in every respect, saw themselves and lived as the family of an American businessman in Egypt. However, Wadie and his wife made sure that all their children were born in Jerusalem. One of these children, young Edward, would grow into one of the most prominent and influential figures in the Palestinian-American community. After schooling in Cairo and Jerusalem, the Saids sent Edward on a journey of American education, beginning at Northfield Mount Hermon prep school in Massachusetts and then on to Princeton and Harvard.

Following his appointment as professor at Columbia University, Edward Said took his place among the most influential literary theorists and critics in the world and became a major figure in the humanities. He was a passionate supporter of Palestinian human and national rights and a long-serving member of the Palestinian National Council. When he passed away in September 2003, he was celebrated as one of the leading intellectuals of his time, a founding figure in postcolonial theory, and one of the most important figures in introducing and explicating the Palestinian national narrative and experience to Western audiences.

As these examples suggest, the Palestinian-American story contains a much-neglected story of success and contribution that stands in contrast to the more familiar narrative of dispossession, exile, and occupation that dominates both the generalized and particular self-perception of the Palestinian story. Like Prof. Edward Said, there have been countless Palestinian Americans who have made major contributions to American life in fields as diverse as the arts and sciences, academia, business, politics, and sports.

One of the most prominent Palestinian-American families hails from New Hampshire and has made a lasting mark in American political life through leadership in the Republican Party. John H. Sununu was born in Havana, Cuba, to Palestinian parents who immigrated to the United States. After a successful career as an engineer in business and academia, he served three consecutive terms as governor of New Hampshire. He then served as the first White House Chief of Staff for President George H. W. Bush, serving from 1989 to 1991, which is probably the most prominent political position yet achieved by a Palestinian American. He went on to co-host CNN’s nightly Crossfire debate programme from March 1992 until February 1998. 

His son, John E. Sununu, is currently a Republican senator from New Hampshire who previously spent three terms in the House of Representatives. He represents the second generation of Sununus prominent in American political life. Both are actively engaged with the Palestinian-American community and proud of their heritage.

In addition to Prof. Said, a number of Palestinian-American academics have made significant contributions to scholarship in the United States. Among the most prominent of these in the sciences is Mujid Kazimi, who is TEPCO Professor of Nuclear Engineering and Director of the Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems (CANES) at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Others have taken a lead in developing the understanding of the Palestinian experience and relations between Palestinians and other Arabs and the West. The celebrated sociologist Ibrahim Abu Lughod devoted most of his professional life to this cause and was described by Prof. Said as “Palestine’s foremost academic and intellectual,” though he lived and taught in the United States. He was among the leading figures during the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s and 1980s who were engaged in developing and defining an Arab-American identity that would lead to the formation of a distinct political interest group within American society.

Two prominent Palestinian-American historians, Walid Khalidi and Rashid Khalidi, have pioneered the work of documenting contemporary Palestinian history and national identity. Among his many powerful works, Walid Khalidi’s two books, Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic History of the Palestinians, 1876-1948 (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1984) andAll That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992) are two of the most invaluable studies ever published to reinforce the details of the society destroyed in the process of the creation of Israel. Rashid Khalidi’sPalestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness(Columbia University Press, 1997) is perhaps the most detailed study of the development of Palestinian political consciousness; and his more recent work The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Beacon Press, 2006) unsentimentally chronicles the failures of Palestinian leadership in the thus-far frustrated effort to establish an independent Palestinian state.

Other noted Palestinian Americans include the late political scientist Hisham Sharabi, the celebrated poet Naomi Shihab Nye, basketball star Rony Seikaly, and the ‘oud and violin virtuoso and composer Simon Shaheen.

Palestinian Americans such as Abu Lughod, Said, and others were instrumental in the establishment and development of the first Arab-American political organisations such as the Arab-American University Graduates (AAUG) and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC). Over time, however, along with active participation in the broader Arab-American community, Palestinian Americans have been increasingly developing their own distinct organisations, both social and political.

Numerous social organisations have emerged in the Palestinian-American community based on town and village of origin that bring people of common ancestry throughout the country together, mainly for social, cultural, and philanthropic purposes. The largest of these, the American Federation of Ramallah, Palestine, is also one of the biggest Arab-American organisations of any kind. Among the most noteworthy Palestinian-American philanthropic organisations is the United Palestinian Appeal, founded in 1978, which has raised and distributed millions of dollars in charitable aid in Palestine, and which works closely with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in humanitarian projects to benefit the Palestinian people.

Several distinctly Palestinian-American political organisations have emerged in recent decades, including the Palestinian American Congress among others. In 2003 the American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP) was formed to give a voice to those Palestinian Americans who wished to speak for themselves and express their support for an end to the conflict in the Middle East based on two states – Israel and Palestine – living side by side in peace.

The organisation’s approach represents a paradigm shift in advocacy for Palestine in the United States: it fully embraces its American identity, and its mission is to advocate for the establishment of a Palestinian state by using the argument that it would be in the United States’ national interest rather than using the traditional appeal to justice, human rights, and international law.

ATFP seeks to engage the policy conversation in Washington as it actually exists and to develop close ties to both U.S. and Palestinian national leadership. The Task Force’s headway in achieving this aim was perhaps most dramatically demonstrated at its first annual gala in 2006, when the keynote speaker, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, told the audience, “there could be no greater legacy for America than to help to bring into being a Palestinian state.”

The Task Force has also sought to redefine the perception of Palestinians and Palestinian Americans in Washington and the rest of the country by celebrating the contributions of Palestinians in the United States and their successes and achievements. It is currently working on developing a national coalition to support the two-state solution to the conflict, which seeks to bring together Arab, Jewish, and other American organisations which, for whatever reason, support an end to the occupation and a life of peace and security for those who live side by side in Palestine and Israel.

Another recent development in the United States has been the emergence, mainly on university campuses, of a perspective that opposes Palestinian statehood and supports instead a single state to replace both Israel and Palestine. Leading voices in this camp include Prof. Joseph Massad, of Columbia University, Ali Abunimah, and other contributors to his Electronic Intifada website. Recent years have witnessed increasingly acrimonious disputes between one-state and two-state advocates within the Palestinian-American community.

Whereas some see these and other divisions as disturbing, others argue that they reflect a healthy and dynamic community that has long-since moved beyond simplistic forms of solidarity and unity for unity’s sake, and is capable of reflecting a wide diversity of views, perspectives and experiences.

With the rise of Arab-American comedians in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, hip, wry, and incisive performers such as Maysoon Zayid, Dean Obeidallah, and Aaron Kader have pioneered yet another positive and engaging role for young Palestinian Americans and helped their fellow citizens deal with the anxieties and concerns of the era of the “war on terror.” Through this new form of engagement with American popular culture in comedy, music, and other arts, Palestinian Americans are more engaged than ever and are proactively building a distinctive, non-derivative identity that moves beyond traditions, slogans, and stereotypes.

The Palestinian-American future would appear to be bright and on a definite upswing, with the increasing number of prominent Palestinians in various aspects of American life who are transforming Palestinian identity, once associated simply with images of downtrodden refugees and political radicalism, into one that is respectable and respected by most other Americans.

http://archives.chicagotribune.com/2007/dec/05/opinion/chi-oped1205teddydec05