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

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Commentary/Sep/14/Defend-the-Palestinian-cause-against-its-most-unreasonable-supporters.ashx

The conflict that has developed between Fatah and Hamas poses new and unprecedented challenges for supporters of the Palestinian cause. A rational response to this crisis should focus on reformulating a viable strategy for ending the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. The only serious prospect for ending the conflict and gaining independence for the Palestinian people is a negotiated solution to the occupation and the creation of a Palestinian state.

To work effectively toward that aim, there is no need for supporters of Palestine to become partisans of Fatah. However, important choices need to be made and there are serious consequences to words and deeds.

In the United States a small but vocal group of left-wing commentators has reacted by defending Hamas and heaping vitriol on Fatah. However well-intentioned, their rhetoric, or more significantly what it advocates, might significantly undermine efforts to help to end the occupation.

Such support for the Muslim far right is symptomatic of a broad trend in Arab leftist circles. Some in the Arab left have, in effect, abandoned many of the left’s traditional values, including class analysis and a materialist program for social change, secularism and iconoclasm, feminism and the cause of women’s rights, and internationalism. What remains intact is Arab nationalism, suspicion of the West, and hatred of Israel.

There are still many honorable pockets of bona fide leftist thinking in the Arab world. However, some Arab leftists now find themselves reading politics mainly through the lens of ethnic nationalism, an orientation now dominated by Islamist organizations. Thus, Islamist groups can seem appealing to those on the left. What gets lost or ignored in the process is the far right’s reactionary, repressive and theocratic agenda.

In the United States, the most strident of these voices are Columbia University professor Joseph Massad, Asaad AbuKhalil of California State University, Stanislaus, and Ali Abunimah and others writing on the Electronic Intifada Web site.

Massad has drawn an extended analogy comparing Hamas to the deposed and murdered Chilean leftist President Salvador Allende, and Fatah to the fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet. When someone on the left starts looking at Khaled Meshaal and seeing Salvador Allende, their moral and political compass may be so badly broken that there is little hope for them to ever find their way back. Similarly, Abunimah has repeatedly compared Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization to the Nicaraguan Contras, arguing: “These are Palestinian Contras.”

Rather than seeing the obvious shortcomings on both sides, these writers insist that the fault line is between a gang of traitors on the one hand and the defenders of Palestine on the other.

Massad has passionately defended Hamas’ extremely violent takeover of the Gaza Strip, for example, claiming that Fatah had “pushed it into a corner in the hope of slaughtering all its leadership in Gaza” and that, therefore, Hamas “could not but defend itself against their final onslaught.” In May 2006, AbuKhalil urged Hamas to “to pre-empt their enemies if they want to rule,” anticipating the bloody scenes in Gaza over a year later. And Abunimah has gone so far as to accuse Fatah of waging a “war against the Palestinian people.”

Massad takes every opportunity to suggest that Hamas and democracy are organically linked, declaring that “the supporters of Hamas, whether believers or atheists or secularists or Islamists, are the supporters of the real Palestinian democracy because Hamas’ struggle is a struggle against dictatorial traitors (under the legal definition of treason).” However, when it was obvious that Mahmoud Abbas was about to be elected Palestinian president in January 2005, Abunimah’s Web site published several articles questioning the possibility of democracy under occupation and arguing that “the elections are a liability for the Palestinians.”

Electronic Intifada then published “The False Promise of Western Democracy,” which claimed that the election of Abbas “added to a growing worldwide skepticism about Western notions of democracy (i.e. institutionalized suffrage, parliamentary procedures, etc.).” The article affirmed that “the value of Western democracy is questionable for the Palestinian people” and condemned the international community for “an invasive imposition of democratic practices” on the Palestinians.

There were no articles to this effect following the Hamas parliamentary victory.

The rationalization many of these commentators offer to explain Palestinian support for Fatah and opposition to Hamas is that it is the fruit of willful wickedness and greed. Singled out for special condemnation has been the beloved Palestinian

poet Mahmoud Darwish, who Massad frankly accuses of being an intellectual prostitute: “Perhaps Mahmoud Darwish’s recent poem in support of the coup published on the front page of the Saudi newspaper Al-Hayat, can be explained by the monthly checks he receives from the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority, and he is not alone.”

AbuKhalil claims that Darwish supports Fatah only because the “Oslo regime gave him a nice house in Ramallah.” He added that, “I expect [Darwish] to declare [Israeli Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert the ‘knight of Zionism’ any day now,” and that Darwish’s recent poetry reading in Haifa was properly translated as: “I want Nobel. Please give me Nobel. I really want Nobel. Please give it to me NOW. If you give me Nobel, I will keep repeating that Arabs are in love with Israeli nuclear weapons.”

These hyperbolic and hyper-personalized attacks on Darwish typify the approach to Palestinian politics that has been developed by some leftist and secular defenders of Hamas. These accusations can border on incitement to violence. What is to be done to those condemned, as Massad put it, “under the legal definition of treason?”

The Palestinian public, in contrast, has had the good sense to blame both sides – Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. Majorities urge reconciliation and continue to support an end to the conflict based on a negotiated agreement leading to the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Public opinion also continues to give an edge to Fatah over Hamas to an increasing degree, based on the most recent polls that showed 48 percent support for Fatah and 31 percent backing for Hamas.

Abunimah has suggested, “We know what Hamas is against, but no one is clear what it is for.” In fact, Hamas has been very clear and consistent that its aim is to establish an Islamic state, according to the model of the Muslim Brotherhood, in all of Mandatory Palestine. It also seeks to “Islamize” Palestinian society along ultraconservative Salafist lines.

After its election victory, Hamas was urged to renounce deliberate attacks against civilians, abide by the treaty obligations undertaken by its predecessors, and express a willingness to negotiate an end to the Israeli occupation based on mutual recognition with Israel in accordance with international law. Hamas adamantly refused to take any such steps, preferring to stick with its already well-established positions.

Those presently inclined to be sympathetic to Hamas need to step back and ask themselves: Are we really laboring to support the creation of another theocracy in the Middle East? Would we want to live in such a society? Is that what liberation looks like?

The suicide bombing campaigns have done more than anything else to harm the Palestinian cause in the eyes of the world, unify Israelis, and give them a false sense that the occupation is some kind of self-defense necessity. That is a gift that no occupier should ever be granted. Nor are we even mentioning the corrosive effect that the ideology and rhetoric of “martyrdom” has had on Palestinian society. There are limitations on what is acceptable in the pursuit of freedom.

Fatah also has serious problems, not only with corruption and cronyism but also with incompetence, disunity and a history of poor management of Palestinian diplomacy. It is obviously no model of democracy either.

Abbas has demonstrated an unshakable dedication to the goal of establishing a viable and independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, a principled position that has required both personal and political courage. However, he has proven an uninspiring leader, lacks charisma and has been systematically undermined by Israel.

Nonetheless, Fatah’s approach at least offers the possibility of a negotiated agreement with Israel and the development of a secular state. In order to achieve an end to the occupation, Palestinians must come to an agreement with the Israelis, just as in order to have peace and security Israel must make a deal with the Palestinians.

The real alternative is not some utopian reconciliation and post-nationalist bliss, but rather unending conflict and untold suffering. Friends of Palestine in the US must be clear about the principles that inform their activism. If people are genuinely in sympathy with the aims and methods of Hamas, then that is one thing; but those of us who seek first to end the occupation and then support the development of a democratic and pluralistic Palestinian state have to hold firm to those commitments. Dismissing those who maintain these important values and goals as “diplomatic fronts” or “Washington lobbies” for narrow Palestinian political factions, or most preposterously as “neoconservatives,” is beneath contempt.

An approach that simply condemns Israel and the US, now lamentably extended to include, and even focus on, other Palestinians and Arabs, is trapped in the limitations of its own negativity. By offering nothing of positive value, this method functions as a terribly weak argument for ending the occupation. Any successful approach to pro-Palestinian advocacy in the United States should therefore emphasize the benefits to the United States, and indeed to Israel, of freedom for the Palestinian people. The Palestinians cannot achieve their aims without international backing that applies pressure on Israel and that provides the context and support that a workable agreement and a fledgling state would obviously require. This is why Hamas’ policies that reject international law outright are so damaging to the Palestinian cause.

Therefore, building international support to end the occupation must be the principal aim above all in the US. The single greatest tool for this that Palestinian- and Arab-Americans have is their citizenship. Their primary task is to engage the political system nationally and the policy conversation as it is taking place in Washington. A politically receivable message is urgently required. This could emphasize the benefits to American policy goals in the region generally, reducing the appeal of anti-American extremism in the region, enhancing the US role as a responsible world leader, the promotion of American values such as independence and citizenship, and economic benefits to the region and to the US.

Friends of Palestine must also help build up a serious coalition to end the Israeli occupation. The motivations for such support are irrelevant, as are differences on other issues.

Jewish-and Arab-Americans who are serious about peace also need to develop functional working relationships. I do not mean here simply groups friendly to Israel that nevertheless oppose the occupation on moral grounds, but also those that wish to end it simply for practical purposes. Israel has every reason, in pursuit of its own manifest self-interest, to come to reasonable terms with the Palestinians; and its American supporters have every reason to encourage it to do so, even though not everyone has fully comprehended this yet.

If we say we want the same thing, we should at least try to call each other’s bluff and test the waters, rather than conclude from the outset that it is inconceivable that self-interest might actually bring friends of Palestine and Israel to the same place at the same time, with the real potential for mutual benefit.

Palestinian-Americans have to recognize that their traditional approaches have failed and see the poverty and pointlessness of a purely negative agenda of condemnation without positive content. The keys to success are to take much better advantage of our status as Americans, develop new and effective forms of advocacy, and forge the alliances that can actually achieve results.

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Commentary/May/19/Is-Arab-American-irrelevance-our-goal.ashx#axzz2axJWowPa

What was amazing in the response to the much-publicized recent paper written by Steven Walt and John Mearsheimer on the influence of the pro- Israel lobby on American foreign policy was not the chorus of condemnations from Israel’s supporters, but similar criticism from some on the Arab-American left.

The paper, a set of fairly obvious observations about the workings of one of the most influential centers of power in Washington, combined with a few debatable claims and a couple of minor errors, should have produced little comment. But given the atmosphere of intimidation in political and academic circles regarding Israel, its publication created a firestorm.

The response from the pro-Israel right was predictable. “[T]here is no Israel lobby” one noted pundit thundered. Another called it “worse than the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion.'”

The preposterous argument offered by some pro-Israel commentators is that hundreds of millions of dollars, innumerable man-hours and relentless organizing at every level of society, over many decades, has had no significant role in producing the staunchly Israel-centric American policies of recent years – allegedly no more than natural expressions of Americans’ love of Israel. An insult to one’s intelligence, this proposition holds that the intended effect was not produced by its putative cause.

If this were true, then the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is not a great political force but a remarkable fraud and confidence trick: millions of unsuspecting Jewish Americans and their friends have been bilked by unscrupulous grifters continuously begging for money on the false pretense that it is needed to consolidate the U.S.-Israel relationship. Call the cops!

But surely no serious person would believe that. Would they?

Enter some Arab-American commentators, stage left. Joseph Massad of Columbia University and Asaad Abu Khalil of Californian State University, Stanislaus, have dismissed the Walt-Mearsheimer paper and agree that the pro-Israel lobby is basically irrelevant.

In a widely-circulated article in Al-Ahram Weekly, Massad agued that the real problem was the “imperial policies” of the United States, which exist independently of the influence of the pro-Israel lobby. There are surely American imperial interests that have been pursued in very damaging ways in the Arab and post-colonial worlds. But Massad does not attempt to explain how, why, or by whom these interests are defined, except that he is sure the lobby has virtually no role in it.

Such arguments are deterministic, a-historical, and profoundly disempowering. This thinking has led the Arab-American community to largely exclude itself from the political system, ensuring its own irrelevance in shaping political behavior, while also granting the pro-Israel lobby an open field without any substantial opposition.

One finds here a profound ignorance of, or more precisely complete disinterest in, the process of American policy-making as it actually takes place. There is no sense that the U.S. government is the sum of its constituent parts that vie for influence in a system designed precisely to be lobbied if any faction seeks to effect policy and law.

In place of these mundane realities are the amorphous “imperial policies” described by Massad in the language of a divine absolute, floating above a Kabuki-show political fray. His is a simplistic version of American politics in which power is exercised in an automatic and irresistible manner by an imperial hidden hand – a caricature of the old Marxist idea of a social superstructure.

This argument cannot account for the development of American policy toward Israel, unless one accepts that American interests in the Middle East have independently evolved in almost perfect concert with the growing size, competency, and entrenched power of the pro-Israel lobby.

Take Israel’s forced withdrawal from Suez in 1956, followed by its French-supported victory in the 1967 war, the development of a military technology-transfer regime with the Nixon administration, the closer embrace under President Ronald Reagan, and the almost complete convergence of U.S. and Israeli policies under President Bill Clinton and his successor George W. Bush; is the movement toward the later developments better accounted for by changes in the international climate than by the gradual and painstaking development of political influence thanks to the efforts of a highly focused ethnic lobby and its allies? Did the removal of a number of key legislators in the late 1970s and early 1980s and the defeat of President George H.W. Bush, who confronted Israel over settlements, (all major scalps claimed by AIPAC) mean nothing? Is the adoption in recent years of Israel as the main issue for a well-organized fundamentalist Christian right irrelevant?

As the Walt-Mearsheimer paper points out, Arab-Americans have, for the most part, sat on the sidelines rather than engage the political system, unlike the pro-Israel lobby. After all, why would any politician care what a group that doesn’t seriously participate, or contribute its time or money in a substantial or coordinated way, have to say?

If Walt and Mearsheimer are right, then Arab-Americans have been a big part of the problem by opting out of the give and take of politics and refusing to challenge their opponents or provide cover for and support their friends. If, on the other hand, Massad and Abu Khalil are right and American policies are not the products of the social forces brought to bear on political institutions, but instead follow the dictates of an ineluctable and ineffable imperial imperative, then what’s the point?

And here, surely, lies the appeal of this analysis beyond the confines of the ultra-left: it lets both Arabs and Jews off the hook, frees them from their rivalry, and places “the blame,” as Massad puts it, on “the United States,” an entity that bears no resemblance to the sum of its parts. It’s very convenient as an argument, but also completely wrong.

We Arab-Americans have failed ourselves and our Arab brethren through self-imposed alienation from American politics. While substantial efforts are required and obstacles must be overcome, there is nothing preventing Arab-Americans from serious political engagement, or from having a major impact on U.S. foreign policy, except a tradition of ignoring our own interests and being seduced by beguiling pseudo-revolutionary excuses.

The late Edward Said warned against “sitting back blaming ‘the Arabs’ since, after all, we are the Arabs,” and we all play a role in defining our social and political condition. It is high time for Arab-Americans to embrace the fact that we are also, in exactly the same sense, “the Americans.”

Far from blaming “the United States,” we need to roll up our sleeves, assert the full spectrum of our rights as citizens within our political system, and take responsibility for helping to shape our government’s policies.