Category: News

In an unpublished lecture from 2008, Rob Malley, the new Iran envoy, wrestles with his father’s legacy of Arabist anti-imperialism.  An introduction by Peter Beinart provides additional commentary.

By Robert Malley |  Jewish Currents  |  Feb 4, 2021

My father was, dare I say, an awakened Arab or one who, at a minimum, awoke in me an interest in his part of the world.

THE ONE THING we know for sure is that he was born in Cairo. He left us with few other certainties. His parents appear to have originally hailed from Aleppo, moving to Egypt at the turn of the last century. There is good reason to believe he was born in the 1920s, though as for the precise year or day, one could trust either one’s imagination or his word—the former often proving more reliable than the latter. His old Egyptian passport indicates a birth date of May 25th, 1923, but he had more than one—passports as well as birthdays.

Continue reading “An anti-imperialist father and his American diplomat son”

With a Biden victory a mixed reality emerges between those who experience colonialism first hand and the broader social justice movement.

By Benay Blend | Palestine Chronicle  |  Jan 26, 2021

…a Biden presidency will “attempt to be even more hawkish than the Barack Obama administration in every warmongering, drone-dropping, coup-backing, militarized-policing way.”
— Erica Caines, writer and organizer

“As Palestinians,” writes Zarefah Baroud, “we are taught to comply with our oppression for the sake of a peace we won’t be included in. Unlearn this,” she suggests, and moreover, “when a Zionist is elected, you don’t have to cheer. We are entitled to aspirations and agendas for our people’s best interests, just like everybody else.”

From Raphael Warnock, who backtracked his criticism of the Occupation for the sake of a few Zionist votes, to activists who overlooked Biden’s foreign policy in return for a (neo)liberal agenda at home, Baroud exposes the cracks within the solidarity movement. When anti-imperialism got swept away by the overriding goal of defeating Trump, colonized people at home and around the world lost importance.

Continue reading “On the high cost of solidarity: Joe Biden, Palestine and The Left”

“No country has done what we are able to do,” said Israel PM Benjamin Netanyahu. He is so right – but not in the way he thinks he is.

By Kathryn Shihadah |  Israel-Palestine News  |  Jan 31, 2021

…most Palestinians under Israeli rule, regardless of age or risk, don’t qualify.

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu (who is up for re-election this spring) boasts, “We are vaccinating at 10 times the pace of the United States. No country has done what we are able to do.” He’s right.

Israel is so far ahead in the Covid vaccine game that the Israeli Health Ministry is making it available to all Israelis over 35 years of age – not just essential workers, healthcare providers, and high-risk individuals.

But most Palestinians under Israeli rule, regardless of age or risk, don’t qualify.

Continue reading “Israel’s obscene mismanagement of the Covid-19 vaccine”

The Never Trump political consultants are deluded if they think that working for Benjamin Netanyahu’s main opponent in Israel’s upcoming election serves democracy and the rule of law.

By Peter Beinart  | The New York Review  | Jan 27, 2021

Given how many professional Republicans have abetted Trump, former GOP insiders like Stevens deserve credit. Which makes it doubly depressing that Stevens—along three other Lincoln Project leaders, Steve Schmidt, Rick Wilson, and Reed Galen—are now working for Gideon Saar’s campaign to be prime minister of Israel.

Ever since a group of Republican operatives launched the Lincoln Project, more than a year ago, to defeat Donald Trump, skeptical progressives have wondered: Do they realize the rot inside the GOP runs much deeper than Trump? The answer, increasingly, appears to be yes.

Despite having been longtime pillars of the GOP establishment, the Lincoln Project’s founders now acknowledge that white supremacy infects the entire Republican Party. Last October, they filed an amicus brief against GOP-led voter suppression in Texas. That same month, Lincoln Project member Stuart Stevens—who has worked for Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney—told The New Yorker that, “Even if Donald Trump loses in 2020, the Republican Party has legitimized bigotry and hate as an organizing principle.” When I talked to Stevens, he volunteered that William F. Buckley Jr.—a founder of the modern American conservative movement—“started out as a stone cold racist.”

Continue reading “What the Lincoln Project Gets Wrong About Israel-Palestine”

Read all three perspectives with insight for President Biden.

By Rev Alex Awad, Rami G Khouri, Matthew Hoh  |  Washington Report on Middle East Affairs |  January/February 2021

Mr. Biden, please avoid the temptation of designing yet another peace plan that merely pays lip service to peace while ignoring the realities that are creating conflict and violence.
— Alex Awad

Some Advice on How to Succeed Where Others Have Failed
By Rev. Alex Awad

ADDING TO THE CHORUS of millions of peace and justice-loving people in the U.S. and around the world, I sincerely offer my heartfelt congratulations to you, President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President- elect Kamala Harris. You passed through the election fray graciously, and you won.

It will soon be time for the passing of the leadership “baton.” And it will be your cabinet’s turn, Mr. President-elect, to tackle tremendous tasks such as the pandemic, the economy, racism and global warming among many others. Most likely, sooner rather than later after you move to the White House, like all U.S. presidents for the past half century, you will be called upon to address the challenge of the Israel-Palestine conflict. I imagine you will have many advisers ready to help you develop your policy toward what seems to be an intractable conflict.

Continue reading “On-the-ground realities for Biden in The Middle East”

By Palestinian children are frequent targets of the Israeli military and court systems – contrary to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Israel is a signatory. Since 2000, over 12,000 Palestinian children have experienced detention.

Kathryn Shihadah   | Israel-Palestine News  | Jan 28, 2021

Although a signatory to the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC), Israel has declared that the Convention “does not apply in the [Palestinian] West Bank.”

The International Middle East Media Center (IMEMC) posted a brief article on Monday, but it is part of a much larger and very disturbing story.

IMEMC reported that on Sunday night, 4 Palestinian children in a village near Jerusalem were detained and interrogated by Israeli forces. The children were ages 9-10. They endured “several hours” of questioning before being released later that night.

On average, Israel arrests and prosecutes 500-700 Palestinian children ages 12-17 every year; sometimes, as in this case, children even younger are taken. The youths are prosecuted in a military court system that “lacks basic and fundamental guarantees of due process in violation of international standards.”

Continue reading “Israel detains, interrogates four Palestinian children, ages 9-10”

A look at how Biden’s pledge for diversity is being shaped within the first days of his administration.

By Theo Stamatis |  Arab America  |  Jan 27, 2021

So far, there have been seven Arab Americans chosen to be in the Biden Administration and there are more to follow.

As the new administration steps into its first 100 days, President Joe Biden has promised the American people that his administration will reflect America’s diversity. Throughout his campaign and once elected president, Biden has been a vocal advocate of every ethnicity and background being represented: African American, Hispanics, Asians, and finally at the table – Arab Americans. Biden’s victory recognizes the overwhelming advocacy from the Arab American communities across the country. Roughly 59% of Arab Americans supported him last November compared to 35% for Trump. So far, there have been seven Arab Americans chosen to be in the Biden Administration and there are more to follow. Meet some of the new Biden officials.

Read the full article here →

Mona AlMsaddar tells incoming Secretary of State Antony Blinken that his family’s story of surviving World War II resonates with her own family’s history of the Nakba.

By Mona AlMsaddar |  Mondoweiss  | Jan 22, 2021

…reading about your stepfather’s forced exile brings to mind my maternal grandparents and their forced displacement by the creation of Israel in 1948. We call it the Nakba (catastrophe).

The following open letter to Antony Blinken was first published by We Are Not Numbers. Blinken is expected to soon be confirmed as U.S. President Joe Biden’s secretary of state. When accepting his nomination, Blinken recalled his stepfather Samuel Pisar, who was one of 900 children in his school in Bialystok, Poland, but the only one to survive the Holocaust after four years in concentration camps. He went on to recall Pisar’s escape from a death march in Nazi-controlled Germany, after which the boy was rescued by a Black U.S. soldier. Just before being lifted onto a tank, Pisar “fell to his knees, and said the only three words he knew in English that his mother had taught him before the war: “God bless America.”​ Later in his confirmation hearing Blinken also said the U.S.-Israel relationship was “sacrosanct” and the U.S. would keep its embassy in Jerusalem, which he called the capital of Israel.

Continue reading “Mr. Blinken, we share similar family stories”

Israelis live in the illusion that another hero will show up, another general with the dust of a recent war still in his hair, and who will see the folly of war and the wisdom of making peace.

By Miko Peled | Politics Today | Jan 25, 2021

…the most liberal Zionist will never concede on the issue of land and will always blame the Palestinians for any failure to reach an agreement.

he upcoming Israeli elections – the fourth in two years – bring little promise of change. These elections bring to mind the famous saying that trying to do something over and over again while expecting different results is a sign of madness. Anyone who expects that the existing Zionist political spectrum will give rise to a progressive or even a slightly liberal coalition lives in a fantasy world. Even Israelis realize that the possibility of change does not exist. The only purpose for calling for elections at this point is to allow Benyamin Netanyahu to remain in office.

When Netanyahu signed the current coalition agreement, which allowed him to remain prime minister, it was obvious that he had no intentions of keeping his word and that at the first opportunity he would break the coalition agreements and dissolve the coalition. New elections mean his coalition partner, former Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) Chief General Benny Gatnz, will never take his place as prime minister.

Continue reading “Gantz, Netanyahu, Bennett and Israeli politics in a stalemate”

For Palestinians the information in the B’Tselem human rights report is what they have been reporting for years.

By Benay Blend  |  The Palestine Chronicle  |  Jan 19, 2021

“Everything is framed in terms of the occupier, its interests, its desires, its wants and dislikes. It’s never about the people who *face* apartheid, occupation, and Israeli settler colonialism.”
— Remi Kanazi, Palestinian poet and activist

“Everyone’s reporting on the B’Tselem report like it’s the first they’ve ever heard anyone say that Israel’s an apartheid state,” commented Susan Abulhawa, Palestinian author and activist. “It’s like nothing about Palestinian lives, realities, and experiences is true or real until Israelis proclaim it.”

Abulhawa’s commentary refers to the Israeli human rights group’s position paper (January 12) that declared “the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River is organized under a single principle: advancing and cementing the supremacy of one group—Jews—over another—Palestinians.” Moreover, it labeled that system an apartheid regime.

On the one hand, B’tselem’s report got a lot of traction partly because it makes Israeli denial all that much more difficult to support, either by its own people or by journalists who are afraid of being labeled anti-Semitic.

On the other hand, Palestinian poet and activist Remi Kanazi captured the irony of this moment in a tweet:

“Palestinians are always spoken about, but rarely ever spoken to or allowed to speak. Everything is framed in terms of the occupier, its interests, its desires, its wants and dislikes. It’s never about the people who *face* apartheid, occupation, and Israeli settler colonialism.”

Read the full article here →