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Time’s Up Israel: Get Your Knee Off Palestine’s Neck

Sam Bahour

The timer is now ticking on Israel. While Israel historically put Palestinians on the slow burner, gnawing at their lands and livelihoods, time was in Israel’s favor was the world turned a blind eye. Those days are over.

Israel must now choose, allow the state of Palestine to emerge, or have it imposed upon them. The traditional options of two-states vs. one state of Israel without equality for all its citizens have passed long ago. Israel can accept Palestine in all the occupied territory of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip, or ultimately be forced to accept Palestine from the river to the sea.

For us Palestinians, like any normal human beings on this earth, it is natural for us to expect to be viewed as a people worthy of our rights, freedom, and independence. The days when this can be ignored are over too.

Today, all have been exposed to the naked eye. Thanks to decades of denial by Jewish Israeli citizens and the Jewish diaspora, US President Trump and his messianic entourage of Jared Kushner and David M. Friedman, Israel’s state-sanctioned settlement enterprise, financier Sheldon Adelson’s fanaticism, Christian Evangelicals bent on personally witnessing the Armageddon, and none other than Israel’s own extremist prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s annexation frenzy, a frenzy on steroids attempting to divert his path to jail on three corruption charges.

To force the timer to tick even faster, outgoing Israeli ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, in an interview with Stephen Sackur of the BBC Hardtalk program, proudly proclaimed, “I represent not only the people of Israel, I represented [sic] the Jewish people in the U.N.”. He went on, “We [Jews] do have biblical rights to the land. Whether you are Christian, Muslim, or Jew — you read the Bible, you read the stories of the Bible — it’s all there.” It got worse. He went on to say, “This is our deed to the land. That’s biblical.” This from Israel’s top international diplomat! Regardless of how one views the Bible, it’s a religious text, not a document that can be submitted in a case of international law.

The further back Israel goes in time, the faster today’s timer is ticking. Below I will touch on three momentous developments lubricating the timer.

Peter Beinart, Zionism, and the ‘Jewish State’

Enter Peter Beinart. A prominent and outspoken observant Jewish American columnist, journalist, political commentator, and professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, his parents were Jewish immigrants from South Africa. He is a self-defined Zionist, albeit from the flavor that most Israeli Jews would dismiss.

Earlier this month, Beinart penned a long-read essay titled, Yavne: A Jewish Case for Equality in Israel-Palestine, and then followed it up with a New York Times opinion piece titled, I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State. He makes a monumental shift from supporting a two-state solution, Israel and Palestine side by side, to arguing that Zionism does not require a ‘Jewish State’ at all and calls for his fellow Jews to come to this understanding.

It is interesting to note that Palestinians have always made the point that they have nothing against Judaism, rather they view Zionism as having hijacked this noble religion to the detriment of Israelis and Palestinians alike. To be clear, the only version of Zionism Palestinians have experienced is the one that is a political ideology based on supremacy. This Zionism has held conferences starting in 1897 in Basel, Switzerland, and has left behind an incriminating and bloody paper trail.

Peter is my friend. We have interlocked as editor and writer, spoke on the same panel at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, and he has attended many of the talks I have given to Jewish American audiences when they visited Bethlehem. He has universal values and does not discriminate when applying them. He knows how to actively listen, ask probing questions, and analyze in relation to reality rather than blindly forcing reality to fit a set of Israeli state talking points. Most importantly, he has opened the Pandora’s box of global Jewry. For this, he will go down in history next to notable early Zionist thinkers such as Ahad Ha’am, Martin Buber, and Judah Magnes, among others.

There is much to discuss about Peter’s new revelation, but that’s for another day. For now, he will have his hands full within his Jewish communal circles. It’s a shame that Israeli Jews are, for the most part, missing out on this conversation. Israeli media has chosen to pretend that the call for equal rights in one state does not exist.

Yesh Din, Israel, and Apartheid

At the same time that Peter took to the global stage, another storm was brewing closer to Jerusalem. The renowned Israeli human rights organization, Yesh Din (There is a Law), released a landmark legal opinion titled, The Occupation of the West Bank and the Crime of Apartheid: Legal Opinion. This was written by Adv. Michael Sfard, one of Israel’s leading legal minds specializing in international human rights law and the laws of war. The opinion is damning for Israel.

“The conclusion of this legal opinion is that the crime against humanity of apartheid is being committed in the West Bank. The perpetrators are Israelis, and the victims are Palestinians.” The report further states that this is the case with or without another round of Israeli annexation, or as Benjamin Netanyahu, Benjamin Gantz, and Ambassador Danon like to call it, “applying sovereignty over parts of Judea and Samaria.” Call it what you may because it is all illegal.

But that’s not all. Annexation does play a role; the opinion notes that “Continued creeping legal annexation, let alone official annexation of a particular part of the West Bank through legislation that would apply Israeli law and administration there, is an amalgamation of the regimes. This could mean strengthening the argument, which already is being heard, that the crime of Apartheid is not committed only in the West Bank. That the Israeli regime in its entirety is an apartheid regime. That Israel is an Apartheid state. ”

You read that correctly. Israel has gone from attacking former US President Jimmy Carter for using the “A” word in the title of his 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, to having to deal with an Israeli organization making the legal case that the entire state may be an Apartheid state.

Israelis should take note. Yesh Din is not a newcomer to this issue. Neither are the many other Israeli human rights organizations that have been exposing reality for what it is for years. Organizations such as B’Tselem, Gisha, HaMoked (Center for the Defence of the Individual), Physicians for Human Rights (Israel), Rabbis for Human Rights, Shalom Achshav (Peace Now), Shovrim Shtika (Breaking the Silence), Who Profits?, and Yesh Gvul (There is a Limit), among many others.

The timer ticks faster and faster.

The above-broken taboos have awakened many Jews around the world. But anyone who missed out on the last three decades of facts being made on the ground, by gunships and bulldozers displaying the “Star of David,” would have found a summary of what was to come in a report released at the end of last year. Read on.

UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD)

One of the most important organs of the UN is The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). This entity is comprised of a body of independent experts that monitors implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination by its State parties. In short, this body gives the pulse of today’s rules-based world order, country by country.

Israel, being a “State party,” is obliged to submit reports to this Committee and they comply. Also, ever since November 29, 2012, when Palestine became a “non-member observer State,” Palestine also submits reports to this Committee.

In its December 2019 Concluding Observations on Israel, the Committee determined that Israeli policies and practices comprise of racial segregation and apartheid over the Palestinian people on both sides of the Green Line. This was earthshaking. Palestinian, regional, and international human rights organizations worked hard to bring the facts of the matter to the deliberations. Interestingly, even while Israel’s premiership bad mouths the UN at every opportunity possible, Israel engaged the committee, but to no avail.

However, the Committee’s Concluding Observations report did make an interesting catch. It noted that “While acknowledging the willingness of the State [Israel] party delegation to discuss questions relating to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, the Committee regrets that the report did not contain any information concerning the population living in these territories.”

So while the Israeli, and now the American, leaderships claim there is no military occupation to speak of, in the chambers of international law that matter for Israel to remain a member of the community of nations, Israel is actively engaging on issues related to the “Occupied Palestinian Territory,” even if they do so blind to the Palestinians they oppress.

Tick, tick, tick. One can hear the timer racing forward in their sleep.

Israel still has a choice

This is not about Peter, Yesh Din, or the UN. It is about Israel finally having to look in the mirror and reckon with itself.

For us Palestinians, our case is crystal clear. We demand our rights, freedom, and independence.

It took US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, the Jewish Senator from Vermont who, in November 2019 drew sustained applause from the crowd at the MSNBC/Washington Post Democratic primary debate in Atlanta, to declare, “It is no longer good enough for us to be pro-Israel, I am pro-Israel, but we must treat the Palestinians with the dignity they deserve.” The audience’s applause was rightly due because Sanders inserted the issue of Palestinians being human into the debate. That is an extremely low bar.

Sanders doubled down at the next Democratic debate in South Carolina in February of this year when he “labeled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “reactionary racist” and said he’d consider reversing President Donald Trump’s move of the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.”

The Israeli Foreign Minister at the time, Israel Katz, slammed Sanders in what he said was a ‘Horrifying Comment’ while proclaiming that Israel does not “intervene in the internal American electoral process…” The latter comment, for anyone even faintly familiar with the pro-Israeli lobby in the US, would be hilarious if the situation were not so dire.

Remember in 2015 when Netanyahu barged into Congress without White House approval which was met by objections from many supporters of Israel including prominent American Jewish leaders? This Bibi blunder sparked a letter from the Washington-based Israeli-American lobby group J-Street where they noted, “Our Congress should not be used as a prop in another nation’s election. One of the central elements that underpins the alliance between our two nations is our common commitment to democracy and elections. That means that both nations stay out of the other’s democratic process.” So much for not intervening in US politics.

Nevertheless, many Jewish Americans and Israelis remain blind to the clear shifts that have already taken place in the Democratic party.

But Palestinians do not need anyone’s affirmation that they are human. If what drives you is solely your love of Israel, even if it is blind love, then common sense is making a clarion call—now is the time to act to save Israel from itself.

Israel can end its 53-year-old military occupation and allow a real Palestinian state to emerge or end up with all the land it wants from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, along with a citizenry of 7 million Palestinians and 7 million Jewish Israelis. Either way, 5 million Palestinian refugees will still be demanding to return home.

Otherwise, Israel, and Jews everywhere, must forever hold their peace (and hasbara) because history is about to be made, again, based on the facts that successive Israeli governments have imposed on the reality between the river and the sea with their ‘might is right’ policies over 73 years.

Soon, the choice will no longer be Israel’s to make. Tick, tick, tick.

[Sam Bahour is managing partner of Applied Information Management (AIM), a policy analyst with Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, a secretariat member of the Palestine Strategy Group, and chairman of Americans for a Vibrant Palestinian Economy.] 

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Good News from Washington: AIPAC, Israel Losing to Progressive Democrats

Ramzy Baroud

While the US administration of President Donald Trump remains adamant in its support for Israel, the traditional democratic leadership continues to employ underhanded language, the kind of ‘strategic ambiguity’ that offers full support to Israel and nothing but lip service to Palestine and peace.

Trump’s policies on Israel and Palestine have been damaging, culminating in the outrageously unfair ‘Deal of the Century’, and his administration remains largely committed to the trend of growing affinity between the Republican establishment and the Israeli right-wing camp of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The views of the Democratic leadership, represented in the presumptive Democratic challenger in the upcoming November election, Joe Biden, are still those of a bygone era, when the Democrats’ unconditional love for Israel equaled that of Republicans. It is safe to say that those days are drawing to an end, for successive opinion polls are reaffirming the changing political landscape in Washington.

Once upon a time, America’s political elite, whose politics diverged on many issues, wholeheartedly agreed on one single foreign policy matter: their country’s blind and unconditional love and support for Israel. In those days, the influential pro-Israel lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) ruled the roost, reigning supreme in the US Congress and, almost single-handedly, decided on the fate of Congressmen and women based on their support, or lack thereof, of Israel.

While it is too early to proclaim that ‘those days are over,’ judging by the vastly changing political discourse on Palestine and Israel, the many opinion polls, and the electoral successes of anti-Israeli occupation candidates in national and local elections, one is compelled to say that AIPAC’s tight grip on US foreign policy is finally loosening.

Such a statement may seem premature considering the current administration’s unparalleled bias towards Israel – the illegal US embassy move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the dismissal of the ‘Right of Return’ for Palestinian Refugees, and the administration’s support of the Israeli plan to illegally annex parts of the West Bank, and so on.

However, a distinction must be made between support for Israel among the ruling, the increasingly isolated clique of politicians, and the general mood of a country that, despite numerous infringements on democracy in recent years, is still, somewhat democratic.

On June 25, a whopping number of nearly 200 Democratic House members, including some of the most staunch supporters of Israel, called, in a letter, on Netanyahu and other top Israeli officials to scrap their plan to illegally annex nearly 30 percent of the West Bank.

“We express our deep concern with the stated intention to move ahead with any unilateral annexation of West Bank territory, and we urge your government to reconsider plans to do so,” the letter said, in part.

While the wording of the letter was far from being dubbed ‘threatening’, the fact that it was signed by stalwart Israeli allies, such as Florida Congressman, Ted Deutch and Illinois Congressman, Brad Schneider, speaks volumes about the shifting discourse on Israel among the center and even conservative corners of the Democratic Party. Among the signers were also prominent figures in the Democratic establishment, like Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and House Majority Leader, Steny Hoyer.

Equally important, is that the influence of the younger and more progressive generation of Democratic politicians continues to push the boundaries of the party’s discourse on Israel, thanks to the tireless work of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her colleagues. Along with a dozen Democratic lawmakers, Ocasio-Cortez issued another letter on June 30, this time addressed to US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo.

Unlike the first letter, the second one was assertive and markedly daring. “Should the Israeli government continue down this path (of annexation), we will work to ensure non-recognition of annexed territories as well as pursue legislation that conditions the $3.8 billion in US military funding to Israel to ensure US taxpayers are not supporting annexation in any way,” the letter read, in part.

Imagine if this exact wording was used by Democratic representatives in July 1980, when the Israeli Parliament unlawfully annexed East Jerusalem in an action that was – and remains – contrary to international law. The fate of these politicians would have been similar to the fate of others who dared to speak out at the risk of losing their seats in Congress; in fact, their political careers altogether.

But times have changed. It is quite unusual, and refreshing, to see AIPAC scrambling to put out the many fires ignited by the new radical voices among Democrats.

The reason that it is no longer easy for the pro-Israel lobby to maintain its decades-long hegemony over Congress is that the likes of Ocasio-Cortez are, themselves, a byproduct of the generational and, likely, irreversible change that has taken place among Democrats over the years.

The trend of polarization of American public opinion regarding Israel goes back nearly twenty years, when Americans began viewing their support for Israel based on party lines. More recent polls suggest that this polarization is growing. A Pew opinion poll published in 2016 showed that sympathy for Israel among Republicans morphed to an unprecedented 74% while falling among Democrats to 33%.

Then, for the first time in history, support for Israel and Palestinians was almost equally split among Democrats; 33% and 31% respectively. This was a period in which we began seeing such unusual mainstream news headlines as, “Why Democrats are abandoning Israel?”

This ‘abandonment’ continued unabated, as more recent polls have indicated. In January 2018, another Pew survey showed that the Democrats’ support for Israel dwindled to reach 27%.

Not only are the rank-and-file of Democrats walking away from Israel as a result of the growing awareness of Israel’s relentless crimes and violent occupation in Palestine, young Jews are also doing the same.

The changing views on Israel among young American Jews are finally paying dividends, to the extent that, in April 2019, Pew data concluded that Jewish Americans, as a whole, are now far more likely (42%) than Christians to say that President Trump was “favoring the Israelis too much.”

While many Democrats in Congress are increasingly in touch with the views of their constituencies, those at the helm, such as Biden, remain stubbornly committed to agendas that are championed by AIPAC and the rest of the old guard.

The good news from Washington is that, despite Trump’s current support for Israel, an incremental, but lasting structural change continues to take place among Democratic Party supporters everywhere and throughout the country. More sobering news is that Israel’s traditional stronghold over the country’s Jewish communities is faltering – and quickly so.

While AIPAC is likely to continue using and improvising on old tactics to protect Israel’s interests at the US Congress, the long-dubbed ‘powerful lobby’ will unlikely be able to turn back time. Indeed, the age of total dominance of Israel over the US Congress is likely over, and hopefully, this time, for good.

[Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU).]