Author Archives: Arab America

The real reason behind Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent anti-Iran speech to Congress had nothing to do with foreign policy, Paul Krugman opines in Monday’s column. Insulting the president is not the way to go about that. No, Netanyahu has a serious problem at home and polls suggest that he may well get the boot in Tuesday’s election. That problem might sound familiar—Israel has become almost as unequal as America, and there is widespread economic discontent in the country that once was built on the socialist ideals of the kibbutz syztem.

Economic happiness is not the usual mainstream story we hear about Israel. The country is a high-technology powerhouse and its economy has grown rapidly, barely affected by the worldwide recession starting in 2008. But the spoils of that growth have gone disproportionately to Israel’s own version of the one percent. According to Krugman, since the early 1990s,

Source: www.rawstory.com

It seems somehow difficult to remember now, but the Israeli general elections were announced on the crest of a tidal wave of nationalist hostilities — unusually pronounced even by the standards of Israel-Palestine. This past summer, rogue Palestinian militants abducted and killed three Israeli teenagers from a hitchhiking post outside a West Bank settlement. When they were found, a clique of young Israelis kidnapped a Palestinian boy, beat him, and burned him alive.

The weeks that followed were replete with incidents of Jews and Arabs coming to blows in cafes, on public transport and on the street; a longstanding neighborly dispute between Palestinian families and ultra-Right Israeli Jews in Jaffa nearly bubbled over into a full scale riot and was only quelled by a timely intervention of imams from the neighborhood mosque and the police.

A memory that seems to stick to many Israelis from that summer, is that of the very ground slipping under their feet; for a few moments the country seemed on the brink of an unprecedented collapse into grassroots violence along the lines of Kenya in 2007, underlining how intermingled Jews and Palestinians have become in recent years — perhaps more so that at any time since the outbreak of the First Intifada in 1987 — and yet how alien and threatening they were to each other all the same.

The tension eventually found release in the devastation of the Gaza war, with the more traditional purveyors of violence — the Israeli government and Hamas — reasserting their respective monopolies. The prospect of ethnic strife within Israel proper receded somewhat, but was soon supplanted by political violence, with right-wing demonstrators repeatedly attacking left-wing protesters against the war, both at the protests and afterwards, away from the police, on the streets.

Source: 972mag.com

The UK’s advertising watchdog has banned the Israeli Government Tourist Office from using an ad which implies that Jerusalem’s Old City is part of Israel.

The ad shows a panoramic photo of the Old City with the caption “Israel has it all.” It appeared in a brochure produced by the Israeli Government Tourist Office (IGTO). 

Last week, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) upheld a complaint made by a member of the public against the ad and banned it from appearing again in its current form.

However, this is not the first time that the IGTO’s advertising campaigns have fallen foul of the watchdog

Source: electronicintifada.net

Nearly eight years ago the Association for Civil Rights in Israel petitioned the High Court of Justice, demanding the removal of ethnic identity as a component of threat assessment (“profiling”) of Israeli citizens in airport security checks, so that ethnic origin – Jewish or Arab – would no longer be a factor in determining a passenger’s risk profile.

The state did not explicitly admit to using ethnic identity as a criterion, but it did not deny its use either. Its main argument before the court was that technological improvements were being made and a new baggage screening system that was about to be introduced would reduce friction between passengers and security personnel. In other words, the ethnic component will not be eliminated, but because part of the process will no longer be carried out in front of passengers the feelings of discrimination and humiliation will be dulled. The court has been deliberating over the technological improvement since the petition was filed, in May 2007.

Over the years, the security checks at Israeli airports have justifiably become, in the eyes of Israel’s Arab population, a symbol of institutional discrimination and humiliation. The mere existence of such a criterion violates the norm in other countries, including Britain and the United States, that have experienced terror attacks and face terror threats, including ones from their own citizens and ones that target their airports.

Source: www.haaretz.com

Federal Judge Gershwin Drain sentenced Palestinian American activist and community leader Rasmea Odeh to 18 months in prison, revoking her citizenship and imposing $1,100 in fines at a March 12 hearing in Detroit.

Odeh remains out on bond pending the outcome of an appeal of her conviction on immigration fraud charges. The Chicago resident was accused of not revealing on her Immigration and Naturalization Services application that she was tried by a military tribunal and sent to prison by the Israeli regime some 45 years ago.

The courtroom was packed with another overflow area filled as well where her supporters anxiously awaited outside the outcome of the sentencing hearing. As part of its argument for a harsh sentence, government prosecutors presented clips of a documentary on the Palestine liberation struggle during the late 1960s and early 1970s where veteran activists talked about their efforts to free Palestine.

Source: www.workers.org

UPA has partnered with the Iqraa running club since 2008 in the Washington, DC area to raise money for education projects in Palestine. Iqraa, which means “read” in Arabic, has trained runners—including beginners—to successfully complete the Baltimore Half-Marathon or 5K or the Marine Corps Marathon or 10K. Since 2008, Iqraa has trained 129 runners and raised over $162,000 for Palestinian education projects.

Source: www.helpupa.org

Info sessions will be at the offices of the United Palestinian Appeal (UPA), located at 1330 New Hampshire Ave NW Suite 104.Washington DC. Near the Dupont Circle metro stop.  Light refreshments will be provided.

Training begins in May, so don’t delay!

Please RSVP to Kirk at kirkcruachan@yahoo.com so we’ll know to expect you.

Joseph A. Massad, Islam in Liberalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Joseph Massad (JM): I had been thinking for a while about a different book, namely one that traces genealogically the transformation in the semantic uses of the term “Islam” since the eighteenth century in Europe and among Muslims and Arabs in Asia and Africa. The project is an intellectual and semantic history of a term and the peregrinations it has made and undergone since its insertion in a modern “European” lexicon that depicted it as the opposite of an emergent “Europe” and an emergent “liberalism,” let alone the historic enemy of Christianity—indeed, how Islam became not only un-Europe and non-Europe but specifically anti-Europe, not to say only anti-, but also and interestingly, ante-Christian.

Before I undertook this history, I thought it important to write an introduction as to how “Islam”—regardless of what it was, is, becomes, or what it constitutes and constituted—operates within western liberalism, and how liberalism is related to Protestantism, the latter seen as a precursor of current understandings and practices of liberalism in an interesting relationship that was being conceived between what came to be constituted as “religion” and the modern state. It was important that I explained to myself and to my readers how liberalism functions internally in relation to the antonymical objects it created and creates, especially Islam on one side and Europe and Protestant Christianity on the other, but also derivatives therein, including Western democracy and Oriental despotism; European and Christian women’s freedom versus Muslim women’s slavery; European and Euro-American sexual freedom versus “Islamic” repressiveness and oppressiveness of sexual desires and practices; the tolerance of modern Europe versus the intolerance of Islam and Muslims; indeed the sanity of Europe versus the neurosis, even the psychosis, of Islam. It was then that I realized that my introduction to the book had become a book unto itself, which I decided to go ahead and write before I proceeded to write my original project on the many genealogies of “Islam.”

Source: www.jadaliyya.com

In September 2014, Truthout reported on 67-year-old Rasmea Odeh, a Palestinian woman who sought refuge in the United States more than 20 years ago after having been tortured horrifically by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) personnel.

The story, titled “Tortured and Raped by Israel, Persecuted by the United States,” outlined how Odeh, who has now been a US citizen for more than a decade, was essentially framed by the Israelis when she was a victim of a mass detention exercise that took place in the wake of a supermarket bombing.

After testifying to the UN at Geneva, Switzerland, about her treatment at the hands of the Israelis, detailing how she was beaten with metal rods, sexually assaulted, kicked, threatened and abused in other ways, Odeh eventually managed to join her father in the United States, where she has lived in Chicago, working as a productive community member and activist for Palestinian rights.

In 2013, Odeh was indicted by the US government and charged with immigration fraud, a charge stemming from other charges pulled from her then 35-year-old IDF file. The first judge in her case had to step down, due to an overt and strong pro-Israel bias.

On March 12, stunningly, Odeh was sentenced to 18 months in prison, fined $1,000 and had her US citizenship revoked.

Source: www.truth-out.org

I am in Israel hoping to see the end of an era, the downfall of Benjamin Netanyahu. I hope that he is crushed in the election tonight. Many who care about Palestinians want Netanyahu to be reelected. They say that things must get worse before they get better, or that no one has done more to delegitimize the state of Israel in the eyes of the world than crude Benjamin Netanyahu the king of the Jews. True. Keep him in another couple of years, and Israel will be discredited in more and more people’s eyes. I don’t support this view.

I look at everything Israeli first in terms of my interest, as an American. I want to end the Zionist captivity in the U.S. Wanting Netanyahu to stay in office is a little bit like saying, I want the neocons to stay in the thinktanks and influential posts and foment a war in Iran so that they will be fully discredited, and people will put their heads on pikes. That might be in my ideological interest, but it is nihilistic and has no appeal to me. The neocons have already done enough damage. If they aren’t discredited enough at this point, then you’re f’ing stupid. Walt and Mearsheimer’s worst charges against the Israel lobby have been proven, in the minds of reasonable people. I don’t want to win ideological battles at the price of a war that will hurt a lot of people I don’t know.

Another few years of Netanyahu will hurt a lot of people. It will hurt more Palestinians in the West Bank, force more people out of their homes in East Jerusalem, it will increase the likelihood of another Gaza war.

So you don’t think Labor Zionists will massacre Palestinians in Gaza? They have done so in the past, and the US liberal Zionists have supported them. They cheered Cast Lead at J Street. And won’t a Herzog government just give the occupation a lease on life?

Source: mondoweiss.net

Over the weekend, Egypt unveiled plans to build a wholly new capital. The new city would lie somewhere to Cairo’s east, closer to the Red Sea. It would sprawl across some 150 square miles and potentially be home to as many as 7 million people. Projected to cost $45 billion, it was announced at a summit in the seaside resort of Sharm El-Sheikh aimed at boosting the country’s flagging economy.

A flashy Web site outlining the proposal hails it as “the catalyst for an Egyptian renaissance” and “a momentous endeavour to build national spirit, foster consensus and provide for the country’s sustainable long-term growth.” Cairo, Egypt’s teeming capital of 18 million people, is routinely criticized for its creaking infrastructure and horrendous traffic. The project would help ease congestion and overpopulation.

The proposed new city — which has no name yet — would be built in partnership with a prominent private developer from the United Arab Emirates and supposedly would take only five to seven years to complete, according to Egyptian Housing Minister Mostafa Madbouly. The economic summit where the project was announced attracted some $12 billion in investment pledges from an array of wealthy Gulf states.

Source: www.washingtonpost.com

The first Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) meeting Mitchell Plitnick attended was in 1999, in a living room alongside fifteen people. The latest JVP meeting he went to was last weekend, where over five hundred people took over the second floor of the Baltimore Hyatt. Hundreds more wanted to attend, but it was sold out.

Plitnick, program director of the Foundation for Middle East Peace and a former director of policy at JVP, told me the conference was impressive.

It was a sentiment shared by many of the attendees. JVP has transformed from a scrappy California-based group to a national force in the American Jewish community and in the Palestine solidarity movement. Held from March 13-15, JVP’s latest national membership meeting was filled with Jewish prayer, a memorial service for those killed in Israel/Palestine last summer, and countless talks on dozens of different topics. The meeting, like JVP itself, was intergenerational and interdenominational, with young and old Jews and non-Jews holding discussions on the future of JVP. Some attendees were there for their first JVP gathering.

It was not nearly as slick as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference, but there was a real sense that JVP was growing into a force that holds real power at the grassroots level.

Source: mondoweiss.net

Forget whatever temporary crisis Benjamin Netanyahu created with the United States in his campaign speech on the Hill. If Netanyahu is re-elected on Tuesday, Israel is going to have a much more serious problem with Europe.

In an interview with Israeli news site NRG one day before elections, the prime minister made clear what he has only hinted at and skirted around for years.

Source: 972mag.com